[homepage.git] / blog / archive / 2014 / 10 / 10.rss

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                <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries from October 2014</title>
                <description>Entries from October 2014</description>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>

        
        <item>
                <title>I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2014 23:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I spent last weekend at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.makercon.no/&quot;&gt;Makercon
Nordic&lt;/a&gt;, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/&quot;&gt;dvswitch&lt;/a&gt;, a
camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
live.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/&quot;&gt;now becoming
public&lt;/a&gt; on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/&quot;&gt;Creative
Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge&lt;/a&gt;.  Many great
talks available.  Check it out! :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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                <title>listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 22 Oct 2014 20:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin&quot;&gt;the
listadmin program&lt;/a&gt;.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
lists I recently took over:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
% time listadmin xiph
fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue

real    0m1.709s
user    0m0.232s
sys     0m0.012s
%
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
program.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you install
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin&quot;&gt;the listadmin
package&lt;/a&gt; from Debian and create a file &lt;tt&gt;~/.listadmin.ini&lt;/tt&gt;
with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
username username@example.org
spamlevel 23
default discard
discard_if_reason &quot;Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list.&quot;

password secret
adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
mailman-list@lists.example.com

password hidden
other-list@otherserver.example.org
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
learn the details.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
email.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
software.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&amp;label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2014-10-27: Added missing &#39;username&#39; statement in
configuration example.  Also, I&#39;ve been told that the
PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
sure why.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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                <title>Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2014 14:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
&lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html&quot;&gt;my isenkram
package&lt;/a&gt; and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
to do this using simple preseeding.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
of this story.)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
hardware it is the only option in Debian.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
firmware installed automatically by the installer:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
implemented in the package currently in unstable.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
this recipe work for you. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
Task: isenkram-packages
Section: hardware
Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
 proposed.
Test-new-install: show show
Relevance: 8
Packages: for-current-hardware

Task: isenkram-firmware
Section: hardware
Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
 packages are proposed.
Test-new-install: mark show
Relevance: 8
Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
#!/bin/sh
#
PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
export PATH
isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
installed, run &lt;tt&gt;DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
--new-install&lt;/tt&gt; to get the list of packages that tasksel would
install.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu&lt;/a&gt; will be
pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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        <item>
                <title>Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 4 Oct 2014 15:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p align=&quot;center&quot;&gt;&lt;img width=&quot;70%&quot; src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
&lt;a href=&quot;http://revealingerrors.com/&quot;&gt;errors can reveal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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                <title>New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 4 Oct 2014 08:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/&quot;&gt;lsdvd project&lt;/a&gt;
got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
Dibb.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I just wrapped up
&lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/&quot;&gt;a
new lsdvd release&lt;/a&gt;, available in git or from
&lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/&quot;&gt;the
download page&lt;/a&gt;.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
0.17.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Ignore &#39;phantom&#39; audio, subtitle tracks&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
   non-existant, to work around additional copy protection&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;Fix pallete display of first entry&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;Fix include orders&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;Fix the chapter count&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
   the palette size is the same.&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;Fix array printing.&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;Correct subsecond calculations.&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;Add sector information to the output format.&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
   with more GCC compiler warnings.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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