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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "english".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MIME_type__text_vnd_sosi__for_SOSI_map_data.html">MIME type "text/vnd.sosi" for SOSI map data</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         20th May 2019
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>As part of my involvement in the work to
  32 <a href="https://github.com/arkivverket/noark5-tjenestegrensesnitt-standard">standardise
  33 a REST based API for Noark 5</a>, the Norwegian archiving standard, I
  34 spent some time the last few months to try to register a
  35 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/">MIME type</a>
  36 and <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/">PRONOM
  37 code</a> for the SOSI file format.  The background is that there is a
  38 set of formats approved for long term storage and archiving in Norway,
  39 and among these formats, SOSI is the only format missing a MIME type
  40 and PRONOM code.</p>
  41
  42 <p>What is SOSI, you might ask?  To quote Wikipedia: SOSI is short for
  43 Samordnet Opplegg for Stedfestet Informasjon (literally "Coordinated
  44 Approach for Spatial Information", but more commonly expanded in
  45 English to Systematic Organization of Spatial Information).  It is a
  46 text based file format for geo-spatial vector information used in
  47 Norway.  Information about the SOSI format can be found in English
  48 from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSI">Wikipedia</a>.  The
  49 specification is available in Norwegian from
  50 <a href="https://www.kartverket.no/geodataarbeid/Standarder/SOSI/">the
  51 Norwegian mapping authority</a>.  The SOSI standard, which originated
  52 in the beginning of ninety eighties, was the inspiration and formed the
  53 basis for the XML based
  54 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_Markup_Language">Geography
  55 Markup Language</a>.</p>
  56
  57 <p>I have so far written
  58 <a href="https://github.com/file/file/pull/67">a pattern matching
  59 rule</a> for the file(1) unix tool to recognize SOSI files, submitted
  60 a request to the PRONOM project to have a PRONOM ID assigned to the
  61 format (reference TNA1555078202S60), and today send a request to IANA
  62 to register the "text/vnd.sosi" MIME type for this format (referanse
  63 <a href="https://tools.iana.org/public-view/viewticket/1143144">IANA
  64 #1143144</a>).  If all go well, in a few months, anyone implementing
  65 the Noark 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt API spesification should be able to
  66 use an official MIME type and PRONOM code for SOSI files.  In
  67 addition, anyone using SOSI files on Linux should be able to
  68 automatically recognise the format and web sites handing out SOSI
  69 files can begin providing a more specific MIME type.  So far, SOSI
  70 files has been handed out from web sites using the
  71 "application/octet-stream" MIME type, which is just a nice way of
  72 stating "I do not know".  Soon, we will know. :)</p>
  73
  74 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  75 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  76 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
  77
  78       </div>
  79       <div class="tags">
  80
  81
  82         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
  83
  84
  85       </div>
  86     </div>
  87     <div class="padding"></div>
  88
  89     <div class="entry">
  90       <div class="title">
  91         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PlantUML_for_text_based_UML_diagram_modelling___nice_free_software.html">PlantUML for text based UML diagram modelling - nice free software</a>
  92       </div>
  93       <div class="date">
  94         25th March 2019
  95       </div>
  96       <div class="body">
  97         <p>As part of my involvement with the
  98 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/">Nikita
  99 Noark 5 core project</a>, I have been proposing improvements to the
 100 API specification created by <a href="https://www.arkivverket.no/">The
 101 National Archives of Norway</a> and helped migrating the text from a
 102 version control system unfriendly binary format (docx) to Markdown in
 103 git.  Combined with the migration to a public git repository (on
 104 github), this has made it possible for anyone to suggest improvement
 105 to the text.</p>
 106
 107 <p>The specification is filled with UML diagrams.  I believe the
 108 original diagrams were modelled using Sparx Systems Enterprise
 109 Architect, and exported as EMF files for import into docx.  This
 110 approach make it very hard to track changes using a version control
 111 system.  To improve the situation I have been looking for a good text
 112 based UML format with associated command line free software tools on
 113 Linux and Windows, to allow anyone to send in corrections to the UML
 114 diagrams in the specification.  The tool must be text based to work
 115 with git, and command line to be able to run it automatically to
 116 generate the diagram images.  Finally, it must be free software to
 117 allow anyone, even those that can not accept a non-free software
 118 license, to contribute.</p>
 119
 120 <p>I did not know much about free software UML modelling tools when I
 121 started.  I have used dia and inkscape for simple modelling in the
 122 past, but neither are available on Windows, as far as I could tell.  I
 123 came across a nice
 124 <a href="https://modeling-languages.com/text-uml-tools-complete-list/">list
 125 of text mode uml tools</a>, and tested out a few of the tools listed
 126 there.  <a href="http://plantuml.com/">The PlantUML tool</a> seemed
 127 most promising.  After verifying that the packages
 128 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/plantuml">is available in
 129 Debian</a> and found <a href="https://github.com/plantuml/plantuml">its
 130 Java source</a> under a GPL license on github, I set out to test if it
 131 could represent the diagrams we needed, ie the ones currently in
 132 <a href="https://github.com/arkivverket/noark5-tjenestegrensesnitt-standard/">the
 133 Noark 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt specification</a>.  I am happy to report
 134 that it could represent them, even thought it have a few warts here
 135 and there.</p>
 136
 137 <p>After a few days of modelling I completed the task this weekend.  A
 138 temporary link to the complete set of diagrams (original and from
 139 PlantUML) is available in
 140 <a href="https://github.com/arkivverket/noark5-tjenestegrensesnitt-standard/issues/76">the
 141 github issue discussing the need for a text based UML format</a>, but
 142 please note I lack a sensible tool to convert EMF files to PNGs, so
 143 the "original" rendering is not as good as the original was in the
 144 publised PDF.</p>
 145
 146 <p>Here is an example UML diagram, showing the core classes for
 147 keeping metadata about archived documents:</p>
 148
 149 <pre>
 150 @startuml
 151 skinparam classAttributeIconSize 0
 152
 153 !include media/uml-class-arkivskaper.iuml
 154 !include media/uml-class-arkiv.iuml
 155 !include media/uml-class-klassifikasjonssystem.iuml
 156 !include media/uml-class-klasse.iuml
 157 !include media/uml-class-arkivdel.iuml
 158 !include media/uml-class-mappe.iuml
 159 !include media/uml-class-merknad.iuml
 160 !include media/uml-class-registrering.iuml
 161 !include media/uml-class-basisregistrering.iuml
 162 !include media/uml-class-dokumentbeskrivelse.iuml
 163 !include media/uml-class-dokumentobjekt.iuml
 164 !include media/uml-class-konvertering.iuml
 165 !include media/uml-datatype-elektronisksignatur.iuml
 166
 167 Arkivstruktur.Arkivskaper "+arkivskaper 1..*" <-o "+arkiv 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Arkiv
 168 Arkivstruktur.Arkiv o--> "+underarkiv 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Arkiv
 169 Arkivstruktur.Arkiv "+arkiv 1" o--> "+arkivdel 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel
 170 Arkivstruktur.Klassifikasjonssystem "+klassifikasjonssystem [0..1]" <--o "+arkivdel 1..*" Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel
 171 Arkivstruktur.Klassifikasjonssystem "+klassifikasjonssystem [0..1]" o--> "+klasse 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Klasse
 172 Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel "+arkivdel 0..1" o--> "+mappe 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Mappe
 173 Arkivstruktur.Arkivdel "+arkivdel 0..1" o--> "+registrering 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Registrering
 174 Arkivstruktur.Klasse "+klasse 0..1" o--> "+mappe 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Mappe
 175 Arkivstruktur.Klasse "+klasse 0..1" o--> "+registrering 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Registrering
 176 Arkivstruktur.Mappe --> "+undermappe 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Mappe
 177 Arkivstruktur.Mappe "+mappe 0..1" o--> "+registrering 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Registrering
 178 Arkivstruktur.Merknad "+merknad 0..*" <--* Arkivstruktur.Mappe
 179 Arkivstruktur.Merknad "+merknad 0..*" <--* Arkivstruktur.Dokumentbeskrivelse
 180 Arkivstruktur.Basisregistrering -|> Arkivstruktur.Registrering
 181 Arkivstruktur.Merknad "+merknad 0..*" <--* Arkivstruktur.Basisregistrering
 182 Arkivstruktur.Registrering "+registrering 1..*" o--> "+dokumentbeskrivelse 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Dokumentbeskrivelse
 183 Arkivstruktur.Dokumentbeskrivelse "+dokumentbeskrivelse 1" o-> "+dokumentobjekt 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Dokumentobjekt
 184 Arkivstruktur.Dokumentobjekt *-> "+konvertering 0..*" Arkivstruktur.Konvertering
 185 Arkivstruktur.ElektroniskSignatur -[hidden]-> Arkivstruktur.Dokumentobjekt
 186 @enduml
 187 </pre>
 188
 189 <p><a href="http://plantuml.com/class-diagram">The format</a> is quite
 190 compact, with little redundant information.  The text expresses
 191 entities and relations, and there is little layout related fluff.  One
 192 can reuse content by using include files, allowing for consistent
 193 naming across several diagrams.  The include files can be standalone
 194 PlantUML too.  Here is the content of
 195 <tt>media/uml-class-arkivskaper.iuml<tt>:</p>
 196
 197 <pre>
 198 @startuml
 199 class Arkivstruktur.Arkivskaper <Arkivenhet> {
 200   +arkivskaperID : string
 201   +arkivskaperNavn : string
 202   +beskrivelse : string [0..1]
 203 }
 204 @enduml
 205 </pre>
 206
 207 <p>This is what the complete diagram for the PlantUML notation above
 208 look like:</p>
 209
 210 <p><img width="80%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2019-03-25-noark5-plantuml-diagrameksempel.png"></p>
 211
 212 <p>A cool feature of PlantUML is that the generated PNG files include
 213 the entire original source diagram as text.  The source (with include
 214 statements expanded) can be extracted using for example
 215 <tt>exiftool</tt>.  Another cool feature is that parts of the entities
 216 can be hidden after inclusion.  This allow to use include files with
 217 all attributes listed, even for UML diagrams that should not list any
 218 attributes.</p>
 219
 220 <p>The diagram also show some of the warts.  Some times the layout
 221 engine place text labels on top of each other, and some times it place
 222 the class boxes too close to each other, not leaving room for the
 223 labels on the relationship arrows.  The former can be worked around by
 224 placing extra newlines in the labes (ie "\n").  I did not do it here
 225 to be able to demonstrate the issue.  I have not found a good way
 226 around the latter, so I normally try to reduce the problem by changing
 227 from vertical to horizontal links to improve the layout.</p>
 228
 229 <p>All in all, I am quite happy with PlantUML, and very impressed with
 230 how quickly its lead developer responds to questions.  So far I got an
 231 answer to my questions in a few hours when I send an email.  I
 232 definitely recommend looking at PlantUML if you need to make UML
 233 diagrams.  Note, PlantUML can draw a lot more than class relations.
 234 Check out the documention for a complete list. :)</p>
 235
 236 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 237 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 238 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 239
 240       </div>
 241       <div class="tags">
 242
 243
 244         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</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>.
 245
 246
 247       </div>
 248     </div>
 249     <div class="padding"></div>
 250
 251     <div class="entry">
 252       <div class="title">
 253         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_3_of_free_software_archive_API_system_Nikita_announced.html">Release 0.3 of free software archive API system Nikita announced</a>
 254       </div>
 255       <div class="date">
 256         24th March 2019
 257       </div>
 258       <div class="body">
 259         <p>Yesterday,  a new release of
 260 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/">Nikita
 261 Noark 5 core project</a> was
 262 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2019-March/000451.html">announced
 263 on the project mailing list</a>.  The free software solution is an
 264 implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark 5 used by
 265 government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in version 0.3
 266 since version 0.2.1 (from NEWS.md):</p>
 267
 268 <ul>
 269   <li>Improved ClassificationSystem and Class behaviour.</li>
 270   <li>Tidied up known inconsistencies between domain model and hateaos links.</li>
 271   <li>Added experimental code for blockchain integration.  </li>
 272   <li>Make token expiry time configurable at upstart from properties file.</li>
 273   <li>Continued work on OData search syntax.</li>
 274   <li>Started work on pagination for entities, partly implemented for Saksmappe.</li>
 275   <li>Finalise ClassifiedCode Metadata entity.</li>
 276   <li>Implement mechanism to check if authentication token is still
 277    valid.  This allow the GUI to return a more sensible message to the
 278    user if the token is expired.</li>
 279   <li>Reintroduce browse.html page to allow user to browse JSON API using
 280    hateoas links.</li>
 281   <li>Fix bug in handling file/mappe sequence number.  Year change was
 282    not properly handled.</li>
 283   <li>Update application yml files to be in sync with current development.</li>
 284   <li>Stop 'converting' everything to PDF using libreoffice.  Only
 285    convert the file formats doc, ppt, xls, docx, pptx, xlsx, odt, odp
 286    and ods.</li>
 287   <li>Continued code style fixing, making code more readable.</li>
 288   <li>Minor bug fixes.</li>
 289
 290 </ul>
 291
 292 <p>If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to
 293 you, please contact us on IRC
 294 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita">#nikita on
 295 irc.freenode.net</a>) or email
 296 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
 297 mailing list</a>).</p>
 298
 299 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 300 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 301 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 302
 303       </div>
 304       <div class="tags">
 305
 306
 307         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
 308
 309
 310       </div>
 311     </div>
 312     <div class="padding"></div>
 313
 314     <div class="entry">
 315       <div class="title">
 316         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Websocket_from_Kraken_in_Valutakrambod.html">Websocket from Kraken in Valutakrambod</a>
 317       </div>
 318       <div class="date">
 319          1st February 2019
 320       </div>
 321       <div class="body">
 322         <p>Yesterday, the Kraken virtual currency exchange announced
 323 <a href="https://blog.kraken.com/post/2019/websockets-public-api-launching-soon/">their
 324 Websocket service</a>, providing a stream of exchange updates to its
 325 clients.  Getting updated rates quickly is a good idea, so I used
 326 their <a href="https://www.kraken.com/en-us/help/websocket-api">API
 327 documentation</a> and added Websocket support to the Kraken service in
 328 Valutakrambod today.  The python library can now get updates
 329 from Kraken several times per second, instead of every time the
 330 information is polled from the REST API.</p>
 331
 332 <p>If this sound interesting to you, the code for valutakrambod is
 333 available from
 334 <a href="http://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/valutakrambod">github</a>.
 335 Here is example output from the example client displaying rates in a
 336 curses view:</p>
 337
 338 <p><blockquote><pre>
 339            Name Pair   Bid         Ask         Spr    Ftcd    Age
 340  BitcoinsNorway BTCEUR   2959.2800   3021.0500   2.0%   36    nan    nan
 341        Bitfinex BTCEUR   3087.9000   3088.0000   0.0%   36     37    nan
 342         Bitmynt BTCEUR   3001.8700   3135.4600   4.3%   36     52    nan
 343          Bitpay BTCEUR   3003.8659         nan   nan%   35    nan    nan
 344        Bitstamp BTCEUR   3008.0000   3010.2300   0.1%    0      1      1
 345            Bl3p BTCEUR   3000.6700   3010.9300   0.3%    1    nan    nan
 346        Coinbase BTCEUR   2992.1800   3023.2500   1.0%   34    nan    nan
 347          Kraken+BTCEUR   3005.7000   3006.6000   0.0%    0      1      0
 348         Paymium BTCEUR   2940.0100   2993.4400   1.8%    0   2688    nan
 349  BitcoinsNorway BTCNOK  29000.0000  29360.7400   1.2%   36    nan    nan
 350         Bitmynt BTCNOK  29115.6400  29720.7500   2.0%   36     52    nan
 351          Bitpay BTCNOK  29029.2512         nan   nan%   36    nan    nan
 352        Coinbase BTCNOK  28927.6000  29218.5900   1.0%   35    nan    nan
 353         MiraiEx BTCNOK  29097.7000  29741.4200   2.2%   36    nan    nan
 354  BitcoinsNorway BTCUSD   3385.4200   3456.0900   2.0%   36    nan    nan
 355        Bitfinex BTCUSD   3538.5000   3538.6000   0.0%   36     45    nan
 356          Bitpay BTCUSD   3443.4600         nan   nan%   34    nan    nan
 357        Bitstamp BTCUSD   3443.0100   3445.0500   0.1%    0      2      1
 358        Coinbase BTCUSD   3428.1600   3462.6300   1.0%   33    nan    nan
 359          Gemini BTCUSD   3445.8800   3445.8900   0.0%   36    326    nan
 360          Hitbtc BTCUSD   3473.4700   3473.0700  -0.0%    0      0      0
 361          Kraken+BTCUSD   3444.4000   3445.6000   0.0%    0      1      0
 362   Exchangerates EURNOK      9.6685      9.6685   0.0%   36  22226    nan
 363      Norgesbank EURNOK      9.6685      9.6685   0.0%   36  22226    nan
 364        Bitstamp EURUSD      1.1440      1.1462   0.2%    0      1      2
 365   Exchangerates EURUSD      1.1471      1.1471   0.0%   36  22226    nan
 366  BitcoinsNorway LTCEUR      1.0009     22.6538  95.6%   35    nan    nan
 367  BitcoinsNorway LTCNOK    259.0900    264.9300   2.2%   35    nan    nan
 368  BitcoinsNorway LTCUSD      0.0000     29.0000 100.0%   35    nan    nan
 369      Norgesbank USDNOK      8.4286      8.4286   0.0%   36  22226    nan
 370 </pre></blockquote></p>
 371
 372 <p>Yes, I notice the strange negative spread on Hitbtc.  I've seen the
 373 same on Kraken.  Another strange observation is that Kraken some times
 374 announce trade orders a fraction of a second in the future.  I really
 375 wonder what is going on there.</p>
 376
 377 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 378 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 379 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 380
 381       </div>
 382       <div class="tags">
 383
 384
 385         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 386
 387
 388       </div>
 389     </div>
 390     <div class="padding"></div>
 391
 392     <div class="entry">
 393       <div class="title">
 394         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_got_everything_you_need_to_program_Micro_bit.html">Debian now got everything you need to program Micro:bit</a>
 395       </div>
 396       <div class="date">
 397         22nd January 2019
 398       </div>
 399       <div class="body">
 400         <p>I am amazed and very pleased to discover that since a few days ago,
 401 everything you need to program the <a href="https://microbit.org/">BBC
 402 micro:bit</a> is available from the Debian archive.  All this is
 403 thanks to the hard work of Nick Morrott and the Debian python
 404 packaging team.  The micro:bit project recommend the mu-editor to
 405 program the microcomputer, as this editor will take care of all the
 406 machinery required to injekt/flash micropython alongside the program
 407 into the micro:bit, as long as the pieces are available.</p>
 408
 409 <p>There are three main pieces involved.  The first to enter Debian
 410 was
 411 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-uflash">python-uflash</a>,
 412 which was accepted into the archive 2019-01-12.  The next one was
 413 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/mu-editor">mu-editor</a>, which
 414 showed up 2019-01-13.  The final and hardest part to to into the
 415 archive was
 416 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-microbit-micropython">firmware-microbit-micropython</a>,
 417 which needed to get its build system and dependencies into Debian
 418 before it was accepted 2019-01-20.  The last one is already in Debian
 419 Unstable and should enter Debian Testing / Buster in three days.  This
 420 all allow any user of the micro:bit to get going by simply running
 421 'apt install mu-editor' when using Testing or Unstable, and once
 422 Buster is released as stable, all the users of Debian stable will be
 423 catered for.</p>
 424
 425 <p>As a minor final touch, I added rules to
 426 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">the isenkram
 427 package</a> for recognizing micro:bit and recommend the mu-editor
 428 package.  This make sure any user of the isenkram desktop daemon will
 429 get a popup suggesting to install mu-editor then the USB cable from
 430 the micro:bit is inserted for the first time.</p>
 431
 432 <p>This should make it easier to have fun.</p>
 433
 434 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 435 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 436 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 437
 438       </div>
 439       <div class="tags">
 440
 441
 442         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
 443
 444
 445       </div>
 446     </div>
 447     <div class="padding"></div>
 448
 449     <div class="entry">
 450       <div class="title">
 451         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/CasparCG_Server_for_TV_broadcast_playout_in_Debian.html">CasparCG Server for TV broadcast playout in Debian</a>
 452       </div>
 453       <div class="date">
 454         15th January 2019
 455       </div>
 456       <div class="body">
 457         <p>The layered video playout server created by Sveriges Television,
 458 <a href="https://casparcg.com/">CasparCG Server</a>, entered Debian
 459 today.  This completes many months of work to get the source ready to
 460 go into Debian.  The first upload to the Debian NEW queue happened a
 461 month ago, but the work upstream to prepare it for Debian started more
 462 than two and a half month ago.  So far
 463 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/casparcg-server">the
 464 casparcg-server package</a> is only available for amd64, but I hope
 465 this can be improved.  The package is in contrib because it depend on
 466 the <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdk-aac">non-free fdk-aac
 467 library</a>.  The Debian package lack support for streaming web pages
 468 because Debian is missing CEF, Chromium Embedded Framework.  CEF is
 469 wanted by several packages in Debian.  But because the Chromium source
 470 is <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/893448">not available as a build
 471 dependency</a>, it is not yet possible to upload CEF to Debian.  I
 472 hope this will change in the future.</p>
 473
 474 <p>The reason I got involved is that
 475 <a href="https://frikanalen.no/">the Norwegian open channel
 476 Frikanalen</a> is starting to use CasparCG for our HD playout, and I
 477 would like to have all the free software tools we use to run the TV
 478 channel available as packages from the Debian project.  The last
 479 remaining piece in the puzzle is Open Broadcast Encoder, but it depend
 480 on quite a lot of patched libraries which would have to be included in
 481 Debian first.</p>
 482
 483 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 484 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 485 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 486
 487       </div>
 488       <div class="tags">
 489
 490
 491         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 492
 493
 494       </div>
 495     </div>
 496     <div class="padding"></div>
 497
 498     <div class="entry">
 499       <div class="title">
 500         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Learn_to_program_with_Minetest_on_Debian.html">Learn to program with Minetest on Debian</a>
 501       </div>
 502       <div class="date">
 503         15th December 2018
 504       </div>
 505       <div class="body">
 506         <p>A fun way to learn how to program
 507 <a href="https://www.python.org/">Python</a> is to follow the
 508 instructions in the book
 509 "<a href="https://nostarch.com/programwithminecraft">Learn to program
 510 with Minecraft</a>", which introduces programming in Python to people
 511 who like to play with Minecraft.  The book uses a Python library to
 512 talk to a TCP/IP socket with an API accepting build instructions and
 513 providing information about the current players in a Minecraft world.
 514 The TCP/IP API was first created for the Minecraft implementation for
 515 Raspberry Pi, and has since been ported to some server versions of
 516 Minecraft.  The book contain recipes for those using Windows, MacOSX
 517 and Raspian.  But a little known fact is that you can follow the same
 518 recipes using the free software construction game
 519 <a href="https://minetest.net/">Minetest</a>.</p>
 520
 521 <p>There is <a href="https://github.com/sprintingkiwi/pycraft_mod">a
 522 Minetest module implementing the same API</a>, making it possible to
 523 use the Python programs coded to talk to Minecraft with Minetest too.
 524 I
 525 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/minetest-mod-pycraft_0.20%2Bgit20180331.0376a0a%2Bdfsg-1.html">uploaded
 526 this module</a> to Debian two weeks ago, and as soon as it clears the
 527 FTP masters NEW queue, learning to program Python with Minetest on
 528 Debian will be a simple 'apt install' away.  The Debian package is
 529 maintained as part of the Debian Games team, and
 530 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/unfinished/minetest-mod-pycraft">the
 531 packaging rules</a> are currently located under 'unfinished' on
 532 Salsa.</p>
 533
 534 <p>You will most likely need to install several of the Minetest
 535 modules in Debian for the examples included with the library to work
 536 well, as there are several blocks used by the example scripts that are
 537 provided via modules in Minetest.  Without the required blocks, a
 538 simple stone block is used instead.  My initial testing with a analog
 539 clock did not get gold arms as instructed in the python library, but
 540 instead used stone arms.</p>
 541
 542 <p>I tried to find a way to add the API to the desktop version of
 543 Minecraft, but were unable to find any working recipes.  The
 544 <a href="https://www.epiphanydigest.com/tag/minecraft-python-api/">recipes</a>
 545 I <a href="https://github.com/kbsriram/mcpiapi">found</a> are only
 546 working with a standalone Minecraft server setup.  Are there any
 547 options to use with the normal desktop version?</p>
 548
 549 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 550 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 551 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 552
 553       </div>
 554       <div class="tags">
 555
 556
 557         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>.
 558
 559
 560       </div>
 561     </div>
 562     <div class="padding"></div>
 563
 564     <div class="entry">
 565       <div class="title">
 566         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Non_blocking_bittorrent_plugin_for_vlc.html">Non-blocking bittorrent plugin for vlc</a>
 567       </div>
 568       <div class="date">
 569         12th December 2018
 570       </div>
 571       <div class="body">
 572         <p>A few hours ago, a new and improved version (2.4) of
 573 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vlc-plugin-bittorrent">the VLC
 574 bittorrent plugin</a> was uploaded to Debian.  This new version
 575 include a complete rewrite of the bittorrent related code, which seem
 576 to make the plugin non-blocking.  This mean you can actually exit VLC
 577 even when the plugin seem to be unable to get the bittorrent streaming
 578 started.  The new version also include support for filtering playlist
 579 by file extension using command line options, if you want to avoid
 580 processing audio, video or images.  The package is currently in Debian
 581 unstable, but should be available in Debian testing in two days.  To
 582 test it, simply install it like this:</p>
 583
 584 <p><pre>
 585 apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent
 586 </pre></p>
 587
 588 <p>After it is installed, you can try to use it to play a file
 589 downloaded live via bittorrent like this:
 590
 591 <p><pre>
 592 vlc https://archive.org/download/Glass_201703/Glass_201703_archive.torrent
 593 </pre></p>
 594
 595 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 596 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 597 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 598
 599       </div>
 600       <div class="tags">
 601
 602
 603         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 604
 605
 606       </div>
 607     </div>
 608     <div class="padding"></div>
 609
 610     <div class="entry">
 611       <div class="title">
 612         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_site_not_using_Content_Security_Policy___CSP_.html">Why is your site not using Content Security Policy / CSP?</a>
 613       </div>
 614       <div class="date">
 615          9th December 2018
 616       </div>
 617       <div class="body">
 618         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of watching on Frikanalen the OWASP
 619 talk by Scott Helme titled
 620 "<a href="https://frikanalen.no/video/626080/">What We’ve Learned From
 621 Billions of Security Reports</a>".  I had not heard of the
 622 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy">Content
 623 Security Policy standard</a> nor its ability to "call home" when a
 624 browser detect a policy breach (I do not follow web page design
 625 development much these days), and found the talk very illuminating.</p>
 626
 627 <p>The mechanism allow a web site owner to use HTTP headers to tell
 628 visitors web browser which sources (internal and external) are allowed to
 629 be used on the web site.  Thus it become possible to enforce a "only
 630 local content" policy despite web designers urge to fetch programs
 631 from random sites on the Internet, like the one
 632 <a href="https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/68966/hacking/browsealoud-plugin-hack.html">enabling
 633 the attack</a> reported by Scott Helme earlier this year.</p>
 634
 635 <p>Using CSP seem like an obvious thing for a site admin to implement
 636 to take some control over the information leak that occur when
 637 external sources are used to render web pages, it is a mystery more
 638 sites are not using CSP?  It is being
 639 <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/CSP/">standardized under W3C</a> these
 640 days, and is supposed by most web browsers</p>
 641
 642 <p>I managed to find <a href="https://github.com/mozilla/django-csp">a
 643 Django middleware for implementing CSP</a> and was happy to discover
 644 it was already in Debian.  I plan to use it to add CSP support to the
 645 Frikanalen web site soon.</p>
 646
 647 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 648 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 649 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 650
 651       </div>
 652       <div class="tags">
 653
 654
 655         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
 656
 657
 658       </div>
 659     </div>
 660     <div class="padding"></div>
 661
 662     <div class="entry">
 663       <div class="title">
 664         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_and_improved_Frikanalen_Kodi_addon_version_0_0_3.html">New and improved Frikanalen Kodi addon version 0.0.3</a>
 665       </div>
 666       <div class="date">
 667          8th November 2018
 668       </div>
 669       <div class="body">
 670         <p>If you read my blog regularly, you probably know I am involved in
 671 running and developing the <a href="https://frikanalen.no/">Norwegian
 672 TV channel Frikanalen</a>.  It is an open channel, allowing everyone
 673 in Norway to publish videos on a TV channel with national coverage.
 674 You can think of it as Youtube for national television.
 675 In addition to distribution on RiksTV and Uninett, Frikanalen is also
 676 available as a Kodi addon.  The last few days I have updated the code
 677 to add more features.  A
 678 <a href="https://kodi.tv/addon/plugins-video-add-ons/frikanalen-nett-tv">new
 679 and improved version 0.0.3 Frikanalen addon</a> was just made
 680 available via the Kodi repositories.  This new version include a
 681 option to browse videos by category, as well as free text search
 682 in the video archive.  It will now also show the video duration in the
 683 video lists, which were missing earlier.  A new and experimental
 684 link to the HD video stream currently being worked on is provided, for
 685 those that want to see what the <a href="https://casparcg.com/">CasparCG</a>
 686 output look like.  The alternative is the SD video stream, generated
 687 using MLT.  CasparCG is controlled by our
 688 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/mltplayout/">mltplayout
 689 server</a> which instead of talking to mlt is giving PLAY instructions
 690 to the CasparCG server when it is time to start a new program.</p>
 691
 692 <p>By now, you are probably wondering what kind of content is being
 693 played on the channel.  These days, it is filled with technical
 694 presentations like those from <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>,
 695 <a href="https://www.debconf.org/">Debconf</a>, Makercon, and TED,
 696 but there are also some periods with
 697 <a href="https://www.empo.no/">EMPT TV</a> and
 698 <a href="https://www.p7.no/">P7</a>.
 699
 700 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 701 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 702 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 703
 704       </div>
 705       <div class="tags">
 706
 707
 708         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 709
 710
 711       </div>
 712     </div>
 713     <div class="padding"></div>
 714
 715     <div class="entry">
 716       <div class="title">
 717         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_an_official_MIME_type_for_patches_.html">Time for an official MIME type for patches?</a>
 718       </div>
 719       <div class="date">
 720          1st November 2018
 721       </div>
 722       <div class="body">
 723         <p>As part of my involvement in
 724 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">the Nikita
 725 archive API project</a>, I've been importing a fairly large lump of
 726 emails into a test instance of the archive to see how well this would
 727 go.  I picked a subset of <a href="https://notmuchmail.org/">my
 728 notmuch email database</a>, all public emails sent to me via
 729 @lists.debian.org, giving me a set of around 216 000 emails to import.
 730 In the process, I had a look at the various attachments included in
 731 these emails, to figure out what to do with attachments, and noticed
 732 that one of the most common attachment formats do not have
 733 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">an
 734 official MIME type</a> registered with IANA/IETF.  The output from
 735 diff, ie the input for patch, is on the top 10 list of formats
 736 included in these emails.  At the moment people seem to use either
 737 text/x-patch or text/x-diff, but neither is officially registered.  It
 738 would be better if one official MIME type were registered and used
 739 everywhere.</p>
 740
 741 <p>To try to get one official MIME type for these files, I've brought
 742 up the topic on
 743 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/media-types">the
 744 media-types mailing list</a>.  If you are interested in discussion
 745 which MIME type to use as the official for patch files, or involved in
 746 making software using a MIME type for patches, perhaps you would like
 747 to join the discussion?</p>
 748
 749 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 750 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 751 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 752
 753       </div>
 754       <div class="tags">
 755
 756
 757         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/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
 758
 759
 760       </div>
 761     </div>
 762     <div class="padding"></div>
 763
 764     <div class="entry">
 765       <div class="title">
 766         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_the_speaker_frequency_response_using_the_AUDMES_free_software_GUI___nice_free_software.html">Measuring the speaker frequency response using the AUDMES free software GUI - nice free software</a>
 767       </div>
 768       <div class="date">
 769         22nd October 2018
 770       </div>
 771       <div class="body">
 772         <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2018-10-22-audmes-measure-speakers.png" align="right" width="40%"/></p>
 773
 774 <p>My current home stereo is a patchwork of various pieces I got on
 775 flee markeds over the years.  It is amazing what kind of equipment
 776 show up there.  I've been wondering for a while if it was possible to
 777 measure how well this equipment is working together, and decided to
 778 see how far I could get using free software.  After trawling the web I
 779 came across an article from DIY Audio and Video on
 780 <a href="https://www.diyaudioandvideo.com/Tutorial/SpeakerResponseTesting/">Speaker
 781 Testing and Analysis</a> describing how to test speakers, and it listing
 782 several software options, among them
 783 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/audmes/">AUDio MEasurement
 784 System (AUDMES)</a>.  It is the only free software system I could find
 785 focusing on measuring speakers and audio frequency response.  In the
 786 process I also found an interesting article from NOVO on
 787 <a href="http://novo.press/understanding-speaker-specifications-and-frequency-response/">Understanding
 788 Speaker Specifications and Frequency Response</a> and an article from
 789 ecoustics on
 790 <a href="https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/understanding-speaker-frequency-response/">Understanding
 791 Speaker Frequency Response</a>, with a lot of information on what to
 792 look for and how to interpret the graphs.  Armed with this knowledge,
 793 I set out to measure the state of my speakers.</p>
 794
 795 <p>The first hurdle was that AUDMES hadn't seen a commit for 10 years
 796 and did not build with current compilers and libraries.  I got in
 797 touch with its author, who no longer was spending time on the program
 798 but gave me write access to the subversion repository on Sourceforge.
 799 The end result is that now the code build on Linux and is capable of
 800 saving and loading the collected frequency response data in CSV
 801 format.  The application is quite nice and flexible, and I was able to
 802 select the input and output audio interfaces independently.  This made
 803 it possible to use a USB mixer as the input source, while sending
 804 output via my laptop headphone connection.  I lacked the hardware and
 805 cabling to figure out a different way to get independent cabling to
 806 speakers and microphone.</p>
 807
 808 <p>Using this setup I could see how a large range of high frequencies
 809 apparently were not making it out of my speakers.  The picture show
 810 the frequency response measurement of one of the speakers.  Note the
 811 frequency lines seem to be slightly misaligned, compared to the CSV
 812 output from the program.  I can not hear several of these are high
 813 frequencies, according to measurement from
 814 <a href="http://freehearingtestsoftware.com">Free Hearing Test
 815 Software</a>, an freeware system to measure your hearing (still
 816 looking for a free software alternative), so I do not know if they are
 817 coming out out the speakers.  I thus do not quite know how to figure
 818 out if the missing frequencies is a problem with the microphone, the
 819 amplifier or the speakers, but I managed to rule out the audio card in my
 820 PC by measuring my Bose noise canceling headset using its own
 821 microphone.  This setup was able to see the high frequency tones, so
 822 the problem with my stereo had to be in the amplifier or speakers.</p>
 823
 824 <p>Anyway, to try to role out one factor I ended up picking up a new
 825 set of speakers at a flee marked, and these work a lot better than the
 826 old speakers, so I guess the microphone and amplifier is OK.  If you
 827 need to measure your own speakers, check out AUDMES.  If more people
 828 get involved, perhaps the project could become good enough to
 829 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/910876">include in Debian</a>?  And if
 830 you know of some other free software to measure speakers and amplifier
 831 performance, please let me know.  I am aware of the freeware option
 832 <a href="https://www.roomeqwizard.com/">REW</a>, but I want something
 833 that can be developed also when the vendor looses interest.</p>
 834
 835 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 836 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 837 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 838
 839       </div>
 840       <div class="tags">
 841
 842
 843         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
 844
 845
 846       </div>
 847     </div>
 848     <div class="padding"></div>
 849
 850     <div class="entry">
 851       <div class="title">
 852         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_browser_integration_of_VLC_with_Bittorrent_support.html">Web browser integration of VLC with Bittorrent support</a>
 853       </div>
 854       <div class="date">
 855         21st October 2018
 856       </div>
 857       <div class="body">
 858         <p>Bittorrent is as far as I know, currently the most efficient way to
 859 distribute content on the Internet.  It is used all by all sorts of
 860 content providers, from national TV stations like
 861 <a href="https://www.nrk.no/">NRK</a>, Linux distributors like
 862 <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> and
 863 <a href="https://www.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu</a>, and of course the
 864 <a href="https://archive.org/">Internet archive</A>.
 865
 866 <p>Almost a month ago
 867 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vlc-plugin-bittorrent">a new
 868 package adding Bittorrent support to VLC</a> became available in
 869 Debian testing and unstable.  To test it, simply install it like
 870 this:</p>
 871
 872 <p><pre>
 873 apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent
 874 </pre></p>
 875
 876 <p>Since the plugin was made available for the first time in Debian,
 877 several improvements have been made to it.  In version 2.2-4, now
 878 available in both testing and unstable, a desktop file is provided to
 879 teach browsers to start VLC when the user click on torrent files or
 880 magnet links.  The last part is thanks to me finally understanding
 881 what the strange x-scheme-handler style MIME types in desktop files
 882 are used for.  By adding x-scheme-handler/magnet to the MimeType entry
 883 in the desktop file, at least the browsers Firefox and Chromium will
 884 suggest to start VLC when selecting a magnet URI on a web page.  The
 885 end result is that now, with the plugin installed in Buster and Sid,
 886 one can visit any
 887 <a href="https://archive.org/details/CopyingIsNotTheft1080p">Internet
 888 Archive page with movies</a> using a web browser and click on the
 889 torrent link to start streaming the movie.</p>
 890
 891 <p>Note, there is still some misfeatures in the plugin.  One is the
 892 fact that it will hang and
 893 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/13">block VLC
 894 from exiting until the torrent streaming starts</a>.  Another is the
 895 fact that it
 896 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/9">will pick
 897 and play a random file in a multi file torrent</a>.  This is not
 898 always the video file you want.  Combined with the first it can be a
 899 bit hard to get the video streaming going.  But when it work, it seem
 900 to do a good job.</p>
 901
 902 <p>For the Debian packaging, I would love to find a good way to test
 903 if the plugin work with VLC using autopkgtest.  I tried, but do not
 904 know enough of the inner workings of VLC to get it working.  For now
 905 the autopkgtest script is only checking if the .so file was
 906 successfully loaded by VLC.  If you have any suggestions, please
 907 submit a patch to the Debian bug tracking system.</p>
 908
 909 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 910 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 911 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 912
 913       </div>
 914       <div class="tags">
 915
 916
 917         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 918
 919
 920       </div>
 921     </div>
 922     <div class="padding"></div>
 923
 924     <div class="entry">
 925       <div class="title">
 926         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_2_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html">Release 0.2 of free software archive system Nikita announced</a>
 927       </div>
 928       <div class="date">
 929         18th October 2018
 930       </div>
 931       <div class="body">
 932         <p>This morning, the new release of the
 933 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core/">Nikita
 934 Noark 5 core project</a> was
 935 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2018-October/000406.html">announced
 936 on the project mailing list</a>.  The free software solution is an
 937 implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark 5 used by
 938 government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in version 0.2
 939 since version 0.1.1 (from NEWS.md):
 940
 941 <ul>
 942   <li>Fix typos in REL names</li>
 943   <li>Tidy up error message reporting</li>
 944   <li>Fix issue where we used Integer.valueOf(), not Integer.getInteger()</li>
 945   <li>Change some String handling to StringBuffer</li>
 946   <li>Fix error reporting</li>
 947   <li>Code tidy-up</li>
 948   <li>Fix issue using static non-synchronized SimpleDateFormat to avoid
 949       race conditions</li>
 950   <li>Fix problem where deserialisers were treating integers as strings</li>
 951   <li>Update methods to make them null-safe</li>
 952   <li>Fix many issues reported by coverity</li>
 953   <li>Improve equals(), compareTo() and hash() in domain model</li>
 954   <li>Improvements to the domain model for metadata classes</li>
 955   <li>Fix CORS issues when downloading document</li>
 956   <li>Implementation of case-handling with registryEntry and document upload</li>
 957   <li>Better support in Javascript for OPTIONS</li>
 958   <li>Adding concept description of mail integration</li>
 959   <li>Improve setting of default values for GET on ny-journalpost</li>
 960   <li>Better handling of required values during deserialisation </li>
 961   <li>Changed tilknyttetDato (M620) from date to dateTime</li>
 962   <li>Corrected some opprettetDato (M600) (de)serialisation errors.</li>
 963   <li>Improve parse error reporting.</li>
 964   <li>Started on OData search and filtering.</li>
 965   <li>Added Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct to project.</li>
 966   <li>Moved repository and project from Github to Gitlab.</li>
 967   <li>Restructured repository, moved code into src/ and web/.</li>
 968   <li>Updated code to use Spring Boot version 2.</li>
 969   <li>Added support for OAuth2 authentication.</li>
 970   <li>Fixed several bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
 971   <li>Corrected handling of date/datetime fields.</li>
 972   <li>Improved error reporting when rejecting during deserializatoin.</li>
 973   <li>Adjusted default values provided for ny-arkivdel, ny-mappe,
 974    ny-saksmappe, ny-journalpost and ny-dokumentbeskrivelse.</li>
 975   <li>Several fixes for korrespondansepart*.</li>
 976   <li>Updated web GUI:
 977      <ul>
 978        <li>Now handle both file upload and download.</li>
 979        <li>Uses new OAuth2 authentication for login.</li>
 980        <li>Forms now fetches default values from API using GET.</li>
 981        <li>Added RFC 822 (email), TIFF and JPEG to list of possible file formats.</li>
 982      </ul></li>
 983 </ul>
 984
 985 <p>The changes and improvements are extensive.  Running diffstat on
 986 the changes between git tab 0.1.1 and 0.2 show 1098 files changed,
 987 108666 insertions(+), 54066 deletions(-).</p>
 988
 989 <p>If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to
 990 you, please contact us on IRC
 991 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita">#nikita on
 992 irc.freenode.net</a>) or email
 993 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
 994 mailing list</a>).</p>
 995
 996 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 997 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 998 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 999
1000       </div>
1001       <div class="tags">
1002
1003
1004         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
1005
1006
1007       </div>
1008     </div>
1009     <div class="padding"></div>
1010
1011     <div class="entry">
1012       <div class="title">
1013         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fetching_trusted_timestamps_using_the_rfc3161ng_python_module.html">Fetching trusted timestamps using the rfc3161ng python module</a>
1014       </div>
1015       <div class="date">
1016          8th October 2018
1017       </div>
1018       <div class="body">
1019         <p>I have  earlier covered the basics of trusted timestamping using the
1020 'openssl ts' client.  See blog post for
1021 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">2014</a>,
1022 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html">2016</a>
1023 and
1024 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html">2017</a>
1025 for those stories.  But some times I want to integrate the timestamping
1026 in other code, and recently I needed to integrate it into Python.
1027 After searching a bit, I found
1028 <a href="https://dev.entrouvert.org/projects/python-rfc3161">the
1029 rfc3161 library</a> which seemed like a good fit, but I soon
1030 discovered it only worked for python version 2, and I needed something
1031 that work with python version 3.  Luckily I next came across
1032 <a href="https://github.com/trbs/rfc3161ng/">the rfc3161ng library</a>,
1033 a fork of the original rfc3161 library.  Not only is it working with
1034 python 3, it have fixed a few of the bugs in the original library, and
1035 it has an active maintainer.  I decided to wrap it up and make it
1036 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-rfc3161ng">available in
1037 Debian</a>, and a few days ago it entered Debian unstable and testing.</p>
1038
1039 <p>Using the library is fairly straight forward.  The only slightly
1040 problematic step is to fetch the required certificates to verify the
1041 timestamp.  For some services it is straight forward, while for others
1042 I have not yet figured out how to do it.  Here is a small standalone
1043 code example based on of the integration tests in the library code:</p>
1044
1045 <pre>
1046 #!/usr/bin/python3
1047
1048 """
1049
1050 Python 3 script demonstrating how to use the rfc3161ng module to
1051 get trusted timestamps.
1052
1053 The license of this code is the same as the license of the rfc3161ng
1054 library, ie MIT/BSD.
1055
1056 """
1057
1058 import os
1059 import pyasn1.codec.der
1060 import rfc3161ng
1061 import subprocess
1062 import tempfile
1063 import urllib.request
1064
1065 def store(f, data):
1066     f.write(data)
1067     f.flush()
1068     f.seek(0)
1069
1070 def fetch(url, f=None):
1071     response = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
1072     data = response.read()
1073     if f:
1074         store(f, data)
1075     return data
1076
1077 def main():
1078     with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as cert_f,\
1079          tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as ca_f,\
1080          tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as msg_f,\
1081          tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as tsr_f:
1082
1083         # First fetch certificates used by service
1084         certificate_data = fetch('https://freetsa.org/files/tsa.crt', cert_f)
1085         ca_data_data = fetch('https://freetsa.org/files/cacert.pem', ca_f)
1086
1087         # Then timestamp the message
1088         timestamper = \
1089             rfc3161ng.RemoteTimestamper('http://freetsa.org/tsr',
1090                                         certificate=certificate_data)
1091         data = b"Python forever!\n"
1092         tsr = timestamper(data=data, return_tsr=True)
1093
1094         # Finally, convert message and response to something 'openssl ts' can verify
1095         store(msg_f, data)
1096         store(tsr_f, pyasn1.codec.der.encoder.encode(tsr))
1097         args = ["openssl", "ts", "-verify",
1098                 "-data", msg_f.name,
1099                 "-in", tsr_f.name,
1100                 "-CAfile", ca_f.name,
1101                 "-untrusted", cert_f.name]
1102         subprocess.check_call(args)
1103
1104 if '__main__' == __name__:
1105    main()
1106 </pre>
1107
1108 <p>The code fetches the required certificates, store them as temporary
1109 files, timestamp a simple message, store the message and timestamp to
1110 disk and ask 'openssl ts' to verify the timestamp.  A timestamp is
1111 around 1.5 kiB in size, and should be fairly easy to store for future
1112 use.</p>
1113
1114 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1115 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1116 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1117
1118       </div>
1119       <div class="tags">
1120
1121
1122         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1123
1124
1125       </div>
1126     </div>
1127     <div class="padding"></div>
1128
1129     <div class="entry">
1130       <div class="title">
1131         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Google_Drive_sync_using_grive_in_Debian.html">Automatic Google Drive sync using grive in Debian</a>
1132       </div>
1133       <div class="date">
1134          4th October 2018
1135       </div>
1136       <div class="body">
1137         <p>A few days, I rescued a Windows victim over to Debian.  To try to
1138 rescue the remains, I helped set up automatic sync with Google Drive.
1139 I did not find any sensible Debian package handling this
1140 automatically, so I rebuild the grive2 source from
1141 <a href="http://www.webupd8.org/">the Ubuntu UPD8 PPA</a> to do the
1142 task and added a autostart desktop entry and a small shell script to
1143 run in the background while the user is logged in to do the sync.
1144 Here is a sketch of the setup for future reference.</p>
1145
1146 <p>I first created <tt>~/googledrive</tt>, entered the directory and
1147 ran '<tt>grive -a</tt>' to authenticate the machine/user.  Next, I
1148 created a autostart hook in <tt>~/.config/autostart/grive.desktop</tt>
1149 to start the sync when the user log in:</p>
1150
1151 <p><blockquote><pre>
1152 [Desktop Entry]
1153 Name=Google drive autosync
1154 Type=Application
1155 Exec=/home/user/bin/grive-sync
1156 </pre></blockquote></p>
1157
1158 <p>Finally, I wrote the <tt>~/bin/grive-sync</tt> script to sync
1159 ~/googledrive/ with the files in Google Drive.</p>
1160
1161 <p><blockquote><pre>
1162 #!/bin/sh
1163 set -e
1164 cd ~/
1165 cleanup() {
1166     if [ "$syncpid" ] ; then
1167         kill $syncpid
1168     fi
1169 }
1170 trap cleanup EXIT INT QUIT
1171 /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh listen googledrive 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%" &
1172 syncpdi=$!
1173 while true; do
1174     if ! xhost >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
1175         echo "no DISPLAY, exiting as the user probably logged out"
1176         exit 1
1177     fi
1178     if [ ! -e /run/user/1000/grive-sync.sh_googledrive ] ; then
1179         /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh sync googledrive
1180     fi
1181     sleep 300
1182 done 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%"
1183 </pre></blockquote></p>
1184
1185 <p>Feel free to use the setup if you want.  It can be assumed to be
1186 GNU GPL v2 licensed (or any later version, at your leisure), but I
1187 doubt this code is possible to claim copyright on.</p>
1188
1189 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1190 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1191 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1192
1193       </div>
1194       <div class="tags">
1195
1196
1197         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1198
1199
1200       </div>
1201     </div>
1202     <div class="padding"></div>
1203
1204     <div class="entry">
1205       <div class="title">
1206         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Valutakrambod___A_python_and_bitcoin_love_story.html">Valutakrambod - A python and bitcoin love story</a>
1207       </div>
1208       <div class="date">
1209         29th September 2018
1210       </div>
1211       <div class="body">
1212         <p>It would come as no surprise to anyone that I am interested in
1213 bitcoins and virtual currencies.  I've been keeping an eye on virtual
1214 currencies for many years, and it is part of the reason a few months
1215 ago, I started writing a python library for collecting currency
1216 exchange rates and trade on virtual currency exchanges.  I decided to
1217 name the end result valutakrambod, which perhaps can be translated to
1218 small currency shop.</p>
1219
1220 <p>The library uses the tornado python library to handle HTTP and
1221 websocket connections, and provide a asynchronous system for
1222 connecting to and tracking several services.  The code is available
1223 from
1224 <a href="http://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/valutakrambod">github</a>.</p>
1225
1226 </p>There are two example clients of the library.  One is very simple and
1227 list every updated buy/sell price received from the various services.
1228 This code is started by running bin/btc-rates and call the client code
1229 in valutakrambod/client.py.  The simple client look like this:</p>
1230
1231 <p><blockquote><pre>
1232 import functools
1233 import tornado.ioloop
1234 import valutakrambod
1235 class SimpleClient(object):
1236     def __init__(self):
1237         self.services = []
1238         self.streams = []
1239         pass
1240     def newdata(self, service, pair, changed):
1241         print("%-15s %s-%s: %8.3f %8.3f" % (
1242             service.servicename(),
1243             pair[0],
1244             pair[1],
1245             service.rates[pair]['ask'],
1246             service.rates[pair]['bid'])
1247         )
1248     async def refresh(self, service):
1249         await service.fetchRates(service.wantedpairs)
1250     def run(self):
1251         self.ioloop = tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.current()
1252         self.services = valutakrambod.service.knownServices()
1253         for e in self.services:
1254             service = e()
1255             service.subscribe(self.newdata)
1256             stream = service.websocket()
1257             if stream:
1258                 self.streams.append(stream)
1259             else:
1260                 # Fetch information from non-streaming services immediately
1261                 self.ioloop.call_later(len(self.services),
1262                                        functools.partial(self.refresh, service))
1263                 # as well as regularly
1264                 service.periodicUpdate(60)
1265         for stream in self.streams:
1266             stream.connect()
1267         try:
1268             self.ioloop.start()
1269         except KeyboardInterrupt:
1270             print("Interrupted by keyboard, closing all connections.")
1271             pass
1272         for stream in self.streams:
1273             stream.close()
1274 </pre></blockquote></p>
1275
1276 <p>The library client loops over all known "public" services,
1277 initialises it, subscribes to any updates from the service, checks and
1278 activates websocket streaming if the service provide it, and if no
1279 streaming is supported, fetches information from the service and sets
1280 up a periodic update every 60 seconds.  The output from this client
1281 can look like this:</p>
1282
1283 <p><blockquote><pre>
1284 Bl3p            BTC-EUR: 5687.110 5653.690
1285 Bl3p            BTC-EUR: 5687.110 5653.690
1286 Bl3p            BTC-EUR: 5687.110 5653.690
1287 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.560 6593.690
1288 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.560 6593.690
1289 Bl3p            BTC-EUR: 5687.110 5653.690
1290 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.570 6593.690
1291 Bitstamp        EUR-USD:    1.159    1.154
1292 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.570 6593.690
1293 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.580 6593.690
1294 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.580 6593.690
1295 Hitbtc          BTC-USD: 6594.580 6593.690
1296 Bl3p            BTC-EUR: 5687.110 5653.690
1297 Paymium         BTC-EUR: 5680.000 5620.240
1298 </pre></blockquote></p>
1299
1300 <p>The exchange order book is tracked in addition to the best buy/sell
1301 price, for those that need to know the details.</p>
1302
1303 <p>The other example client is focusing on providing a curses view
1304 with updated buy/sell prices as soon as they are received from the
1305 services.  This code is located in bin/btc-rates-curses and activated
1306 by using the '-c' argument.  Without the argument the "curses" output
1307 is printed without using curses, which is useful for debugging.  The
1308 curses view look like this:</p>
1309
1310 <p><blockquote><pre>
1311            Name Pair   Bid         Ask         Spr    Ftcd    Age
1312  BitcoinsNorway BTCEUR   5591.8400   5711.0800   2.1%   16    nan     60
1313        Bitfinex BTCEUR   5671.0000   5671.2000   0.0%   16     22     59
1314         Bitmynt BTCEUR   5580.8000   5807.5200   3.9%   16     41     60
1315          Bitpay BTCEUR   5663.2700         nan   nan%   15    nan     60
1316        Bitstamp BTCEUR   5664.8400   5676.5300   0.2%    0      1      1
1317            Bl3p BTCEUR   5653.6900   5684.9400   0.5%    0    nan     19
1318        Coinbase BTCEUR   5600.8200   5714.9000   2.0%   15    nan    nan
1319          Kraken BTCEUR   5670.1000   5670.2000   0.0%   14     17     60
1320         Paymium BTCEUR   5620.0600   5680.0000   1.1%    1   7515    nan
1321  BitcoinsNorway BTCNOK  52898.9700  54034.6100   2.1%   16    nan     60
1322         Bitmynt BTCNOK  52960.3200  54031.1900   2.0%   16     41     60
1323          Bitpay BTCNOK  53477.7833         nan   nan%   16    nan     60
1324        Coinbase BTCNOK  52990.3500  54063.0600   2.0%   15    nan    nan
1325         MiraiEx BTCNOK  52856.5300  54100.6000   2.3%   16    nan    nan
1326  BitcoinsNorway BTCUSD   6495.5300   6631.5400   2.1%   16    nan     60
1327        Bitfinex BTCUSD   6590.6000   6590.7000   0.0%   16     23     57
1328          Bitpay BTCUSD   6564.1300         nan   nan%   15    nan     60
1329        Bitstamp BTCUSD   6561.1400   6565.6200   0.1%    0      2      1
1330        Coinbase BTCUSD   6504.0600   6635.9700   2.0%   14    nan    117
1331          Gemini BTCUSD   6567.1300   6573.0700   0.1%   16     89    nan
1332          Hitbtc+BTCUSD   6592.6200   6594.2100   0.0%    0      0      0
1333          Kraken BTCUSD   6565.2000   6570.9000   0.1%   15     17     58
1334   Exchangerates EURNOK      9.4665      9.4665   0.0%   16 107789    nan
1335      Norgesbank EURNOK      9.4665      9.4665   0.0%   16 107789    nan
1336        Bitstamp EURUSD      1.1537      1.1593   0.5%    4      5      1
1337   Exchangerates EURUSD      1.1576      1.1576   0.0%   16 107789    nan
1338  BitcoinsNorway LTCEUR      1.0000     49.0000  98.0%   16    nan    nan
1339  BitcoinsNorway LTCNOK    492.4800    503.7500   2.2%   16    nan     60
1340  BitcoinsNorway LTCUSD      1.0221     49.0000  97.9%   15    nan    nan
1341      Norgesbank USDNOK      8.1777      8.1777   0.0%   16 107789    nan
1342 </pre></blockquote></p>
1343
1344 <p>The code for this client is too complex for a simple blog post, so
1345 you will have to check out the git repository to figure out how it
1346 work.  What I can tell is how the three last numbers on each line
1347 should be interpreted.  The first is how many seconds ago information
1348 was received from the service.  The second is how long ago, according
1349 to the service, the provided information was updated.  The last is an
1350 estimate on how often the buy/sell values change.</p>
1351
1352 <p>If you find this library useful, or would like to improve it, I
1353 would love to hear from you.  Note that for some of the services I've
1354 implemented a trading API.  It might be the topic of a future blog
1355 post.</p>
1356
1357 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1358 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1359 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1360
1361       </div>
1362       <div class="tags">
1363
1364
1365         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1366
1367
1368       </div>
1369     </div>
1370     <div class="padding"></div>
1371
1372     <div class="entry">
1373       <div class="title">
1374         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/VLC_in_Debian_now_can_do_bittorrent_streaming.html">VLC in Debian now can do bittorrent streaming</a>
1375       </div>
1376       <div class="date">
1377         24th September 2018
1378       </div>
1379       <div class="body">
1380         <p>Back in February, I got curious to see
1381 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html">if
1382 VLC now supported Bittorrent streaming</a>.  It did not, despite the
1383 fact that the idea and code to handle such streaming had been floating
1384 around for years.  I did however find
1385 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent">a standalone plugin
1386 for VLC</a> to do it, and half a year later I decided to wrap up the
1387 plugin and get it into Debian.  I uploaded it to NEW a few days ago,
1388 and am very happy to report that it
1389 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vlc-plugin-bittorrent">entered
1390 Debian</a> a few hours ago, and should be available in Debian/Unstable
1391 tomorrow, and Debian/Testing in a few days.</p>
1392
1393 <p>With the vlc-plugin-bittorrent package installed you should be able
1394 to stream videos using a simple call to</p>
1395
1396 <p><blockquote><pre>
1397 vlc https://archive.org/download/TheGoat/TheGoat_archive.torrent
1398 </pre></blockquote></p>
1399
1400 </p>It can handle magnet links too.  Now if only native vlc had
1401 bittorrent support.  Then a lot more would be helping each other to
1402 share public domain and creative commons movies.  The plugin need some
1403 stability work with seeking and picking the right file in a torrent
1404 with many files, but is already usable.  Please note that the plugin
1405 is not removing downloaded files when vlc is stopped, so it can fill
1406 up your disk if you are not careful.  Have fun. :)</p>
1407
1408 <p>I would love to get help maintaining this package.  Get in touch if
1409 you are interested.</p>
1410
1411 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1412 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1413 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1414
1415       </div>
1416       <div class="tags">
1417
1418
1419         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
1420
1421
1422       </div>
1423     </div>
1424     <div class="padding"></div>
1425
1426     <div class="entry">
1427       <div class="title">
1428         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_the_Kodi_API_to_play_Youtube_videos.html">Using the Kodi API to play Youtube videos</a>
1429       </div>
1430       <div class="date">
1431          2nd September 2018
1432       </div>
1433       <div class="body">
1434         <p>I continue to explore my Kodi installation, and today I wanted to
1435 tell it to play a youtube URL I received in a chat, without having to
1436 insert search terms using the on-screen keyboard.  After searching the
1437 web for API access to the Youtube plugin and testing a bit, I managed
1438 to find a recipe that worked.  If you got a kodi instance with its API
1439 available from http://kodihost/jsonrpc, you can try the following to
1440 have check out a nice cover band.</p>
1441
1442 <p><blockquote><pre>curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
1443   --data-binary '{ "id": 1, "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Player.Open",
1444   "params": {"item": { "file":
1445   "plugin://plugin.video.youtube/play/?video_id=LuRGVM9O0qg" } } }' \
1446   http://projector.local/jsonrpc</pre></blockquote></p>
1447
1448 <p>I've extended kodi-stream program to take a video source as its
1449 first argument.  It can now handle direct video links, youtube links
1450 and 'desktop' to stream my desktop to Kodi.  It is almost like a
1451 Chromecast. :)</p>
1452
1453 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1454 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1455 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1456
1457       </div>
1458       <div class="tags">
1459
1460
1461         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/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
1462
1463
1464       </div>
1465     </div>
1466     <div class="padding"></div>
1467
1468     <div class="entry">
1469       <div class="title">
1470         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_created_using_taxpayers__money_should_be_Free_Software.html">Software created using taxpayers’ money should be Free Software</a>
1471       </div>
1472       <div class="date">
1473         30th August 2018
1474       </div>
1475       <div class="body">
1476         <p>It might seem obvious that software created using tax money should
1477 be available for everyone to use and improve.  Free Software
1478 Foundation Europe recentlystarted a campaign to help get more people
1479 to understand this, and I just signed the petition on
1480 <a href="https://publiccode.eu/">Public Money, Public Code</a> to help
1481 them. I hope you too will do the same.</p>
1482
1483       </div>
1484       <div class="tags">
1485
1486
1487         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
1488
1489
1490       </div>
1491     </div>
1492     <div class="padding"></div>
1493
1494     <div class="entry">
1495       <div class="title">
1496         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_bit_more_on_privacy_respecting_health_monitor___fitness_tracker.html">A bit more on privacy respecting health monitor / fitness tracker</a>
1497       </div>
1498       <div class="date">
1499         13th August 2018
1500       </div>
1501       <div class="body">
1502         <p>A few days ago, I wondered if there are any privacy respecting
1503 health monitors and/or fitness trackers available for sale these days.
1504 I would like to buy one, but do not want to share my personal data
1505 with strangers, nor be forced to have a mobile phone to get data out
1506 of the unit.  I've received some ideas, and would like to share them
1507 with you.
1508
1509 One interesting data point was a pointer to a Free Software app for
1510 Android named
1511 <a href="https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/">Gadgetbridge</a>.
1512 It provide cloudless collection and storing of data from a variety of
1513 trackers.  Its
1514 <a href="https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/#supported-devices">list
1515 of supported devices</a> is a good indicator for units where the
1516 protocol is fairly open, as it is obviously being handled by Free
1517 Software.  Other units are reportedly encrypting the collected
1518 information with their own public key, making sure only the vendor
1519 cloud service is able to extract data from the unit.  The people
1520 contacting me about Gadgetbirde said they were using
1521 <a href="https://us.amazfit.com/shop/bip?variant=336750">Amazfit
1522 Bip</a> and
1523 <a href="http://www.xiaomimi6phone.com/xiaomi-mi-band-3-features-release-date-rumors/">Xiaomi
1524 Band 3</a>.</p>
1525
1526 <p>I also got a suggestion to look at some of the units from Garmin.
1527 I was told their GPS watches can be connected via USB and show up as a
1528 USB storage device with
1529 <a href="https://www.gpsbabel.org/htmldoc-development/fmt_garmin_fit.html">Garmin
1530 FIT files</a> containing the collected measurements.  While
1531 proprietary, FIT files apparently can be read at least by
1532 <a href="https://www.gpsbabel.org">GPSBabel</a> and the
1533 <a href="https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/gpxpod">GpxPod</a> Nextcloud
1534 app.  It is unclear to me if they can read step count and heart rate
1535 data.  The person I talked to was using a
1536 <a href="https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/564291">Garmin Forerunner
1537 935</a>, which is a fairly expensive unit.  I doubt it is worth it for
1538 a unit where the vendor clearly is trying its best to move from open
1539 to closed systems.  I still remember when Garmin dropped NMEA support
1540 in its GPSes.</p>
1541
1542 <p>A final idea was to build ones own unit, perhaps by basing it on a
1543 wearable hardware platforms like
1544 <a href="https://learn.adafruit.com/flora-geo-watch">the Flora Geo
1545 Watch</a>.  Sound like fun, but I had more money than time to spend on
1546 the topic, so I suspect it will have to wait for another time.</p>
1547
1548 <p>While I was working on tracking down links, I came across an
1549 inspiring TED talk by Dave Debronkart about
1550 <a href="https://archive.org/details/DavedeBronkart_2010X">being a
1551 e-patient</a>, and discovered the web site
1552 <a href="https://participatorymedicine.org/epatients/">Participatory
1553 Medicine</a>.  If you too want to track your own health and fitness
1554 without having information about your private life floating around on
1555 computers owned by others, I recommend checking it out.</p>
1556
1557 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1558 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1559 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1560
1561       </div>
1562       <div class="tags">
1563
1564
1565         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1566
1567
1568       </div>
1569     </div>
1570     <div class="padding"></div>
1571
1572     <div class="entry">
1573       <div class="title">
1574         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Privacy_respecting_health_monitor___fitness_tracker_.html">Privacy respecting health monitor / fitness tracker?</a>
1575       </div>
1576       <div class="date">
1577          7th August 2018
1578       </div>
1579       <div class="body">
1580         <p>Dear lazyweb,</p>
1581
1582 <p>I wonder, is there a fitness tracker / health monitor available for
1583 sale today that respect the users privacy?  With this I mean a
1584 watch/bracelet capable of measuring pulse rate and other
1585 fitness/health related values (and by all means, also the correct time
1586 and location if possible), which is <strong>only</strong> provided for
1587 me to extract/read from the unit with computer without a radio beacon
1588 and Internet connection.  In other words, it do not depend on a cell
1589 phone app, and do make the measurements available via other peoples
1590 computer (aka "the cloud").  The collected data should be available
1591 using only free software.  I'm not interested in depending on some
1592 non-free software that will leave me high and dry some time in the
1593 future.  I've been unable to find any such unit.  I would like to buy
1594 it.  The ones I have seen for sale here in Norway are proud to report
1595 that they share my health data with strangers (aka "cloud enabled").
1596 Is there an alternative?  I'm not interested in giving money to people
1597 requiring me to accept "privacy terms" to allow myself to measure my
1598 own health.</p>
1599
1600 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1601 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1602 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1603
1604       </div>
1605       <div class="tags">
1606
1607
1608         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1609
1610
1611       </div>
1612     </div>
1613     <div class="padding"></div>
1614
1615     <div class="entry">
1616       <div class="title">
1617         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sharing_images_with_friends_and_family_using_RSS_and_EXIF_XMP_metadata.html">Sharing images with friends and family using RSS and EXIF/XMP metadata</a>
1618       </div>
1619       <div class="date">
1620         31st July 2018
1621       </div>
1622       <div class="body">
1623         <p>For a while now, I have looked for a sensible way to share images
1624 with my family using a self hosted solution, as it is unacceptable to
1625 place images from my personal life under the control of strangers
1626 working for data hoarders like Google or Dropbox.  The last few days I
1627 have drafted an approach that might work out, and I would like to
1628 share it with you.  I would like to publish images on a server under
1629 my control, and point some Internet connected display units using some
1630 free and open standard to the images I published.  As my primary
1631 language is not limited to ASCII, I need to store metadata using
1632 UTF-8.  Many years ago, I hoped to find a digital photo frame capable
1633 of reading a RSS feed with image references (aka using the
1634 &lt;enclosure&gt; RSS tag), but was unable to find a current supplier
1635 of such frames.  In the end I gave up that approach.</p>
1636
1637 <p>Some months ago, I discovered that
1638 <a href="https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/">XScreensaver</a> is able to
1639 read images from a RSS feed, and used it to set up a screen saver on
1640 my home info screen, showing images from the Daily images feed from
1641 NASA.  This proved to work well.  More recently I discovered that
1642 <a href="https://kodi.tv">Kodi</a> (both using
1643 <a href="https://www.openelec.tv/">OpenELEC</a> and
1644 <a href="https://libreelec.tv">LibreELEC</a>) provide the
1645 <a href="https://github.com/grinsted/script.screensaver.feedreader">Feedreader</a>
1646 screen saver capable of reading a RSS feed with images and news.  For
1647 fun, I used it this summer to test Kodi on my parents TV by hooking up
1648 a Raspberry PI unit with LibreELEC, and wanted to provide them with a
1649 screen saver showing selected pictures from my selection.</p>
1650
1651 <p>Armed with motivation and a test photo frame, I set out to generate
1652 a RSS feed for the Kodi instance.  I adjusted my <a
1653 href="https://freedombox.org/">Freedombox</a> instance, created
1654 /var/www/html/privatepictures/, wrote a small Perl script to extract
1655 title and description metadata from the photo files and generate the
1656 RSS file.  I ended up using Perl instead of python, as the
1657 libimage-exiftool-perl Debian package seemed to handle the EXIF/XMP
1658 tags I ended up using, while python3-exif did not.  The relevant EXIF
1659 tags only support ASCII, so I had to find better alternatives.  XMP
1660 seem to have the support I need.</p>
1661
1662 <p>I am a bit unsure which EXIF/XMP tags to use, as I would like to
1663 use tags that can be easily added/updated using normal free software
1664 photo managing software.  I ended up using the tags set using this
1665 exiftool command, as these tags can also be set using digiKam:</p>
1666
1667 <blockquote><pre>
1668 exiftool -headline='The RSS image title' \
1669   -description='The RSS image description.' \
1670   -subject+=for-family photo.jpeg
1671 </pre></blockquote>
1672
1673 <p>I initially tried the "-title" and "keyword" tags, but they were
1674 invisible in digiKam, so I changed to "-headline" and "-subject".  I
1675 use the keyword/subject 'for-family' to flag that the photo should be
1676 shared with my family.  Images with this keyword set are located and
1677 copied into my Freedombox for the RSS generating script to find.</p>
1678
1679 <p>Are there better ways to do this?  Get in touch if you have better
1680 suggestions.</p>
1681
1682 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1683 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1684 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1685
1686       </div>
1687       <div class="tags">
1688
1689
1690         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>.
1691
1692
1693       </div>
1694     </div>
1695     <div class="padding"></div>
1696
1697     <div class="entry">
1698       <div class="title">
1699         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">Simple streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using GStreamer and RTP</a>
1700       </div>
1701       <div class="date">
1702         12th July 2018
1703       </div>
1704       <div class="body">
1705         <p>Last night, I wrote
1706 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">a
1707 recipe to stream a Linux desktop using VLC to a instance of Kodi</a>.
1708 During the day I received valuable feedback, and thanks to the
1709 suggestions I have been able to rewrite the recipe into a much simpler
1710 approach requiring no setup at all.  It is a single script that take
1711 care of it all.</p>
1712
1713 <p>This new script uses GStreamer instead of VLC to capture the
1714 desktop and stream it to Kodi.  This fixed the video quality issue I
1715 saw initially.  It further removes the need to add a m3u file on the
1716 Kodi machine, as it instead connects to
1717 <a href="https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v8">the JSON-RPC API in
1718 Kodi</a> and simply ask Kodi to play from the stream created using
1719 GStreamer.  Streaming the desktop to Kodi now become trivial.  Copy
1720 the script below, run it with the DNS name or IP address of the kodi
1721 server to stream to as the only argument, and watch your screen show
1722 up on the Kodi screen.  Note, it depend on multicast on the local
1723 network, so if you need to stream outside the local network, the
1724 script must be modified.  Also note, I have no idea if audio work, as
1725 I only care about the picture part.</p>
1726
1727 <blockquote><pre>
1728 #!/bin/sh
1729 #
1730 # Stream the Linux desktop view to Kodi.  See
1731 # http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
1732 # for backgorund information.
1733
1734 # Make sure the stream is stopped in Kodi and the gstreamer process is
1735 # killed if something go wrong (for example if curl is unable to find the
1736 # kodi server).  Do the same when interrupting this script.
1737 kodicmd() {
1738     host="$1"
1739     cmd="$2"
1740     params="$3"
1741     curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
1742          --data-binary "{ \"id\": 1, \"jsonrpc\": \"2.0\", \"method\": \"$cmd\", \"params\": $params }" \
1743          "http://$host/jsonrpc"
1744 }
1745 cleanup() {
1746     if [ -n "$kodihost" ] ; then
1747         # Stop the playing when we end
1748         playerid=$(kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.GetActivePlayers "{}" |
1749                             jq .result[].playerid)
1750         kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Stop "{ \"playerid\" : $playerid }" > /dev/null
1751     fi
1752     if [ "$gstpid" ] && kill -0 "$gstpid" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
1753         kill "$gstpid"
1754     fi
1755 }
1756 trap cleanup EXIT INT
1757
1758 if [ -n "$1" ]; then
1759     kodihost=$1
1760     shift
1761 else
1762     kodihost=kodi.local
1763 fi
1764
1765 mcast=239.255.0.1
1766 mcastport=1234
1767 mcastttl=1
1768
1769 pasrc=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | \
1770   cut -d" " -f2|head -1)
1771 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
1772   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
1773   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
1774   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
1775   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
1776   udpsink host=$mcast port=$mcastport ttl-mc=$mcastttl auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
1777   pulsesrc device=$pasrc ! audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux. \
1778   > /dev/null 2>&1 &
1779 gstpid=$!
1780
1781 # Give stream a second to get going
1782 sleep 1
1783
1784 # Ask kodi to start streaming using its JSON-RPC API
1785 kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Open \
1786         "{\"item\": { \"file\": \"udp://@$mcast:$mcastport\" } }" > /dev/null
1787
1788 # wait for gst to end
1789 wait "$gstpid"
1790 </pre></blockquote>
1791
1792 <p>I hope you find the approach useful.  I know I do.</p>
1793
1794 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1795 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1796 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1797
1798       </div>
1799       <div class="tags">
1800
1801
1802         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/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
1803
1804
1805       </div>
1806     </div>
1807     <div class="padding"></div>
1808
1809     <div class="entry">
1810       <div class="title">
1811         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">Streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using VLC and RTSP</a>
1812       </div>
1813       <div class="date">
1814         12th July 2018
1815       </div>
1816       <div class="body">
1817         <p>PS: See
1818 <ahref="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">the
1819 followup post</a> for a even better approach.</p>
1820
1821 <p>A while back, I was asked by a friend how to stream the desktop to
1822 my projector connected to Kodi.  I sadly had to admit that I had no
1823 idea, as it was a task I never had tried.  Since then, I have been
1824 looking for a way to do so, preferable without much extra software to
1825 install on either side.  Today I found a way that seem to kind of
1826 work.  Not great, but it is a start.</p>
1827
1828 <p>I had a look at several approaches, for example
1829 <a href="https://github.com/mfoetsch/dlna_live_streaming">using uPnP
1830 DLNA as described in 2011</a>, but it required a uPnP server, fuse and
1831 local storage enough to store the stream locally.  This is not going
1832 to work well for me, lacking enough free space, and it would
1833 impossible for my friend to get working.</p>
1834
1835 <p>Next, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use VLC to create a
1836 video stream that Kodi could play.  Preferably using
1837 broadcast/multicast, to avoid having to change any setup on the Kodi
1838 side when starting such stream.  Unfortunately, the only recipe I
1839 could find using multicast used the rtp protocol, and this protocol
1840 seem to not be supported by Kodi.</p>
1841
1842 <p>On the other hand, the rtsp protocol is working!  Unfortunately I
1843 have to specify the IP address of the streaming machine in both the
1844 sending command and the file on the Kodi server.  But it is showing my
1845 desktop, and thus allow us to have a shared look on the big screen at
1846 the programs I work on.</p>
1847
1848 <p>I did not spend much time investigating codeces.  I combined the
1849 rtp and rtsp recipes from
1850 <a href="https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/">the
1851 VLC Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples</a>, and was able to get
1852 this working on the desktop/streaming end.</p>
1853
1854 <blockquote><pre>
1855 vlc screen:// --sout \
1856   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{dst=projector.local,port=1234,sdp=rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp}'
1857 </pre></blockquote>
1858
1859 <p>I ssh-ed into my Kodi box and created a file like this with the
1860 same IP address:</p>
1861
1862 <blockquote><pre>
1863 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp \
1864   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
1865 </pre></blockquote>
1866
1867 <p>Note the 192.168.11.4 IP address is my desktops IP address.  As far
1868 as I can tell the IP must be hardcoded for this to work.  In other
1869 words, if someone elses machine is going to do the steaming, you have
1870 to update screenstream.m3u on the Kodi machine and adjust the vlc
1871 recipe.  To get started, locate the file in Kodi and select the m3u
1872 file while the VLC stream is running.  The desktop then show up in my
1873 big screen. :)</p>
1874
1875 <p>When using the same technique to stream a video file with audio,
1876 the audio quality is really bad.  No idea if the problem is package
1877 loss or bad parameters for the transcode.  I do not know VLC nor Kodi
1878 enough to tell.</p>
1879
1880 <p><strong>Update 2018-07-12</strong>: Johannes Schauer send me a few
1881 succestions and reminded me about an important step.  The "screen:"
1882 input source is only available once the vlc-plugin-access-extra
1883 package is installed on Debian.  Without it, you will see this error
1884 message: "VLC is unable to open the MRL 'screen://'.  Check the log
1885 for details."  He further found that it is possible to drop some parts
1886 of the VLC command line to reduce the amount of hardcoded information.
1887 It is also useful to consider using cvlc to avoid having the VLC
1888 window in the desktop view.  In sum, this give us this command line on
1889 the source end
1890
1891 <blockquote><pre>
1892 cvlc screen:// --sout \
1893   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8080/}'
1894 </pre></blockquote>
1895
1896 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
1897
1898 <blockquote><pre>
1899 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/ \
1900   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
1901 </pre></blockquote>
1902
1903 <p>Still bad image quality, though.  But I did discover that streaming
1904 a DVD using dvdsimple:///dev/dvd as the source had excellent video and
1905 audio quality, so I guess the issue is in the input or transcoding
1906 parts, not the rtsp part.  I've tried to change the vb and ab
1907 parameters to use more bandwidth, but it did not make a
1908 difference.</p>
1909
1910 <p>I further received a suggestion from Einar Haraldseid to try using
1911 gstreamer instead of VLC, and this proved to work great!  He also
1912 provided me with the trick to get Kodi to use a multicast stream as
1913 its source.  By using this monstrous oneliner, I can stream my desktop
1914 with good video quality in reasonable framerate to the 239.255.0.1
1915 multicast address on port 1234:
1916
1917 <blockquote><pre>
1918 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
1919   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
1920   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
1921   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
1922   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
1923   udpsink host=239.255.0.1 port=1234 ttl-mc=1 auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
1924   pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | \
1925     grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' |  cut -d" " -f2|head -1) ! \
1926   audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux.
1927 </pre></blockquote>
1928
1929 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
1930
1931 <blockquote><pre>
1932 echo udp://@239.255.0.1:1234 \
1933   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
1934 </pre></blockquote>
1935
1936 <p>Note the trick to pick a valid pulseaudio source.  It might not
1937 pick the one you need.  This approach will of course lead to trouble
1938 if more than one source uses the same multicast port and address.
1939 Note the ttl-mc=1 setting, which limit the multicast packages to the
1940 local network.  If the value is increased, your screen will be
1941 broadcasted further, one network "hop" for each increase (read up on
1942 multicast to learn more. :)!</p>
1943
1944 <p>Having cracked how to get Kodi to receive multicast streams, I
1945 could use this VLC command to stream to the same multicast address.
1946 The image quality is way better than the rtsp approach, but gstreamer
1947 seem to be doing a better job.</p>
1948
1949 <blockquote><pre>
1950 cvlc screen:// --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{mux=ts,dst=239.255.0.1,port=1234,sdp=sap}'
1951 </pre></blockquote>
1952
1953 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1954 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1955 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1956
1957       </div>
1958       <div class="tags">
1959
1960
1961         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/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
1962
1963
1964       </div>
1965     </div>
1966     <div class="padding"></div>
1967
1968     <div class="entry">
1969       <div class="title">
1970         <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>
1971       </div>
1972       <div class="date">
1973          9th July 2018
1974       </div>
1975       <div class="body">
1976         <p>Five years ago,
1977 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">I
1978 measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was</a>, by
1979 analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive.  Since
1980 then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
1981 the task a lot easier.  This made me want to repeat the measurement,
1982 to see how much things changed.  Here are the new numbers, for
1983 unstable only this time:
1984
1985 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
1986
1987 <pre>
1988   count MIME type
1989   ----- -----------------------
1990      56 image/jpeg
1991      55 image/png
1992      49 image/tiff
1993      48 image/gif
1994      39 image/bmp
1995      38 text/plain
1996      37 audio/mpeg
1997      34 application/ogg
1998      33 audio/x-flac
1999      32 audio/x-mp3
2000      30 audio/x-wav
2001      30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
2002      29 image/x-portable-pixmap
2003      27 inode/directory
2004      27 image/x-portable-bitmap
2005      27 audio/x-mpeg
2006      26 application/x-ogg
2007      25 audio/x-mpegurl
2008      25 audio/ogg
2009      24 text/html
2010 </pre>
2011
2012 <p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat
2013 /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^
2014 - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"</p>
2015
2016 <p>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
2017 as the most announced supported MIME type.  These days, thanks to the
2018 AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
2019 want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
2020 MIME type of the file using "file --mime &lt;filename&gt;", and then
2021 look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
2022 AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli
2023 what-provides mimetype &lt;mime-type&gt;.  For example if you, like
2024 me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
2025 list like this:</p>
2026
2027 <p><blockquote><pre>
2028 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
2029 Package: anjuta
2030 Package: audacious
2031 Package: baobab
2032 Package: cervisia
2033 Package: chirp
2034 Package: dolphin
2035 Package: doublecmd-common
2036 Package: easytag
2037 Package: enlightenment
2038 Package: ephoto
2039 Package: filelight
2040 Package: gwenview
2041 Package: k4dirstat
2042 Package: kaffeine
2043 Package: kdesvn
2044 Package: kid3
2045 Package: kid3-qt
2046 Package: nautilus
2047 Package: nemo
2048 Package: pcmanfm
2049 Package: pcmanfm-qt
2050 Package: qweborf
2051 Package: ranger
2052 Package: sirikali
2053 Package: spacefm
2054 Package: spacefm
2055 Package: vifm
2056 %
2057 </pre></blockquote></p>
2058
2059 <p>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
2060 format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:</p>
2061
2062 <p><blockquote><pre>
2063 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/vnd.sketchup.skp
2064 Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'.
2065 %
2066 </pre></blockquote></p>
2067
2068 <p>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D
2069 format:</p>
2070
2071 <p><blockquote><pre>
2072 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/sla|grep Package
2073 Package: cura
2074 Package: meshlab
2075 Package: printrun
2076 %
2077 </pre></blockquote></p>
2078
2079 <p>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.</p>
2080
2081 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2082 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2083 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2084
2085       </div>
2086       <div class="tags">
2087
2088
2089         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>.
2090
2091
2092       </div>
2093     </div>
2094     <div class="padding"></div>
2095
2096     <div class="entry">
2097       <div class="title">
2098         <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>
2099       </div>
2100       <div class="date">
2101          8th July 2018
2102       </div>
2103       <div class="body">
2104         <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
2105 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
2106 space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'.  I normally
2107 would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install &lt;somepackages&gt;' to
2108 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
2109 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
2110 Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
2111 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually.  I concluded
2112 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
2113 decided to see if I could automate it.  I came up with this small
2114 script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
2115
2116 <p><blockquote><pre>
2117 #!/bin/sh
2118 #
2119 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
2120 # upgradable package in one lump.  Fetching packages to upgrade using
2121 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
2122 # flag for manual/automatic.
2123
2124 set -e
2125
2126 ignore() {
2127     if [ "$1" ]; then
2128         grep -v "$1"
2129     else
2130         cat
2131     fi
2132 }
2133
2134 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
2135     echo "Upgrading $p"
2136     apt clean
2137     apt install --download-only -y $p
2138     for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
2139         if [ -e "$f" ]; then
2140             dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
2141             break
2142         fi
2143     done
2144 done
2145 </pre></blockquote></p>
2146
2147 <p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
2148 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
2149 downloaded packages using dpkg.  The idea is to upgrade packages
2150 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
2151 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency).  To
2152 use it, simply run it as root from the command line.  If it fail, try
2153 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again.  This
2154 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
2155 packages.  dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
2156
2157 <p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
2158 upgrade.  The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
2159 the packages that are simply too large to unpack.  Today this was
2160 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
2161 problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
2162
2163 <p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
2164 alternative ways to handle this.  The "unattended-upgrades
2165 --minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
2166 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
2167 first.  It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
2168 Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
2169 the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
2170
2171 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2172 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2173 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2174
2175       </div>
2176       <div class="tags">
2177
2178
2179         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>.
2180
2181
2182       </div>
2183     </div>
2184     <div class="padding"></div>
2185
2186     <div class="entry">
2187       <div class="title">
2188         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_worlds_only_stone_power_plant_.html">The worlds only stone power plant?</a>
2189       </div>
2190       <div class="date">
2191         30th June 2018
2192       </div>
2193       <div class="body">
2194         <p>So far, at least hydro-electric power, coal power, wind power,
2195 solar power, and wood power are well known.  Until a few days ago, I
2196 had never heard of stone power.  Then I learn about a quarry in a
2197 mountain in
2198 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremanger">Bremanger</a> i
2199 Norway, where
2200 <a href="https://www.bontrup.com/en/activities/raw-materials/bremanger-quarry/">the
2201 Bremanger Quarry</a> company is extracting stone and dumping the stone
2202 into a shaft leading to its shipping harbour.  This downward movement
2203 in this shaft is used to produce electricity.  In short, it is using
2204 falling rocks instead of falling water to produce electricity, and
2205 according to its own statements it is producing more power than it is
2206 using, and selling the surplus electricity to the Norwegian power
2207 grid.  I find the concept truly amazing.  Is this the worlds only
2208 stone power plant?</p>
2209
2210 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2211 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2212 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2213
2214       </div>
2215       <div class="tags">
2216
2217
2218         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2219
2220
2221       </div>
2222     </div>
2223     <div class="padding"></div>
2224
2225     <div class="entry">
2226       <div class="title">
2227         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Add_on_to_control_the_projector_from_within_Kodi.html">Add-on to control the projector from within Kodi</a>
2228       </div>
2229       <div class="date">
2230         26th June 2018
2231       </div>
2232       <div class="body">
2233         <p>My movie playing setup involve <a href="https://kodi.tv/">Kodi</a>,
2234 <a href="https://openelec.tv">OpenELEC</a> (probably soon to be
2235 replaced with <a href="https://libreelec.tv/">LibreELEC</a>) and an
2236 Infocus IN76 video projector.  My projector can be controlled via both
2237 a infrared remote controller, and a RS-232 serial line.  The vendor of
2238 my projector, <a href="https://www.infocus.com/">InFocus</a>, had been
2239 sensible enough to document the serial protocol in its user manual, so
2240 it is easily available, and I used it some years ago to write
2241 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/infocus-projector-control">a
2242 small script to control the projector</a>.  For a while now, I longed
2243 for a setup where the projector was controlled by Kodi, for example in
2244 such a way that when the screen saver went on, the projector was
2245 turned off, and when the screen saver exited, the projector was turned
2246 on again.</p>
2247
2248 <p>A few days ago, with very good help from parts of my family, I
2249 managed to find a Kodi Add-on for controlling a Epson projector, and
2250 got in touch with its author to see if we could join forces and make a
2251 Add-on with support for several projectors.  To my pleasure, he was
2252 positive to the idea, and we set out to add InFocus support to his
2253 add-on, and make the add-on suitable for the official Kodi add-on
2254 repository.</p>
2255
2256 <p>The Add-on is now working (for me, at least), with a few minor
2257 adjustments.  The most important change I do relative to the master
2258 branch in the github repository is embedding the
2259 <a href="https://github.com/pyserial/pyserial">pyserial module</a> in
2260 the add-on.  The long term solution is to make a "script" type
2261 pyserial module for Kodi, that can be pulled in as a dependency in
2262 Kodi.  But until that in place, I embed it.</p>
2263
2264 <p>The add-on can be configured to turn on the projector when Kodi
2265 starts, off when Kodi stops as well as turn the projector off when the
2266 screensaver start and on when the screesaver stops.  It can also be
2267 told to set the projector source when turning on the projector.
2268
2269 <p>If this sound interesting to you, check out
2270 <a href="https://github.com/fredrik-eriksson/kodi_projcontrol">the
2271 project github repository</a>.  Perhaps you can send patches to
2272 support your projector too?  As soon as we find time to wrap up the
2273 latest changes, it should be available for easy installation using any
2274 Kodi instance.</p>
2275
2276 <p>For future improvements, I would like to add projector model
2277 detection and the ability to adjust the brightness level of the
2278 projector from within Kodi.  We also need to figure out how to handle
2279 the cooling period of the projector.  My projector refuses to turn on
2280 for 60 seconds after it was turned off.  This is not handled well by
2281 the add-on at the moment.</p>
2282
2283 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2284 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2285 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2286
2287       </div>
2288       <div class="tags">
2289
2290
2291         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2292
2293
2294       </div>
2295     </div>
2296     <div class="padding"></div>
2297
2298     <div class="entry">
2299       <div class="title">
2300         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Self_appointed_leaders_of_the_Free_World.html">Self-appointed leaders of the Free World</a>
2301       </div>
2302       <div class="date">
2303         22nd March 2018
2304       </div>
2305       <div class="body">
2306         <p>The leaders of the worlds have started to congratulate the
2307 re-elected Russian head of state, and this causes some criticism.  I
2308 am though a little fascinated by a comment from USA senator John McCain,
2309 <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/379339-mccain-rips-trumps-congratulatory-call-to-putin-as-insult-to-russian-people">sited
2310 by The Hill and others</a>:
2311
2312 <p><blockquote>
2313 <p>"An American president does not lead the Free World by
2314 congratulating dictators on winning sham elections."</p>
2315 </blockquote></p>
2316
2317 <p>While I totally agree with the senator here, the way the quote is
2318 phrased make me suspect that he is unaware of the simple fact that USA
2319 have not lead the Free World since at least before its government
2320 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar">kidnapped a
2321 completely innocent Canadian citizen in transit on his way home to
2322 Canada via John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 and
2323 sent him to be tortured in Syria for a year</a>.</p>
2324
2325 <p>USA might be running ahead, but the path they are taking is not the
2326 one taken by any Free World.</p>
2327
2328       </div>
2329       <div class="tags">
2330
2331
2332         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2333
2334
2335       </div>
2336     </div>
2337     <div class="padding"></div>
2338
2339     <div class="entry">
2340       <div class="title">
2341         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Facebooks_ability_to_sell_your_personal_information_is_the_real_Cambridge_Analytica_scandal.html">Facebooks ability to sell your personal information is the real Cambridge Analytica scandal</a>
2342       </div>
2343       <div class="date">
2344         21st March 2018
2345       </div>
2346       <div class="body">
2347         <p>So, Cambridge Analytica is getting some well deserved criticism for
2348 (mis)using information it got from Facebook about 50 million people,
2349 mostly in the USA.  What I find a bit surprising, is how little
2350 criticism Facebook is getting for handing the information over to
2351 Cambridge Analytica and others in the first place.  And what about the
2352 people handing their private and personal information to Facebook?
2353 And last, but not least, what about the government offices who are
2354 handing information about the visitors of their web pages to Facebook?
2355 No-one who looked at the terms of use of Facebook should be surprised
2356 that information about peoples interests, political views, personal
2357 lifes and whereabouts would be sold by Facebook.</p>
2358
2359 <p>What I find to be the real scandal is the fact that Facebook is
2360 selling your personal information, not that one of the buyers used it
2361 in a way Facebook did not approve when exposed.  It is well known that
2362 Facebook is selling out their users privacy, but a scandal
2363 nevertheless.  Of course the information provided to them by Facebook
2364 would be misused by one of the parties given access to personal
2365 information about the millions of Facebook users.  Collected
2366 information will be misused sooner or later.  The only way to avoid
2367 such misuse, is to not collect the information in the first place.  If
2368 you do not want Facebook to hand out information about yourself for
2369 the use and misuse of its customers, do not give Facebook the
2370 information.</p>
2371
2372 <p>Personally, I would recommend to completely remove your Facebook
2373 account, and take back some control of your personal information.
2374 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/how-to-protect-your-facebook-privacy-or-delete-yourself-completely">According
2375 to The Guardian</a>, it is a bit hard to find out how to request
2376 account removal (and not just 'disabling').  You need to
2377 <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?helpref=faq_content">visit
2378 a specific Facebook page</a> and click on 'let us know' on that page
2379 to get to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account">the
2380 real account deletion screen</a>.  Perhaps something to consider?  I
2381 would not trust the information to really be deleted (who knows,
2382 perhaps NSA, GCHQ and FRA already got a copy), but it might reduce the
2383 exposure a bit.</p>
2384
2385 <p>If you want to learn more about the capabilities of Cambridge
2386 Analytica, I recommend to see the video recording of the one hour talk
2387 Paul-Olivier Dehaye gave to <a href="">NUUG</a> last april about
2388 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20170404-big-data-psychometric/">
2389 Data collection, psychometric profiling and their impact on
2390 politics</a>.</p>
2391
2392 <p>And if you want to communicate with your friends and loved ones,
2393 use some end-to-end encrypted method like
2394 <a href="https://www.signal.org/">Signal</a> or
2395 <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>, and stop sharing your private
2396 messages with strangers like Facebook and Google.</p>
2397
2398       </div>
2399       <div class="tags">
2400
2401
2402         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
2403
2404
2405       </div>
2406     </div>
2407     <div class="padding"></div>
2408
2409     <div class="entry">
2410       <div class="title">
2411         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_rough_draft_Norwegian_and_Spanish_edition_of_the_book_Made_with_Creative_Commons.html">First rough draft Norwegian and Spanish edition of the book Made with Creative Commons</a>
2412       </div>
2413       <div class="date">
2414         13th March 2018
2415       </div>
2416       <div class="body">
2417         <p>I am working on publishing yet another book related to Creative
2418 Commons.  This time it is a book filled with interviews and histories
2419 from those around the globe making a living using Creative
2420 Commons.</p>
2421
2422 <p>Yesterday, after many months of hard work by several volunteer
2423 translators, the first draft of a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the book
2424 <a href="https://madewith.cc">Made with Creative Commons from 2017</a>
2425 was complete.  The Spanish translation is also complete, while the
2426 Dutch, Polish, German and Ukraine edition need a lot of work.  Get in
2427 touch if you want to help make those happen, or would like to
2428 translate into your mother tongue.</p>
2429
2430 <p>The whole book project started when
2431 <a href="http://gwolf.org/node/4102">Gunnar Wolf announced</a> that he
2432 was going to make a Spanish edition of the book.  I noticed, and
2433 offered some input on how to make a book, based on my experience with
2434 translating the
2435 <a href="https://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Free
2436 Culture</a> and
2437 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">The Debian
2438 Administrator's Handbook</a> books to Norwegian Bokmål.  To make a
2439 long story short, we ended up working on a Bokmål edition, and now the
2440 first rough translation is complete, thanks to the hard work of
2441 Ole-Erik Yrvin, Ingrid Yrvin, Allan Nordhøy and myself.  The first
2442 proof reading is almost done, and only the second and third proof
2443 reading remains.  We will also need to translate the 14 figures and
2444 create a book cover.  Once it is done we will publish the book on
2445 paper, as well as in PDF, ePub and possibly Mobi formats.</p>
2446
2447 <p>The book itself originates as a manuscript on Google Docs, is
2448 downloaded as ODT from there and converted to Markdown using pandoc.
2449 The Markdown is modified by a script before is converted to DocBook
2450 using pandoc.  The DocBook is modified again using a script before it
2451 is used to create a Gettext POT file for translators.  The translated
2452 PO file is then combined with the earlier mentioned DocBook file to
2453 create a translated DocBook file, which finally is given to dblatex to
2454 create the final PDF.  The end result is a set of editions of the
2455 manuscript, one English and one for each of the translations.</p>
2456
2457 <p>The translation is conducted using
2458 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/madewithcc/translation/">the
2459 Weblate web based translation system</a>.  Please have a look there
2460 and get in touch if you would like to help out with proof
2461 reading. :)</p>
2462
2463 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2464 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2465 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2466
2467       </div>
2468       <div class="tags">
2469
2470
2471         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2472
2473
2474       </div>
2475     </div>
2476     <div class="padding"></div>
2477
2478     <div class="entry">
2479       <div class="title">
2480         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_used_in_the_subway_info_screens_in_Oslo__Norway.html">Debian used in the subway info screens in Oslo, Norway</a>
2481       </div>
2482       <div class="date">
2483          2nd March 2018
2484       </div>
2485       <div class="body">
2486         <p>Today I was pleasantly surprised to discover my operating system of
2487 choice, Debian, was used in the info screens on the subway stations.
2488 While passing Nydalen subway station in Oslo, Norway, I discovered the
2489 info screen booting with some text scrolling.  I was not quick enough
2490 with my camera to be able to record a video of the scrolling boot
2491 screen, but I did get a photo from when the boot got stuck with a
2492 corrupt file system:
2493
2494 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2018-03-02-ruter-debian-lenny.jpeg"><img align="center" width="40%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2018-03-02-ruter-debian-lenny.jpeg" alt="[photo of subway info screen]"></a></p>
2495
2496 <p>While I am happy to see Debian used more places, some details of the
2497 content on the screen worries me.</p>
2498
2499 <p>The image show the version booting is 'Debian GNU/Linux lenny/sid',
2500 indicating that this is based on code taken from Debian Unstable/Sid
2501 after Debian Etch (version 4) was released 2007-04-08 and before
2502 Debian Lenny (version 5) was released 2009-02-14.  Since Lenny Debian
2503 has released version 6 (Squeeze) 2011-02-06, 7 (Wheezy) 2013-05-04, 8
2504 (Jessie) 2015-04-25 and 9 (Stretch) 2017-06-15, according to
2505 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history">a Debian
2506 version history on Wikpedia</a>.  This mean the system is running
2507 around 10 year old code, with no security fixes from the vendor for
2508 many years.</p>
2509
2510 <p>This is not the first time I discover the Oslo subway company,
2511 Ruter, running outdated software.  In 2012,
2512 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Er_billettautomatene_til_kollektivtrafikken_i_Oslo_uten_sikkerhetsoppdateringer_.html">I
2513 discovered the ticket vending machines were running Windows 2000</a>,
2514 and this was
2515 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fortsatt_ingen_sikkerhetsoppdateringer_for_billettautomatene_til_kollektivtrafikken_i_Oslo_.html">still
2516 the case in 2016</a>.  Given the response from the responsible people
2517 in 2016, I would assume the machines are still running unpatched
2518 Windows 2000.  Thus, an unpatched Debian setup come as no surprise.</p>
2519
2520 <p>The photo is made available under the license terms
2521 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons
2522 4.0 Attribution International (CC BY 4.0)</a>.</p>
2523
2524 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2525 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2526 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2527
2528       </div>
2529       <div class="tags">
2530
2531
2532         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter</a>.
2533
2534
2535       </div>
2536     </div>
2537     <div class="padding"></div>
2538
2539     <div class="entry">
2540       <div class="title">
2541         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_SysVinit_upstream_project_just_migrated_to_git.html">The SysVinit upstream project just migrated to git</a>
2542       </div>
2543       <div class="date">
2544         18th February 2018
2545       </div>
2546       <div class="body">
2547         <p>Surprising as it might sound, there are still computers using the
2548 traditional Sys V init system, and there probably will be until
2549 systemd start working on Hurd and FreeBSD.
2550 <a href="https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/sysvinit">The upstream
2551 project still exist</a>, though, and up until today, the upstream
2552 source was available from Savannah via subversion.  I am happy to
2553 report that this just changed.</p>
2554
2555 <p>The upstream source is now in Git, and consist of three
2556 repositories:</p>
2557
2558 <ul>
2559
2560 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit.git">sysvinit</a></li>
2561 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/insserv.git">insserv</a></li>
2562 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/startpar.git">startpar</a></li>
2563
2564 </ul>
2565
2566 <p>I do not really spend much time on the project these days, and I
2567 has mostly retired, but found it best to migrate the source to a good
2568 version control system to help those willing to move it forward.</p>
2569
2570 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2571 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2572 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2573
2574       </div>
2575       <div class="tags">
2576
2577
2578         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2579
2580
2581       </div>
2582     </div>
2583     <div class="padding"></div>
2584
2585     <div class="entry">
2586       <div class="title">
2587         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html">Using VLC to stream bittorrent sources</a>
2588       </div>
2589       <div class="date">
2590         14th February 2018
2591       </div>
2592       <div class="body">
2593         <p>A few days ago, a new major version of
2594 <a href="https://www.videolan.org/">VLC</a> was announced, and I
2595 decided to check out if it now supported streaming over
2596 <a href="http://bittorrent.org/">bittorrent</a> and
2597 <a href="https://webtorrent.io">webtorrent</a>.  Bittorrent is one of
2598 the most efficient ways to distribute large files on the Internet, and
2599 Webtorrent is a variant of Bittorrent using
2600 <a href="https://webrtc.org">WebRTC</a> as its transport channel,
2601 allowing web pages to stream and share files using the same technique.
2602 The network protocols are similar but not identical, so a client
2603 supporting one of them can not talk to a client supporting the other.
2604 I was a bit surprised with what I discovered when I started to look.
2605 Looking at
2606 <a href="https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/3.0.0.html">the release
2607 notes</a> did not help answering this question, so I started searching
2608 the web.  I found several news articles from 2013, most of them
2609 tracing the news from Torrentfreak
2610 ("<a href=https://torrentfreak.com/open-source-giant-vlc-mulls-bittorrent-support-130211/">Open
2611 Source Giant VLC Mulls BitTorrent Streaming Support</a>"), about a
2612 initiative to pay someone to create a VLC patch for bittorrent
2613 support.  To figure out what happend with this initiative, I headed
2614 over to the #videolan IRC channel and asked if there were some bug or
2615 feature request tickets tracking such feature.  I got an answer from
2616 lead developer Jean-Babtiste Kempf, telling me that there was a patch
2617 but neither he nor anyone else knew where it was.  So I searched a bit
2618 more, and came across an independent
2619 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent">VLC plugin to add
2620 bittorrent support</a>, created by Johan Gunnarsson in 2016/2017.
2621 Again according to Jean-Babtiste, this is not the patch he was talking
2622 about.</p>
2623
2624 <p>Anyway, to test the plugin, I made a working Debian package from
2625 the git repository, with some modifications.  After installing this
2626 package, I could stream videos from
2627 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a> using VLC
2628 commands like this:</p>
2629
2630 <p><blockquote><pre>
2631 vlc https://archive.org/download/LoveNest/LoveNest_archive.torrent
2632 </pre></blockquote></p>
2633
2634 <p>The plugin is supposed to handle magnet links too, but since The
2635 Internet Archive do not have magnet links and I did not want to spend
2636 time tracking down another source, I have not tested it.  It can take
2637 quite a while before the video start playing without any indication of
2638 what is going on from VLC.  It took 10-20 seconds when I measured it.
2639 Some times the plugin seem unable to find the correct video file to
2640 play, and show the metadata XML file name in the VLC status line.  I
2641 have no idea why.</p>
2642
2643 <p>I have created a <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/890360">request for
2644 a new package in Debian (RFP)</a> and
2645 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/1">asked if
2646 the upstream author is willing to help make this happen</a>.  Now we
2647 wait to see what come out of this.  I do not want to maintain a
2648 package that is not maintained upstream, nor do I really have time to
2649 maintain more packages myself, so I might leave it at this.  But I
2650 really hope someone step up to do the packaging, and hope upstream is
2651 still maintaining the source.  If you want to help, please update the
2652 RFP request or the upstream issue.</p>
2653
2654 <p>I have not found any traces of webtorrent support for VLC.</p>
2655
2656 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2657 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2658 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2659
2660       </div>
2661       <div class="tags">
2662
2663
2664         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2665
2666
2667       </div>
2668     </div>
2669     <div class="padding"></div>
2670
2671     <div class="entry">
2672       <div class="title">
2673         <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>
2674       </div>
2675       <div class="date">
2676         13th February 2018
2677       </div>
2678       <div class="body">
2679         <p>A new version of the
2680 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
2681 software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
2682 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid).  I hope you find it
2683 useful.  It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
2684 enter testing tomorrow.  See the
2685 <a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
2686 notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features.  Version 3.2
2687 was announced 6 days ago.  We will try to get it into Debian as
2688 well.</p>
2689
2690 <p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
2691 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
2692 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
2693 in Debian.</p>
2694
2695 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2696 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2697 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2698
2699       </div>
2700       <div class="tags">
2701
2702
2703         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>.
2704
2705
2706       </div>
2707     </div>
2708     <div class="padding"></div>
2709
2710     <div class="entry">
2711       <div class="title">
2712         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_hard_can______and___be_.html">How hard can æ, ø and å be?</a>
2713       </div>
2714       <div class="date">
2715         11th February 2018
2716       </div>
2717       <div class="body">
2718         <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2018-02-11-peppes-unicode.jpeg" align="right"/>
2719
2720 <p>We write 2018, and it is 30 years since Unicode was introduced.
2721 Most of us in Norway have come to expect the use of our alphabet to
2722 just work with any computer system.  But it is apparently beyond reach
2723 of the computers printing recites at a restaurant.  Recently I visited
2724 a Peppes pizza resturant, and noticed a few details on the recite.
2725 Notice how 'ø' and 'å' are replaced with strange symbols in
2726 'Servitør', 'Å BETALE', 'Beløp pr. gjest', 'Takk for besøket.' and 'Vi
2727 gleder oss til å se deg igjen'.</p>
2728
2729 <p>I would say that this state is passed sad and over in embarrassing.</p>
2730
2731 <p>I removed personal and private information to be nice.</p>
2732
2733 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2734 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2735 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2736
2737       </div>
2738       <div class="tags">
2739
2740
2741         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2742
2743
2744       </div>
2745     </div>
2746     <div class="padding"></div>
2747
2748     <div class="entry">
2749       <div class="title">
2750         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_11_000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html">Legal to share more than 11,000 movies listed on IMDB?</a>
2751       </div>
2752       <div class="date">
2753          7th January 2018
2754       </div>
2755       <div class="body">
2756         <p>I've continued to track down list of movies that are legal to
2757 distribute on the Internet, and identified more than 11,000 title IDs
2758 in The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) so far.  Most of them (57%) are
2759 feature films from USA published before 1923.  I've also tracked down
2760 more than 24,000 movies I have not yet been able to map to IMDB title
2761 ID, so the real number could be a lot higher.  According to the front
2762 web page for <a href="https://retrofilmvault.com/">Retro Film
2763 Vault</A>, there are 44,000 public domain films, so I guess there are
2764 still some left to identify.</p>
2765
2766 <p>The complete data set is available from
2767 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
2768 public git repository</a>, including the scripts used to create it.
2769 Most of the data is collected using web scraping, for example from the
2770 "product catalog" of companies selling copies of public domain movies,
2771 but any source I find believable is used.  I've so far had to throw
2772 out three sources because I did not trust the public domain status of
2773 the movies listed.</p>
2774
2775 <p>Anyway, this is the summary of the 28 collected data sources so
2776 far:</p>
2777
2778 <p><pre>
2779  2352 entries (   66 unique) with and 15983 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-search.json
2780  2302 entries (  120 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
2781   195 entries (   63 unique) with and   200 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-cinemovies.json
2782    89 entries (   52 unique) with and    38 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-creative-commons.json
2783   344 entries (   28 unique) with and   655 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-fesfilm.json
2784   668 entries (  209 unique) with and  1064 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-filmchest-com.json
2785   830 entries (   21 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
2786    19 entries (   19 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-gb.json
2787  6822 entries ( 6669 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-us.json
2788   137 entries (    0 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-externlist.json
2789  1205 entries (   57 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
2790    84 entries (   20 unique) with and   167 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-infodigi-pd.json
2791   158 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-looney-tunes.json
2792   113 entries (    4 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
2793   182 entries (  100 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-silent.json
2794   229 entries (   87 unique) with and     1 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
2795    44 entries (    2 unique) with and    64 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-openflix.json
2796   291 entries (   33 unique) with and   474 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-profilms-pd.json
2797   211 entries (    7 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-info.json
2798  1232 entries (   57 unique) with and  1875 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-net.json
2799    46 entries (   13 unique) with and    81 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
2800   698 entries (   64 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
2801  1758 entries (  882 unique) with and  3786 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-retrofilmvault.json
2802    16 entries (    0 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-thehillproductions.json
2803    63 entries (   16 unique) with and   141 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
2804 11583 unique IMDB title IDs in total, 8724 only in one list, 24647 without IMDB title ID
2805 </pre></p>
2806
2807 <p> I keep finding more data sources.  I found the cinemovies source
2808 just a few days ago, and as you can see from the summary, it extended
2809 my list with 63 movies.  Check out the mklist-* scripts in the git
2810 repository if you are curious how the lists are created.  Many of the
2811 titles are extracted using searches on IMDB, where I look for the
2812 title and year, and accept search results with only one movie listed
2813 if the year matches.  This allow me to automatically use many lists of
2814 movies without IMDB title ID references at the cost of increasing the
2815 risk of wrongly identify a IMDB title ID as public domain.  So far my
2816 random manual checks have indicated that the method is solid, but I
2817 really wish all lists of public domain movies would include unique
2818 movie identifier like the IMDB title ID.  It would make the job of
2819 counting movies in the public domain a lot easier.</p>
2820
2821 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2822 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2823 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2824
2825       </div>
2826       <div class="tags">
2827
2828
2829         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
2830
2831
2832       </div>
2833     </div>
2834     <div class="padding"></div>
2835
2836     <div class="entry">
2837       <div class="title">
2838         <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>
2839       </div>
2840       <div class="date">
2841         17th December 2017
2842       </div>
2843       <div class="body">
2844         <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
2845 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
2846 entered Debian Unstable.  It consist of five packages,
2847 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
2848 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
2849 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
2850 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
2851 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
2852 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>.  The last
2853 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday.  This should make
2854 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
2855 3D printers.  My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
2856 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
2857
2858 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
2859 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages.  With the introduction
2860 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
2861 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa.  If you own or have access to a 3D
2862 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
2863
2864 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
2865 team, flocking together on the
2866 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
2867 mailing list and the
2868 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
2869 IRC channel.</p>
2870
2871 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
2872 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
2873 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
2874
2875       </div>
2876       <div class="tags">
2877
2878
2879         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>.
2880
2881
2882       </div>
2883     </div>
2884     <div class="padding"></div>
2885
2886     <div class="entry">
2887       <div class="title">
2888         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_finding_all_public_domain_movies_in_the_USA.html">Idea for finding all public domain movies in the USA</a>
2889       </div>
2890       <div class="date">
2891         13th December 2017
2892       </div>
2893       <div class="body">
2894         <p>While looking at
2895 <a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/">the scanned copies
2896 for the copyright renewal entries for movies published in the USA</a>,
2897 an idea occurred to me.  The number of renewals are so few per year, it
2898 should be fairly quick to transcribe them all and add references to
2899 the corresponding IMDB title ID.  This would give the (presumably)
2900 complete list of movies published 28 years earlier that did _not_
2901 enter the public domain for the transcribed year.  By fetching the
2902 list of USA movies published 28 years earlier and subtract the movies
2903 with renewals, we should be left with movies registered in IMDB that
2904 are now in the public domain.  For the year 1955 (which is the one I
2905 have looked at the most), the total number of pages to transcribe is
2906 21.  For the 28 years from 1950 to 1978, it should be in the range
2907 500-600 pages.  It is just a few days of work, and spread among a
2908 small group of people it should be doable in a few weeks of spare
2909 time.</p>
2910
2911 <p>A typical copyright renewal entry look like this (the first one
2912 listed for 1955):</p>
2913
2914 <p><blockquote>
2915   ADAM AND EVIL, a photoplay in seven reels by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
2916   Distribution Corp. (c) 17Aug27; L24293. Loew's Incorporated (PWH);
2917   10Jun55; R151558.
2918 </blockquote></p>
2919
2920 <p>The movie title as well as registration and renewal dates are easy
2921 enough to locate by a program (split on first comma and look for
2922 DDmmmYY).  The rest of the text is not required to find the movie in
2923 IMDB, but is useful to confirm the correct movie is found.  I am not
2924 quite sure what the L and R numbers mean, but suspect they are
2925 reference numbers into the archive of the US Copyright Office.</p>
2926
2927 <p>Tracking down the equivalent IMDB title ID is probably going to be
2928 a manual task, but given the year it is fairly easy to search for the
2929 movie title using for example
2930 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/find?q=adam+and+evil+1927&s=all">http://www.imdb.com/find?q=adam+and+evil+1927&s=all</a>.
2931 Using this search, I find that the equivalent IMDB title ID for the
2932 first renewal entry from 1955 is
2933 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/</a>.</p>
2934
2935 <p>I suspect the best way to do this would be to make a specialised
2936 web service to make it easy for contributors to transcribe and track
2937 down IMDB title IDs.  In the web service, once a entry is transcribed,
2938 the title and year could be extracted from the text, a search in IMDB
2939 conducted for the user to pick the equivalent IMDB title ID right
2940 away.  By spreading out the work among volunteers, it would also be
2941 possible to make at least two persons transcribe the same entries to
2942 be able to discover any typos introduced.  But I will need help to
2943 make this happen, as I lack the spare time to do all of this on my
2944 own.  If you would like to help, please get in touch.  Perhaps you can
2945 draft a web service for crowd sourcing the task?</p>
2946
2947 <p>Note, Project Gutenberg already have some
2948 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=copyright+office+renewals">transcribed
2949 copies of the US Copyright Office renewal protocols</a>, but I have
2950 not been able to find any film renewals there, so I suspect they only
2951 have copies of renewal for written works.  I have not been able to find
2952 any transcribed versions of movie renewals so far.  Perhaps they exist
2953 somewhere?</p>
2954
2955 <p>I would love to figure out methods for finding all the public
2956 domain works in other countries too, but it is a lot harder.  At least
2957 for Norway and Great Britain, such work involve tracking down the
2958 people involved in making the movie and figuring out when they died.
2959 It is hard enough to figure out who was part of making a movie, but I
2960 do not know how to automate such procedure without a registry of every
2961 person involved in making movies and their death year.</p>
2962
2963 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2964 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2965 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2966
2967       </div>
2968       <div class="tags">
2969
2970
2971         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
2972
2973
2974       </div>
2975     </div>
2976     <div class="padding"></div>
2977
2978     <div class="entry">
2979       <div class="title">
2980         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_short_movie__Empty_Socks__from_1927_in_the_public_domain_or_not_.html">Is the short movie «Empty Socks» from 1927 in the public domain or not?</a>
2981       </div>
2982       <div class="date">
2983          5th December 2017
2984       </div>
2985       <div class="body">
2986         <p>Three years ago, a presumed lost animation film,
2987 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Socks">Empty Socks from
2988 1927</a>, was discovered in the Norwegian National Library.  At the
2989 time it was discovered, it was generally assumed to be copyrighted by
2990 The Walt Disney Company, and I blogged about
2991 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opphavsretts_status_for__Empty_Socks__fra_1927_.html">my
2992 reasoning to conclude</a> that it would would enter the Norwegian
2993 equivalent of the public domain in 2053, based on my understanding of
2994 Norwegian Copyright Law.  But a few days ago, I came across
2995 <a href="http://www.toonzone.net/forums/threads/exposed-disneys-repurchase-of-oswald-the-rabbit-a-sham.4792291/">a
2996 blog post claiming the movie was already in the public domain</a>, at
2997 least in USA.  The reasoning is as follows: The film was released in
2998 November or Desember 1927 (sources disagree), and presumably
2999 registered its copyright that year.  At that time, right holders of
3000 movies registered by the copyright office received government
3001 protection for there work for 28 years.  After 28 years, the copyright
3002 had to be renewed if the wanted the government to protect it further.
3003 The blog post I found claim such renewal did not happen for this
3004 movie, and thus it entered the public domain in 1956.  Yet someone
3005 claim the copyright was renewed and the movie is still copyright
3006 protected.  Can anyone help me to figure out which claim is correct?
3007 I have not been able to find Empty Socks in Catalog of copyright
3008 entries.  Ser.3 pt.12-13 v.9-12 1955-1958 Motion Pictures
3009 <a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/1955r.html#film">available
3010 from the University of Pennsylvania</a>, neither in
3011 <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=83;num=45">page
3012 45 for the first half of 1955</a>, nor in
3013 <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=175;num=119">page
3014 119 for the second half of 1955</a>.  It is of course possible that
3015 the renewal entry was left out of the printed catalog by mistake.  Is
3016 there some way to rule out this possibility?  Please help, and update
3017 the wikipedia page with your findings.
3018
3019 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3020 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3021 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3022
3023       </div>
3024       <div class="tags">
3025
3026
3027         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
3028
3029
3030       </div>
3031     </div>
3032     <div class="padding"></div>
3033
3034     <div class="entry">
3035       <div class="title">
3036         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Metadata_proposal_for_movies_on_the_Internet_Archive.html">Metadata proposal for movies on the Internet Archive</a>
3037       </div>
3038       <div class="date">
3039         28th November 2017
3040       </div>
3041       <div class="body">
3042         <p>It would be easier to locate the movie you want to watch in
3043 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">the Internet Archive</a>, if the
3044 metadata about each movie was more complete and accurate.  In the
3045 archiving community, a well known saying state that good metadata is a
3046 love letter to the future.  The metadata in the Internet Archive could
3047 use a face lift for the future to love us back.  Here is a proposal
3048 for a small improvement that would make the metadata more useful
3049 today.  I've been unable to find any document describing the various
3050 standard fields available when uploading videos to the archive, so
3051 this proposal is based on my best quess and searching through several
3052 of the existing movies.</p>
3053
3054 <p>I have a few use cases in mind.  First of all, I would like to be
3055 able to count the number of distinct movies in the Internet Archive,
3056 without duplicates.  I would further like to identify the IMDB title
3057 ID of the movies in the Internet Archive, to be able to look up a IMDB
3058 title ID and know if I can fetch the video from there and share it
3059 with my friends.</p>
3060
3061 <p>Second, I would like the Butter data provider for The Internet
3062 archive
3063 (<a href="https://github.com/butterproviders/butter-provider-archive">available
3064 from github</a>), to list as many of the good movies as possible.  The
3065 plugin currently do a search in the archive with the following
3066 parameters:</p>
3067
3068 <p><pre>
3069 collection:moviesandfilms
3070 AND NOT collection:movie_trailers
3071 AND -mediatype:collection
3072 AND format:"Archive BitTorrent"
3073 AND year
3074 </pre></p>
3075
3076 <p>Most of the cool movies that fail to show up in Butter do so
3077 because the 'year' field is missing.  The 'year' field is populated by
3078 the year part from the 'date' field, and should be when the movie was
3079 released (date or year).  Two such examples are
3080 <a href="https://archive.org/details/SidneyOlcottsBen-hur1905">Ben Hur
3081 from 1905</a> and
3082 <a href="https://archive.org/details/Caminandes2GranDillama">Caminandes
3083 2: Gran Dillama from 2013</a>, where the year metadata field is
3084 missing.</p>
3085
3086 So, my proposal is simply, for every movie in The Internet Archive
3087 where an IMDB title ID exist, please fill in these metadata fields
3088 (note, they can be updated also long after the video was uploaded, but
3089 as far as I can tell, only by the uploader):
3090
3091 <dl>
3092
3093 <dt>mediatype</dt>
3094 <dd>Should be 'movie' for movies.</dd>
3095
3096 <dt>collection</dt>
3097 <dd>Should contain 'moviesandfilms'.</dd>
3098
3099 <dt>title</dt>
3100 <dd>The title of the movie, without the publication year.</dd>
3101
3102 <dt>date</dt>
3103 <dd>The data or year the movie was released.  This make the movie show
3104 up in Butter, as well as make it possible to know the age of the
3105 movie and is useful to figure out copyright status.</dd>
3106
3107 <dt>director</dt>
3108 <dd>The director of the movie.  This make it easier to know if the
3109 correct movie is found in movie databases.</dd>
3110
3111 <dt>publisher</dt>
3112 <dd>The production company making the movie.  Also useful for
3113 identifying the correct movie.</dd>
3114
3115 <dt>links</dt>
3116
3117 <dd>Add a link to the IMDB title page, for example like this: &lt;a
3118 href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028496/"&gt;Movie in
3119 IMDB&lt;/a&gt;.  This make it easier to find duplicates and allow for
3120 counting of number of unique movies in the Archive.  Other external
3121 references, like to TMDB, could be added like this too.</dd>
3122
3123 </dl>
3124
3125 <p>I did consider proposing a Custom field for the IMDB title ID (for
3126 example 'imdb_title_url', 'imdb_code' or simply 'imdb', but suspect it
3127 will be easier to simply place it in the links free text field.</p>
3128
3129 <p>I created
3130 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
3131 list of IMDB title IDs for several thousand movies in the Internet
3132 Archive</a>, but I also got a list of several thousand movies without
3133 such IMDB title ID (and quite a few duplicates).  It would be great if
3134 this data set could be integrated into the Internet Archive metadata
3135 to be available for everyone in the future, but with the current
3136 policy of leaving metadata editing to the uploaders, it will take a
3137 while before this happen.  If you have uploaded movies into the
3138 Internet Archive, you can help.  Please consider following my proposal
3139 above for your movies, to ensure that movie is properly
3140 counted. :)</p>
3141
3142 <p>The list is mostly generated using wikidata, which based on
3143 Wikipedia articles make it possible to link between IMDB and movies in
3144 the Internet Archive.  But there are lots of movies without a
3145 Wikipedia article, and some movies where only a collection page exist
3146 (like for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caminandes">the
3147 Caminandes example above</a>, where there are three movies but only
3148 one Wikidata entry).</p>
3149
3150 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3151 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3152 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3153
3154       </div>
3155       <div class="tags">
3156
3157
3158         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
3159
3160
3161       </div>
3162     </div>
3163     <div class="padding"></div>
3164
3165     <div class="entry">
3166       <div class="title">
3167         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_3000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html">Legal to share more than 3000 movies listed on IMDB?</a>
3168       </div>
3169       <div class="date">
3170         18th November 2017
3171       </div>
3172       <div class="body">
3173         <p>A month ago, I blogged about my work to
3174 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html">automatically
3175 check the copyright status of IMDB entries</a>, and try to count the
3176 number of movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the
3177 Internet.  I have continued to look for good data sources, and
3178 identified a few more.  The code used to extract information from
3179 various data sources is available in
3180 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
3181 git repository</a>, currently available from github.</p>
3182
3183 <p>So far I have identified 3186 unique IMDB title IDs.  To gain
3184 better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a
3185 histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release
3186 year).  It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the
3187 graph are located.  I wonder why they are placed there.  I suspect
3188 World War II caused the dip around 1940, but what caused the peak
3189 around 2010?</p>
3190
3191 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-11-18-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png" /></p>
3192
3193 <p>I've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in
3194 the public domain or with a free license.  This is the statistics
3195 reported when running 'make stats' in the git repository:</p>
3196
3197 <pre>
3198   249 entries (    6 unique) with and   288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
3199  2301 entries (  540 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
3200   830 entries (   29 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
3201  2109 entries (  377 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
3202   291 entries (  122 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
3203   144 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
3204   350 entries (    1 unique) with and   801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
3205     4 entries (    0 unique) with and   124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
3206   698 entries (  119 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
3207     8 entries (    8 unique) with and   196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
3208  3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total
3209 </pre>
3210
3211 <p>The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the
3212 data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already
3213 listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent
3214 movies that lack a IMDB title ID.  I've seen examples of all these
3215 situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID.  Based
3216 on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that
3217 are legal to distribute on the Internet is between 3186 and 4713.
3218
3219 <p>It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement,
3220 if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata.  I have
3221 tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they
3222 are interested in doing this, without any replies so far.  Perhaps you
3223 can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO, Public Domain
3224 Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review to try to
3225 convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries?</p>
3226
3227 <p>Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about
3228 movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet.  If such page
3229 exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the
3230 script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should
3231 pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates.</p>
3232
3233 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3234 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3235 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3236
3237       </div>
3238       <div class="tags">
3239
3240
3241         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
3242
3243
3244       </div>
3245     </div>
3246     <div class="padding"></div>
3247
3248     <div class="entry">
3249       <div class="title">
3250         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_fault_tolerant_storage_systems.html">Some notes on fault tolerant storage systems</a>
3251       </div>
3252       <div class="date">
3253          1st November 2017
3254       </div>
3255       <div class="body">
3256         <p>If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might
3257 find these articles and papers interesting.  They have formed how I
3258 think of when designing a storage system.</p>
3259
3260 <ul>
3261
3262 <li>USENIX :login; <a
3263 href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2017/ganesan">Redundancy
3264 Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance.  Analysis of Distributed Storage
3265 Reactions to Single Errors and Corruptions</a> by Aishwarya Ganesan,
3266 Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi
3267 H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
3268
3269 <li>ZDNet
3270 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/">Why
3271 RAID 5 stops working in 2009</a> by Robin Harris</li>
3272
3273 <li>ZDNet
3274 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/">Why
3275 RAID 6 stops working in 2019</a> by Robin Harris</li>
3276
3277 <li>USENIX FAST'07
3278 <a href="http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf">Failure
3279 Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population</a> by Eduardo Pinheiro,
3280 Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz André Barroso</li>
3281
3282 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
3283 href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/hughes12-04.pdf">Data
3284 Integrity.  Finding Truth in a World of Guesses and Lies</a> by Doug
3285 Hughes</li>
3286
3287 <li>USENIX FAST'08
3288 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/bairavasundaram/bairavasundaram_html/">An
3289 Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack</a> by
3290 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. C.
3291 Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
3292
3293 <li>USENIX FAST'07 <a
3294 href="https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/">Disk
3295 failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean
3296 to you?</a> by B. Schroeder and G. A. Gibson.</li>
3297
3298 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
3299 href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/jiang/jiang_html/">Are
3300 Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures?  A Comprehensive
3301 Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics</a> by Weihang
3302 Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Arkady Kanevsky</li>
3303
3304 <li>SIGMETRICS 2007
3305 <a href="http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/latent-sigmetrics07.pdf">An
3306 analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives</a> by
3307 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, S. Pasupathy, and J. Schindler</li>
3308
3309 </ul>
3310
3311 <p>Several of these research papers are based on data collected from
3312 hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye
3313 opening.  The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or
3314 redundant storage systems.  Details matter.  And unfortunately there
3315 are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues.  Both
3316 ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and
3317 practical issues on their own.  I wonder how cluster file systems like
3318 Ceph do in this regard.  After all, there is an old saying, you know
3319 you have a distributed system when the crash of a computer you have
3320 never heard of stops you from getting any work done.  The same holds
3321 true if fault tolerance do not work.</p>
3322
3323 <p>Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how
3324 fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its
3325 status to detect and replace failed disks.</p>
3326
3327 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3328 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3329 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3330
3331       </div>
3332       <div class="tags">
3333
3334
3335         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
3336
3337
3338       </div>
3339     </div>
3340     <div class="padding"></div>
3341
3342     <div class="entry">
3343       <div class="title">
3344         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_services_for_writing_academic_LaTeX_papers_as_a_team.html">Web services for writing academic LaTeX papers as a team</a>
3345       </div>
3346       <div class="date">
3347         31st October 2017
3348       </div>
3349       <div class="body">
3350         <p>I was surprised today to learn that a friend in academia did not
3351 know there are easily available web services available for writing
3352 LaTeX documents as a team.  I thought it was common knowledge, but to
3353 make sure at least my readers are aware of it, I would like to mention
3354 these useful services for writing LaTeX documents.  Some of them even
3355 provide a WYSIWYG editor to ease writing even further.</p>
3356
3357 <p>There are two commercial services available,
3358 <a href="https://sharelatex.com">ShareLaTeX</a> and
3359 <a href="https://overleaf.com">Overleaf</a>.  They are very easy to
3360 use.  Just start a new document, select which publisher to write for
3361 (ie which LaTeX style to use), and start writing.  Note, these two
3362 have announced their intention to join forces, so soon it will only be
3363 one joint service.  I've used both for different documents, and they
3364 work just fine.  While
3365 <a href="https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex">ShareLaTeX is free
3366 software</a>, while the latter is not.  According to <a
3367 href="https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source">a
3368 announcement from Overleaf</a>, they plan to keep the ShareLaTeX code
3369 base maintained as free software.</p>
3370
3371 But these two are not the only alternatives.
3372 <a href="https://app.fiduswriter.org/">Fidus Writer</a> is another free
3373 software solution with <a href="https://github.com/fiduswriter">the
3374 source available on github</a>.  I have not used it myself.  Several
3375 others can be found on the nice
3376 <a href="https://alternativeto.net/software/sharelatex/">alterntiveTo
3377 web service</a>.
3378
3379 <p>If you like Google Docs or Etherpad, but would like to write
3380 documents in LaTeX, you should check out these services.  You can even
3381 host your own, if you want to. :)</p>
3382
3383 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3384 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3385 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3386
3387       </div>
3388       <div class="tags">
3389
3390
3391         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3392
3393
3394       </div>
3395     </div>
3396     <div class="padding"></div>
3397
3398     <div class="entry">
3399       <div class="title">
3400         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html">Locating IMDB IDs of movies in the Internet Archive using Wikidata</a>
3401       </div>
3402       <div class="date">
3403         25th October 2017
3404       </div>
3405       <div class="body">
3406         <p>Recently, I needed to automatically check the copyright status of a
3407 set of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/">The Internet Movie database
3408 (IMDB)</a> entries, to figure out which one of the movies they refer
3409 to can be freely distributed on the Internet.  This proved to be
3410 harder than it sounds.  IMDB for sure list movies without any
3411 copyright protection, where the copyright protection has expired or
3412 where the movie is lisenced using a permissive license like one from
3413 Creative Commons.  These are mixed with copyright protected movies,
3414 and there seem to be no way to separate these classes of movies using
3415 the information in IMDB.</p>
3416
3417 <p>First I tried to look up entries manually in IMDB,
3418 <a href="https://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> and
3419 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a>, to get a
3420 feel how to do this.  It is hard to know for sure using these sources,
3421 but it should be possible to be reasonable confident a movie is "out
3422 of copyright" with a few hours work per movie.  As I needed to check
3423 almost 20,000 entries, this approach was not sustainable.  I simply
3424 can not work around the clock for about 6 years to check this data
3425 set.</p>
3426
3427 <p>I asked the people behind The Internet Archive if they could
3428 introduce a new metadata field in their metadata XML for IMDB ID, but
3429 was told that they leave it completely to the uploaders to update the
3430 metadata.  Some of the metadata entries had IMDB links in the
3431 description, but I found no way to download all metadata files in bulk
3432 to locate those ones and put that approach aside.</p>
3433
3434 <p>In the process I noticed several Wikipedia articles about movies
3435 had links to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, and it occured to me
3436 that I could use the Wikipedia RDF data set to locate entries with
3437 both, to at least get a lower bound on the number of movies on The
3438 Internet Archive with a IMDB ID.  This is useful based on the
3439 assumption that movies distributed by The Internet Archive can be
3440 legally distributed on the Internet.  With some help from the RDF
3441 community (thank you DanC), I was able to come up with this query to
3442 pass to <a href="https://query.wikidata.org/">the SPARQL interface on
3443 Wikidata</a>:
3444
3445 <p><pre>
3446 SELECT ?work ?imdb ?ia ?when ?label
3447 WHERE
3448 {
3449   ?work wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q11424.
3450   ?work wdt:P345 ?imdb.
3451   ?work wdt:P724 ?ia.
3452   OPTIONAL {
3453         ?work wdt:P577 ?when.
3454         ?work rdfs:label ?label.
3455         FILTER(LANG(?label) = "en").
3456   }
3457 }
3458 </pre></p>
3459
3460 <p>If I understand the query right, for every film entry anywhere in
3461 Wikpedia, it will return the IMDB ID and The Internet Archive ID, and
3462 when the movie was released and its English title, if either or both
3463 of the latter two are available.  At the moment the result set contain
3464 2338 entries.  Of course, it depend on volunteers including both
3465 correct IMDB and The Internet Archive IDs in the wikipedia articles
3466 for the movie.  It should be noted that the result will include
3467 duplicates if the movie have entries in several languages.  There are
3468 some bogus entries, either because The Internet Archive ID contain a
3469 typo or because the movie is not available from The Internet Archive.
3470 I did not verify the IMDB IDs, as I am unsure how to do that
3471 automatically.</p>
3472
3473 <p>I wrote a small python script to extract the data set from Wikidata
3474 and check if the XML metadata for the movie is available from The
3475 Internet Archive, and after around 1.5 hour it produced a list of 2097
3476 free movies and their IMDB ID.  In total, 171 entries in Wikidata lack
3477 the refered Internet Archive entry.  I assume the 70 "disappearing"
3478 entries (ie 2338-2097-171) are duplicate entries.</p>
3479
3480 <p>This is not too bad, given that The Internet Archive report to
3481 contain <a href="https://archive.org/details/feature_films">5331
3482 feature films</a> at the moment, but it also mean more than 3000
3483 movies are missing on Wikipedia or are missing the pair of references
3484 on Wikipedia.</p>
3485
3486 <p>I was curious about the distribution by release year, and made a
3487 little graph to show how the amount of free movies is spread over the
3488 years:<p>
3489
3490 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-10-25-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png"></p>
3491
3492 <p>I expect the relative distribution of the remaining 3000 movies to
3493 be similar.</p>
3494
3495 <p>If you want to help, and want to ensure Wikipedia can be used to
3496 cross reference The Internet Archive and The Internet Movie Database,
3497 please make sure entries like this are listed under the "External
3498 links" heading on the Wikipedia article for the movie:</p>
3499
3500 <p><pre>
3501 * {{Internet Archive film|id=FightingLady}}
3502 * {{IMDb title|id=0036823|title=The Fighting Lady}}
3503 </pre></p>
3504
3505 <p>Please verify the links on the final page, to make sure you did not
3506 introduce a typo.</p>
3507
3508 <p>Here is the complete list, if you want to correct the 171
3509 identified Wikipedia entries with broken links to The Internet
3510 Archive: <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1140317">Q1140317</a>,
3511 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
3512 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
3513 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q470560">Q470560</a>,
3514 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q743340">Q743340</a>,
3515 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q822580">Q822580</a>,
3516 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q480696">Q480696</a>,
3517 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q128761">Q128761</a>,
3518 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1307059">Q1307059</a>,
3519 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1335091">Q1335091</a>,
3520 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1537166">Q1537166</a>,
3521 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1438334">Q1438334</a>,
3522 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1479751">Q1479751</a>,
3523 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1497200">Q1497200</a>,
3524 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1498122">Q1498122</a>,
3525 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q865973">Q865973</a>,
3526 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q834269">Q834269</a>,
3527 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
3528 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
3529 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1548193">Q1548193</a>,
3530 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q499031">Q499031</a>,
3531 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1564769">Q1564769</a>,
3532 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585239">Q1585239</a>,
3533 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585569">Q1585569</a>,
3534 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1624236">Q1624236</a>,
3535 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4796595">Q4796595</a>,
3536 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4853469">Q4853469</a>,
3537 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4873046">Q4873046</a>,
3538 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q915016">Q915016</a>,
3539 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4660396">Q4660396</a>,
3540 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4677708">Q4677708</a>,
3541 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4738449">Q4738449</a>,
3542 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4756096">Q4756096</a>,
3543 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4766785">Q4766785</a>,
3544 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q880357">Q880357</a>,
3545 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
3546 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
3547 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
3548 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
3549 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1194170">Q1194170</a>,
3550 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q940014">Q940014</a>,
3551 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q946863">Q946863</a>,
3552 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q172837">Q172837</a>,
3553 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q573077">Q573077</a>,
3554 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219005">Q1219005</a>,
3555 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219599">Q1219599</a>,
3556 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1643798">Q1643798</a>,
3557 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1656352">Q1656352</a>,
3558 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1659549">Q1659549</a>,
3559 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1660007">Q1660007</a>,
3560 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1698154">Q1698154</a>,
3561 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1737980">Q1737980</a>,
3562 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1877284">Q1877284</a>,
3563 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
3564 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
3565 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199451">Q1199451</a>,
3566 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1211871">Q1211871</a>,
3567 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1212179">Q1212179</a>,
3568 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1238382">Q1238382</a>,
3569 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4906454">Q4906454</a>,
3570 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q320219">Q320219</a>,
3571 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1148649">Q1148649</a>,
3572 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q645094">Q645094</a>,
3573 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5050350">Q5050350</a>,
3574 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166548">Q5166548</a>,
3575 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2677926">Q2677926</a>,
3576 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2698139">Q2698139</a>,
3577 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2707305">Q2707305</a>,
3578 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2740725">Q2740725</a>,
3579 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2024780">Q2024780</a>,
3580 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2117418">Q2117418</a>,
3581 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2138984">Q2138984</a>,
3582 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1127992">Q1127992</a>,
3583 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1058087">Q1058087</a>,
3584 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1070484">Q1070484</a>,
3585 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1080080">Q1080080</a>,
3586 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1090813">Q1090813</a>,
3587 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1251918">Q1251918</a>,
3588 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1254110">Q1254110</a>,
3589 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257070">Q1257070</a>,
3590 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257079">Q1257079</a>,
3591 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1197410">Q1197410</a>,
3592 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1198423">Q1198423</a>,
3593 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q706951">Q706951</a>,
3594 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q723239">Q723239</a>,
3595 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2079261">Q2079261</a>,
3596 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1171364">Q1171364</a>,
3597 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q617858">Q617858</a>,
3598 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
3599 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
3600 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q324513">Q324513</a>,
3601 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q374172">Q374172</a>,
3602 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7533269">Q7533269</a>,
3603 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q970386">Q970386</a>,
3604 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q976849">Q976849</a>,
3605 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7458614">Q7458614</a>,
3606 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5347416">Q5347416</a>,
3607 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5460005">Q5460005</a>,
3608 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5463392">Q5463392</a>,
3609 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3038555">Q3038555</a>,
3610 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5288458">Q5288458</a>,
3611 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2346516">Q2346516</a>,
3612 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5183645">Q5183645</a>,
3613 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5185497">Q5185497</a>,
3614 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5216127">Q5216127</a>,
3615 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5223127">Q5223127</a>,
3616 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5261159">Q5261159</a>,
3617 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1300759">Q1300759</a>,
3618 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5521241">Q5521241</a>,
3619 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7733434">Q7733434</a>,
3620 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7736264">Q7736264</a>,
3621 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7737032">Q7737032</a>,
3622 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7882671">Q7882671</a>,
3623 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719427">Q7719427</a>,
3624 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719444">Q7719444</a>,
3625 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7722575">Q7722575</a>,
3626 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2629763">Q2629763</a>,
3627 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2640346">Q2640346</a>,
3628 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2649671">Q2649671</a>,
3629 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7703851">Q7703851</a>,
3630 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7747041">Q7747041</a>,
3631 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6544949">Q6544949</a>,
3632 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6672759">Q6672759</a>,
3633 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2445896">Q2445896</a>,
3634 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12124891">Q12124891</a>,
3635 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3127044">Q3127044</a>,
3636 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2511262">Q2511262</a>,
3637 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2517672">Q2517672</a>,
3638 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2543165">Q2543165</a>,
3639 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628">Q426628</a>,
3640 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628">Q426628</a>,
3641 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12126890">Q12126890</a>,
3642 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q13359969">Q13359969</a>,
3643 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q13359969">Q13359969</a>,
3644 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2294295">Q2294295</a>,
3645 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2294295">Q2294295</a>,
3646 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2559509">Q2559509</a>,
3647 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2559912">Q2559912</a>,
3648 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7760469">Q7760469</a>,
3649 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6703974">Q6703974</a>,
3650 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4744">Q4744</a>,
3651 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7766962">Q7766962</a>,
3652 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7768516">Q7768516</a>,
3653 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7769205">Q7769205</a>,
3654 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7769988">Q7769988</a>,
3655 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2946945">Q2946945</a>,
3656 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086">Q3212086</a>,
3657 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086">Q3212086</a>,
3658 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
3659 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
3660 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
3661 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6909175">Q6909175</a>,
3662 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7405709">Q7405709</a>,
3663 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7416149">Q7416149</a>,
3664 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7239952">Q7239952</a>,
3665 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7317332">Q7317332</a>,
3666 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783674">Q7783674</a>,
3667 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783704">Q7783704</a>,
3668 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7857590">Q7857590</a>,
3669 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372526">Q3372526</a>,
3670 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372642">Q3372642</a>,
3671 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372816">Q3372816</a>,
3672 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372909">Q3372909</a>,
3673 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7959649">Q7959649</a>,
3674 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7977485">Q7977485</a>,
3675 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7992684">Q7992684</a>,
3676 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3817966">Q3817966</a>,
3677 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3821852">Q3821852</a>,
3678 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3420907">Q3420907</a>,
3679 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3429733">Q3429733</a>,
3680 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q774474">Q774474</a></p>
3681
3682 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3683 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3684 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3685
3686       </div>
3687       <div class="tags">
3688
3689
3690         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
3691
3692
3693       </div>
3694     </div>
3695     <div class="padding"></div>
3696
3697     <div class="entry">
3698       <div class="title">
3699         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_one_way_wall_on_the_border_.html">A one-way wall on the border?</a>
3700       </div>
3701       <div class="date">
3702         14th October 2017
3703       </div>
3704       <div class="body">
3705         <p>I find it fascinating how many of the people being locked inside
3706 the proposed border wall between USA and Mexico support the idea.  The
3707 proposal to keep Mexicans out reminds me of
3708 <a href="http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-berlin-wall">the
3709 propaganda twist from the East Germany government</a> calling the wall
3710 the “Antifascist Bulwark” after erecting the Berlin Wall, claiming
3711 that the wall was erected to keep enemies from creeping into East
3712 Germany, while it was obvious to the people locked inside it that it
3713 was erected to keep the people from escaping.</p>
3714
3715 <p>Do the people in USA supporting this wall really believe it is a
3716 one way wall, only keeping people on the outside from getting in,
3717 while not keeping people in the inside from getting out?</p>
3718
3719 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3720 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3721 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3722
3723       </div>
3724       <div class="tags">
3725
3726
3727         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3728
3729
3730       </div>
3731     </div>
3732     <div class="padding"></div>
3733
3734     <div class="entry">
3735       <div class="title">
3736         <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>
3737       </div>
3738       <div class="date">
3739          9th October 2017
3740       </div>
3741       <div class="body">
3742         <p>At my nearby maker space,
3743 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
3744 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
3745 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
3746 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
3747 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
3748 as the software involved,
3749 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
3750 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
3751 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
3752 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
3753 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
3754 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
3755 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
3756
3757 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
3758 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
3759 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
3760 on
3761 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3762 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
3763
3764 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
3765 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
3766 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
3767 upstream version.</p>
3768
3769 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
3770 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
3771 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
3772 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
3773 Debian, check out
3774 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
3775 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
3776 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
3777
3778 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3779 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3780 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3781
3782       </div>
3783       <div class="tags">
3784
3785
3786         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>.
3787
3788
3789       </div>
3790     </div>
3791     <div class="padding"></div>
3792
3793     <div class="entry">
3794       <div class="title">
3795         <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>
3796       </div>
3797       <div class="date">
3798         29th September 2017
3799       </div>
3800       <div class="body">
3801         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
3802 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
3803 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
3804 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
3805 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
3806 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
3807 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
3808 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
3809 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
3810 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
3811 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
3812 listen.</p>
3813
3814 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
3815 visualizing this information up and running for
3816 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
3817 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
3818 library.  The solution is based on the
3819 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
3820 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
3821 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
3822 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
3823 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
3824 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
3825 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
3826 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
3827
3828 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
3829 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
3830 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
3831 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
3832 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
3833 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
3834 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
3835 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
3836
3837 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
3838 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
3839 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
3840 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
3841 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
3842 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
3843 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
3844 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
3845 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
3846 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
3847 mentioned in
3848 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
3849 issue for the topic</a>.
3850
3851 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
3852
3853       </div>
3854       <div class="tags">
3855
3856
3857         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>.
3858
3859
3860       </div>
3861     </div>
3862     <div class="padding"></div>
3863
3864     <div class="entry">
3865       <div class="title">
3866         <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>
3867       </div>
3868       <div class="date">
3869         24th September 2017
3870       </div>
3871       <div class="body">
3872         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
3873 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
3874 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
3875 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
3876 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
3877 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
3878 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
3879 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
3880 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
3881
3882 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
3883 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
3884 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
3885 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
3886
3887 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
3888 clone of two python scripts:</p>
3889
3890 <ol>
3891
3892 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
3893   testing).</li>
3894
3895 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
3896   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
3897
3898 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
3899   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
3900
3901 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
3902
3903 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
3904   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
3905   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
3906
3907 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
3908   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
3909
3910 </ol>
3911
3912 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
3913 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
3914 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
3915 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
3916 very cheaply
3917 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
3918 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
3919 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
3920
3921 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
3922 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
3923 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
3924 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
3925 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
3926 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
3927 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
3928 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
3929
3930 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
3931 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
3932 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
3933 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
3934 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
3935 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
3936 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
3937 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
3938 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
3939 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
3940 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
3941 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
3942
3943       </div>
3944       <div class="tags">
3945
3946
3947         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>.
3948
3949
3950       </div>
3951     </div>
3952     <div class="padding"></div>
3953
3954     <div class="entry">
3955       <div class="title">
3956         <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>
3957       </div>
3958       <div class="date">
3959          9th August 2017
3960       </div>
3961       <div class="body">
3962         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
3963 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
3964 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
3965 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
3966 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
3967 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
3968 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
3969
3970 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
3971 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
3972 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
3973 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
3974 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
3975 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
3976 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
3977 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
3978 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
3979 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
3980 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
3981 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
3982 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
3983
3984 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
3985 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
3986 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
3987 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
3988 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
3989 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
3990 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
3991 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
3992 collector for a few days now.</p>
3993
3994 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
3995
3996 <ol>
3997
3998 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
3999
4000 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
4001 <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>
4002
4003 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
4004
4005 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
4006 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
4007 found a GSM station).</li>
4008
4009 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
4010
4011 </ol>
4012
4013 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
4014 running, I decided to package
4015 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
4016 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
4017 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
4018 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
4019 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
4020
4021 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
4022 commercial tools like
4023 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
4024 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
4025 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
4026 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
4027 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
4028 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
4029 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
4030 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
4031 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
4032 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
4033 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
4034 of government officials...</p>
4035
4036 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
4037 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
4038 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
4039 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
4040 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
4041 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
4042 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
4043 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
4044 one frequency?</p>
4045
4046       </div>
4047       <div class="tags">
4048
4049
4050         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>.
4051
4052
4053       </div>
4054     </div>
4055     <div class="padding"></div>
4056
4057     <div class="entry">
4058       <div class="title">
4059         <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>
4060       </div>
4061       <div class="date">
4062         25th July 2017
4063       </div>
4064       <div class="body">
4065         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
4066
4067 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
4068 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
4069 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
4070 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
4071 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
4072 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
4073 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
4074 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
4075 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
4076 as a web page</a>.</p>
4077
4078 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
4079 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
4080 in
4081 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
4082 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
4083 and
4084 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
4085 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
4086 project.  I hope
4087 "<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
4088 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
4089
4090       </div>
4091       <div class="tags">
4092
4093
4094         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>.
4095
4096
4097       </div>
4098     </div>
4099     <div class="padding"></div>
4100
4101     <div class="entry">
4102       <div class="title">
4103         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions.html">Updated sales number for my Free Culture paper editions</a>
4104       </div>
4105       <div class="date">
4106         12th June 2017
4107       </div>
4108       <div class="body">
4109         <p>It is pleasing to see that the work we put down in publishing new
4110 editions of the classic <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free
4111 Culture book</a> by the founder of the Creative Commons movement,
4112 Lawrence Lessig, is still being appreciated.  I had a look at the
4113 latest sales numbers for the paper edition today.  Not too impressive,
4114 but happy to see some buyers still exist.  All the revenue from the
4115 books is sent to the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative
4116 Commons Corporation</a>, and they receive the largest cut if you buy
4117 directly from Lulu.  Most books are sold via Amazon, with Ingram
4118 second and only a small fraction directly from Lulu.  The ebook
4119 edition is available for free from
4120 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
4121
4122 <table border="0">
4123 <tr><th rowspan="2" valign="bottom">Title / language</th><th colspan="3">Quantity</th></tr>
4124 <tr><th>2016 jan-jun</th><th>2016 jul-dec</th><th>2017 jan-may</th></tr>
4125
4126 <tr>
4127   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td>
4128   <td align="right">3</td>
4129   <td align="right">6</td>
4130   <td align="right">15</td>
4131 </tr>
4132
4133 <tr>
4134   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td>
4135   <td align="right">7</td>
4136   <td align="right">1</td>
4137   <td align="right">0</td>
4138 </tr>
4139
4140 <tr>
4141   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td>
4142   <td align="right">14</td>
4143   <td align="right">27</td>
4144   <td align="right">16</td>
4145 </tr>
4146
4147 <tr>
4148   <td>Total</td>
4149   <td align="right">24</td>
4150   <td align="right">34</td>
4151   <td align="right">31</td>
4152 </tr>
4153
4154 </table>
4155
4156 <p>A bit sad to see the low sales number on the Norwegian edition, and
4157 a bit surprising the English edition still selling so well.</p>
4158
4159 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
4160 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
4161 touch.</p>
4162
4163       </div>
4164       <div class="tags">
4165
4166
4167         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
4168
4169
4170       </div>
4171     </div>
4172     <div class="padding"></div>
4173
4174     <div class="entry">
4175       <div class="title">
4176         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_1_1_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html">Release 0.1.1 of free software archive system Nikita announced</a>
4177       </div>
4178       <div class="date">
4179         10th June 2017
4180       </div>
4181       <div class="body">
4182         <p>I am very happy to report that the
4183 <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita Noark 5
4184 core project</a> tagged its second release today.  The free software
4185 solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
4186 5 used by government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in
4187 version 0.1.1 since version 0.1.0 (from NEWS.md):
4188
4189 <ul>
4190
4191  <li>Continued work on the angularjs GUI, including document upload.</li>
4192  <li>Implemented correspondencepartPerson, correspondencepartUnit and
4193    correspondencepartInternal</li>
4194  <li>Applied for coverity coverage and started submitting code on
4195    regualr basis.</li>
4196  <li>Started fixing bugs reported by coverity</li>
4197  <li>Corrected and completed HATEOAS links to make sure entire API is
4198    available via URLs in _links.</li>
4199  <li>Corrected all relation URLs to use trailing slash.</li>
4200  <li>Add initial support for storing data in ElasticSearch.</li>
4201  <li>Now able to receive and store uploaded files in the archive.</li>
4202  <li>Changed JSON output for object lists to have relations in _links.</li>
4203  <li>Improve JSON output for empty object lists.</li>
4204  <li>Now uses correct MIME type application/vnd.noark5-v4+json.</li>
4205  <li>Added support for docker container images.</li>
4206  <li>Added simple API browser implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
4207  <li>Started on archive client implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
4208  <li>Started on prototype to show the public mail journal.</li>
4209  <li>Improved performance by disabling Sprint FileWatcher.</li>
4210  <li>Added support for 'arkivskaper', 'saksmappe' and 'journalpost'.</li>
4211  <li>Added support for some metadata codelists.</li>
4212  <li>Added support for Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).</li>
4213  <li>Changed login method from Basic Auth to JSON Web Token (RFC 7519)
4214    style.</li>
4215  <li>Added support for GET-ing ny-* URLs.</li>
4216  <li>Added support for modifying entities using PUT and eTag.</li>
4217  <li>Added support for returning XML output on request.</li>
4218  <li>Removed support for English field and class names, limiting ourself
4219    to the official names.</li>
4220  <li>...</li>
4221
4222 </ul>
4223
4224 <p>If this sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita
4225 on irc.freenode.net) or email
4226 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
4227 mailing list).</p>
4228
4229       </div>
4230       <div class="tags">
4231
4232
4233         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
4234
4235
4236       </div>
4237     </div>
4238     <div class="padding"></div>
4239
4240     <div class="entry">
4241       <div class="title">
4242         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html">Idea for storing trusted timestamps in a Noark 5 archive</a>
4243       </div>
4244       <div class="date">
4245          7th June 2017
4246       </div>
4247       <div class="body">
4248         <p><em>This is a copy of
4249 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2017-June/000297.html">an
4250 email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list</a>.  Please follow up
4251 there if you would like to discuss this topic.  The background is that
4252 we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian
4253 <a href="https://www.arkivverket.no/forvaltning-og-utvikling/regelverk-og-standarder/noark-standarden">Noark
4254 5 standard</a> for government archives.</em></p>
4255
4256 <p>I've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be
4257 stored in Noark 5.
4258 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">Trusted
4259 timestamps</a> can be used to verify that some information
4260 (document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a
4261 specific time in the past.  This is useful to verify the integrity of
4262 the documents in the archive.</p>
4263
4264 <p>Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be
4265 stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from
4266 dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is
4267 stamping?</p>
4268
4269 <p>Given a "dokumentbeskrivelse" with an associated "dokumentobjekt",
4270 a new dokumentobjekt is associated with "dokumentbeskrivelse" with the
4271 same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these
4272 attributes:</p>
4273
4274 <ul>
4275
4276 <li>format -> "RFC3161"
4277 <li>mimeType -> "application/timestamp-reply"
4278 <li>formatDetaljer -> "&lt;source URL for timestamp service&gt;"
4279 <li>filenavn -> "&lt;sjekksum&gt;.tsr"
4280
4281 </ul>
4282
4283 <p>This assume a service following
4284 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">IETF RFC 3161</a> is
4285 used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file
4286 ending for the content of such trusted timestamp.  As far as I can
4287 tell from the Noark 5 specifications, it is OK to have several
4288 variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given
4289 dokumentbeskrivelse objekt.  It might be stretching it a bit to make
4290 some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for
4291 verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument
4292 itself.</p>
4293
4294 <p>Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several
4295 timestamping services to be used.  This is useful to spread the risk
4296 of key compromise over several organisations.  It would only be a
4297 problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are
4298 compromised.</p>
4299
4300 <p>The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr
4301 file.  $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the
4302 SHA-256 checksum of the file (ie the "<sjekksum>.tsr" value mentioned
4303 above).</p>
4304
4305 <p><blockquote><pre>
4306 openssl ts -query -data "$inputfile" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
4307   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
4308       --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > $sha256.tsr
4309 </pre></blockquote></p>
4310
4311 <p>To verify the timestamp, you first need to download the public key
4312 of the trusted timestamp service, for example using this command:</p>
4313
4314 <p><blockquote><pre>
4315 wget -O ca-cert.txt \
4316   https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
4317 </pre></blockquote></p>
4318
4319 <p>Note, the public key should be stored alongside the timestamps in
4320 the archive to make sure it is also available 100 years from now.  It
4321 is probably a good idea to standardise how and were to store such
4322 public keys, to make it easier to find for those trying to verify
4323 documents 100 or 1000 years from now. :)</p>
4324
4325 <p>The verification itself is a simple openssl command:</p>
4326
4327 <p><blockquote><pre>
4328 openssl ts -verify -data $inputfile -in $sha256.tsr \
4329   -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
4330 </pre></blockquote></p>
4331
4332 <p>Is there any reason this approach would not work?  Is it somehow against
4333 the Noark 5 specification?</p>
4334
4335       </div>
4336       <div class="tags">
4337
4338
4339         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
4340
4341
4342       </div>
4343     </div>
4344     <div class="padding"></div>
4345
4346     <div class="entry">
4347       <div class="title">
4348         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_archive_system_Nikita_now_able_to_store_documents.html">Free software archive system Nikita now able to store documents</a>
4349       </div>
4350       <div class="date">
4351         19th March 2017
4352       </div>
4353       <div class="body">
4354         <p>The <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita
4355 Noark 5 core project</a> is implementing the Norwegian standard for
4356 keeping an electronic archive of government documents.
4357 <a href="http://www.arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Offentlig-forvaltning/Noark/Noark-5/English-version">The
4358 Noark 5 standard</a> document the requirement for data systems used by
4359 the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark 5 web interface
4360 specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and
4361 retrieving documents and metadata in such archive.  I've been involved
4362 in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian
4363 Unix User Group
4364 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/NOARK5_kjerne_som_fri_programvare_f_r_epostliste_hos_NUUG.shtml">announced
4365 it supported the project</a>.  I believe this is an important project,
4366 and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the
4367 future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend
4368 on.  But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use
4369 case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published
4370 from the government.  I find it useful to have a clear use case in
4371 mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my
4372 itches.</p>
4373
4374 <p>If you would like to help make sure there is a free software
4375 alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel
4376 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita">#nikita on
4377 irc.freenode.net</a>) and
4378 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">the
4379 project mailing list</a>.</p>
4380
4381 <p>When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about
4382 documents.  But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it
4383 became possible to store full text documents too.  Yesterday, I
4384 completed an implementation of a command line tool
4385 <tt>archive-pdf</tt> to upload a PDF file to the archive using this
4386 API.  The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing
4387 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds">fonds</a>, series and
4388 files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than
4389 one exist.  Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the
4390 file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself.  The
4391 process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet,
4392 locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive.  Here is
4393 a test run directly after populating the database with test data using
4394 our API tester:</p>
4395
4396 <p><blockquote><pre>
4397 ~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
4398 using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
4399 using arkivdel: Title of the test series created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
4400
4401  0 - Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
4402  1 - Title of the test file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
4403 Select which mappe you want (or search term): 0
4404 Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
4405   PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
4406   File 2017/1: Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
4407 ~/src//noark5-tester$
4408 </pre></blockquote></p>
4409
4410 <p>You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had
4411 one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use
4412 among the two created by the API tester.  The <tt>archive-pdf</tt>
4413 tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.</p>
4414
4415 <p>In the project, I have been mostly working on
4416 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester">the API
4417 tester</a> so far, while getting to know the code base.  The API
4418 tester currently use
4419 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS">the HATEOAS links</a>
4420 to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed
4421 operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to
4422 create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to
4423 store.  The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our
4424 implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the
4425 specification.</p>
4426
4427 <p>The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification
4428 defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service.
4429 There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification,
4430 and we have
4431 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/tree/master/mangelmelding">started
4432 writing down</a> the questions we get from implementing it.  We use a
4433 format inspired by how <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/">The
4434 Austin Group</a> collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with
4435 <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mantis.html">their
4436 instructions for the MANTIS defect tracker system</a>, in lack of an official way to structure defect reports for Noark 5 (our first submitted defect report was a <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/blob/master/mangelmelding/sendt/2017-03-15-mangel-prosess.md">request for a procedure for submitting defect reports</a> :).
4437
4438 <p>The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is
4439 fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those
4440 that want to test the current code base.  The API tester is
4441 implemented in Python.</p>
4442
4443       </div>
4444       <div class="tags">
4445
4446
4447         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
4448
4449
4450       </div>
4451     </div>
4452     <div class="padding"></div>
4453
4454     <div class="entry">
4455       <div class="title">
4456         <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>
4457       </div>
4458       <div class="date">
4459          9th March 2017
4460       </div>
4461       <div class="body">
4462         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
4463 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
4464 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
4465 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
4466 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
4467 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
4468 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
4469 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
4470
4471 <p><blockquote>
4472 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
4473 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
4474 </blockquote></p>
4475
4476 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
4477 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
4478 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
4479 are noticed.</p>
4480
4481 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
4482 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
4483 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
4484 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
4485 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
4486 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
4487
4488 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
4489 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
4490 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
4491 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
4492 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
4493 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
4494
4495 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
4496
4497 <p><blockquote><pre>
4498 [...]
4499 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
4500 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
4501         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
4502         age:    7863311
4503         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
4504         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
4505         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
4506         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
4507         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
4508         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
4509         per-op statistics
4510                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
4511              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
4512              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
4513               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
4514               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
4515             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
4516                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
4517                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
4518               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
4519                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
4520              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
4521                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
4522               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
4523                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
4524               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
4525                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
4526              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
4527          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
4528               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
4529               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
4530             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
4531               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
4532
4533 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
4534 [...]
4535 </pre></blockquote></p>
4536
4537 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
4538 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
4539 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
4540 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
4541 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
4542 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
4543 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
4544 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
4545 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
4546 mount options.</p>
4547
4548 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
4549 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
4550 But according to
4551 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
4552 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
4553 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
4554 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
4555 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
4556 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
4557
4558 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
4559 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
4560 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
4561 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
4562 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
4563
4564       </div>
4565       <div class="tags">
4566
4567
4568         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>.
4569
4570
4571       </div>
4572     </div>
4573     <div class="padding"></div>
4574
4575     <div class="entry">
4576       <div class="title">
4577         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_does_it_feel_to_be_wiretapped__when_you_should_be_doing_the_wiretapping___.html">How does it feel to be wiretapped, when you should be doing the wiretapping...</a>
4578       </div>
4579       <div class="date">
4580          8th March 2017
4581       </div>
4582       <div class="body">
4583         <p>So the new president in the United States of America claim to be
4584 surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election
4585 before he was elected president.  He even claim this must be illegal.
4586 Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden
4587 documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one
4588 way or another.  Of course the president candidates were wiretapped,
4589 alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.</p>
4590
4591 <p>Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of
4592 Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was
4593 wiretapped illegally.  I fail to see the relevance, given that I am
4594 sure the surveillance industry in USA believe they have all the legal
4595 backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire
4596 world.</p>
4597
4598 <p>There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an
4599 order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump.  That is not very
4600 surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being
4601 secret.  Perhaps he only heard about it?</p>
4602
4603 <p>What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists
4604 present it.  In a news reports the other day in the radio from the
4605 Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist
4606 claim that 'the FBI denies any wiretapping', while the reality is that
4607 'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping'.  There is a fundamental and
4608 important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are
4609 unable to grasp it.</p>
4610
4611 <p><strong>Update 2017-03-13:</strong> Look like
4612 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/03/13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/">The
4613 Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above</a>.</p>
4614
4615       </div>
4616       <div class="tags">
4617
4618
4619         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4620
4621
4622       </div>
4623     </div>
4624     <div class="padding"></div>
4625
4626     <div class="entry">
4627       <div class="title">
4628         <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>
4629       </div>
4630       <div class="date">
4631          3rd March 2017
4632       </div>
4633       <div class="body">
4634         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
4635 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
4636 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
4637 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
4638 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
4639 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
4640 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
4641 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
4642 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
4643
4644 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
4645
4646 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
4647 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
4648 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
4649 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
4650 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
4651 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
4652 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
4653 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
4654
4655       </div>
4656       <div class="tags">
4657
4658
4659         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>.
4660
4661
4662       </div>
4663     </div>
4664     <div class="padding"></div>
4665
4666     <div class="entry">
4667       <div class="title">
4668         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
4669       </div>
4670       <div class="date">
4671          1st March 2017
4672       </div>
4673       <div class="body">
4674         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
4675 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
4676 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
4677 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
4678 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
4679 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
4680 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
4681 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
4682 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
4683 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
4684 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
4685
4686 <blockquote><pre>
4687 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
4688   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
4689   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
4690      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
4691      sleep 1; \
4692   done
4693 300
4694 0+1 oppføringer inn
4695 0+1 oppføringer ut
4696 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
4697 4
4698 8
4699 12
4700 17
4701 21
4702 %
4703 </pre></blockquote>
4704
4705 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
4706 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
4707 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
4708 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
4709
4710 <blockquote><pre>
4711 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
4712   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
4713   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
4714      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
4715      sleep 1; \
4716   done
4717 1079
4718 0+1 oppføringer inn
4719 0+1 oppføringer ut
4720 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
4721 433
4722 1028
4723 1031
4724 1035
4725 1038
4726 %
4727 </pre></blockquote>
4728
4729 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
4730 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
4731
4732 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
4733 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
4734 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
4735 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
4736 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
4737 post.</p>
4738
4739       </div>
4740       <div class="tags">
4741
4742
4743         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4744
4745
4746       </div>
4747     </div>
4748     <div class="padding"></div>
4749
4750     <div class="entry">
4751       <div class="title">
4752         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html">Detect OOXML files with undefined behaviour?</a>
4753       </div>
4754       <div class="date">
4755         21st February 2017
4756       </div>
4757       <div class="body">
4758         <p>I just noticed
4759 <a href="http://www.arkivrad.no/aktuelt/riksarkivarens-forskrift-pa-horing">the
4760 new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment</a> list
4761 <a href="http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm">ECMA-376</a>
4762 / ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term
4763 storage.  Luckily such files will only be accepted based on
4764 pre-approval from the National Archive.  Allowing OOXML files to be
4765 used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we
4766 forget that there are plenty of ways for a "valid" OOXML document to
4767 have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which
4768 lead to a question and an idea.</p>
4769
4770 <p>Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such
4771 undefined behaviour?  It would be useful for the National Archive (and
4772 anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined)
4773 to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of
4774 OOXML.  I'm aware of the
4775 <a href="https://github.com/arlm/officeotron/">officeotron OOXML
4776 validator</a>, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will
4777 report use of undefined behaviour.  Are there other similar tools
4778 available?  Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.</p>
4779
4780       </div>
4781       <div class="tags">
4782
4783
4784         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
4785
4786
4787       </div>
4788     </div>
4789     <div class="padding"></div>
4790
4791     <div class="entry">
4792       <div class="title">
4793         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ruling_ignored_our_objections_to_the_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no___domstolkontroll_.html">Ruling ignored our objections to the seizure of popcorn-time.no (#domstolkontroll)</a>
4794       </div>
4795       <div class="date">
4796         13th February 2017
4797       </div>
4798       <div class="body">
4799         <p>A few days ago, we received the ruling from
4800 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">my
4801 day in court</a>.  The case in question is a challenge of the seizure
4802 of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no.  The ruling simply did not mention
4803 most of our arguments, and seemed to take everything ØKOKRIM said at
4804 face value, ignoring our demonstration and explanations.  But it is
4805 hard to tell for sure, as we still have not seen most of the documents
4806 in the case and thus were unprepared and unable to contradict several
4807 of the claims made in court by the opposition.  We are considering an
4808 appeal, but it is partly a question of funding, as it is costing us
4809 quite a bit to pay for our lawyer.  If you want to help, please
4810 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to the
4811 NUUG defense fund</a>.</p>
4812
4813 <p>The details of the case, as far as we know it, is available in
4814 Norwegian from
4815 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the NUUG
4816 blog</a>.  This also include
4817 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/Avslag_etter_rettslig_h_ring_om_DNS_beslaget___vurderer_veien_videre.shtml">the
4818 ruling itself</a>.</p>
4819
4820       </div>
4821       <div class="tags">
4822
4823
4824         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
4825
4826
4827       </div>
4828     </div>
4829     <div class="padding"></div>
4830
4831     <div class="entry">
4832       <div class="title">
4833         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">A day in court challenging seizure of popcorn-time.no for #domstolkontroll</a>
4834       </div>
4835       <div class="date">
4836          3rd February 2017
4837       </div>
4838       <div class="body">
4839         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-02-01-popcorn-time-in-court.jpeg"></p>
4840
4841 <p>On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett
4842 representing <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the member association
4843 NUUG</a>, alongside <a href="https://www.efn.no/">the member
4844 association EFN</a> and <a href="http://www.imc.no">the DNS registrar
4845 IMC</a>, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no.  It
4846 was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my
4847 life.  Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola
4848 Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil
4849 Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen.</p>
4850
4851 <p><a href="http://www.domstol.no/no/Enkelt-domstol/follo-tingrett/Nar-gar-rettssaken/Beramming/?cid=AAAA1701301512081262234UJFBVEZZZZZEJBAvtale">The
4852 case at hand</a> is that the Norwegian National Authority for
4853 Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (aka
4854 Økokrim) decided on their own, to seize a DNS domain early last
4855 year, without following
4856 <a href="https://www.norid.no/no/regelverk/navnepolitikk/#link12">the
4857 official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority</a> which require a
4858 court decision.  The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn
4859 Time.  And Popcorn Time is the name of a technology with both legal
4860 and illegal applications.  Popcorn Time is a client combining
4861 searching a Bittorrent directory available on the Internet with
4862 downloading/distribute content via Bittorrent and playing the
4863 downloaded content on screen.  It can be used illegally if it is used
4864 to distribute content against the will of the right holder, but it can
4865 also be used legally to play a lot of content, for example the
4866 millions of movies
4867 <a href="https://archive.org/details/movies">available from the
4868 Internet Archive</a> or the collection
4869 <a href="http://vodo.net/films/">available from Vodo</a>.  We created
4870 <a href="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:86c1802af5a667ca56d3918aecb7d3c0f7173084&dn=PresentasjonFolloTingrett.mov&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce">a
4871 video demonstrating legally use of Popcorn Time</a> and played it in
4872 Court.  It can of course be downloaded using Bittorrent.</p>
4873
4874 <p>I did not quite know what to expect from a day in court.  The
4875 government held on to their version of the story and we held on to
4876 ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all.  We will
4877 know in two weeks time.  Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as
4878 the Government have the upper hand here with more knowledge about the
4879 case, better training in handling criminal law and in general higher
4880 standing in the courts than fairly unknown DNS registrar and member
4881 associations.  It is expensive to be right also in Norway.  So far the
4882 case have cost more than NOK 70 000,-.  To help fund the case, NUUG
4883 and EFN have asked for donations, and managed to collect around NOK 25
4884 000,- so far.  Given the presentation from the Government, I expect
4885 the government to appeal if the case go our way.  And if the case do
4886 not go our way, I hope we have enough funding to appeal.</p>
4887
4888 <p>From the other side came two people from Økokrim.  On the benches,
4889 appearing to be part of the group from the government were two people
4890 from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office, and three others I am not
4891 quite sure who was.  Økokrim had proposed to present two witnesses
4892 from The Motion Picture Association, but this was rejected because
4893 they did not speak Norwegian and it was a bit late to bring in a
4894 translator, but perhaps the two from MPA were present anyway.  All
4895 seven appeared to know each other.  Good to see the case is take
4896 seriously.</p>
4897
4898 <p>If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS
4899 domain is hijacked by the government, or you believe the Popcorn Time
4900 technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you
4901 too <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to
4902 the NUUG defense fund</a>.  Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are
4903 available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action (very
4904 unlikely), the rest will be spend promoting free software, open
4905 standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway, so no matter what
4906 happens the money will be put to good use.</p>
4907
4908 <p>If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out
4909 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the blog
4910 posts from NUUG covering the case</a>.  They cover the legal arguments
4911 on both sides.</p>
4912
4913       </div>
4914       <div class="tags">
4915
4916
4917         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
4918
4919
4920       </div>
4921     </div>
4922     <div class="padding"></div>
4923
4924     <div class="entry">
4925       <div class="title">
4926         <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>
4927       </div>
4928       <div class="date">
4929          9th January 2017
4930       </div>
4931       <div class="body">
4932         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
4933 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
4934 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
4935 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
4936 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
4937 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
4938 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
4939 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
4940 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
4941 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
4942 this:
4943
4944 <p><pre>
4945 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
4946  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
4947  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
4948  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
4949  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
4950  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
4951  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
4952  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
4953  8  * * *
4954  9  * * *
4955 [...]
4956 </pre></p>
4957
4958 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
4959 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
4960 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
4961 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
4962 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
4963 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
4964 traceroute request.</p>
4965
4966 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
4967 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
4968 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
4969 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
4970 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
4971
4972 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
4973 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
4974 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
4975 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
4976 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
4977 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
4978 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
4979 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
4980 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
4981
4982 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
4983 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
4984 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
4985 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
4986 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
4987 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
4988 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
4989 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
4990 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
4991 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
4992 render the page (in HAR format using
4993 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
4994 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
4995 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
4996 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
4997 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
4998
4999 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
5000 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>
5001
5002 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
5003 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
5004 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
5005 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
5006 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
5007 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
5008 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
5009 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
5010 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
5011 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
5012 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
5013 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
5014 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
5015 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
5016
5017 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
5018 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>
5019
5020 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
5021 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
5022 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
5023 question.
5024 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
5025 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
5026 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
5027 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
5028 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
5029 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
5030 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
5031
5032 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
5033 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>
5034
5035 <p>In the process, I came across the
5036 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
5037 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
5038 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
5039 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
5040 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
5041 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
5042 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
5043 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
5044 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
5045 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
5046 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
5047 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
5048 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
5049 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
5050
5051 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
5052 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>
5053
5054 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
5055 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
5056 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
5057 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
5058
5059 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
5060 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
5061 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
5062 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
5063 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
5064 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
5065 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
5066
5067 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
5068 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
5069 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
5070 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
5071 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
5072 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
5073 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
5074
5075 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
5076 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
5077 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
5078 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
5079
5080 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5081 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5082 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5083
5084       </div>
5085       <div class="tags">
5086
5087
5088         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>.
5089
5090
5091       </div>
5092     </div>
5093     <div class="padding"></div>
5094
5095     <div class="entry">
5096       <div class="title">
5097         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Introducing_ical_archiver_to_split_out_old_iCalendar_entries.html">Introducing ical-archiver to split out old iCalendar entries</a>
5098       </div>
5099       <div class="date">
5100          4th January 2017
5101       </div>
5102       <div class="body">
5103         <p>Do you have a large <a href="https://icalendar.org/">iCalendar</a>
5104 file with lots of old entries, and would like to archive them to save
5105 space and resources?  At least those of us using KOrganizer know that
5106 turning on and off an event set become slower and slower the more
5107 entries are in the set.  While working on migrating our calendars to a
5108 <a href="http://radicale.org/">Radicale CalDAV server</a> on our
5109 <a href="https://freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox server</a/>, my
5110 loved one wondered if I could find a way to split up the calendar file
5111 she had in KOrganizer, and I set out to write a tool.  I spent a few
5112 days writing and polishing the system, and it is now ready for general
5113 consumption.  The
5114 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/ical-archiver">code for
5115 ical-archiver</a> is publicly available from a git repository on
5116 github.  The system is written in Python and depend on
5117 <a href="http://eventable.github.io/vobject/">the vobject Python
5118 module</a>.</p>
5119
5120 <p>To use it, locate the iCalendar file you want to operate on and
5121 give it as an argument to the ical-archiver script.  This will
5122 generate a set of new files, one file per component type per year for
5123 all components expiring more than two years in the past.  The vevent,
5124 vtodo and vjournal entries are handled by the script.  The remaining
5125 entries are stored in a 'remaining' file.</p>
5126
5127 <p>This is what a test run can look like:
5128
5129 <p><pre>
5130 % ical-archiver t/2004-2016.ics
5131 Found 3612 vevents
5132 Found 6 vtodos
5133 Found 2 vjournals
5134 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2004.ics
5135 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2005.ics
5136 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2006.ics
5137 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2007.ics
5138 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2008.ics
5139 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2009.ics
5140 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2010.ics
5141 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2011.ics
5142 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2012.ics
5143 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2013.ics
5144 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2014.ics
5145 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2007.ics
5146 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2011.ics
5147 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vtodo-2012.ics
5148 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-remaining.ics
5149 %
5150 </pre></p>
5151
5152 <p>As you can see, the original file is untouched and new files are
5153 written with names derived from the original file.  If you are happy
5154 with their content, the *-remaining.ics file can replace the original
5155 the the others can be archived or imported as historical calendar
5156 collections.</p>
5157
5158 <p>The script should probably be improved a bit.  The error handling
5159 when discovering broken entries is not good, and I am not sure yet if
5160 it make sense to split different entry types into separate files or
5161 not.  The program is thus likely to change.  If you find it
5162 interesting, please get in touch. :)</p>
5163
5164 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5165 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5166 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5167
5168       </div>
5169       <div class="tags">
5170
5171
5172         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
5173
5174
5175       </div>
5176     </div>
5177     <div class="padding"></div>
5178
5179     <div class="entry">
5180       <div class="title">
5181         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html">Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!</a>
5182       </div>
5183       <div class="date">
5184         23rd December 2016
5185       </div>
5186       <div class="body">
5187         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
5188 readers probably know, I have been working on the
5189 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
5190 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
5191 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
5192 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
5193 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
5194 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
5195 metadata format.  And today,
5196 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
5197 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
5198 ie using fnmatch():</p>
5199
5200 <p><pre>
5201 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
5202   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
5203 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
5204 Name: pymissile
5205 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
5206 Package: pymissile
5207 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
5208 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
5209 Name: libnxt
5210 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
5211 Package: libnxt
5212 ---
5213 Identifier: t2n [generic]
5214 Name: t2n
5215 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
5216 Package: t2n
5217 ---
5218 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
5219 Name: python-nxt
5220 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
5221 Package: python-nxt
5222 ---
5223 Identifier: nbc [generic]
5224 Name: nbc
5225 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
5226 Package: nbc
5227 %
5228 </pre></p>
5229
5230 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
5231 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
5232
5233 <p><pre>
5234 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
5235 pymissile
5236 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
5237 libnxt
5238 nbc
5239 python-nxt
5240 t2n
5241 %
5242 </pre></p>
5243
5244 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
5245 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
5246
5247 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
5248 make the most of the hardware they have, please
5249 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
5250 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
5251 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
5252 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
5253 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
5254 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
5255 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
5256 part of my involvement in
5257 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
5258 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
5259 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
5260 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
5261 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
5262 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
5263 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
5264 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
5265 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
5266
5267 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5268 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5269 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5270
5271       </div>
5272       <div class="tags">
5273
5274
5275         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>.
5276
5277
5278       </div>
5279     </div>
5280     <div class="padding"></div>
5281
5282     <div class="entry">
5283       <div class="title">
5284         <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>
5285       </div>
5286       <div class="date">
5287         20th December 2016
5288       </div>
5289       <div class="body">
5290         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
5291 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
5292 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
5293 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
5294 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
5295 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
5296 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
5297 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
5298 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
5299 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
5300
5301 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
5302
5303 <p><pre>
5304 % isenkram-lookup
5305 bluez
5306 cheese
5307 ethtool
5308 fprintd
5309 fprintd-demo
5310 gkrellm-thinkbat
5311 hdapsd
5312 libpam-fprintd
5313 pidgin-blinklight
5314 thinkfan
5315 tlp
5316 tp-smapi-dkms
5317 tp-smapi-source
5318 tpb
5319 %
5320 </pre></p>
5321
5322 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
5323 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
5324 I have all the firmware my machine need:
5325
5326 <p><pre>
5327 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
5328 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
5329 %
5330 </pre></p>
5331
5332 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
5333 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
5334 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
5335 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
5336 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
5337 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
5338 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
5339 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
5340
5341 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
5342 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
5343 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
5344
5345 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
5346 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
5347 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
5348 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
5349 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
5350 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
5351 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
5352 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
5353 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
5354 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
5355 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
5356 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
5357 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
5358 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
5359 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
5360 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
5361 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
5362 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
5363 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
5364 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
5365 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
5366 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
5367 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
5368 zd1211-firmware</p>
5369
5370 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
5371 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
5372 maintainer to
5373 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
5374 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
5375 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
5376 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
5377
5378 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
5379 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
5380 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
5381 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
5382 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
5383
5384       </div>
5385       <div class="tags">
5386
5387
5388         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>.
5389
5390
5391       </div>
5392     </div>
5393     <div class="padding"></div>
5394
5395     <div class="entry">
5396       <div class="title">
5397         <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>
5398       </div>
5399       <div class="date">
5400         11th December 2016
5401       </div>
5402       <div class="body">
5403         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
5404
5405 <p>In my early years, I played
5406 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
5407 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
5408 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
5409 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
5410 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
5411 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
5412 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
5413 small.</p>
5414
5415 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
5416 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
5417 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
5418 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
5419 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
5420 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
5421 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
5422 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
5423 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
5424
5425 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
5426 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
5427 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
5428 advantages of the
5429 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
5430 where information about each planet is easily available with common
5431 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
5432 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
5433 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
5434 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
5435 after less then a week.</p>
5436
5437 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
5438 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
5439 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
5440
5441 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5442 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5443 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5444
5445       </div>
5446       <div class="tags">
5447
5448
5449         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>.
5450
5451
5452       </div>
5453     </div>
5454     <div class="padding"></div>
5455
5456     <div class="entry">
5457       <div class="title">
5458         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
5459       </div>
5460       <div class="date">
5461         25th November 2016
5462       </div>
5463       <div class="body">
5464         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
5465 installation system, observing how using
5466 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
5467 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
5468 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
5469 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
5470 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
5471 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
5472 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
5473 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
5474 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
5475 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
5476 up the process make perfect sense.
5477
5478 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
5479 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
5480 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
5481 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
5482 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
5483 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
5484 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
5485 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
5486 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
5487 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
5488
5489 <blockquote><pre>
5490 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
5491 </pre></blockquote>
5492
5493 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
5494 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
5495 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
5496 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
5497 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
5498 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
5499 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
5500 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
5501 tested its impact.</p>
5502
5503
5504       </div>
5505       <div class="tags">
5506
5507
5508         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>.
5509
5510
5511       </div>
5512     </div>
5513     <div class="padding"></div>
5514
5515     <div class="entry">
5516       <div class="title">
5517         <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>
5518       </div>
5519       <div class="date">
5520         13th November 2016
5521       </div>
5522       <div class="body">
5523         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
5524 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
5525 multi-threaded program, finally
5526 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
5527 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
5528 months since
5529 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
5530 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
5531 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
5532 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
5533 JavaScript libraries.</p>
5534
5535 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
5536
5537 <p><blockquote>
5538 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
5539 </blockquote></p>
5540
5541 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
5542 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
5543 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
5544 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
5545 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
5546
5547 <p><blockquote>
5548 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
5549 </blockquote></p>
5550
5551 <p>See the project home page and the
5552 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
5553 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
5554 working.</p>
5555
5556       </div>
5557       <div class="tags">
5558
5559
5560         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>.
5561
5562
5563       </div>
5564     </div>
5565     <div class="padding"></div>
5566
5567     <div class="entry">
5568       <div class="title">
5569         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_talk_with_your_loved_ones_in_private.html">How to talk with your loved ones in private</a>
5570       </div>
5571       <div class="date">
5572          7th November 2016
5573       </div>
5574       <div class="body">
5575         <p>A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an
5576 idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end
5577 encryption with friends and family.  I explicitly asked people not to
5578 list options only used in a work setting.  The background is the
5579 uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as
5580 a blog post from Sander Venima about
5581 <a href="https://sandervenema.ch/2016/11/why-i-wont-recommend-signal-anymore/">why
5582 he do not recommend Signal anymore</a> (with
5583 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883410">feedback from
5584 the Signal author available from ycombinator</a>).  I wanted an
5585 overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options
5586 in a less biased survey later on.  So far I have not taken the time to
5587 look into the individual proposed systems.  They range from text
5588 sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging,
5589 VOIP and video conferencing.  For those considering which system to
5590 use, it is also useful to have a look at
5591 <a href="https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard">the EFF Secure
5592 messaging scorecard</a> which is slightly out of date but still
5593 provide valuable information.</p>
5594
5595 <p>So, on to the list.  There were some used by many, some used by a
5596 few, some rarely used ones and a few mentioned but without anyone
5597 claiming to use them.  Notice the grouping is in reality quite random
5598 given the biased self selected set of participants.  First the ones
5599 used by many:</p>
5600
5601 <ul>
5602
5603 <li><a href="https://whispersystems.org/">Signal</a></li>
5604 <li>Email w/<a href="http://openpgp.org/">OpenPGP</a> (Enigmail, GPGSuite,etc)</li>
5605 <li><a href="https://www.whatsapp.com/">Whatsapp</a></li>
5606 <li>IRC w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
5607 <li>XMPP w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
5608
5609 </ul>
5610
5611 <p>Then the ones used by a few.</p>
5612
5613 <ul>
5614
5615 <li><a href="https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page">Mumble</a></li>
5616 <li>iMessage (included in iOS from Apple)</li>
5617 <li><a href="https://telegram.org/">Telegram</a></li>
5618 <li><a href="https://jitsi.org/">Jitsi</a></li>
5619 <li><a href="https://keybase.io/download">Keybase file</a></li>
5620
5621 </ul>
5622
5623 <p>Then the ones used by even fewer people</p>
5624
5625 <ul>
5626
5627 <li><a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a></li>
5628 <li><a href="https://bitmessage.org/">Bitmessage</a></li>
5629 <li><a href="https://wire.com/">Wire</a></li>
5630 <li>VoIP w/<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP">ZRTP</a> or controlled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Real-time_Transport_Protocol">SRTP</a> (e.g using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSipSimple">CSipSimple</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linphone">Linphone</a>)</li>
5631 <li><a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix</a></li>
5632 <li><a href="https://kontalk.org/">Kontalk</a></li>
5633 <li><a href="https://0bin.net/">0bin</a> (encrypted pastebin)</li>
5634 <li><a href="https://appear.in">Appear.in</a></li>
5635 <li><a href="https://riot.im/">riot</a></li>
5636 <li><a href="https://www.wickr.com/">Wickr Me</a></li>
5637
5638 </ul>
5639
5640 <p>And finally the ones mentioned by not marked as used by
5641 anyone. This might be a mistake, perhaps the person adding the entry
5642 forgot to flag it as used?</p>
5643
5644 <ul>
5645
5646 <li>Email w/Certificates <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME">S/MIME</a></li>
5647 <li><a href="https://www.crypho.com/">Crypho</a></li>
5648 <li><a href="https://cryptpad.fr/">CryptPad</a></li>
5649 <li><a href="https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet">ricochet</a></li>
5650
5651 </ul>
5652
5653 <p>Given the network effect it seem obvious to me that we as a society
5654 have been divided and conquered by those interested in keeping
5655 encrypted and secure communication away from the masses.  The
5656 finishing remarks <a href="https://vimeo.com/97505679">from Aral Balkan
5657 in his talk "Free is a lie"</a> about the usability of free software
5658 really come into effect when you want to communicate in private with
5659 your friends and family.  We can not expect them to allow the
5660 usability of communication tool to block their ability to talk to
5661 their loved ones.</p>
5662
5663 <p>Note for example the option IRC w/OTR.  Most IRC clients do not
5664 have OTR support, so in most cases OTR would not be an option, even if
5665 you wanted to.  In my personal experience, about 1 in 20 I talk to
5666 have a IRC client with OTR.  For private communication to really be
5667 available, most people to talk to must have the option in their
5668 currently used client.  I can not simply ask my family to install an
5669 IRC client.  I need to guide them through a technical multi-step
5670 process of adding extensions to the client to get them going.  This is
5671 a non-starter for most.</p>
5672
5673 <p>I would like to be able to do video phone calls, audio phone calls,
5674 exchange instant messages and share files with my loved ones, without
5675 being forced to share with people I do not know.  I do not want to
5676 share the content of the conversations, and I do not want to share who
5677 I communicate with or the fact that I communicate with someone.
5678 Without all these factors in place, my private life is being more or
5679 less invaded.</p>
5680
5681       </div>
5682       <div class="tags">
5683
5684
5685         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
5686
5687
5688       </div>
5689     </div>
5690     <div class="padding"></div>
5691
5692     <div class="entry">
5693       <div class="title">
5694         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
5695       </div>
5696       <div class="date">
5697          4th November 2016
5698       </div>
5699       <div class="body">
5700         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
5701 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
5702 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
5703 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
5704 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
5705 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
5706 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
5707 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
5708 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
5709 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
5710 and had
5711 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
5712 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
5713 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
5714 loved ones. :)</p>
5715
5716 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
5717 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
5718 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
5719 building
5720 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
5721 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
5722 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
5723 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
5724 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
5725 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
5726 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
5727 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
5728
5729 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
5730
5731 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
5732 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
5733 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
5734 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
5735 the battery status run low:</p>
5736
5737 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
5738    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
5739 </video></p>
5740
5741 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
5742 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
5743
5744 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
5745 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
5746 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
5747 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
5748 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
5749 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
5750 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
5751 should.</p>
5752
5753       </div>
5754       <div class="tags">
5755
5756
5757         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>.
5758
5759
5760       </div>
5761     </div>
5762     <div class="padding"></div>
5763
5764     <div class="entry">
5765       <div class="title">
5766         <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>
5767       </div>
5768       <div class="date">
5769         10th October 2016
5770       </div>
5771       <div class="body">
5772         <p>In July
5773 <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
5774 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
5775 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
5776 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
5777
5778 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
5779 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
5780 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
5781 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
5782 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
5783 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
5784 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
5785 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
5786 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
5787 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
5788 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
5789 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
5790 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
5791 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
5792 time.</p>
5793
5794 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
5795 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
5796 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
5797 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
5798 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
5799 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
5800 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
5801
5802 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
5803 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
5804 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
5805 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
5806 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
5807 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
5808 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
5809 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
5810 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
5811 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
5812
5813 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
5814
5815 <ol>
5816
5817 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
5818 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
5819 know, so you need to install it.
5820
5821 <pre>
5822 apt install git tor chromium
5823 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
5824 </pre></li>
5825
5826 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
5827 block below.</li>
5828
5829 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
5830 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
5831
5832 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
5833 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
5834 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
5835 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
5836 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
5837
5838 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
5839 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
5840 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
5841 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
5842 a associated contact database.</li>
5843
5844 </ol>
5845
5846 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
5847 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
5848 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
5849 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
5850 example
5851 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
5852 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
5853 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
5854 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
5855 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
5856 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
5857 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
5858 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
5859 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
5860 working on Debian Stable.</p>
5861
5862 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
5863 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
5864 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
5865
5866 <pre>
5867 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
5868 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
5869 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
5870 --- a/js/background.js
5871 +++ b/js/background.js
5872 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
5873          });
5874      });
5875
5876 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
5877 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
5878      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
5879 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
5880 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
5881      var messageReceiver;
5882      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
5883          if (messageReceiver) {
5884 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
5885 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
5886 --- a/js/expire.js
5887 +++ b/js/expire.js
5888 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
5889  ;(function() {
5890      'use strict';
5891 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
5892 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
5893
5894      window.extension = window.extension || {};
5895
5896 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
5897 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
5898 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
5899 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
5900 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
5901              return {
5902                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
5903                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
5904 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
5905 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
5906 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
5907              };
5908          },
5909          clearQR: function() {
5910 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
5911 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
5912 --- a/options.html
5913 +++ b/options.html
5914 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
5915          &lt;div class='nav'>
5916            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
5917            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
5918 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
5919 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
5920 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
5921 +
5922 +         &lt;/div>
5923            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
5924            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
5925            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
5926 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
5927 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
5928 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
5929 +#!/bin/sh
5930 +set -e
5931 +cd $(dirname $0)
5932 +mkdir -p userdata
5933 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
5934 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
5935 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
5936 +fi
5937 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
5938 +exec chromium \
5939 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
5940 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
5941 EOF
5942 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
5943 </pre>
5944
5945 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5946 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5947 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5948
5949       </div>
5950       <div class="tags">
5951
5952
5953         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>.
5954
5955
5956       </div>
5957     </div>
5958     <div class="padding"></div>
5959
5960     <div class="entry">
5961       <div class="title">
5962         <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>
5963       </div>
5964       <div class="date">
5965          7th October 2016
5966       </div>
5967       <div class="body">
5968         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
5969 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
5970 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
5971 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
5972 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
5973 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
5974 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
5975 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
5976 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
5977 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
5978 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
5979 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
5980 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
5981
5982 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
5983 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
5984 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
5985 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
5986 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
5987 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
5988
5989 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
5990 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
5991 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
5992 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
5993 identifiers.</p>
5994
5995 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
5996 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
5997 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
5998 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
5999 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
6000 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
6001 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
6002 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
6003 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
6004 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
6005 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
6006 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
6007 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
6008 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
6009
6010 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
6011 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
6012 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
6013 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
6014 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
6015 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
6016 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
6017
6018 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
6019 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
6020 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
6021 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
6022 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
6023 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
6024 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
6025 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
6026 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
6027 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
6028 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
6029 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
6030 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
6031 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
6032 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
6033 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
6034 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
6035
6036 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
6037 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
6038 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
6039 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
6040 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
6041 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
6042 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
6043
6044 <p><pre>
6045 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
6046     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
6047 </pre></p>
6048
6049 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
6050 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
6051 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
6052 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
6053 to detect this?</p>
6054
6055 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
6056 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
6057 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
6058 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
6059 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
6060 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
6061 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
6062 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
6063 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
6064 directly if no such class exist.</p>
6065
6066 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
6067 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
6068 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
6069
6070 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
6071 please join us on our IRC channel
6072 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
6073 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
6074 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
6075 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
6076
6077 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6078 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6079 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6080
6081       </div>
6082       <div class="tags">
6083
6084
6085         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>.
6086
6087
6088       </div>
6089     </div>
6090     <div class="padding"></div>
6091
6092     <div class="entry">
6093       <div class="title">
6094         <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>
6095       </div>
6096       <div class="date">
6097         30th August 2016
6098       </div>
6099       <div class="body">
6100         <p>In April we
6101 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
6102 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
6103 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
6104 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
6105 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
6106 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
6107 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
6108 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
6109 contributing using
6110 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
6111 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
6112 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
6113 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
6114 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
6115 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
6116 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
6117
6118 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
6119 electronic form.</p>
6120
6121       </div>
6122       <div class="tags">
6123
6124
6125         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>.
6126
6127
6128       </div>
6129     </div>
6130     <div class="padding"></div>
6131
6132     <div class="entry">
6133       <div class="title">
6134         <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>
6135       </div>
6136       <div class="date">
6137         11th August 2016
6138       </div>
6139       <div class="body">
6140         <p>This summer, I read a great article
6141 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
6142 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
6143 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
6144 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
6145 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
6146 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
6147 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
6148 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
6149 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
6150 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
6151 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
6152 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
6153
6154 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
6155 get the system into Debian.  I
6156 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
6157 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
6158 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
6159 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
6160 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
6161 profiling information included in the source package.
6162 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
6163
6164 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
6165 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
6166
6167 <p><blockquote><pre>
6168 coz run --- program-to-run
6169 </pre></blockquote></p>
6170
6171 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
6172 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
6173 most, use a web browser and either point it to
6174 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
6175 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
6176 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
6177 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
6178 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
6179 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
6180 targeted experiments.</p>
6181
6182 <p>A video published by ACM
6183 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
6184 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
6185 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
6186 titled
6187 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
6188 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
6189
6190 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
6191 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
6192 because it uses a
6193 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
6194 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
6195 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
6196 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
6197
6198 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
6199 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
6200 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
6201 C++ libraries.</p>
6202
6203       </div>
6204       <div class="tags">
6205
6206
6207         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>.
6208
6209
6210       </div>
6211     </div>
6212     <div class="padding"></div>
6213
6214     <div class="entry">
6215       <div class="title">
6216         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sales_number_for_the_Free_Culture_translation__first_half_of_2016.html">Sales number for the Free Culture translation, first half of 2016</a>
6217       </div>
6218       <div class="date">
6219          5th August 2016
6220       </div>
6221       <div class="body">
6222         <p>As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published
6223 a French and Norwegian translation of the classic
6224 <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book</a> by the
6225 founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig.  A bit less
6226 known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations,
6227 using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original.  And
6228 because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it
6229 too.  The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons
6230 Corporation.  In other words, I do not earn any money from this
6231 project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available
6232 for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative
6233 Commons is needed.</p>
6234
6235 <p>Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at
6236 Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping.  Much to
6237 my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the
6238 French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been
6239 available in English since it was first published.  In total, 24 paper
6240 books was sold for USD $19.99 between 2016-01-01 and 2016-07-31:</p>
6241
6242 <table border="0">
6243 <tr><th>Title / language</th><th>Quantity</th></tr>
6244 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td><td align="right">3</td></tr>
6245 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td><td align="right">7</td></tr>
6246 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td><td align="right">14</td></tr>
6247 </table>
6248
6249 <p>The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book
6250 stores like Amazon and Barnes&Noble.  Most revenue, around $10 per
6251 book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold
6252 directly by Lulu.com.  The other channels give less revenue.  The
6253 summary from Lulu tell me 10 books was sold via the Amazon channel, 10
6254 via Ingram (what is this?) and 4 directly by Lulu.  And Lulu.com tells
6255 me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $101.42.  No idea
6256 what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a
6257 good amount of sales for a 10 year old book or not.  But it make me
6258 happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it
6259 as much as I did.</p>
6260
6261 <p>The ebook edition is available for free from
6262 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
6263
6264 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
6265 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
6266 touch.</p>
6267
6268       </div>
6269       <div class="tags">
6270
6271
6272         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
6273
6274
6275       </div>
6276     </div>
6277     <div class="padding"></div>
6278
6279     <div class="entry">
6280       <div class="title">
6281         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Techno_TV_broadcasting_live_across_Norway_and_the_Internet___debconf16___nuug__on__frikanalen.html">Techno TV broadcasting live across Norway and the Internet (#debconf16, #nuug) on @frikanalen</a>
6282       </div>
6283       <div class="date">
6284          1st August 2016
6285       </div>
6286       <div class="body">
6287         <p>Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf
6288 16 across an entire country?  Or that there is a TV channel
6289 broadcasting talks by or about
6290 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625529/">Linus Torvalds</a>,
6291 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599/">Tor</a>,
6292 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/624019/">OpenID</A>,
6293 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625624/">Common Lisp</a>,
6294 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625446/">Civic Tech</a>,
6295 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625090/">EFF founder John Barlow</a>,
6296 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625432/">how to make 3D
6297 printer electronics</a> and many more fascinating topics?  It works
6298 using only free software (all of it
6299 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from Github</a>), and
6300 is administrated using a web browser and a web API.</p>
6301
6302 <p>The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel
6303 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, and I am involved
6304 via <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG member association</a> in
6305 running and developing the software for the channel.  The channel is
6306 organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and
6307 broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national
6308 broadcasting television).  Individuals can broadcast too.  The time
6309 slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis.  Because the
6310 channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can
6311 experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make
6312 mistakes.  And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on
6313 the schedule are free.  I see this as an opportunity to spread
6314 knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run
6315 regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with
6316 technology related video.  The end result is a channel I like to
6317 describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and
6318 presentations.</p>
6319
6320 <p>It is available on channel 50 on the Norwegian national digital TV
6321 network (RiksTV).  It is also available as a multicast stream on
6322 Uninett.  And finally, it is available as
6323 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/">a WebM unicast stream</a> from
6324 Frikanalen and NUUG.  Check it out. :)</p>
6325
6326       </div>
6327       <div class="tags">
6328
6329
6330         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
6331
6332
6333       </div>
6334     </div>
6335     <div class="padding"></div>
6336
6337     <div class="entry">
6338       <div class="title">
6339         <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>
6340       </div>
6341       <div class="date">
6342          7th July 2016
6343       </div>
6344       <div class="body">
6345         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
6346 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
6347 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
6348 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
6349 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
6350 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
6351 microphone The initial idea had been to just
6352 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
6353 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
6354 until a few days ago.</p>
6355
6356 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
6357 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
6358 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
6359 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
6360 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
6361 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
6362 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
6363
6364 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
6365 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
6366 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
6367 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
6368 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
6369 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
6370 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
6371 him.</p>
6372
6373 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
6374 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
6375 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
6376 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
6377 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
6378 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
6379 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
6380 devices it would work for.</p>
6381
6382 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
6383 followed some instructions
6384 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
6385 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
6386 machine with Debian testing:</p>
6387
6388 <p><pre>
6389 adb reboot-bootloader
6390 fastboot oem rebootRUU
6391 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
6392 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
6393 fastboot reboot
6394 </pre></p>
6395
6396 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
6397 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
6398 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
6399 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
6400 too.</p>
6401
6402 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
6403 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
6404 like this:</p>
6405
6406 <p><pre>
6407 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
6408 </pre>
6409
6410 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
6411 this:</p>
6412
6413 <p><pre>
6414 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
6415 </pre></p>
6416
6417 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
6418 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
6419 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
6420 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
6421 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
6422
6423       </div>
6424       <div class="tags">
6425
6426
6427         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>.
6428
6429
6430       </div>
6431     </div>
6432     <div class="padding"></div>
6433
6434     <div class="entry">
6435       <div class="title">
6436         <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>
6437       </div>
6438       <div class="date">
6439          3rd July 2016
6440       </div>
6441       <div class="body">
6442         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
6443 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
6444 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
6445 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
6446 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
6447 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
6448 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
6449 Github source, compared it to the source in
6450 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
6451 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
6452 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
6453 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
6454 the recipe how I did it.</p>
6455
6456 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
6457
6458 <pre>
6459 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
6460 </pre>
6461
6462 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
6463 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
6464
6465 <pre>
6466 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
6467 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
6468 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
6469 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
6470 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
6471          });
6472      });
6473
6474 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
6475 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
6476 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
6477 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
6478      var messageReceiver;
6479      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
6480          if (messageReceiver) {
6481 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
6482 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
6483 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
6484 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
6485  ;(function() {
6486      'use strict';
6487 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
6488 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
6489
6490      window.extension = window.extension || {};
6491
6492 EOF
6493 </pre>
6494
6495 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
6496 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
6497 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
6498 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
6499
6500 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
6501 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
6502
6503 <pre>
6504 #!/bin/sh
6505 cd $(dirname $0)
6506 mkdir -p userdata
6507 exec chromium \
6508   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
6509   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
6510 </pre>
6511
6512 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
6513 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
6514 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
6515 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
6516 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
6517
6518 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
6519 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
6520 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
6521 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
6522 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
6523 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
6524 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
6525 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
6526 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
6527 Signal from my laptop.
6528
6529 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
6530 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
6531 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
6532 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
6533 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
6534 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
6535 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
6536 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
6537 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
6538 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
6539 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
6540 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
6541
6542 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
6543 on this topic in
6544 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
6545 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
6546 phone</a>.</p>
6547
6548       </div>
6549       <div class="tags">
6550
6551
6552         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>.
6553
6554
6555       </div>
6556     </div>
6557     <div class="padding"></div>
6558
6559     <div class="entry">
6560       <div class="title">
6561         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
6562       </div>
6563       <div class="date">
6564          6th June 2016
6565       </div>
6566       <div class="body">
6567         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
6568 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
6569 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
6570 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
6571 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
6572 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
6573 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
6574 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
6575 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
6576
6577 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
6578 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
6579 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
6580 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
6581 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
6582 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
6583 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
6584
6585 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
6586 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
6587 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
6588 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
6589 toten and parole.</p>
6590
6591 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
6592 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
6593 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
6594 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
6595 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
6596 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
6597 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
6598 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
6599 formats.</p>
6600
6601       </div>
6602       <div class="tags">
6603
6604
6605         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>.
6606
6607
6608       </div>
6609     </div>
6610     <div class="padding"></div>
6611
6612     <div class="entry">
6613       <div class="title">
6614         <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>
6615       </div>
6616       <div class="date">
6617          5th June 2016
6618       </div>
6619       <div class="body">
6620         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
6621 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
6622 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
6623 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
6624 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
6625 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
6626 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
6627 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
6628 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
6629 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
6630 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
6631 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
6632 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
6633 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
6634 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
6635 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
6636 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
6637 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
6638 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
6639 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
6640
6641 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
6642 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
6643 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
6644 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
6645 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
6646 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
6647 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
6648 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
6649 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
6650 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
6651 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
6652 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
6653 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
6654 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
6655
6656 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
6657 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
6658 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
6659 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
6660 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
6661 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
6662 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
6663 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
6664
6665 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
6666 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
6667 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
6668 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
6669 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
6670 information is collected from
6671 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
6672 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
6673 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
6674 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
6675 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
6676 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
6677 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
6678 type (preferably
6679 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
6680 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
6681 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
6682 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
6683
6684 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
6685 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
6686 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
6687
6688 <p><blockquote><pre>
6689 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
6690 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
6691   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
6692     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
6693     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
6694     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
6695   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
6696 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
6697 </pre></blockquote></p>
6698
6699 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
6700 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
6701 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
6702 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
6703
6704 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
6705 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
6706 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
6707
6708 <p><blockquote><pre>
6709 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
6710 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
6711 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
6712 %
6713 </pre></blockquote></p>
6714
6715 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
6716 MimeType= line.</p>
6717
6718 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
6719 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
6720 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
6721 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
6722 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
6723 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
6724 fixed. :)</p>
6725
6726       </div>
6727       <div class="tags">
6728
6729
6730         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>.
6731
6732
6733       </div>
6734     </div>
6735     <div class="padding"></div>
6736
6737     <div class="entry">
6738       <div class="title">
6739         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Tor___from_its_creators_mouth_11_years_ago.html">Tor - from its creators mouth 11 years ago</a>
6740       </div>
6741       <div class="date">
6742         28th May 2016
6743       </div>
6744       <div class="body">
6745         <p>A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and
6746 the current President of <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">the Tor
6747 project</a>, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the
6748 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group</a> (NUUG).  A
6749 video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help
6750 from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk
6751 on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG
6752 currently publishes its talks.  You can
6753 <a href="http://frikanalen.no/se">watch the live stream using a web
6754 browser</a> with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video
6755 on demand page for the talk
6756 "<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599">Tor: Anonymous
6757 communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.</a>".</p>
6758
6759 <p>Here is the video included for those of you using browsers with
6760 HTML video and Ogg Theora support:</p>
6761
6762 <p><video width="70%" poster="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/large_thumb/20050421-tor-frikanalen.jpg" controls>
6763   <source src="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/theora/20050421-tor-frikanalen.ogv" type="video/ogg"/>
6764 </video></p>
6765
6766 <p>I guess the gist of the talk can be summarised quite simply: If you
6767 want to help the military in USA (and everyone else), use Tor. :)</p>
6768
6769       </div>
6770       <div class="tags">
6771
6772
6773         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
6774
6775
6776       </div>
6777     </div>
6778     <div class="padding"></div>
6779
6780     <div class="entry">
6781       <div class="title">
6782         <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>
6783       </div>
6784       <div class="date">
6785         25th May 2016
6786       </div>
6787       <div class="body">
6788         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
6789 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
6790 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
6791 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
6792 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
6793 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
6794 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
6795 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
6796 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
6797 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
6798 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
6799 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
6800
6801 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
6802 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
6803 is going away and is generally being replaced by
6804 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
6805 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
6806 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
6807 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
6808 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
6809 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
6810 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
6811 and see if it is recognised.</p>
6812
6813 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
6814 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
6815 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
6816
6817 <p><blockquote><pre>
6818 % isenkram-lookup
6819 bluez
6820 cheese
6821 fprintd
6822 fprintd-demo
6823 gkrellm-thinkbat
6824 hdapsd
6825 libpam-fprintd
6826 pidgin-blinklight
6827 thinkfan
6828 tleds
6829 tp-smapi-dkms
6830 tp-smapi-source
6831 tpb
6832 %p
6833 </pre></blockquote></p>
6834
6835 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
6836 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
6837 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
6838 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
6839 See
6840 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
6841 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
6842
6843       </div>
6844       <div class="tags">
6845
6846
6847         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>.
6848
6849
6850       </div>
6851     </div>
6852     <div class="padding"></div>
6853
6854     <div class="entry">
6855       <div class="title">
6856         <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>
6857       </div>
6858       <div class="date">
6859         23rd May 2016
6860       </div>
6861       <div class="body">
6862         <p>Yesterday I updated the
6863 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
6864 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
6865 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
6866 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
6867 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
6868 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
6869 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
6870 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
6871 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
6872 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
6873
6874 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
6875 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
6876 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
6877 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
6878 capacity.</p>
6879
6880 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
6881
6882 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
6883 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
6884 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
6885 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
6886
6887 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
6888
6889 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
6890 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
6891 shrinking. :(</p>
6892
6893 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
6894 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
6895 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
6896 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
6897 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
6898 machine.</p>
6899
6900 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
6901 check out the
6902 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
6903 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
6904 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
6905 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
6906 Patches are very welcome.</p>
6907
6908 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6909 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6910 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6911
6912       </div>
6913       <div class="tags">
6914
6915
6916         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>.
6917
6918
6919       </div>
6920     </div>
6921     <div class="padding"></div>
6922
6923     <div class="entry">
6924       <div class="title">
6925         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_edition_of_Lawrence_Lessigs_book_Cultura_Libre_on_Amazon_and_Barnes___Noble.html">French edition of Lawrence Lessigs book Cultura Libre on Amazon and Barnes & Noble</a>
6926       </div>
6927       <div class="date">
6928         21st May 2016
6929       </div>
6930       <div class="body">
6931         <p>A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs
6932 2004 book Cultura Libre was published.  Today I noticed that the book
6933 is now available from book stores.  You can now buy it from
6934 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Libre-French-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/8269018260">Amazon</a>
6935 ($19.99),
6936 <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/culture-libre-lawrence-lessig/1123776705">Barnes
6937 & Noble</a> ($?) and as always from
6938 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Lulu.com</a>
6939 ($19.99).  The revenue is donated to the Creative Commons project.  If
6940 you buy from Lulu.com, they currently get $10.59, while if you buy
6941 from one of the book stores most of the revenue go to the book store
6942 and the Creative Commons project get much (not sure how much
6943 less).</p>
6944
6945 <p>I was a bit surprised to discover that there is a kindle edition
6946 sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC on Amazon.  Not quite sure how
6947 that edition was created, but if you want to download a electronic
6948 edition (PDF, EPUB, Mobi) generated from the same files used to create
6949 the paperback edition, they are
6950 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">available
6951 from github</a>.</p>
6952
6953       </div>
6954       <div class="tags">
6955
6956
6957         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
6958
6959
6960       </div>
6961     </div>
6962     <div class="padding"></div>
6963
6964     <div class="entry">
6965       <div class="title">
6966         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_want_the_courts_to_be_involved_before_the_police_can_hijack_a_news_site_DNS_domain___domstolkontroll_.html">I want the courts to be involved before the police can hijack a news site DNS domain (#domstolkontroll)</a>
6967       </div>
6968       <div class="date">
6969         19th May 2016
6970       </div>
6971       <div class="body">
6972         <p>I just donated to the
6973 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">NUUG defence
6974 "fond"</a> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
6975 site popcorn-time.no tested in court.  I hope everyone that agree with
6976 me will do the same.</p>
6977
6978 <p>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
6979 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
6980 talking to a judge first?  I am.  What if the free software system
6981 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
6982 and was called Popcorn Time?  Would that affect your view?  It still
6983 make me worried.</p>
6984
6985 <p>In March 2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
6986 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
6987 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
6988 the courts.  I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
6989 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
6990 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
6991 permission first.  I was even more surprised when I had a look at
6992 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no">the web
6993 site content on the Internet Archive</A>, and only found news coverage
6994 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
6995 holders permissions.</p>
6996
6997 <p>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
6998 example <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/2016/03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim">Hegnar Online</a> and
6999 <a href="http://itavisen.no/2016/03/08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/">ITavisen<a/>
7000 and
7001 <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-1.12842452">NRK</a>),
7002 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
7003 on
7004 <a href="http://blogg.torvund.net/2016/03/09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/">protests
7005 from the law professor Olav Torvund</a> and
7006 <a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/article/20160311/ARTICLE/160319995">lawyer
7007 Jon Wessel-Aas</a>.  It even got some
7008 <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-160418/">coverage
7009 on TorrentFreak</a>.</p>
7010
7011 <p>I
7012 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">
7013 wrote about the case a month ago</a>, when the
7014 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> (NUUG),
7015 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
7016 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
7017 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
7018 legally challenged.  They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
7019 those that want to support the request.</p>
7020
7021 <p>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
7022 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
7023 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
7024 suggest you <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">show
7025 your support by donating to NUUG</a>.</a>
7026
7027       </div>
7028       <div class="tags">
7029
7030
7031         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
7032
7033
7034       </div>
7035     </div>
7036     <div class="padding"></div>
7037
7038     <div class="entry">
7039       <div class="title">
7040         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
7041       </div>
7042       <div class="date">
7043         12th May 2016
7044       </div>
7045       <div class="body">
7046         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
7047 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
7048 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
7049 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
7050 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
7051 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
7052 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
7053 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
7054 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
7055 great if you could help out with
7056 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
7057 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
7058
7059       </div>
7060       <div class="tags">
7061
7062
7063         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>.
7064
7065
7066       </div>
7067     </div>
7068     <div class="padding"></div>
7069
7070     <div class="entry">
7071       <div class="title">
7072         <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>
7073       </div>
7074       <div class="date">
7075          8th May 2016
7076       </div>
7077       <div class="body">
7078         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
7079 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
7080
7081 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
7082 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
7083 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
7084 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
7085 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
7086 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
7087 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
7088 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
7089 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
7090 players.</p>
7091
7092 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
7093 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
7094 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
7095 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
7096 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
7097 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
7098 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
7099 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
7100 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
7101 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
7102 support most file formats.</p>
7103
7104 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
7105 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
7106 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
7107 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
7108 listed first in the table.</p>
7109
7110 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
7111 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
7112 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
7113 support?</p>
7114
7115       </div>
7116       <div class="tags">
7117
7118
7119         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>.
7120
7121
7122       </div>
7123     </div>
7124     <div class="padding"></div>
7125
7126     <div class="entry">
7127       <div class="title">
7128         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
7129       </div>
7130       <div class="date">
7131          4th May 2016
7132       </div>
7133       <div class="body">
7134         A friend of mine made me aware of
7135 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
7136 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
7137 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
7138
7139 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
7140 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
7141 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
7142 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
7143 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
7144 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
7145 production started.</p>
7146
7147 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
7148 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
7149 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
7150
7151       </div>
7152       <div class="tags">
7153
7154
7155         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>.
7156
7157
7158       </div>
7159     </div>
7160     <div class="padding"></div>
7161
7162     <div class="entry">
7163       <div class="title">
7164         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">NUUG contests Norwegian police DNS seizure of popcorn-time.no</a>
7165       </div>
7166       <div class="date">
7167         18th April 2016
7168       </div>
7169       <div class="body">
7170         <p>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
7171 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User group</a>, a
7172 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
7173 standards and unix-like operating systems.  NUUG announced today it
7174 will
7175 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__NUUG_og_EFN_begj_rer_rettslig_pr_ving_for_DNS_domenebeslag_av_popcorn_time_no.shtml">try
7176 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
7177 unlawful</a>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
7178 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
7179 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
7180 police.  The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
7181 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
7182 a month ago.  I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
7183 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
7184 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.</p>
7185
7186       </div>
7187       <div class="tags">
7188
7189
7190         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
7191
7192
7193       </div>
7194     </div>
7195     <div class="padding"></div>
7196
7197     <div class="entry">
7198       <div class="title">
7199         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html">I.F. Stone - an inspiration for us all</a>
7200       </div>
7201       <div class="date">
7202         13th April 2016
7203       </div>
7204       <div class="body">
7205         <p>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
7206 Schwarz on The Intercept
7207 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/">about
7208 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
7209 USA</a>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
7210 (<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974841">part one is 12 minutes</a> and
7211 <a href="https://vimeo.com/123974842">part two is 30 minutes</a>), and
7212 I found both truly fascinating.  It is amazing what he was able to
7213 find by digging up public sources and government papers.  He
7214 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
7215 <a href="http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php">his weekly news letters</a>
7216 inspiring to read even today.</p>
7217
7218 <p><blockquote>
7219 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
7220 <br>- I. F. Stone
7221 </blockquote></p>
7222
7223 <p>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
7224 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
7225 much as possible.  I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
7226 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone.  They are definitely in short
7227 supply.  If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
7228 check him out.</p>
7229
7230       </div>
7231       <div class="tags">
7232
7233
7234         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
7235
7236
7237       </div>
7238     </div>
7239     <div class="padding"></div>
7240
7241     <div class="entry">
7242       <div class="title">
7243         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html">A French paperback edition of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig is now available</a>
7244       </div>
7245       <div class="date">
7246         12th April 2016
7247       </div>
7248       <div class="body">
7249         <p>I'm happy to report that
7250 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">the
7251 French paperback edition</a> of
7252 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
7253 project to translate</a> the <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free
7254 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
7255 Lulu.com.  Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
7256 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
7257 book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.</p>
7258
7259 <p>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
7260 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> developer Benoît
7261 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
7262 available from
7263 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">the Wikilivres
7264 wiki pages</a> and completed and corrected the translation to match
7265 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
7266 coordinated the proof reading of the final result.  I believe the end
7267 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French.  In
7268 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
7269 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.</p>
7270
7271 <p>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
7272 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit.  I also had to
7273 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
7274 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
7275 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem.  To bypass the problem I
7276 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
7277 that the revenue for these editions go to the
7278 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons non-profit
7279 Corporation</a> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
7280 So far they have earned around USD 70 on sales of the
7281 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>
7282 and
7283 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
7284 Bokmål</a> editions, according to Lulu.com.  They will get the revenue
7285 for the French edition too.  Their revenue is higher if you buy the
7286 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
7287 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.</p>
7288
7289 <p>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
7290 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
7291 technical bar to enter is fairly low.  Get in touch if you would like
7292 to make this happen.</p>
7293
7294       </div>
7295       <div class="tags">
7296
7297
7298         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
7299
7300
7301       </div>
7302     </div>
7303     <div class="padding"></div>
7304
7305     <div class="entry">
7306       <div class="title">
7307         <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>
7308       </div>
7309       <div class="date">
7310         10th April 2016
7311       </div>
7312       <div class="body">
7313         <p>During this weekends
7314 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
7315 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
7316 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
7317 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
7318 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
7319 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
7320 contributing using
7321 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
7322 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
7323 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
7324 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
7325 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
7326 contributors</a>.</p>
7327
7328 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
7329 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
7330 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
7331 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
7332 available for many more languages.</p>
7333
7334       </div>
7335       <div class="tags">
7336
7337
7338         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>.
7339
7340
7341       </div>
7342     </div>
7343     <div class="padding"></div>
7344
7345     <div class="entry">
7346       <div class="title">
7347         <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>
7348       </div>
7349       <div class="date">
7350          7th April 2016
7351       </div>
7352       <div class="body">
7353         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
7354 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
7355 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
7356 But I might be wrong.</p>
7357
7358 <p>According to
7359 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
7360 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
7361 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
7362 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
7363 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
7364 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
7365 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
7366 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
7367 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
7368 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
7369
7370 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
7371 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
7372 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
7373 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
7374 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
7375 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
7376 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
7377 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
7378 team status page</a>, and
7379 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
7380 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
7381
7382 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
7383 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
7384 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
7385 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
7386 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
7387 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
7388 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
7389 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
7390 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
7391 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
7392 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
7393 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
7394
7395       </div>
7396       <div class="tags">
7397
7398
7399         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>.
7400
7401
7402       </div>
7403     </div>
7404     <div class="padding"></div>
7405
7406     <div class="entry">
7407       <div class="title">
7408         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html">syslog-trusted-timestamp - chain of trusted timestamps for your syslog</a>
7409       </div>
7410       <div class="date">
7411          2nd April 2016
7412       </div>
7413       <div class="body">
7414         <p>Two years ago, I had
7415 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">a
7416 look at trusted timestamping options available</a>, and among
7417 other things noted a still open
7418 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/742553">bug in the tsget script</a>
7419 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
7420 as a trusted timestamping client.  A few days ago I was told
7421 <a href="https:/www.difi.no/">the Norwegian government office DIFI</a> is
7422 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
7423 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
7424 using only curl:</p>
7425
7426 <p><pre>
7427 openssl ts -query -data "/etc/shells" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
7428   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
7429          --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > etc-shells.tsr
7430 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
7431 </pre></p>
7432
7433 <p>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
7434 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
7435 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
7436 was made.  The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
7437 in human readable form.  The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
7438 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
7439 changed since the file was stamped.</p>
7440
7441 <p>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
7442 the timestamp file, run the following commands.  It make sure you have
7443 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
7444 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp.  In
7445 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
7446 service certificate.</p>
7447
7448 <p><pre>
7449 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
7450 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
7451 </pre></p>
7452
7453 <p>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
7454 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
7455 Timestamping</a> and
7456 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping">linked
7457 timestamping</a>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
7458 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
7459 Among the latter is
7460 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">the
7461 zeitstempel.dfn.de service</a> mentioned above and
7462 <a href="https://freetsa.org/">freetsa.org service</a> linked to from the
7463 wikipedia web site.  I believe the DIFI service should show up on
7464 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
7465 moment.  I hope this will change when it is into production.  The
7466 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC 3161</a> trusted
7467 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
7468 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
7469 a document was created.</p>
7470
7471 <p>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
7472 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
7473 not been tampered with.  This is not a new idea.  I found one example
7474 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
7475 <a href="http://help.endian.com/entries/21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-">the
7476 configuration of such feature was described in 2012</a>.</p>
7477
7478 <p>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
7479 searched, so I decided to try to
7480 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">build
7481 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp</a>.  My idea is to
7482 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
7483 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation.  This
7484 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
7485 files are tampered with.  But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
7486 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
7487 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
7488 reassemble the timestamp file again.  To use it, simply run it like
7489 this:
7490
7491 <p><pre>
7492 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
7493 </pre></p>
7494
7495 <p>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
7496 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
7497 logger(1).  To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
7498 --verify option:</p>
7499
7500 <p><pre>
7501 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
7502 </pre></p>
7503
7504 <p>The verification step is not yet well designed.  The current
7505 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
7506 and this is not a solid assumption.  It also uses process number as
7507 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions.  I hope to
7508 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
7509 verification later.</p>
7510
7511 <p>Please check out
7512 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">the
7513 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github</a> and send
7514 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
7515 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
7516 forces with others with the same interest.</p>
7517
7518 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7519 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7520 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
7521
7522       </div>
7523       <div class="tags">
7524
7525
7526         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
7527
7528
7529       </div>
7530     </div>
7531     <div class="padding"></div>
7532
7533     <div class="entry">
7534       <div class="title">
7535         <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>
7536       </div>
7537       <div class="date">
7538         23rd March 2016
7539       </div>
7540       <div class="body">
7541         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
7542 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
7543 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
7544 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
7545 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
7546 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
7547 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
7548 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
7549
7550 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
7551 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
7552 and lifetime prediction by running:
7553
7554 <p><pre>
7555 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
7556 </pre></p>
7557
7558 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
7559
7560 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
7561 entry yet):</p>
7562
7563 <p><pre>
7564 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
7565 </pre></p>
7566
7567 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
7568 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
7569 few years of data.</p>
7570
7571 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
7572 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
7573 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
7574 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
7575 know.  The issue is reported as
7576 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
7577 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
7578 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
7579 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
7580 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
7581
7582 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
7583 check out the
7584 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
7585 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
7586 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
7587 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
7588 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
7589
7590       </div>
7591       <div class="tags">
7592
7593
7594         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>.
7595
7596
7597       </div>
7598     </div>
7599     <div class="padding"></div>
7600
7601     <div class="entry">
7602       <div class="title">
7603         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html">UsingQR - "Electronic" paper invoices using JSON and QR codes</a>
7604       </div>
7605       <div class="date">
7606         19th March 2016
7607       </div>
7608       <div class="body">
7609         <p>Back in 2013 I proposed
7610 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
7611 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
7612 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>.  I
7613 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
7614 for name and address, but any format would work.  I did not do
7615 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
7616 something like it.  It would make it possible to efficiently send
7617 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
7618
7619 <p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
7620 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
7621 <a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
7622 <a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>.  Their PDF invoices contain
7623 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
7624 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
7625 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
7626 get a more bogus entry).  I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
7627 to read.  Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
7628
7629 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
7630 {
7631  "vh":500.00,
7632  "vm":0,
7633  "vl":0,
7634  "uqr":1,
7635  "tp":1,
7636  "nme":"Din Leverandør",
7637  "cc":"NO",
7638  "cid":"997912345 MVA",
7639  "iref":"12300001",
7640  "idt":"20151022",
7641  "ddt":"20151105",
7642  "due":2500.0000,
7643  "cur":"NOK",
7644  "pt":"BBAN",
7645  "acc":"17202612345",
7646  "bc":"BIENNOK1",
7647  "adr":"0313 OSLO"
7648 }
7649 </pre></p>
7650
7651 </p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
7652 <a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
7653 specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014).  The format seem to
7654 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
7655 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
7656 Norway.</p>
7657
7658 <p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
7659 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
7660 specification.  Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
7661 November to clarify.  Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
7662 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
7663 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
7664 usage limitations for the format.  I urged her to make sure this was
7665 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
7666 unfortunately this has not happened yet.  So I guess if there is
7667 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
7668 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
7669 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
7670 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so.  At least
7671 with patents, there is always
7672 <a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
7673 chance of getting sued...</a></p>
7674
7675 <p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
7676 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
7677 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
7678 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this.  Their plan was
7679 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
7680 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular.  I hope
7681 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
7682 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
7683 maintain such specification.</p>
7684
7685 <p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
7686 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
7687 about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
7688 similar systems.  In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
7689 standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
7690 information.  More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
7691 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
7692 Payment Descriptor</a>.  And in Germany, there is a system named
7693 <a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
7694 (<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
7695 v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
7696 URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
7697 provide the payment information.  There is also the
7698 <a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
7699 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
7700 not sure if it is done already.  Last, in Bolivia there are reports
7701 that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
7702 format on invoices.  I have not been able to track down a
7703 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
7704 sets.</p>
7705
7706       </div>
7707       <div class="tags">
7708
7709
7710         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
7711
7712
7713       </div>
7714     </div>
7715     <div class="padding"></div>
7716
7717     <div class="entry">
7718       <div class="title">
7719         <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>
7720       </div>
7721       <div class="date">
7722         15th March 2016
7723       </div>
7724       <div class="body">
7725         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
7726 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
7727 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
7728 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
7729 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
7730 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
7731 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
7732 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
7733 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
7734 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
7735 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
7736
7737 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
7738 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
7739 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
7740 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
7741 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
7742 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
7743 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
7744 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
7745 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
7746 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
7747 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
7748
7749 <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>
7750
7751 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
7752 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
7753 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
7754 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
7755 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
7756 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
7757
7758 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
7759 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
7760 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
7761 and graphing.</p>
7762
7763 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
7764 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
7765 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
7766 on
7767 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
7768 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
7769
7770       </div>
7771       <div class="tags">
7772
7773
7774         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>.
7775
7776
7777       </div>
7778     </div>
7779     <div class="padding"></div>
7780
7781     <div class="entry">
7782       <div class="title">
7783         <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>
7784       </div>
7785       <div class="date">
7786         19th February 2016
7787       </div>
7788       <div class="body">
7789         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
7790 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
7791 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
7792 the code in the package in question, preferably in
7793 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
7794 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
7795
7796 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
7797 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
7798 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
7799 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
7800 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
7801 out what was wrong with
7802 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
7803 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
7804 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
7805 semi-automatically.</p>
7806
7807 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
7808 file based on the code in the source package,
7809 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
7810 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
7811 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
7812 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
7813 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
7814 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
7815 option in
7816 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
7817 blog posts from 2014</a>.
7818
7819 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
7820
7821 <p><pre>
7822 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
7823 </pre></p>
7824
7825 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
7826 this might not be the best option.</p>
7827
7828 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
7829 this approach in
7830 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
7831 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
7832 dpkg-copyright' option:
7833
7834 <p><pre>
7835 cme update dpkg-copyright
7836 </pre></p>
7837
7838 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
7839 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
7840
7841 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
7842 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
7843 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
7844 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
7845 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
7846 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
7847 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
7848 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
7849 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
7850 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
7851
7852 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
7853 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
7854 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
7855 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
7856
7857 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
7858 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
7859 planet.debian.org.</p>
7860
7861 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7862 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7863 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
7864
7865 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
7866 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
7867
7868 <p><pre>
7869 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
7870   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
7871 </pre></p>
7872
7873 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
7874 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
7875 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
7876 with my packages in the future.</p>
7877
7878 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
7879 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
7880 command line.</p>
7881
7882       </div>
7883       <div class="tags">
7884
7885
7886         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>.
7887
7888
7889       </div>
7890     </div>
7891     <div class="padding"></div>
7892
7893     <div class="entry">
7894       <div class="title">
7895         <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>
7896       </div>
7897       <div class="date">
7898          4th February 2016
7899       </div>
7900       <div class="body">
7901         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
7902 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
7903 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
7904 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
7905 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
7906 about. :)</p>
7907
7908 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
7909 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
7910 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
7911 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
7912 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
7913 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
7914
7915 <blockquote><pre>
7916 % apt install appstream
7917 [...]
7918 % apt update
7919 [...]
7920 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
7921   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
7922 firmware-qlogic
7923 %
7924 </pre></blockquote>
7925
7926 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
7927 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
7928 a way appstream can use.</p>
7929
7930 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
7931 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
7932 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
7933 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
7934 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
7935 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
7936
7937 <blockquote><pre>
7938 % apt install appstream
7939 [...]
7940 % apt update
7941 [...]
7942 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
7943   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
7944 bkchem
7945 phototonic
7946 inkscape
7947 shutter
7948 tetzle
7949 geeqie
7950 xia
7951 pinta
7952 gthumb
7953 karbon
7954 comix
7955 mirage
7956 viewnior
7957 postr
7958 ristretto
7959 kolourpaint4
7960 eog
7961 eom
7962 gimagereader
7963 midori
7964 %
7965 </pre></blockquote>
7966
7967 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
7968 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
7969
7970       </div>
7971       <div class="tags">
7972
7973
7974         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>.
7975
7976
7977       </div>
7978     </div>
7979     <div class="padding"></div>
7980
7981     <div class="entry">
7982       <div class="title">
7983         <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>
7984       </div>
7985       <div class="date">
7986         24th January 2016
7987       </div>
7988       <div class="body">
7989         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
7990 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
7991 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
7992 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
7993 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
7994 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
7995 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
7996 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
7997 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
7998 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
7999 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
8000 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
8001 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
8002 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
8003 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
8004 entities.</p>
8005
8006 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
8007
8008 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
8009 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
8010 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
8011 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
8012 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
8013 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
8014 tool to do so is called
8015 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
8016 discovered it when I read
8017 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
8018 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
8019 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
8020 The python program was in Debian, but
8021 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
8022 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
8023 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
8024 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
8025 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
8026 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
8027 are now included
8028 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
8029
8030 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
8031 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
8032 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
8033 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
8034 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
8035 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
8036 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
8037 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
8038 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
8039 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
8040 about yourself with the services.</p>
8041
8042 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
8043 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
8044 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
8045 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
8046 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
8047 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
8048 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
8049 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
8050 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
8051 things.  A similar technique have been
8052 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
8053 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
8054 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
8055 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
8056 public.</p>
8057
8058 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
8059 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
8060 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
8061 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
8062
8063 <p>(I have uploaded
8064 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
8065 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
8066 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
8067
8068       </div>
8069       <div class="tags">
8070
8071
8072         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>.
8073
8074
8075       </div>
8076     </div>
8077     <div class="padding"></div>
8078
8079     <div class="entry">
8080       <div class="title">
8081         <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>
8082       </div>
8083       <div class="date">
8084         15th January 2016
8085       </div>
8086       <div class="body">
8087         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
8088 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
8089 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
8090 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
8091 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
8092 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
8093 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
8094 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
8095 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
8096 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
8097 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
8098 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
8099 was not the first to propose this, as the
8100 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
8101 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
8102 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
8103 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
8104
8105 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
8106 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
8107 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
8108 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
8109 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
8110
8111 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
8112 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
8113 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
8114 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
8115 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
8116 done in /etc/.</p>
8117
8118 <blockquote><pre>
8119 apt install apt-transport-tor
8120 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
8121 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
8122 </pre></blockquote>
8123
8124 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
8125 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
8126 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
8127 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
8128
8129 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
8130 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
8131 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
8132 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
8133 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
8134 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
8135
8136 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
8137 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
8138 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
8139 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
8140 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
8141
8142 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
8143 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
8144 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
8145 system.</p>
8146
8147       </div>
8148       <div class="tags">
8149
8150
8151         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>.
8152
8153
8154       </div>
8155     </div>
8156     <div class="padding"></div>
8157
8158     <div class="entry">
8159       <div class="title">
8160         <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>
8161       </div>
8162       <div class="date">
8163         23rd December 2015
8164       </div>
8165       <div class="body">
8166         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
8167 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
8168 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
8169 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
8170 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
8171 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
8172
8173 <p>A few days I came across
8174 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
8175 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
8176 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
8177 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
8178 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
8179 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
8180 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
8181 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
8182 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
8183 discovered the developer
8184 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
8185 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
8186 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
8187 archive.</p>
8188
8189 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
8190 it into Debian, where it currently
8191 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
8192 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
8193
8194 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
8195 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
8196 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
8197 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
8198 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
8199 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
8200 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
8201 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
8202 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
8203 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
8204 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
8205 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
8206
8207 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
8208 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
8209 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
8210 package show up in unstable.</p>
8211
8212       </div>
8213       <div class="tags">
8214
8215
8216         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>.
8217
8218
8219       </div>
8220     </div>
8221     <div class="padding"></div>
8222
8223     <div class="entry">
8224       <div class="title">
8225         <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>
8226       </div>
8227       <div class="date">
8228         20th December 2015
8229       </div>
8230       <div class="body">
8231         <p>Around three years ago, I created
8232 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
8233 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
8234 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
8235 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
8236 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
8237 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
8238 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
8239 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
8240 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
8241 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
8242 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
8243 with.</p>
8244
8245 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
8246 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
8247 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
8248 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
8249 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
8250 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
8251 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
8252 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
8253 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
8254 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
8255 Debian version of appstream.</p>
8256
8257 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
8258 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
8259 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
8260 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
8261 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
8262 how do add the required
8263 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
8264 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
8265 this content:</p>
8266
8267 <blockquote><pre>
8268 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
8269 &lt;component&gt;
8270   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
8271   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
8272   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
8273   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
8274   &lt;description&gt;
8275     &lt;p&gt;
8276       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
8277       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
8278       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
8279       launcher.
8280     &lt;/p&gt;
8281   &lt;/description&gt;
8282   &lt;provides&gt;
8283     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
8284   &lt;/provides&gt;
8285 &lt;/component&gt;
8286 </pre></blockquote>
8287
8288 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
8289 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
8290 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
8291 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
8292 0202.</p>
8293
8294 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
8295 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
8296 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
8297 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
8298 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
8299 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
8300 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
8301 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
8302
8303 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
8304 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
8305 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
8306 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
8307 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
8308
8309 <blockquote><pre>
8310 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
8311 </pre></blockquote>
8312
8313 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
8314 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
8315 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
8316 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
8317 question.</p>
8318
8319 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
8320 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
8321
8322 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
8323 try running this command on the command line:</p>
8324
8325 <blockquote><pre>
8326 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
8327 </pre></blockquote>
8328
8329 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
8330 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
8331 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
8332
8333       </div>
8334       <div class="tags">
8335
8336
8337         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>.
8338
8339
8340       </div>
8341     </div>
8342     <div class="padding"></div>
8343
8344     <div class="entry">
8345       <div class="title">
8346         <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>
8347       </div>
8348       <div class="date">
8349         30th November 2015
8350       </div>
8351       <div class="body">
8352         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
8353 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
8354 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
8355 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
8356 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
8357
8358 <blockquote>
8359
8360 <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>
8361
8362 <blockquote>
8363 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
8364
8365 The first step is to choose a
8366 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
8367 code.<br/>
8368
8369 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
8370 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
8371
8372 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
8373 work<br/>
8374
8375 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
8376 </blockquote>
8377
8378 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
8379 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
8380 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
8381 0x57</a></small></p>
8382
8383 <p>As the Debian Website
8384 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
8385 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
8386 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
8387 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
8388 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
8389 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
8390 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
8391 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
8392 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
8393 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
8394 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
8395 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
8396 Freedom">FaiF</a>
8397 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
8398 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
8399 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
8400 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
8401 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
8402 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
8403 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
8404 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
8405 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
8406 In March the SFC supported a
8407 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
8408 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
8409 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
8410 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
8411 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
8412 conferences
8413 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
8414 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
8415 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
8416 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
8417 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
8418 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
8419 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
8420 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
8421 Software.</p>
8422
8423 <p>If you support Free Software,
8424 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
8425 what the SFC do, agree with their
8426 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
8427 principles</a>, are happy about their
8428 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
8429 work on a project that is an SFC
8430 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
8431 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
8432 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
8433 Allan Webber</a>,
8434 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
8435 Smith</a>,
8436 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
8437 Bacon</a>, myself and
8438 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
8439 becoming a
8440 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
8441 next week your donation will be
8442 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
8443 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
8444 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
8445 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
8446 social media accounts.</p>
8447
8448 </blockquote>
8449
8450 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
8451 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
8452 supporter too?</p>
8453
8454       </div>
8455       <div class="tags">
8456
8457
8458         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>.
8459
8460
8461       </div>
8462     </div>
8463     <div class="padding"></div>
8464
8465     <div class="entry">
8466       <div class="title">
8467         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
8468       </div>
8469       <div class="date">
8470         17th November 2015
8471       </div>
8472       <div class="body">
8473         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
8474 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
8475 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
8476 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
8477 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
8478 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
8479 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
8480 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
8481 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
8482 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
8483
8484 <pre>
8485 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
8486       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
8487 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
8488 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
8489 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
8490 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
8491 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
8492 </pre>
8493
8494 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
8495 my old key.</p>
8496
8497 <p>If you signed my old key
8498 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
8499 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
8500 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
8501 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
8502
8503       </div>
8504       <div class="tags">
8505
8506
8507         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>.
8508
8509
8510       </div>
8511     </div>
8512     <div class="padding"></div>
8513
8514     <div class="entry">
8515       <div class="title">
8516         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html">Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?</a>
8517       </div>
8518       <div class="date">
8519          3rd November 2015
8520       </div>
8521       <div class="body">
8522         <p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
8523 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
8524 Internal notes should also be documented.  The document list (called a mail
8525 journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
8526 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
8527 journal is available for everyone.  Most offices even publish the mail
8528 journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages.  The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called
8529 <a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
8530 OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list.  Not
8531 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
8532 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
8533 journal entries .</p>
8534
8535 <p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
8536 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
8537 piqued my interest.  The title of the document was
8538 "<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
8539 Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
8540 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet").  The
8541 document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
8542 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations".  I asked for a
8543 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
8544 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
8545 letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
8546 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
8547 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar.  I
8548 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
8549 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  The
8550 explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
8551 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
8552 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
8553 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
8554 ended,
8555 <a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
8556 in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
8557 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty.  It seemed
8558 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
8559 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
8560 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
8561 and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
8562 Transport and Communications</a>.  This might be the reason the letter
8563 was sent to the ministry.  As I was unable to find the document in the
8564 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
8565 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
8566 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
8567 Geneva.</p>
8568
8569 <p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
8570 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
8571 over now.  This time
8572 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
8573 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
8574 receiver</a> and
8575 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
8576 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
8577 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
8578 public.  The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
8579 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
8580 different clause
8581 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
8582 letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
8583 content of the document from the public because it contained
8584 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
8585 that the information should not be made public.  I asked the permanent
8586 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
8587 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
8588 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
8589 of the meeting to be publicly known.  They explained that giving me a
8590 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
8591 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway.  They
8592 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
8593 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
8594 this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
8595
8596 <p>Armed with this
8597 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
8598 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
8599 "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications.  The
8600 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
8601 the document.  According to
8602 <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
8603 government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
8604 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
8605 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
8606 the report initially and
8607 <a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
8608 them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
8609 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
8610 when the document was written.  Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
8611 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
8612 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
8613 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva.  The Foreign Ministry also
8614 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
8615 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
8616 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington.  I do not know if this is the
8617 same person as the author of the document.</p>
8618
8619 <p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
8620 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
8621 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
8622 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
8623 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
8624 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
8625 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance.  It is truly amazing what can
8626 be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
8627
8628 <p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
8629 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting?  Anyone know?</p>
8630
8631       </div>
8632       <div class="tags">
8633
8634
8635         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
8636
8637
8638       </div>
8639     </div>
8640     <div class="padding"></div>
8641
8642     <div class="entry">
8643       <div class="title">
8644         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html">New book, "Fri kultur" by @lessig, a Norwegian Bokmål translation of "Free Culture" from 2004</a>
8645       </div>
8646       <div class="date">
8647         31st October 2015
8648       </div>
8649       <div class="body">
8650         <p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
8651 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
8652 book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>.  It was
8653 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
8654 and MOBI format.  I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
8655 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
8656 Amazon and Barnes & Noble later.  This will double the price and force
8657 me to make a profit from selling the book.  Anyway, here are links to
8658 get the book in different formats:</p>
8659
8660 <ul>
8661
8662   <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
8663     paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
8664
8665   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
8666     PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
8667
8668   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
8669     ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
8670
8671   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
8672     MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
8673
8674 </ul>
8675
8676 <p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
8677 at least with the viewers I have been able to test.  And the ePub file
8678 have several problems according to
8679 <a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
8680 to display fine in the viewers I have tested.  All the files needed to
8681 create the book in various forms are available from
8682 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
8683 github project page</a>.</p>
8684
8685 <p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
8686 digi.no.  Check out the article
8687 "<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
8688 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
8689
8690 <p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
8691 about the project</a> as it moved along.  The blogs document the translation
8692 progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
8693
8694       </div>
8695       <div class="tags">
8696
8697
8698         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
8699
8700
8701       </div>
8702     </div>
8703     <div class="padding"></div>
8704
8705     <div class="entry">
8706       <div class="title">
8707         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html">"Free Culture" by @lessig - The background story for Creative Commons - new edition available</a>
8708       </div>
8709       <div class="date">
8710         23rd October 2015
8711       </div>
8712       <div class="body">
8713         <p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
8714 here to buy the book</a>.</p>
8715
8716 <p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
8717 movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
8718 book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
8719 Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
8720 regulation and suggest some solutions.  I read the book back then and
8721 was very moved by it.  Reading the book inspired me and changed the
8722 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
8723 would read it too.</p>
8724
8725 <p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
8726 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
8727 that prefer to read books in Norwegian.  I translated the book using
8728 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
8729 new edition of the English original.  I've been in touch with the
8730 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
8731 published an English version.  So I decided to do so.  Today, I made
8732 this edition
8733 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
8734 for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book.  This
8735 is the cover:
8736
8737 <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-10-23-free-culture-english-published-cover.png"/></a></p>
8738
8739 <p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
8740 few days.  I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
8741 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
8742 join the translation project.  So far there is only one active
8743 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
8744 need some proof reading.</p>
8745
8746 <p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
8747 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
8748 github project page</a>.  Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
8749 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
8750 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
8751 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
8752 and
8753 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
8754 but I have not taken the time to investigate.  I recommend the PDF and
8755 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
8756 have available.</p>
8757
8758 <p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
8759 to secure some sponsoring from
8760 <a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
8761 print the book.  This is the reason their logo is located on the back
8762 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
8763 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
8764 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
8765
8766       </div>
8767       <div class="tags">
8768
8769
8770         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
8771
8772
8773       </div>
8774     </div>
8775     <div class="padding"></div>
8776
8777     <div class="entry">
8778       <div class="title">
8779         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html">Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden a year ago</a>
8780       </div>
8781       <div class="date">
8782         19th October 2015
8783       </div>
8784       <div class="body">
8785         <p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
8786 in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden.  The
8787 one hour interview was
8788 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
8789 Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
8790 place 2014-10-20.</p>
8791
8792 <p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
8793 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
8794 being raised.  Please check it out.</p>
8795
8796 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
8797
8798 <p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
8799 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
8800 luck.  It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
8801 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
8802 <a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
8803 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
8804 concerns internally and using official channels.  It make me sad
8805 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
8806
8807       </div>
8808       <div class="tags">
8809
8810
8811         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
8812
8813
8814       </div>
8815     </div>
8816     <div class="padding"></div>
8817
8818     <div class="entry">
8819       <div class="title">
8820         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html">The Story of Aaron Swartz - Let us all weep!</a>
8821       </div>
8822       <div class="date">
8823          8th October 2015
8824       </div>
8825       <div class="body">
8826         <p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
8827 Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
8828 and depressing at the same time.  The work of Aaron Swartz has
8829 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
8830 was able to initiate or complete.  I wish I am able to do as much good
8831 in my life as he did in his.  Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
8832 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
8833 improving the society and this world.  And it is depressing in
8834 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
8835 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
8836 downloading too many scientific articles.  Aaron is dead.  Let us all
8837 weep.</p>
8838
8839 <p>The movie is also available on
8840 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>.  I
8841 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
8842 my parents.</p>
8843
8844       </div>
8845       <div class="tags">
8846
8847
8848         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
8849
8850
8851       </div>
8852     </div>
8853     <div class="padding"></div>
8854
8855     <div class="entry">
8856       <div class="title">
8857         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html">French Docbook/PDF/EPUB/MOBI edition of the Free Culture book</a>
8858       </div>
8859       <div class="date">
8860          1st October 2015
8861       </div>
8862       <div class="body">
8863         <p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
8864 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
8865 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
8866 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
8867 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
8868 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
8869 to try to create a French version of the book.  He started with the
8870 French translation available from the
8871 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
8872 pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
8873 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
8874 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition.  We meet
8875 on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
8876 channel</a> to discuss the work.  If you want to help create a French
8877 edition, check out
8878 <a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
8879 repository</a> and join us on IRC.  If the French edition look good,
8880 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com.  A French version of
8881 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
8882
8883       </div>
8884       <div class="tags">
8885
8886
8887         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
8888
8889
8890       </div>
8891     </div>
8892     <div class="padding"></div>
8893
8894     <div class="entry">
8895       <div class="title">
8896         <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>
8897       </div>
8898       <div class="date">
8899         24th September 2015
8900       </div>
8901       <div class="body">
8902         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
8903 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
8904 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
8905 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
8906 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
8907 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
8908 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
8909
8910 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
8911
8912 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
8913 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
8914 by someone else.  I found
8915 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
8916 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
8917 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
8918 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
8919 from him.  Via
8920 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
8921 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
8922 discovered
8923 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
8924 available in Debian.</p>
8925
8926 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
8927 battery stats ever since. Now my
8928 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
8929 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
8930 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
8931 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
8932
8933 <pre>
8934 #!/bin/sh
8935 # Inspired by
8936 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
8937 # See also
8938 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
8939 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
8940
8941 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
8942     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
8943
8944 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
8945     (
8946         printf "timestamp,"
8947         for f in $files; do
8948             printf "%s," $f
8949         done
8950         echo
8951     ) > "$logfile"
8952 fi
8953
8954 log_battery() {
8955     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
8956     # when several log processes run in parallel.
8957     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
8958         for f in $files; do \
8959             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
8960         done)
8961     echo "$msg"
8962 }
8963
8964 cd /sys/class/power_supply
8965
8966 for bat in BAT*; do
8967     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
8968 done
8969 </pre>
8970
8971 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
8972 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
8973 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
8974 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
8975 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
8976 The code for the Debian package
8977 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
8978 available on github</a>.</p>
8979
8980 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
8981
8982 <pre>
8983 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
8984 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
8985 [...]
8986 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
8987 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
8988 </pre>
8989
8990 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
8991 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
8992 battery.</p>
8993
8994 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
8995 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
8996 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
8997 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
8998 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
8999 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
9000 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
9001 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
9002 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
9003 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
9004 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
9005 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
9006 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
9007 Linux too.</p>
9008
9009 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
9010 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
9011 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
9012 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
9013 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
9014 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
9015 load).</p>
9016
9017 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
9018 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
9019 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
9020 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
9021 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
9022 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
9023 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
9024 those.</p>
9025
9026 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
9027 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
9028 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
9029 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
9030 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
9031 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
9032 specific.</p>
9033
9034       </div>
9035       <div class="tags">
9036
9037
9038         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>.
9039
9040
9041       </div>
9042     </div>
9043     <div class="padding"></div>
9044
9045     <div class="entry">
9046       <div class="title">
9047         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html">Book cover for the Free Culture book finally done</a>
9048       </div>
9049       <div class="date">
9050          3rd September 2015
9051       </div>
9052       <div class="body">
9053         <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
9054 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
9055 the
9056 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
9057 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
9058 vector format for high resolution printing.  But my inkscape knowledge
9059 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
9060
9061 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
9062 the cover yesterday evening.  I asked on the
9063 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
9064 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
9065 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
9066 version.  Not only did he create a
9067 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
9068 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
9069 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
9070 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>.  But the instruction video is
9071 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
9072 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
9073 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
9074 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
9075 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
9076 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
9077
9078 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
9079 on the cover I was drawing.  I am happy with the end result, and the
9080 current english version look like this:</p>
9081
9082 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
9083
9084 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
9085 do.  I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
9086 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers.  The
9087 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
9088 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
9089
9090 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
9091 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
9092 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
9093 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
9094 English or Norwegian Bokmål.  I'm waiting to give the the productive
9095 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
9096
9097       </div>
9098       <div class="tags">
9099
9100
9101         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
9102
9103
9104       </div>
9105     </div>
9106     <div class="padding"></div>
9107
9108     <div class="entry">
9109       <div class="title">
9110         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html">In my hand, a pocket book edition of the Norwegian Free Culture book!</a>
9111       </div>
9112       <div class="date">
9113         19th August 2015
9114       </div>
9115       <div class="body">
9116         <p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
9117 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
9118 years arrived in the mail.  I had to fake a cover to get the interior
9119 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
9120 irrelevant at this point.  I asked for a printed pocket book version
9121 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
9122 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
9123 pocket book version would look like.  After receiving the 500 page
9124 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
9125 small for this book.  I believe the book is too thick, and several
9126 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
9127 small page sizes.  I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
9128 instead.  A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
9129 URLs look in print.  They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
9130 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper.  I need to
9131 change the color of links somehow to look better.  But there is a
9132 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
9133
9134 <p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
9135 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
9136 readers before the book is ready for proper printing.  Cover artists
9137 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
9138 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
9139 a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
9140
9141       </div>
9142       <div class="tags">
9143
9144
9145         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
9146
9147
9148       </div>
9149     </div>
9150     <div class="padding"></div>
9151
9152     <div class="entry">
9153       <div class="title">
9154         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html">First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way</a>
9155       </div>
9156       <div class="date">
9157          9th August 2015
9158       </div>
9159       <div class="body">
9160         <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped.  As the translation is
9161 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
9162 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
9163 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
9164 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
9165 Lessig.  I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
9166 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
9167 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
9168 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
9169
9170 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
9171 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
9172 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper.  It is lacking a
9173 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
9174 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
9175
9176 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
9177 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
9178 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
9179 to lack pocket book with extended distribution).  I looked for a
9180 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far.  Please
9181 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
9182
9183 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size.  Should I go for
9184 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
9185 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
9186 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages?  Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
9187 smaller book is easier to carry around.  The test book I ordered was
9188 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
9189 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
9190 bring the prize down further.</p>
9191
9192 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art.  My
9193 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
9194 cover in SVG format.  I also need to figure out what to write about
9195 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
9196 description on web based book stores).  I would love help with this,
9197 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
9198 the same CC license as the book.  My artistic skills are not really up
9199 to the task.</p>
9200
9201 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
9202 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format.  The current
9203 status can as usual be found on
9204 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
9205 in the archive/ directory.  So far I have spent all time on making the
9206 PDF version look good.  Someone should probably do the same with the
9207 dbtoepub generated e-book.  Help is definitely needed here, as I
9208 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
9209 formatting.</p>
9210
9211 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
9212 discover translations that should be improved.  The final proof
9213 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
9214 result in a few months.</p>
9215
9216       </div>
9217       <div class="tags">
9218
9219
9220         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
9221
9222
9223       </div>
9224     </div>
9225     <div class="padding"></div>
9226
9227     <div class="entry">
9228       <div class="title">
9229         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html">Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</a>
9230       </div>
9231       <div class="date">
9232         16th July 2015
9233       </div>
9234       <div class="body">
9235         <p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
9236 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
9237 Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
9238 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
9239 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
9240 chapter.  Based on the
9241 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
9242 maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
9243 would like to share with you.  The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
9244 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
9245 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
9246 file variable.  So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
9247 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
9248 the generated LaTeX File.</p>
9249
9250 <p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
9251 and add this text there:</p>
9252
9253 <pre>
9254 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
9255 </pre>
9256
9257 <p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
9258 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
9259 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
9260
9261 <pre>
9262 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
9263 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
9264   &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
9265     &lt;xsl:text&gt;
9266 \usepackage{endnotes}
9267 \let\footnote=\endnote
9268 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
9269 \begin{document}
9270     &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
9271   &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
9272 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
9273 </pre>
9274
9275 <p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
9276 this:</p>
9277
9278 <pre>
9279 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
9280 </pre>
9281
9282 <p>The end result can be seen on github, where
9283 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
9284 book project</a> is located.</p>
9285
9286       </div>
9287       <div class="tags">
9288
9289
9290         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
9291
9292
9293       </div>
9294     </div>
9295     <div class="padding"></div>
9296
9297     <div class="entry">
9298       <div class="title">
9299         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html">MPEG LA on "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" licensing and non-private use</a>
9300       </div>
9301       <div class="date">
9302          7th July 2015
9303       </div>
9304       <div class="body">
9305         <p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
9306 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hva_gj_r_at_NRK_kan_distribuere_H_264_video_uten_patentavtale_med_MPEG_LA_.html">why
9307 they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
9308 the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused.  So I asked MPEG LA
9309 if their understanding matched that of NRK.  As far as I can tell, it
9310 does not.</p>
9311
9312 <p>I started by asking for more information about the various
9313 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
9314 Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
9315 did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
9316
9317 <p><blockquote>
9318
9319 <p>According to
9320 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
9321 MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
9322 using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
9323 Video".  I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
9324 Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me.  What
9325 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
9326
9327 <p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
9328 PDF named
9329 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
9330 Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
9331 fees:</p>
9332
9333 <ul>
9334  <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
9335   <ul>
9336    <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
9337      subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
9338      $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
9339      1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
9340
9341    <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
9342      length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
9343   </ul></li>
9344
9345  <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
9346   <ul>
9347    <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
9348      (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
9349      maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
9350
9351    <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
9352      – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
9353   </ul></li>
9354 </ul>
9355
9356 <p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
9357 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
9358 Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
9359 one of the other three categories?  Can you point me to a good source
9360 explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
9361 the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
9362
9363 <p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
9364 "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
9365 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
9366 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
9367 Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
9368 Portfolio license?  Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
9369 access to personalized services?</p>
9370
9371 <p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
9372 Internet.</p>
9373 </blockquote></p>
9374
9375 <p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
9376 with the MPEG LA:</p>
9377
9378 <p><blockquote>
9379 <p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA.  We
9380 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
9381
9382 <p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
9383 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
9384 the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10).  Specifically, coverage is
9385 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
9386 technology.  Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
9387 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
9388 paying the applicable royalties.</p>
9389
9390 <p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
9391 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
9392 the Internet free-of-charge.  Therefore, if a party offers a service
9393 which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
9394 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
9395 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
9396 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
9397 License.  This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
9398 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
9399 AVC Video content.  In other words, as long as the End User is given
9400 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
9401 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
9402
9403 <p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
9404 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
9405 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video.  In cases where AVC
9406 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
9407 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video.  If a party offers
9408 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
9409 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
9410
9411 <p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
9412 through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
9413 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
9414 subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
9415
9416 <p>For your reference, I have attached
9417 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
9418 .pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
9419 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
9420 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
9421 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
9422 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
9423 Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License.  Please note that the
9424 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
9425 be used for execution.</p>
9426
9427 <p>I hope the above information is helpful.  If you have additional
9428 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
9429 free to contact me directly.</p>
9430 </blockquote></p>
9431
9432 <p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
9433 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
9434 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
9435 But I still had a few questions:</p>
9436
9437 <p><blockquote>
9438 <p>I have a small followup question.  Would it be possible for me to get
9439 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid?  The
9440 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
9441 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA.  The clauses
9442 typically look similar to this:
9443
9444 <p><blockquote>
9445   This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
9446   the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
9447   video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
9448   decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
9449   personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
9450   obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
9451   license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
9452   information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
9453 </blockquote></p>
9454
9455 <p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
9456 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
9457 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA.  I suspect it will
9458 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway.  What is
9459 MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
9460 </blockquote></p>
9461
9462 <p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
9463 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
9464
9465 <p><blockquote>
9466
9467 <p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
9468 clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
9469 reads:</p>
9470
9471 <p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
9472 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
9473 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
9474 STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
9475 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
9476 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
9477 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
9478 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
9479
9480 <p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
9481 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
9482 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
9483 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
9484 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
9485 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
9486 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
9487 Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
9488
9489 <p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
9490 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
9491 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
9492 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
9493 payable under the License.  On the other hand, if that party (either a
9494 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
9495 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
9496 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
9497 Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
9498
9499 <p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
9500 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
9501 Norway.</p>
9502
9503 <p>I hope this clarification is helpful.  If I may be of any further
9504 assistance, just let me know.</p>
9505 </blockquote></p>
9506
9507 <p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
9508 asked for more information:</p>
9509
9510 <p><blockquote>
9511
9512 <p>But one minor question at the end.  If I understand you correctly,
9513 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
9514 Portfolio that are valid in Norway.  This make me believe I read the
9515 list available from &lt;URL:
9516 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
9517 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
9518 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
9519 Electric Corporation expired in 2012.  Which patents are you referring
9520 to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
9521
9522 </blockquote></p>
9523
9524 <p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
9525 in that list:</p>
9526
9527 <p><blockquote>
9528
9529 <p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
9530 Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012.  Therefore, where AVC
9531 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
9532 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
9533 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
9534 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
9535 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired.  I would also like to clarify
9536 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
9537 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
9538
9539 <p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
9540 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
9541 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
9542 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
9543 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
9544 Patents (for example, Norway).  Similarly, a party would need to
9545 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
9546 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
9547 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
9548 Portfolio Patents.</p>
9549 </blockquote></p>
9550
9551 <p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
9552 Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
9553 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
9554 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
9555 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
9556 content.  I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
9557 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid.  Will the
9558 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
9559 the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
9560
9561       </div>
9562       <div class="tags">
9563
9564
9565         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9566
9567
9568       </div>
9569     </div>
9570     <div class="padding"></div>
9571
9572     <div class="entry">
9573       <div class="title">
9574         <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>
9575       </div>
9576       <div class="date">
9577          5th July 2015
9578       </div>
9579       <div class="body">
9580         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
9581 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
9582 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
9583 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
9584 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
9585 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
9586 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
9587 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
9588 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
9589 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
9590 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
9591
9592 <p>One tip I got was to use the
9593 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
9594 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
9595 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
9596 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
9597 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
9598 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
9599
9600 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
9601 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
9602 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
9603 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
9604 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
9605 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
9606 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
9607 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
9608 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
9609 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
9610 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
9611 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
9612 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
9613 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
9614 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
9615
9616 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
9617 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
9618 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
9619 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
9620
9621 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
9622 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
9623
9624 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
9625 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
9626 different
9627 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
9628 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
9629
9630       </div>
9631       <div class="tags">
9632
9633
9634         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>.
9635
9636
9637       </div>
9638     </div>
9639     <div class="padding"></div>
9640
9641     <div class="entry">
9642       <div class="title">
9643         <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>
9644       </div>
9645       <div class="date">
9646          3rd July 2015
9647       </div>
9648       <div class="body">
9649         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
9650 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
9651 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
9652 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
9653 flickering.</p>
9654
9655 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
9656 still as
9657 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
9658 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
9659 good help from
9660 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
9661 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
9662 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
9663 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
9664 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
9665 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
9666 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
9667 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
9668 deteriorated since X41.</p>
9669
9670 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
9671 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
9672 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
9673 have suggestions.</p>
9674
9675 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
9676 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
9677 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
9678
9679       </div>
9680       <div class="tags">
9681
9682
9683         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>.
9684
9685
9686       </div>
9687     </div>
9688     <div class="padding"></div>
9689
9690     <div class="entry">
9691       <div class="title">
9692         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html">MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</a>
9693       </div>
9694       <div class="date">
9695          2nd July 2015
9696       </div>
9697       <div class="body">
9698         <p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
9699 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
9700 <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
9701 the Maker movement.  Since then it has been the plan to publish the
9702 recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
9703 finally happened the last few days.  A few talks are missing because
9704 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
9705 talks are available.  The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
9706 channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
9707 from the Frikanalen web site.  The unedited recordings are
9708 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
9709 Youtube too</a>.</p>
9710
9711 <p>This is the list of talks available at the moment.  Visit the
9712 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
9713 pages</a> to view them.</p>
9714
9715 <ul>
9716
9717   <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
9718       to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
9719
9720   <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
9721
9722   <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
9723       (Olav Helland)</li>
9724
9725   <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
9726       Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
9727
9728   <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
9729
9730   <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
9731
9732   <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
9733       Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
9734
9735   <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
9736
9737   <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
9738
9739   <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
9740
9741   <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
9742
9743   <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
9744       Sevens)</li>
9745
9746   <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
9747       (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
9748
9749   <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
9750       Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
9751
9752   <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
9753       Dyvik)</li>
9754
9755   <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
9756
9757 </ul>
9758
9759 <p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
9760 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
9761 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
9762 argument changes).  In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
9763 which sent me on a detour to
9764 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
9765 bs1770gain for Debian</a>.  Now this is in place and it became a lot
9766 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
9767
9768       </div>
9769       <div class="tags">
9770
9771
9772         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
9773
9774
9775       </div>
9776     </div>
9777     <div class="padding"></div>
9778
9779     <div class="entry">
9780       <div class="title">
9781         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html">Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</a>
9782       </div>
9783       <div class="date">
9784         15th June 2015
9785       </div>
9786       <div class="body">
9787         <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
9788 in Norway.  The information is publicly available, but one need to
9789 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
9790 ownership graph of a given set of companies.  To save me the work in
9791 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
9792 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format.  The data source
9793 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
9794 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
9795 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
9796
9797 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
9798 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number.  I'm
9799 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
9800 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
9801
9802 <pre>
9803 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
9804
9805 real    0m2.841s
9806 user    0m0.184s
9807 sys     0m0.036s
9808 %
9809 </pre>
9810
9811 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
9812 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image.  The
9813 resulting dot file for the example above look like this.  The edges
9814 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
9815 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
9816
9817 <pre>
9818 digraph ownership {
9819 rankdir = LR;
9820 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
9821 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
9822 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
9823 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
9824 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
9825 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
9826 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
9827 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
9828 }
9829 </pre>
9830
9831 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
9832 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
9833 dagbladet.png</tt>".  The result can be seen below:</p>
9834
9835 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
9836
9837 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
9838 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
9839 registered in the official company register for Norway.  The ownership
9840 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
9841 of the ownership links.</p>
9842
9843 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
9844 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
9845
9846 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
9847 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
9848 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
9849 have a Norwegian organisation number.  I've also been told that there
9850 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
9851 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
9852 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
9853
9854       </div>
9855       <div class="tags">
9856
9857
9858         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
9859
9860
9861       </div>
9862     </div>
9863     <div class="padding"></div>
9864
9865     <div class="entry">
9866       <div class="title">
9867         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain</a>
9868       </div>
9869       <div class="date">
9870         11th June 2015
9871       </div>
9872       <div class="body">
9873         <p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
9874 everywhere.  Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
9875 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
9876 the viewers do not like this.  This fact is well known to the TV
9877 channels.  See for example the BBC white paper
9878 "<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
9879 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
9880 summary of the problem domain.  To better address the need for even
9881 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
9882 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
9883 standardizing loudness.  From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
9884 "<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
9885 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
9886
9887 <p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
9888 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
9889 having a way to measure is not enough.  To get the same loudness
9890 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
9891 on.  For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
9892 R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
9893 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
9894 specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS.  In Norway, I have been
9895 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
9896 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
9897
9898 <p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
9899 level using the LUFS.  In Debian, I am aware of a library named
9900 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
9901 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
9902 named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
9903 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
9904 for NEW processing.  I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
9905 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
9906 multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
9907
9908 <p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
9909 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
9910 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
9911 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
9912 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
9913 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
9914 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
9915 NUUG member organisation</a>.  The program seem to be able to measure
9916 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
9917 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files.  I suspect it
9918 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
9919
9920       </div>
9921       <div class="tags">
9922
9923
9924         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
9925
9926
9927       </div>
9928     </div>
9929     <div class="padding"></div>
9930
9931     <div class="entry">
9932       <div class="title">
9933         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html">Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police</a>
9934       </div>
9935       <div class="date">
9936         10th May 2015
9937       </div>
9938       <div class="body">
9939         <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
9940 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
9941 criminal or not, are
9942 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
9943 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
9944 ord).  The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
9945 years there will be no option any more.  The ID will be required to
9946 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
9947 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
9948 and many other tasks required to function in Norway.  The banks plan
9949 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
9950 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
9951 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
9952 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
9953 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
9954 the police.</p>
9955
9956 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
9957 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
9958 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
9959 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
9960 the face and other information about the person.  Some of the
9961 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
9962 system as currently used in the passports.  The codes to decrypt will
9963 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
9964 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
9965 is good to know that
9966 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
9967 encryption is already broken</a>.  And they
9968 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
9969 be read from 70 meters away</a>.  This can be mitigated a bit by
9970 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
9971 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
9972 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
9973 business getting access to that information.</p>
9974
9975 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
9976 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
9977 of privacy without any objections.  So are the Norwegian passports,
9978 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
9979 That option is going away with the passing of the new law.  In this, I
9980 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
9981 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
9982
9983 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
9984 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
9985 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
9986 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
9987
9988 <p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
9989 really could make such decision, I wrote
9990 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
9991 summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
9992 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
9993
9994       </div>
9995       <div class="tags">
9996
9997
9998         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
9999
10000
10001       </div>
10002     </div>
10003     <div class="padding"></div>
10004
10005     <div class="entry">
10006       <div class="title">
10007         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?</a>
10008       </div>
10009       <div class="date">
10010          1st May 2015
10011       </div>
10012       <div class="body">
10013         <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
10014 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
10015 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
10016 year.  I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
10017 like today.  To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
10018 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
10019 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
10020
10021 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
10022 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
10023 the 2012 numbers are from
10024 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
10025 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
10026 email.  I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
10027 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
10028 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
10029
10030 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
10031 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
10032 enough.  See for example a
10033 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
10034 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives.  8 Kbit/s is 60
10035 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
10036 to get the storage requirements.</p>
10037
10038 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
10039 availability requirements etc.  But a simple way to calculate can be
10040 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
10041 it to take space, power and redundancy into account.  It could be much
10042 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
10043
10044 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
10045 calls in Norway?  Not much.  Here is a small table showing the
10046 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
10047 and large organisations:</p>
10048
10049 <table border="1">
10050 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
10051 <tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">3 mill / 358 000</td></tr>
10052 <tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">2.2 mill / 262 000</td></tr>
10053 <tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">2.1 mill / 250 000</td></tr>
10054 </table>
10055
10056 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage.  Maintenance need to be
10057 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
10058 for the reader.  But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
10059 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
10060 stopped because it is too expensive.  I wonder if someone already is
10061 collecting the data?</p>
10062
10063       </div>
10064       <div class="tags">
10065
10066
10067         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
10068
10069
10070       </div>
10071     </div>
10072     <div class="padding"></div>
10073
10074     <div class="entry">
10075       <div class="title">
10076         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
10077       </div>
10078       <div class="date">
10079         26th April 2015
10080       </div>
10081       <div class="body">
10082         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
10083 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
10084 announcement today</a>:</p>
10085
10086 <pre>
10087 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
10088 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
10089 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
10090 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
10091
10092 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
10093 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
10094 later today ;)
10095
10096 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
10097 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
10098 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
10099 be possible and encouraged!
10100
10101 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
10102 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
10103
10104 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
10105 operating system for schools, universities and other
10106 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
10107 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
10108 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
10109 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
10110 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
10111 days.
10112
10113 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
10114 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
10115 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
10116 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
10117
10118 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
10119 installation instructions are available, including detailed
10120 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
10121 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
10122 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
10123 least 5 characters!
10124
10125 == Where to download ==
10126
10127 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
10128 can be downloaded at the following locations:
10129
10130     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
10131     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
10132
10133 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
10134
10135 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
10136 available, with more software included (saving additional download
10137 time):
10138
10139     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
10140     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
10141
10142 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
10143
10144 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
10145 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
10146 options.
10147
10148 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
10149
10150 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
10151 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
10152
10153 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
10154 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
10155 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
10156 online version of the translated manual.
10157
10158 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
10159 release notes and the installation manual:
10160 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
10161 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
10162
10163
10164 == Errata / known problems ==
10165
10166     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
10167     DHCP (#780461).
10168
10169     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
10170
10171 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
10172 hostname immediately.
10173
10174 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
10175 more current and complete list.
10176
10177 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
10178
10179 === Software updates ===
10180
10181 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
10182
10183  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
10184    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
10185    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
10186
10187  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
10188    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
10189    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
10190    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
10191      the others see the manual.
10192  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
10193  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
10194  * GOsa 2.7.4
10195  * LTSP 5.5.4
10196  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
10197  * new boot framework: systemd
10198  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
10199  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
10200  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
10201  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
10202  * golearn 0.9
10203  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
10204  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
10205  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
10206  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
10207    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
10208
10209 === Installation changes ===
10210
10211     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
10212     for the hardware present.
10213
10214 === Fixed bugs ===
10215
10216 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
10217 from a user perspective:
10218
10219  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
10220    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
10221    information is corrected (710362)
10222
10223  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
10224
10225 === Sugar desktop removed ===
10226
10227 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
10228 available in Debian Edu jessie.
10229
10230
10231 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
10232
10233 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
10234 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
10235 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
10236 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
10237 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
10238 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
10239 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
10240 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
10241 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
10242 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
10243 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
10244 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
10245 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
10246 environment.
10247
10248 == About Debian ==
10249
10250 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
10251 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
10252 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
10253 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
10254 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
10255 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
10256 operating system.
10257
10258 == Thanks ==
10259
10260 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
10261 You rock.
10262 </pre>
10263
10264       </div>
10265       <div class="tags">
10266
10267
10268         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10269
10270
10271       </div>
10272     </div>
10273     <div class="padding"></div>
10274
10275     <div class="entry">
10276       <div class="title">
10277         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
10278       </div>
10279       <div class="date">
10280         15th April 2015
10281       </div>
10282       <div class="body">
10283         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
10284 computer system for schools I've involved in,
10285 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
10286 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
10287 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
10288 Agarwal.</p>
10289
10290 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10291
10292 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
10293 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
10294 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
10295 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
10296 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
10297 few software start-ups as well.</p>
10298
10299 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10300 project?</strong></p>
10301
10302 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
10303 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
10304 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
10305 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
10306 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
10307 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
10308 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
10309
10310 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10311 Edu?</strong></p>
10312
10313 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
10314 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
10315 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
10316 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
10317 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
10318 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
10319 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
10320 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
10321
10322 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
10323 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
10324 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
10325 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
10326 for the developer per-se.</p>
10327
10328 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10329 Edu?</strong></p>
10330
10331 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
10332 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
10333 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
10334
10335 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
10336 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
10337 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
10338 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
10339 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
10340 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
10341 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
10342
10343 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
10344 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
10345 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
10346
10347 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
10348 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
10349 interactive manner. While sites such as the
10350 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
10351 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
10352 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
10353 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
10354 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
10355 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
10356 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
10357 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
10358 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
10359 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
10360 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
10361
10362 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
10363 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
10364 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
10365 also be used.</p>
10366
10367 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
10368 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
10369 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
10370 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
10371 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
10372 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
10373 the user's input.</p>
10374
10375 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
10376 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
10377 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
10378 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
10379 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
10380 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
10381 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
10382 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
10383
10384 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
10385 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
10386 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
10387 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
10388 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
10389 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
10390 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
10391 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
10392
10393 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10394
10395 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
10396 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
10397 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
10398 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
10399 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
10400
10401 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10402 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10403
10404 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
10405 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
10406 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
10407 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
10408 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
10409 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
10410
10411 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
10412 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
10413 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
10414 well.</p>
10415
10416 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
10417 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
10418 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
10419 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
10420
10421 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
10422 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
10423 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
10424 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
10425 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
10426 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
10427 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
10428 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
10429 releases.</p>
10430
10431 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
10432 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
10433 is aimed at.
10434
10435 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
10436 around 2 years, and
10437 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
10438 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
10439 there was :</p>
10440
10441 <ol>
10442
10443   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
10444    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
10445    portion/syllabus given.</li>
10446
10447   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
10448    is in the syllabus.</li>
10449
10450   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
10451    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
10452    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
10453    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
10454    as recognizable as say a
10455    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
10456    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
10457    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
10458    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
10459    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
10460    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
10461
10462 </ol>
10463
10464       </div>
10465       <div class="tags">
10466
10467
10468         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
10469
10470
10471       </div>
10472     </div>
10473     <div class="padding"></div>
10474
10475     <div class="entry">
10476       <div class="title">
10477         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html">I'm going to the Open Source Developers' Conference Nordic 2015!</a>
10478       </div>
10479       <div class="date">
10480          7th April 2015
10481       </div>
10482       <div class="body">
10483         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
10484 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
10485 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
10486
10487 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
10488 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
10489 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
10490 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
10491 part of my involvement with the
10492 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
10493 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
10494 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
10495 Hackathon with our friends
10496 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
10497 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
10498 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
10499 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
10500
10501 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
10502 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
10503
10504       </div>
10505       <div class="tags">
10506
10507
10508         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
10509
10510
10511       </div>
10512     </div>
10513     <div class="padding"></div>
10514
10515     <div class="entry">
10516       <div class="title">
10517         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html">Proof reading the Norwegian translation of Free Culture by Lessig</a>
10518       </div>
10519       <div class="date">
10520          4th April 2015
10521       </div>
10522       <div class="body">
10523         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
10524 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
10525 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
10526 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
10527 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
10528 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
10529 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
10530 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
10531 project pages.  You can also check out the
10532 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
10533 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
10534 and HTML version available in the
10535 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
10536 directory</a>.</p>
10537
10538 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
10539 you find any.</p>
10540
10541       </div>
10542       <div class="tags">
10543
10544
10545         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
10546
10547
10548       </div>
10549     </div>
10550     <div class="padding"></div>
10551
10552     <div class="entry">
10553       <div class="title">
10554         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
10555       </div>
10556       <div class="date">
10557          9th March 2015
10558       </div>
10559       <div class="body">
10560         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
10561 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
10562 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
10563 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
10564 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
10565 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
10566 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
10567 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
10568 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
10569 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
10570 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
10571 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
10572 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
10573 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
10574
10575 <p>The list of NUUG videos
10576 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
10577 include things like a
10578 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
10579 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
10580 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
10581 re-implementation</a>, the
10582 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
10583 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
10584 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
10585 video</A> and many others.</p>
10586
10587 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
10588 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
10589 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
10590 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
10591 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
10592 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
10593 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
10594 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
10595 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
10596 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
10597
10598 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
10599 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
10600 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
10601 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
10602 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
10603 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
10604 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
10605 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
10606 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
10607 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
10608
10609       </div>
10610       <div class="tags">
10611
10612
10613         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
10614
10615
10616       </div>
10617     </div>
10618     <div class="padding"></div>
10619
10620     <div class="entry">
10621       <div class="title">
10622         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html">The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</a>
10623       </div>
10624       <div class="date">
10625         28th February 2015
10626       </div>
10627       <div class="body">
10628         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
10629 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
10630 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
10631 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
10632 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
10633 made for
10634 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
10635 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
10636 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
10637 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
10638 a friend have
10639 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
10640 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
10641 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
10642 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
10643 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
10644 it happen ourselves.
10645 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
10646 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
10647 is.</p>
10648
10649 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
10650 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
10651
10652       </div>
10653       <div class="tags">
10654
10655
10656         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
10657
10658
10659       </div>
10660     </div>
10661     <div class="padding"></div>
10662
10663     <div class="entry">
10664       <div class="title">
10665         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html">The Norwegian open channel Frikanalen - 24x7 on the Internet</a>
10666       </div>
10667       <div class="date">
10668         25th February 2015
10669       </div>
10670       <div class="body">
10671         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
10672 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
10673 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
10674 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
10675 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
10676 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
10677 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
10678 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
10679 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
10680 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
10681 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
10682 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
10683 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
10684 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
10685 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
10686 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
10687 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
10688
10689 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
10690 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
10691 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
10692 with VLC.</p>
10693
10694 <ul>
10695   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
10696   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
10697 </ul>
10698
10699 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
10700 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
10701 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
10702 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
10703 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
10704 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
10705 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
10706
10707 <blockquote><pre>
10708 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
10709  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
10710  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
10711 </pre></blockquote>
10712
10713 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
10714 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
10715 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
10716 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
10717
10718       </div>
10719       <div class="tags">
10720
10721
10722         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
10723
10724
10725       </div>
10726     </div>
10727     <div class="padding"></div>
10728
10729     <div class="entry">
10730       <div class="title">
10731         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html">Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport</a>
10732       </div>
10733       <div class="date">
10734         10th February 2015
10735       </div>
10736       <div class="body">
10737         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
10738 that
10739 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
10740 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
10741 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
10742 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
10743 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
10744 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
10745 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
10746 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
10747 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
10748 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
10749 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
10750 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
10751 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
10752 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
10753 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
10754
10755 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
10756 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
10757 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
10758 controversy about these scanners.</p>
10759
10760 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
10761 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
10762 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
10763
10764       </div>
10765       <div class="tags">
10766
10767
10768         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
10769
10770
10771       </div>
10772     </div>
10773     <div class="padding"></div>
10774
10775     <div class="entry">
10776       <div class="title">
10777         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html">Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working</a>
10778       </div>
10779       <div class="date">
10780          8th February 2015
10781       </div>
10782       <div class="body">
10783         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
10784 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
10785 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
10786 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
10787 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
10788 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
10789 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
10790 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
10791 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
10792 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
10793 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
10794 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
10795
10796 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
10797 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
10798 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
10799 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
10800
10801 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
10802 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
10803 distribute the TV content.  The
10804 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
10805 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
10806 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
10807 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
10808 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
10809 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
10810 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
10811 following activity, we now have the schedule
10812 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
10813 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
10814 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
10815 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
10816
10817 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
10818 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
10819 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
10820 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
10821 streams are working as they should.</p>
10822
10823       </div>
10824       <div class="tags">
10825
10826
10827         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
10828
10829
10830       </div>
10831     </div>
10832     <div class="padding"></div>
10833
10834     <div class="entry">
10835       <div class="title">
10836         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html">Norwegian Bokmål subtitles for the FSF video User Liberation</a>
10837       </div>
10838       <div class="date">
10839         12th January 2015
10840       </div>
10841       <div class="body">
10842         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
10843 Foundation</a> announced a new video
10844 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
10845 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
10846 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
10847 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
10848 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
10849 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
10850
10851 <p>But today I was told that
10852 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
10853 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
10854 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
10855 available in
10856 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
10857 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
10858 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
10859
10860 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
10861 Libreplanet
10862 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
10863 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
10864
10865       </div>
10866       <div class="tags">
10867
10868
10869         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
10870
10871
10872       </div>
10873     </div>
10874     <div class="padding"></div>
10875
10876     <div class="entry">
10877       <div class="title">
10878         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html">Updated version of the Norwegian web service FiksGataMi</a>
10879       </div>
10880       <div class="date">
10881         30th December 2014
10882       </div>
10883       <div class="body">
10884         <p>I am very happy that we in the
10885 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
10886 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
10887 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
10888 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
10889 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
10890 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
10891 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
10892 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
10893 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
10894 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
10895
10896 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
10897 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
10898 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
10899 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
10900 reports in public.</p>
10901
10902       </div>
10903       <div class="tags">
10904
10905
10906         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10907
10908
10909       </div>
10910     </div>
10911     <div class="padding"></div>
10912
10913     <div class="entry">
10914       <div class="title">
10915         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Of_course_USA_loses_in_cyber_war___NSA_and_friends_made_sure_it_would_happen.html">Of course USA loses in cyber war - NSA and friends made sure it would happen</a>
10916       </div>
10917       <div class="date">
10918         19th December 2014
10919       </div>
10920       <div class="body">
10921         <p>So, Sony caved in
10922 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
10923 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
10924 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
10925 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
10926 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
10927 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
10928 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
10929 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
10930 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
10931 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
10932 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
10933 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
10934 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
10935
10936 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
10937 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
10938 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
10939 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
10940
10941 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
10942 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
10943 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
10944 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
10945 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
10946 income. :)</p>
10947
10948       </div>
10949       <div class="tags">
10950
10951
10952         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
10953
10954
10955       </div>
10956     </div>
10957     <div class="padding"></div>
10958
10959     <div class="entry">
10960       <div class="title">
10961         <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>
10962       </div>
10963       <div class="date">
10964         22nd November 2014
10965       </div>
10966       <div class="body">
10967         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
10968 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
10969 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
10970 courtesy of
10971 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
10972 Schubert</a> and
10973 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
10974 McVittie</a>.
10975
10976 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
10977 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
10978 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
10979 you upgrade:</p>
10980
10981 <p><blockquote><pre>
10982 Package: systemd-sysv
10983 Pin: release o=Debian
10984 Pin-Priority: -1
10985 </pre></blockquote><p>
10986
10987 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
10988 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
10989 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
10990 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
10991 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
10992
10993 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
10994 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
10995 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
10996 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
10997 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
10998 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
10999
11000 <p><blockquote><pre>
11001 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
11002 </pre></blockquote><p>
11003
11004 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
11005
11006 <p><blockquote><pre>
11007 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
11008 </pre></blockquote><p>
11009
11010 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
11011 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
11012
11013 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
11014 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
11015 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
11016 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
11017 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
11018 Jessie is released.</p>
11019
11020 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
11021 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
11022 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
11023 line.</p>
11024
11025       </div>
11026       <div class="tags">
11027
11028
11029         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>.
11030
11031
11032       </div>
11033     </div>
11034     <div class="padding"></div>
11035
11036     <div class="entry">
11037       <div class="title">
11038         <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>
11039       </div>
11040       <div class="date">
11041         10th November 2014
11042       </div>
11043       <div class="body">
11044         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
11045 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
11046 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
11047
11048 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
11049 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
11050 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
11051 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
11052 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
11053 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
11054 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
11055 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
11056 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
11057 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
11058 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
11059 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
11060 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
11061 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
11062 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
11063
11064 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
11065 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
11066 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
11067 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
11068 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
11069 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
11070 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
11071 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
11072 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
11073 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
11074 were fairly easy, and
11075 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
11076 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
11077 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
11078 useful approach.</p>
11079
11080 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
11081 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
11082 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
11083 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
11084 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
11085 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
11086 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
11087 this:</p>
11088
11089 <p><blockquote><pre>
11090 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
11091   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
11092 </pre></blockquote></p>
11093
11094 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
11095 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
11096
11097 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
11098 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
11099 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
11100 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
11101 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
11102 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
11103 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
11104 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
11105 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
11106 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
11107 system.</p>
11108
11109 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
11110 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
11111 SMTorP. :)</p>
11112
11113       </div>
11114       <div class="tags">
11115
11116
11117         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>.
11118
11119
11120       </div>
11121     </div>
11122     <div class="padding"></div>
11123
11124     <div class="entry">
11125       <div class="title">
11126         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
11127       </div>
11128       <div class="date">
11129         27th October 2014
11130       </div>
11131       <div class="body">
11132         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
11133 sent out
11134 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
11135 announcement</a>:</p>
11136
11137 <pre>
11138 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
11139 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
11140
11141 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
11142 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
11143 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
11144 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
11145 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
11146 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
11147 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
11148
11149 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
11150 installation instructions are available, including detailed
11151 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
11152 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
11153 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
11154 of at least 5 characters!
11155
11156  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
11157
11158 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
11159 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
11160 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
11161 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
11162 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
11163
11164 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
11165 mostly in Germany and Norway.
11166
11167 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
11168 ===============================
11169
11170 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
11171 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
11172 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
11173 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
11174 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
11175 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
11176 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
11177 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
11178 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
11179 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
11180 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
11181 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
11182 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
11183 environment.
11184
11185  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
11186  [3] &lt;URL: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html</a> &gt;
11187
11188 Full release notes and manual
11189 =============================
11190
11191 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
11192 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
11193 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
11194 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
11195 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
11196
11197  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
11198  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
11199
11200 Where to get it
11201 ---------------
11202
11203 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
11204
11205  * <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
11206  * <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
11207  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
11208
11209 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
11210
11211 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
11212 ===============================================================================
11213
11214
11215 Installation changes
11216 --------------------
11217
11218  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
11219
11220 Software updates
11221 ----------------
11222
11223 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
11224
11225  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
11226  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
11227    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
11228    choose one of the others see manual.)
11229  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
11230  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
11231  * GOsa 2.7.4
11232  * LTSP 5.5.4
11233  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
11234  * new boot framework: systemd
11235  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
11236  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
11237  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
11238  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
11239  * golearn 0.9
11240  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
11241  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
11242  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
11243    installation.
11244  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
11245    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
11246
11247  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
11248  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
11249
11250 Fixed bugs
11251 ----------
11252
11253  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
11254    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
11255    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
11256  * and many others.
11257
11258 Documentation and translation updates
11259 -------------------------------------
11260
11261  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
11262    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
11263    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
11264
11265 Other changes
11266 -------------
11267
11268  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
11269    server takes more time.
11270  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
11271    doesn't work.
11272
11273 Regressions / known problems
11274 ----------------------------
11275
11276  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
11277    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
11278    and Debian bug #762103).
11279  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
11280    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
11281  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
11282    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
11283    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
11284
11285 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
11286
11287  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
11288
11289 How to report bugs
11290 ------------------
11291
11292 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
11293
11294 About Debian
11295 ============
11296
11297 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
11298 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
11299 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
11300 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
11301 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
11302 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
11303 operating system.
11304
11305 Contact Information
11306 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
11307 mail to press@debian.org.
11308
11309  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
11310 </pre>
11311
11312       </div>
11313       <div class="tags">
11314
11315
11316         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11317
11318
11319       </div>
11320     </div>
11321     <div class="padding"></div>
11322
11323     <div class="entry">
11324       <div class="title">
11325         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
11326       </div>
11327       <div class="date">
11328         23rd October 2014
11329       </div>
11330       <div class="body">
11331         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
11332 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
11333 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
11334 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
11335 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
11336 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
11337 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
11338 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
11339 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
11340 live.</p>
11341
11342 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
11343 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
11344 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
11345 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
11346 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
11347 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
11348 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
11349 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
11350
11351       </div>
11352       <div class="tags">
11353
11354
11355         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
11356
11357
11358       </div>
11359     </div>
11360     <div class="padding"></div>
11361
11362     <div class="entry">
11363       <div class="title">
11364         <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>
11365       </div>
11366       <div class="date">
11367         22nd October 2014
11368       </div>
11369       <div class="body">
11370         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
11371 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
11372 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
11373 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
11374 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
11375 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
11376 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
11377 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
11378 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
11379 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
11380 lists I recently took over:</p>
11381
11382 <p><blockquote><pre>
11383 % time listadmin xiph
11384 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
11385 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
11386
11387 real    0m1.709s
11388 user    0m0.232s
11389 sys     0m0.012s
11390 %
11391 </pre></blockquote></p>
11392
11393 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
11394 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
11395 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
11396 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
11397 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
11398 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
11399 program.</p>
11400
11401 <p>If you install
11402 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
11403 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
11404 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
11405
11406 <p><blockquote><pre>
11407 username username@example.org
11408 spamlevel 23
11409 default discard
11410 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
11411
11412 password secret
11413 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
11414 mailman-list@lists.example.com
11415
11416 password hidden
11417 other-list@otherserver.example.org
11418 </pre></blockquote></p>
11419
11420 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
11421 learn the details.</p>
11422
11423 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
11424 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
11425 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
11426 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
11427
11428 <p><blockquote><pre>
11429 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
11430 </pre></blockquote></p>
11431
11432 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
11433 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
11434 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
11435 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
11436 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
11437 email.</p>
11438
11439 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
11440 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
11441 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
11442 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
11443 software.</p>
11444
11445 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
11446 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
11447 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
11448
11449 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
11450 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
11451 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
11452 sure why.</p>
11453
11454       </div>
11455       <div class="tags">
11456
11457
11458         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>.
11459
11460
11461       </div>
11462     </div>
11463     <div class="padding"></div>
11464
11465     <div class="entry">
11466       <div class="title">
11467         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
11468       </div>
11469       <div class="date">
11470         17th October 2014
11471       </div>
11472       <div class="body">
11473         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
11474 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
11475 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
11476 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
11477 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
11478 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
11479 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
11480
11481 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
11482 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
11483 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
11484 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
11485 of this story.)</p>
11486
11487 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
11488 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
11489 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
11490 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
11491 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
11492 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
11493 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
11494 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
11495 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
11496 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
11497
11498 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
11499 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
11500 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
11501 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
11502
11503 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
11504 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
11505
11506 <p><blockquote><pre>
11507 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
11508 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
11509 </pre></blockquote></p>
11510
11511 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
11512 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
11513 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
11514 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
11515 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
11516 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
11517 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
11518 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
11519
11520 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
11521 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
11522
11523 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
11524 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
11525 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
11526 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
11527 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
11528
11529 <p><blockquote><pre>
11530 Task: isenkram-packages
11531 Section: hardware
11532 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
11533  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
11534  proposed.
11535 Test-new-install: show show
11536 Relevance: 8
11537 Packages: for-current-hardware
11538
11539 Task: isenkram-firmware
11540 Section: hardware
11541 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
11542  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
11543  packages are proposed.
11544 Test-new-install: mark show
11545 Relevance: 8
11546 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
11547 </pre></blockquote></p>
11548
11549 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
11550 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
11551 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
11552 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
11553 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
11554
11555 <p><blockquote><pre>
11556 #!/bin/sh
11557 #
11558 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
11559 export PATH
11560 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
11561 </pre></blockquote></p>
11562
11563 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
11564 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
11565
11566 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
11567 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
11568 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
11569 install.</p>
11570
11571 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
11572 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
11573 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
11574
11575       </div>
11576       <div class="tags">
11577
11578
11579         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>.
11580
11581
11582       </div>
11583     </div>
11584     <div class="padding"></div>
11585
11586     <div class="entry">
11587       <div class="title">
11588         <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>
11589       </div>
11590       <div class="date">
11591          4th October 2014
11592       </div>
11593       <div class="body">
11594         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
11595 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
11596 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
11597 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
11598
11599 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
11600
11601 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
11602 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
11603 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
11604
11605       </div>
11606       <div class="tags">
11607
11608
11609         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>.
11610
11611
11612       </div>
11613     </div>
11614     <div class="padding"></div>
11615
11616     <div class="entry">
11617       <div class="title">
11618         <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>
11619       </div>
11620       <div class="date">
11621          4th October 2014
11622       </div>
11623       <div class="body">
11624         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
11625 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
11626 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
11627 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
11628 Dibb.</p>
11629
11630 <p>I just wrapped up
11631 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
11632 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
11633 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
11634 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
11635 0.17.</p>
11636
11637 <ul>
11638
11639  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
11640  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
11641    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
11642  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
11643  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
11644  <li>Fix include orders</li>
11645  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
11646  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
11647  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
11648    the palette size is the same.</li>
11649  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
11650  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
11651  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
11652  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
11653    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
11654
11655 </ul>
11656
11657 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
11658 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
11659 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
11660
11661       </div>
11662       <div class="tags">
11663
11664
11665         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>.
11666
11667
11668       </div>
11669     </div>
11670     <div class="padding"></div>
11671
11672     <div class="entry">
11673       <div class="title">
11674         <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>
11675       </div>
11676       <div class="date">
11677         26th September 2014
11678       </div>
11679       <div class="body">
11680         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
11681 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
11682 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
11683 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
11684 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
11685 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
11686 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
11687 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
11688 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
11689 future.  The
11690 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
11691 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
11692 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
11693 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
11694 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
11695
11696 <p>First, download the test ISO via
11697 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
11698 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
11699 or rsync (use
11700 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
11701 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
11702 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
11703 install with some tweaking.</p>
11704
11705 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
11706 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
11707
11708 <p><blockquote><pre>
11709 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
11710 </pre></blockquote></p>
11711
11712 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
11713 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
11714 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
11715 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
11716
11717 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
11718 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
11719 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
11720 your need.</p>
11721
11722 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
11723 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
11724 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
11725 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
11726 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
11727 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
11728 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
11729 days.</p>
11730
11731 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
11732 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
11733 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
11734 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
11735 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
11736 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
11737 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
11738 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
11739 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
11740
11741 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
11742 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
11743 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
11744
11745       </div>
11746       <div class="tags">
11747
11748
11749         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>.
11750
11751
11752       </div>
11753     </div>
11754     <div class="padding"></div>
11755
11756     <div class="entry">
11757       <div class="title">
11758         <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>
11759       </div>
11760       <div class="date">
11761         25th September 2014
11762       </div>
11763       <div class="body">
11764         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
11765 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
11766 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
11767 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
11768 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
11769 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
11770 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
11771 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
11772 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
11773 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
11774 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
11775 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
11776 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
11777
11778 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
11779 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
11780 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
11781 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
11782 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
11783 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
11784 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
11785 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
11786 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
11787 list</a>. :)</p>
11788
11789       </div>
11790       <div class="tags">
11791
11792
11793         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>.
11794
11795
11796       </div>
11797     </div>
11798     <div class="padding"></div>
11799
11800     <div class="entry">
11801       <div class="title">
11802         <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>
11803       </div>
11804       <div class="date">
11805         16th September 2014
11806       </div>
11807       <div class="body">
11808         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
11809 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
11810 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
11811 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
11812 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
11813 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
11814 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
11815 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
11816 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
11817 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
11818 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
11819 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
11820 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
11821 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
11822
11823 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
11824 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
11825 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
11826 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
11827 depend on the small and clever package
11828 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
11829 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
11830 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
11831 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
11832 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
11833 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
11834 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
11835 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
11836 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
11837 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
11838 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
11839
11840 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
11841 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
11842 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
11843 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
11844 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
11845 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
11846 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
11847 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
11848 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
11849 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
11850 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
11851 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
11852 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
11853 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
11854 dialog.</p>
11855
11856 <p><table>
11857
11858 <tr>
11859 <th>Machine/setup</th>
11860 <th>Original tasksel</th>
11861 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
11862 <th>Reduction</th>
11863 </tr>
11864
11865 <tr>
11866 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
11867 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
11868 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
11869 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
11870 </tr>
11871
11872 <tr>
11873 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
11874 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
11875 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
11876 <td>23 min 40%</td>
11877 </tr>
11878
11879 <tr>
11880 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
11881 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
11882 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
11883 <td>11 min 50%</td>
11884 </tr>
11885
11886 <tr>
11887 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
11888 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
11889 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
11890 <td>2 min 33%</td>
11891 </tr>
11892
11893 <tr>
11894 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
11895 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
11896 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
11897 <td>4 min 21%</td>
11898 </tr>
11899
11900 </table></p>
11901
11902 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
11903 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
11904 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
11905 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
11906 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
11907 installed.</p>
11908
11909 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
11910 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
11911 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
11912 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
11913 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
11914 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
11915 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
11916 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
11917 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
11918 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
11919 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
11920 for the entire installation.</p>
11921
11922 <p>I've implemented this in the
11923 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
11924 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
11925 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
11926 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
11927 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
11928
11929 <p><blockquote><pre>
11930 #!/bin/sh
11931 set -e
11932 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
11933 info() {
11934     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
11935 }
11936 error() {
11937     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
11938 }
11939 override_install() {
11940     apt-install eatmydata || true
11941     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
11942         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
11943             file=/usr/bin/$bin
11944             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
11945             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
11946                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
11947                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
11948                     > /target$file.edu
11949                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
11950                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
11951                     --rename --quiet --add $file
11952                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
11953             else
11954                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
11955             fi
11956         done
11957     else
11958         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
11959     fi
11960 }
11961
11962 override_install
11963 </pre></blockquote></p>
11964
11965 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
11966 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
11967
11968 <p><blockquote><pre>
11969 #! /bin/sh -e
11970 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
11971 error() {
11972     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
11973 }
11974 remove_install_override() {
11975     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
11976         file=/usr/bin/$bin
11977         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
11978             rm /target$file
11979             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
11980                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
11981             rm /target$file.edu
11982         else
11983             error "Missing divert for $file."
11984         fi
11985     done
11986     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
11987 }
11988
11989 remove_install_override
11990 </pre></blockquote></p>
11991
11992 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
11993 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
11994 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
11995
11996 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
11997 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
11998 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
11999 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
12000 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
12001 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
12002 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
12003 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
12004 everyone.</p>
12005
12006 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
12007 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
12008 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
12009 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
12010
12011 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
12012 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
12013 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
12014 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
12015 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
12016
12017 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
12018 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
12019 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
12020 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
12021 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
12022
12023       </div>
12024       <div class="tags">
12025
12026
12027         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>.
12028
12029
12030       </div>
12031     </div>
12032     <div class="padding"></div>
12033
12034     <div class="entry">
12035       <div class="title">
12036         <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>
12037       </div>
12038       <div class="date">
12039         10th September 2014
12040       </div>
12041       <div class="body">
12042         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
12043 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
12044 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
12045 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
12046 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
12047 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
12048 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
12049 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
12050 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
12051 those problems are gone now.</p>
12052
12053 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
12054 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
12055 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
12056 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
12057 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
12058
12059 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
12060 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
12061 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
12062
12063 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
12064 line:</p>
12065
12066 <p><blockquote><pre>
12067 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
12068 </pre></blockquote></p>
12069
12070 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
12071 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
12072 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
12073 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
12074
12075 <p><blockquote><pre>
12076 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
12077 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
12078 %
12079 </pre></blockquote></p>
12080
12081 <p>Now if only
12082 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
12083 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
12084 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
12085 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
12086 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
12087 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
12088 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
12089 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
12090 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
12091
12092       </div>
12093       <div class="tags">
12094
12095
12096         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>.
12097
12098
12099       </div>
12100     </div>
12101     <div class="padding"></div>
12102
12103     <div class="entry">
12104       <div class="title">
12105         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Do_you_need_an_agreement_with_MPEG_LA_to_publish_and_broadcast_H_264_video_in_Norway_.html">Do you need an agreement with MPEG-LA to publish and broadcast H.264 video in Norway?</a>
12106       </div>
12107       <div class="date">
12108         25th August 2014
12109       </div>
12110       <div class="body">
12111         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
12112 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
12113 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
12114 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
12115 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
12116 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
12117 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
12118 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
12119 am not sure.
12120 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
12121 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
12122 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
12123 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
12124 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
12125 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
12126 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
12127 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
12128 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
12129 licenses are.</p>
12130
12131 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
12132 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
12133 end user</a>
12134 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
12135 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
12136
12137 <p><blockquote>
12138 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
12139 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
12140
12141 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
12142 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
12143 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
12144 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
12145 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
12146 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
12147 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
12148 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
12149 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
12150 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
12151 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
12152 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
12153 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
12154 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
12155 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
12156 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
12157 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
12158 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
12159
12160 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
12161 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
12162
12163 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
12164 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
12165 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
12166 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
12167 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
12168 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
12169 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
12170 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
12171 </blockquote></p>
12172
12173 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
12174 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
12175
12176 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
12177 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
12178
12179 <p><blockquote>
12180
12181 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
12182 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
12183 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
12184 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
12185 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
12186 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
12187 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
12188 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
12189 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
12190 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
12191 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
12192 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
12193
12194 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
12195 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
12196 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
12197 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
12198 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
12199 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
12200 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
12201 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
12202 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
12203 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
12204 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
12205 additional details.</p>
12206
12207 </blockquote></p>
12208
12209 <p>Some free software like
12210 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
12211 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
12212 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
12213 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
12214
12215       </div>
12216       <div class="tags">
12217
12218
12219         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
12220
12221
12222       </div>
12223     </div>
12224     <div class="padding"></div>
12225
12226     <div class="entry">
12227       <div class="title">
12228         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
12229       </div>
12230       <div class="date">
12231         31st July 2014
12232       </div>
12233       <div class="body">
12234         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
12235 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
12236 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
12237 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
12238 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
12239 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
12240
12241 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12242
12243 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
12244 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
12245 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
12246 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
12247 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
12248 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
12249 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
12250 works with Windows . :-(</p>
12251
12252 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
12253 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
12254 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
12255 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
12256 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
12257 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
12258
12259 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
12260 project?</strong></p>
12261
12262 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
12263 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
12264 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
12265 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
12266 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
12267 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
12268 with this job.</p>
12269
12270 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12271 Edu?</strong></p>
12272
12273 <p>The independence.</p>
12274
12275 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
12276 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
12277 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
12278
12279 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
12280 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
12281 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
12282 working reliable. </p>
12283
12284 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
12285 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
12286 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
12287 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
12288 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
12289 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
12290 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
12291 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
12292
12293 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12294 Edu?</strong></p>
12295
12296 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
12297 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
12298 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
12299
12300 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12301
12302 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
12303 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
12304
12305 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12306 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12307
12308 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
12309 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
12310 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
12311 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
12312 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
12313 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
12314 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
12315
12316       </div>
12317       <div class="tags">
12318
12319
12320         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
12321
12322
12323       </div>
12324     </div>
12325     <div class="padding"></div>
12326
12327     <div class="entry">
12328       <div class="title">
12329         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html">98.6 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</a>
12330       </div>
12331       <div class="date">
12332         23rd July 2014
12333       </div>
12334       <div class="body">
12335         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
12336 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
12337 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
12338 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
12339 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
12340 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
12341 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
12342 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
12343 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
12344 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
12345 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
12346 the translation show this very well:</p>
12347
12348 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
12349
12350 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
12351 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
12352 project pages and the
12353 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
12354 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
12355 and HTML version available in the
12356 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
12357 directory</a>.</p>
12358
12359 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
12360 you find any.</p>
12361
12362       </div>
12363       <div class="tags">
12364
12365
12366         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
12367
12368
12369       </div>
12370     </div>
12371     <div class="padding"></div>
12372
12373     <div class="entry">
12374       <div class="title">
12375         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
12376       </div>
12377       <div class="date">
12378         17th June 2014
12379       </div>
12380       <div class="body">
12381         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12382 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
12383 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
12384 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
12385 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
12386
12387 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
12388 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
12389 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
12390 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
12391 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
12392 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
12393 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
12394 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
12395 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
12396 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
12397 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
12398 goals.</p>
12399
12400 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
12401 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
12402 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
12403 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
12404 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
12405 chapters together into one large web page (aka
12406 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
12407 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
12408 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
12409 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
12410 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
12411 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
12412 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
12413 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
12414 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
12415 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
12416 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
12417 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
12418 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
12419 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
12420 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
12421 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
12422 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
12423 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
12424
12425 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
12426 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
12427 track the English original.  For this we use the
12428 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
12429 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
12430 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
12431 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
12432 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
12433 files), which the translations update with the native language
12434 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
12435 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
12436 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
12437 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
12438 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
12439 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
12440 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
12441 of the documentation.</p>
12442
12443 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
12444 recommend using
12445 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
12446 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
12447 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
12448 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
12449 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
12450 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
12451 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
12452 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
12453
12454 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
12455 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
12456 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
12457 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
12458 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
12459 translated images by storing translated versions in
12460 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
12461 package maintainers know more.</p>
12462
12463 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
12464 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
12465 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
12466 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
12467 PDF version</a> or the
12468 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
12469 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
12470 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
12471
12472 <p>To learn more, check out
12473 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
12474 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
12475 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
12476 manual on the wiki</a> and
12477 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
12478 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
12479
12480       </div>
12481       <div class="tags">
12482
12483
12484         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>.
12485
12486
12487       </div>
12488     </div>
12489     <div class="padding"></div>
12490
12491     <div class="entry">
12492       <div class="title">
12493         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
12494       </div>
12495       <div class="date">
12496         29th May 2014
12497       </div>
12498       <div class="body">
12499         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
12500 in my car, connected to
12501 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
12502 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
12503 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
12504 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
12505 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
12506 such car computer.</p>
12507
12508 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
12509
12510 <ul>
12511
12512  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
12513
12514  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
12515    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
12516    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
12517    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
12518    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
12519
12520  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
12521    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
12522    route.</li>
12523
12524  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
12525
12526  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
12527    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
12528    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
12529    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
12530    connection do not work.</li>
12531
12532  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
12533    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
12534
12535  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
12536    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
12537
12538  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
12539    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
12540
12541 </ul>
12542
12543 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
12544 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
12545
12546       </div>
12547       <div class="tags">
12548
12549
12550         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12551
12552
12553       </div>
12554     </div>
12555     <div class="padding"></div>
12556
12557     <div class="entry">
12558       <div class="title">
12559         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html">Half the Coverity issues in Gnash fixed in the next release</a>
12560       </div>
12561       <div class="date">
12562         29th April 2014
12563       </div>
12564       <div class="body">
12565         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
12566 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
12567 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
12568 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
12569 newer AVM2 format - see
12570 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
12571 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
12572 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
12573 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
12574 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
12575 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
12576 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
12577 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
12578 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
12579 sites do not work yet.</p>
12580
12581 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
12582 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
12583 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
12584 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
12585 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
12586 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
12587 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
12588 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
12589 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
12590 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
12591 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
12592
12593 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
12594 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
12595 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
12596 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
12597 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
12598 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
12599 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
12600
12601 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
12602 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
12603 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
12604 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
12605 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
12606
12607       </div>
12608       <div class="tags">
12609
12610
12611         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
12612
12613
12614       </div>
12615     </div>
12616     <div class="padding"></div>
12617
12618     <div class="entry">
12619       <div class="title">
12620         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
12621       </div>
12622       <div class="date">
12623         23rd April 2014
12624       </div>
12625       <div class="body">
12626         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
12627 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
12628 So I implemented one, using
12629 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
12630 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
12631 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
12632 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
12633 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
12634 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
12635
12636 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
12637 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
12638 packages to install.  The first part is in
12639 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
12640 this:</p>
12641
12642 <p><blockquote><pre>
12643 Task: isenkram
12644 Section: hardware
12645 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
12646  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
12647  proposed.
12648 Test-new-install: mark show
12649 Relevance: 8
12650 Packages: for-current-hardware
12651 </pre></blockquote></p>
12652
12653 <p>The second part is in
12654 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
12655 this:</p>
12656
12657 <p><blockquote><pre>
12658 #!/bin/sh
12659 #
12660 (
12661     isenkram-lookup
12662     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
12663 ) | sort -u
12664 </pre></blockquote></p>
12665
12666 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
12667 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
12668 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
12669 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
12670 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
12671 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
12672
12673 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
12674 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
12675 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
12676 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
12677 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
12678 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
12679 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
12680 the python-apt code (bug
12681 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
12682 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
12683 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
12684 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
12685 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
12686 unstable today.</p>
12687
12688 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
12689 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
12690 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
12691 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
12692 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
12693 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
12694 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
12695 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
12696 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
12697
12698 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
12699 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
12700 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
12701 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
12702 package.  See also
12703 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
12704 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
12705 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
12706 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
12707
12708       </div>
12709       <div class="tags">
12710
12711
12712         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>.
12713
12714
12715       </div>
12716     </div>
12717     <div class="padding"></div>
12718
12719     <div class="entry">
12720       <div class="title">
12721         <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>
12722       </div>
12723       <div class="date">
12724         15th April 2014
12725       </div>
12726       <div class="body">
12727         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
12728 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
12729 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
12730 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
12731 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
12732 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
12733
12734 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
12735 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
12736 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
12737 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
12738 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
12739 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
12740 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
12741
12742 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
12743 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
12744 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
12745 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
12746 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
12747 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
12748 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
12749 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
12750 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
12751 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
12752 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
12753 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
12754
12755 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
12756 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
12757 become root:</p>
12758
12759 <p><pre>
12760 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
12761   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
12762   u-boot-tools
12763 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
12764   freedom-maker
12765 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
12766 </pre></p>
12767
12768 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
12769 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
12770 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
12771 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
12772 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
12773 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
12774 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
12775 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
12776
12777 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
12778 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
12779 the preseed values:</p>
12780
12781 <p><pre>
12782 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
12783 </pre></p>
12784
12785 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
12786 it still work.</p>
12787
12788 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
12789 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
12790 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
12791 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
12792 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
12793 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
12794 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
12795
12796 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
12797 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
12798 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
12799 irc.debian.org)</a> and
12800 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
12801 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
12802
12803       </div>
12804       <div class="tags">
12805
12806
12807         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>.
12808
12809
12810       </div>
12811     </div>
12812     <div class="padding"></div>
12813
12814     <div class="entry">
12815       <div class="title">
12816         <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>
12817       </div>
12818       <div class="date">
12819          9th April 2014
12820       </div>
12821       <div class="body">
12822         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
12823 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
12824 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
12825 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
12826 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
12827 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
12828 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
12829 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
12830 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
12831 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
12832 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
12833 have looked at a system called
12834 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
12835 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
12836
12837 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
12838 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
12839 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
12840 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
12841 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
12842 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
12843 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
12844 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
12845 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
12846 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
12847 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
12848 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
12849 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
12850
12851 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
12852 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
12853 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
12854 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
12855 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
12856 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
12857 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
12858 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
12859 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
12860 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
12861 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
12862 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
12863 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
12864 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
12865 account.</p>
12866
12867 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
12868 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
12869 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
12870 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
12871 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
12872 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
12873 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
12874
12875 <p><blockquote><pre>
12876 [s3c]
12877 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
12878 backend-login: API-login
12879 backend-password: API-password
12880 fs-passphrase: local-password
12881 </pre></blockquote></p>
12882
12883 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
12884 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
12885 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
12886 details and password to create it:</p>
12887
12888 <p><blockquote><pre>
12889 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
12890 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
12891   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
12892 Enter backend login:
12893 Enter backend password:
12894 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
12895 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
12896 Enter encryption password:
12897 Confirm encryption password:
12898 Generating random encryption key...
12899 Creating metadata tables...
12900 Dumping metadata...
12901 ..objects..
12902 ..blocks..
12903 ..inodes..
12904 ..inode_blocks..
12905 ..symlink_targets..
12906 ..names..
12907 ..contents..
12908 ..ext_attributes..
12909 Compressing and uploading metadata...
12910 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
12911 # </pre></blockquote></p>
12912
12913 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
12914
12915 <p><blockquote><pre>
12916 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
12917   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
12918 Using 4 upload threads.
12919 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
12920 Reading metadata...
12921 ..objects..
12922 ..blocks..
12923 ..inodes..
12924 ..inode_blocks..
12925 ..symlink_targets..
12926 ..names..
12927 ..contents..
12928 ..ext_attributes..
12929 Mounting filesystem...
12930 # df -h /s3ql
12931 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
12932 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
12933 #
12934 </pre></blockquote></p>
12935
12936 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
12937 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
12938 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
12939 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
12940 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
12941 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
12942
12943 <p><blockquote><pre>
12944 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
12945 #
12946 </pre></blockquote></p>
12947
12948 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
12949 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
12950 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
12951 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
12952 file system:</p>
12953
12954 <p><blockquote><pre>
12955 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
12956 Using cached metadata.
12957 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
12958 Checking DB integrity...
12959 Creating temporary extra indices...
12960 Checking lost+found...
12961 Checking cached objects...
12962 Checking names (refcounts)...
12963 Checking contents (names)...
12964 Checking contents (inodes)...
12965 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
12966 Checking objects (reference counts)...
12967 Checking objects (backend)...
12968 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
12969 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
12970 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
12971 Checking objects (sizes)...
12972 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
12973 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
12974 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
12975 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
12976 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
12977 Checking inodes (sizes)...
12978 Checking extended attributes (names)...
12979 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
12980 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
12981 Checking directory reachability...
12982 Checking unix conventions...
12983 Checking referential integrity...
12984 Dropping temporary indices...
12985 Backing up old metadata...
12986 Dumping metadata...
12987 ..objects..
12988 ..blocks..
12989 ..inodes..
12990 ..inode_blocks..
12991 ..symlink_targets..
12992 ..names..
12993 ..contents..
12994 ..ext_attributes..
12995 Compressing and uploading metadata...
12996 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
12997 #
12998 </pre></blockquote></p>
12999
13000 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
13001 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
13002 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
13003 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
13004 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
13005 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
13006 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
13007 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
13008 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
13009 working set.</p>
13010
13011 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
13012 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
13013 busy:</p>
13014
13015 <p><blockquote><pre>
13016 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
13017   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
13018 Using 8 upload threads.
13019 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
13020 #
13021 </pre></blockquote></p>
13022
13023 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
13024 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
13025 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
13026 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
13027 s3qlctrl:
13028
13029 <p><blockquote><pre>
13030 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
13031 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
13032 #
13033 </pre></blockquote></p>
13034
13035 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
13036 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
13037 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
13038 a report:</p>
13039
13040 <p><blockquote><pre>
13041 # s3qlstat /s3ql
13042 Directory entries:    9141
13043 Inodes:               9143
13044 Data blocks:          8851
13045 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
13046 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
13047 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
13048 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
13049 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
13050 #
13051 </pre></blockquote></p>
13052
13053 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
13054 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
13055 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
13056 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
13057 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
13058 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
13059 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
13060 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
13061 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
13062 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
13063 best.</p>
13064
13065 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
13066 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
13067 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
13068 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
13069 poster is titled
13070 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
13071 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
13072 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
13073 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
13074 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
13075
13076 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
13077 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
13078 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
13079 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
13080 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
13081 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
13082 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
13083 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
13084
13085 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
13086 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
13087 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
13088 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
13089 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
13090 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
13091 only read from it.</p>
13092
13093 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
13094 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
13095 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
13096
13097       </div>
13098       <div class="tags">
13099
13100
13101         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>.
13102
13103
13104       </div>
13105     </div>
13106     <div class="padding"></div>
13107
13108     <div class="entry">
13109       <div class="title">
13110         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
13111       </div>
13112       <div class="date">
13113          1st April 2014
13114       </div>
13115       <div class="body">
13116         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
13117 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
13118 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
13119 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
13120 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
13121 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
13122 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
13123 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
13124 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
13125 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
13126 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
13127 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
13128 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
13129
13130 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
13131 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
13132 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
13133 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
13134 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
13135 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
13136 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
13137 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
13138 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
13139 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
13140 Linux.</p>
13141
13142 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
13143 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
13144 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
13145 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
13146 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
13147 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
13148 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
13149 Windows before metro).</p>
13150
13151 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
13152 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
13153 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
13154 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
13155 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
13156 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
13157 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
13158 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
13159 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
13160 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
13161 old Windows binaries, check it out by
13162 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
13163 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
13164 image.</p>
13165
13166       </div>
13167       <div class="tags">
13168
13169
13170         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos</a>.
13171
13172
13173       </div>
13174     </div>
13175     <div class="padding"></div>
13176
13177     <div class="entry">
13178       <div class="title">
13179         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
13180       </div>
13181       <div class="date">
13182         30th March 2014
13183       </div>
13184       <div class="body">
13185         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
13186 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
13187 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
13188 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
13189 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
13190
13191 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13192
13193 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
13194 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
13195 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
13196 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
13197 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
13198
13199 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
13200 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
13201 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
13202
13203 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
13204 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
13205 hunger.</p>
13206
13207 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
13208 project?</strong></p>
13209
13210 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
13211 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
13212 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
13213 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
13214 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
13215 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
13216 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
13217 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
13218 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
13219 running.  I just loved it.</p>
13220
13221 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13222 Edu?</strong></p>
13223
13224 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
13225 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
13226 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
13227 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
13228 be made of steel.</p>
13229
13230 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13231 Edu?</strong></p>
13232
13233 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
13234
13235 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
13236 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
13237 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
13238 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
13239 or dropped.</p>
13240
13241 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
13242 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
13243 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
13244 discourage many people too.</p>
13245
13246 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13247
13248 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
13249 Virtualbox.</p>
13250
13251
13252 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13253 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13254
13255 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
13256 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
13257 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
13258 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
13259 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
13260 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
13261 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
13262 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
13263 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
13264
13265       </div>
13266       <div class="tags">
13267
13268
13269         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
13270
13271
13272       </div>
13273     </div>
13274     <div class="padding"></div>
13275
13276     <div class="entry">
13277       <div class="title">
13278         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
13279       </div>
13280       <div class="date">
13281         25th March 2014
13282       </div>
13283       <div class="body">
13284         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
13285 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
13286 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
13287 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
13288 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
13289 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
13290 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
13291 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
13292 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
13293
13294 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
13295 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
13296 looked a given way.  Such
13297 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
13298 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
13299 called a
13300 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
13301 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
13302 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
13303 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
13304 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
13305 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
13306 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
13307 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
13308 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
13309 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
13310 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
13311 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
13312 There are several commercial services around providing such
13313 timestamping.  A quick search for
13314 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
13315 service</a>" pointed me to at least
13316 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
13317 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
13318 Vadis</a>,
13319 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
13320 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
13321 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
13322 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
13323
13324 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
13325 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
13326 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
13327 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
13328 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
13329 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
13330 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
13331 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
13332 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
13333 Greifswald.</p>
13334
13335 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
13336 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
13337 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
13338 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
13339 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
13340
13341 <p><blockquote><pre>
13342 #!/bin/sh
13343 set -e
13344 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
13345 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
13346 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
13347 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
13348 cafile=chain.txt
13349 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
13350     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
13351 fi
13352 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
13353     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
13354 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
13355 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
13356 base64 < "$resfile"
13357 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
13358 </pre></blockquote></p>
13359
13360 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
13361 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
13362 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
13363 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
13364 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
13365 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
13366 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
13367 changed.</p>
13368
13369 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
13370 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
13371 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
13372 to set up?</p>
13373
13374       </div>
13375       <div class="tags">
13376
13377
13378         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
13379
13380
13381       </div>
13382     </div>
13383     <div class="padding"></div>
13384
13385     <div class="entry">
13386       <div class="title">
13387         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html">Video DVD reader library / python-dvdvideo - nice free software</a>
13388       </div>
13389       <div class="date">
13390         21st March 2014
13391       </div>
13392       <div class="body">
13393         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
13394 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
13395 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
13396 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
13397 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
13398 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
13399 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
13400
13401 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
13402 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
13403 tried using
13404 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
13405 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
13406 and program
13407 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
13408 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
13409 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
13410 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
13411 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
13412 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
13413 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
13414 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
13415 this method.</p>
13416
13417 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
13418 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
13419 problem is
13420 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
13421 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
13422 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
13423 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
13424 DVD structures, as the python library
13425 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
13426 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
13427 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
13428 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
13429 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
13430 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
13431
13432 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
13433 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
13434
13435       </div>
13436       <div class="tags">
13437
13438
13439         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
13440
13441
13442       </div>
13443     </div>
13444     <div class="padding"></div>
13445
13446     <div class="entry">
13447       <div class="title">
13448         <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>
13449       </div>
13450       <div class="date">
13451         14th March 2014
13452       </div>
13453       <div class="body">
13454         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
13455 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
13456 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
13457 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
13458 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
13459 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
13460 release (0.2).</p>
13461
13462 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
13463 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
13464 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
13465 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
13466 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
13467 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
13468 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
13469 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
13470 and build using
13471 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
13472 with a user with sudo access to become root:
13473
13474 <pre>
13475 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
13476   freedom-maker
13477 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
13478   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
13479   u-boot-tools
13480 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
13481 </pre>
13482
13483 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
13484 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
13485 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
13486 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
13487 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
13488 kpartx call.</p>
13489
13490 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
13491 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
13492 the preseed values:</p>
13493
13494 <pre>
13495 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
13496 </pre>
13497
13498 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
13499 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
13500 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
13501 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
13502 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
13503 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
13504
13505 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
13506 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
13507 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
13508 irc.debian.org)</a> and
13509 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
13510 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
13511
13512       </div>
13513       <div class="tags">
13514
13515
13516         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>.
13517
13518
13519       </div>
13520     </div>
13521     <div class="padding"></div>
13522
13523     <div class="entry">
13524       <div class="title">
13525         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">How to add extra storage servers in Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
13526       </div>
13527       <div class="date">
13528         12th March 2014
13529       </div>
13530       <div class="body">
13531         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
13532 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
13533 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
13534 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
13535 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
13536 document this better when one of the customers of
13537 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
13538 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
13539 get this working are the following:</p>
13540
13541 <p><ol>
13542
13543 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
13544 example host here.</li>
13545
13546 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
13547 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
13548
13549 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
13550 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
13551
13552 </ol></p>
13553
13554 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
13555 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
13556 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
13557 started).</p>
13558
13559 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
13560 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
13561
13562 <p><blockquote><pre>
13563 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
13564 Export list for nas-server:
13565 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
13566 root@tjener:~#
13567 </pre></blockquote></p>
13568
13569 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
13570 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
13571 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
13572 NFS access.</p>
13573
13574 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
13575 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
13576 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
13577
13578 <p><blockquote><pre>
13579 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13580 </pre></blockquote></p>
13581
13582 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
13583 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
13584 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
13585 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
13586
13587 <p><blockquote><pre>
13588 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13589 objectClass: automount
13590 cn: nas-server
13591 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13592
13593 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13594 objectClass: top
13595 objectClass: automountMap
13596 ou: auto.nas-server
13597
13598 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13599 objectClass: automount
13600 cn: /
13601 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
13602 </pre></blockquote></p>
13603
13604 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
13605 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
13606 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
13607
13608 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
13609 the storage server directly by just visiting the
13610 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
13611 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
13612
13613       </div>
13614       <div class="tags">
13615
13616
13617         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>.
13618
13619
13620       </div>
13621     </div>
13622     <div class="padding"></div>
13623
13624     <div class="entry">
13625       <div class="title">
13626         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
13627       </div>
13628       <div class="date">
13629         22nd February 2014
13630       </div>
13631       <div class="body">
13632         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
13633 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
13634 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
13635 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
13636 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
13637 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
13638 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
13639 proper home since then.</p>
13640
13641 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
13642 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
13643 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
13644 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
13645 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
13646
13647 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
13648 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
13649 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
13650 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
13651 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
13652 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
13653 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
13654 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
13655 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
13656
13657       </div>
13658       <div class="tags">
13659
13660
13661         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>.
13662
13663
13664       </div>
13665     </div>
13666     <div class="padding"></div>
13667
13668     <div class="entry">
13669       <div class="title">
13670         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
13671       </div>
13672       <div class="date">
13673          3rd February 2014
13674       </div>
13675       <div class="body">
13676         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
13677 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
13678 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
13679 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
13680 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
13681 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
13682 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
13683 <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>,
13684 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
13685
13686 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
13687 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
13688 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
13689 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
13690 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
13691 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
13692
13693 <p><blockquote><pre>
13694 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
13695 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
13696 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
13697 dhclient /dev/eth0
13698 </pre></blockquote></p>
13699
13700 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
13701 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
13702 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
13703
13704 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
13705 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
13706 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
13707 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
13708 side.</p>
13709
13710 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
13711 stuff:</p>
13712
13713 <p><blockquote><pre>
13714 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
13715 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
13716 EOF
13717 apt-get update
13718 apt-get dist-upgrade
13719 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
13720     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
13721 update-alternatives --config runsystem
13722 </pre></blockquote></p>
13723
13724 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
13725 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
13726 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
13727 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
13728 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
13729 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
13730 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
13731 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
13732 ssh instead.
13733
13734 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
13735 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
13736 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
13737 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
13738 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
13739 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
13740
13741 <p><blockquote><pre>
13742 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
13743 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
13744 EOF
13745 </pre></blockquote></p>
13746
13747 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
13748 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
13749 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
13750 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
13751
13752 <p><blockquote><pre>
13753 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
13754 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
13755 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
13756 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
13757 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
13758 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
13759 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
13760 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
13761 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
13762 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
13763 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
13764 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
13765 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
13766 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
13767 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
13768 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
13769 #
13770 </pre></blockquote></p>
13771
13772 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
13773 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
13774 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
13775 command line stuff.<p>
13776
13777       </div>
13778       <div class="tags">
13779
13780
13781         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>.
13782
13783
13784       </div>
13785     </div>
13786     <div class="padding"></div>
13787
13788     <div class="entry">
13789       <div class="title">
13790         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
13791       </div>
13792       <div class="date">
13793         29th January 2014
13794       </div>
13795       <div class="body">
13796         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
13797 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
13798 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
13799 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
13800 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
13801 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
13802 investigated in
13803 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
13804 from December 2013, in the article
13805 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
13806 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
13807 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
13808 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
13809 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
13810 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
13811 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
13812 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
13813
13814 <p><blockquote>
13815 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
13816 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
13817 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
13818 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
13819 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
13820 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
13821 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
13822 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
13823 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
13824 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
13825 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
13826 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
13827
13828 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
13829 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
13830 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
13831 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
13832 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
13833 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
13834 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
13835 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
13836 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
13837 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
13838 </blockquote><p>
13839
13840 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
13841 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
13842 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
13843 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
13844 summarized like this:</p>
13845
13846 <p><blockquote>
13847 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
13848 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
13849 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
13850 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
13851 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
13852 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
13853 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
13854 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
13855 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
13856 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
13857 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
13858 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
13859 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
13860 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
13861 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
13862 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
13863 </blockquote></p>
13864
13865 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
13866 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
13867 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
13868 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
13869
13870 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
13871 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
13872 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
13873
13874       </div>
13875       <div class="tags">
13876
13877
13878         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
13879
13880
13881       </div>
13882     </div>
13883     <div class="padding"></div>
13884
13885     <div class="entry">
13886       <div class="title">
13887         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
13888       </div>
13889       <div class="date">
13890         14th January 2014
13891       </div>
13892       <div class="body">
13893         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
13894 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
13895 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
13896 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
13897 the source.  The company behind it provide
13898 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
13899 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
13900 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
13901 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
13902 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
13903 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
13904 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
13905 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
13906 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
13907 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
13908 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
13909 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
13910 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
13911 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
13912 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
13913 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
13914 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
13915 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
13916 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
13917
13918 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
13919
13920 <ul>
13921
13922   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
13923   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
13924   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
13925
13926 </ul>
13927
13928 <p>You can
13929 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
13930 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
13931 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
13932 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
13933 include a test suite check.</p>
13934
13935       </div>
13936       <div class="tags">
13937
13938
13939         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>.
13940
13941
13942       </div>
13943     </div>
13944     <div class="padding"></div>
13945
13946     <div class="entry">
13947       <div class="title">
13948         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
13949       </div>
13950       <div class="date">
13951         25th December 2013
13952       </div>
13953       <div class="body">
13954         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13955 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
13956 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
13957 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
13958 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
13959 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
13960 George</a>.</p>
13961
13962 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
13963
13964 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13965
13966 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
13967 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
13968 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
13969 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
13970 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
13971 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
13972
13973 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
13974 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
13975 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
13976 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
13977 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
13978 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
13979 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
13980 to help building another school's informational education concept from
13981 scratch.</p>
13982
13983 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
13984 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
13985 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
13986
13987 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
13988 and cycling.</p>
13989
13990 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
13991 project?</strong></p>
13992
13993 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
13994 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
13995 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
13996 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
13997 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
13998 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
13999
14000 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
14001 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
14002 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
14003 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
14004 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
14005 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
14006 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
14007 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
14008 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
14009
14010 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
14011 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
14012 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
14013 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
14014
14015 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14016 Edu?</strong></p>
14017
14018 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
14019 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
14020 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
14021 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
14022 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
14023 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
14024 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
14025 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
14026 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
14027 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
14028 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
14029 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
14030 that it rocks!</p>
14031
14032 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
14033 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
14034 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
14035 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
14036 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
14037 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
14038 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
14039
14040 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14041 Edu?</strong></p>
14042
14043 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
14044 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
14045 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
14046 can list a few points about that:</p>
14047
14048 <ul>
14049
14050  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
14051  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
14052  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
14053
14054 </ul>
14055
14056 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
14057
14058 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14059
14060 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
14061 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
14062 year.</p>
14063
14064 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
14065 run text tools. I use
14066 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
14067 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
14068 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
14069 based full-featured student management software with the two),
14070 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
14071 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
14072 coloured world called the WWW, I use
14073 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
14074 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
14075 e-mail.</p>
14076
14077 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
14078 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
14079 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
14080 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
14081 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
14082 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
14083 Facebook now ;).</p>
14084
14085 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14086 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14087
14088 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
14089 side is what I have experienced.</p>
14090
14091 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
14092 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
14093 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
14094 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
14095 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
14096 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
14097 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
14098 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
14099 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
14100 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
14101 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
14102 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
14103 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
14104 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
14105 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
14106 plain criminal.</p>
14107
14108 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
14109 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
14110 founded an association named
14111 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
14112 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
14113 area of free and open source software, for example the
14114 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
14115 Teckids and are the youth programme of
14116 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
14117 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
14118 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
14119 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
14120 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
14121 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
14122
14123 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
14124 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
14125 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
14126 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
14127 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
14128 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
14129 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
14130 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
14131 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
14132 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
14133 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
14134 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
14135
14136 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
14137 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
14138 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
14139 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
14140
14141 <!--
14142
14143 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
14144
14145 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
14146 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
14147
14148  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
14149    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
14150    of the decision makers above;
14151  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
14152    knowledge about free software
14153
14154 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
14155
14156 -->
14157
14158       </div>
14159       <div class="tags">
14160
14161
14162         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
14163
14164
14165       </div>
14166     </div>
14167     <div class="padding"></div>
14168
14169     <div class="entry">
14170       <div class="title">
14171         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
14172       </div>
14173       <div class="date">
14174          6th December 2013
14175       </div>
14176       <div class="body">
14177         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
14178 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
14179 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
14180 had a new school administrator show up on
14181 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
14182 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
14183 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
14184 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
14185 Germany a few years ago.</p>
14186
14187 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14188
14189 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
14190 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
14191 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
14192 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
14193
14194 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
14195 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
14196 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
14197 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
14198 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
14199 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
14200 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
14201 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
14202 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
14203
14204 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
14205 project?</strong></p>
14206
14207 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
14208 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
14209 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
14210 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
14211
14212 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14213 Edu?</strong></p>
14214
14215 <ul>
14216   <li>Quick installation,</li>
14217   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
14218   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
14219   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
14220     single company,</li>
14221   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
14222     experience and problem solutions.</li>
14223 </ul>
14224
14225 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14226 Edu?</strong></p>
14227
14228 <ul>
14229   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
14230   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
14231   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
14232   working again reliably.
14233
14234   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
14235   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
14236   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
14237   as their base.
14238
14239   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
14240   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
14241   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
14242   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
14243   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
14244   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
14245
14246   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
14247   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
14248   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
14249   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
14250   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
14251   schemes.</li>
14252
14253   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
14254   compared to Debian.</li>
14255
14256 </ul>
14257
14258 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
14259 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
14260 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
14261 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
14262
14263 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14264
14265 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
14266 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
14267 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
14268 programming languages for teaching.</p>
14269
14270 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14271 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14272
14273 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
14274
14275 <ul>
14276
14277   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
14278     teaching and learning.</li>
14279
14280   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
14281     home, and at their working place without running into license or
14282     conversion problems.</li>
14283
14284   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
14285     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
14286     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
14287     science, not products.</li>
14288
14289   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
14290     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
14291
14292 </ul>
14293
14294       </div>
14295       <div class="tags">
14296
14297
14298         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
14299
14300
14301       </div>
14302     </div>
14303     <div class="padding"></div>
14304
14305     <div class="entry">
14306       <div class="title">
14307         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html">Dugnadsnett for alle, a wireless community network in Oslo, take shape</a>
14308       </div>
14309       <div class="date">
14310         30th November 2013
14311       </div>
14312       <div class="body">
14313         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
14314 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
14315 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
14316 experiment with interesting network technology, the
14317 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
14318 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
14319 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
14320 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
14321 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
14322 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
14323 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
14324 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
14325 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
14326 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
14327 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
14328 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
14329 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
14330 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
14331 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
14332 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
14333
14334       </div>
14335       <div class="tags">
14336
14337
14338         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14339
14340
14341       </div>
14342     </div>
14343     <div class="padding"></div>
14344
14345     <div class="entry">
14346       <div class="title">
14347         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
14348       </div>
14349       <div class="date">
14350         24th November 2013
14351       </div>
14352       <div class="body">
14353         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
14354 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
14355 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
14356 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
14357 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
14358 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
14359 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
14360 is working on.  I checked the
14361 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
14362 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
14363 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
14364 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
14365 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
14366 These are the release notes:</p>
14367
14368 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
14369
14370 <ul>
14371
14372   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
14373    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
14374    up.</li>
14375
14376   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
14377
14378   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
14379    Matthias Klose.</li>
14380
14381   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
14382    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
14383
14384   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
14385    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
14386    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
14387
14388 </ul>
14389
14390 <p>You can
14391 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
14392 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
14393 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
14394 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
14395 include a testsuite check.</p>
14396
14397       </div>
14398       <div class="tags">
14399
14400
14401         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>.
14402
14403
14404       </div>
14405     </div>
14406     <div class="padding"></div>
14407
14408     <div class="entry">
14409       <div class="title">
14410         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/All_drones_should_be_radio_marked_with_what_they_do_and_who_they_belong_to.html">All drones should be radio marked with what they do and who they belong to</a>
14411       </div>
14412       <div class="date">
14413         21st November 2013
14414       </div>
14415       <div class="body">
14416         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
14417 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
14418 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
14419 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
14420 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
14421 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
14422 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
14423 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
14424 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
14425 TED talk
14426 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
14427 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
14428 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
14429
14430 <blockquote>
14431
14432 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
14433 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
14434 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
14435 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
14436 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
14437 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
14438 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
14439 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
14440 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
14441 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
14442 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
14443
14444 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
14445 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
14446 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
14447
14448 </blockquote>
14449
14450 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
14451 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
14452 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
14453 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
14454 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
14455 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
14456 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
14457 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
14458 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
14459
14460       </div>
14461       <div class="tags">
14462
14463
14464         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
14465
14466
14467       </div>
14468     </div>
14469     <div class="padding"></div>
14470
14471     <div class="entry">
14472       <div class="title">
14473         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo_.html">Lets make a wireless community network in Oslo!</a>
14474       </div>
14475       <div class="date">
14476         13th November 2013
14477       </div>
14478       <div class="body">
14479         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
14480 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
14481 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
14482 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
14483 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
14484 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
14485 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
14486 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
14487 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
14488 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
14489 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
14490 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
14491 right away. :)</p>
14492
14493       </div>
14494       <div class="tags">
14495
14496
14497         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14498
14499
14500       </div>
14501     </div>
14502     <div class="padding"></div>
14503
14504     <div class="entry">
14505       <div class="title">
14506         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Running_TP_Link_MR3040_as_a_batman_adv_mesh_node_using_openwrt.html">Running TP-Link MR3040 as a batman-adv mesh node using openwrt</a>
14507       </div>
14508       <div class="date">
14509         10th November 2013
14510       </div>
14511       <div class="body">
14512         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
14513 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
14514 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
14515 MR3040 as a mesh node using
14516 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
14517
14518 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
14519 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
14520 and downloaded
14521 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
14522 recommended firmware image</a>
14523 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
14524 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
14525 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
14526 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
14527 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
14528
14529 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
14530 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
14531 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
14532 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
14533 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
14534 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
14535 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
14536 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
14537 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
14538 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
14539 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
14540 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
14541 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
14542
14543 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
14544 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
14545 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
14546 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
14547 them:</p>
14548
14549 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
14550
14551 <pre>
14552
14553 config interface 'loopback'
14554         option ifname 'lo'
14555         option proto 'static'
14556         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
14557         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
14558
14559 config globals 'globals'
14560         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
14561
14562 config interface 'lan'
14563         option ifname 'eth0'
14564         option type 'bridge'
14565         option proto 'dhcp'
14566         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
14567         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
14568         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
14569         option ip6assign '60'
14570
14571 config interface 'mesh'
14572         option ifname 'adhoc0'
14573         option mtu '1528'
14574         option proto 'batadv'
14575         option mesh 'bat0'
14576 </pre>
14577
14578 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
14579 <pre>
14580
14581 config wifi-device 'radio0'
14582         option type 'mac80211'
14583         option channel '11'
14584         option hwmode '11ng'
14585         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
14586         option htmode 'HT20'
14587         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
14588         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
14589         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
14590         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
14591         option disabled '0'
14592
14593 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
14594         option device 'radio0'
14595         option ifname 'adhoc0'
14596         option network 'mesh'
14597         option encryption 'none'
14598         option mode 'adhoc'
14599         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
14600         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
14601 </pre>
14602 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
14603 <pre>
14604
14605 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
14606         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
14607         option 'aggregated_ogms'
14608         option 'ap_isolation'
14609         option 'bonding'
14610         option 'fragmentation'
14611         option 'gw_bandwidth'
14612         option 'gw_mode'
14613         option 'gw_sel_class'
14614         option 'log_level'
14615         option 'orig_interval'
14616         option 'vis_mode'
14617         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
14618         option 'distributed_arp_table'
14619         option 'network_coding'
14620         option 'hop_penalty'
14621
14622 # yet another batX instance
14623 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
14624 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
14625 </pre>
14626
14627 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
14628 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
14629 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
14630
14631       </div>
14632       <div class="tags">
14633
14634
14635         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14636
14637
14638       </div>
14639     </div>
14640     <div class="padding"></div>
14641
14642     <div class="entry">
14643       <div class="title">
14644         <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>
14645       </div>
14646       <div class="date">
14647          2nd November 2013
14648       </div>
14649       <div class="body">
14650         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
14651 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
14652 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
14653 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
14654 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
14655
14656 <p><pre>
14657 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
14658 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
14659 # Provides:          rsyslog
14660 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
14661 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
14662 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
14663 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
14664 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
14665 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
14666 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
14667 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
14668 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
14669 ### END INIT INFO
14670 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
14671 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
14672 </pre></p>
14673
14674 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
14675 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
14676 info/comments.</p>
14677
14678 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
14679 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
14680
14681 <p><pre>
14682 #!/bin/sh
14683
14684 # Define LSB log_* functions.
14685 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
14686 # and status_of_proc is working.
14687 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
14688
14689 #
14690 # Function that starts the daemon/service
14691
14692 #
14693 do_start()
14694 {
14695         # Return
14696         #   0 if daemon has been started
14697         #   1 if daemon was already running
14698         #   2 if daemon could not be started
14699         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
14700                 || return 1
14701         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
14702                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
14703                 || return 2
14704         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
14705         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
14706         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
14707 }
14708
14709 #
14710 # Function that stops the daemon/service
14711 #
14712 do_stop()
14713 {
14714         # Return
14715         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
14716         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
14717         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
14718         #   other if a failure occurred
14719         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
14720         RETVAL="$?"
14721         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
14722         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
14723         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
14724         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
14725         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
14726         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
14727         # sleep for some time.
14728         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
14729         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
14730         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
14731         rm -f $PIDFILE
14732         return "$RETVAL"
14733 }
14734
14735 #
14736 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
14737 #
14738 do_reload() {
14739         #
14740         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
14741         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
14742         # then implement that here.
14743         #
14744         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
14745         return 0
14746 }
14747
14748 SCRIPTNAME=$1
14749 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
14750 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
14751 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
14752     script="$1"
14753     shift
14754     . $script
14755 else
14756     exit 0
14757 fi
14758
14759 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
14760 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
14761
14762 # Exit if the package is not installed
14763 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
14764
14765 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
14766 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
14767
14768 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
14769 . /lib/init/vars.sh
14770
14771 case "$1" in
14772   start)
14773         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
14774         do_start
14775         case "$?" in
14776                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
14777                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
14778         esac
14779         ;;
14780   stop)
14781         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
14782         do_stop
14783         case "$?" in
14784                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
14785                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
14786         esac
14787         ;;
14788   status)
14789         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
14790         ;;
14791   #reload|force-reload)
14792         #
14793         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
14794         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
14795         #
14796         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
14797         #do_reload
14798         #log_end_msg $?
14799         #;;
14800   restart|force-reload)
14801         #
14802         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
14803         # 'force-reload' alias
14804         #
14805         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
14806         do_stop
14807         case "$?" in
14808           0|1)
14809                 do_start
14810                 case "$?" in
14811                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
14812                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
14813                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
14814                 esac
14815                 ;;
14816           *)
14817                 # Failed to stop
14818                 log_end_msg 1
14819                 ;;
14820         esac
14821         ;;
14822   *)
14823         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
14824         exit 3
14825         ;;
14826 esac
14827
14828 :
14829 </pre></p>
14830
14831 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
14832 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
14833 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
14834 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
14835
14836 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
14837 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
14838 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
14839 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
14840 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
14841
14842       </div>
14843       <div class="tags">
14844
14845
14846         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>.
14847
14848
14849       </div>
14850     </div>
14851     <div class="padding"></div>
14852
14853     <div class="entry">
14854       <div class="title">
14855         <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>
14856       </div>
14857       <div class="date">
14858          1st November 2013
14859       </div>
14860       <div class="body">
14861         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
14862 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
14863 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
14864 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
14865 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
14866 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
14867 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
14868 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
14869 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
14870 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
14871 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
14872 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
14873
14874 <p>The source is now available from
14875 <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>
14876
14877       </div>
14878       <div class="tags">
14879
14880
14881         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>.
14882
14883
14884       </div>
14885     </div>
14886     <div class="padding"></div>
14887
14888     <div class="entry">
14889       <div class="title">
14890         <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>
14891       </div>
14892       <div class="date">
14893         27th October 2013
14894       </div>
14895       <div class="body">
14896         <p>The
14897 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
14898 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
14899 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
14900 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
14901 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
14902 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
14903 of a plan to simplify the build system for
14904 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
14905 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
14906 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
14907 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
14908 Raspberry Pi.</p>
14909
14910 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
14911 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
14912 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
14913 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
14914 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
14915 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
14916 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
14917 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
14918 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
14919 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
14920 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
14921 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
14922 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
14923 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
14924 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
14925 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
14926 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
14927 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
14928 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
14929 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
14930 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
14931 available from
14932 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
14933 upstream project page</a>.</p>
14934
14935 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
14936 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
14937 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
14938 list:</p>
14939
14940 <p><pre>
14941 #!/bin/sh
14942 set -e # Exit on first error
14943 rootdir="$1"
14944 cd "$rootdir"
14945 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
14946 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
14947 EOF
14948 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
14949 # install a kernel somewhere too.
14950 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
14951     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
14952 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
14953 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
14954 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
14955 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
14956 </pre></p>
14957
14958 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
14959 to build the image:</p>
14960
14961 <pre>
14962 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
14963     --variant minbase \
14964     --arch armel \
14965     --distribution jessie \
14966     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
14967     --image test.img \
14968     --size 600M \
14969     --bootsize 64M \
14970     --boottype vfat \
14971     --log-level debug \
14972     --verbose \
14973     --no-kernel \
14974     --no-extlinux \
14975     --root-password raspberry \
14976     --hostname raspberrypi \
14977     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
14978     --customize `pwd`/customize \
14979     --package netbase \
14980     --package git-core \
14981     --package binutils \
14982     --package ca-certificates \
14983     --package wget \
14984     --package kmod
14985 </pre></p>
14986
14987 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
14988 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
14989 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
14990 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
14991 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
14992 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
14993 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
14994
14995 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
14996 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
14997 build dependency list.</p>
14998
14999 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
15000 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
15001 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
15002 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
15003
15004       </div>
15005       <div class="tags">
15006
15007
15008         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>.
15009
15010
15011       </div>
15012     </div>
15013     <div class="padding"></div>
15014
15015     <div class="entry">
15016       <div class="title">
15017         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">A Raspberry Pi based batman-adv Mesh network node</a>
15018       </div>
15019       <div class="date">
15020         21st October 2013
15021       </div>
15022       <div class="body">
15023         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
15024 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
15025 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
15026 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
15027 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
15028 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
15029 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
15030 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
15031
15032 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
15033 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
15034 instead, I started playing with a
15035 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
15036 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
15037 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
15038 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
15039 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
15040 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
15041 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
15042 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
15043 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
15044 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
15045 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
15046 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
15047 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
15048 every client on the local network.</p>
15049
15050 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
15051 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
15052 and a script
15053 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
15054 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
15055 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
15056 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
15057 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
15058 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
15059 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
15060 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
15061 support.</p>
15062
15063 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
15064 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
15065
15066 <p><pre>
15067 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
15068     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
15069 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
15070 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
15071 %
15072 </pre></p>
15073
15074 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
15075 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
15076 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
15077 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
15078 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
15079 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
15080
15081 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
15082 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
15083 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
15084
15085 <p><table>
15086
15087 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
15088 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
15089 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
15090 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
15091 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
15092 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
15093
15094 </table></p>
15095
15096 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
15097 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
15098 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
15099 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
15100 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
15101 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
15102 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
15103
15104       </div>
15105       <div class="tags">
15106
15107
15108         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15109
15110
15111       </div>
15112     </div>
15113     <div class="padding"></div>
15114
15115     <div class="entry">
15116       <div class="title">
15117         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot_moved_to_github.html">Perl library to control the Spykee robot moved to github</a>
15118       </div>
15119       <div class="date">
15120         19th October 2013
15121       </div>
15122       <div class="body">
15123         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
15124 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
15125 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
15126 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
15127 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
15128 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
15129 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
15130 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
15131
15132       </div>
15133       <div class="tags">
15134
15135
15136         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
15137
15138
15139       </div>
15140     </div>
15141     <div class="padding"></div>
15142
15143     <div class="entry">
15144       <div class="title">
15145         <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>
15146       </div>
15147       <div class="date">
15148         15th October 2013
15149       </div>
15150       <div class="body">
15151         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
15152 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
15153 these. :)</p>
15154
15155 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
15156 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
15157 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
15158 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
15159 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
15160 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
15161 hope you will to. :)</p>
15162
15163 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
15164 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
15165 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
15166 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
15167 donated.  Are you next?</p>
15168
15169 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
15170 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
15171 statement under the heading
15172 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
15173 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
15174 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
15175 too.</p>
15176
15177       </div>
15178       <div class="tags">
15179
15180
15181         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>.
15182
15183
15184       </div>
15185     </div>
15186     <div class="padding"></div>
15187
15188     <div class="entry">
15189       <div class="title">
15190         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania</a>
15191       </div>
15192       <div class="date">
15193         11th October 2013
15194       </div>
15195       <div class="body">
15196         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
15197 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
15198 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
15199 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
15200 successful examples like
15201 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
15202 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
15203 (see
15204 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
15205 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
15206 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
15207 can be seen from their
15208 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
15209 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
15210 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
15211 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
15212 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
15213
15214 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
15215 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
15216 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
15217 my recent involvement in
15218 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
15219 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
15220 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
15221 when possible, given that most communication between people are
15222 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
15223 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
15224 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
15225 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
15226 important over the years.</p>
15227
15228 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
15229 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
15230 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
15231 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
15232 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
15233 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
15234 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
15235 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
15236 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
15237 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
15238 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
15239 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
15240 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
15241 speakers about this talk (from
15242 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
15243
15244 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
15245
15246 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
15247 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
15248 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
15249 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
15250 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
15251 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
15252 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
15253 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
15254 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
15255 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
15256 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
15257 that project (from
15258 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
15259
15260 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
15261
15262 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
15263 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
15264 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
15265 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
15266 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
15267 based community mesh networks.</p>
15268
15269 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
15270 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
15271 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
15272 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
15273 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
15274 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
15275 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
15276 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
15277 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
15278
15279 <p><table>
15280 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
15281 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
15282 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
15283 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
15284 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
15285 </table></p>
15286
15287 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
15288 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
15289 VillageTelco about
15290 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
15291 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
15292 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
15293 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
15294 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
15295 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
15296
15297 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
15298 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
15299 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
15300 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
15301
15302 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
15303 us on IRC, either channel
15304 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
15305 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
15306 irc.freenode.net.</p>
15307
15308 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
15309 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
15310 and Innovation called
15311 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
15312 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
15313 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
15314 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
15315 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
15316 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
15317 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
15318 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
15319
15320 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
15321 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
15322 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
15323 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
15324 mesh system.</p>
15325
15326       </div>
15327       <div class="tags">
15328
15329
15330         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15331
15332
15333       </div>
15334     </div>
15335     <div class="padding"></div>
15336
15337     <div class="entry">
15338       <div class="title">
15339         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_7_1_install_and_overview_video_from_Marcelo_Salvador.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu 7.1 install and overview video from Marcelo Salvador</a>
15340       </div>
15341       <div class="date">
15342          8th October 2013
15343       </div>
15344       <div class="body">
15345         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
15346 Salvador had published a
15347 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
15348 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
15349 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
15350 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
15351 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
15352 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
15353 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
15354 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
15355 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
15356 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
15357 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
15358 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
15359 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
15360 computers without hard drives by installing one central
15361 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
15362
15363 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
15364
15365 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
15366
15367 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
15368 me know. :)</p>
15369
15370       </div>
15371       <div class="tags">
15372
15373
15374         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
15375
15376
15377       </div>
15378     </div>
15379     <div class="padding"></div>
15380
15381     <div class="entry">
15382       <div class="title">
15383         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
15384       </div>
15385       <div class="date">
15386         29th September 2013
15387       </div>
15388       <div class="body">
15389         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
15390 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
15391 complete announcement text can be found at
15392 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
15393 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
15394
15395 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
15396 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
15397 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
15398 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
15399
15400       </div>
15401       <div class="tags">
15402
15403
15404         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15405
15406
15407       </div>
15408     </div>
15409     <div class="padding"></div>
15410
15411     <div class="entry">
15412       <div class="title">
15413         <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>
15414       </div>
15415       <div class="date">
15416         27th September 2013
15417       </div>
15418       <div class="body">
15419         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
15420 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
15421 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
15422 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
15423
15424 <ul>
15425
15426 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
15427 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
15428
15429 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
15430 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
15431
15432 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
15433 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
15434 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
15435 (Youtube)</li>
15436
15437 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
15438 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
15439
15440 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
15441 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
15442
15443 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
15444 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
15445 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
15446
15447 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
15448 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
15449 (Youtube)</li>
15450
15451 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
15452 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
15453
15454 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
15455 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
15456
15457 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
15458 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
15459 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
15460
15461 </ul>
15462
15463 <p>A larger list is available from
15464 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
15465 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
15466
15467 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
15468 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
15469 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
15470 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
15471 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
15472 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
15473 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
15474 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
15475 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
15476 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
15477 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
15478
15479       </div>
15480       <div class="tags">
15481
15482
15483         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>.
15484
15485
15486       </div>
15487     </div>
15488     <div class="padding"></div>
15489
15490     <div class="entry">
15491       <div class="title">
15492         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_and_probably_last_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Wheezy.html">Third and probably last beta release of Debian Edu Wheezy</a>
15493       </div>
15494       <div class="date">
15495         16th September 2013
15496       </div>
15497       <div class="body">
15498         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
15499 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
15500
15501 <blockquote>
15502 <p>Hi,</p>
15503
15504 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
15505 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
15506 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
15507
15508 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
15509 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
15510 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
15511 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
15512
15513 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
15514 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
15515
15516 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
15517 compared to beta1:</p>
15518
15519 <ul>
15520
15521 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
15522 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
15523 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
15524 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
15525 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
15526 main server.</li>
15527 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
15528 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
15529 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
15530 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
15531 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
15532
15533 </ul>
15534
15535 <p>Where to get it:</p>
15536
15537 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
15538
15539 <ul>
15540 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso</a></li>
15541 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso</a></li>
15542 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
15543 </ul>
15544
15545 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
15546
15547 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
15548 <ul>
15549 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso</a></li>
15550 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso</a></li>
15551 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
15552 </ul>
15553
15554 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
15555
15556 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
15557 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
15558 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
15559 as the other isos.</p>
15560
15561 <p>How to report bugs</p>
15562
15563 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
15564 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
15565
15566
15567 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
15568
15569 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
15570 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
15571 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
15572 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
15573 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
15574 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
15575 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
15576 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
15577 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
15578 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
15579 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
15580 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
15581 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
15582
15583 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
15584 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
15585 Squeeze release.</p>
15586
15587 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
15588
15589 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
15590 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
15591 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
15592 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
15593 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
15594 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
15595 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
15596 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
15597 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
15598 directory.</p>
15599
15600
15601 <p>cheers,
15602 <br>        Holger</p>
15603 </blockquote>
15604
15605       </div>
15606       <div class="tags">
15607
15608
15609         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15610
15611
15612       </div>
15613     </div>
15614     <div class="padding"></div>
15615
15616     <div class="entry">
15617       <div class="title">
15618         <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>
15619       </div>
15620       <div class="date">
15621         10th September 2013
15622       </div>
15623       <div class="body">
15624         <p>I was introduced to the
15625 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
15626 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
15627 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
15628 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
15629 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
15630 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
15631 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
15632 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
15633
15634 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
15635 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
15636 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
15637 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
15638 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
15639
15640 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
15641 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
15642 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
15643 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
15644 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
15645 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
15646 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
15647 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
15648 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
15649 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
15650 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
15651 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
15652 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
15653 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
15654 missing in Debian).</p>
15655
15656 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
15657 scripts
15658 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
15659 and a administrative web interface
15660 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
15661 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
15662 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
15663 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
15664 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
15665 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
15666 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
15667 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
15668 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
15669 this is really working yet, see
15670 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
15671 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
15672 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
15673 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
15674 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
15675 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
15676 with lots of half baked features.</p>
15677
15678 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
15679 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
15680 at.</p>
15681
15682 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
15683
15684 <ol>
15685
15686 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
15687 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
15688 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
15689 to the Debian installer:<p>
15690 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
15691
15692 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
15693 install on.</li>
15694
15695 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
15696 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
15697
15698 </ol>
15699
15700 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
15701
15702 <ol>
15703
15704 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
15705 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
15706 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
15707 <pre>
15708 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
15709 </pre></li>
15710 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
15711 <pre>
15712 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
15713    apt-key add -
15714 apt-get update
15715 apt-get install freedombox-setup
15716 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
15717 </pre></li>
15718 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
15719
15720 </ol>
15721
15722 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
15723 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
15724 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
15725 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
15726 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
15727
15728 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
15729 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
15730 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
15731 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
15732
15733 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
15734 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
15735 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
15736 irc.debian.org and the
15737 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
15738 mailing list</a>.</p>
15739
15740 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
15741 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
15742 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
15743 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
15744 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
15745 default password is 'secret'.</p>
15746
15747       </div>
15748       <div class="tags">
15749
15750
15751         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>.
15752
15753
15754       </div>
15755     </div>
15756     <div class="padding"></div>
15757
15758     <div class="entry">
15759       <div class="title">
15760         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_release__beta_1__of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Second beta release (beta 1) of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
15761       </div>
15762       <div class="date">
15763         22nd August 2013
15764       </div>
15765       <div class="body">
15766         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
15767 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
15768 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
15769
15770 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
15771
15772 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
15773 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
15774
15775 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
15776
15777 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
15778 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
15779 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
15780 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
15781 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
15782 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
15783 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
15784 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
15785 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
15786 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
15787 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
15788 desktop contains
15789 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
15790 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
15791 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
15792 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
15793
15794 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
15795 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
15796 release.</p>
15797
15798 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
15799 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
15800 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
15801 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
15802 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
15803 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
15804 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
15805 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
15806 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
15807 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
15808 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
15809
15810 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
15811
15812 <ul>
15813
15814 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
15815     work also without a attached tty.</li>
15816 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
15817     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
15818     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
15819     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
15820     required).</li>
15821
15822 </ul>
15823
15824 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
15825
15826 <ul>
15827
15828 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
15829 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
15830 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
15831 stick ISO image.</li>
15832 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
15833 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
15834 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
15835     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
15836     cope with this.</li>
15837 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
15838 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
15839     empty password hashes.</li>
15840 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
15841     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
15842     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
15843
15844 </ul>
15845
15846 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
15847
15848 <ul>
15849
15850 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
15851     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
15852 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
15853     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
15854
15855 </ul>
15856
15857 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
15858
15859 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
15860
15861 <ul>
15862
15863 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso</a></li>
15864
15865 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso</a></li>
15866
15867 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
15868
15869 </ul>
15870
15871 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
15872 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
15873
15874 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
15875
15876 <ul>
15877
15878 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso</a></li>
15879 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso</a></li>
15880 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
15881
15882 </ul>
15883
15884 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
15885 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
15886
15887
15888 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
15889
15890 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
15891
15892       </div>
15893       <div class="tags">
15894
15895
15896         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15897
15898
15899       </div>
15900     </div>
15901     <div class="padding"></div>
15902
15903     <div class="entry">
15904       <div class="title">
15905         <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>
15906       </div>
15907       <div class="date">
15908         18th August 2013
15909       </div>
15910       <div class="body">
15911         <p>Earlier, I reported about
15912 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
15913 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
15914 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
15915 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
15916 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
15917 currently on the disk.</p>
15918
15919 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
15920 <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>
15921 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
15922 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
15923 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
15924 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
15925 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
15926 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
15927 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
15928 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
15929 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
15930 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
15931 the broken disks.</p>
15932
15933       </div>
15934       <div class="tags">
15935
15936
15937         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>.
15938
15939
15940       </div>
15941     </div>
15942     <div class="padding"></div>
15943
15944     <div class="entry">
15945       <div class="title">
15946         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/90_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html">90 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</a>
15947       </div>
15948       <div class="date">
15949          2nd August 2013
15950       </div>
15951       <div class="body">
15952         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
15953 have worked on a Norwegian
15954 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
15955 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
15956 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
15957 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
15958 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
15959 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
15960 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
15961 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
15962 progress of the translation:</p>
15963
15964 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
15965
15966 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
15967 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
15968 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
15969 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
15970 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
15971 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
15972 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
15973 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
15974 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
15975 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
15976 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
15977
15978 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
15979 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
15980 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
15981 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
15982 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
15983 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
15984 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
15985 project files currently available from
15986 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
15987
15988 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
15989 the updated
15990 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
15991 and
15992 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
15993 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
15994 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
15995 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
15996
15997       </div>
15998       <div class="tags">
15999
16000
16001         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
16002
16003
16004       </div>
16005     </div>
16006     <div class="padding"></div>
16007
16008     <div class="entry">
16009       <div class="title">
16010         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">First beta release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
16011       </div>
16012       <div class="date">
16013         27th July 2013
16014       </div>
16015       <div class="body">
16016         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
16017 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
16018
16019 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
16020 2013-07-27</strong></p>
16021
16022 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16023 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
16024
16025 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
16026
16027 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
16028 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
16029 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
16030 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
16031 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
16032 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
16033 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
16034 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
16035 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
16036 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
16037 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
16038 desktop contains
16039 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
16040 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
16041 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
16042 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
16043
16044 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
16045 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
16046 Squeeze release.</p>
16047
16048 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
16049 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
16050 release.</p>
16051
16052 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
16053
16054 <ul>
16055
16056 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
16057    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
16058 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
16059    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
16060    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
16061    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
16062    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
16063 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
16064 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
16065 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
16066    crash bugs.</li>
16067
16068 </ul>
16069
16070 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
16071
16072 <ul>
16073
16074 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
16075    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
16076 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
16077    netinst CD.</li>
16078 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
16079    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
16080 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
16081    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
16082    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
16083 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
16084    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
16085    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
16086 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
16087    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
16088    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
16089 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
16090    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
16091 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
16092
16093 </ul>
16094
16095 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
16096
16097 <ul>
16098
16099 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
16100 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
16101     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
16102 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
16103
16104 </ul>
16105
16106 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
16107
16108 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
16109
16110 <ul>
16111
16112 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso</a></li>
16113
16114 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso</a></li>
16115
16116 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
16117
16118 </ul>
16119
16120 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
16121 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
16122
16123 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
16124
16125 <ul>
16126
16127 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso</a></li>
16128 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso</a></li>
16129 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
16130
16131 </ul>
16132
16133 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
16134 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
16135
16136
16137 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
16138
16139 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
16140
16141       </div>
16142       <div class="tags">
16143
16144
16145         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16146
16147
16148       </div>
16149     </div>
16150     <div class="padding"></div>
16151
16152     <div class="entry">
16153       <div class="title">
16154         <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>
16155       </div>
16156       <div class="date">
16157         17th July 2013
16158       </div>
16159       <div class="body">
16160         <p>Today I switched to
16161 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
16162 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
16163 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
16164 <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
16165 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
16166 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
16167 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
16168 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
16169 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
16170 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
16171 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
16172 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
16173 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
16174 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
16175 station from now on.</p>
16176
16177 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
16178 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
16179 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
16180 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
16181 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
16182 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
16183 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
16184 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
16185 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
16186 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
16187 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
16188 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
16189
16190 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
16191 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
16192 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
16193 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
16194 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
16195 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
16196 parameters are tuned:</p>
16197
16198 <ul>
16199
16200 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
16201     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
16202
16203 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
16204     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
16205     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
16206
16207 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
16208     systems.</li>
16209
16210 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
16211     /etc/fstab.</li>
16212
16213 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
16214
16215 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
16216     cron.daily).</li>
16217
16218 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
16219     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
16220
16221 </ul>
16222
16223 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
16224 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
16225 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
16226 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
16227 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
16228 from getting the data on the disk (see
16229 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
16230 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
16231 right thing to do.</p>
16232
16233 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
16234 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
16235 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
16236
16237 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
16238 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
16239 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
16240 instead of during my work.</p>
16241
16242 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
16243 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
16244
16245 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
16246 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
16247 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
16248
16249 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
16250 there.</p>
16251
16252 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
16253 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
16254 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
16255 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
16256 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
16257 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
16258 back.</p>
16259
16260       </div>
16261       <div class="tags">
16262
16263
16264         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>.
16265
16266
16267       </div>
16268     </div>
16269     <div class="padding"></div>
16270
16271     <div class="entry">
16272       <div class="title">
16273         <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>
16274       </div>
16275       <div class="date">
16276         10th July 2013
16277       </div>
16278       <div class="body">
16279         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
16280 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
16281 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
16282 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
16283 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
16284 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
16285 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
16286 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
16287
16288 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
16289 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
16290 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
16291 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
16292 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
16293 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
16294 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
16295 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
16296 lock up when I download a new
16297 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
16298 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
16299 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
16300
16301 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
16302 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
16303 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
16304 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
16305 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
16306 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
16307
16308 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
16309 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
16310 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
16311 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
16312 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
16313 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
16314
16315 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
16316 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
16317 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
16318 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
16319 exist).</p>
16320
16321       </div>
16322       <div class="tags">
16323
16324
16325         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>.
16326
16327
16328       </div>
16329     </div>
16330     <div class="padding"></div>
16331
16332     <div class="entry">
16333       <div class="title">
16334         <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>
16335       </div>
16336       <div class="date">
16337          9th July 2013
16338       </div>
16339       <div class="body">
16340         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
16341 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
16342 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
16343 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
16344 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16345 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
16346 Bitraf</a>.</p>
16347
16348 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
16349 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
16350 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
16351 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
16352 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
16353
16354       </div>
16355       <div class="tags">
16356
16357
16358         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>.
16359
16360
16361       </div>
16362     </div>
16363     <div class="padding"></div>
16364
16365     <div class="entry">
16366       <div class="title">
16367         <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>
16368       </div>
16369       <div class="date">
16370          5th July 2013
16371       </div>
16372       <div class="body">
16373         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
16374 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
16375 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
16376 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
16377 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
16378 ended up picking a
16379 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
16380 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
16381 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
16382 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
16383 on that below.</p>
16384
16385 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
16386 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
16387 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
16388 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
16389 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
16390 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
16391 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
16392 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
16393 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
16394
16395 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
16396 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
16397 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
16398 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
16399 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
16400 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
16401 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
16402
16403 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
16404 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
16405
16406 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
16407 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
16408 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
16409 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
16410 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
16411 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
16412 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
16413 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
16414 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
16415 kernel developers as
16416 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
16417 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
16418 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
16419 Lenovo forums, both for
16420 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
16421 2012-11-10</a> and for
16422 <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
16423 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
16424 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
16425 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
16426 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
16427 There is even a
16428 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
16429 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
16430 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
16431
16432 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
16433 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
16434 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
16435 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
16436 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
16437 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
16438 fixed. :)</p>
16439
16440       </div>
16441       <div class="tags">
16442
16443
16444         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>.
16445
16446
16447       </div>
16448     </div>
16449     <div class="padding"></div>
16450
16451     <div class="entry">
16452       <div class="title">
16453         <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>
16454       </div>
16455       <div class="date">
16456          4th July 2013
16457       </div>
16458       <div class="body">
16459         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
16460 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
16461 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
16462 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
16463 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
16464 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
16465 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
16466 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
16467 with an expencive door stop.</p>
16468
16469 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
16470 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
16471 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
16472 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
16473 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
16474 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
16475 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
16476
16477 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
16478 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
16479 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
16480 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
16481 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
16482 new laptop now. :)</p>
16483
16484 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
16485
16486       </div>
16487       <div class="tags">
16488
16489
16490         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>.
16491
16492
16493       </div>
16494     </div>
16495     <div class="padding"></div>
16496
16497     <div class="entry">
16498       <div class="title">
16499         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fourth_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Fourth alpha release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
16500       </div>
16501       <div class="date">
16502          3rd July 2013
16503       </div>
16504       <div class="body">
16505         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
16506 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
16507
16508 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
16509 2013-07-03</strong></p>
16510
16511 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16512 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
16513
16514 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
16515
16516 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
16517 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
16518 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
16519 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
16520 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
16521 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
16522 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
16523 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
16524 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
16525 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
16526 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
16527 desktop contains
16528 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
16529 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
16530 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
16531 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
16532
16533 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
16534 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
16535 Squeeze release.</p>
16536
16537 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
16538 <ul>
16539   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
16540   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
16541     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
16542     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
16543   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
16544     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
16545     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
16546   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
16547     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
16548     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
16549     too.</li>
16550   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
16551     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
16552 </ul>
16553 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
16554 <ul>
16555   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
16556   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
16557   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
16558     up for some language options.</li>
16559   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
16560   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
16561   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
16562     d-i is doing it.</li>
16563   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
16564     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
16565   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
16566     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
16567     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
16568   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
16569     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
16570   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
16571   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
16572     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
16573   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
16574     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
16575 </ul>
16576 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
16577 <ul>
16578   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
16579     available yet (698840).</li>
16580   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
16581 </ul>
16582 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
16583
16584 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
16585 <ul>
16586   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso</a></li>
16587   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso</a></li>
16588   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
16589 </ul>
16590
16591 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
16592 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
16593
16594 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
16595 <ul>
16596   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso</a></li>
16597   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso</a></li>
16598   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
16599 </ul>
16600
16601 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
16602 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
16603
16604 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
16605
16606 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
16607
16608       </div>
16609       <div class="tags">
16610
16611
16612         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16613
16614
16615       </div>
16616     </div>
16617     <div class="padding"></div>
16618
16619     <div class="entry">
16620       <div class="title">
16621         <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>
16622       </div>
16623       <div class="date">
16624         25th June 2013
16625       </div>
16626       <div class="body">
16627         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
16628 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
16629 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
16630 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
16631 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
16632 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
16633 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
16634 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
16635 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
16636 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
16637 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
16638
16639 <p><pre>
16640 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
16641 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
16642 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
16643 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
16644 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
16645 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
16646 firmware-ipw2x00
16647 firmware-ipw2x00
16648 Preconfiguring packages ...
16649 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
16650 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
16651 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
16652 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
16653 #
16654 </pre></p>
16655
16656 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
16657 printed instead:</p>
16658
16659 <p><pre>
16660 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
16661 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
16662 #
16663 </pre></p>
16664
16665 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
16666 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
16667
16668 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
16669 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
16670 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
16671 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
16672 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
16673 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
16674 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
16675 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
16676 machine.</p>
16677
16678 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
16679 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
16680 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
16681 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
16682 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
16683 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
16684
16685       </div>
16686       <div class="tags">
16687
16688
16689         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>.
16690
16691
16692       </div>
16693     </div>
16694     <div class="padding"></div>
16695
16696     <div class="entry">
16697       <div class="title">
16698         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html">The value of a good distro wide test suite...</a>
16699       </div>
16700       <div class="date">
16701         22nd June 2013
16702       </div>
16703       <div class="body">
16704         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
16705 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
16706 which check that services are running, working, and return the
16707 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
16708 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
16709 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
16710 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
16711 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
16712 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
16713
16714 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
16715 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
16716 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
16717 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
16718 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
16719 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
16720 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
16721 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
16722 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
16723 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
16724 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
16725 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
16726 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
16727 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
16728
16729 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
16730 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
16731 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
16732 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
16733 the problem.</p>
16734
16735 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
16736 please join us on
16737 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
16738 irc.debian.org</a> and the
16739 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
16740 list.</p>
16741
16742       </div>
16743       <div class="tags">
16744
16745
16746         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16747
16748
16749       </div>
16750     </div>
16751     <div class="padding"></div>
16752
16753     <div class="entry">
16754       <div class="title">
16755         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
16756       </div>
16757       <div class="date">
16758         17th June 2013
16759       </div>
16760       <div class="body">
16761         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
16762 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
16763 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
16764 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
16765 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
16766 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
16767 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
16768 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
16769
16770 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16771
16772 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
16773 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
16774 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
16775 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
16776 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
16777 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
16778 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
16779 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
16780 field.</p>
16781
16782 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
16783 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
16784 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
16785 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
16786 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
16787 the only one we have in our country.</p>
16788
16789 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
16790 project?</strong></p>
16791
16792 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
16793 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
16794 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
16795 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
16796 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
16797 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
16798 ways to contribute.</p>
16799
16800 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
16801 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
16802 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
16803 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
16804 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
16805 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
16806 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
16807 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
16808 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
16809 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
16810
16811 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16812 Edu?</strong></p>
16813
16814 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
16815 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
16816 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
16817 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
16818 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
16819 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
16820 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
16821 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
16822
16823 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
16824 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
16825 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
16826 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
16827 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
16828 project.</p>
16829
16830 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
16831 Edu?</strong></p>
16832
16833 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
16834 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
16835 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
16836 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
16837 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
16838 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
16839 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
16840 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
16841 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
16842
16843 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
16844 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
16845 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
16846 on.</p>
16847
16848 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16849
16850 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
16851 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
16852 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
16853 Enlightenment project a lot!),
16854 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
16855 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
16856 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
16857 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
16858 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
16859
16860 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16861 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16862
16863 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
16864 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
16865 that:</p>
16866
16867 <ul>
16868
16869 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
16870
16871 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
16872     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
16873     of teenagers more?</li>
16874
16875 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
16876     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
16877     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
16878     them!)</li>
16879
16880 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
16881     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
16882     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
16883
16884 </ul>
16885
16886 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
16887 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
16888 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
16889 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
16890 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
16891
16892       </div>
16893       <div class="tags">
16894
16895
16896         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
16897
16898
16899       </div>
16900     </div>
16901     <div class="padding"></div>
16902
16903     <div class="entry">
16904       <div class="title">
16905         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
16906       </div>
16907       <div class="date">
16908         12th June 2013
16909       </div>
16910       <div class="body">
16911         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
16912 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16913 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
16914 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
16915 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
16916 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
16917
16918 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16919
16920 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
16921 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
16922 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
16923
16924 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
16925 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
16926 each other.</p>
16927
16928 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
16929 project?</strong></p>
16930
16931 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
16932 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
16933 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
16934 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
16935 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
16936 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
16937 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
16938 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
16939 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
16940 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
16941 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
16942 we'll get there one day.</p>
16943
16944 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
16945 Edu?</strong></p>
16946
16947 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
16948 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
16949 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
16950 very high quality work.</p>
16951
16952 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
16953 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
16954 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
16955 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
16956 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
16957
16958 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
16959 Edu?</strong></p>
16960
16961 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
16962 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
16963 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
16964
16965 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
16966 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
16967 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
16968 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
16969 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
16970 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
16971 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
16972 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
16973 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
16974 currently.</p>
16975
16976 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
16977 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
16978 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
16979 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
16980 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
16981 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
16982 autonomous.</p>
16983
16984 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16985
16986 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
16987 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
16988 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
16989 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
16990 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
16991
16992 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
16993 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
16994 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
16995 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
16996 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
16997 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
16998 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
16999 X.</p>
17000
17001 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
17002 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
17003 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
17004 it :p)
17005
17006 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17007 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17008
17009 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
17010 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
17011 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
17012 that.</p>
17013
17014 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
17015 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
17016 advantage of that.</p>
17017
17018 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
17019 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
17020 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
17021 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
17022 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
17023 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
17024 best solution for them.</p>
17025
17026 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
17027 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
17028 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
17029
17030       </div>
17031       <div class="tags">
17032
17033
17034         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
17035
17036
17037       </div>
17038     </div>
17039     <div class="padding"></div>
17040
17041     <div class="entry">
17042       <div class="title">
17043         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
17044       </div>
17045       <div class="date">
17046         11th June 2013
17047       </div>
17048       <div class="body">
17049         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
17050 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
17051 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
17052 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
17053 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
17054 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
17055 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
17056 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
17057 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
17058 i915 driver used by the
17059 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
17060 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
17061
17062 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
17063 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
17064 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
17065 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
17066 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
17067
17068 <pre>
17069 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
17070 update-initramfs -u -k all
17071 </pre>
17072
17073 <p>Since March 2012 there is
17074 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
17075 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
17076 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
17077 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
17078 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
17079 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
17080 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
17081 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
17082 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
17083 number.</p>
17084
17085 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
17086 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
17087
17088 <p><pre>
17089 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
17090     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
17091     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
17092  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
17093  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
17094     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
17095  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
17096     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
17097  Latency: 0
17098  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
17099  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
17100  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
17101  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
17102  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
17103  Capabilities: <access denied>
17104  Kernel driver in use: i915
17105 </pre></p>
17106
17107 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
17108
17109 <p><pre>
17110 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
17111        ...
17112         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
17113         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
17114        ...
17115 }
17116 </pre></p>
17117
17118 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
17119 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
17120 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
17121 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
17122 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
17123 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
17124 yet shown up in
17125 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
17126 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
17127 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
17128 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
17129 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
17130 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
17131
17132 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
17133 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
17134 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
17135 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
17136 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
17137 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
17138 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
17139 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
17140 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
17141 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
17142 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
17143 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
17144
17145 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
17146 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
17147 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
17148 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
17149 backlight.</p>
17150
17151       </div>
17152       <div class="tags">
17153
17154
17155         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>.
17156
17157
17158       </div>
17159     </div>
17160     <div class="padding"></div>
17161
17162     <div class="entry">
17163       <div class="title">
17164         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Third alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
17165       </div>
17166       <div class="date">
17167         10th June 2013
17168       </div>
17169       <div class="body">
17170         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
17171 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
17172
17173 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
17174 2013-06-10</strong></p>
17175
17176 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
17177 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
17178
17179 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
17180
17181 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
17182 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
17183 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
17184 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
17185 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
17186 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
17187 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
17188 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
17189 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
17190 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
17191 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
17192 desktop contains
17193 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
17194 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
17195 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
17196 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
17197
17198 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
17199 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
17200 Squeeze release.</p>
17201
17202 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
17203
17204 <ul>
17205
17206 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
17207 <li>Updated libxv (DSA-2674), libxvmc (DSA-2675), libxfixes (DSA-2676), libxrender (DSA-2677), mesa (DSA-2678), xserver-xorg-video-openchrome (DSA-2679), libxt (DSA-2680), libxcursor (DSA-2681), libxext (DSA-2682), libxi (DSA-2683), libxrandr (DSA-2684), libxp (DSA-2685), libxcb (DSA-2686), libfs (DSA-2687), libxres (DSA-2688), libxtst (DSA-2689), libxxf86dga (DSA-2690), libxinerama (DSA-2691), libxxf86vm (DSA-2692), libx11 (DSA-2693), chromium-browser (DSA-2695), gnutls26 (DSA-2697), wireshark (DSA-2700), krb5 (DSA-2701), telepathy-gabble (DSA-2702) and subversion (DSA-2703).
17208 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
17209 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
17210 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
17211
17212 </ul>
17213
17214 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
17215
17216 <ul>
17217
17218 <li>The subnet-change script is now able to change all files needing a change on the main-server when changing the IP network used.
17219 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
17220 <li>New Romanian translation.
17221 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
17222 <li>Fix roaming workstation setup (Closed in libpam-mklocaluser/0.8, libpam-mklocaluser/0.8~deb7u1: #706753: libpam-mklocaluser: Fail to create local user during first login).
17223 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
17224 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
17225 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
17226 <li>More testsuite tests.
17227 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
17228 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
17229
17230 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
17231 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
17232
17233 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
17234 them up with GOsa².</li>
17235
17236 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
17237
17238 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
17239 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
17240 entered password). </li>
17241
17242 </ul>
17243
17244 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
17245
17246 <ul>
17247
17248 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
17249
17250 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
17251 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
17252 missing import feature).</li>
17253
17254 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
17255
17256 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
17257 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
17258 unfixed.</li>
17259
17260 </ul>
17261
17262 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
17263
17264 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
17265
17266 <ul>
17267
17268 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso</a></li>
17269
17270 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso</a></li>
17271
17272 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
17273
17274 </ul>
17275
17276 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
17277 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
17278
17279 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
17280
17281 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
17282
17283       </div>
17284       <div class="tags">
17285
17286
17287         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17288
17289
17290       </div>
17291     </div>
17292     <div class="padding"></div>
17293
17294     <div class="entry">
17295       <div class="title">
17296         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_there_a_PHP_expert_in_the_building___Debian_Edu_need_help_.html">Is there a PHP expert in the building?  Debian Edu need help!</a>
17297       </div>
17298       <div class="date">
17299          5th June 2013
17300       </div>
17301       <div class="body">
17302         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
17303 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
17304 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
17305 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
17306 the project:
17307
17308 <ol>
17309
17310 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
17311   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
17312   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
17313   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
17314   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
17315
17316 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
17317   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
17318   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
17319   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
17320   #698840</a>.</li>
17321
17322 </ol>
17323
17324 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
17325 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
17326 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
17327
17328       </div>
17329       <div class="tags">
17330
17331
17332         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17333
17334
17335       </div>
17336     </div>
17337     <div class="padding"></div>
17338
17339     <div class="entry">
17340       <div class="title">
17341         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
17342       </div>
17343       <div class="date">
17344          4th June 2013
17345       </div>
17346       <div class="body">
17347         <p>It has been a while since my last English
17348 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
17349 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
17350 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
17351 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
17352 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
17353
17354 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17355
17356 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
17357 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
17358 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
17359 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
17360
17361 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
17362 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
17363 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
17364
17365 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
17366 project?</strong></p>
17367
17368 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
17369 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
17370 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
17371 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
17372 manual.
17373
17374 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
17375 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
17376 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
17377 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
17378
17379 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
17380 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
17381 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
17382 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
17383 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
17384 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
17385 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
17386 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
17387 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
17388 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
17389
17390 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
17391 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
17392 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
17393 beautiful project.</p>
17394
17395 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
17396 Edu?</strong></p>
17397
17398 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
17399 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
17400 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
17401
17402 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
17403 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
17404 of educational free software.</p>
17405
17406 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
17407 Edu?</strong></p>
17408
17409 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
17410 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
17411 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
17412 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
17413 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
17414
17415 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
17416 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
17417 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
17418 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
17419 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
17420 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
17421 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
17422 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
17423
17424 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17425
17426 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
17427 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
17428 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
17429 also using the mathematical software
17430 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
17431 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
17432 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
17433
17434 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
17435 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
17436 statistics?</strong></p>
17437
17438 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
17439 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
17440 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
17441 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
17442
17443 <ul>
17444
17445 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
17446 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
17447 constructions in planar geometry
17448
17449 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
17450 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
17451 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
17452
17453 </ul>
17454
17455 <p>I like also
17456 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
17457 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
17458 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
17459
17460 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17461 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17462
17463 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
17464
17465 <ul>
17466
17467 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
17468
17469 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
17470     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
17471     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
17472
17473 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
17474
17475 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
17476     system.</li>
17477
17478 </ul>
17479
17480       </div>
17481       <div class="tags">
17482
17483
17484         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
17485
17486
17487       </div>
17488     </div>
17489     <div class="padding"></div>
17490
17491     <div class="entry">
17492       <div class="title">
17493         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">Educational applications included in Debian Edu / Skolelinux (the screenshot collection :-)</a>
17494       </div>
17495       <div class="date">
17496          1st June 2013
17497       </div>
17498       <div class="body">
17499         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
17500 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
17501 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
17502 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
17503 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
17504 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
17505 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
17506 program.</p>
17507
17508 <!-- for f in $(debtags tagcat|grep field::|awk '{print $2}'); do   echo; echo "<p><strong>$f</strong></p>"; echo "<p>";   (     for p in $(debtags search --names "use::learning && interface::x11 && role::program && $f"); do img="<img src='http://screenshots.debian.net/thumbnail/$p' alt='$p'>"; if dpkg -s $p > /dev/null 2>&1; then           echo "<a href='http://packages.qa.debian.org/$p'>$img</a>"; fi;     done;   ) | LANG=C sort; echo "</p>"; done -->
17509
17510 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
17511 <p>
17512 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=audacity'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/audacity.png' alt='audacity'></a>
17513 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
17514 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=denemo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/denemo.png' alt='denemo'></a>
17515 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=freebirth'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/freebirth.png' alt='freebirth'></a>
17516 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
17517 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gimp'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gimp.png' alt='gimp'></a>
17518 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=hydrogen'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/hydrogen.png' alt='hydrogen'></a>
17519 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=lilypond'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/lilypond.png' alt='lilypond'></a>
17520 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=lmms'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/lmms.png' alt='lmms'></a>
17521 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=rosegarden'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/rosegarden.png' alt='rosegarden'></a>
17522 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scribus'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scribus.png' alt='scribus'></a>
17523 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=solfege'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/solfege.png' alt='solfege'></a>
17524 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=stopmotion'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/stopmotion.png' alt='stopmotion'></a>
17525 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=tuxpaint'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/tuxpaint.png' alt='tuxpaint'></a>
17526 </p>
17527
17528 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
17529 <p>
17530 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=celestia-gnome'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/celestia-gnome.png' alt='celestia-gnome'></a>
17531 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpredict'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gpredict.png' alt='gpredict'></a>
17532 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kstars'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kstars.png' alt='kstars'></a>
17533 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=planets'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/planets.png' alt='planets'></a>
17534 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=stellarium'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/stellarium.png' alt='stellarium'></a>
17535 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xplanet'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xplanet.png' alt='xplanet'></a>
17536 </p>
17537
17538 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
17539 <p>
17540 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=pymol'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/pymol.png' alt='pymol'></a>
17541 </p>
17542
17543 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
17544 <p>
17545 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=atomix'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/atomix.png' alt='atomix'></a>
17546 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=chemtool'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/chemtool.png' alt='chemtool'></a>
17547 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=easychem'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/easychem.png' alt='easychem'></a>
17548 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gchempaint'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gchempaint.png' alt='gchempaint'></a>
17549 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gdis'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gdis.png' alt='gdis'></a>
17550 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=ghemical'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/ghemical.png' alt='ghemical'></a>
17551 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gperiodic'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gperiodic.png' alt='gperiodic'></a>
17552 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kalzium'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kalzium.png' alt='kalzium'></a>
17553 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=pymol'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/pymol.png' alt='pymol'></a>
17554 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
17555 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xdrawchem'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xdrawchem.png' alt='xdrawchem'></a>
17556 </p>
17557
17558 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
17559 <p>
17560 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
17561 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
17562 </p>
17563
17564 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
17565 <p>
17566 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kgeography'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kgeography.png' alt='kgeography'></a>
17567 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=marble'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/marble.png' alt='marble'></a>
17568 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xplanet'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xplanet.png' alt='xplanet'></a>
17569 </p>
17570
17571 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
17572 <p>
17573 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
17574 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kanagram'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kanagram.png' alt='kanagram'></a>
17575 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=khangman'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/khangman.png' alt='khangman'></a>
17576 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=klettres'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/klettres.png' alt='klettres'></a>
17577 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=parley'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/parley.png' alt='parley'></a>
17578 </p>
17579
17580 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
17581 <p>
17582 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
17583 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=drgeo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/drgeo.png' alt='drgeo'></a>
17584 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
17585 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geogebra'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/geogebra.png' alt='geogebra'></a>
17586 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
17587 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=grace'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/grace.png' alt='grace'></a>
17588 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=graphmonkey'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/graphmonkey.png' alt='graphmonkey'></a>
17589 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=graphthing'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/graphthing.png' alt='graphthing'></a>
17590 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kalgebra'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kalgebra.png' alt='kalgebra'></a>
17591 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kbruch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kbruch.png' alt='kbruch'></a>
17592 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kig'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kig.png' alt='kig'></a>
17593 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kmplot'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kmplot.png' alt='kmplot'></a>
17594 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=mathwar'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/mathwar.png' alt='mathwar'></a>
17595 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=rocs'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/rocs.png' alt='rocs'></a>
17596 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scratch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scratch.png' alt='scratch'></a>
17597 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=tuxmath'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/tuxmath.png' alt='tuxmath'></a>
17598 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xabacus'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xabacus.png' alt='xabacus'></a>
17599 </p>
17600
17601 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
17602 <p>
17603 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
17604 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=step'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/step.png' alt='step'></a>
17605 </p>
17606
17607 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
17608 <p>
17609 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=blinken'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/blinken.png' alt='blinken'></a>
17610 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=cgoban'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/cgoban.png' alt='cgoban'></a>
17611 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
17612 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
17613 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gnuchess'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gnuchess.png' alt='gnuchess'></a>
17614 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gnugo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gnugo.png' alt='gnugo'></a>
17615 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gtans'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gtans.png' alt='gtans'></a>
17616 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=ktouch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/ktouch.png' alt='ktouch'></a>
17617 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=librecad'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/librecad.png' alt='librecad'></a>
17618 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scratch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scratch.png' alt='scratch'></a>
17619 </p>
17620
17621 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
17622 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
17623 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
17624 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
17625 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
17626 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
17627 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
17628
17629       </div>
17630       <div class="tags">
17631
17632
17633         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17634
17635
17636       </div>
17637     </div>
17638     <div class="padding"></div>
17639
17640     <div class="entry">
17641       <div class="title">
17642         <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>
17643       </div>
17644       <div class="date">
17645         27th May 2013
17646       </div>
17647       <div class="body">
17648         <p>Two days ago, I asked
17649 <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
17650 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
17651 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
17652 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
17653 and Windows 8.</p>
17654
17655 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
17656 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
17657 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
17658 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
17659 enough to tell.</p>
17660
17661 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
17662 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
17663 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
17664 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
17665 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
17666 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
17667 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
17668 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
17669 to follow.</p>
17670
17671 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
17672 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
17673 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
17674 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
17675 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
17676 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
17677 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
17678 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
17679
17680 <p>I've updated the
17681 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
17682 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
17683 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
17684 machine.</p>
17685
17686 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
17687 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
17688
17689       </div>
17690       <div class="tags">
17691
17692
17693         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>.
17694
17695
17696       </div>
17697     </div>
17698     <div class="padding"></div>
17699
17700     <div class="entry">
17701       <div class="title">
17702         <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>
17703       </div>
17704       <div class="date">
17705         25th May 2013
17706       </div>
17707       <div class="body">
17708         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
17709 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
17710 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
17711 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
17712 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
17713 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
17714
17715 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
17716 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
17717 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
17718 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
17719 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
17720 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
17721 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
17722 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
17723 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
17724 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
17725
17726 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
17727 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
17728 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
17729 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
17730 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
17731 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
17732
17733 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
17734 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
17735 on new Laptops?</p>
17736
17737       </div>
17738       <div class="tags">
17739
17740
17741         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>.
17742
17743
17744       </div>
17745     </div>
17746     <div class="padding"></div>
17747
17748     <div class="entry">
17749       <div class="title">
17750         <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>
17751       </div>
17752       <div class="date">
17753         17th May 2013
17754       </div>
17755       <div class="body">
17756         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
17757 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
17758 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
17759 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
17760 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
17761 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
17762 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
17763 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
17764 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
17765 donate some money</a>.
17766
17767 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
17768 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
17769 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
17770 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
17771 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
17772
17773 <p>The script,
17774 <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/>
17775 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
17776 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
17777 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
17778
17779 <ol>
17780
17781 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
17782 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
17783 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
17784     our configuration.</li>
17785 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
17786     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
17787     according to the profile specified in the config above,
17788     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
17789 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
17790     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
17791 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
17792
17793 </ol>
17794
17795 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
17796 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
17797 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
17798 the needed packages.</p>
17799
17800 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
17801 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
17802 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
17803 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
17804 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
17805 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
17806
17807 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
17808 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
17809 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
17810
17811 <p><pre>
17812 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
17813 DESKTOP="lxde"
17814 </pre></p>
17815
17816 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
17817 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
17818 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
17819 boot.</p>
17820
17821       </div>
17822       <div class="tags">
17823
17824
17825         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>.
17826
17827
17828       </div>
17829     </div>
17830     <div class="padding"></div>
17831
17832     <div class="entry">
17833       <div class="title">
17834         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Second alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
17835       </div>
17836       <div class="date">
17837         14th May 2013
17838       </div>
17839       <div class="body">
17840         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
17841 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
17842 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
17843
17844 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
17845 2013-05-14</strong></p>
17846
17847 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
17848 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
17849 codename "Wheezy".</p>
17850
17851 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
17852
17853 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
17854 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
17855 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
17856 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
17857 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
17858 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
17859 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
17860 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
17861
17862 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
17863 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
17864 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
17865
17866 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
17867 <ul>
17868   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
17869     default.</li>
17870   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
17871   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
17872   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
17873     ibus-anthy.</li>
17874 </ul>
17875
17876 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
17877 <ul>
17878
17879   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
17880     reliability improvements.</li>
17881   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
17882     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
17883   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
17884     problems.</li>
17885   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
17886     direct:// URL.</li>
17887   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
17888   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
17889   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
17890   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
17891     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
17892   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
17893     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
17894 </ul>
17895
17896 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
17897 <ul>
17898
17899   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
17900     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
17901     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
17902   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
17903   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
17904     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
17905   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
17906   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
17907   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
17908     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
17909   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
17910     password submission problem
17911     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
17912
17913 </ul>
17914
17915 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
17916
17917 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
17918 <ul>
17919
17920   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</a></li>
17921   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</a></li>
17922   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</li>
17923
17924 </ul>
17925
17926 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
17927
17928 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
17929
17930 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
17931
17932 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
17933
17934       </div>
17935       <div class="tags">
17936
17937
17938         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17939
17940
17941       </div>
17942     </div>
17943     <div class="padding"></div>
17944
17945     <div class="entry">
17946       <div class="title">
17947         <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>
17948       </div>
17949       <div class="date">
17950         11th May 2013
17951       </div>
17952       <div class="body">
17953         <P>In January,
17954 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
17955 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
17956 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
17957 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
17958 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
17959 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
17960 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
17961 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
17962 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
17963 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
17964 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
17965 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
17966
17967 <p><table>
17968 <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>
17969 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
17970 <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>
17971 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
17972 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
17973 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
17974 <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>
17975 <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>
17976 <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>
17977 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
17978 </table></p>
17979
17980 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
17981 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
17982 available in experimental.</p>
17983
17984 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
17985 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
17986 for LEGO designers.</p>
17987
17988       </div>
17989       <div class="tags">
17990
17991
17992         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>.
17993
17994
17995       </div>
17996     </div>
17997     <div class="padding"></div>
17998
17999     <div class="entry">
18000       <div class="title">
18001         <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>
18002       </div>
18003       <div class="date">
18004          5th May 2013
18005       </div>
18006       <div class="body">
18007         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
18008 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
18009 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
18010 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
18011 soon.</p>
18012
18013 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
18014 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
18015 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
18016 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
18017 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
18018 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
18019 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
18020 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
18021 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
18022 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
18023 Edu.</a>
18024
18025 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
18026 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
18027 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
18028 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
18029 follow.<p>
18030
18031       </div>
18032       <div class="tags">
18033
18034
18035         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>.
18036
18037
18038       </div>
18039     </div>
18040     <div class="padding"></div>
18041
18042     <div class="entry">
18043       <div class="title">
18044         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">First alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
18045       </div>
18046       <div class="date">
18047         26th April 2013
18048       </div>
18049       <div class="body">
18050         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
18051 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
18052 announcement:</p>
18053
18054 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
18055 2013-04-26</strong></p>
18056
18057 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
18058 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
18059
18060 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
18061
18062 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
18063 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
18064 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
18065 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
18066 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
18067 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
18068 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
18069 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
18070 installed via the network.</p>
18071
18072 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
18073 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
18074 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
18075
18076 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
18077
18078 <ul>
18079 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
18080   <ul>
18081      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
18082      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
18083          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
18084          manual.)</li>
18085      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
18086      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
18087      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
18088      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
18089      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
18090      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
18091      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
18092      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
18093      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
18094      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
18095      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
18096      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
18097          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
18098          manual</a> for more details.</li>
18099      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
18100          installation.</li>
18101      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
18102          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/releasenotes">release notes</a> and the <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation manual</a>.</li>
18103   </ul></li>
18104 </ul>
18105
18106 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
18107 <ul>
18108 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
18109     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
18110     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
18111 </ul>
18112
18113 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
18114 <ul>
18115 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
18116     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
18117     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
18118 </ul>
18119
18120 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
18121 <ul>
18122 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
18123     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
18124     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
18125 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
18126     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
18127     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
18128 </ul>
18129
18130 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
18131 <ul>
18132 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
18133     yet.</li>
18134 </ul>
18135
18136 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
18137
18138 <ul>
18139 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
18140     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
18141     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
18142 </ul>
18143
18144 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
18145
18146 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
18147 <ul>
18148 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
18149 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
18150 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
18151 </ul>
18152
18153 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
18154
18155 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
18156
18157 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
18158
18159 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
18160
18161       </div>
18162       <div class="tags">
18163
18164
18165         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18166
18167
18168       </div>
18169     </div>
18170     <div class="padding"></div>
18171
18172     <div class="entry">
18173       <div class="title">
18174         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_developer_gathering_in_2013_take_place_in_Trondheim.html">First Debian Edu / Skolelinux developer gathering in 2013 take place in Trondheim</a>
18175       </div>
18176       <div class="date">
18177         16th April 2013
18178       </div>
18179       <div class="body">
18180         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
18181 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
18182 Details about the gathering can be found
18183 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
18184 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
18185 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
18186 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
18187 weekend.</p>
18188
18189 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
18190 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
18191 Edu release.</p>
18192
18193 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
18194
18195       </div>
18196       <div class="tags">
18197
18198
18199         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18200
18201
18202       </div>
18203     </div>
18204     <div class="padding"></div>
18205
18206     <div class="entry">
18207       <div class="title">
18208         <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>
18209       </div>
18210       <div class="date">
18211          3rd April 2013
18212       </div>
18213       <div class="body">
18214         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
18215 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
18216 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
18217 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
18218
18219 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
18220 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
18221 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
18222 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
18223 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
18224 BTS. :)</p>
18225
18226       </div>
18227       <div class="tags">
18228
18229
18230         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>.
18231
18232
18233       </div>
18234     </div>
18235     <div class="padding"></div>
18236
18237     <div class="entry">
18238       <div class="title">
18239         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Change_the_font__save_the_world__and_save_some_money_in_the_process_.html">Change the font, save the world (and save some money in the process)</a>
18240       </div>
18241       <div class="date">
18242         26th March 2013
18243       </div>
18244       <div class="body">
18245         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
18246 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
18247 font you use when printing.</p>
18248
18249 <p>Three years ago,
18250 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
18251 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
18252 changed their default front from
18253 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
18254 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
18255 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
18256 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
18257 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
18258 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
18259 prints.</p>
18260
18261 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
18262 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
18263 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
18264 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
18265 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
18266 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
18267 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
18268 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
18269 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
18270 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
18271 depend on the documents printed.</p>
18272
18273 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
18274 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
18275 and save some money in the process.</p>
18276
18277 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
18278 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
18279 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
18280 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
18281 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
18282 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
18283 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
18284 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
18285 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
18286
18287       </div>
18288       <div class="tags">
18289
18290
18291         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18292
18293
18294       </div>
18295     </div>
18296     <div class="padding"></div>
18297
18298     <div class="entry">
18299       <div class="title">
18300         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html">Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB</a>
18301       </div>
18302       <div class="date">
18303         24th March 2013
18304       </div>
18305       <div class="body">
18306         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
18307 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
18308 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
18309 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
18310 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
18311 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
18312 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
18313 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
18314 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
18315 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
18316 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
18317 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
18318
18319 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
18320 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
18321 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
18322 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
18323 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
18324 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
18325 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
18326 all I had to do was to use the
18327 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
18328 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
18329 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
18330 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
18331 xsltproc/fop (aka
18332 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
18333 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
18334 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
18335 technical detail.</p>
18336
18337 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
18338 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
18339 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
18340 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
18341 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
18342 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
18343
18344 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
18345 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
18346 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
18347 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
18348 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
18349 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
18350 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
18351 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
18352 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
18353
18354 <p><blockquote><pre>
18355 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
18356 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
18357   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
18358     &lt;hr/&gt;
18359   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
18360 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
18361 </pre></blockquote></p>
18362
18363 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
18364
18365 <p><blockquote><pre>
18366 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
18367 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
18368   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
18369     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
18370       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
18371     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
18372   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
18373 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
18374 </pre></blockquote></p>
18375
18376 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
18377 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
18378 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
18379 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
18380 enough.</p>
18381
18382 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
18383 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
18384 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
18385 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
18386 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
18387 look like this:</p>
18388
18389 <p><blockquote><pre>
18390 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
18391 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
18392   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
18393     &lt;br/&gt;
18394   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
18395 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
18396 </pre></blockquote></p>
18397
18398 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
18399
18400 <p><blockquote><pre>
18401 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
18402 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
18403   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
18404   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
18405     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
18406   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
18407 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
18408 </pre></blockquote></p>
18409
18410 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
18411 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
18412 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
18413 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
18414 page.</p>
18415
18416 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
18417 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
18418 github</a>
18419 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
18420 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
18421 days.</p>
18422
18423       </div>
18424       <div class="tags">
18425
18426
18427         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
18428
18429
18430       </div>
18431     </div>
18432     <div class="padding"></div>
18433
18434     <div class="entry">
18435       <div class="title">
18436         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_6_got_a_video_review_from_Pcwizz.html">Skolelinux 6 got a video review from Pcwizz</a>
18437       </div>
18438       <div class="date">
18439         17th March 2013
18440       </div>
18441       <div class="body">
18442         <p>Via
18443 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
18444 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
18445 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
18446 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
18447 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
18448 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
18449 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
18450
18451 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
18452 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
18453
18454 <blockquote>
18455 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
18456 </blockquote>
18457
18458 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
18459
18460 <blockquote>
18461 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
18462 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
18463 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
18464 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
18465 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
18466 </blockquote>
18467
18468 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
18469 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
18470 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
18471 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
18472
18473 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
18474 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
18475
18476 <blockquote>
18477 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
18478 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
18479 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
18480 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
18481 </blockquote>
18482
18483 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
18484 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
18485 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
18486 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
18487 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
18488
18489 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
18490 embedding:</p>
18491
18492 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
18493
18494       </div>
18495       <div class="tags">
18496
18497
18498         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
18499
18500
18501       </div>
18502     </div>
18503     <div class="padding"></div>
18504
18505     <div class="entry">
18506       <div class="title">
18507         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
18508       </div>
18509       <div class="date">
18510          8th March 2013
18511       </div>
18512       <div class="body">
18513         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
18514 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
18515 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
18516 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
18517 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
18518 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
18519 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
18520
18521 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
18522
18523 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
18524 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
18525
18526 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
18527 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
18528 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
18529 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
18530 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
18531 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
18532
18533 <p>Images are available for download at
18534 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
18535
18536 <p>md5sums:
18537 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
18538 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
18539 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
18540
18541 <p>sha1sums:
18542 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
18543 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
18544 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
18545
18546 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
18547
18548 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
18549 2013-03-03:</p>
18550
18551 <ul>
18552   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
18553   <ul>
18554         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
18555         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
18556   </ul></li>
18557   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
18558   <ul>
18559         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
18560         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
18561   </ul></li>
18562   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
18563      <ul>
18564         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
18565         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
18566         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
18567                 Closes: #664596</li>
18568         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
18569                 Closes: #664976</li>
18570         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
18571            <ul>
18572                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
18573                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
18574            </ul></li>
18575         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
18576            <ul>
18577                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
18578                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
18579                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
18580                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
18581                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
18582            </ul></li>
18583         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
18584     </ul>
18585   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
18586     <ul>
18587         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
18588     </ul></li>
18589 </ul>
18590
18591 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
18592 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
18593 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
18594 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
18595
18596 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
18597 mailinglist
18598 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
18599 </p></blockquote>
18600
18601 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
18602
18603       </div>
18604       <div class="tags">
18605
18606
18607         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18608
18609
18610       </div>
18611     </div>
18612     <div class="padding"></div>
18613
18614     <div class="entry">
18615       <div class="title">
18616         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen___Complete_TV_station_organised_using_the_web.html">Frikanalen - Complete TV station organised using the web</a>
18617       </div>
18618       <div class="date">
18619          3rd March 2013
18620       </div>
18621       <div class="body">
18622         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
18623 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
18624 support using
18625 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
18626 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
18627 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
18628 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
18629 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
18630 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
18631 using the GNU LGPL, and
18632 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
18633
18634 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
18635 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
18636 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
18637 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
18638 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
18639 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
18640
18641 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
18642 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
18643 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
18644 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
18645 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
18646 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
18647 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
18648 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
18649 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
18650 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
18651 signal distribution is handled using
18652 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
18653 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
18654 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
18655 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
18656 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
18657 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
18658 them up a bit more first.</p>
18659
18660 <p>The development is coordinated on the
18661 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
18662 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
18663 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
18664 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
18665 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
18666 development.</p>
18667
18668       </div>
18669       <div class="tags">
18670
18671
18672         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
18673
18674
18675       </div>
18676     </div>
18677     <div class="padding"></div>
18678
18679     <div class="entry">
18680       <div class="title">
18681         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dr__Richard_Stallman__founder_of_Free_Software_Foundation__give_a_talk_in_Oslo_March_1st_2013.html">Dr. Richard Stallman, founder of Free Software Foundation, give a talk in Oslo March 1st 2013</a>
18682       </div>
18683       <div class="date">
18684         27th February 2013
18685       </div>
18686       <div class="body">
18687         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
18688 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
18689 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
18690 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
18691 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
18692 (where I am the chair of the board) and
18693 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
18694 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
18695 GNU», with this description:
18696
18697 <p><blockquote>
18698 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
18699 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
18700 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
18701 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
18702 </blockquote></p>
18703
18704 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
18705 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
18706 am really curious how many will show up.  See
18707 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
18708 page</a> for the location details.</p>
18709
18710       </div>
18711       <div class="tags">
18712
18713
18714         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
18715
18716
18717       </div>
18718     </div>
18719     <div class="padding"></div>
18720
18721     <div class="entry">
18722       <div class="title">
18723         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikart___Free_Garmin_maps_for_European_countries_based_on_OpenStreetmap.html">Frikart - Free Garmin maps for European countries based on OpenStreetmap</a>
18724       </div>
18725       <div class="date">
18726         15th February 2013
18727       </div>
18728       <div class="body">
18729         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
18730 now a great source of free maps available from
18731 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
18732 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
18733 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
18734 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
18735 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
18736 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
18737 page for descriptions).</p>
18738
18739 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
18740 map you can just edit the
18741 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
18742 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
18743
18744       </div>
18745       <div class="tags">
18746
18747
18748         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
18749
18750
18751       </div>
18752     </div>
18753     <div class="padding"></div>
18754
18755     <div class="entry">
18756       <div class="title">
18757         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">"Electronic" paper invoices - using vCard in a QR code</a>
18758       </div>
18759       <div class="date">
18760         12th February 2013
18761       </div>
18762       <div class="body">
18763         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
18764 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
18765 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
18766 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
18767 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
18768 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
18769 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
18770 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
18771 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
18772 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
18773 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
18774 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
18775 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
18776 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
18777 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
18778 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
18779
18780 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
18781 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
18782 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
18783 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
18784 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
18785 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
18786 fields:</p>
18787
18788 <p><pre>
18789 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
18790 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
18791 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
18792 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
18793 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
18794 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
18795 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
18796 </pre></p>
18797
18798 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
18799 answer regarding
18800 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
18801 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
18802 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
18803 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
18804
18805 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
18806
18807 <p><pre>
18808 BEGIN:VCARD
18809 VERSION:2.1
18810 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
18811 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
18812 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
18813 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
18814 REV:20130212T095000Z
18815 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
18816 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
18817 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
18818 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
18819 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
18820 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
18821 END:VCARD
18822 </pre></p>
18823
18824 <p>The resulting QR code created using
18825 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
18826 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
18827 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
18828 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
18829 system.</p>
18830
18831 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
18832
18833 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
18834 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
18835 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
18836 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
18837
18838 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
18839 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
18840
18841       </div>
18842       <div class="tags">
18843
18844
18845         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
18846
18847
18848       </div>
18849     </div>
18850     <div class="padding"></div>
18851
18852     <div class="entry">
18853       <div class="title">
18854         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html">Sleep until morning - home automation for the kids</a>
18855       </div>
18856       <div class="date">
18857         10th February 2013
18858       </div>
18859       <div class="body">
18860         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
18861
18862 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
18863 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
18864 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
18865 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
18866 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
18867 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
18868 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
18869 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
18870 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
18871 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
18872 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
18873
18874 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
18875 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
18876 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
18877 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
18878 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
18879 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
18880 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
18881 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
18882 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
18883 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
18884 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
18885 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
18886 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
18887 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
18888 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
18889 ones own
18890 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
18891 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
18892 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
18893 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
18894 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
18895 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
18896 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
18897 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
18898 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
18899 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
18900 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
18901
18902 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
18903 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
18904 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
18905 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
18906 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
18907 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
18908
18909 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
18910 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
18911 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
18912
18913       </div>
18914       <div class="tags">
18915
18916
18917         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18918
18919
18920       </div>
18921     </div>
18922     <div class="padding"></div>
18923
18924     <div class="entry">
18925       <div class="title">
18926         <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>
18927       </div>
18928       <div class="date">
18929          2nd February 2013
18930       </div>
18931       <div class="body">
18932         <p>My
18933 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
18934 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
18935 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
18936 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
18937 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
18938 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
18939 version too.</p>
18940
18941 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
18942 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
18943 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
18944 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
18945 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
18946 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
18947 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
18948 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
18949
18950 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
18951 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
18952 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
18953 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
18954 it. :)</p>
18955
18956 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
18957 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
18958 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
18959
18960       </div>
18961       <div class="tags">
18962
18963
18964         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>.
18965
18966
18967       </div>
18968     </div>
18969     <div class="padding"></div>
18970
18971     <div class="entry">
18972       <div class="title">
18973         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
18974       </div>
18975       <div class="date">
18976         22nd January 2013
18977       </div>
18978       <div class="body">
18979         <p>Yesterday, I
18980 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
18981 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
18982 pluggable hardware devices, which I
18983 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
18984 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
18985 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
18986 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
18987 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
18988 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
18989 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
18990 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
18991 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
18992 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
18993
18994 <pre>
18995 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
18996 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
18997 </pre>
18998
18999 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
19000 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
19001 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
19002 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
19003
19004 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
19005 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
19006 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
19007 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
19008 word.</p>
19009
19010 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
19011 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
19012 process.</p>
19013
19014 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
19015 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
19016
19017       </div>
19018       <div class="tags">
19019
19020
19021         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>.
19022
19023
19024       </div>
19025     </div>
19026     <div class="padding"></div>
19027
19028     <div class="entry">
19029       <div class="title">
19030         <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>
19031       </div>
19032       <div class="date">
19033         21st January 2013
19034       </div>
19035       <div class="body">
19036         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
19037 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
19038 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
19039 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
19040 it, fetch the
19041 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
19042 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
19043 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
19044 autostart script.</p>
19045
19046 <p>The design is simple:</p>
19047
19048 <ul>
19049
19050 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
19051 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
19052
19053 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
19054 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
19055 initially did.</li>
19056
19057 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
19058 the APT database, a database
19059 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
19060 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
19061
19062 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
19063 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
19064 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
19065 package or packages.</li>
19066
19067 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
19068 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
19069
19070 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
19071 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
19072
19073 </ul>
19074
19075 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
19076 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
19077 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
19078 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
19079
19080 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
19081 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
19082 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
19083 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
19084 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
19085
19086 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
19087 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
19088 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
19089 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
19090 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
19091 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
19092 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
19093 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
19094
19095 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
19096 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
19097 '<tt>svn checkout
19098 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
19099 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
19100 devscripts package.</p>
19101
19102 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
19103 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
19104 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
19105 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
19106 instructions</a> for details.</p>
19107
19108       </div>
19109       <div class="tags">
19110
19111
19112         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>.
19113
19114
19115       </div>
19116     </div>
19117     <div class="padding"></div>
19118
19119     <div class="entry">
19120       <div class="title">
19121         <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>
19122       </div>
19123       <div class="date">
19124         19th January 2013
19125       </div>
19126       <div class="body">
19127         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
19128 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
19129 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
19130 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
19131 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
19132 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
19133 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
19134 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
19135 not a durable solution.
19136
19137 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
19138 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
19139
19140 <ul>
19141
19142 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
19143   than A4).</li>
19144 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
19145 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
19146 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
19147 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
19148 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
19149 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
19150 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
19151 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
19152 size).</li>
19153 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
19154   X.org packages.</li>
19155 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
19156   the time).
19157
19158 </ul>
19159
19160 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
19161 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
19162 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
19163 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
19164 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
19165 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
19166 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
19167 still be useful.</p>
19168
19169 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
19170 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
19171 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
19172 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
19173 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
19174 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
19175
19176       </div>
19177       <div class="tags">
19178
19179
19180         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>.
19181
19182
19183       </div>
19184     </div>
19185     <div class="padding"></div>
19186
19187     <div class="entry">
19188       <div class="title">
19189         <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>
19190       </div>
19191       <div class="date">
19192         18th January 2013
19193       </div>
19194       <div class="body">
19195         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
19196 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
19197 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
19198 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
19199 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
19200 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
19201 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
19202
19203 <pre>
19204 #!/usr/bin/python
19205 import sys
19206 import apt
19207 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
19208     cache = apt.Cache()
19209     cache.open(None)
19210     thepkgs = []
19211     for pkg in cache:
19212         version = pkg.candidate
19213         if version is None:
19214             version = pkg.installed
19215         if version is None:
19216             continue
19217         record = version.record
19218         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
19219             continue
19220         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
19221         for t in mime_types:
19222             t = t.rstrip().strip()
19223             if t == mimetype:
19224                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
19225     return thepkgs
19226 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
19227 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
19228     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
19229 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
19230 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
19231     print "  %s" %pkg
19232 </pre>
19233
19234 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
19235
19236 <pre>
19237 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
19238 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
19239   gecko-mediaplayer
19240 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
19241 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
19242   browser-plugin-gnash
19243 %
19244 </pre>
19245
19246 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
19247 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
19248 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
19249 anyone working on adding it?</p>
19250
19251 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
19252 request for icweasel support for this feature is
19253 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
19254 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
19255 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
19256 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
19257
19258       </div>
19259       <div class="tags">
19260
19261
19262         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>.
19263
19264
19265       </div>
19266     </div>
19267     <div class="padding"></div>
19268
19269     <div class="entry">
19270       <div class="title">
19271         <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>
19272       </div>
19273       <div class="date">
19274         16th January 2013
19275       </div>
19276       <div class="body">
19277         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
19278 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
19279 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
19280 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
19281 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
19282 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
19283 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
19284 downloaded by the browser.</p>
19285
19286 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
19287 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
19288 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
19289 can be found on the
19290 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
19291 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
19292 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
19293 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
19294 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
19295
19296 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
19297
19298 <pre>
19299   count MIME type
19300   ----- -----------------------
19301      32 text/plain
19302      30 audio/mpeg
19303      29 image/png
19304      28 image/jpeg
19305      27 application/ogg
19306      26 audio/x-mp3
19307      25 image/tiff
19308      25 image/gif
19309      22 image/bmp
19310      22 audio/x-wav
19311      20 audio/x-flac
19312      19 audio/x-mpegurl
19313      18 video/x-ms-asf
19314      18 audio/x-musepack
19315      18 audio/x-mpeg
19316      18 application/x-ogg
19317      17 video/mpeg
19318      17 audio/x-scpls
19319      17 audio/ogg
19320      16 video/x-ms-wmv
19321 </pre>
19322
19323 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
19324
19325 <pre>
19326   count MIME type
19327   ----- -----------------------
19328      33 text/plain
19329      32 image/png
19330      32 image/jpeg
19331      29 audio/mpeg
19332      27 image/gif
19333      26 image/tiff
19334      26 application/ogg
19335      25 audio/x-mp3
19336      22 image/bmp
19337      21 audio/x-wav
19338      19 audio/x-mpegurl
19339      19 audio/x-mpeg
19340      18 video/mpeg
19341      18 audio/x-scpls
19342      18 audio/x-flac
19343      18 application/x-ogg
19344      17 video/x-ms-asf
19345      17 text/html
19346      17 audio/x-musepack
19347      16 image/x-xbitmap
19348 </pre>
19349
19350 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
19351
19352 <pre>
19353   count MIME type
19354   ----- -----------------------
19355      31 text/plain
19356      31 image/png
19357      31 image/jpeg
19358      29 audio/mpeg
19359      28 application/ogg
19360      27 image/gif
19361      26 image/tiff
19362      26 audio/x-mp3
19363      23 audio/x-wav
19364      22 image/bmp
19365      21 audio/x-flac
19366      20 audio/x-mpegurl
19367      19 audio/x-mpeg
19368      18 video/x-ms-asf
19369      18 video/mpeg
19370      18 audio/x-scpls
19371      18 application/x-ogg
19372      17 audio/x-musepack
19373      16 video/x-ms-wmv
19374      16 video/x-msvideo
19375 </pre>
19376
19377 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
19378 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
19379 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
19380 issues.</p>
19381
19382 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
19383 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
19384
19385       </div>
19386       <div class="tags">
19387
19388
19389         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>.
19390
19391
19392       </div>
19393     </div>
19394     <div class="padding"></div>
19395
19396     <div class="entry">
19397       <div class="title">
19398         <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>
19399       </div>
19400       <div class="date">
19401         15th January 2013
19402       </div>
19403       <div class="body">
19404         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
19405 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
19406 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
19407 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
19408 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
19409 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
19410 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
19411 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
19412 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
19413 packages.</p>
19414
19415 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
19416 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
19417 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
19418 modalias.</p>
19419
19420 <p><blockquote>
19421 Package: package-name
19422 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
19423 </blockquote></p>
19424
19425 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
19426 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
19427
19428 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
19429 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
19430
19431 <p><blockquote>
19432 Package: cheese
19433 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
19434 </blockquote></p>
19435
19436 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
19437 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
19438
19439 <p><blockquote>
19440 Package: pcmciautils
19441 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
19442 </blockquote></p>
19443
19444 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
19445 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
19446
19447 <p><blockquote>
19448 Package: colorhug-client
19449 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
19450 </blockquote></p>
19451
19452 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
19453 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
19454 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
19455
19456 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
19457 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
19458 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
19459 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
19460 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
19461 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
19462 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
19463 Raring.</p>
19464
19465 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
19466 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
19467 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
19468 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
19469 try the
19470 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
19471 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
19472 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
19473 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
19474
19475 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
19476 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
19477
19478 <p><blockquote>
19479 % ./hw-support-lookup
19480 <br>yubikey-personalization
19481 <br>%
19482 </blockquote></p>
19483
19484 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
19485 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
19486
19487 <p><blockquote>
19488 % ./hw-support-lookup
19489 <br>pcmciautils
19490 <br>%
19491 </blockquote></p>
19492
19493 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
19494 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
19495 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
19496
19497 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
19498 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
19499 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
19500 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
19501 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
19502 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
19503 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
19504 see if it work.</p>
19505
19506 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
19507 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
19508 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
19509 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
19510
19511       </div>
19512       <div class="tags">
19513
19514
19515         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>.
19516
19517
19518       </div>
19519     </div>
19520     <div class="padding"></div>
19521
19522     <div class="entry">
19523       <div class="title">
19524         <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>
19525       </div>
19526       <div class="date">
19527         14th January 2013
19528       </div>
19529       <div class="body">
19530         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
19531 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
19532 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
19533 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
19534 in
19535 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
19536 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
19537
19538 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
19539
19540 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
19541 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
19542 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
19543 &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;,
19544 &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
19545 &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;.
19546
19547 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
19548 this shell script:</p>
19549
19550 <pre>
19551 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
19552 </pre>
19553
19554 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
19555 using modinfo:</p>
19556
19557 <pre>
19558 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
19559 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
19560 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
19561 %
19562 </pre>
19563
19564 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
19565
19566 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
19567 Bridge memory controller:</p>
19568
19569 <p><blockquote>
19570 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
19571 </blockquote></p>
19572
19573 <p>This represent these values:</p>
19574
19575 <pre>
19576  v   00008086  (vendor)
19577  d   00002770  (device)
19578  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
19579  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
19580  bc  06        (bus class)
19581  sc  00        (bus subclass)
19582  i   00        (interface)
19583 </pre>
19584
19585 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
19586 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
19587 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
19588 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
19589
19590 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
19591 means.</p>
19592
19593 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
19594
19595 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
19596 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
19597
19598 <p><blockquote>
19599 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
19600 </blockquote></p>
19601
19602 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
19603
19604 <pre>
19605  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
19606  p    0001  (device product)
19607  d    0206  (bcddevice)
19608  dc     09  (device class)
19609  dsc    00  (device subclass)
19610  dp     00  (device protocol)
19611  ic     09  (interface class)
19612  isc    00  (interface subclass)
19613  ip     00  (interface protocol)
19614 </pre>
19615
19616 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
19617 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
19618 these alias entries show up:</p>
19619
19620 <p><blockquote>
19621 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
19622 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
19623 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
19624 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
19625 </blockquote></p>
19626
19627 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
19628 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
19629 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
19630
19631 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
19632
19633 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
19634 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
19635
19636 <p><blockquote>
19637 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
19638 </blockquote></p>
19639
19640 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
19641
19642 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
19643
19644 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
19645 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
19646 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
19647
19648 <p><blockquote>
19649 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
19650 </blockquote></p>
19651
19652 <p>The values present are</p>
19653
19654 <pre>
19655  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
19656  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
19657  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
19658  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
19659  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
19660  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
19661  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
19662  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
19663  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
19664  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
19665  ct   10             (chassis type)
19666  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
19667 </pre>
19668
19669 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
19670 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
19671
19672 <pre>
19673   3 Desktop
19674   4 Low Profile Desktop
19675   5 Pizza Box
19676   6 Mini Tower
19677   7 Tower
19678   8 Portable
19679   9 Laptop
19680  10 Notebook
19681  11 Hand Held
19682  12 Docking Station
19683  13 All In One
19684  14 Sub Notebook
19685  15 Space-saving
19686  16 Lunch Box
19687  17 Main Server Chassis
19688  18 Expansion Chassis
19689  19 Sub Chassis
19690  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
19691  21 Peripheral Chassis
19692  22 RAID Chassis
19693  23 Rack Mount Chassis
19694  24 Sealed-case PC
19695  25 Multi-system
19696  26 CompactPCI
19697  27 AdvancedTCA
19698  28 Blade
19699  29 Blade Enclosing
19700 </pre>
19701
19702 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
19703 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
19704 claim it is a desktop.</p>
19705
19706 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
19707
19708 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
19709 test machine:</p>
19710
19711 <p><blockquote>
19712 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
19713 </blockquote></p>
19714
19715 <p>The values present are</p>
19716
19717 <pre>
19718   ty  01  (type)
19719   pr  00  (prototype)
19720   id  00  (id)
19721   ex  00  (extra)
19722 </pre>
19723
19724 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
19725 the valid values are.</p>
19726
19727 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
19728
19729 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
19730 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
19731 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
19732 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
19733 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
19734 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
19735 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
19736
19737 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
19738
19739 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
19740 one can use the following shell script:</p>
19741
19742 <pre>
19743   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
19744     echo "$id" ; \
19745     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
19746   done
19747 </pre>
19748
19749 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
19750 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
19751
19752 <pre>
19753   acpi:ACPI0003:
19754     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
19755   acpi:device:
19756   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
19757   acpi:IBM0068:
19758     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
19759     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
19760     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
19761     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
19762   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
19763     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
19764     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
19765     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
19766   [...]
19767 </pre>
19768
19769 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
19770 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
19771 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
19772 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
19773
19774 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
19775 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
19776 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
19777
19778       </div>
19779       <div class="tags">
19780
19781
19782         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>.
19783
19784
19785       </div>
19786     </div>
19787     <div class="padding"></div>
19788
19789     <div class="entry">
19790       <div class="title">
19791         <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>
19792       </div>
19793       <div class="date">
19794         10th January 2013
19795       </div>
19796       <div class="body">
19797         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
19798 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
19799 Launcher and updated the Debian package
19800 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
19801 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
19802 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
19803 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
19804 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
19805 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
19806 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
19807 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
19808 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
19809 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
19810 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
19811 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
19812 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
19813 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
19814 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
19815
19816       </div>
19817       <div class="tags">
19818
19819
19820         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>.
19821
19822
19823       </div>
19824     </div>
19825     <div class="padding"></div>
19826
19827     <div class="entry">
19828       <div class="title">
19829         <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>
19830       </div>
19831       <div class="date">
19832          9th January 2013
19833       </div>
19834       <div class="body">
19835         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
19836 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
19837 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
19838 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
19839 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
19840 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
19841 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
19842 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
19843 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
19844 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
19845 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
19846
19847 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
19848 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
19849 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
19850 simple:
19851
19852 <ul>
19853
19854 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
19855   starting when a user log in.</li>
19856
19857 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
19858   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
19859
19860 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
19861   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
19862   packages.</li>
19863
19864 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
19865   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
19866
19867 </ul>
19868
19869 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
19870 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
19871 discover database to find packages and
19872 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
19873 packages.</p>
19874
19875 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
19876 draft package is now checked into
19877 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
19878 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
19879 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
19880 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
19881 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
19882 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
19883 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
19884 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
19885 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
19886 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
19887 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
19888 because of the freeze).</p>
19889
19890 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
19891 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
19892 inserted):</p>
19893
19894 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
19895
19896 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
19897 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
19898 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
19899
19900 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
19901 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
19902 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
19903 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
19904 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
19905 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
19906 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
19907
19908 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
19909 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
19910 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
19911 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
19912 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
19913 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
19914 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
19915 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
19916 not be installed?</p>
19917
19918 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
19919 please send me an email. :)</p>
19920
19921       </div>
19922       <div class="tags">
19923
19924
19925         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>.
19926
19927
19928       </div>
19929     </div>
19930     <div class="padding"></div>
19931
19932     <div class="entry">
19933       <div class="title">
19934         <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>
19935       </div>
19936       <div class="date">
19937          2nd January 2013
19938       </div>
19939       <div class="body">
19940         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
19941 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
19942 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
19943 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
19944 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
19945 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
19946 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
19947 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
19948 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
19949 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
19950
19951 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
19952 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
19953 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
19954
19955       </div>
19956       <div class="tags">
19957
19958
19959         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>.
19960
19961
19962       </div>
19963     </div>
19964     <div class="padding"></div>
19965
19966     <div class="entry">
19967       <div class="title">
19968         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
19969       </div>
19970       <div class="date">
19971         28th December 2012
19972       </div>
19973       <div class="body">
19974         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
19975 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
19976 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
19977 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
19978 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
19979 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
19980 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
19981 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
19982 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
19983 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
19984 followed by many others. :)</p>
19985
19986 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
19987 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
19988 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
19989 you want to donate to the project.</p>
19990
19991       </div>
19992       <div class="tags">
19993
19994
19995         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19996
19997
19998       </div>
19999     </div>
20000     <div class="padding"></div>
20001
20002     <div class="entry">
20003       <div class="title">
20004         <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>
20005       </div>
20006       <div class="date">
20007         25th December 2012
20008       </div>
20009       <div class="body">
20010         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
20011 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
20012
20013 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
20014 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
20015 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
20016 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
20017 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
20018 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
20019 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
20020 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
20021 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
20022 name.</p>
20023
20024 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
20025 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
20026 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
20027
20028 <blockquote><pre>
20029 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
20030 cd bitcoin
20031 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
20032 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
20033 </pre></blockquote>
20034
20035 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
20036 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
20037 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
20038 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
20039 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
20040 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
20041 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
20042 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
20043 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
20044
20045 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
20046 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
20047 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
20048
20049       </div>
20050       <div class="tags">
20051
20052
20053         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>.
20054
20055
20056       </div>
20057     </div>
20058     <div class="padding"></div>
20059
20060     <div class="entry">
20061       <div class="title">
20062         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
20063       </div>
20064       <div class="date">
20065         21st December 2012
20066       </div>
20067       <div class="body">
20068         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
20069 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
20070 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
20071 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
20072 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
20073 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
20074 is now maintained by a
20075 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
20076 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
20077 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
20078 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
20079 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
20080 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
20081 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
20082 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
20083 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
20084 Corallo in a
20085 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
20086 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
20087 Debian package.</p>
20088
20089 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
20090 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
20091 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
20092 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
20093 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
20094 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
20095 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
20096 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
20097 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
20098 new version to unstable.
20099
20100 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
20101 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
20102 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
20103 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
20104 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
20105 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
20106 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
20107 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
20108 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
20109 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
20110 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
20111 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
20112 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
20113 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
20114 have not tested them.</p>
20115
20116 <p>My
20117 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
20118 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
20119 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
20120 years ago, as can be
20121 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
20122 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
20123 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
20124 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
20125 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
20126 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
20127 the same address as last time,
20128 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
20129
20130       </div>
20131       <div class="tags">
20132
20133
20134         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>.
20135
20136
20137       </div>
20138     </div>
20139     <div class="padding"></div>
20140
20141     <div class="entry">
20142       <div class="title">
20143         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ledger___double_entry_accounting_using_text_based_storage_format.html">Ledger - double-entry accounting using text based storage format</a>
20144       </div>
20145       <div class="date">
20146         18th December 2012
20147       </div>
20148       <div class="body">
20149         <p>A few days ago I came across
20150 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
20151 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
20152 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
20153 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
20154 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
20155 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
20156 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
20157 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
20158 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
20159
20160 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
20161 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
20162 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
20163 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
20164
20165 <blockquote><pre>
20166 2004-05-27 Book Store
20167       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
20168       Liabilities:Visa
20169 </pre></blockquote>
20170
20171 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
20172 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
20173 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
20174 Spang</a>,
20175 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
20176 Keen</a>,
20177 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
20178 Cantino</a> and
20179 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
20180 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
20181 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
20182 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
20183 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
20184
20185 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
20186 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
20187 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
20188 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
20189 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
20190
20191 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
20192 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
20193 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
20194 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
20195 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
20196 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
20197 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
20198 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
20199 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
20200
20201       </div>
20202       <div class="tags">
20203
20204
20205         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
20206
20207
20208       </div>
20209     </div>
20210     <div class="padding"></div>
20211
20212     <div class="entry">
20213       <div class="title">
20214         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html">Scripting the Cerebrum/bofhd user administration system using XML-RPC</a>
20215       </div>
20216       <div class="date">
20217          6th December 2012
20218       </div>
20219       <div class="body">
20220         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
20221 Oslo</a>, we use the
20222 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
20223 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
20224 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
20225 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
20226 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
20227 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
20228 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
20229 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
20230 Python.</p>
20231
20232 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
20233 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
20234 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
20235 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
20236 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
20237 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
20238
20239 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
20240 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
20241 user currently logged in:</p>
20242
20243 <blockquote><pre>
20244 #!/usr/bin/env python
20245 import getpass
20246 import xmlrpclib
20247 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
20248 username = getpass.getuser()
20249 password = getpass.getpass()
20250 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
20251 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
20252 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
20253 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
20254 result = server.logout(sessionid)
20255 print result
20256 </pre></blockquote>
20257
20258 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
20259 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
20260
20261       </div>
20262       <div class="tags">
20263
20264
20265         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
20266
20267
20268       </div>
20269     </div>
20270     <div class="padding"></div>
20271
20272     <div class="entry">
20273       <div class="title">
20274         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html">Why isn't the value of copyright taxed?</a>
20275       </div>
20276       <div class="date">
20277         17th November 2012
20278       </div>
20279       <div class="body">
20280         <p>While working on a
20281 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
20282 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
20283 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
20284 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
20285 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
20286 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
20287
20288 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
20289 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
20290 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
20291 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
20292 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
20293 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
20294 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
20295 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
20296 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
20297 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
20298 arguments.</p>
20299
20300 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
20301 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
20302 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
20303 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
20304 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
20305 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
20306 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
20307 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
20308
20309 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
20310 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
20311 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
20312 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
20313 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
20314 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
20315 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
20316 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
20317 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
20318 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
20319 correct right holder.</p>
20320
20321 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
20322 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
20323 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
20324 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
20325 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
20326 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
20327 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
20328 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
20329 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
20330 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
20331 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
20332 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
20333 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
20334 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
20335
20336 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
20337 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
20338 domain and help to get more work into the public domain.</p>
20339
20340 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
20341 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
20342
20343       </div>
20344       <div class="tags">
20345
20346
20347         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
20348
20349
20350       </div>
20351     </div>
20352     <div class="padding"></div>
20353
20354     <div class="entry">
20355       <div class="title">
20356         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
20357       </div>
20358       <div class="date">
20359         14th November 2012
20360       </div>
20361       <div class="body">
20362         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
20363 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
20364 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
20365 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
20366 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
20367 the people behind the German
20368 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
20369 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
20370 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
20371
20372 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20373
20374 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
20375 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
20376 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
20377
20378 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
20379 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
20380 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
20381 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
20382 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
20383 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
20384
20385 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
20386 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
20387 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
20388 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
20389 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
20390 relationship management and the communication processes in the
20391 project.</p>
20392
20393 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
20394 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
20395 and a yoga teacher.</p>
20396
20397 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
20398 project?</strong></p>
20399
20400 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
20401
20402 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
20403 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
20404 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
20405 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
20406 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
20407 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
20408 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
20409 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
20410 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
20411 parents.</p>
20412
20413 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
20414 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
20415 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
20416 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
20417 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
20418 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
20419 Germany.</p>
20420
20421 <p>For information about our school project you can read
20422 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
20423 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
20424
20425 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
20426 Edu?</strong></p>
20427
20428 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
20429 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
20430
20431 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
20432 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
20433 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
20434 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
20435 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
20436 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
20437 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
20438 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
20439 teachers, parents...</p>
20440
20441 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
20442 Edu?</strong></p>
20443
20444 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
20445 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
20446
20447 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
20448 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
20449 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
20450 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
20451 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
20452
20453 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
20454 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
20455 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
20456 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
20457 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
20458 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
20459 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
20460
20461 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20462
20463 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
20464 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
20465 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
20466 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
20467
20468 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20469 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20470
20471 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
20472 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
20473 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
20474 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
20475 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
20476
20477 <ul>
20478
20479 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
20480 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
20481 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
20482
20483 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
20484 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
20485 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
20486 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
20487 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
20488 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
20489 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
20490
20491 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
20492 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
20493 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
20494 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
20495
20496 </ul>
20497
20498       </div>
20499       <div class="tags">
20500
20501
20502         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
20503
20504
20505       </div>
20506     </div>
20507     <div class="padding"></div>
20508
20509     <div class="entry">
20510       <div class="title">
20511         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html">The European Central Bank (ECB) take a look at bitcoin</a>
20512       </div>
20513       <div class="date">
20514          4th November 2012
20515       </div>
20516       <div class="body">
20517         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
20518 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
20519 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
20520 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
20521 see how a member of the bitcoin community
20522 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
20523 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
20524 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
20525 competition.  My thoughts go to the
20526 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
20527 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
20528 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
20529 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
20530 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
20531
20532 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
20533 that the community already seem to have
20534 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
20535 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
20536 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
20537 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
20538 wealth is available.</p>
20539
20540       </div>
20541       <div class="tags">
20542
20543
20544         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
20545
20546
20547       </div>
20548     </div>
20549     <div class="padding"></div>
20550
20551     <div class="entry">
20552       <div class="title">
20553         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html">12 years of outages - summarised by Stuart Kendrick</a>
20554       </div>
20555       <div class="date">
20556         26th October 2012
20557       </div>
20558       <div class="body">
20559         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
20560 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
20561 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
20562 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
20563 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
20564 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
20565 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
20566 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
20567 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
20568 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
20569 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
20570 it every time.</p>
20571
20572 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
20573 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
20574 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
20575 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
20576 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
20577 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
20578 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
20579 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
20580 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
20581 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
20582 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
20583 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
20584
20585 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
20586 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
20587 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
20588 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
20589 article: First the unplanned outage:
20590
20591 <blockquote><pre>
20592 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
20593 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
20594 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
20595 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
20596 Duration:    40 minutes
20597 Scope:       Exchange 2003
20598 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
20599              a cluster failover.
20600
20601 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
20602              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
20603 Technician:  [xxx]
20604 </pre></blockquote>
20605
20606 Next the planned outage:
20607
20608 <blockquote><pre>
20609 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
20610 Severity:    Major (Planned)
20611 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
20612 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
20613 Duration:    10 hours
20614 Scope:       H2 Transport
20615 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
20616              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
20617              4510s.
20618 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
20619              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
20620              connectivity.
20621 Technician:  [xxx]
20622 </pre></blockquote>
20623
20624 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
20625 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
20626 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
20627 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
20628 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
20629 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
20630 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
20631
20632 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
20633 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
20634 university too.  We do register
20635 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
20636 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
20637 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
20638 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
20639 for other sites to consider too?</p>
20640
20641       </div>
20642       <div class="tags">
20643
20644
20645         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
20646
20647
20648       </div>
20649     </div>
20650     <div class="padding"></div>
20651
20652     <div class="entry">
20653       <div class="title">
20654         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html">Amazon steal books from customer and throw out her out without any explanation</a>
20655       </div>
20656       <div class="date">
20657         22nd October 2012
20658       </div>
20659       <div class="body">
20660         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
20661 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
20662 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
20663 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
20664 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
20665 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
20666 background information is available in Norwegian from
20667 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
20668 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
20669 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
20670 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
20671 willing to
20672 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
20673 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
20674 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
20675 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
20676 sounded like
20677 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
20678 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
20679 later.</p>
20680
20681 <p>And thought this action is
20682 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
20683 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
20684 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
20685 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
20686 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
20687 rights.</p>
20688
20689 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
20690 unacceptable terms.  For example
20691 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
20692 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
20693 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
20694 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
20695 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
20696
20697 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
20698 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
20699 restored the account of the user, as reported by
20700 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
20701 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
20702 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
20703 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
20704 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
20705 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
20706 reading two opinions from
20707 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
20708 Phipps</a> and
20709 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
20710 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
20711 details about the original story.</p>
20712
20713       </div>
20714       <div class="tags">
20715
20716
20717         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
20718
20719
20720       </div>
20721     </div>
20722     <div class="padding"></div>
20723
20724     <div class="entry">
20725       <div class="title">
20726         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
20727       </div>
20728       <div class="date">
20729         18th October 2012
20730       </div>
20731       <div class="body">
20732         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
20733 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
20734 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
20735 across a marvellous drawing by
20736 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
20737 visualising some of what is going on.
20738
20739 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
20740 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
20741
20742 <blockquote>
20743 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
20744 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
20745 </blockquote>
20746
20747 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
20748 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
20749 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
20750 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
20751 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
20752 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
20753
20754       </div>
20755       <div class="tags">
20756
20757
20758         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
20759
20760
20761       </div>
20762     </div>
20763     <div class="padding"></div>
20764
20765     <div class="entry">
20766       <div class="title">
20767         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
20768       </div>
20769       <div class="date">
20770         12th October 2012
20771       </div>
20772       <div class="body">
20773         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
20774 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
20775 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
20776 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
20777 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
20778 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
20779 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
20780 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
20781 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
20782 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
20783 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
20784 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
20785 matter".</p>
20786
20787 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
20788 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
20789 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
20790 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
20791 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
20792 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
20793 to argue its side.</p>
20794
20795 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
20796 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
20797 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
20798 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
20799
20800 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
20801 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
20802 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
20803
20804       </div>
20805       <div class="tags">
20806
20807
20808         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis</a>.
20809
20810
20811       </div>
20812     </div>
20813     <div class="padding"></div>
20814
20815     <div class="entry">
20816       <div class="title">
20817         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_local_library_collecting_the__wrong__computer_books_.html">Why is your local library collecting the "wrong" computer books?</a>
20818       </div>
20819       <div class="date">
20820          3rd October 2012
20821       </div>
20822       <div class="body">
20823         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
20824 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
20825 the computer science book collection available in his local
20826 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
20827 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
20828 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
20829 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
20830 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
20831 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
20832 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
20833 recently published books.</p>
20834
20835 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
20836 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
20837 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
20838 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
20839 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
20840 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
20841 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
20842 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
20843 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
20844 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
20845 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
20846 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
20847 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
20848 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
20849 for the library that evening.</p>
20850
20851 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
20852 going to know that for example
20853 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
20854 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
20855 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
20856 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
20857 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
20858 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
20859 book right away.</p>
20860
20861       </div>
20862       <div class="tags">
20863
20864
20865         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20866
20867
20868       </div>
20869     </div>
20870     <div class="padding"></div>
20871
20872     <div class="entry">
20873       <div class="title">
20874         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Seventy_percent_done_with_Norwegian_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html">Seventy percent done with Norwegian docbook version of Free Culture</a>
20875       </div>
20876       <div class="date">
20877         23rd September 2012
20878       </div>
20879       <div class="body">
20880         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
20881 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
20882 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
20883 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
20884 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
20885 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
20886
20887 When I started, I
20888 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
20889 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
20890 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
20891 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
20892 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
20893 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
20894 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
20895
20896 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
20897
20898 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
20899 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
20900 the project files currently available from
20901 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
20902
20903 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
20904 the updated
20905 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
20906 and
20907 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
20908 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
20909 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
20910 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
20911
20912       </div>
20913       <div class="tags">
20914
20915
20916         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
20917
20918
20919       </div>
20920     </div>
20921     <div class="padding"></div>
20922
20923     <div class="entry">
20924       <div class="title">
20925         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
20926       </div>
20927       <div class="date">
20928         17th September 2012
20929       </div>
20930       <div class="body">
20931         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
20932 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
20933 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
20934 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
20935 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
20936 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
20937 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
20938
20939 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20940
20941 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
20942 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
20943 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
20944 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
20945 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
20946 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
20947 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
20948 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
20949 training is anyway very important</p>
20950
20951 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
20952 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
20953 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
20954 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
20955 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
20956
20957 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20958 project?</strong></p>
20959
20960 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
20961 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
20962 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
20963 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
20964 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
20965 hole.</p>
20966
20967 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20968 Edu?</strong></p>
20969
20970 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
20971 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
20972 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
20973 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
20974 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
20975 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
20976 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
20977 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
20978 hassle.</p>
20979
20980 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20981 Edu?</strong></p>
20982
20983 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
20984 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
20985 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
20986 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
20987 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
20988 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
20989 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
20990 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
20991
20992 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20993
20994 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
20995 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
20996 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
20997 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
20998 has the same...</p>
20999
21000 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
21001 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
21002 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
21003 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
21004
21005 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21006 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21007
21008 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
21009 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
21010 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
21011
21012 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
21013 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
21014 don't.</p>
21015
21016 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
21017 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
21018 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
21019 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
21020 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
21021 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
21022 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
21023
21024       </div>
21025       <div class="tags">
21026
21027
21028         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
21029
21030
21031       </div>
21032     </div>
21033     <div class="padding"></div>
21034
21035     <div class="entry">
21036       <div class="title">
21037         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
21038       </div>
21039       <div class="date">
21040         15th September 2012
21041       </div>
21042       <div class="body">
21043         <p>After the
21044 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
21045 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
21046 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
21047 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
21048 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
21049 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
21050 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
21051 was
21052 <a href="http://ietf.10.n7.nabble.com/New-Non-WG-Mailing-List-video-codec-Video-codec-BoF-discussion-list-td119548.html">created 2012-08-20</a>.  It is intended to discuss the topic and if a
21053 formal working group should be formed.</p>
21054
21055 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
21056 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
21057 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
21058 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
21059 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
21060 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
21061 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
21062 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
21063
21064 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
21065 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
21066 IETF.</p>
21067
21068       </div>
21069       <div class="tags">
21070
21071
21072         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
21073
21074
21075       </div>
21076     </div>
21077     <div class="padding"></div>
21078
21079     <div class="entry">
21080       <div class="title">
21081         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
21082       </div>
21083       <div class="date">
21084         12th September 2012
21085       </div>
21086       <div class="body">
21087         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
21088 publication of of
21089 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
21090 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
21091 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
21092 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
21093 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
21094 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
21095 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
21096 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
21097 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
21098 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
21099
21100 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
21101 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
21102 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
21103 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
21104
21105 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
21106 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
21107
21108       </div>
21109       <div class="tags">
21110
21111
21112         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
21113
21114
21115       </div>
21116     </div>
21117     <div class="padding"></div>
21118
21119     <div class="entry">
21120       <div class="title">
21121         <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>
21122       </div>
21123       <div class="date">
21124          7th September 2012
21125       </div>
21126       <div class="body">
21127         <p>As I
21128 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
21129 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
21130 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
21131 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
21132 repository for the project</a>.</p>
21133
21134 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
21135 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
21136 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
21137 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
21138
21139 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
21140 PostScript formats at
21141 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
21142 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
21143
21144       </div>
21145       <div class="tags">
21146
21147
21148         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>.
21149
21150
21151       </div>
21152     </div>
21153     <div class="padding"></div>
21154
21155     <div class="entry">
21156       <div class="title">
21157         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_forced_Microsoft_to_open_Office__and_don_t_forget_Officeshots_.html">Free software forced Microsoft to open Office (and don't forget Officeshots)</a>
21158       </div>
21159       <div class="date">
21160         23rd August 2012
21161       </div>
21162       <div class="body">
21163         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
21164 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
21165 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
21166 revisit the great site
21167 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
21168 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
21169 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
21170
21171       </div>
21172       <div class="tags">
21173
21174
21175         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
21176
21177
21178       </div>
21179     </div>
21180     <div class="padding"></div>
21181
21182     <div class="entry">
21183       <div class="title">
21184         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_way_there_with_translated_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html">Half way there with translated docbook version of Free Culture</a>
21185       </div>
21186       <div class="date">
21187         17th August 2012
21188       </div>
21189       <div class="body">
21190         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
21191 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
21192 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
21193 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
21194 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
21195 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
21196 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
21197 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
21198 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
21199 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
21200 summer I
21201 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
21202 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
21203 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
21204
21205 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
21206 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
21207 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
21208 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
21209 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
21210 progress:</p>
21211
21212 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
21213
21214 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
21215 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
21216 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
21217 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
21218 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
21219 english version of the docbook source.</p>
21220
21221 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
21222 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
21223 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
21224 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
21225 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
21226 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
21227 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
21228 project files currently available from <a
21229 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
21230
21231 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
21232 the updated
21233 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
21234 and
21235 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
21236 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
21237 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
21238 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
21239
21240       </div>
21241       <div class="tags">
21242
21243
21244         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
21245
21246
21247       </div>
21248     </div>
21249     <div class="padding"></div>
21250
21251     <div class="entry">
21252       <div class="title">
21253         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Notes_on_language_codes_for_Norwegian_docbook_processing___.html">Notes on language codes for Norwegian docbook processing...</a>
21254       </div>
21255       <div class="date">
21256         10th August 2012
21257       </div>
21258       <div class="body">
21259         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
21260 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
21261 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
21262 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
21263 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
21264 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
21265 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
21266 case for the language
21267 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
21268 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
21269
21270 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
21271 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
21272 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
21273 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
21274 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
21275
21276 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
21277 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
21278 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
21279 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
21280 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
21281 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
21282 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
21283 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
21284 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
21285 alias for 'nb'.</p>
21286
21287 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
21288 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
21289 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
21290 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
21291 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
21292 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
21293 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
21294 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
21295 at the same time. :(</p>
21296
21297 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
21298 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
21299 processors. :(</p>
21300
21301 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
21302
21303       </div>
21304       <div class="tags">
21305
21306
21307         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
21308
21309
21310       </div>
21311     </div>
21312     <div class="padding"></div>
21313
21314     <div class="entry">
21315       <div class="title">
21316         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
21317       </div>
21318       <div class="date">
21319         31st July 2012
21320       </div>
21321       <div class="body">
21322         <p>I tried to send this text to the
21323 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
21324 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
21325 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
21326 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
21327 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
21328 out.</p>
21329
21330 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
21331 learning curve at the moment.</p>
21332
21333 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
21334 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
21335 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
21336 available from
21337 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
21338 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
21339 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
21340 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
21341 Squeeze.</p>
21342
21343 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
21344 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
21345 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
21346 problems.</p>
21347
21348 <ul>
21349
21350 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
21351    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
21352    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
21353    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
21354    index references spanning several pages (See
21355    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
21356    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
21357    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
21358
21359 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
21360    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
21361    #683163</a>).</li>
21362
21363 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
21364    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
21365    footnote and text body, see
21366    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
21367    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
21368    refs listed are not right).</li>
21369
21370 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
21371
21372 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
21373    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
21374
21375 </ul>
21376
21377 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
21378 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
21379 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
21380
21381 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
21382
21383       </div>
21384       <div class="tags">
21385
21386
21387         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
21388
21389
21390       </div>
21391     </div>
21392     <div class="padding"></div>
21393
21394     <div class="entry">
21395       <div class="title">
21396         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">Free Culture in Norwegian - 5 chapters done, 74 percent left to do</a>
21397       </div>
21398       <div class="date">
21399         21st July 2012
21400       </div>
21401       <div class="body">
21402         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
21403 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
21404 norwegian version</a> of the book
21405 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
21406 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
21407 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
21408 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
21409 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
21410
21411 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
21412 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
21413 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
21414 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
21415 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
21416 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
21417 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
21418 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
21419 print. :)</p>
21420
21421 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
21422 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
21423 language.</p>
21424
21425       </div>
21426       <div class="tags">
21427
21428
21429         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
21430
21431
21432       </div>
21433     </div>
21434     <div class="padding"></div>
21435
21436     <div class="entry">
21437       <div class="title">
21438         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html">Call for help from docbook expert to tag Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a>
21439       </div>
21440       <div class="date">
21441         16th July 2012
21442       </div>
21443       <div class="body">
21444         <p>I am currently working on a
21445 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
21446 to translate</a> the book
21447 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
21448 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
21449 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
21450 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
21451 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
21452 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
21453 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
21454
21455 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
21456 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
21457 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
21458 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
21459 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
21460 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
21461 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
21462 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
21463 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
21464
21465       </div>
21466       <div class="tags">
21467
21468
21469         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
21470
21471
21472       </div>
21473     </div>
21474     <div class="padding"></div>
21475
21476     <div class="entry">
21477       <div class="title">
21478         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
21479       </div>
21480       <div class="date">
21481          9th July 2012
21482       </div>
21483       <div class="body">
21484         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
21485 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
21486 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
21487 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
21488 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
21489 to adjust and scale the just released
21490 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
21491 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
21492 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
21493
21494 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21495
21496 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
21497 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
21498 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
21499 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
21500 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
21501 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
21502 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
21503 perspective when working with IT.</p>
21504
21505 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21506 project?</strong></p>
21507
21508 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
21509 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
21510 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
21511 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
21512 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
21513 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
21514
21515 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21516 Edu?</strong></p>
21517
21518 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
21519 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
21520 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
21521 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
21522 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
21523 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
21524 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
21525 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
21526 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
21527 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
21528 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
21529 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
21530 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
21531 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
21532 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
21533 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
21534 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
21535 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
21536 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
21537 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
21538 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
21539 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
21540 quicker to update.
21541
21542 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21543 Edu?</strong></p>
21544
21545 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
21546 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
21547 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
21548 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
21549 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
21550 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
21551
21552 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
21553 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
21554 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
21555 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
21556 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
21557 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
21558 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
21559 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
21560 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
21561 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
21562 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
21563 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
21564 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
21565 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
21566 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
21567
21568 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
21569 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
21570 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
21571 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
21572 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
21573 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
21574 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
21575 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
21576
21577 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
21578 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
21579 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
21580 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
21581 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
21582 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
21583 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
21584 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
21585 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
21586 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
21587 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
21588 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
21589 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
21590 sound file.</p>
21591
21592 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
21593 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
21594 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
21595 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
21596 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
21597 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
21598 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
21599 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
21600 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
21601
21602 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21603
21604 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
21605 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
21606 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
21607 )</p>
21608
21609 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21610 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21611
21612 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
21613 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
21614 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
21615 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
21616 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
21617 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
21618 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
21619 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
21620 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
21621 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
21622 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
21623 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
21624 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
21625 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
21626 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
21627
21628 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
21629 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
21630 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
21631 management with Airtime</a>,
21632 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
21633 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
21634 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
21635 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
21636 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
21637
21638       </div>
21639       <div class="tags">
21640
21641
21642         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
21643
21644
21645       </div>
21646     </div>
21647     <div class="padding"></div>
21648
21649     <div class="entry">
21650       <div class="title">
21651         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
21652       </div>
21653       <div class="date">
21654          8th July 2012
21655       </div>
21656       <div class="body">
21657         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
21658 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
21659 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
21660 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
21661 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
21662 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
21663 Steinberg in his blog post
21664 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
21665 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
21666 spending of your tax money.</p>
21667
21668 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
21669 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
21670 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
21671 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
21672 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
21673 purchases.</p>
21674
21675       </div>
21676       <div class="tags">
21677
21678
21679         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21680
21681
21682       </div>
21683     </div>
21684     <div class="padding"></div>
21685
21686     <div class="entry">
21687       <div class="title">
21688         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
21689       </div>
21690       <div class="date">
21691          7th July 2012
21692       </div>
21693       <div class="body">
21694         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
21695 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
21696 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
21697 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
21698 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
21699 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
21700 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
21701 receive.  The software is
21702
21703 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
21704 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
21705 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
21706 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
21707 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
21708 Windows</a>.</p>
21709
21710 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
21711 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
21712
21713 <p><ul>
21714
21715   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
21716     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
21717
21718   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
21719     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
21720     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
21721     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
21722     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
21723     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
21724     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
21725     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
21726     </li>
21727
21728   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
21729     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
21730
21731   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
21732     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
21733
21734   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
21735     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
21736
21737   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
21738
21739   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
21740     formats </li>
21741
21742   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
21743     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
21744     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
21745     (as separate sets)</li>
21746
21747   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
21748     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
21749     percentage)</li>
21750
21751   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
21752     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
21753     memory):
21754     <ul>
21755       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
21756       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
21757       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
21758       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
21759       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
21760       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
21761       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
21762       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
21763       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
21764       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
21765           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
21766           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
21767           activity)</li>
21768       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
21769       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
21770     </ul></li>
21771
21772   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
21773     <ul>
21774       <li>Break periods</li>
21775       <li>For teacher(s):
21776         <ul>
21777           <li>Not available periods</li>
21778           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
21779           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
21780           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
21781           <li>Min hours daily</li>
21782           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
21783
21784           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
21785             days per week</li>
21786         </ul></li>
21787       <li>For students (sets):
21788         <ul>
21789           <li>Not available periods</li>
21790           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
21791           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
21792           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
21793           <li>Min hours daily</li>
21794           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
21795
21796           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
21797             days per week</li>
21798         </ul></li>
21799       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
21800         <ul>
21801           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
21802           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
21803           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
21804           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
21805           <li>End(s) students day</li>
21806           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
21807           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
21808             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
21809           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
21810           <li>Not overlapping</li>
21811           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
21812           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
21813         </ul></li>
21814     </ul></li>
21815
21816   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
21817     <ul>
21818       <li>Room not available periods</li>
21819       <li>For teacher(s):
21820         <ul>
21821           <li>Home room(s)</li>
21822           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
21823           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
21824         </ul>
21825       </li>
21826
21827       <li>For students (sets):
21828         <ul>
21829           <li>Home room(s)</li>
21830           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
21831           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
21832         </ul>
21833       </li>
21834       <li>Preferred room(s):
21835         <ul>
21836           <li>For a subject</li>
21837           <li>For an activity tag</li>
21838           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
21839           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
21840         </ul>
21841       </li>
21842
21843       <li>For a set of activities:
21844         <ul>
21845           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
21846         </ul>
21847       </li>
21848     </ul>
21849   </li>
21850 </ul></p>
21851
21852 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
21853 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
21854 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
21855 manually, check it out.
21856
21857 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
21858 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
21859 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
21860 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
21861 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
21862 section</a>.</p>
21863
21864       </div>
21865       <div class="tags">
21866
21867
21868         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
21869
21870
21871       </div>
21872     </div>
21873     <div class="padding"></div>
21874
21875     <div class="entry">
21876       <div class="title">
21877         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html">Can Zimbra be told to send autoreplies to the From: address?</a>
21878       </div>
21879       <div class="date">
21880          3rd July 2012
21881       </div>
21882       <div class="body">
21883         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
21884 project (Norwegian version of
21885 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
21886 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
21887 a problem with the municipalities using
21888 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
21889 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
21890 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
21891 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
21892 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
21893 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
21894 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
21895 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
21896 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
21897 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
21898 the From: header.</p>
21899
21900 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
21901 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
21902 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
21903 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
21904 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
21905 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
21906 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
21907 behaviour.</p>
21908
21909 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
21910 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
21911 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
21912 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
21913 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
21914 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
21915 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
21916
21917       </div>
21918       <div class="tags">
21919
21920
21921         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
21922
21923
21924       </div>
21925     </div>
21926     <div class="padding"></div>
21927
21928     <div class="entry">
21929       <div class="title">
21930         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html">Debian Edu interview: José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez</a>
21931       </div>
21932       <div class="date">
21933         26th June 2012
21934       </div>
21935       <div class="body">
21936         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
21937 another interview with the people behind
21938 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
21939 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
21940 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
21941 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
21942 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
21943 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
21944 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
21945
21946 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21947
21948 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
21949 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
21950 ICT in schools</p>
21951
21952 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21953 project?</strong></p>
21954
21955 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
21956 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
21957 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
21958 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
21959
21960 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21961 Edu?</strong></p>
21962
21963 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
21964 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
21965 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
21966 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
21967
21968 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21969 Edu?</strong></p>
21970
21971 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
21972 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
21973 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
21974 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
21975 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
21976 technologies in school.</p>
21977
21978 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21979
21980 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
21981 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
21982 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
21983
21984 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21985 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21986
21987 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
21988 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
21989 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
21990 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
21991
21992 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
21993 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
21994 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
21995
21996 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
21997 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
21998 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
21999 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
22000 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
22001 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
22002 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
22003 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
22004 working there.</p>
22005
22006       </div>
22007       <div class="tags">
22008
22009
22010         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
22011
22012
22013       </div>
22014     </div>
22015     <div class="padding"></div>
22016
22017     <div class="entry">
22018       <div class="title">
22019         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
22020       </div>
22021       <div class="date">
22022         24th June 2012
22023       </div>
22024       <div class="body">
22025         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
22026 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
22027 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
22028 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
22029 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
22030 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
22031 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
22032 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
22033 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
22034 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
22035 missing in my book.</p>
22036
22037 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
22038 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
22039 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
22040 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
22041 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
22042 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
22043 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
22044
22045       </div>
22046       <div class="tags">
22047
22048
22049         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>.
22050
22051
22052       </div>
22053     </div>
22054     <div class="padding"></div>
22055
22056     <div class="entry">
22057       <div class="title">
22058         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html">Debian Edu - some ideas for the future versions</a>
22059       </div>
22060       <div class="date">
22061         11th June 2012
22062       </div>
22063       <div class="body">
22064         <p>During my work on
22065 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
22066 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
22067 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
22068 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
22069 explanation.</p>
22070
22071 <p><ul>
22072
22073 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
22074 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
22075 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
22076 system depend on tasksel tasks in
22077 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
22078 installation.</li>
22079
22080 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
22081 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
22082 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
22083 at least try to enable it for these services:
22084 <ul>
22085
22086   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
22087     quotas.</li>
22088   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
22089   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
22090   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
22091   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
22092   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
22093
22094 </ul></li>
22095
22096 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
22097 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
22098 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
22099 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
22100
22101 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
22102 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
22103 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
22104
22105 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
22106 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
22107 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
22108 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
22109 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
22110 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
22111
22112 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
22113 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
22114 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
22115 in Wheezy.
22116
22117 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
22118 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
22119 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
22120
22121 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
22122 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
22123 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
22124 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
22125
22126 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
22127 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
22128 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
22129 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
22130
22131 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
22132 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
22133 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
22134
22135 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
22136 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
22137 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
22138
22139 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
22140 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
22141 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
22142 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
22143 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
22144
22145 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
22146 <ul>
22147
22148 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
22149 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
22150 <li>and probably more?</li>
22151 </ul></li>
22152
22153 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
22154 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
22155 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
22156 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
22157 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
22158 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
22159 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
22160 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
22161
22162
22163 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
22164 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
22165 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
22166 use.</li>
22167
22168 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
22169 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
22170 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
22171 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
22172 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
22173
22174 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
22175 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
22176 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
22177 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
22178 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
22179 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
22180
22181 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
22182 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
22183 There are at least three implementations,
22184 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
22185 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
22186 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
22187 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
22188 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
22189 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
22190 given room.</li>
22191
22192 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
22193 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
22194 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
22195 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
22196 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
22197 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
22198 investigated.</li>
22199
22200 </ul></p>
22201
22202 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
22203 version.</p>
22204
22205       </div>
22206       <div class="tags">
22207
22208
22209         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22210
22211
22212       </div>
22213     </div>
22214     <div class="padding"></div>
22215
22216     <div class="entry">
22217       <div class="title">
22218         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html">TV with face recognition, for improved viewer experience</a>
22219       </div>
22220       <div class="date">
22221          9th June 2012
22222       </div>
22223       <div class="body">
22224         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
22225 <a href="http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/12/06/09/0012247/intel-to-launch-tv-service-with-facial-recognition-by-end-of-the-year">TV
22226 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
22227 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
22228 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
22229 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
22230 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
22231 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
22232 be willing to pay for.</p>
22233
22234 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
22235 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
22236 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
22237 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
22238 Orwell</a>.</p>
22239
22240       </div>
22241       <div class="tags">
22242
22243
22244         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
22245
22246
22247       </div>
22248     </div>
22249     <div class="padding"></div>
22250
22251     <div class="entry">
22252       <div class="title">
22253         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html">Web service to look up HP and Dell computer hardware support status</a>
22254       </div>
22255       <div class="date">
22256          6th June 2012
22257       </div>
22258       <div class="body">
22259         <p>A few days ago
22260 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
22261 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
22262 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
22263 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
22264 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
22265 code for HP, Dell and IBM
22266 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
22267 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
22268 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
22269 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
22270 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
22271
22272 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
22273 output:
22274
22275 <blockquote><pre>
22276 % GET <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&vendor=Dell&servicetag=2v1xwn1">https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&vendor=Dell&servicetag=2v1xwn1</a>
22277 supportstatus({"servicetag": "2v1xwn1", "warrantyend": "2013-11-24", "shipped": "2010-11-24", "scrapestamputc": "2012-06-06T20:26:56.965847", "scrapedurl": "http://143.166.84.118/services/assetservice.asmx?WSDL", "vendor": "Dell", "productid": ""})
22278 %
22279 </pre></blockquote>
22280
22281 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
22282 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
22283 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
22284
22285       </div>
22286       <div class="tags">
22287
22288
22289         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
22290
22291
22292       </div>
22293     </div>
22294     <div class="padding"></div>
22295
22296     <div class="entry">
22297       <div class="title">
22298         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
22299       </div>
22300       <div class="date">
22301          2nd June 2012
22302       </div>
22303       <div class="body">
22304         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
22305 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
22306 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
22307 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
22308 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
22309 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
22310
22311 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
22312
22313 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
22314 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
22315 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
22316 by Angela).</p>
22317
22318 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
22319 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
22320 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
22321 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
22322 becoming an osteopath.</p>
22323
22324 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
22325 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
22326 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
22327 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
22328 skills with communication skills.</p>
22329
22330 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
22331 project?</strong></p>
22332
22333 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
22334 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
22335 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
22336 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
22337 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
22338
22339 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
22340 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
22341 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
22342 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
22343 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
22344 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
22345 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
22346 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
22347 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
22348
22349 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
22350 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
22351 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
22352
22353 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
22354
22355 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
22356 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
22357 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
22358 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
22359 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
22360 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
22361 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
22362 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
22363 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
22364 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
22365 point.</p>
22366
22367 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
22368 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
22369 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
22370 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
22371 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
22372 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
22373
22374 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
22375 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
22376 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
22377 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
22378 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
22379 spare time.</p>
22380
22381 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
22382 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
22383 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
22384 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
22385 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
22386
22387 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
22388 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
22389 avoidance do exist.</p>
22390
22391 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
22392 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
22393 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
22394 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
22395 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
22396 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
22397 and probably a gain for all.</p>
22398
22399 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22400 Edu?</strong></p>
22401
22402 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
22403 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
22404 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
22405 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
22406 project communication, honest communication within the group of
22407 developers, etc.</p>
22408
22409 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22410 Edu?</strong></p>
22411
22412 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
22413
22414 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
22415 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
22416 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
22417 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
22418 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
22419 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
22420 contribute).</p>
22421
22422 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
22423 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
22424 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
22425 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
22426 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
22427 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
22428 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
22429 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
22430 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
22431 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
22432
22433 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
22434
22435 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
22436
22437 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
22438 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
22439 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
22440
22441 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
22442 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
22443 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
22444 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
22445
22446 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
22447 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
22448 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
22449 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
22450 whiteboard.</p>
22451
22452 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
22453
22454 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
22455 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
22456
22457 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
22458 enrol people.</p>
22459
22460       </div>
22461       <div class="tags">
22462
22463
22464         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
22465
22466
22467       </div>
22468     </div>
22469     <div class="padding"></div>
22470
22471     <div class="entry">
22472       <div class="title">
22473         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">SOAP based webservice from Dell to check server support status</a>
22474       </div>
22475       <div class="date">
22476          1st June 2012
22477       </div>
22478       <div class="body">
22479         <p>A few years ago I wrote
22480 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
22481 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
22482 I have learned from colleges here at the
22483 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
22484 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
22485 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
22486 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
22487 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
22488
22489 <p><pre>
22490 use strict;
22491 use warnings;
22492 use SOAP::Lite;
22493 use Data::Dumper;
22494 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
22495 my $App = 'test';
22496 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
22497 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
22498 my $s = SOAP::Lite
22499     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
22500     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
22501     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
22502     ;
22503 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
22504     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
22505     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
22506     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
22507 );
22508 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
22509 </pre></p>
22510
22511 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
22512
22513 <p><pre>
22514 $VAR1 = {
22515           'Asset' => {
22516                      'Entitlements' => {
22517                                        'EntitlementData' => [
22518                                                             {
22519                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
22520                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
22521                                                               'Provider' => '',
22522                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
22523                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
22524                                                             },
22525                                                             {
22526                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
22527                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
22528                                                               'Provider' => '',
22529                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
22530                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
22531                                                             },
22532                                                             {
22533                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
22534                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
22535                                                               'Provider' => '',
22536                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
22537                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
22538                                                             }
22539                                                           ]
22540                                      },
22541                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
22542                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
22543                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
22544                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
22545                                           'Buid' => '2323',
22546                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
22547                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
22548                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
22549                                         }
22550                    }
22551         };
22552 </pre></p>
22553
22554 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
22555 service outside the
22556 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
22557 documentation</a>, and according to
22558 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
22559 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
22560 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
22561
22562 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
22563 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
22564
22565       </div>
22566       <div class="tags">
22567
22568
22569         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
22570
22571
22572       </div>
22573     </div>
22574     <div class="padding"></div>
22575
22576     <div class="entry">
22577       <div class="title">
22578         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
22579       </div>
22580       <div class="date">
22581         31st May 2012
22582       </div>
22583       <div class="body">
22584         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
22585 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
22586 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
22587 running Debian Squeeze, where
22588 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
22589 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
22590 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
22591 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
22592 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
22593 another day.</p>
22594
22595 <p>After calibration, I get a
22596 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
22597 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
22598 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
22599 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
22600 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
22601 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
22602 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
22603 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
22604 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
22605 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
22606 and a simple</p>
22607
22608 <p><pre>
22609 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
22610 </pre></p>
22611
22612 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
22613 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
22614 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
22615 enough for now.</p>
22616
22617       </div>
22618       <div class="tags">
22619
22620
22621         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22622
22623
22624       </div>
22625     </div>
22626     <div class="padding"></div>
22627
22628     <div class="entry">
22629       <div class="title">
22630         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
22631       </div>
22632       <div class="date">
22633         27th May 2012
22634       </div>
22635       <div class="body">
22636         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
22637 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
22638 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
22639 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
22640 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
22641 since then, helping to make sure the
22642 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
22643 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
22644
22645 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
22646
22647 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
22648 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
22649 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
22650 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
22651 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
22652 our computer network.</p>
22653
22654 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
22655 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
22656 (4 months).</p>
22657
22658 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
22659 project?</strong></p>
22660
22661 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
22662 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
22663 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
22664 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
22665 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
22666 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
22667 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
22668 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
22669 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
22670 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
22671 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
22672 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
22673 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
22674 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
22675
22676 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22677 Edu?</strong></p>
22678
22679 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
22680 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
22681 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
22682 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
22683 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
22684 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
22685 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
22686 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
22687
22688 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22689 Edu?</strong></p>
22690
22691 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
22692 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
22693 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
22694 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
22695 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
22696 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
22697 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
22698 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
22699 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
22700 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
22701 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
22702 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
22703
22704 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
22705
22706 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
22707 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
22708 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
22709
22710 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
22711 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
22712
22713 <p><ol>
22714
22715 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
22716 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
22717 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
22718 developing.</li>
22719
22720 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
22721 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
22722 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
22723 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
22724 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
22725
22726 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
22727 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
22728 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
22729
22730 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
22731 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
22732 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
22733 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
22734
22735 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
22736 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
22737 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
22738
22739 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
22740
22741 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
22742 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
22743 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
22744 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
22745
22746 </ol></p>
22747
22748       </div>
22749       <div class="tags">
22750
22751
22752         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
22753
22754
22755       </div>
22756     </div>
22757     <div class="padding"></div>
22758
22759     <div class="entry">
22760       <div class="title">
22761         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
22762       </div>
22763       <div class="date">
22764         26th May 2012
22765       </div>
22766       <div class="body">
22767         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
22768 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
22769 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
22770 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
22771 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
22772
22773 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
22774 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm">http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm</a>
22775 comment:</p>
22776
22777 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
22778 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
22779 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
22780 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
22781 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
22782 </blockquote></p>
22783
22784 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
22785 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
22786 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
22787 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
22788 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
22789 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
22790 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
22791 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
22792 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
22793 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
22794 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
22795 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
22796 of wasted effort.</p>
22797
22798 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
22799 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
22800 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
22801
22802 <p>See
22803 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
22804 and
22805 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
22806 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
22807 </blockquote></p>
22808
22809       </div>
22810       <div class="tags">
22811
22812
22813         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
22814
22815
22816       </div>
22817     </div>
22818     <div class="padding"></div>
22819
22820     <div class="entry">
22821       <div class="title">
22822         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html">ColorHug - USB and free software based screen color calibration</a>
22823       </div>
22824       <div class="date">
22825         18th May 2012
22826       </div>
22827       <div class="body">
22828         <p>In january, I
22829 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
22830 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
22831 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
22832 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
22833 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
22834 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
22835 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
22836 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
22837 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
22838 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
22839
22840 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
22841 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
22842 drivers. :)</p>
22843
22844       </div>
22845       <div class="tags">
22846
22847
22848         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22849
22850
22851       </div>
22852     </div>
22853     <div class="padding"></div>
22854
22855     <div class="entry">
22856       <div class="title">
22857         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
22858       </div>
22859       <div class="date">
22860         13th May 2012
22861       </div>
22862       <div class="body">
22863         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
22864 publish another interview with the people behind
22865 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
22866 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
22867 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
22868 details get right before release.
22869
22870 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
22871
22872 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
22873 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
22874 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
22875 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
22876 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
22877 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
22878 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
22879 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
22880
22881 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
22882 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
22883 home since 2006.</p>
22884
22885 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
22886 project?</strong></p>
22887
22888 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
22889 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
22890 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
22891 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
22892 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
22893 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
22894
22895 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
22896 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
22897 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
22898 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
22899 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
22900 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
22901 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
22902 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
22903 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
22904 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
22905 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
22906 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
22907 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
22908 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
22909 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
22910 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
22911
22912 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22913 Edu?</strong></p>
22914
22915 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
22916 for me as today.</p>
22917
22918 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
22919
22920 <p><ul>
22921
22922 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
22923 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
22924
22925 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
22926 cost.</li>
22927
22928 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
22929 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
22930 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
22931 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
22932 server</li>
22933
22934 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
22935 school.</li>
22936
22937 </ul></p>
22938
22939 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
22940 came up in this way:</p>
22941
22942 <p><ul>
22943
22944 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
22945 now.</li>
22946
22947 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
22948 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
22949 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
22950
22951 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
22952 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
22953 interfaces used in the past.</li>
22954
22955 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
22956 different needs.</li>
22957
22958 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
22959
22960 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
22961 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
22962 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
22963
22964 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
22965 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
22966
22967 </ul></p>
22968
22969 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
22970 Edu?</strong></p>
22971
22972 <p><ul>
22973
22974 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
22975 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
22976 whole municipality areas.</li>
22977
22978 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
22979 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
22980 politicians.</li>
22981
22982 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
22983
22984 </ul></p>
22985
22986 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
22987
22988 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
22989 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
22990 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
22991 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
22992 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
22993 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
22994
22995 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
22996 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
22997 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
22998 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
22999 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
23000
23001 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
23002 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
23003
23004 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
23005 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
23006 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
23007
23008       </div>
23009       <div class="tags">
23010
23011
23012         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
23013
23014
23015       </div>
23016     </div>
23017     <div class="padding"></div>
23018
23019     <div class="entry">
23020       <div class="title">
23021         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html">Cutting it short - and picking the right tool for the job</a>
23022       </div>
23023       <div class="date">
23024         30th April 2012
23025       </div>
23026       <div class="body">
23027         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
23028 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
23029
23030 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
23031 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
23032 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
23033 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
23034 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
23035 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
23036 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
23037 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
23038 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
23039 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
23040 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
23041 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
23042 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
23043 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
23044 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
23045 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
23046
23047 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
23048 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
23049 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
23050 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
23051 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
23052 finally found a Danish supplier
23053 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
23054 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
23055 days ago.</p>
23056
23057 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
23058 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
23059 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
23060 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
23061 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
23062 toys.</p>
23063
23064       </div>
23065       <div class="tags">
23066
23067
23068         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23069
23070
23071       </div>
23072     </div>
23073     <div class="padding"></div>
23074
23075     <div class="entry">
23076       <div class="title">
23077         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html">HTC One X - Your video?  What do you mean?</a>
23078       </div>
23079       <div class="date">
23080         26th April 2012
23081       </div>
23082       <div class="body">
23083         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
23084 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
23085 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
23086 that the video editor application included with
23087 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
23088 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
23089 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
23090
23091 <p><blockquote>
23092 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
23093 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
23094 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
23095 </blockquote></p>
23096
23097 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
23098
23099 <p><blockquote>
23100 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
23101 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
23102 </blockquote></p>
23103
23104 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
23105 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
23106 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
23107 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
23108 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
23109 video.  AMR is
23110 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
23111 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
23112 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
23113 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
23114 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
23115 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
23116 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
23117
23118 <p>I know why I prefer
23119 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
23120 standards</a> also for video.</p>
23121
23122       </div>
23123       <div class="tags">
23124
23125
23126         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
23127
23128
23129       </div>
23130     </div>
23131     <div class="padding"></div>
23132
23133     <div class="entry">
23134       <div class="title">
23135         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
23136       </div>
23137       <div class="date">
23138         19th April 2012
23139       </div>
23140       <div class="body">
23141         <p>Here in Norway, the
23142 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
23143 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
23144 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
23145 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
23146 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
23147 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
23148 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
23149 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
23150 on the same level.</p>
23151
23152 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
23153 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
23154 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
23155 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
23156 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
23157 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
23158 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
23159 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
23160 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
23161 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
23162 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
23163 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
23164 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
23165 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
23166 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
23167 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
23168 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
23169 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
23170
23171 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
23172 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
23173 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
23174 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
23175 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
23176 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
23177 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
23178 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
23179
23180 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
23181 from Simon Phipps
23182 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
23183 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
23184
23185 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
23186 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
23187 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
23188 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
23189 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
23190 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
23191 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
23192 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
23193 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
23194
23195       </div>
23196       <div class="tags">
23197
23198
23199         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
23200
23201
23202       </div>
23203     </div>
23204     <div class="padding"></div>
23205
23206     <div class="entry">
23207       <div class="title">
23208         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
23209       </div>
23210       <div class="date">
23211         15th April 2012
23212       </div>
23213       <div class="body">
23214         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
23215 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
23216 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
23217 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
23218 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
23219 up in the recently released
23220 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
23221 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
23222
23223 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
23224
23225 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
23226 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
23227 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
23228 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
23229 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
23230 information technology and science/technology.</p>
23231
23232 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
23233 project?</strong></p>
23234
23235 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
23236 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
23237 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
23238 contributing.</p>
23239
23240 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23241 Edu?</strong></p>
23242
23243 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
23244 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
23245 Debian Project!</p>
23246
23247 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23248 Edu?</strong></p>
23249
23250 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
23251 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
23252 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
23253 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
23254 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
23255 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
23256 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
23257
23258 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
23259 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
23260
23261 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
23262
23263 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
23264 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
23265 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
23266 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
23267
23268 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
23269 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
23270
23271 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
23272 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
23273 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
23274 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
23275 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
23276 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
23277 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
23278
23279 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
23280 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
23281 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
23282 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
23283 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
23284 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
23285 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
23286 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
23287
23288       </div>
23289       <div class="tags">
23290
23291
23292         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
23293
23294
23295       </div>
23296     </div>
23297     <div class="padding"></div>
23298
23299     <div class="entry">
23300       <div class="title">
23301         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
23302       </div>
23303       <div class="date">
23304          8th April 2012
23305       </div>
23306       <div class="body">
23307         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
23308 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
23309 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
23310 contributor to the
23311 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
23312 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
23313
23314 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
23315
23316 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
23317 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
23318
23319 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
23320 project?</strong></p>
23321
23322 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
23323 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
23324 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
23325 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
23326 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
23327 "localisation".</p>
23328
23329 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23330 Edu?</strong></p>
23331
23332 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23333 Edu?</strong></p>
23334
23335 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
23336 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
23337 education system.</p>
23338
23339 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
23340 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
23341 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
23342 money on the latest hardware.</p>
23343
23344 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
23345
23346 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
23347 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
23348 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
23349
23350 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
23351 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
23352
23353 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
23354 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
23355 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
23356
23357       </div>
23358       <div class="tags">
23359
23360
23361         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
23362
23363
23364       </div>
23365     </div>
23366     <div class="padding"></div>
23367
23368     <div class="entry">
23369       <div class="title">
23370         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html">Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround</a>
23371       </div>
23372       <div class="date">
23373          6th April 2012
23374       </div>
23375       <div class="body">
23376         <p>Recently I have spent time with
23377 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
23378 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
23379 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
23380 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
23381 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
23382 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
23383 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
23384 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
23385
23386 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
23387 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
23388 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
23389 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
23390 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
23391 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
23392 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
23393 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
23394
23395 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
23396 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
23397 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
23398 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
23399 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
23400 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
23401 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
23402 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
23403
23404 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
23405 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
23406 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
23407 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
23408 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
23409 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
23410 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
23411 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
23412 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
23413 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
23414
23415 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
23416 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
23417 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
23418 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
23419
23420 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
23421 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
23422
23423 <p>Update 2015-08-04: The
23424 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/">source
23425 of the scripts and associated Debian package</a> is available from the
23426 Debian Edu github repository.</p>
23427
23428       </div>
23429       <div class="tags">
23430
23431
23432         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23433
23434
23435       </div>
23436     </div>
23437     <div class="padding"></div>
23438
23439     <div class="entry">
23440       <div class="title">
23441         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
23442       </div>
23443       <div class="date">
23444          5th April 2012
23445       </div>
23446       <div class="body">
23447         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
23448 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
23449 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
23450 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
23451 for schools.  Check out his article
23452 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
23453 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
23454
23455       </div>
23456       <div class="tags">
23457
23458
23459         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23460
23461
23462       </div>
23463     </div>
23464     <div class="padding"></div>
23465
23466     <div class="entry">
23467       <div class="title">
23468         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
23469       </div>
23470       <div class="date">
23471          1st April 2012
23472       </div>
23473       <div class="body">
23474         <p>Germany is a core area for the
23475 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
23476 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
23477 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
23478
23479 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
23480
23481 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
23482 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
23483 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
23484 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
23485 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
23486 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
23487 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
23488 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
23489
23490 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
23491 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
23492 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
23493 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
23494 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
23495 the end of April this year.</p>
23496
23497 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
23498 project?</strong></p>
23499
23500 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
23501 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
23502 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
23503 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
23504 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
23505 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
23506 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
23507 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
23508 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
23509 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
23510 Skolelinux.</p>
23511
23512 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
23513 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
23514 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
23515 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
23516 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
23517 the admin teachers.</p>
23518
23519 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23520 Edu?</strong></p>
23521
23522 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
23523 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
23524 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
23525
23526 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
23527 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
23528 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
23529 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
23530 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
23531
23532 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23533 Edu?</strong></p>
23534
23535 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
23536
23537 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
23538
23539 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
23540 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
23541 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
23542 LibreOffice.</p>
23543
23544 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
23545 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
23546
23547 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
23548 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
23549 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
23550
23551       </div>
23552       <div class="tags">
23553
23554
23555         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
23556
23557
23558       </div>
23559     </div>
23560     <div class="padding"></div>
23561
23562     <div class="entry">
23563       <div class="title">
23564         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html">Debian Edu screencast: Checking email with kmail using Kerberos authentication</a>
23565       </div>
23566       <div class="date">
23567         25th March 2012
23568       </div>
23569       <div class="body">
23570         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
23571
23572 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
23573 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
23574 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
23575 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
23576 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
23577 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
23578 and download as a
23579 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
23580 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
23581
23582 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
23583   <source src="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"' />
23584     <p>Download video as
23585       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
23586 </video></p>
23587
23588       </div>
23589       <div class="tags">
23590
23591
23592         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23593
23594
23595       </div>
23596     </div>
23597     <div class="padding"></div>
23598
23599     <div class="entry">
23600       <div class="title">
23601         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
23602       </div>
23603       <div class="date">
23604         19th March 2012
23605       </div>
23606       <div class="body">
23607         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
23608 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
23609 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
23610 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
23611 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
23612
23613 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
23614
23615 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
23616 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
23617 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
23618 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
23619 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
23620 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
23621 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
23622 installations.</p>
23623
23624 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
23625 project?</strong></p>
23626
23627 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
23628 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
23629 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
23630 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
23631 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
23632 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
23633 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
23634 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
23635 these things we decided to try it.</p>
23636
23637 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23638 Edu?</strong></p>
23639
23640 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
23641 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
23642 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
23643 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
23644 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
23645 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
23646 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
23647 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
23648
23649 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23650 Edu?</strong></p>
23651
23652 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
23653 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
23654 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
23655 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
23656 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
23657
23658 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
23659
23660 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
23661 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
23662 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
23663 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
23664 that counts...)</p>
23665
23666 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
23667 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
23668
23669 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
23670 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
23671 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
23672 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
23673 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
23674 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
23675 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
23676 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
23677 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
23678 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
23679 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
23680
23681 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
23682 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
23683 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
23684
23685       </div>
23686       <div class="tags">
23687
23688
23689         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
23690
23691
23692       </div>
23693     </div>
23694     <div class="padding"></div>
23695
23696     <div class="entry">
23697       <div class="title">
23698         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
23699       </div>
23700       <div class="date">
23701         16th March 2012
23702       </div>
23703       <div class="body">
23704         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
23705 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
23706 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
23707 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
23708
23709 <ol>
23710
23711 <li>The documentation is written in a
23712 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
23713 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
23714 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
23715 docbook XML.</li>
23716
23717 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
23718 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
23719 with the translated text.</li>
23720
23721 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
23722 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
23723 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
23724 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
23725 images.</li>
23726
23727 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
23728 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
23729
23730 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
23731 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
23732
23733 </ol>
23734
23735 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
23736 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
23737 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
23738 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
23739 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
23740
23741 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
23742 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
23743 package</a>.</p>
23744
23745       </div>
23746       <div class="tags">
23747
23748
23749         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23750
23751
23752       </div>
23753     </div>
23754     <div class="padding"></div>
23755
23756     <div class="entry">
23757       <div class="title">
23758         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
23759       </div>
23760       <div class="date">
23761         11th March 2012
23762       </div>
23763       <div class="body">
23764         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
23765 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
23766 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
23767 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
23768 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
23769 you have not done so already.</p>
23770
23771 <p>I plan to present the new version at
23772 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
23773 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
23774 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
23775
23776       </div>
23777       <div class="tags">
23778
23779
23780         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23781
23782
23783       </div>
23784     </div>
23785     <div class="padding"></div>
23786
23787     <div class="entry">
23788       <div class="title">
23789         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
23790       </div>
23791       <div class="date">
23792          9th March 2012
23793       </div>
23794       <div class="body">
23795         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
23796 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
23797 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
23798 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
23799 more international audience.</p>
23800
23801 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
23802 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
23803 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
23804 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
23805 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
23806 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
23807 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
23808
23809
23810 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
23811
23812 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
23813 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
23814 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
23815 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
23816 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
23817 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
23818 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
23819 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
23820 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
23821 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
23822 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
23823
23824 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
23825 project?</strong></p>
23826
23827 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
23828 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
23829 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
23830 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
23831 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
23832 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
23833 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
23834 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
23835 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
23836 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
23837 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
23838 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
23839 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
23840
23841 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23842 Edu?</strong></p>
23843
23844 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
23845 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
23846 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
23847 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
23848 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
23849 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
23850 Japan.</p>
23851
23852 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
23853 Edu?</strong></p>
23854
23855 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
23856 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
23857 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
23858 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
23859 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
23860 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
23861 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
23862 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
23863 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
23864 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
23865 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
23866 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
23867 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
23868 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
23869 help.</p>
23870
23871 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
23872
23873 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
23874 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
23875 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
23876 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
23877 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
23878 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
23879 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
23880 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
23881 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
23882 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
23883 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
23884
23885 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
23886 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
23887
23888 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
23889 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
23890 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
23891 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
23892 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
23893 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
23894 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
23895 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
23896 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
23897 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
23898 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
23899 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
23900
23901       </div>
23902       <div class="tags">
23903
23904
23905         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
23906
23907
23908       </div>
23909     </div>
23910     <div class="padding"></div>
23911
23912     <div class="entry">
23913       <div class="title">
23914         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html">Debian Edu screencast: Mass creation of user accounts in Squeeze</a>
23915       </div>
23916       <div class="date">
23917          7th March 2012
23918       </div>
23919       <div class="body">
23920         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
23921
23922 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
23923 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
23924 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
23925 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
23926 download as a
23927 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
23928 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
23929
23930 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
23931   <source src="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"' />
23932     <p>Download video as
23933       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
23934 </video></p>
23935
23936       </div>
23937       <div class="tags">
23938
23939
23940         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23941
23942
23943       </div>
23944     </div>
23945     <div class="padding"></div>
23946
23947     <div class="entry">
23948       <div class="title">
23949         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Third release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
23950       </div>
23951       <div class="date">
23952          4th March 2012
23953       </div>
23954       <div class="body">
23955         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
23956 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
23957 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
23958 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
23959 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
23960 need a software solution for your school.</p>
23961
23962       </div>
23963       <div class="tags">
23964
23965
23966         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23967
23968
23969       </div>
23970     </div>
23971     <div class="padding"></div>
23972
23973     <div class="entry">
23974       <div class="title">
23975         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html">Stopmotion for making stop motion animations on Linux - reloaded</a>
23976       </div>
23977       <div class="date">
23978          3rd March 2012
23979       </div>
23980       <div class="body">
23981         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
23982 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
23983 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
23984 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
23985 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
23986 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
23987 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
23988 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
23989 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
23990 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
23991 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
23992 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
23993 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
23994 year...</p>
23995
23996 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
23997 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
23998 name,
23999 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
24000 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
24001 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
24002 mean). I've been following
24003 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
24004 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
24005 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
24006 Check it out. :)</p>
24007
24008       </div>
24009       <div class="tags">
24010
24011
24012         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
24013
24014
24015       </div>
24016     </div>
24017     <div class="padding"></div>
24018
24019     <div class="entry">
24020       <div class="title">
24021         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Second release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
24022       </div>
24023       <div class="date">
24024         27th February 2012
24025       </div>
24026       <div class="body">
24027         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
24028 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
24029 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
24030 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
24031 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
24032 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
24033 need a software solution for your school.</p>
24034
24035       </div>
24036       <div class="tags">
24037
24038
24039         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24040
24041
24042       </div>
24043     </div>
24044     <div class="padding"></div>
24045
24046     <div class="entry">
24047       <div class="title">
24048         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">First release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
24049       </div>
24050       <div class="date">
24051         19th February 2012
24052       </div>
24053       <div class="body">
24054         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
24055 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
24056 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
24057 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
24058 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
24059 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
24060 solution for your school.</p>
24061
24062       </div>
24063       <div class="tags">
24064
24065
24066         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24067
24068
24069       </div>
24070     </div>
24071     <div class="padding"></div>
24072
24073     <div class="entry">
24074       <div class="title">
24075         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html">How to figure out which RAID disk to replace when it fail</a>
24076       </div>
24077       <div class="date">
24078         14th February 2012
24079       </div>
24080       <div class="body">
24081         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
24082 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
24083 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
24084 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
24085 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
24086 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
24087 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
24088 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
24089 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
24090
24091 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
24092 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
24093 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
24094 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
24095 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
24096
24097 <blockquote><pre>
24098 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
24099 do
24100     printf "Failed disk $d: "
24101     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
24102 done
24103 </blockquote></pre>
24104
24105 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
24106 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
24107
24108 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
24109
24110 <blockquote><pre>
24111 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
24112 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
24113 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
24114 </blockquote></pre>
24115
24116 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
24117 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
24118 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
24119 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
24120 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
24121 mounted inside my box.</p>
24122
24123 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
24124 Software RAID in the
24125 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
24126 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
24127 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
24128 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
24129 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
24130 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
24131
24132       </div>
24133       <div class="tags">
24134
24135
24136         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid</a>.
24137
24138
24139       </div>
24140     </div>
24141     <div class="padding"></div>
24142
24143     <div class="entry">
24144       <div class="title">
24145         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
24146       </div>
24147       <div class="date">
24148         13th February 2012
24149       </div>
24150       <div class="body">
24151         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
24152 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
24153 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
24154 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
24155 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
24156 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
24157 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
24158 change the global proxy setting by editing
24159 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
24160 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
24161
24162 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
24163 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
24164 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
24165
24166 <blockquote><pre>
24167 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
24168 {
24169    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
24170        isPlainHostName(host) ||
24171        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
24172       return "DIRECT";
24173    else
24174       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
24175 }
24176 </pre></blockquote>
24177
24178 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
24179
24180 <blockquote><pre>
24181 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
24182 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
24183 </pre></blockquote>
24184
24185 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
24186 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
24187 would be used for
24188 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
24189 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
24190 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
24191 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
24192 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
24193 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
24194 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
24195 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
24196 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
24197 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
24198
24199 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
24200 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
24201 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
24202 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
24203 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
24204 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
24205
24206 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
24207 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
24208 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
24209 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
24210 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
24211 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
24212 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
24213 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
24214 the network setup changes.</p>
24215
24216 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
24217 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
24218 draft</a> and a
24219 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
24220 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
24221
24222       </div>
24223       <div class="tags">
24224
24225
24226         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24227
24228
24229       </div>
24230     </div>
24231     <div class="padding"></div>
24232
24233     <div class="entry">
24234       <div class="title">
24235         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html">Saving power with Debian Edu / Skolelinux using shutdown-at-night</a>
24236       </div>
24237       <div class="date">
24238          5th February 2012
24239       </div>
24240       <div class="body">
24241         <p>Since the Lenny version of
24242 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
24243 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
24244 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
24245 in the morning.  This is done using the
24246 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
24247
24248 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
24249 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
24250 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
24251 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
24252 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
24253 the
24254 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
24255 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
24256 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
24257 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
24258 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
24259
24260 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
24261 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
24262 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
24263 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
24264 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
24265 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
24266 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
24267
24268 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
24269 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
24270 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
24271 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
24272 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
24273
24274       </div>
24275       <div class="tags">
24276
24277
24278         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24279
24280
24281       </div>
24282     </div>
24283     <div class="padding"></div>
24284
24285     <div class="entry">
24286       <div class="title">
24287         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Third beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
24288       </div>
24289       <div class="date">
24290          4th February 2012
24291       </div>
24292       <div class="body">
24293         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
24294 publish the third beta version of
24295 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
24296 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
24297 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
24298 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
24299 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
24300 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
24301 on the project announcement list.</p>
24302
24303 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
24304 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
24305
24306 <ul>
24307
24308 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
24309   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
24310   the installation.</li>
24311
24312 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
24313   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
24314
24315 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
24316   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
24317   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
24318
24319 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
24320   for the local system administrator is created during installation
24321   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
24322   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
24323   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
24324   up to date on the system.</li>
24325
24326 </ul>
24327
24328 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
24329 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
24330 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
24331 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
24332
24333 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
24334 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
24335 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
24336 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
24337 will see you there?</p>
24338
24339       </div>
24340       <div class="tags">
24341
24342
24343         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24344
24345
24346       </div>
24347     </div>
24348     <div class="padding"></div>
24349
24350     <div class="entry">
24351       <div class="title">
24352         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
24353       </div>
24354       <div class="date">
24355         27th January 2012
24356       </div>
24357       <div class="body">
24358         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
24359 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
24360 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
24361 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
24362 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
24363 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
24364 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
24365
24366 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
24367 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
24368 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
24369 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
24370 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
24371 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
24372 not taken care of by this.</p>
24373
24374 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
24375 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
24376 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
24377 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
24378 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
24379 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
24380 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
24381 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
24382 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
24383 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
24384 firmware packages.</p>
24385
24386 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
24387 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
24388 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
24389 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
24390 initrd with extra firmware, the
24391 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
24392 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
24393 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
24394
24395 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
24396 network cards working.  For this,
24397 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
24398 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
24399 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
24400
24401 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
24402 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
24403 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
24404
24405 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
24406 try.</p>
24407
24408       </div>
24409       <div class="tags">
24410
24411
24412         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24413
24414
24415       </div>
24416     </div>
24417     <div class="padding"></div>
24418
24419     <div class="entry">
24420       <div class="title">
24421         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Setting up a new school with Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
24422       </div>
24423       <div class="date">
24424         25th January 2012
24425       </div>
24426       <div class="body">
24427         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
24428 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
24429 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
24430 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
24431 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
24432
24433 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
24434 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
24435 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
24436 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
24437 this is done, log on to the central server and run
24438 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
24439 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
24440 will look similar to this:</p>
24441
24442 <p><blockquote><pre>
24443 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
24444 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
24445 info: Create GOsa machine for auto-mac-00-01-02-03-04-06 [10.0.16.20] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:06.
24446
24447 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
24448
24449 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
24450 enter password: *******
24451 %
24452 </pre></blockquote></p>
24453
24454 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
24455 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
24456 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
24457 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
24458 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
24459 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
24460 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
24461 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
24462 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
24463 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
24464 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
24465 automatically.</p>
24466
24467 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
24468 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
24469
24470 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
24471 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
24472 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
24473
24474       </div>
24475       <div class="tags">
24476
24477
24478         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
24479
24480
24481       </div>
24482     </div>
24483     <div class="padding"></div>
24484
24485     <div class="entry">
24486       <div class="title">
24487         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Changing the default Iceweasel start page in Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
24488       </div>
24489       <div class="date">
24490         10th January 2012
24491       </div>
24492       <div class="body">
24493         <p>In the Squeeze version of
24494 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
24495 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
24496 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
24497 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
24498 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
24499 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
24500 first time.</p>
24501
24502 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
24503 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
24504 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
24505 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
24506
24507 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
24508 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
24509 new setting.</p>
24510
24511 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
24512 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
24513 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
24514
24515       </div>
24516       <div class="tags">
24517
24518
24519         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
24520
24521
24522       </div>
24523     </div>
24524     <div class="padding"></div>
24525
24526     <div class="entry">
24527       <div class="title">
24528         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Second beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
24529       </div>
24530       <div class="date">
24531          7th January 2012
24532       </div>
24533       <div class="body">
24534         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
24535 the second beta version of
24536 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
24537 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
24538 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
24539 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
24540 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
24541 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
24542 on the project announcement list.</p>
24543
24544       </div>
24545       <div class="tags">
24546
24547
24548         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24549
24550
24551       </div>
24552     </div>
24553     <div class="padding"></div>
24554
24555     <div class="entry">
24556       <div class="title">
24557         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html">Fixing an hanging debian installer for Debian Edu</a>
24558       </div>
24559       <div class="date">
24560          3rd January 2012
24561       </div>
24562       <div class="body">
24563         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
24564 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
24565 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
24566 interesting.</p>
24567
24568 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
24569 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
24570 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
24571 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
24572 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
24573 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
24574 wrap up its tasks.</p>
24575
24576 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
24577 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
24578 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
24579 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
24580 because I was typing.</P>
24581
24582 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
24583 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
24584 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
24585 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
24586 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
24587 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
24588 generate entropy.</p>
24589
24590 <p>The fix is in
24591 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
24592 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
24593 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
24594 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
24595
24596       </div>
24597       <div class="tags">
24598
24599
24600         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24601
24602
24603       </div>
24604     </div>
24605     <div class="padding"></div>
24606
24607     <div class="entry">
24608       <div class="title">
24609         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
24610       </div>
24611       <div class="date">
24612         21st November 2011
24613       </div>
24614       <div class="body">
24615         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
24616 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
24617 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
24618 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
24619 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
24620 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
24621 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
24622 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
24623 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
24624 the tools to do so.</p>
24625
24626 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
24627 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
24628 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
24629 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
24630
24631 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
24632 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
24633 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
24634 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
24635 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
24636 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
24637 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
24638 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
24639
24640 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
24641 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
24642 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
24643
24644 <p><pre>
24645 #!/usr/bin/perl
24646 use strict;
24647 use warnings;
24648 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
24649 BEGIN {
24650     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
24651     my %rhelmodules = (
24652         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
24653         );
24654     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
24655         eval "use $module;";
24656         if ($@) {
24657             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
24658             system("yum install -y $pkg");
24659             eval "use $module;";
24660         }
24661     }
24662 }
24663 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
24664
24665 upgrade_dell();
24666
24667 exit 0;
24668
24669 sub run_firmware_script {
24670     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
24671     unless ($script) {
24672         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
24673         exit 1
24674     }
24675     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
24676
24677     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
24678         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
24679     } else {
24680         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
24681     }
24682 }
24683
24684 sub run_firmware_scripts {
24685     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
24686     # Run firmware packages
24687     for my $dir (@dirs) {
24688         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
24689         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
24690         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
24691             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
24692             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
24693         }
24694         closedir $dh;
24695     }
24696 }
24697
24698 sub download {
24699     my $url = shift;
24700     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
24701     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
24702 }
24703
24704 sub upgrade_dell {
24705     my @dirs;
24706     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
24707     chomp $product;
24708
24709     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
24710
24711         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
24712         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
24713
24714         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
24715             CLEANUP => 1
24716             );
24717         chdir($tmpdir);
24718         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
24719         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
24720         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
24721         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
24722         my $fwopts = "-q";
24723         if (@paths) {
24724             for my $url (@paths) {
24725                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
24726             }
24727             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
24728         } else {
24729             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
24730             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
24731         }
24732         chdir('/');
24733     } else {
24734         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
24735         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
24736     }
24737 }
24738
24739 sub fetch_dell_fw {
24740     my $path = shift;
24741     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
24742     download($url);
24743 }
24744
24745 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
24746 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
24747 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
24748 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
24749     my $filename = shift;
24750
24751     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
24752     chomp $product;
24753     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
24754
24755     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
24756
24757     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
24758     my @paths;
24759     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
24760         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
24761         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
24762         my $oscode;
24763         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
24764             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
24765         } else {
24766             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
24767         }
24768         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
24769         {
24770             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
24771         }
24772     }
24773     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
24774         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
24775
24776         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
24777         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
24778
24779         my $cpath = $component->{path};
24780         for my $path (@paths) {
24781             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
24782                 push(@paths, $cpath);
24783             }
24784         }
24785     }
24786     return @paths;
24787 }
24788 </pre>
24789
24790 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
24791 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
24792 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
24793 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
24794 outdated.</p>
24795
24796       </div>
24797       <div class="tags">
24798
24799
24800         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>.
24801
24802
24803       </div>
24804     </div>
24805     <div class="padding"></div>
24806
24807     <div class="entry">
24808       <div class="title">
24809         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html">Free e-book kiosk for the public libraries?</a>
24810       </div>
24811       <div class="date">
24812          7th October 2011
24813       </div>
24814       <div class="body">
24815         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
24816 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
24817 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
24818 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
24819 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
24820 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
24821 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
24822 models.</p>
24823
24824 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
24825 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
24826 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
24827 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
24828
24829 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
24830 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
24831 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
24832 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
24833 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
24834 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
24835 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
24836 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
24837 distributed.</p>
24838
24839 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
24840
24841 <ul>
24842
24843 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
24844   other relevant equipment.</li>
24845
24846 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
24847
24848 </ul>
24849
24850 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
24851 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
24852 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
24853 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
24854 books available.</p>
24855
24856 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
24857 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
24858 libraries. :)</p>
24859
24860       </div>
24861       <div class="tags">
24862
24863
24864         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
24865
24866
24867       </div>
24868     </div>
24869     <div class="padding"></div>
24870
24871     <div class="entry">
24872       <div class="title">
24873         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
24874       </div>
24875       <div class="date">
24876         17th September 2011
24877       </div>
24878       <div class="body">
24879         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
24880 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
24881 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
24882 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
24883 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
24884 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
24885 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
24886 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
24887
24888 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
24889
24890 <blockquote><pre>
24891 #!/bin/sh
24892 # apt-get install lsdvd
24893 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
24894 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
24895 </pre></blockquote>
24896
24897 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
24898 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
24899 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
24900 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
24901
24902 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
24903 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
24904 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
24905 back as an ISO.
24906
24907 <blockquote><pre>
24908 #!/bin/sh
24909 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
24910 set -e
24911 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
24912 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
24913 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
24914 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
24915 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
24916 </pre></blockquote>
24917
24918 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
24919
24920 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
24921 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
24922 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
24923 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
24924 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
24925
24926 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
24927 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
24928 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
24929 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
24930 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
24931 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
24932
24933       </div>
24934       <div class="tags">
24935
24936
24937         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
24938
24939
24940       </div>
24941     </div>
24942     <div class="padding"></div>
24943
24944     <div class="entry">
24945       <div class="title">
24946         <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>
24947       </div>
24948       <div class="date">
24949          4th August 2011
24950       </div>
24951       <div class="body">
24952         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
24953 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
24954 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
24955 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
24956 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
24957 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
24958 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
24959 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
24960 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
24961
24962 <p><blockquote>
24963 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
24964 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
24965 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
24966 </blockquote></p>
24967
24968 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
24969 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
24970 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
24971 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
24972 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
24973 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
24974 hard to explain.</p>
24975
24976 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
24977 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
24978 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
24979 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
24980 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
24981 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
24982 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
24983 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
24984 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
24985 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
24986 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
24987 mode).</p>
24988
24989 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
24990 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
24991 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
24992 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
24993 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
24994 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
24995 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
24996 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
24997 after visiting single user mode.</p>
24998
24999 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
25000 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
25001 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
25002 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
25003 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
25004 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
25005 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
25006 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
25007
25008 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
25009 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
25010 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
25011
25012       </div>
25013       <div class="tags">
25014
25015
25016         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>.
25017
25018
25019       </div>
25020     </div>
25021     <div class="padding"></div>
25022
25023     <div class="entry">
25024       <div class="title">
25025         <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>
25026       </div>
25027       <div class="date">
25028         30th July 2011
25029       </div>
25030       <div class="body">
25031         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
25032 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
25033 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
25034 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
25035 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
25036 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
25037 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
25038 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
25039 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
25040 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
25041 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
25042 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
25043 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
25044
25045 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
25046 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
25047 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
25048 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
25049 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
25050 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
25051 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
25052 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
25053 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
25054
25055 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
25056 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
25057 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
25058 is presented.</p>
25059
25060 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
25061 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
25062 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
25063 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
25064 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
25065 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
25066 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
25067 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
25068 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
25069 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
25070 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
25071 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
25072 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
25073 find time to push this forward.</p>
25074
25075       </div>
25076       <div class="tags">
25077
25078
25079         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>.
25080
25081
25082       </div>
25083     </div>
25084     <div class="padding"></div>
25085
25086     <div class="entry">
25087       <div class="title">
25088         <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>
25089       </div>
25090       <div class="date">
25091         29th July 2011
25092       </div>
25093       <div class="body">
25094         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
25095 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
25096 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
25097 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
25098 issues.</p>
25099
25100 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
25101 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
25102 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
25103
25104 <ol>
25105
25106 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
25107 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
25108 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
25109 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
25110 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
25111 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
25112 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
25113 Debian.</li>
25114
25115 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
25116 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
25117 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
25118 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
25119 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
25120 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
25121 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
25122 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
25123 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
25124 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
25125 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
25126 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
25127 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
25128
25129 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
25130 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
25131 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
25132 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
25133 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
25134 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
25135 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
25136 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
25137 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
25138 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
25139
25140 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
25141 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
25142 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
25143 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
25144 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
25145 latter behaviour.</li>
25146
25147 </ol>
25148
25149 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
25150 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
25151 it do not matter much.</p>
25152
25153 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
25154 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
25155 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
25156
25157       </div>
25158       <div class="tags">
25159
25160
25161         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>.
25162
25163
25164       </div>
25165     </div>
25166     <div class="padding"></div>
25167
25168     <div class="entry">
25169       <div class="title">
25170         <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>
25171       </div>
25172       <div class="date">
25173         26th July 2011
25174       </div>
25175       <div class="body">
25176         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
25177 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
25178 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
25179 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
25180 security support for a few years.</p>
25181
25182 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
25183 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
25184 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
25185 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
25186 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
25187 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
25188 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
25189 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
25190 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
25191 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
25192 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
25193 easier in the future.</p>
25194
25195 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
25196 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
25197 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
25198 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
25199 do not have time for.</p>
25200
25201       </div>
25202       <div class="tags">
25203
25204
25205         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>.
25206
25207
25208       </div>
25209     </div>
25210     <div class="padding"></div>
25211
25212     <div class="entry">
25213       <div class="title">
25214         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
25215       </div>
25216       <div class="date">
25217         20th June 2011
25218       </div>
25219       <div class="body">
25220         <p>Reading
25221 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
25222 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
25223 parts of the
25224 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
25225 and
25226 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
25227 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
25228 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
25229 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
25230
25231       </div>
25232       <div class="tags">
25233
25234
25235         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
25236
25237
25238       </div>
25239     </div>
25240     <div class="padding"></div>
25241
25242     <div class="entry">
25243       <div class="title">
25244         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html">Experimental Open311 API for the mySociety fixmystreet system</a>
25245       </div>
25246       <div class="date">
25247         30th April 2011
25248       </div>
25249       <div class="body">
25250         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
25251 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
25252 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
25253 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
25254 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
25255 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
25256 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
25257 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
25258 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
25259 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
25260
25261 <p>Where is it?  Visit
25262 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
25263 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
25264 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
25265 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
25266
25267       </div>
25268       <div class="tags">
25269
25270
25271         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311</a>.
25272
25273
25274       </div>
25275     </div>
25276     <div class="padding"></div>
25277
25278     <div class="entry">
25279       <div class="title">
25280         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html">Initial notes on adding Open311 server API on FixMyStreet</a>
25281       </div>
25282       <div class="date">
25283         29th April 2011
25284       </div>
25285       <div class="body">
25286         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
25287 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
25288 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
25289 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
25290 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
25291 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
25292 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
25293 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
25294 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
25295 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
25296 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
25297 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
25298 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
25299
25300 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
25301 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
25302 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
25303 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
25304 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
25305 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
25306 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
25307 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
25308 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
25309 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
25310 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
25311 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
25312 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
25313
25314 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
25315 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
25316 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
25317 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
25318 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
25319 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
25320 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
25321 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
25322 it.</p>
25323
25324 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
25325 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
25326 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
25327 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
25328 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
25329 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
25330 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
25331
25332 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
25333 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
25334 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
25335 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
25336 and range= options.</p>
25337
25338 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
25339 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
25340 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
25341 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
25342 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
25343 to best handle this.  I've noticed
25344 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
25345 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
25346 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
25347 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
25348
25349 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
25350 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
25351 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
25352 discussions instead of only
25353 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
25354 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
25355 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
25356 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
25357 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
25358 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
25359
25360       </div>
25361       <div class="tags">
25362
25363
25364         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311</a>.
25365
25366
25367       </div>
25368     </div>
25369     <div class="padding"></div>
25370
25371     <div class="entry">
25372       <div class="title">
25373         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
25374       </div>
25375       <div class="date">
25376          6th April 2011
25377       </div>
25378       <div class="body">
25379         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
25380 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
25381 A few days ago the project
25382 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
25383 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
25384 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
25385 into Gnash.</p>
25386
25387       </div>
25388       <div class="tags">
25389
25390
25391         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
25392
25393
25394       </div>
25395     </div>
25396     <div class="padding"></div>
25397
25398     <div class="entry">
25399       <div class="title">
25400         <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>
25401       </div>
25402       <div class="date">
25403          3rd April 2011
25404       </div>
25405       <div class="body">
25406         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
25407 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
25408 update in English.</p>
25409
25410 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
25411 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
25412 of the British service
25413 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
25414 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
25415 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
25416 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
25417 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
25418 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
25419 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
25420 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
25421 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
25422 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
25423 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
25424 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
25425 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
25426
25427 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
25428 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
25429 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
25430 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
25431 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
25432 public infrastructure.</p>
25433
25434 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
25435 such service?</p>
25436
25437       </div>
25438       <div class="tags">
25439
25440
25441         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>.
25442
25443
25444       </div>
25445     </div>
25446     <div class="padding"></div>
25447
25448     <div class="entry">
25449       <div class="title">
25450         <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>
25451       </div>
25452       <div class="date">
25453         28th January 2011
25454       </div>
25455       <div class="body">
25456         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
25457 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
25458 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
25459 available on the Internet, and check our locally
25460 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
25461 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
25462 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
25463 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
25464 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
25465 out which security holes were present in our free software
25466 collection.</p>
25467
25468 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
25469 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
25470 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
25471 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
25472 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
25473 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
25474 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
25475 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
25476 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
25477 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
25478 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
25479 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
25480 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
25481 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
25482 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
25483 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
25484
25485 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
25486 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
25487 check out, one could look up
25488 <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
25489 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
25490 The most recent one is
25491 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
25492 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
25493 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
25494
25495 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
25496 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
25497 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
25498 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
25499 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
25500 security issues out.</p>
25501
25502 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
25503 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
25504 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
25505 RHEL is providing
25506 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
25507 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
25508 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
25509
25510 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
25511 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
25512 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
25513 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
25514 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
25515 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
25516 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
25517 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
25518 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
25519 established soon.</p>
25520
25521 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
25522 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
25523 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
25524 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
25525 for their packages.</p>
25526
25527       </div>
25528       <div class="tags">
25529
25530
25531         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>.
25532
25533
25534       </div>
25535     </div>
25536     <div class="padding"></div>
25537
25538     <div class="entry">
25539       <div class="title">
25540         <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>
25541       </div>
25542       <div class="date">
25543         23rd January 2011
25544       </div>
25545       <div class="body">
25546         <p>In the
25547 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
25548 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
25549 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
25550 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
25551 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
25552 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
25553 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
25554 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
25555 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
25556 one of my machines like this:</p>
25557
25558 <pre>
25559 loaded modules:
25560 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
25561 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
25562 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
25563 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
25564 10de:03ec pata_amd
25565 10de:03f6 sata_nv
25566 1022:1103 k8temp
25567 109e:036e bttv
25568 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
25569 11ab:4364 sky2
25570 </pre>
25571
25572 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
25573 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
25574
25575 <pre>
25576 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
25577     echo loaded pci modules:
25578     (
25579         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
25580         for address in * ; do
25581             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
25582                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
25583                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
25584                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
25585                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
25586                     echo "$id $module"
25587                 fi
25588             fi
25589         done
25590     )
25591     echo
25592 fi
25593 </pre>
25594
25595 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
25596 mappings:</p>
25597
25598 <pre>
25599 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
25600     echo loaded usb modules:
25601     (
25602         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
25603         for address in * ; do
25604             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
25605                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
25606                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
25607                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
25608                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
25609                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
25610                         echo "$id $module"
25611                     fi
25612                 fi
25613             fi
25614         done
25615     )
25616     echo
25617 fi
25618 </pre>
25619
25620 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
25621 well.</p>
25622
25623       </div>
25624       <div class="tags">
25625
25626
25627         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>.
25628
25629
25630       </div>
25631     </div>
25632     <div class="padding"></div>
25633
25634     <div class="entry">
25635       <div class="title">
25636         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html">The video format most supported in web browsers?</a>
25637       </div>
25638       <div class="date">
25639         16th January 2011
25640       </div>
25641       <div class="body">
25642         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
25643 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
25644 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
25645 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
25646 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
25647 the Wikipedia article on
25648 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
25649 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
25650 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
25651 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
25652 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
25653 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
25654 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
25655 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
25656 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
25657 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
25658 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
25659 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
25660
25661 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
25662 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
25663 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
25664 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
25665 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
25666 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
25667 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
25668 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
25669 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
25670 from last week</a>.</p>
25671
25672 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
25673 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
25674 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
25675 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
25676 was without royalties and license terms, check out
25677 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
25678 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
25679
25680 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
25681 available from
25682 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
25683 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
25684 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
25685
25686 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
25687 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
25688 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
25689 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
25690
25691       </div>
25692       <div class="tags">
25693
25694
25695         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
25696
25697
25698       </div>
25699     </div>
25700     <div class="padding"></div>
25701
25702     <div class="entry">
25703       <div class="title">
25704         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html">Chrome plan to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt;</a>
25705       </div>
25706       <div class="date">
25707         12th January 2011
25708       </div>
25709       <div class="body">
25710         <p>Today I discovered
25711 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
25712 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
25713 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
25714 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
25715 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
25716 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
25717 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
25718 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
25719 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
25720 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
25721 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
25722 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
25723 on the Google announcement is available from
25724 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
25725 A good read. :)</p>
25726
25727 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
25728 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
25729 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
25730 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
25731 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
25732 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
25733 browsers support H.264, and others support
25734 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
25735 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
25736 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
25737 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
25738 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
25739 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
25740 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
25741 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
25742
25743 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
25744 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
25745 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
25746 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
25747 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
25748 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
25749 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
25750
25751 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
25752 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
25753 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
25754 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
25755 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
25756 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
25757 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
25758
25759 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
25760 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
25761 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
25762 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
25763 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
25764 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
25765 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
25766
25767 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
25768 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
25769 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
25770 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
25771 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
25772 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
25773 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
25774 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
25775 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
25776 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
25777 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
25778 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
25779 I guess time will tell.</p>
25780
25781 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
25782 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
25783 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
25784
25785       </div>
25786       <div class="tags">
25787
25788
25789         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
25790
25791
25792       </div>
25793     </div>
25794     <div class="padding"></div>
25795
25796     <div class="entry">
25797       <div class="title">
25798         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html">What standards are Free and Open as defined by Digistan?</a>
25799       </div>
25800       <div class="date">
25801         30th December 2010
25802       </div>
25803       <div class="body">
25804         <p>After trying to
25805 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
25806 Ogg Theora</a> to
25807 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
25808 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
25809 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
25810 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
25811 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
25812 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
25813 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
25814
25815 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
25816 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
25817 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
25818 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
25819 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
25820 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
25821 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
25822
25823 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
25824 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
25825
25826       </div>
25827       <div class="tags">
25828
25829
25830         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
25831
25832
25833       </div>
25834     </div>
25835     <div class="padding"></div>
25836
25837     <div class="entry">
25838       <div class="title">
25839         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
25840       </div>
25841       <div class="date">
25842         27th December 2010
25843       </div>
25844       <div class="body">
25845         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
25846 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
25847 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
25848 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
25849 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
25850 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
25851 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
25852 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
25853
25854 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
25855 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
25856 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
25857 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
25858 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
25859 page</a>.</p>
25860
25861 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
25862 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
25863 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
25864 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
25865 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
25866 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
25867 specification on equal terms.</p>
25868
25869 <blockquote>
25870
25871 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
25872 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
25873 open standard:</p>
25874
25875 <ul>
25876
25877 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
25878 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
25879 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
25880 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
25881
25882 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
25883 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
25884 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
25885 nominal fee.</li>
25886
25887 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
25888 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
25889 free basis.</li>
25890
25891 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
25892
25893 </ul>
25894 </blockquote>
25895
25896 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
25897 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
25898 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
25899 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
25900 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
25901 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
25902 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
25903
25904 <blockquote>
25905
25906 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
25907
25908 <ol>
25909
25910 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
25911 tilgængelig.</li>
25912
25913 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
25914 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
25915
25916 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
25917 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
25918
25919 </ol>
25920
25921 </blockquote>
25922
25923 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
25924 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
25925
25926 <blockquote>
25927
25928 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
25929
25930 <ol>
25931
25932 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
25933 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
25934
25935 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
25936 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
25937 Standard themselves;</li>
25938
25939 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
25940 any party or in any business model;</li>
25941
25942 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
25943 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
25944 parties;</li>
25945
25946 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
25947 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
25948 parties.</li>
25949
25950 </ol>
25951
25952 </blockquote>
25953
25954 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
25955 its
25956 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
25957 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
25958
25959 <blockquote>
25960 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
25961
25962 <ul>
25963
25964 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
25965   democratic:
25966
25967          <ul>
25968
25969          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
25970             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
25971             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
25972             and managed.</li>
25973
25974          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
25975             method, can be changed through input from all
25976             participants.</li>
25977
25978          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
25979             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
25980
25981          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
25982             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
25983
25984          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
25985             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
25986             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
25987
25988          </ul>
25989
25990 </li>
25991
25992 </ul>
25993
25994 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
25995 <ul>
25996
25997 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
25998   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
25999   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
26000   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
26001   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
26002
26003 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
26004   a technical or economic barriers</li>
26005
26006 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
26007   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
26008   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
26009   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
26010   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
26011   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
26012   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
26013   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
26014   intended to function.</li>
26015
26016 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
26017   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
26018   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
26019
26020 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
26021   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
26022   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
26023   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
26024   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
26025   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
26026   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
26027   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
26028
26029       <ul>
26030
26031       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
26032         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
26033         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
26034
26035       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
26036         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
26037         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
26038         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
26039
26040       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
26041         licensor</li>
26042
26043       </ul>
26044 </li>
26045
26046 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
26047   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
26048   or restricted licensing terms</li>
26049
26050 </ul>
26051
26052 </blockquote>
26053
26054 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
26055 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
26056 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
26057 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
26058 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
26059 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
26060 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
26061 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
26062 Standards.</p>
26063
26064       </div>
26065       <div class="tags">
26066
26067
26068         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
26069
26070
26071       </div>
26072     </div>
26073     <div class="padding"></div>
26074
26075     <div class="entry">
26076       <div class="title">
26077         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">Is Ogg Theora a free and open standard?</a>
26078       </div>
26079       <div class="date">
26080         25th December 2010
26081       </div>
26082       <div class="body">
26083         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
26084 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
26085
26086 <blockquote>
26087
26088 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
26089 as follows:</p>
26090
26091 <ol>
26092
26093 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
26094 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
26095 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
26096
26097 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
26098 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
26099 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
26100 parties.</li>
26101
26102 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
26103 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
26104 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
26105
26106 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
26107 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
26108
26109 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
26110
26111 </ol>
26112
26113 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
26114 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
26115 products based on the standard.</p>
26116 </blockquote>
26117
26118 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
26119 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
26120 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
26121 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
26122 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
26123 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
26124 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
26125 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
26126
26127 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
26128
26129 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
26130 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
26131 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
26132 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
26133 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
26134 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
26135 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
26136 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
26137 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
26138 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
26139 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
26140 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
26141 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
26142 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
26143
26144 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
26145
26146 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
26147 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
26148 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
26149 documentation indicating this.</p>
26150
26151 <p>According to
26152 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
26153 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
26154 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
26155 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
26156 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
26157 report is correct.</p>
26158
26159 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
26160
26161 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
26162 container format</a> and both the
26163 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
26164 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
26165 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
26166
26167 <blockquote>
26168
26169 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
26170 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
26171 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
26172 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
26173 specification compliance.
26174
26175 </blockquote>
26176
26177 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
26178 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
26179 this is the term:<p>
26180
26181 <blockquote>
26182
26183 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
26184 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
26185 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
26186 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
26187 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
26188 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
26189 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
26190 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
26191 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
26192 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
26193 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
26194 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
26195
26196 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
26197 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
26198 </blockquote>
26199
26200 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
26201 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
26202 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
26203 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
26204 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
26205
26206 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
26207
26208 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
26209 Theora format.
26210 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
26211 and
26212 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
26213 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
26214 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
26215 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
26216 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
26217 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
26218 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
26219 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
26220
26221 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
26222
26223 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
26224
26225 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
26226
26227 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
26228 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
26229 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
26230 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
26231 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
26232 this.</p>
26233
26234 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
26235 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
26236
26237       </div>
26238       <div class="tags">
26239
26240
26241         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
26242
26243
26244       </div>
26245     </div>
26246     <div class="padding"></div>
26247
26248     <div class="entry">
26249       <div class="title">
26250         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html">The reply from Edgar Villanueva to Microsoft in Peru</a>
26251       </div>
26252       <div class="date">
26253         25th December 2010
26254       </div>
26255       <div class="body">
26256         <p>A few days ago
26257 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
26258 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
26259 2.0 of
26260 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
26261 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
26262 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
26263 Nothing very surprising there, given
26264 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
26265 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
26266 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
26267 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
26268 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
26269 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
26270 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
26271 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
26272 standard definition from its content.</p>
26273
26274 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
26275 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
26276 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
26277 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
26278 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
26279 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
26280 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
26281 background information about that story is available in
26282 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
26283 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
26284
26285 <blockquote>
26286 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
26287 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
26288 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
26289
26290 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
26291
26292 <p>First of all, I thank you for your letter of March 25, 2002 in which you state the official position of Microsoft relative to Bill Number 1609, Free Software in Public Administration, which is indubitably inspired by the desire for Peru to find a suitable place in the global technological context. In the same spirit, and convinced that we will find the best solutions through an exchange of clear and open ideas, I will take this opportunity to reply to the commentaries included in your letter.</p>
26293
26294 <p>While acknowledging that opinions such as yours constitute a significant contribution, it would have been even more worthwhile for me if, rather than formulating objections of a general nature (which we will analyze in detail later) you had gathered solid arguments for the advantages that proprietary software could bring to the Peruvian State, and to its citizens in general, since this would have allowed a more enlightening exchange in respect of each of our positions.</p>
26295
26296 <p>With the aim of creating an orderly debate, we will assume that what you call "open source software" is what the Bill defines as "free software", since there exists software for which the source code is distributed together with the program, but which does not fall within the definition established by the Bill; and that what you call "commercial software" is what the Bill defines as "proprietary" or "unfree", given that there exists free software which is sold in the market for a price like any other good or service.</p>
26297
26298 <p>It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:</p>
26299
26300 <p>
26301 <ul>
26302 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
26303 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
26304 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
26305 </ul>
26306 </p>
26307
26308 <p>To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indispensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.</p>
26309
26310 <p>To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code.</p>
26311
26312 <p>To guarantee national security or the security of the State, it is indispensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source code will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code*. </p>
26313
26314 <p>In the same way, our proposal strengthens the security of the citizens, both in their role as legitimate owners of information managed by the state, and in their role as consumers. In this second case, by allowing the growth of a widespread availability of free software not containing *spy code* able to put at risk privacy and individual freedoms.</p>
26315
26316 <p>In this sense, the Bill is limited to establishing the conditions under which the state bodies will obtain software in the future, that is, in a way compatible with these basic principles.</p>
26317
26318
26319 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
26320 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
26321 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
26322 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
26323 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
26324 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
26325
26326 </p>
26327
26328 <p>What the Bill does express clearly, is that, for software to be acceptable for the state it is not enough that it is technically capable of fulfilling a task, but that further the contractual conditions must satisfy a series of requirements regarding the license, without which the State cannot guarantee the citizen adequate processing of his data, watching over its integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility throughout time, as these are very critical aspects for its normal functioning.</p>
26329
26330 <p>We agree, Mr. Gonzalez, that information and communication technology have a significant impact on the quality of life of the citizens (whether it be positive or negative). We surely also agree that the basic values I have pointed out above are fundamental in a democratic state like Peru. So we are very interested to know of any other way of guaranteeing these principles, other than through the use of free software in the terms defined by the Bill.</p>
26331
26332 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
26333
26334 <p>Firstly, you point out that: "1. The bill makes it compulsory for all public bodies to use only free software, that is to say open source software, which breaches the principles of equality before the law, that of non-discrimination and the right of free private enterprise, freedom of industry and of contract, protected by the constitution."</p>
26335
26336 <p>This understanding is in error. The Bill in no way affects the rights you list; it limits itself entirely to establishing conditions for the use of software on the part of state institutions, without in any way meddling in private sector transactions. It is a well established principle that the State does not enjoy the wide spectrum of contractual freedom of the private sector, as it is limited in its actions precisely by the requirement for transparency of public acts; and in this sense, the preservation of the greater common interest must prevail when legislating on the matter.</p>
26337
26338 <p>The Bill protects equality under the law, since no natural or legal person is excluded from the right of offering these goods to the State under the conditions defined in the Bill and without more limitations than those established by the Law of State Contracts and Purchasing (T.U.O. by Supreme Decree No. 012-2001-PCM).</p>
26339
26340 <p>The Bill does not introduce any discrimination whatever, since it only establishes *how* the goods have to be provided (which is a state power) and not *who* has to provide them (which would effectively be discriminatory, if restrictions based on national origin, race religion, ideology, sexual preference etc. were imposed). On the contrary, the Bill is decidedly antidiscriminatory. This is so because by defining with no room for doubt the conditions for the provision of software, it prevents state bodies from using software which has a license including discriminatory conditions.</p>
26341
26342 <p>It should be obvious from the preceding two paragraphs that the Bill does not harm free private enterprise, since the latter can always choose under what conditions it will produce software; some of these will be acceptable to the State, and others will not be since they contradict the guarantee of the basic principles listed above. This free initiative is of course compatible with the freedom of industry and freedom of contract (in the limited form in which the State can exercise the latter). Any private subject can produce software under the conditions which the State requires, or can refrain from doing so. Nobody is forced to adopt a model of production, but if they wish to provide software to the State, they must provide the mechanisms which guarantee the basic principles, and which are those described in the Bill.</p>
26343
26344 <p>By way of an example: nothing in the text of the Bill would prevent your company offering the State bodies an office "suite", under the conditions defined in the Bill and setting the price that you consider satisfactory. If you did not, it would not be due to restrictions imposed by the law, but to business decisions relative to the method of commercializing your products, decisions with which the State is not involved.</p>
26345
26346 <p>To continue; you note that:" 2. The bill, by making the use of open source software compulsory, would establish discriminatory and non competitive practices in the contracting and purchasing by public bodies..."</p>
26347
26348 <p>This statement is just a reiteration of the previous one, and so the response can be found above. However, let us concern ourselves for a moment with your comment regarding "non-competitive ... practices."</p>
26349
26350 <p>Of course, in defining any kind of purchase, the buyer sets conditions which relate to the proposed use of the good or service. From the start, this excludes certain manufacturers from the possibility of competing, but does not exclude them "a priori", but rather based on a series of principles determined by the autonomous will of the purchaser, and so the process takes place in conformance with the law. And in the Bill it is established that *no one* is excluded from competing as far as he guarantees the fulfillment of the basic principles.</p>
26351
26352 <p>Furthermore, the Bill *stimulates* competition, since it tends to generate a supply of software with better conditions of usability, and to better existing work, in a model of continuous improvement.</p>
26353
26354 <p>On the other hand, the central aspect of competivity is the chance to provide better choices to the consumer. Now, it is impossible to ignore the fact that marketing does not play a neutral role when the product is offered on the market (since accepting the opposite would lead one to suppose that firms' expenses in marketing lack any sense), and that therefore a significant expense under this heading can influence the decisions of the purchaser. This influence of marketing is in large measure reduced by the bill that we are backing, since the choice within the framework proposed is based on the *technical merits* of the product and not on the effort put into commercialization by the producer; in this sense, competitiveness is increased, since the smallest software producer can compete on equal terms with the most powerful corporations.</p>
26355
26356 <p>It is necessary to stress that there is no position more anti-competitive than that of the big software producers, which frequently abuse their dominant position, since in innumerable cases they propose as a solution to problems raised by users: "update your software to the new version" (at the user's expense, naturally); furthermore, it is common to find arbitrary cessation of technical help for products, which, in the provider's judgment alone, are "old"; and so, to receive any kind of technical assistance, the user finds himself forced to migrate to new versions (with non-trivial costs, especially as changes in hardware platform are often involved). And as the whole infrastructure is based on proprietary data formats, the user stays "trapped" in the need to continue using products from the same supplier, or to make the huge effort to change to another environment (probably also proprietary).</p>
26357
26358 <p>You add: "3. So, by compelling the State to favor a business model based entirely on open source, the bill would only discourage the local and international manufacturing companies, which are the ones which really undertake important expenditures, create a significant number of direct and indirect jobs, as well as contributing to the GNP, as opposed to a model of open source software which tends to have an ever weaker economic impact, since it mainly creates jobs in the service sector."</p>
26359
26360 <p>I do not agree with your statement. Partly because of what you yourself point out in paragraph 6 of your letter, regarding the relative weight of services in the context of software use. This contradiction alone would invalidate your position. The service model, adopted by a large number of companies in the software industry, is much larger in economic terms, and with a tendency to increase, than the licensing of programs.</p>
26361
26362 <p>On the other hand, the private sector of the economy has the widest possible freedom to choose the economic model which best suits its interests, even if this freedom of choice is often obscured subliminally by the disproportionate expenditure on marketing by the producers of proprietary software.</p>
26363
26364 <p>In addition, a reading of your opinion would lead to the conclusion that the State market is crucial and essential for the proprietary software industry, to such a point that the choice made by the State in this bill would completely eliminate the market for these firms. If that is true, we can deduce that the State must be subsidizing the proprietary software industry. In the unlikely event that this were true, the State would have the right to apply the subsidies in the area it considered of greatest social value; it is undeniable, in this improbable hypothesis, that if the State decided to subsidize software, it would have to do so choosing the free over the proprietary, considering its social effect and the rational use of taxpayers money.</p>
26365
26366 <p>In respect of the jobs generated by proprietary software in countries like ours, these mainly concern technical tasks of little aggregate value; at the local level, the technicians who provide support for proprietary software produced by transnational companies do not have the possibility of fixing bugs, not necessarily for lack of technical capability or of talent, but because they do not have access to the source code to fix it. With free software one creates more technically qualified employment and a framework of free competence where success is only tied to the ability to offer good technical support and quality of service, one stimulates the market, and one increases the shared fund of knowledge, opening up alternatives to generate services of greater total value and a higher quality level, to the benefit of all involved: producers, service organizations, and consumers.</p>
26367
26368 <p>It is a common phenomenon in developing countries that local software industries obtain the majority of their takings in the service sector, or in the creation of "ad hoc" software. Therefore, any negative impact that the application of the Bill might have in this sector will be more than compensated by a growth in demand for services (as long as these are carried out to high quality standards). If the transnational software companies decide not to compete under these new rules of the game, it is likely that they will undergo some decrease in takings in terms of payment for licenses; however, considering that these firms continue to allege that much of the software used by the State has been illegally copied, one can see that the impact will not be very serious. Certainly, in any case their fortune will be determined by market laws, changes in which cannot be avoided; many firms traditionally associated with proprietary software have already set out on the road (supported by copious expense) of providing services associated with free software, which shows that the models are not mutually exclusive.</p>
26369
26370 <p>With this bill the State is deciding that it needs to preserve certain fundamental values. And it is deciding this based on its sovereign power, without affecting any of the constitutional guarantees. If these values could be guaranteed without having to choose a particular economic model, the effects of the law would be even more beneficial. In any case, it should be clear that the State does not choose an economic model; if it happens that there only exists one economic model capable of providing software which provides the basic guarantee of these principles, this is because of historical circumstances, not because of an arbitrary choice of a given model.</p>
26371
26372 <p>Your letter continues: "4. The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties."</p>
26373
26374 <p>Alluding in an abstract way to "the dangers this can bring", without specifically mentioning a single one of these supposed dangers, shows at the least some lack of knowledge of the topic. So, allow me to enlighten you on these points.</p>
26375
26376 <p>On security:</p>
26377
26378 <p>National security has already been mentioned in general terms in the initial discussion of the basic principles of the bill. In more specific terms, relative to the security of the software itself, it is well known that all software (whether proprietary or free) contains errors or "bugs" (in programmers' slang). But it is also well known that the bugs in free software are fewer, and are fixed much more quickly, than in proprietary software. It is not in vain that numerous public bodies responsible for the IT security of state systems in developed countries require the use of free software for the same conditions of security and efficiency.</p>
26379
26380 <p>What is impossible to prove is that proprietary software is more secure than free, without the public and open inspection of the scientific community and users in general. This demonstration is impossible because the model of proprietary software itself prevents this analysis, so that any guarantee of security is based only on promises of good intentions (biased, by any reckoning) made by the producer itself, or its contractors.</p>
26381
26382 <p>It should be remembered that in many cases, the licensing conditions include Non-Disclosure clauses which prevent the user from publicly revealing security flaws found in the licensed proprietary product.</p>
26383
26384 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
26385
26386 <p>As you know perfectly well, or could find out by reading the "End User License Agreement" of the products you license, in the great majority of cases the guarantees are limited to replacement of the storage medium in case of defects, but in no case is compensation given for direct or indirect damages, loss of profits, etc... If as a result of a security bug in one of your products, not fixed in time by yourselves, an attacker managed to compromise crucial State systems, what guarantees, reparations and compensation would your company make in accordance with your licensing conditions? The guarantees of proprietary software, inasmuch as programs are delivered ``AS IS'', that is, in the state in which they are, with no additional responsibility of the provider in respect of function, in no way differ from those normal with free software.</p>
26387
26388 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
26389
26390 <p>Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity).</p>
26391
26392 <p>You go on to say that: "The bill uses the concept of open source software incorrectly, since it does not necessarily imply that the software is free or of zero cost, and so arrives at mistaken conclusions regarding State savings, with no cost-benefit analysis to validate its position."</p>
26393
26394 <p>This observation is wrong; in principle, freedom and lack of cost are orthogonal concepts: there is software which is proprietary and charged for (for example, MS Office), software which is proprietary and free of charge (MS Internet Explorer), software which is free and charged for (Red Hat, SuSE etc GNU/Linux distributions), software which is free and not charged for (Apache, Open Office, Mozilla), and even software which can be licensed in a range of combinations (MySQL).</p>
26395
26396 <p>Certainly free software is not necessarily free of charge. And the text of the bill does not state that it has to be so, as you will have noted after reading it. The definitions included in the Bill state clearly *what* should be considered free software, at no point referring to freedom from charges. Although the possibility of savings in payments for proprietary software licenses are mentioned, the foundations of the bill clearly refer to the fundamental guarantees to be preserved and to the stimulus to local technological development. Given that a democratic State must support these principles, it has no other choice than to use software with publicly available source code, and to exchange information only in standard formats.</p>
26397
26398 <p>If the State does not use software with these characteristics, it will be weakening basic republican principles. Luckily, free software also implies lower total costs; however, even given the hypothesis (easily disproved) that it was more expensive than proprietary software, the simple existence of an effective free software tool for a particular IT function would oblige the State to use it; not by command of this Bill, but because of the basic principles we enumerated at the start, and which arise from the very essence of the lawful democratic State.</p>
26399
26400 <p>You continue: "6. It is wrong to think that Open Source Software is free of charge. Research by the Gartner Group (an important investigator of the technological market recognized at world level) has shown that the cost of purchase of software (operating system and applications) is only 8% of the total cost which firms and institutions take on for a rational and truly beneficial use of the technology. The other 92% consists of: installation costs, enabling, support, maintenance, administration, and down-time."</p>
26401
26402 <p>This argument repeats that already given in paragraph 5 and partly contradicts paragraph 3. For the sake of brevity we refer to the comments on those paragraphs. However, allow me to point out that your conclusion is logically false: even if according to Gartner Group the cost of software is on average only 8% of the total cost of use, this does not in any way deny the existence of software which is free of charge, that is, with a licensing cost of zero.</p>
26403
26404 <p>In addition, in this paragraph you correctly point out that the service components and losses due to down-time make up the largest part of the total cost of software use, which, as you will note, contradicts your statement regarding the small value of services suggested in paragraph 3. Now the use of free software contributes significantly to reduce the remaining life-cycle costs. This reduction in the costs of installation, support etc. can be noted in several areas: in the first place, the competitive service model of free software, support and maintenance for which can be freely contracted out to a range of suppliers competing on the grounds of quality and low cost. This is true for installation, enabling, and support, and in large part for maintenance. In the second place, due to the reproductive characteristics of the model, maintenance carried out for an application is easily replicable, without incurring large costs (that is, without paying more than once for the same thing) since modifications, if one wishes, can be incorporated in the common fund of knowledge. Thirdly, the huge costs caused by non-functioning software ("blue screens of death", malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability.</p>
26405
26406 <p>You further state that: "7. One of the arguments behind the bill is the supposed freedom from costs of open-source software, compared with the costs of commercial software, without taking into account the fact that there exist types of volume licensing which can be highly advantageous for the State, as has happened in other countries."</p>
26407
26408 <p>I have already pointed out that what is in question is not the cost of the software but the principles of freedom of information, accessibility, and security. These arguments have been covered extensively in the preceding paragraphs to which I would refer you.</p>
26409
26410 <p>On the other hand, there certainly exist types of volume licensing (although unfortunately proprietary software does not satisfy the basic principles). But as you correctly pointed out in the immediately preceding paragraph of your letter, they only manage to reduce the impact of a component which makes up no more than 8% of the total.</p>
26411
26412 <p>You continue: "8. In addition, the alternative adopted by the bill (I) is clearly more expensive, due to the high costs of software migration, and (II) puts at risk compatibility and interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector, given the hundreds of versions of open source software on the market."</p>
26413
26414 <p>Let us analyze your statement in two parts. Your first argument, that migration implies high costs, is in reality an argument in favor of the Bill. Because the more time goes by, the more difficult migration to another technology will become; and at the same time, the security risks associated with proprietary software will continue to increase. In this way, the use of proprietary systems and formats will make the State ever more dependent on specific suppliers. Once a policy of using free software has been established (which certainly, does imply some cost) then on the contrary migration from one system to another becomes very simple, since all data is stored in open formats. On the other hand, migration to an open software context implies no more costs than migration between two different proprietary software contexts, which invalidates your argument completely.</p>
26415
26416 <p>The second argument refers to "problems in interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector" This statement implies a certain lack of knowledge of the way in which free software is built, which does not maximize the dependence of the user on a particular platform, as normally happens in the realm of proprietary software. Even when there are multiple free software distributions, and numerous programs which can be used for the same function, interoperability is guaranteed as much by the use of standard formats, as required by the bill, as by the possibility of creating interoperable software given the availability of the source code.</p>
26417
26418 <p>You then say that: "9. The majority of open source code does not offer adequate levels of service nor the guarantee from recognized manufacturers of high productivity on the part of the users, which has led various public organizations to retract their decision to go with an open source software solution and to use commercial software in its place."</p>
26419
26420 <p>This observation is without foundation. In respect of the guarantee, your argument was rebutted in the response to paragraph 4. In respect of support services, it is possible to use free software without them (just as also happens with proprietary software), but anyone who does need them can obtain support separately, whether from local firms or from international corporations, again just as in the case of proprietary software.</p>
26421
26422 <p>On the other hand, it would contribute greatly to our analysis if you could inform us about free software projects *established* in public bodies which have already been abandoned in favor of proprietary software. We know of a good number of cases where the opposite has taken place, but not know of any where what you describe has taken place.</p>
26423
26424 <p>You continue by observing that: "10. The bill discourages the creativity of the Peruvian software industry, which invoices 40 million US$/year, exports 4 million US$ (10th in ranking among non-traditional exports, more than handicrafts) and is a source of highly qualified employment. With a law that encourages the use of open source, software programmers lose their intellectual property rights and their main source of payment."</p>
26425
26426 <p>It is clear enough that nobody is forced to commercialize their code as free software. The only thing to take into account is that if it is not free software, it cannot be sold to the public sector. This is not in any case the main market for the national software industry. We covered some questions referring to the influence of the Bill on the generation of employment which would be both highly technically qualified and in better conditions for competition above, so it seems unnecessary to insist on this point.</p>
26427
26428 <p>What follows in your statement is incorrect. On the one hand, no author of free software loses his intellectual property rights, unless he expressly wishes to place his work in the public domain. The free software movement has always been very respectful of intellectual property, and has generated widespread public recognition of its authors. Names like those of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Miguel de Icaza, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Andrea Arcangeli, Bruce Perens, Darren Reed, Alan Cox, Eric Raymond, and many others, are recognized world-wide for their contributions to the development of software that is used today by millions of people throughout the world. On the other hand, to say that the rewards for authors rights make up the main source of payment of Peruvian programmers is in any case a guess, in particular since there is no proof to this effect, nor a demonstration of how the use of free software by the State would influence these payments.</p>
26429
26430 <p>You go on to say that: "11. Open source software, since it can be distributed without charge, does not allow the generation of income for its developers through exports. In this way, the multiplier effect of the sale of software to other countries is weakened, and so in turn is the growth of the industry, while Government rules ought on the contrary to stimulate local industry."</p>
26431
26432 <p>This statement shows once again complete ignorance of the mechanisms of and market for free software. It tries to claim that the market of sale of non- exclusive rights for use (sale of licenses) is the only possible one for the software industry, when you yourself pointed out several paragraphs above that it is not even the most important one. The incentives that the bill offers for the growth of a supply of better qualified professionals, together with the increase in experience that working on a large scale with free software within the State will bring for Peruvian technicians, will place them in a highly competitive position to offer their services abroad.</p>
26433
26434 <p>You then state that: "12. In the Forum, the use of open source software in education was discussed, without mentioning the complete collapse of this initiative in a country like Mexico, where precisely the State employees who founded the project now state that open source software did not make it possible to offer a learning experience to pupils in the schools, did not take into account the capability at a national level to give adequate support to the platform, and that the software did not and does not allow for the levels of platform integration that now exist in schools."</p>
26435
26436 <p>In fact Mexico has gone into reverse with the Red Escolar (Schools Network) project. This is due precisely to the fact that the driving forces behind the Mexican project used license costs as their main argument, instead of the other reasons specified in our project, which are far more essential. Because of this conceptual mistake, and as a result of the lack of effective support from the SEP (Secretary of State for Public Education), the assumption was made that to implant free software in schools it would be enough to drop their software budget and send them a CD ROM with Gnu/Linux instead. Of course this failed, and it couldn't have been otherwise, just as school laboratories fail when they use proprietary software and have no budget for implementation and maintenance. That's exactly why our bill is not limited to making the use of free software mandatory, but recognizes the need to create a viable migration plan, in which the State undertakes the technical transition in an orderly way in order to then enjoy the advantages of free software.</p>
26437
26438 <p>You end with a rhetorical question: "13. If open source software satisfies all the requirements of State bodies, why do you need a law to adopt it? Shouldn't it be the market which decides freely which products give most benefits or value?"</p>
26439
26440 <p>We agree that in the private sector of the economy, it must be the market that decides which products to use, and no state interference is permissible there. However, in the case of the public sector, the reasoning is not the same: as we have already established, the state archives, handles, and transmits information which does not belong to it, but which is entrusted to it by citizens, who have no alternative under the rule of law. As a counterpart to this legal requirement, the State must take extreme measures to safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of this information. The use of proprietary software raises serious doubts as to whether these requirements can be fulfilled, lacks conclusive evidence in this respect, and so is not suitable for use in the public sector.</p>
26441
26442 <p>The need for a law is based, firstly, on the realization of the fundamental principles listed above in the specific area of software; secondly, on the fact that the State is not an ideal homogeneous entity, but made up of multiple bodies with varying degrees of autonomy in decision making. Given that it is inappropriate to use proprietary software, the fact of establishing these rules in law will prevent the personal discretion of any state employee from putting at risk the information which belongs to citizens. And above all, because it constitutes an up-to-date reaffirmation in relation to the means of management and communication of information used today, it is based on the republican principle of openness to the public.</p>
26443
26444 <p>In conformance with this universally accepted principle, the citizen has the right to know all information held by the State and not covered by well- founded declarations of secrecy based on law. Now, software deals with information and is itself information. Information in a special form, capable of being interpreted by a machine in order to execute actions, but crucial information all the same because the citizen has a legitimate right to know, for example, how his vote is computed or his taxes calculated. And for that he must have free access to the source code and be able to prove to his satisfaction the programs used for electoral computations or calculation of his taxes.</p>
26445
26446 <p>I wish you the greatest respect, and would like to repeat that my office will always be open for you to expound your point of view to whatever level of detail you consider suitable.</p>
26447
26448 <p>Cordially,<br>
26449 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
26450 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
26451 </blockquote>
26452
26453       </div>
26454       <div class="tags">
26455
26456
26457         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
26458
26459
26460       </div>
26461     </div>
26462     <div class="padding"></div>
26463
26464     <div class="entry">
26465       <div class="title">
26466         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
26467       </div>
26468       <div class="date">
26469         25th December 2010
26470       </div>
26471       <div class="body">
26472         <p>Half a year ago I
26473 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
26474 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
26475 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
26476 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
26477
26478 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
26479 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
26480 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
26481 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
26482 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
26483 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
26484 got such a great test tool available.</p>
26485
26486       </div>
26487       <div class="tags">
26488
26489
26490         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
26491
26492
26493       </div>
26494     </div>
26495     <div class="padding"></div>
26496
26497     <div class="entry">
26498       <div class="title">
26499         <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>
26500       </div>
26501       <div class="date">
26502         22nd December 2010
26503       </div>
26504       <div class="body">
26505         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
26506 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
26507 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
26508 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
26509 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
26510 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
26511 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
26512 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
26513 university.</p>
26514
26515 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
26516 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
26517 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
26518 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
26519 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
26520 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
26521 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
26522 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
26523
26524 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
26525 I perform on a new model.</p>
26526
26527 <ul>
26528
26529 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
26530 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
26531 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
26532
26533 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
26534 installation, X.org is working.</li>
26535
26536 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
26537 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
26538 reported by the program.</li>
26539
26540 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
26541 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
26542 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
26543 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
26544 normally test this by playing
26545 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
26546 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
26547
26548 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
26549 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
26550
26551 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
26552 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
26553
26554 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
26555 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
26556
26557 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
26558 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
26559 few.</li>
26560
26561 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
26562 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
26563 notice this.</li>
26564
26565 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
26566 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
26567 resume.</li>
26568
26569 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
26570 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
26571 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
26572 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
26573 not.</li>
26574
26575 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
26576 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
26577 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
26578 existence.</li>
26579
26580 </ul>
26581
26582 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
26583 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
26584 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
26585 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
26586 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
26587 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
26588 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
26589 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
26590
26591       </div>
26592       <div class="tags">
26593
26594
26595         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>.
26596
26597
26598       </div>
26599     </div>
26600     <div class="padding"></div>
26601
26602     <div class="entry">
26603       <div class="title">
26604         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
26605       </div>
26606       <div class="date">
26607         11th December 2010
26608       </div>
26609       <div class="body">
26610         <p>As I continue to explore
26611 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
26612 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
26613 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
26614
26615 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
26616 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
26617 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
26618 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
26619 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
26620 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
26621 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
26622 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
26623 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
26624 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
26625 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
26626 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
26627 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
26628 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
26629 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
26630 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
26631 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
26632 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
26633 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
26634 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
26635
26636 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
26637 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
26638 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
26639 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
26640 If the Skolelinux foundation
26641 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
26642 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
26643 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
26644 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
26645 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
26646 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
26647 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
26648 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
26649
26650 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
26651 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
26652 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
26653 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
26654 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
26655 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
26656 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
26657 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
26658 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
26659 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
26660 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
26661 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
26662 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
26663 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
26664 currencies.</p>
26665
26666 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
26667 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
26668 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
26669 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
26670 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
26671 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
26672 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
26673 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
26674 BitCoins.  Check out
26675 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
26676 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
26677 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
26678 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
26679 yet.</p>
26680
26681 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
26682 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
26683 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
26684 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
26685 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
26686
26687       </div>
26688       <div class="tags">
26689
26690
26691         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>.
26692
26693
26694       </div>
26695     </div>
26696     <div class="padding"></div>
26697
26698     <div class="entry">
26699       <div class="title">
26700         <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>
26701       </div>
26702       <div class="date">
26703         10th December 2010
26704       </div>
26705       <div class="body">
26706         <p>With this weeks lawless
26707 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
26708 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
26709 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
26710 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
26711 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
26712 A blog post from
26713 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
26714 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
26715 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
26716 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
26717 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
26718 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
26719 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
26720
26721 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
26722 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
26723 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
26724 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
26725 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
26726 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
26727 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
26728 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
26729 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
26730 Debian</a> soon.</p>
26731
26732 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
26733 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
26734 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
26735 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
26736 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
26737 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
26738 you can even get
26739 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
26740 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
26741 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
26742 on the current exchange rates.</p>
26743
26744 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
26745 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
26746 donations to the address
26747 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
26748
26749       </div>
26750       <div class="tags">
26751
26752
26753         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>.
26754
26755
26756       </div>
26757     </div>
26758     <div class="padding"></div>
26759
26760     <div class="entry">
26761       <div class="title">
26762         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html">Student group continue the work on my Reprap 3D printer</a>
26763       </div>
26764       <div class="date">
26765          9th December 2010
26766       </div>
26767       <div class="body">
26768         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
26769 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
26770 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
26771 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
26772 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
26773 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
26774 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
26775 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
26776 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
26777 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
26778 operational.</p>
26779
26780 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
26781 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
26782 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
26783 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
26784 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
26785 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
26786 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
26787
26788       </div>
26789       <div class="tags">
26790
26791
26792         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap</a>.
26793
26794
26795       </div>
26796     </div>
26797     <div class="padding"></div>
26798
26799     <div class="entry">
26800       <div class="title">
26801         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html">Debian Edu development gathering and General Assembly for FRiSK</a>
26802       </div>
26803       <div class="date">
26804         29th November 2010
26805       </div>
26806       <div class="body">
26807         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
26808 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
26809 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
26810 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
26811 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
26812 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
26813
26814 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
26815 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
26816 will hold its
26817 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
26818 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
26819 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
26820 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
26821 vote this year.</p>
26822
26823       </div>
26824       <div class="tags">
26825
26826
26827         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
26828
26829
26830       </div>
26831     </div>
26832     <div class="padding"></div>
26833
26834     <div class="entry">
26835       <div class="title">
26836         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
26837       </div>
26838       <div class="date">
26839         27th November 2010
26840       </div>
26841       <div class="body">
26842         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
26843 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
26844 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
26845 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
26846 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
26847 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
26848 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
26849 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
26850
26851 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
26852 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
26853 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
26854 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
26855 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
26856 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
26857 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
26858 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
26859 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
26860 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
26861 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
26862
26863 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
26864 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
26865 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
26866 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
26867 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
26868 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
26869 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
26870 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
26871 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
26872 what is going on.</p>
26873
26874       </div>
26875       <div class="tags">
26876
26877
26878         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>.
26879
26880
26881       </div>
26882     </div>
26883     <div class="padding"></div>
26884
26885     <div class="entry">
26886       <div class="title">
26887         <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>
26888       </div>
26889       <div class="date">
26890         22nd November 2010
26891       </div>
26892       <div class="body">
26893         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
26894 upgrade testing of the
26895 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
26896 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
26897 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
26898 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
26899
26900 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
26901
26902 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
26903
26904 <blockquote><p>
26905   apache2.2-bin
26906   aptdaemon
26907   baobab
26908   binfmt-support
26909   browser-plugin-gnash
26910   cheese-common
26911   cli-common
26912   cups-pk-helper
26913   dmz-cursor-theme
26914   empathy
26915   empathy-common
26916   freedesktop-sound-theme
26917   freeglut3
26918   gconf-defaults-service
26919   gdm-themes
26920   gedit-plugins
26921   geoclue
26922   geoclue-hostip
26923   geoclue-localnet
26924   geoclue-manual
26925   geoclue-yahoo
26926   gnash
26927   gnash-common
26928   gnome
26929   gnome-backgrounds
26930   gnome-cards-data
26931   gnome-codec-install
26932   gnome-core
26933   gnome-desktop-environment
26934   gnome-disk-utility
26935   gnome-screenshot
26936   gnome-search-tool
26937   gnome-session-canberra
26938   gnome-system-log
26939   gnome-themes-extras
26940   gnome-themes-more
26941   gnome-user-share
26942   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
26943   gstreamer0.10-tools
26944   gtk2-engines
26945   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
26946   gtk2-engines-smooth
26947   hamster-applet
26948   libapache2-mod-dnssd
26949   libapr1
26950   libaprutil1
26951   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
26952   libaprutil1-ldap
26953   libart2.0-cil
26954   libboost-date-time1.42.0
26955   libboost-python1.42.0
26956   libboost-thread1.42.0
26957   libchamplain-0.4-0
26958   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
26959   libcheese-gtk18
26960   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
26961   libcryptui0
26962   libdiscid0
26963   libelf1
26964   libepc-1.0-2
26965   libepc-common
26966   libepc-ui-1.0-2
26967   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
26968   libfreerdp0
26969   libgconf2.0-cil
26970   libgdata-common
26971   libgdata7
26972   libgdu-gtk0
26973   libgee2
26974   libgeoclue0
26975   libgexiv2-0
26976   libgif4
26977   libglade2.0-cil
26978   libglib2.0-cil
26979   libgmime2.4-cil
26980   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
26981   libgnome2.24-cil
26982   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
26983   libgpod-common
26984   libgpod4
26985   libgtk2.0-cil
26986   libgtkglext1
26987   libgtksourceview2.0-common
26988   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
26989   libmono-addins0.2-cil
26990   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
26991   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
26992   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
26993   libmono-posix2.0-cil
26994   libmono-security2.0-cil
26995   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
26996   libmono-system2.0-cil
26997   libmtp8
26998   libmusicbrainz3-6
26999   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
27000   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
27001   libopal3.6.8
27002   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
27003   libpt2.6.7
27004   libpython2.6
27005   librpm1
27006   librpmio1
27007   libsdl1.2debian
27008   libsrtp0
27009   libssh-4
27010   libtelepathy-farsight0
27011   libtelepathy-glib0
27012   libtidy-0.99-0
27013   media-player-info
27014   mesa-utils
27015   mono-2.0-gac
27016   mono-gac
27017   mono-runtime
27018   nautilus-sendto
27019   nautilus-sendto-empathy
27020   p7zip-full
27021   pkg-config
27022   python-aptdaemon
27023   python-aptdaemon-gtk
27024   python-axiom
27025   python-beautifulsoup
27026   python-bugbuddy
27027   python-clientform
27028   python-coherence
27029   python-configobj
27030   python-crypto
27031   python-cupshelpers
27032   python-elementtree
27033   python-epsilon
27034   python-evolution
27035   python-feedparser
27036   python-gdata
27037   python-gdbm
27038   python-gst0.10
27039   python-gtkglext1
27040   python-gtksourceview2
27041   python-httplib2
27042   python-louie
27043   python-mako
27044   python-markupsafe
27045   python-mechanize
27046   python-nevow
27047   python-notify
27048   python-opengl
27049   python-openssl
27050   python-pam
27051   python-pkg-resources
27052   python-pyasn1
27053   python-pysqlite2
27054   python-rdflib
27055   python-serial
27056   python-tagpy
27057   python-twisted-bin
27058   python-twisted-conch
27059   python-twisted-core
27060   python-twisted-web
27061   python-utidylib
27062   python-webkit
27063   python-xdg
27064   python-zope.interface
27065   remmina
27066   remmina-plugin-data
27067   remmina-plugin-rdp
27068   remmina-plugin-vnc
27069   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
27070   rhythmbox-plugins
27071   rpm-common
27072   rpm2cpio
27073   seahorse-plugins
27074   shotwell
27075   software-center
27076   system-config-printer-udev
27077   telepathy-gabble
27078   telepathy-mission-control-5
27079   telepathy-salut
27080   tomboy
27081   totem
27082   totem-coherence
27083   totem-mozilla
27084   totem-plugins
27085   transmission-common
27086   xdg-user-dirs
27087   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
27088   xserver-xephyr
27089 </p></blockquote>
27090
27091 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
27092
27093 <blockquote><p>
27094   cheese
27095   ekiga
27096   eog
27097   epiphany-extensions
27098   evolution-exchange
27099   fast-user-switch-applet
27100   file-roller
27101   gcalctool
27102   gconf-editor
27103   gdm
27104   gedit
27105   gedit-common
27106   gnome-games
27107   gnome-games-data
27108   gnome-nettool
27109   gnome-system-tools
27110   gnome-themes
27111   gnuchess
27112   gucharmap
27113   guile-1.8-libs
27114   libavahi-ui0
27115   libdmx1
27116   libgalago3
27117   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
27118   libgtksourceview2.0-0
27119   liblircclient0
27120   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
27121   libspeexdsp1
27122   libsvga1
27123   rhythmbox
27124   seahorse
27125   sound-juicer
27126   system-config-printer
27127   totem-common
27128   transmission-gtk
27129   vinagre
27130   vino
27131 </p></blockquote>
27132
27133 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
27134
27135 <blockquote><p>
27136   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
27137 </p></blockquote>
27138
27139 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
27140
27141 <blockquote><p>
27142 [nothing]
27143 </p></blockquote>
27144
27145 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
27146
27147 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
27148
27149 <blockquote><p>
27150   ksmserver
27151 </p></blockquote>
27152
27153 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
27154
27155 <blockquote><p>
27156   kwin
27157   network-manager-kde
27158 </p></blockquote>
27159
27160 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
27161
27162 <blockquote><p>
27163   arts
27164   dolphin
27165   freespacenotifier
27166   google-gadgets-gst
27167   google-gadgets-xul
27168   kappfinder
27169   kcalc
27170   kcharselect
27171   kde-core
27172   kde-plasma-desktop
27173   kde-standard
27174   kde-window-manager
27175   kdeartwork
27176   kdeartwork-emoticons
27177   kdeartwork-style
27178   kdeartwork-theme-icon
27179   kdebase
27180   kdebase-apps
27181   kdebase-workspace
27182   kdebase-workspace-bin
27183   kdebase-workspace-data
27184   kdeeject
27185   kdelibs
27186   kdeplasma-addons
27187   kdeutils
27188   kdewallpapers
27189   kdf
27190   kfloppy
27191   kgpg
27192   khelpcenter4
27193   kinfocenter
27194   konq-plugins-l10n
27195   konqueror-nsplugins
27196   kscreensaver
27197   kscreensaver-xsavers
27198   ktimer
27199   kwrite
27200   libgle3
27201   libkde4-ruby1.8
27202   libkonq5
27203   libkonq5-templates
27204   libnetpbm10
27205   libplasma-ruby
27206   libplasma-ruby1.8
27207   libqt4-ruby1.8
27208   marble-data
27209   marble-plugins
27210   netpbm
27211   nuvola-icon-theme
27212   plasma-dataengines-workspace
27213   plasma-desktop
27214   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
27215   plasma-runners-addons
27216   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
27217   plasma-scriptengine-python
27218   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
27219   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
27220   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
27221   plasma-scriptengines
27222   plasma-wallpapers-addons
27223   plasma-widget-folderview
27224   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
27225   ruby
27226   sweeper
27227   update-notifier-kde
27228   xscreensaver-data-extra
27229   xscreensaver-gl
27230   xscreensaver-gl-extra
27231   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
27232 </p></blockquote>
27233
27234 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
27235
27236 <blockquote><p>
27237   ark
27238   google-gadgets-common
27239   google-gadgets-qt
27240   htdig
27241   kate
27242   kdebase-bin
27243   kdebase-data
27244   kdepasswd
27245   kfind
27246   klipper
27247   konq-plugins
27248   konqueror
27249   ksysguard
27250   ksysguardd
27251   libarchive1
27252   libcln6
27253   libeet1
27254   libeina-svn-06
27255   libggadget-1.0-0b
27256   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
27257   libgps19
27258   libkdecorations4
27259   libkephal4
27260   libkonq4
27261   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
27262   libkscreensaver5
27263   libksgrd4
27264   libksignalplotter4
27265   libkunitconversion4
27266   libkwineffects1a
27267   libmarblewidget4
27268   libntrack-qt4-1
27269   libntrack0
27270   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
27271   libplasmaclock4a
27272   libplasmagenericshell4
27273   libprocesscore4a
27274   libprocessui4a
27275   libqalculate5
27276   libqedje0a
27277   libqtruby4shared2
27278   libqzion0a
27279   libruby1.8
27280   libscim8c2a
27281   libsmokekdecore4-3
27282   libsmokekdeui4-3
27283   libsmokekfile3
27284   libsmokekhtml3
27285   libsmokekio3
27286   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
27287   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
27288   libsmokekparts3
27289   libsmokektexteditor3
27290   libsmokekutils3
27291   libsmokenepomuk3
27292   libsmokephonon3
27293   libsmokeplasma3
27294   libsmokeqtcore4-3
27295   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
27296   libsmokeqtgui4-3
27297   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
27298   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
27299   libsmokeqtscript4-3
27300   libsmokeqtsql4-3
27301   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
27302   libsmokeqttest4-3
27303   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
27304   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
27305   libsmokeqtxml4-3
27306   libsmokesolid3
27307   libsmokesoprano3
27308   libtaskmanager4a
27309   libtidy-0.99-0
27310   libweather-ion4a
27311   libxklavier16
27312   libxxf86misc1
27313   okteta
27314   oxygencursors
27315   plasma-dataengines-addons
27316   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
27317   plasma-widget-lancelot
27318   plasma-widgets-addons
27319   plasma-widgets-workspace
27320   polkit-kde-1
27321   ruby1.8
27322   systemsettings
27323   update-notifier-common
27324 </p></blockquote>
27325
27326 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
27327 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
27328 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
27329 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
27330
27331       </div>
27332       <div class="tags">
27333
27334
27335         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>.
27336
27337
27338       </div>
27339     </div>
27340     <div class="padding"></div>
27341
27342     <div class="entry">
27343       <div class="title">
27344         <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>
27345       </div>
27346       <div class="date">
27347         22nd November 2010
27348       </div>
27349       <div class="body">
27350         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
27351 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
27352 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
27353 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
27354 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
27355 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
27356 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
27357 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
27358 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
27359
27360 <p>I found
27361 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
27362 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
27363 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
27364 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
27365 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
27366 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
27367
27368 <pre>
27369 #!/bin/sh
27370
27371 # Based on
27372 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
27373
27374 set -e
27375 set -x
27376
27377 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
27378     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
27379     exit 1
27380 else
27381     host="$1"
27382 fi
27383
27384 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
27385     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
27386     exit 1
27387 fi
27388
27389 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
27390 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
27391 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
27392 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
27393
27394 img=$host.img
27395 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
27396 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
27397
27398 parted $img mklabel msdos
27399 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
27400 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
27401 parted $img set 1 boot on
27402
27403 modprobe dm-mod
27404 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
27405 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
27406
27407 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
27408 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
27409 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
27410
27411 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
27412 losetup -d /dev/loop0
27413 </pre>
27414
27415 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
27416 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
27417
27418 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
27419 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
27420 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
27421 seem to work just fine.</p>
27422
27423       </div>
27424       <div class="tags">
27425
27426
27427         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>.
27428
27429
27430       </div>
27431     </div>
27432     <div class="padding"></div>
27433
27434     <div class="entry">
27435       <div class="title">
27436         <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>
27437       </div>
27438       <div class="date">
27439         20th November 2010
27440       </div>
27441       <div class="body">
27442         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
27443 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
27444 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
27445 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
27446
27447 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
27448 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
27449 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
27450
27451 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
27452
27453 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
27454
27455 <blockquote><p>
27456   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
27457   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
27458   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
27459   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
27460   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
27461   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
27462   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
27463   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
27464   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
27465   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
27466   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
27467   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
27468   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
27469   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
27470   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
27471   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
27472   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
27473   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
27474   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
27475   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
27476   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
27477   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
27478   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
27479   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
27480   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
27481   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
27482   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
27483   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
27484   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
27485   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
27486   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
27487   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
27488   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
27489   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
27490   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
27491   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
27492   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
27493   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
27494   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
27495   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
27496   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
27497   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
27498   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
27499   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
27500   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
27501   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
27502   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
27503   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
27504   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
27505   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
27506   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
27507   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
27508   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
27509   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
27510   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
27511   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
27512   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
27513   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
27514   zip
27515 </p></blockquote>
27516
27517 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
27518
27519 <blockquote><p>
27520   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
27521   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
27522   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
27523   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
27524   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
27525   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
27526   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
27527   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
27528   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
27529   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
27530   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
27531   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
27532   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
27533   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
27534   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
27535   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
27536   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
27537   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
27538   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
27539   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
27540   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
27541   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
27542   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
27543   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
27544   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
27545   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
27546   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
27547   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
27548   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
27549 </p></blockquote>
27550
27551 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
27552
27553 <blockquote><p>
27554   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
27555 </p></blockquote>
27556
27557 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
27558
27559 <blockquote><p>
27560 [nothing]
27561 </p></blockquote>
27562
27563 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
27564
27565 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
27566
27567 <blockquote><p>
27568   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
27569   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
27570   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
27571   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
27572   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
27573   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
27574   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
27575   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
27576   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
27577   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
27578   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
27579   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
27580   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
27581   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
27582   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
27583   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
27584   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
27585   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
27586   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
27587   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
27588   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
27589   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
27590   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
27591   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
27592   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
27593   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
27594   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
27595   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
27596   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
27597   ttf-sazanami-gothic
27598 </p></blockquote>
27599
27600 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
27601
27602 <blockquote><p>
27603   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
27604   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
27605   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
27606   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
27607   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
27608   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
27609   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
27610   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
27611   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
27612   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
27613   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
27614   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
27615   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
27616   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
27617   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
27618   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
27619   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
27620   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
27621   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
27622   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
27623   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
27624   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
27625   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
27626   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
27627   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
27628   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
27629   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
27630   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
27631   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
27632   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
27633   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
27634   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
27635   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
27636 </p></blockquote>
27637
27638 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
27639
27640 <blockquote><p>
27641   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
27642   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
27643   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
27644   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
27645   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
27646   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
27647   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
27648 </p></blockquote>
27649
27650 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
27651
27652 <blockquote><p>
27653   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
27654 </p></blockquote>
27655
27656       </div>
27657       <div class="tags">
27658
27659
27660         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>.
27661
27662
27663       </div>
27664     </div>
27665     <div class="padding"></div>
27666
27667     <div class="entry">
27668       <div class="title">
27669         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
27670       </div>
27671       <div class="date">
27672         20th November 2010
27673       </div>
27674       <div class="body">
27675         <p>Answering
27676 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
27677 call from the Gnash project</a> for
27678 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
27679 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
27680 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
27681 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
27682 releases out more often.</p>
27683
27684 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
27685 I have considered setting up a <a
27686 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
27687 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
27688 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
27689 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
27690 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
27691 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
27692 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
27693 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
27694 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
27695 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
27696 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
27697 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
27698
27699       </div>
27700       <div class="tags">
27701
27702
27703         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>.
27704
27705
27706       </div>
27707     </div>
27708     <div class="padding"></div>
27709
27710     <div class="entry">
27711       <div class="title">
27712         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
27713       </div>
27714       <div class="date">
27715          9th November 2010
27716       </div>
27717       <div class="body">
27718         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
27719
27720 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
27721 3D linked in from
27722 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
27723 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
27724
27725       </div>
27726       <div class="tags">
27727
27728
27729         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>.
27730
27731
27732       </div>
27733     </div>
27734     <div class="padding"></div>
27735
27736     <div class="entry">
27737       <div class="title">
27738         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html">Making room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD</a>
27739       </div>
27740       <div class="date">
27741          7th November 2010
27742       </div>
27743       <div class="body">
27744         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
27745 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
27746 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
27747 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
27748 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
27749 working using this DVD.</p>
27750
27751 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
27752 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
27753 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
27754 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
27755 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
27756 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
27757 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
27758
27759 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
27760 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
27761 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
27762 Debian archive.</p>
27763
27764 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
27765 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
27766 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
27767 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
27768 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
27769 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
27770 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
27771 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
27772 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
27773 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
27774 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
27775 free X driver should work.</p>
27776
27777 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
27778 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
27779 DVD more useful again.</p>
27780
27781       </div>
27782       <div class="tags">
27783
27784
27785         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
27786
27787
27788       </div>
27789     </div>
27790     <div class="padding"></div>
27791
27792     <div class="entry">
27793       <div class="title">
27794         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
27795       </div>
27796       <div class="date">
27797         24th October 2010
27798       </div>
27799       <div class="body">
27800         <p>Some updates.</p>
27801
27802 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
27803 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
27804 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
27805 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
27806 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
27807 :)</p>
27808
27809 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
27810 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
27811 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
27812 It is called
27813 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
27814 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
27815 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
27816 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
27817 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
27818 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
27819
27820 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
27821 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
27822 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
27823 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
27824 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
27825 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
27826 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
27827 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
27828 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
27829 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
27830
27831       </div>
27832       <div class="tags">
27833
27834
27835         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>.
27836
27837
27838       </div>
27839     </div>
27840     <div class="padding"></div>
27841
27842     <div class="entry">
27843       <div class="title">
27844         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html">Pledge for funding to the Gnash project to get AVM2 support</a>
27845       </div>
27846       <div class="date">
27847         19th October 2010
27848       </div>
27849       <div class="body">
27850         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
27851 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
27852 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
27853 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
27854 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
27855 AVM2 flash files.</p>
27856
27857 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
27858 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
27859 following text:</P>
27860
27861 <p><blockquote>
27862
27863   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
27864   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
27865
27866   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
27867
27868   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
27869
27870   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
27871   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
27872   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
27873   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
27874   days. The project web page is available from
27875   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
27876   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
27877   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
27878
27879   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
27880   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
27881   to get this to happen.</p>
27882
27883   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
27884   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
27885
27886 </blockquote></p>
27887
27888 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
27889 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
27890 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
27891 :)</p>
27892
27893       </div>
27894       <div class="tags">
27895
27896
27897         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
27898
27899
27900       </div>
27901     </div>
27902     <div class="padding"></div>
27903
27904     <div class="entry">
27905       <div class="title">
27906         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html">First version of a Perl library to control the Spykee robot</a>
27907       </div>
27908       <div class="date">
27909          9th October 2010
27910       </div>
27911       <div class="body">
27912         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
27913 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
27914 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
27915 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
27916 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
27917 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
27918 robots.</p>
27919
27920 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
27921 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
27922 a few less important features too.</p>
27923
27924 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
27925 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
27926 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
27927 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
27928
27929 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
27930 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
27931 source or binary package:</p>
27932
27933 <p><ul>
27934 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz</a></li>
27935 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc</a></li>
27936 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb</a></li>
27937 </ul></p>
27938
27939 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
27940 please let me know.</p>
27941
27942       </div>
27943       <div class="tags">
27944
27945
27946         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
27947
27948
27949       </div>
27950     </div>
27951     <div class="padding"></div>
27952
27953     <div class="entry">
27954       <div class="title">
27955         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
27956       </div>
27957       <div class="date">
27958          3rd October 2010
27959       </div>
27960       <div class="body">
27961         <p><ul>
27962
27963 <li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/there-is-no-plan-b-why-the-ipv4-to-ipv6-transition-will-be-ugly.ars">There
27964 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
27965
27966 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
27967 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
27968 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
27969
27970 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
27971 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
27972 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
27973 simple setup.
27974
27975 </ul></p>
27976
27977       </div>
27978       <div class="tags">
27979
27980
27981         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
27982
27983
27984       </div>
27985     </div>
27986     <div class="padding"></div>
27987
27988     <div class="entry">
27989       <div class="title">
27990         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">Terms of use for video produced by a Canon IXUS 130 digital camera</a>
27991       </div>
27992       <div class="date">
27993          9th September 2010
27994       </div>
27995       <div class="body">
27996         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
27997 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
27998 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
27999 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
28000 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
28001 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
28002 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
28003 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
28004 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
28005
28006 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
28007 written:</p>
28008
28009 <blockquote>
28010 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
28011 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
28012 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
28013 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
28014 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
28015
28016 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
28017 standard.</p>
28018 </blockquote>
28019
28020 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
28021 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
28022 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
28023 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
28024
28025 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
28026 read
28027 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
28028 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
28029 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
28030 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
28031 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
28032 the issue.  The solution is to support the
28033 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
28034 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
28035 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
28036
28037       </div>
28038       <div class="tags">
28039
28040
28041         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
28042
28043
28044       </div>
28045     </div>
28046     <div class="padding"></div>
28047
28048     <div class="entry">
28049       <div class="title">
28050         <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>
28051       </div>
28052       <div class="date">
28053          4th September 2010
28054       </div>
28055       <div class="body">
28056         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
28057 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
28058 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
28059 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
28060 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
28061 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
28062 installed.</p>
28063
28064 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
28065 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
28066 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
28067 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
28068 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
28069 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
28070 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
28071 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
28072 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
28073
28074 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
28075 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
28076 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
28077 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
28078 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
28079 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
28080 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
28081 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
28082 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
28083 pages they want to visit.</p>
28084
28085 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
28086 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
28087 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
28088 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
28089 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
28090 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
28091 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
28092 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
28093 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
28094 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
28095 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
28096
28097       </div>
28098       <div class="tags">
28099
28100
28101         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>.
28102
28103
28104       </div>
28105     </div>
28106     <div class="padding"></div>
28107
28108     <div class="entry">
28109       <div class="title">
28110         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html">My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot</a>
28111       </div>
28112       <div class="date">
28113          1st September 2010
28114       </div>
28115       <div class="body">
28116         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
28117 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
28118 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
28119 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
28120 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
28121 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
28122 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
28123 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
28124 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
28125 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
28126 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
28127 drive around.</p>
28128
28129 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
28130 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
28131
28132 <p><pre>
28133 use Spykee;
28134 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
28135 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
28136 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
28137 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
28138 $spykee->left();
28139 sleep 2;
28140 $spykee->right();
28141 sleep 2;
28142 $spykee->forward();
28143 sleep 2;
28144 $spykee->back();
28145 sleep 2;
28146 $spykee->stop();
28147 </pre></p>
28148
28149 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
28150 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
28151 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
28152 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
28153 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
28154 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
28155 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
28156 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
28157 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
28158 going. :).</p>
28159
28160 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
28161 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
28162 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
28163 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
28164
28165       </div>
28166       <div class="tags">
28167
28168
28169         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
28170
28171
28172       </div>
28173     </div>
28174     <div class="padding"></div>
28175
28176     <div class="entry">
28177       <div class="title">
28178         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
28179       </div>
28180       <div class="date">
28181         30th August 2010
28182       </div>
28183       <div class="body">
28184         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
28185 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
28186 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
28187 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
28188 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
28189 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
28190 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
28191
28192 <pre>
28193 % ln foo bar
28194 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
28195 %
28196 </pre>
28197
28198 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
28199 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
28200 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
28201 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
28202 nevertheless. :)</p>
28203
28204 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
28205 git from
28206 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
28207
28208       </div>
28209       <div class="tags">
28210
28211
28212         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
28213
28214
28215       </div>
28216     </div>
28217     <div class="padding"></div>
28218
28219     <div class="entry">
28220       <div class="title">
28221         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
28222       </div>
28223       <div class="date">
28224         26th August 2010
28225       </div>
28226       <div class="body">
28227         <p>My file system sematics program
28228 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
28229 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
28230 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
28231 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
28232 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
28233 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
28234 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
28235 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
28236 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
28237 script:</p>
28238
28239 <pre>
28240 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
28241   mode_t retval = 0;
28242   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
28243   if (-1 != fd) {
28244     unlink(name);
28245     struct stat statbuf;
28246     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
28247       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
28248     }
28249     close(fd);
28250   }
28251   return retval;
28252 }
28253
28254 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
28255 int test_umask(void) {
28256   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
28257
28258   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
28259   mode_t newmode;
28260   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
28261     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
28262            newmode);
28263   }
28264   umask(007);
28265   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
28266     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
28267            newmode);
28268   }
28269
28270   umask (orig_umask);
28271   return 0;
28272 }
28273
28274 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
28275   [...]
28276   test_umask();
28277   return 0;
28278 }
28279 </pre>
28280
28281 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
28282
28283 <pre>
28284 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
28285 info: testing symlink creation
28286 info: testing subdirectory creation
28287 info: testing fcntl locking
28288   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
28289   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
28290   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
28291   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
28292   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
28293   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
28294 info: testing umask effect on file creation
28295 </pre>
28296
28297 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
28298 result:</p>
28299
28300 <pre>
28301 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
28302 info: testing symlink creation
28303 info: testing subdirectory creation
28304 info: testing fcntl locking
28305   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
28306   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
28307   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
28308   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
28309   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
28310   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
28311 info: testing umask effect on file creation
28312   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
28313   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
28314 </pre>
28315
28316 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
28317 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
28318 directory.</p>
28319
28320 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
28321 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
28322
28323 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
28324 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
28325 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
28326
28327       </div>
28328       <div class="tags">
28329
28330
28331         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
28332
28333
28334       </div>
28335     </div>
28336     <div class="padding"></div>
28337
28338     <div class="entry">
28339       <div class="title">
28340         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
28341       </div>
28342       <div class="date">
28343         15th August 2010
28344       </div>
28345       <div class="body">
28346         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
28347 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
28348 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
28349 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
28350 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
28351 long time.</p>
28352
28353       </div>
28354       <div class="tags">
28355
28356
28357         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
28358
28359
28360       </div>
28361     </div>
28362     <div class="padding"></div>
28363
28364     <div class="entry">
28365       <div class="title">
28366         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
28367       </div>
28368       <div class="date">
28369          9th August 2010
28370       </div>
28371       <div class="body">
28372         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
28373 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
28374 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
28375 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
28376 generated configuration.</p>
28377
28378 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
28379 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
28380 without any manual configuration.</p>
28381
28382 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
28383 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
28384 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
28385 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
28386 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
28387 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
28388 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
28389 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
28390 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
28391 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
28392 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
28393 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
28394 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
28395 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
28396 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
28397 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
28398 use.</p>
28399
28400 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
28401 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
28402 working properly out of the box:</p>
28403
28404 <ul>
28405 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
28406 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
28407 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
28408 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
28409 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
28410 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
28411 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
28412 </ul>
28413
28414 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
28415
28416 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
28417 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
28418 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
28419 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
28420 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
28421
28422 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
28423 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
28424 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
28425 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
28426 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
28427 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
28428 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
28429 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
28430
28431 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
28432 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
28433 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
28434 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
28435 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
28436 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
28437 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
28438 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
28439 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
28440 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
28441 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
28442 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
28443 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
28444 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
28445 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
28446 current DNS domain is used.</p>
28447
28448 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
28449 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
28450 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
28451 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
28452 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
28453 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
28454 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
28455 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
28456 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
28457 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
28458 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
28459 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
28460 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
28461
28462 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
28463 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
28464 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
28465 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
28466 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
28467 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
28468 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
28469 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
28470 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
28471 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
28472 do for now. :)</p>
28473
28474 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
28475 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
28476 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
28477 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
28478 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
28479 yet.</p>
28480
28481 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
28482 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28483
28484 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
28485 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
28486 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
28487 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
28488
28489       </div>
28490       <div class="tags">
28491
28492
28493         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
28494
28495
28496       </div>
28497     </div>
28498     <div class="padding"></div>
28499
28500     <div class="entry">
28501       <div class="title">
28502         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...</a>
28503       </div>
28504       <div class="date">
28505          8th August 2010
28506       </div>
28507       <div class="body">
28508         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
28509 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
28510 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
28511 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
28512 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
28513 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
28514 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
28515
28516 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
28517 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
28518 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
28519 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
28520 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
28521 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
28522 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
28523
28524 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
28525 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
28526 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
28527 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
28528 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
28529
28530 <pre>
28531 /*
28532  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
28533  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
28534  * directory.
28535  * License: GPL v2 or later
28536  *
28537  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
28538  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
28539 */
28540
28541 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
28542 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
28543 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
28544
28545 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
28546
28547 #include &lt;errno.h>
28548 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
28549 #include &lt;stdio.h>
28550 #include &lt;string.h>
28551 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
28552 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
28553 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
28554 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
28555 #include &lt;unistd.h>
28556
28557 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
28558 /*
28559  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
28560  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
28561  * below.
28562  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
28563  */
28564 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
28565 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
28566   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
28567 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
28568   char *zErrMsg;
28569   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
28570   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
28571   unlink(name);
28572   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
28573   if( rc ){
28574     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
28575     sqlite3_close(db);
28576     return -1;
28577   }
28578
28579   /* create tables */
28580   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
28581   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
28582     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
28583     sqlite3_close(db);
28584     return -1;
28585   }
28586   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
28587   sqlite3_close(db);
28588   return 0;
28589 }
28590 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
28591
28592 /*
28593  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
28594  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
28595  * done in the sqlite3 library.
28596  * See also
28597  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
28598  * POSIX specification
28599  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
28600  */
28601 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
28602   struct flock fl;
28603   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
28604   unlink(name);
28605   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
28606   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
28607
28608   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
28609   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
28610   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
28611   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
28612   fl.l_len    = 1;
28613   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
28614   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
28615
28616   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
28617   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
28618   fl.l_len    = 510;
28619   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
28620   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
28621
28622   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
28623   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
28624   fl.l_len    = 1;
28625   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
28626   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
28627
28628   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
28629   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
28630   fl.l_len    = 1;
28631   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
28632   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
28633
28634   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
28635   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
28636   fl.l_len    = 510;
28637   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
28638
28639   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
28640   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
28641   fl.l_len    = 2;
28642   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
28643   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
28644
28645   close(fd);
28646   return 0;
28647 }
28648
28649 /*
28650  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
28651  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
28652  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
28653  * slowing down file operations.
28654  */
28655 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
28656 #define LEVELS 5
28657   char *path = strdup("test");
28658   char *dirs[LEVELS];
28659   int level;
28660   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
28661   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
28662     char *newpath = NULL;
28663     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
28664       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
28665              path, strerror(errno));
28666       break;
28667     }
28668     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
28669     free(path);
28670     path = newpath;
28671   }
28672   return 0;
28673 }
28674
28675 /*
28676  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
28677  * KDE.
28678  */
28679 int test_symlinks(void) {
28680   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
28681   unlink("symlink");
28682   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
28683     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
28684   return 0;
28685 }
28686
28687 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
28688   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
28689   test_symlinks();
28690   test_subdirectory_creation();
28691 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
28692   test_sqlite_open();
28693 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
28694   test_gcompris_locking();
28695   return 0;
28696 }
28697 </pre>
28698
28699 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
28700 this:</p>
28701
28702 <pre>
28703 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
28704 info: testing symlink creation
28705 info: testing subdirectory creation
28706 info: sqlite worked
28707 info: testing fcntl locking
28708   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
28709   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
28710   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
28711   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
28712   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
28713   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
28714 </pre>
28715
28716 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
28717 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
28718 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
28719 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
28720 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
28721 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
28722 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
28723 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
28724
28725 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
28726 it. :)</p>
28727
28728 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
28729 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
28730 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
28731
28732       </div>
28733       <div class="tags">
28734
28735
28736         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
28737
28738
28739       </div>
28740     </div>
28741     <div class="padding"></div>
28742
28743     <div class="entry">
28744       <div class="title">
28745         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html">Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu</a>
28746       </div>
28747       <div class="date">
28748          7th August 2010
28749       </div>
28750       <div class="body">
28751         <p>A few days ago, I
28752 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
28753 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
28754 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
28755 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
28756 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
28757 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
28758 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
28759 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
28760 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
28761
28762 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
28763 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
28764 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
28765 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
28766 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
28767 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
28768 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
28769 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
28770 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
28771 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
28772 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
28773 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
28774 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
28775 gave it a IP address.</p>
28776
28777 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
28778 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
28779 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
28780 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
28781 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
28782 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
28783 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
28784 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
28785
28786 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
28787 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
28788 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
28789 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
28790 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
28791 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
28792
28793 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
28794 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
28795 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
28796 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
28797 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
28798 with UID and GID values.</p>
28799
28800 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
28801 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28802
28803       </div>
28804       <div class="tags">
28805
28806
28807         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
28808
28809
28810       </div>
28811     </div>
28812     <div class="padding"></div>
28813
28814     <div class="entry">
28815       <div class="title">
28816         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo</a>
28817       </div>
28818       <div class="date">
28819          3rd August 2010
28820       </div>
28821       <div class="body">
28822         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
28823 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
28824 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
28825 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
28826 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
28827 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
28828 servers.</p>
28829
28830 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
28831 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
28832 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
28833 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
28834 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
28835 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
28836 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
28837 .uio.no.</p>
28838
28839 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
28840 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
28841 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
28842 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
28843 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
28844 university servers.</p>
28845
28846 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
28847 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
28848 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
28849 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
28850 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
28851 uses.</p>
28852
28853       </div>
28854       <div class="tags">
28855
28856
28857         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
28858
28859
28860       </div>
28861     </div>
28862     <div class="padding"></div>
28863
28864     <div class="entry">
28865       <div class="title">
28866         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
28867       </div>
28868       <div class="date">
28869         27th July 2010
28870       </div>
28871       <div class="body">
28872         <p>I discovered this while doing
28873 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
28874 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
28875 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
28876 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
28877 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
28878
28879 <p>An example is from todays
28880 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
28881 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
28882 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
28883 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
28884 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
28885 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
28886 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
28887
28888 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
28889
28890 <blockquote><pre>
28891 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
28892  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
28893   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
28894 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
28895  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
28896 </pre></blockquote>
28897
28898 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
28899 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
28900 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
28901 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
28902 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
28903 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
28904 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
28905 of dependency loops.</p>
28906
28907 <p>Thanks to
28908 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
28909 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
28910 dependencies
28911 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
28912 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
28913
28914 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
28915 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
28916 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
28917 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
28918 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
28919 it.</p>
28920
28921       </div>
28922       <div class="tags">
28923
28924
28925         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>.
28926
28927
28928       </div>
28929     </div>
28930     <div class="padding"></div>
28931
28932     <div class="entry">
28933       <div class="title">
28934         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html">First Debian Edu test release (alpha0) based on Squeeze is released</a>
28935       </div>
28936       <div class="date">
28937         27th July 2010
28938       </div>
28939       <div class="body">
28940         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
28941 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
28942 completed.</p>
28943
28944 <blockquote>
28945 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
28946 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
28947 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
28948 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
28949 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
28950 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
28951 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
28952 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
28953
28954 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
28955 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
28956 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
28957
28958 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
28959 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
28960 much.</p>
28961
28962 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
28963
28964 <ul>
28965 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
28966 <ul>
28967   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
28968          combination with some new artwork
28969   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
28970   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
28971   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
28972   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
28973   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
28974   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
28975   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
28976   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
28977   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
28978 </ul></li>
28979 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
28980     Enabled for:
28981 <ul>
28982   <li>PAM
28983   <li>LDAP
28984   <li>IMAP
28985   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
28986 </ul>
28987 </li>
28988 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
28989 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
28990     fetched from LDAP.</li>
28991 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
28992 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
28993 </ul>
28994 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
28995
28996 <ul>
28997 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
28998     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
28999     for testing.</li>
29000 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
29001     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
29002     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
29003 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
29004 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
29005 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
29006 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
29007     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
29008 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
29009     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
29010     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
29011 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
29012     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
29013     and help out with translations.</li>
29014 </ul>
29015
29016 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
29017
29018 <ul>
29019 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</a></li>
29020 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</a></li>
29021 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
29022 </ul>
29023 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
29024
29025 <ul>
29026 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</a></li>
29027 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</a></li>
29028 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
29029 </ul>
29030
29031 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
29032 get closer to the final release.</p>
29033
29034 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
29035
29036 <ul>
29037 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
29038 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
29039 </ul>
29040
29041 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
29042 <ul>
29043 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
29044 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
29045 </ul>
29046 <p>How to report bugs:
29047 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
29048
29049 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
29050 </blockquote>
29051
29052       </div>
29053       <div class="tags">
29054
29055
29056         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
29057
29058
29059       </div>
29060     </div>
29061     <div class="padding"></div>
29062
29063     <div class="entry">
29064       <div class="title">
29065         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html">One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu</a>
29066       </div>
29067       <div class="date">
29068         25th July 2010
29069       </div>
29070       <div class="body">
29071         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
29072 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
29073 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
29074 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
29075 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
29076
29077 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
29078 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
29079 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
29080 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
29081 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
29082 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
29083 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
29084
29085 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
29086 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
29087 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
29088 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
29089 up. :)</p>
29090
29091 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
29092 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
29093 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
29094
29095 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
29096 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
29097 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
29098 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
29099 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
29100 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
29101 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
29102 release another day.</p>
29103
29104 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
29105 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
29106
29107       </div>
29108       <div class="tags">
29109
29110
29111         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
29112
29113
29114       </div>
29115     </div>
29116     <div class="padding"></div>
29117
29118     <div class="entry">
29119       <div class="title">
29120         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html">OpenStreetmap one step closer to having routing on its front page</a>
29121       </div>
29122       <div class="date">
29123         18th July 2010
29124       </div>
29125       <div class="body">
29126         <p>Thanks to
29127 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
29128 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
29129 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
29130 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
29131 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
29132 only available from the development server, until more experience is
29133 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
29134
29135 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
29136 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
29137 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
29138 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
29139 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
29140 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
29141 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
29142
29143       </div>
29144       <div class="tags">
29145
29146
29147         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
29148
29149
29150       </div>
29151     </div>
29152     <div class="padding"></div>
29153
29154     <div class="entry">
29155       <div class="title">
29156         <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>
29157       </div>
29158       <div class="date">
29159         17th July 2010
29160       </div>
29161       <div class="body">
29162         <p>This is a
29163 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
29164 on my
29165 <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
29166 work</a> on
29167 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
29168 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
29169
29170 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
29171 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
29172 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
29173 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
29174
29175 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
29176 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
29177 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
29178
29179 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
29180
29181 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
29182 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
29183 the web.
29184
29185 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
29186 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
29187 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
29188 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
29189 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
29190 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
29191
29192 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
29193 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
29194 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
29195 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
29196 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
29197 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
29198 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
29199 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
29200 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
29201 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
29202 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
29203 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
29204 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
29205 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
29206 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
29207 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
29208
29209 <blockquote><pre>
29210 ldapsearch -h ldap \
29211   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
29212   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
29213   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
29214   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
29215   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
29216   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
29217
29218 ldapsearch -h ldap \
29219   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
29220   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
29221   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
29222   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
29223   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
29224 </pre></blockquote>
29225
29226 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
29227 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
29228 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
29229 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
29230 also exist.</p>
29231
29232 <blockquote><pre>
29233 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
29234 objectclass: top
29235 objectclass: dnsdomain
29236 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
29237 dc: tjener
29238 arecord: 10.0.2.2
29239 associateddomain: tjener.intern
29240
29241 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
29242 objectclass: top
29243 objectclass: dnsdomain2
29244 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
29245 dc: 2
29246 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
29247 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
29248 </pre></blockquote>
29249
29250 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
29251 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
29252 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
29253 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
29254 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
29255 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
29256 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
29257 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
29258 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
29259 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
29260 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
29261 instead.</p>
29262
29263 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
29264 like this:</p>
29265
29266 <blockquote><pre>
29267 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
29268   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
29269   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
29270   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
29271   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
29272   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
29273
29274 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
29275   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
29276 </pre></blockquote>
29277
29278 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
29279 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
29280 reverse lookups.</p>
29281
29282 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
29283 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
29284 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
29285 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
29286
29287 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
29288 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
29289 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
29290
29291 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
29292 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
29293 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
29294 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
29295 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
29296
29297 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
29298 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
29299 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
29300 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
29301 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
29302
29303 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
29304 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
29305 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
29306 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
29307 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
29308 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
29309
29310 <blockquote><pre>
29311 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
29312     SUP top
29313     AUXILIARY
29314     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
29315           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
29316           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
29317           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
29318           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
29319     ))
29320 </pre></blockquote>
29321
29322 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
29323 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
29324 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
29325 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
29326 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
29327 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
29328
29329 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
29330
29331 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
29332 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
29333 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
29334 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
29335 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
29336
29337 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
29338 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
29339 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
29340 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
29341
29342 <blockquote><pre>
29343 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
29344 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
29345 </pre></blockquote>
29346
29347 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
29348 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
29349 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
29350 search result is this entry:</p>
29351
29352 <blockquote><pre>
29353 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
29354 cn: dhcp
29355 objectClass: top
29356 objectClass: dhcpServer
29357 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
29358 </pre></blockquote>
29359
29360 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
29361 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
29362 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
29363 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
29364 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
29365 The search result is this entry:</p>
29366
29367 <blockquote><pre>
29368 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
29369 cn: DHCP Config
29370 objectClass: top
29371 objectClass: dhcpService
29372 objectClass: dhcpOptions
29373 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
29374 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
29375 dhcpStatements: authoritative
29376 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
29377 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
29378 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
29379 </pre></blockquote>
29380
29381 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
29382 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
29383 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
29384 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
29385 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
29386 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
29387 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
29388 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
29389 related computer objects.</p>
29390
29391 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
29392 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
29393 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
29394 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
29395 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
29396 like:</p>
29397
29398 <blockquote><pre>
29399 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
29400 cn: hostname
29401 objectClass: top
29402 objectClass: dhcpHost
29403 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
29404 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
29405 </pre></blockquote>
29406
29407 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
29408 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
29409 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
29410 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
29411 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
29412 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
29413 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
29414 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
29415 structural object class.
29416
29417 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
29418
29419 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
29420 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
29421 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
29422 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
29423 in the configuration.</p>
29424
29425 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
29426 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
29427 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
29428 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
29429 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
29430 structure.</p>
29431
29432 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
29433 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
29434
29435 <blockquote><pre>
29436 ou=services
29437   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
29438     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
29439     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
29440       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
29441         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
29442     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
29443       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
29444         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
29445     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
29446       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
29447 </pre></blockquote>
29448
29449 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
29450 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
29451 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
29452 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
29453
29454 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
29455 like this:</p>
29456
29457 <blockquote><pre>
29458 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
29459 dc: hostname
29460 objectClass: top
29461 objectClass: dhcpHost
29462 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
29463 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
29464 associateddomain: hostname.intern
29465 arecord: 10.11.12.13
29466 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
29467 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
29468 </pre></blockquote>
29469
29470 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
29471 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
29472 auxiliary object class.</p>
29473
29474       </div>
29475       <div class="tags">
29476
29477
29478         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>.
29479
29480
29481       </div>
29482     </div>
29483     <div class="padding"></div>
29484
29485     <div class="entry">
29486       <div class="title">
29487         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
29488       </div>
29489       <div class="date">
29490         14th July 2010
29491       </div>
29492       <div class="body">
29493         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
29494 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
29495 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
29496 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
29497 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
29498
29499 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
29500 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
29501
29502 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
29503 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
29504 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
29505 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
29506 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
29507 to a slave DNS server.</p>
29508
29509 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
29510 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
29511 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
29512 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
29513 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
29514 seem to work.</p>
29515
29516 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
29517 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
29518 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
29519 this:</p>
29520
29521 <blockquote><pre>
29522   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
29523   cn: hostname
29524   objectClass: dhcphost
29525   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
29526   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
29527   associateddomain: hostname.intern
29528   arecord: 10.11.12.13
29529   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
29530   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
29531   ldapconfigsound: Y
29532 </pre></blockquote>
29533
29534 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
29535 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
29536 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
29537 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
29538
29539 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
29540 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
29541 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
29542 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
29543 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
29544 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
29545 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
29546 might be a good place to put it.</p>
29547
29548 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
29549 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
29550
29551       </div>
29552       <div class="tags">
29553
29554
29555         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>.
29556
29557
29558       </div>
29559     </div>
29560     <div class="padding"></div>
29561
29562     <div class="entry">
29563       <div class="title">
29564         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
29565       </div>
29566       <div class="date">
29567         11th July 2010
29568       </div>
29569       <div class="body">
29570         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
29571 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
29572 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
29573 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
29574
29575 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
29576 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
29577 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
29578 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
29579 LTSP clients.</p>
29580
29581 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
29582 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
29583 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
29584
29585 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
29586 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
29587 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
29588
29589 <blockquote><pre>
29590 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
29591 #
29592 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
29593 #
29594 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
29595 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
29596 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
29597 #
29598 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
29599 # existence of attribute names.
29600 #
29601 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
29602 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
29603 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
29604 #
29605 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
29606 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
29607 #
29608 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
29609 #     SUP top
29610 #     AUXILIARY
29611 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
29612
29613 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
29614 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
29615     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
29616     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
29617         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
29618         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
29619             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
29620             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
29621             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
29622             # bass value on to clients
29623             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
29624         done
29625     done
29626 fi
29627 </pre></blockquote>
29628
29629 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
29630 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
29631 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
29632 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
29633 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
29634
29635 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
29636 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
29637
29638 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
29639 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
29640 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
29641 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
29642 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
29643 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
29644
29645       </div>
29646       <div class="tags">
29647
29648
29649         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>.
29650
29651
29652       </div>
29653     </div>
29654     <div class="padding"></div>
29655
29656     <div class="entry">
29657       <div class="title">
29658         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
29659       </div>
29660       <div class="date">
29661          9th July 2010
29662       </div>
29663       <div class="body">
29664         <p>Since
29665 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
29666 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
29667 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
29668 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
29669 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
29670 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
29671 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
29672 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
29673 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
29674 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
29675 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
29676 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
29677 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
29678
29679       </div>
29680       <div class="tags">
29681
29682
29683         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>.
29684
29685
29686       </div>
29687     </div>
29688     <div class="padding"></div>
29689
29690     <div class="entry">
29691       <div class="title">
29692         <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>
29693       </div>
29694       <div class="date">
29695          3rd July 2010
29696       </div>
29697       <div class="body">
29698         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
29699 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
29700 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
29701 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
29702 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
29703 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
29704 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
29705 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
29706
29707 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
29708 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
29709 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
29710 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
29711 publish the difference.</p>
29712
29713 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
29714
29715 <blockquote><p>
29716   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
29717   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
29718   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
29719   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
29720   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
29721   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
29722   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
29723   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
29724 </p></blockquote>
29725
29726 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
29727
29728 <blockquote><p>
29729   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
29730   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
29731   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
29732   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
29733   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
29734   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
29735   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
29736   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
29737   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
29738   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
29739   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
29740   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
29741   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
29742   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
29743   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
29744   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
29745   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
29746   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
29747   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
29748   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
29749 </p></blockquote>
29750
29751 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
29752
29753 <blockquote><p>
29754   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
29755   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
29756   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
29757   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
29758   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
29759   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
29760   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
29761   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
29762   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
29763   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
29764   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
29765   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
29766   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
29767   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
29768   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
29769   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
29770   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
29771   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
29772   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
29773   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
29774   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
29775 </p></blockquote>
29776
29777 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
29778
29779 <blockquote><p>
29780   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
29781   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
29782   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
29783 </p></blockquote>
29784
29785 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
29786 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
29787 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
29788 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
29789 the difference somewhat.
29790
29791       </div>
29792       <div class="tags">
29793
29794
29795         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>.
29796
29797
29798       </div>
29799     </div>
29800     <div class="padding"></div>
29801
29802     <div class="entry">
29803       <div class="title">
29804         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html">Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop</a>
29805       </div>
29806       <div class="date">
29807          1st July 2010
29808       </div>
29809       <div class="body">
29810         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
29811 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
29812 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
29813 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
29814 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
29815 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
29816 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
29817 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
29818 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
29819
29820 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
29821
29822 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
29823 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
29824 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
29825 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
29826 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
29827 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
29828 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
29829 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
29830 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
29831 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
29832 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
29833 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
29834 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
29835 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
29836 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
29837
29838 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
29839
29840 <blockquote><pre>
29841 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
29842 </pre></blockquote>
29843
29844 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
29845 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
29846 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
29847 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
29848 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
29849 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
29850 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
29851 on how to get this working.</p>
29852
29853 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
29854 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
29855 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
29856 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
29857 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
29858 instructions I found in the
29859 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
29860 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
29861
29862 <blockquote><pre>
29863         debug-level             0
29864         reload-count            unlimited
29865         paranoia                no
29866
29867         enable-cache            passwd          yes
29868         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
29869         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
29870         suggested-size          passwd          211
29871         check-files             passwd          yes
29872         persistent              passwd          yes
29873         shared                  passwd          yes
29874         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
29875         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
29876
29877         enable-cache            group           yes
29878         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
29879         negative-time-to-live   group           20
29880         suggested-size          group           211
29881         check-files             group           yes
29882         persistent              group           yes
29883         shared                  group           yes
29884         max-db-size             group           33554432
29885         auto-propagate          group           yes
29886
29887         enable-cache            hosts           no
29888         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
29889         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
29890         suggested-size          hosts           211
29891         check-files             hosts           yes
29892         persistent              hosts           yes
29893         shared                  hosts           yes
29894         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
29895
29896         enable-cache            services        yes
29897         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
29898         negative-time-to-live   services        20
29899         suggested-size          services        211
29900         check-files             services        yes
29901         persistent              services        yes
29902         shared                  services        yes
29903         max-db-size             services        33554432
29904 </pre></blockquote>
29905
29906 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
29907 automatically like the one provided in
29908 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
29909 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
29910 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
29911 look like this:</p>
29912
29913 <blockquote><pre>
29914 passwd:         files ldap
29915 group:          files ldap
29916 shadow:         files ldap
29917 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
29918 networks:       files
29919 protocols:      files
29920 services:       files
29921 ethers:         files
29922 rpc:            files
29923 netgroup:       files ldap
29924 </pre></blockquote>
29925
29926 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
29927 shadow and netgroup.</p>
29928
29929 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
29930 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
29931 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
29932 attributes cached.
29933
29934 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
29935   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
29936
29937 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
29938 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
29939 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
29940 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
29941 discovered sssd.</p>
29942
29943 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
29944
29945 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
29946 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
29947 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
29948 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
29949 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
29950 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
29951 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
29952 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
29953 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
29954 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
29955 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
29956 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
29957 version 1.2 is now in testing.
29958
29959 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
29960 roaming setup I want</p>
29961
29962 <blockquote><pre>
29963 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
29964 </pre></blockquote>
29965
29966 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
29967 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
29968
29969 <blockquote><pre>
29970 [sssd]
29971 config_file_version = 2
29972 reconnection_retries = 3
29973 sbus_timeout = 30
29974 services = nss, pam
29975 domains = INTERN
29976
29977 [nss]
29978 filter_groups = root
29979 filter_users = root
29980 reconnection_retries = 3
29981
29982 [pam]
29983 reconnection_retries = 3
29984
29985 [domain/INTERN]
29986 enumerate = false
29987 cache_credentials = true
29988
29989 id_provider = ldap
29990 auth_provider = ldap
29991 chpass_provider = ldap
29992
29993 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
29994 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
29995 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
29996 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
29997 </pre></blockquote>
29998
29999 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
30000 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
30001
30002 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
30003 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
30004 modify it manually.</p>
30005
30006 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
30007 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
30008
30009       </div>
30010       <div class="tags">
30011
30012
30013         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
30014
30015
30016       </div>
30017     </div>
30018     <div class="padding"></div>
30019
30020     <div class="entry">
30021       <div class="title">
30022         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
30023       </div>
30024       <div class="date">
30025         28th June 2010
30026       </div>
30027       <div class="body">
30028         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
30029 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
30030 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
30031 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
30032 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
30033 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
30034 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
30035 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
30036 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
30037 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
30038
30039 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
30040 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
30041 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
30042 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
30043 released.</p>
30044
30045 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
30046 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
30047 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
30048 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
30049
30050 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
30051 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
30052
30053 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
30054 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
30055 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
30056 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
30057 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
30058
30059       </div>
30060       <div class="tags">
30061
30062
30063         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>.
30064
30065
30066       </div>
30067     </div>
30068     <div class="padding"></div>
30069
30070     <div class="entry">
30071       <div class="title">
30072         <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>
30073       </div>
30074       <div class="date">
30075         24th June 2010
30076       </div>
30077       <div class="body">
30078         <p>A while back, I
30079 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
30080 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
30081 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
30082 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
30083
30084 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
30085 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
30086 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
30087 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
30088
30089 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
30090 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
30091 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
30092 Debian Edu.</p>
30093
30094 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
30095 the
30096 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
30097 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
30098 available today from IETF.</p>
30099
30100 <pre>
30101 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
30102 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
30103 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
30104  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
30105         NAME 'dhcpHost'
30106         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
30107 -       SUP top
30108 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
30109         MUST cn
30110         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
30111         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
30112 </pre>
30113
30114 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
30115 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
30116 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
30117
30118 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
30119 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
30120
30121       </div>
30122       <div class="tags">
30123
30124
30125         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>.
30126
30127
30128       </div>
30129     </div>
30130     <div class="padding"></div>
30131
30132     <div class="entry">
30133       <div class="title">
30134         <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>
30135       </div>
30136       <div class="date">
30137         16th June 2010
30138       </div>
30139       <div class="body">
30140         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
30141 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
30142 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
30143 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
30144 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
30145 this:
30146
30147 <blockquote><pre>
30148 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
30149 tasksel --new-install
30150 </pre></blockquote>
30151
30152 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
30153 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
30154 any output what so ever.
30155
30156 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
30157 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
30158 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
30159 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
30160 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
30161 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
30162 code like this:
30163
30164 <blockquote><pre>
30165 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
30166 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
30167 $cmd
30168 </pre></blockquote>
30169
30170 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
30171 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
30172 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
30173 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
30174 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
30175 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
30176 installation.</p>
30177
30178 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
30179 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
30180 like this.</p>
30181
30182       </div>
30183       <div class="tags">
30184
30185
30186         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>.
30187
30188
30189       </div>
30190     </div>
30191     <div class="padding"></div>
30192
30193     <div class="entry">
30194       <div class="title">
30195         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
30196       </div>
30197       <div class="date">
30198         13th June 2010
30199       </div>
30200       <div class="body">
30201         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
30202 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
30203 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
30204 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
30205 pages.</p>
30206
30207 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
30208 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
30209 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
30210 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
30211 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
30212 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
30213 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
30214 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
30215 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
30216 see how the project is doing.</p>
30217
30218 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
30219 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
30220 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
30221 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
30222 Windows.  This is great.</p>
30223
30224       </div>
30225       <div class="tags">
30226
30227
30228         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
30229
30230
30231       </div>
30232     </div>
30233     <div class="padding"></div>
30234
30235     <div class="entry">
30236       <div class="title">
30237         <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>
30238       </div>
30239       <div class="date">
30240         13th June 2010
30241       </div>
30242       <div class="body">
30243         <p>My
30244 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
30245 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
30246 finally made the upgrade logs available from
30247 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
30248 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
30249 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
30250 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
30251
30252 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
30253 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
30254 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
30255 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
30256 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
30257 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
30258 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
30259 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
30260
30261 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
30262 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
30263 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
30264 too surprising.</p>
30265
30266 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
30267 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
30268 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
30269 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
30270 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
30271 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
30272 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
30273 continue.</p>
30274
30275 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
30276 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
30277   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
30278   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
30279   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
30280   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
30281   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
30282   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
30283   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
30284   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
30285   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
30286   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
30287   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
30288   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
30289   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
30290   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
30291   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
30292   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
30293   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
30294   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
30295   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
30296   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
30297   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
30298   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
30299   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
30300   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
30301   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
30302   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
30303   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
30304   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
30305
30306 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
30307
30308 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
30309   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
30310   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
30311   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
30312   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
30313   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
30314   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
30315   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
30316   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
30317   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
30318   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
30319   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
30320   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
30321   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
30322   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
30323   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
30324   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
30325   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
30326   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
30327   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
30328   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
30329   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
30330   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
30331   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
30332   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
30333   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
30334   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
30335   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
30336   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
30337   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
30338   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
30339   zip</p>
30340
30341 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
30342
30343 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
30344   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
30345   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
30346   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
30347   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
30348   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
30349   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
30350   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
30351   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
30352   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
30353   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
30354   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
30355   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
30356   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
30357   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
30358   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
30359   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
30360   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
30361   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
30362   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
30363   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
30364   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
30365   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
30366   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
30367   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
30368   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
30369   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
30370   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
30371
30372 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
30373 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
30374   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
30375   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
30376   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
30377   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
30378   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
30379   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
30380   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
30381   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
30382   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
30383   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
30384   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
30385   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
30386   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
30387   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
30388   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
30389   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
30390   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
30391   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
30392   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
30393   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
30394   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
30395   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
30396   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
30397   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
30398   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
30399   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
30400   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
30401   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
30402   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
30403   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
30404   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
30405   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
30406   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
30407   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
30408   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
30409   xulrunner-1.9</p>
30410
30411
30412       </div>
30413       <div class="tags">
30414
30415
30416         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>.
30417
30418
30419       </div>
30420     </div>
30421     <div class="padding"></div>
30422
30423     <div class="entry">
30424       <div class="title">
30425         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
30426       </div>
30427       <div class="date">
30428         11th June 2010
30429       </div>
30430       <div class="body">
30431         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
30432 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
30433 have been discovered and reported in the process
30434 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
30435 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
30436 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
30437 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
30438 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
30439
30440 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
30441 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
30442 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
30443 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
30444 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
30445 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
30446
30447 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
30448 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
30449 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
30450 is created.  The bug report
30451 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
30452 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
30453 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
30454 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
30455 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
30456 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
30457 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
30458 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
30459 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
30460 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
30461 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
30462 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
30463 Debian Squeeze.</p>
30464
30465 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
30466 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
30467 trick:</p>
30468
30469 <blockquote><pre>
30470 #!/bin/sh
30471 set -ex
30472
30473 if [ "$1" ] ; then
30474     desktop=$1
30475 else
30476     desktop=gnome
30477 fi
30478
30479 from=lenny
30480 to=squeeze
30481
30482 exec &lt; /dev/null
30483 unset LANG
30484 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
30485 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
30486 fuser -mv .
30487 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
30488 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
30489 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
30490 #!/bin/sh
30491 exit 101
30492 EOF
30493 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
30494 exit_cleanup() {
30495     umount $tmpdir/proc
30496 }
30497 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
30498 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
30499 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
30500
30501 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
30502
30503 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
30504 # to return the correct answers.
30505 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
30506     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
30507
30508 # Include the desktop and laptop task
30509 for test in desktop laptop ; do
30510     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
30511 #!/bin/sh
30512 exit 2
30513 EOF
30514     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
30515 done
30516
30517 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
30518 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
30519 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
30520 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
30521
30522 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
30523 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
30524 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
30525 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
30526 fuser -mv
30527 </pre></blockquote>
30528
30529 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
30530 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
30531 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
30532 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
30533 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
30534 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
30535
30536 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
30537 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
30538 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
30539 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
30540 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
30541 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
30542 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
30543
30544 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
30545 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
30546 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
30547 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
30548 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
30549 packages.</p>
30550
30551       </div>
30552       <div class="tags">
30553
30554
30555         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>.
30556
30557
30558       </div>
30559     </div>
30560     <div class="padding"></div>
30561
30562     <div class="entry">
30563       <div class="title">
30564         <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>
30565       </div>
30566       <div class="date">
30567          6th June 2010
30568       </div>
30569       <div class="body">
30570         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
30571 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
30572 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
30573 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
30574 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
30575 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
30576 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
30577
30578 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
30579 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
30580 COLUMNS):</p>
30581
30582 <blockquote><pre>
30583 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
30584 previous=N
30585 PREVLEVEL=
30586 RUNLEVEL=
30587 runlevel=S
30588 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
30589 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
30590 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
30591 </pre></blockquote>
30592
30593 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
30594 script.</p>
30595
30596 <blockquote><pre>
30597 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
30598 previous=N
30599 PREVLEVEL=N
30600 RUNLEVEL=S
30601 runlevel=S
30602 </pre></blockquote>
30603
30604 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
30605 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
30606 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
30607
30608 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
30609 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
30610 choice.</p>
30611
30612       </div>
30613       <div class="tags">
30614
30615
30616         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>.
30617
30618
30619       </div>
30620     </div>
30621     <div class="padding"></div>
30622
30623     <div class="entry">
30624       <div class="title">
30625         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
30626       </div>
30627       <div class="date">
30628          6th June 2010
30629       </div>
30630       <div class="body">
30631         <p>Via the
30632 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
30633 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
30634 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
30635 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
30636 following the standards wars of today.</p>
30637
30638       </div>
30639       <div class="tags">
30640
30641
30642         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>.
30643
30644
30645       </div>
30646     </div>
30647     <div class="padding"></div>
30648
30649     <div class="entry">
30650       <div class="title">
30651         <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>
30652       </div>
30653       <div class="date">
30654          3rd June 2010
30655       </div>
30656       <div class="body">
30657         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
30658 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
30659 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
30660 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
30661 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
30662
30663 <blockquote><pre>
30664 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
30665   vendor                    count
30666   Dell Computer Corporation     1
30667     PowerEdge 1750              1
30668   IBM                           1
30669     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
30670   Intel                         2
30671   [no-dmi-info]                 3
30672 maintainer:~#
30673 </pre></blockquote>
30674
30675 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
30676 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
30677 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
30678 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
30679 option to list the individual machines.</p>
30680
30681 <p>A larger list is
30682 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
30683 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
30684 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
30685 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
30686 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
30687 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
30688 collector.</p>
30689
30690       </div>
30691       <div class="tags">
30692
30693
30694         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>.
30695
30696
30697       </div>
30698     </div>
30699     <div class="padding"></div>
30700
30701     <div class="entry">
30702       <div class="title">
30703         <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>
30704       </div>
30705       <div class="date">
30706          1st June 2010
30707       </div>
30708       <div class="body">
30709         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
30710 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
30711 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
30712 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
30713 wait.</p>
30714
30715 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
30716 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
30717 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
30718 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
30719 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
30720 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
30721
30722 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
30723 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
30724 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
30725 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
30726 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
30727 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
30728 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
30729 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
30730
30731 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
30732
30733       </div>
30734       <div class="tags">
30735
30736
30737         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>.
30738
30739
30740       </div>
30741     </div>
30742     <div class="padding"></div>
30743
30744     <div class="entry">
30745       <div class="title">
30746         <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>
30747       </div>
30748       <div class="date">
30749         27th May 2010
30750       </div>
30751       <div class="body">
30752         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
30753 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
30754 issues are known and should be solved:
30755
30756 <p><ul>
30757
30758 <li>The wicd package seen to
30759 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
30760 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
30761 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
30762 seem to be on the case.</li>
30763
30764 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
30765 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
30766 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
30767 maintainer is on the case.</li>
30768
30769 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
30770 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
30771 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
30772 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
30773 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
30774 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
30775 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
30776 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
30777
30778 </ul></p>
30779
30780 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
30781 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
30782 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
30783 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
30784
30785 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
30786 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
30787 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
30788 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
30789
30790 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
30791
30792       </div>
30793       <div class="tags">
30794
30795
30796         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>.
30797
30798
30799       </div>
30800     </div>
30801     <div class="padding"></div>
30802
30803     <div class="entry">
30804       <div class="title">
30805         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
30806       </div>
30807       <div class="date">
30808         22nd May 2010
30809       </div>
30810       <div class="body">
30811         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
30812 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
30813 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
30814 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
30815
30816 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
30817 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
30818 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
30819 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
30820 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
30821 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
30822 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
30823 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
30824 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
30825 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
30826 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
30827 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
30828 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
30829 going to work.</p>
30830
30831 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
30832 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
30833 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
30834 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
30835 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
30836 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
30837 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
30838 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
30839 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
30840 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
30841 Edu.</p>
30842
30843 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
30844 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
30845 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
30846 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
30847 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
30848 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
30849
30850 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
30851 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
30852
30853       </div>
30854       <div class="tags">
30855
30856
30857         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>.
30858
30859
30860       </div>
30861     </div>
30862     <div class="padding"></div>
30863
30864     <div class="entry">
30865       <div class="title">
30866         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html">Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian</a>
30867       </div>
30868       <div class="date">
30869         19th May 2010
30870       </div>
30871       <div class="body">
30872         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
30873 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
30874 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
30875 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
30876 into unstable.  The
30877 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
30878 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
30879 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
30880 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
30881 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
30882 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
30883 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
30884
30885 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
30886 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
30887 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
30888 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
30889 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
30890 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
30891 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
30892 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
30893
30894 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
30895 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
30896 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
30897 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
30898 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
30899 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
30900 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
30901
30902 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
30903 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
30904 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
30905 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
30906 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
30907 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
30908 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
30909 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
30910 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
30911 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
30912 on the home directory servers.</p>
30913
30914 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
30915 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
30916 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
30917 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
30918 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
30919 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
30920
30921 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
30922 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
30923
30924       </div>
30925       <div class="tags">
30926
30927
30928         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
30929
30930
30931       </div>
30932     </div>
30933     <div class="padding"></div>
30934
30935     <div class="entry">
30936       <div class="title">
30937         <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>
30938       </div>
30939       <div class="date">
30940         14th May 2010
30941       </div>
30942       <div class="body">
30943         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
30944 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
30945 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
30946 expected, if I am to believe the
30947 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
30948 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
30949 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
30950 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
30951 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
30952 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
30953 version.</p>
30954
30955 More information about
30956 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
30957 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
30958 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
30959 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
30960
30961 <blockquote><pre>
30962 CONCURRENCY=none
30963 </pre></blockquote>
30964
30965 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
30966 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
30967 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
30968 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
30969
30970       </div>
30971       <div class="tags">
30972
30973
30974         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>.
30975
30976
30977       </div>
30978     </div>
30979     <div class="padding"></div>
30980
30981     <div class="entry">
30982       <div class="title">
30983         <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>
30984       </div>
30985       <div class="date">
30986         14th May 2010
30987       </div>
30988       <div class="body">
30989         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
30990 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
30991 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
30992 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
30993 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
30994 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
30995 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
30996 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
30997
30998 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
30999 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
31000 this on the collector host:</p>
31001
31002 <blockquote><pre>
31003 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
31004 </pre></blockquote>
31005
31006 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
31007 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
31008
31009 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
31010 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
31011 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
31012 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
31013 written yet.</p>
31014
31015       </div>
31016       <div class="tags">
31017
31018
31019         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>.
31020
31021
31022       </div>
31023     </div>
31024     <div class="padding"></div>
31025
31026     <div class="entry">
31027       <div class="title">
31028         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
31029       </div>
31030       <div class="date">
31031         13th May 2010
31032       </div>
31033       <div class="body">
31034         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
31035 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
31036 has been
31037 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
31038
31039 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
31040 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
31041 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
31042 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
31043 based boot system.  Tollef is
31044 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
31045 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
31046 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
31047 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
31048 at the moment do not.</p>
31049
31050 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
31051 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
31052 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
31053 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
31054 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
31055 way forward.</p>
31056
31057 <p>In the mean time, based on the
31058 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
31059 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
31060 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
31061 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
31062 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
31063 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
31064 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
31065 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
31066
31067       </div>
31068       <div class="tags">
31069
31070
31071         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>.
31072
31073
31074       </div>
31075     </div>
31076     <div class="padding"></div>
31077
31078     <div class="entry">
31079       <div class="title">
31080         <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>
31081       </div>
31082       <div class="date">
31083          6th May 2010
31084       </div>
31085       <div class="body">
31086         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
31087 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
31088 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
31089 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
31090 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
31091 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
31092 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
31093
31094 <blockquote><pre>
31095 CONCURRENCY=makefile
31096 </pre></blockquote>
31097
31098 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
31099 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
31100 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
31101 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
31102 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
31103 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
31104 make this happen.</p>
31105
31106 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
31107 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
31108 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
31109 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
31110 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
31111
31112 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
31113 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
31114 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
31115 fix the remaining issues.</p>
31116
31117 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
31118 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
31119 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
31120 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
31121
31122       </div>
31123       <div class="tags">
31124
31125
31126         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>.
31127
31128
31129       </div>
31130     </div>
31131     <div class="padding"></div>
31132
31133     <div class="entry">
31134       <div class="title">
31135         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html">Forcing new users to change their password on first login</a>
31136       </div>
31137       <div class="date">
31138          2nd May 2010
31139       </div>
31140       <div class="body">
31141         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
31142 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
31143 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
31144
31145 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
31146 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
31147 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
31148 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
31149 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
31150
31151 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
31152 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
31153
31154 <blockquote><pre>
31155 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
31156 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
31157 Password expires                                        : never
31158 Password inactive                                       : never
31159 Account expires                                         : never
31160 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
31161 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
31162 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
31163 root@tjener:~#
31164 </pre></blockquote>
31165
31166 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
31167 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
31168 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
31169 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
31170 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
31171 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
31172
31173 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
31174 intended:</p>
31175
31176 <blockquote><pre>
31177 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
31178 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
31179 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
31180 Password expires                                        : never
31181 Password inactive                                       : never
31182 Account expires                                         : never
31183 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
31184 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
31185 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
31186 root@tjener:~#
31187 </pre></blockquote>
31188
31189 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
31190 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
31191 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
31192
31193 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
31194 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
31195
31196 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
31197 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
31198
31199 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
31200 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
31201 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
31202 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
31203 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
31204 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
31205 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
31206
31207 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
31208 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
31209 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
31210 change.</p>
31211
31212       </div>
31213       <div class="tags">
31214
31215
31216         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
31217
31218
31219       </div>
31220     </div>
31221     <div class="padding"></div>
31222
31223     <div class="entry">
31224       <div class="title">
31225         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html">Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu</a>
31226       </div>
31227       <div class="date">
31228         28th April 2010
31229       </div>
31230       <div class="body">
31231         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
31232 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
31233 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
31234 and go.</p>
31235
31236 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
31237 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
31238 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
31239 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
31240
31241 <ul>
31242
31243  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
31244    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
31245    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
31246    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
31247    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
31248    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
31249    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
31250    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
31251    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
31252    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
31253    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
31254    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
31255
31256  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
31257    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
31258    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
31259    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
31260    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
31261    or the Fedora developed
31262    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
31263    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
31264
31265  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
31266    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
31267    directory, using unison.</li>
31268
31269  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
31270    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
31271    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
31272    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
31273    implemented.</li>
31274
31275  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
31276    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
31277
31278  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
31279    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
31280    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
31281
31282 </ul>
31283
31284 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
31285 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
31286 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
31287 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
31288 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
31289 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
31290 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
31291 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
31292 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
31293
31294 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
31295 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
31296
31297       </div>
31298       <div class="tags">
31299
31300
31301         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
31302
31303
31304       </div>
31305     </div>
31306     <div class="padding"></div>
31307
31308     <div class="entry">
31309       <div class="title">
31310         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html">Great book: "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future"</a>
31311       </div>
31312       <div class="date">
31313         19th April 2010
31314       </div>
31315       <div class="body">
31316         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
31317 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
31318 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
31319 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
31320 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
31321 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
31322 restrictions on the web, for example from
31323 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
31324 epub-version from
31325 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
31326 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
31327 strongly recommend this book.</p>
31328
31329       </div>
31330       <div class="tags">
31331
31332
31333         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
31334
31335
31336       </div>
31337     </div>
31338     <div class="padding"></div>
31339
31340     <div class="entry">
31341       <div class="title">
31342         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
31343       </div>
31344       <div class="date">
31345         14th April 2010
31346       </div>
31347       <div class="body">
31348         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
31349 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
31350 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
31351 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
31352 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
31353 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
31354 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
31355 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
31356 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
31357
31358 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
31359 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
31360 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
31361 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
31362 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
31363
31364 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
31365 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
31366
31367 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
31368 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
31369 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
31370 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
31371 to work properly.</p>
31372
31373 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
31374 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
31375 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
31376 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
31377 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
31378 time.</p>
31379
31380 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
31381 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
31382 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
31383 up in a few days.</p>
31384
31385       </div>
31386       <div class="tags">
31387
31388
31389         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
31390
31391
31392       </div>
31393     </div>
31394     <div class="padding"></div>
31395
31396     <div class="entry">
31397       <div class="title">
31398         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html">After 6 years of waiting, the Xreset.d feature is implemented</a>
31399       </div>
31400       <div class="date">
31401          6th March 2010
31402       </div>
31403       <div class="body">
31404         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
31405 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
31406 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
31407 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
31408 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
31409 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
31410
31411 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
31412 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
31413 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
31414 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
31415
31416 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
31417 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
31418 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
31419 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
31420 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
31421 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
31422
31423       </div>
31424       <div class="tags">
31425
31426
31427         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
31428
31429
31430       </div>
31431     </div>
31432     <div class="padding"></div>
31433
31434     <div class="entry">
31435       <div class="title">
31436         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html">Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Lenny released, work continues</a>
31437       </div>
31438       <div class="date">
31439         11th February 2010
31440       </div>
31441       <div class="body">
31442         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
31443 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
31444 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
31445 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
31446 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
31447 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
31448 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
31449
31450 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
31451
31452 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
31453 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
31454 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
31455 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
31456
31457       </div>
31458       <div class="tags">
31459
31460
31461         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
31462
31463
31464       </div>
31465     </div>
31466     <div class="padding"></div>
31467
31468     <div class="entry">
31469       <div class="title">
31470         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
31471       </div>
31472       <div class="date">
31473         27th January 2010
31474       </div>
31475       <div class="body">
31476         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
31477 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
31478 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
31479 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
31480 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
31481 further.</p>
31482
31483 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
31484 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
31485 configured to be a server for the
31486 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
31487 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
31488 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
31489 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
31490 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
31491 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
31492 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
31493 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
31494 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
31495 and Nagios configuration.</p>
31496
31497 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
31498 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
31499 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
31500 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
31501
31502 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
31503 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
31504 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
31505 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
31506 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
31507 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
31508 the machine.</p>
31509
31510 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
31511 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
31512 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
31513 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
31514
31515 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
31516 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
31517 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
31518 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
31519 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
31520 everything is taken care of.</p>
31521
31522       </div>
31523       <div class="tags">
31524
31525
31526         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
31527
31528
31529       </div>
31530     </div>
31531     <div class="padding"></div>
31532
31533     <div class="entry">
31534       <div class="title">
31535         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html">Relative popularity of document formats (MS Office vs. ODF)</a>
31536       </div>
31537       <div class="date">
31538         12th August 2009
31539       </div>
31540       <div class="body">
31541         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
31542 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
31543 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
31544 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
31545
31546 <table>
31547 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
31548 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
31549 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
31550 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
31551 </table>
31552
31553 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
31554 got these numbers:</p>
31555
31556 <table>
31557 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
31558 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
31559 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
31560 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
31561 </table>
31562
31563 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
31564
31565 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
31566 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
31567 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
31568 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
31569 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
31570
31571
31572 <table>
31573 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
31574 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
31575 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
31576 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
31577 </table>
31578
31579 <p>And with 'site:no':
31580
31581 <table>
31582 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
31583 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
31584 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
31585 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
31586 </table>
31587
31588 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
31589 numbers.</p>
31590
31591       </div>
31592       <div class="tags">
31593
31594
31595         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
31596
31597
31598       </div>
31599     </div>
31600     <div class="padding"></div>
31601
31602     <div class="entry">
31603       <div class="title">
31604         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
31605       </div>
31606       <div class="date">
31607          8th August 2009
31608       </div>
31609       <div class="body">
31610         <p>According to <a
31611 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
31612 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
31613 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
31614 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
31615 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
31616 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
31617 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
31618 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
31619 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
31620 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
31621
31622 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
31623 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
31624 seminar this autumn.</p>
31625
31626       </div>
31627       <div class="tags">
31628
31629
31630         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
31631
31632
31633       </div>
31634     </div>
31635     <div class="padding"></div>
31636
31637     <div class="entry">
31638       <div class="title">
31639         <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>
31640       </div>
31641       <div class="date">
31642         27th July 2009
31643       </div>
31644       <div class="body">
31645         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
31646 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
31647 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
31648 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
31649 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
31650 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
31651 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
31652
31653 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
31654 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
31655 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
31656
31657       </div>
31658       <div class="tags">
31659
31660
31661         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>.
31662
31663
31664       </div>
31665     </div>
31666     <div class="padding"></div>
31667
31668     <div class="entry">
31669       <div class="title">
31670         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
31671       </div>
31672       <div class="date">
31673         22nd July 2009
31674       </div>
31675       <div class="body">
31676         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
31677 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
31678 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
31679 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
31680 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
31681 the package up to date.</p>
31682
31683 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
31684 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
31685 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
31686 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
31687 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
31688 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
31689 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
31690 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
31691 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
31692 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
31693 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
31694 working on the future release.</p>
31695
31696 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
31697 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
31698
31699       </div>
31700       <div class="tags">
31701
31702
31703         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>.
31704
31705
31706       </div>
31707     </div>
31708     <div class="padding"></div>
31709
31710     <div class="entry">
31711       <div class="title">
31712         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
31713       </div>
31714       <div class="date">
31715         24th June 2009
31716       </div>
31717       <div class="body">
31718         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
31719 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
31720 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
31721 funded
31722 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
31723 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
31724 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
31725 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
31726 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
31727 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
31728
31729 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
31730 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
31731 boot:</p>
31732
31733 <ul>
31734
31735 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
31736
31737 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
31738    clock is in UTC.</li>
31739
31740 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
31741    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
31742    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
31743
31744 </ul>
31745
31746 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
31747 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
31748 Villegas</a>.
31749
31750 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
31751 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
31752 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
31753 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
31754 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
31755 using this.</p>
31756
31757 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
31758 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
31759 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
31760 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
31761 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
31762 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
31763 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
31764
31765       </div>
31766       <div class="tags">
31767
31768
31769         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>.
31770
31771
31772       </div>
31773     </div>
31774     <div class="padding"></div>
31775
31776     <div class="entry">
31777       <div class="title">
31778         <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>
31779       </div>
31780       <div class="date">
31781          2nd May 2009
31782       </div>
31783       <div class="body">
31784         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
31785 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
31786 do not yet know them.</p>
31787
31788 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
31789 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
31790 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
31791 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
31792 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
31793 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
31794 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
31795 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
31796 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
31797 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
31798 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
31799
31800 <p>The second one is
31801 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
31802 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
31803 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
31804 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
31805 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
31806 and the company behind it is running
31807 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
31808 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
31809 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
31810 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
31811 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
31812 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
31813 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
31814 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
31815
31816 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
31817 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
31818 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
31819 surrounded by today.</p>
31820
31821       </div>
31822       <div class="tags">
31823
31824
31825         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>.
31826
31827
31828       </div>
31829     </div>
31830     <div class="padding"></div>
31831
31832     <div class="entry">
31833       <div class="title">
31834         <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>
31835       </div>
31836       <div class="date">
31837         28th April 2009
31838       </div>
31839       <div class="body">
31840         <p>Julien Blache
31841 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
31842 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
31843 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
31844 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
31845 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
31846 properties.</p>
31847
31848       </div>
31849       <div class="tags">
31850
31851
31852         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>.
31853
31854
31855       </div>
31856     </div>
31857     <div class="padding"></div>
31858
31859     <div class="entry">
31860       <div class="title">
31861         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
31862       </div>
31863       <div class="date">
31864          5th April 2009
31865       </div>
31866       <div class="body">
31867         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
31868 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
31869 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
31870 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
31871 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
31872 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
31873 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
31874 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
31875
31876 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
31877 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
31878 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
31879   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
31880   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
31881
31882 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
31883 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
31884 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
31885 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
31886
31887 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
31888 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
31889 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
31890 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
31891
31892 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
31893 set -e
31894 URL="$1"
31895 SAVEFILE="$2"
31896 DURATION="$3"
31897 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
31898   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
31899   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
31900 pid=$!
31901 sleep $DURATION
31902 kill $pid
31903 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
31904
31905       </div>
31906       <div class="tags">
31907
31908
31909         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
31910
31911
31912       </div>
31913     </div>
31914     <div class="padding"></div>
31915
31916     <div class="entry">
31917       <div class="title">
31918         <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>
31919       </div>
31920       <div class="date">
31921         30th March 2009
31922       </div>
31923       <div class="body">
31924         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
31925 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
31926 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
31927 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
31928 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
31929 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
31930 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
31931 application.</p>
31932
31933 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
31934 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
31935 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
31936 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
31937 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
31938 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
31939 blocked from doing so.</p>
31940
31941 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
31942 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
31943 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
31944 requirements change.</p>
31945
31946 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
31947 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
31948 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
31949
31950       </div>
31951       <div class="tags">
31952
31953
31954         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>.
31955
31956
31957       </div>
31958     </div>
31959     <div class="padding"></div>
31960
31961     <div class="entry">
31962       <div class="title">
31963         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
31964       </div>
31965       <div class="date">
31966         29th March 2009
31967       </div>
31968       <div class="body">
31969         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
31970 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
31971 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
31972 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
31973 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
31974 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
31975 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
31976 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
31977 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
31978 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
31979 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
31980 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
31981 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
31982 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
31983 now. :)</p>
31984
31985       </div>
31986       <div class="tags">
31987
31988
31989         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>.
31990
31991
31992       </div>
31993     </div>
31994     <div class="padding"></div>
31995
31996     <div class="entry">
31997       <div class="title">
31998         <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>
31999       </div>
32000       <div class="date">
32001         29th March 2009
32002       </div>
32003       <div class="body">
32004         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
32005 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
32006 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
32007 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
32008 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
32009 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
32010
32011 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
32012 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
32013 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
32014 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
32015 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
32016 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
32017 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
32018 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
32019 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
32020 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
32021 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
32022 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
32023 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
32024
32025 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
32026 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
32027 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
32028 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
32029
32030 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
32031 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
32032
32033 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
32034 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
32035 new IETF work group?</p>
32036
32037       </div>
32038       <div class="tags">
32039
32040
32041         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>.
32042
32043
32044       </div>
32045     </div>
32046     <div class="padding"></div>
32047
32048     <div class="entry">
32049       <div class="title">
32050         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers</a>
32051       </div>
32052       <div class="date">
32053         28th February 2009
32054       </div>
32055       <div class="body">
32056         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
32057 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
32058 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
32059 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
32060 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
32061 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
32062 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
32063 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
32064 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
32065 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
32066 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
32067 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
32068 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
32069 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
32070 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
32071 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
32072 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
32073 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
32074 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
32075 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
32076 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
32077 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
32078 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
32079 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
32080 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
32081 machine.</p>
32082
32083 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
32084 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
32085 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
32086 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
32087 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
32088 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
32089 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
32090
32091 <pre>
32092 use LWP::Simple;
32093 use POSIX;
32094 use WWW::Mechanize;
32095 use Date::Parse;
32096 [...]
32097 sub get_support_info {
32098     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
32099     my $str;
32100
32101     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
32102         # fetch website from Dell support
32103         my $url = "http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no&amp;cs=nodhs1&amp;l=no&amp;s=dhs&amp;ServiceTag=$serial";
32104         my $webpage = get($url);
32105         return undef unless ($webpage);
32106
32107         my $daysleft = -1;
32108         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
32109         foreach my $line (@lines) {
32110             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
32111             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
32112             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
32113
32114             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
32115             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
32116             my $lastend = "";
32117             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
32118                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
32119
32120                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
32121                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
32122                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
32123                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
32124                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
32125                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
32126                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
32127             }
32128             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
32129             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
32130                 if ($lastend lt $today);
32131         }
32132     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
32133         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
32134         my $url =
32135             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
32136         $mech->get($url);
32137         my $fields = {
32138             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
32139             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
32140             'country' => 'NO',
32141             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
32142             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
32143         };
32144         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
32145                             fields      => $fields );
32146         # Next step is screen scraping
32147         my $content = $mech->content();
32148
32149         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
32150         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
32151         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
32152         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
32153
32154         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
32155
32156         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
32157             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
32158                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
32159             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
32160             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
32161                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
32162             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
32163                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
32164
32165             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
32166
32167             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
32168                 if ($end lt $today);
32169         }
32170     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
32171         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
32172         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
32173         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
32174             my $content =
32175                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
32176             if ($content) {
32177                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
32178                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
32179                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
32180                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
32181
32182                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
32183                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
32184
32185                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
32186
32187                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
32188                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
32189                     if ($end lt $today);
32190             }
32191         }
32192     }
32193     return $str;
32194 }
32195 </pre>
32196
32197 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
32198 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
32199 from dmidecode.</p>
32200
32201 <pre>
32202 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
32203                        "447707-B21");
32204 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
32205 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
32206                        "1234567");
32207 </pre>
32208
32209 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
32210 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
32211
32212 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
32213 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
32214 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
32215 do so.</p>
32216
32217       </div>
32218       <div class="tags">
32219
32220
32221         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
32222
32223
32224       </div>
32225     </div>
32226     <div class="padding"></div>
32227
32228     <div class="entry">
32229       <div class="title">
32230         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
32231       </div>
32232       <div class="date">
32233         20th February 2009
32234       </div>
32235       <div class="body">
32236         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
32237 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
32238 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
32239 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
32240 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
32241 the "missing" computer.</p>
32242
32243 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
32244 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
32245 code blocks as defined in the
32246 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
32247 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
32248 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
32249 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
32250 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
32251 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
32252 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
32253 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
32254 codes.</p>
32255
32256 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
32257 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
32258 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
32259 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
32260 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
32261 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
32262
32263 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
32264 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
32265 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
32266 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
32267 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
32268 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
32269 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
32270 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
32271 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
32272 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
32273
32274 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
32275 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
32276 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
32277
32278       </div>
32279       <div class="tags">
32280
32281
32282         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
32283
32284
32285       </div>
32286     </div>
32287     <div class="padding"></div>
32288
32289     <div class="entry">
32290       <div class="title">
32291         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html">When web browser developers make a video player...</a>
32292       </div>
32293       <div class="date">
32294         17th January 2009
32295       </div>
32296       <div class="body">
32297         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
32298 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
32299 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
32300 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
32301 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
32302 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
32303 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
32304 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
32305 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
32306 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
32307 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
32308 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
32309 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
32310 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
32311
32312 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
32313 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
32314 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
32315 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
32316 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
32317 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
32318 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
32319 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
32320 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
32321 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
32322 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
32323 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
32324 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
32325 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
32326 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
32327 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
32328 playing when the download is done.</p>
32329
32330 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
32331 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
32332 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
32333 too.</p>
32334
32335 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
32336 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
32337 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
32338 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
32339
32340       </div>
32341       <div class="tags">
32342
32343
32344         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
32345
32346
32347       </div>
32348     </div>
32349     <div class="padding"></div>
32350
32351     <div class="entry">
32352       <div class="title">
32353         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
32354       </div>
32355       <div class="date">
32356         28th December 2008
32357       </div>
32358       <div class="body">
32359         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
32360 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
32361 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
32362 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
32363 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
32364 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
32365 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
32366 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
32367 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
32368 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
32369 source, sink and mixer applications and
32370 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
32371 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
32372 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
32373 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
32374 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
32375 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
32376 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
32377 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
32378 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
32379
32380 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
32381 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
32382 larger stick as well.</p>
32383
32384       </div>
32385       <div class="tags">
32386
32387
32388         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
32389
32390
32391       </div>
32392     </div>
32393     <div class="padding"></div>
32394
32395     <div class="entry">
32396       <div class="title">
32397         <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>
32398       </div>
32399       <div class="date">
32400          7th December 2008
32401       </div>
32402       <div class="body">
32403         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
32404 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
32405 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
32406 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
32407 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
32408 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
32409 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
32410 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
32411
32412 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
32413 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
32414 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
32415 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
32416 of these cards.</p>
32417
32418       </div>
32419       <div class="tags">
32420
32421
32422         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>.
32423
32424
32425       </div>
32426     </div>
32427     <div class="padding"></div>
32428
32429     <div class="entry">
32430       <div class="title">
32431         <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>
32432       </div>
32433       <div class="date">
32434         25th November 2008
32435       </div>
32436       <div class="body">
32437         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
32438 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
32439 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
32440 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
32441 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
32442 notes are available on
32443 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
32444 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
32445 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
32446 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
32447 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
32448 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
32449 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
32450 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
32451 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
32452
32453 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
32454 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
32455
32456       </div>
32457       <div class="tags">
32458
32459
32460         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>.
32461
32462
32463       </div>
32464     </div>
32465     <div class="padding"></div>
32466
32467     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="english.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
32468     <div id="sidebar">
32469
32470
32471
32472 <h2>Archive</h2>
32473 <ul>
32474
32475 <li>2019
32476 <ul>
32477
32478 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/01/">January (4)</a></li>
32479
32480 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/02/">February (3)</a></li>
32481
32482 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/03/">March (3)</a></li>
32483
32484 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/05/">May (1)</a></li>
32485
32486 </ul></li>
32487
32488 <li>2018
32489 <ul>
32490
32491 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
32492
32493 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/02/">February (5)</a></li>
32494
32495 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/03/">March (5)</a></li>
32496
32497 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/04/">April (3)</a></li>
32498
32499 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/06/">June (2)</a></li>
32500
32501 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/07/">July (5)</a></li>
32502
32503 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/08/">August (3)</a></li>
32504
32505 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/09/">September (3)</a></li>
32506
32507 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/10/">October (5)</a></li>
32508
32509 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/11/">November (2)</a></li>
32510
32511 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/12/">December (4)</a></li>
32512
32513 </ul></li>
32514
32515 <li>2017
32516 <ul>
32517
32518 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
32519
32520 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
32521
32522 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
32523
32524 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
32525
32526 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
32527
32528 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
32529
32530 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
32531
32532 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
32533
32534 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
32535
32536 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
32537
32538 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
32539
32540 </ul></li>
32541
32542 <li>2016
32543 <ul>
32544
32545 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
32546
32547 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
32548
32549 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
32550
32551 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
32552
32553 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
32554
32555 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
32556
32557 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
32558
32559 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
32560
32561 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
32562
32563 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
32564
32565 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
32566
32567 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
32568
32569 </ul></li>
32570
32571 <li>2015
32572 <ul>
32573
32574 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
32575
32576 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
32577
32578 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
32579
32580 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
32581
32582 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
32583
32584 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
32585
32586 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
32587
32588 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
32589
32590 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
32591
32592 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
32593
32594 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
32595
32596 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
32597
32598 </ul></li>
32599
32600 <li>2014
32601 <ul>
32602
32603 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
32604
32605 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
32606
32607 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
32608
32609 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
32610
32611 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
32612
32613 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
32614
32615 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
32616
32617 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
32618
32619 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
32620
32621 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
32622
32623 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
32624
32625 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
32626
32627 </ul></li>
32628
32629 <li>2013
32630 <ul>
32631
32632 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
32633
32634 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
32635
32636 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
32637
32638 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
32639
32640 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
32641
32642 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
32643
32644 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
32645
32646 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
32647
32648 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
32649
32650 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
32651
32652 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
32653
32654 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
32655
32656 </ul></li>
32657
32658 <li>2012
32659 <ul>
32660
32661 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
32662
32663 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
32664
32665 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
32666
32667 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
32668
32669 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
32670
32671 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
32672
32673 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
32674
32675 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
32676
32677 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
32678
32679 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
32680
32681 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
32682
32683 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
32684
32685 </ul></li>
32686
32687 <li>2011
32688 <ul>
32689
32690 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
32691
32692 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
32693
32694 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
32695
32696 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
32697
32698 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
32699
32700 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
32701
32702 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
32703
32704 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
32705
32706 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
32707
32708 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
32709
32710 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
32711
32712 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
32713
32714 </ul></li>
32715
32716 <li>2010
32717 <ul>
32718
32719 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
32720
32721 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
32722
32723 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
32724
32725 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
32726
32727 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
32728
32729 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
32730
32731 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
32732
32733 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
32734
32735 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
32736
32737 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
32738
32739 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
32740
32741 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
32742
32743 </ul></li>
32744
32745 <li>2009
32746 <ul>
32747
32748 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
32749
32750 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
32751
32752 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
32753
32754 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
32755
32756 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
32757
32758 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
32759
32760 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
32761
32762 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
32763
32764 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
32765
32766 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
32767
32768 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
32769
32770 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
32771
32772 </ul></li>
32773
32774 <li>2008
32775 <ul>
32776
32777 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
32778
32779 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
32780
32781 </ul></li>
32782
32783 </ul>
32784
32785
32786
32787 <h2>Tags</h2>
32788 <ul>
32789
32790  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (16)</a></li>
32791
32792  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
32793
32794  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
32795
32796  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
32797
32798  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/betalkontant">betalkontant (8)</a></li>
32799
32800  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (11)</a></li>
32801
32802  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (17)</a></li>
32803
32804  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
32805
32806  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
32807
32808  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (167)</a></li>
32809
32810  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
32811
32812  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (4)</a></li>
32813
32814  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (11)</a></li>
32815
32816  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (17)</a></li>
32817
32818  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (25)</a></li>
32819
32820  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
32821
32822  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (401)</a></li>
32823
32824  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
32825
32826  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (14)</a></li>
32827
32828  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (33)</a></li>
32829
32830  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
32831
32832  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (20)</a></li>
32833
32834  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
32835
32836  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
32837
32838  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (16)</a></li>
32839
32840  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (21)</a></li>
32841
32842  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi (4)</a></li>
32843
32844  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
32845
32846  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (4)</a></li>
32847
32848  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
32849
32850  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
32851
32852  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
32853
32854  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
32855
32856  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (42)</a></li>
32857
32858  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (12)</a></li>
32859
32860  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5 (13)</a></li>
32861
32862  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (305)</a></li>
32863
32864  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (194)</a></li>
32865
32866  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (36)</a></li>
32867
32868  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
32869
32870  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (73)</a></li>
32871
32872  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (108)</a></li>
32873
32874  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
32875
32876  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
32877
32878  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
32879
32880  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
32881
32882  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (11)</a></li>
32883
32884  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
32885
32886  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (7)</a></li>
32887
32888  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
32889
32890  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (55)</a></li>
32891
32892  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
32893
32894  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
32895
32896  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (62)</a></li>
32897
32898  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
32899
32900  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (12)</a></li>
32901
32902  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (55)</a></li>
32903
32904  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (4)</a></li>
32905
32906  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
32907
32908  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
32909
32910  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (15)</a></li>
32911
32912  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (73)</a></li>
32913
32914  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
32915
32916  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (42)</a></li>
32917
32918 </ul>
32919
32920
32921     </div>
32922     <p style="text-align: right">
32923  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
32924 </p>
32925
32926   </body>
32927 </html>