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<rss version='2.0' xmlns:lj='http://www.livejournal.org/rss/lj/1.0/' xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
        <channel>
                <title>Petter Reinholdtsen</title>
                <description></description>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
                <atom:link href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 31 Jul 2014 08:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
schools, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu /
Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I&#39;m married with Hedda, a self
employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
haven&#39;t worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
works with Windows . :-(&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
work with the documentations of our patients.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
his school (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/&quot;&gt;Gymnasium
Harsewinkel&lt;/a&gt;).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
computer skills in optional lessons.  I&#39;m spending 4-6 hours a week
with this job.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The independence.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
working reliable. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &amp;lt;Irony on&amp;gt; And Linux
isn&#39;t cool. It&#39;s software for freaks using the command line. &amp;lt;Irony
off&amp;gt; They don&#39;t realize the stability of the system. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
Office. They don&#39;t know about the possibility to use Free Software
instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>98.6 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2014 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.docbook.org/&quot;&gt;docbook&lt;/a&gt; version of the 2004 book
&lt;a href=&quot;http://free-culture.cc/&quot;&gt;Free Culture&lt;/a&gt; by Lawrence Lessig,
to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
the translation show this very well:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;img width=&quot;80%&quot; align=&quot;center&quot; src=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to read the result, check out the 
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt;
project pages and the
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true&quot;&gt;EPUB&lt;/a&gt;
and HTML version available in the
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive&quot;&gt;archive
directory&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
you find any.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 17 Jun 2014 11:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux
project&lt;/a&gt; provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
text processing of this manual is handled in the project.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
goals.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/&quot;&gt;Debian
wiki&lt;/a&gt;, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
for each chapter, and finally one &quot;collection page&quot; gluing all the
chapters together into one large web page (aka
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne&quot;&gt;the
AllInOne page&lt;/a&gt;).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://moinmo.in/&quot;&gt;MoinMoin&lt;/a&gt; installation on
wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.docbook.org/&quot;&gt;the Docbook format&lt;/a&gt;, we can fetch
the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
manual.  This process also download images and transform image
references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
using the &lt;tt&gt;documentation/scripts/get_manual&lt;/tt&gt; program, and the
result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
track the English original.  For this we use the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html&quot;&gt;poxml&lt;/a&gt; package,
which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
files), which the translations update with the native language
translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
of the documentation.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
recommend using
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/&quot;&gt;lokalize&lt;/a&gt;,
while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
&lt;a href=&quot;http://pootle.translatehouse.org/&quot;&gt;Poodle&lt;/a&gt; or
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.transifex.com/&quot;&gt;Transifex&lt;/a&gt;.  All we care about
is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc&quot;&gt;bug reports
against the debian-edu-doc package&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
translated images by storing translated versions in
images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
package maintainers know more.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
&lt;a href=&quot;http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/&quot;&gt;the content
of the documentation packages on the web&lt;/a&gt;.  See for example the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf&quot;&gt;Italian
PDF version&lt;/a&gt; or the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html&quot;&gt;German
HTML version&lt;/a&gt;.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
but perhaps it will be done in the future.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To learn more, check out
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html&quot;&gt;the
debian-edu-doc package&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/&quot;&gt;the
manual on the wiki&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations&quot;&gt;the
translation instructions&lt;/a&gt; in the manual.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Hvordan enkelt laste ned filmer fra NRK med den &quot;nye&quot; løsningen</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hvordan_enkelt_laste_ned_filmer_fra_NRK_med_den__nye__l_sningen.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hvordan_enkelt_laste_ned_filmer_fra_NRK_med_den__nye__l_sningen.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2014 19:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Jeg har fortsatt behov for å kunne laste ned innslag fra NRKs
nettsted av og til for å se senere når jeg ikke er på nett, men
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hvordan_enkelt_laste_ned_filmer_fra_NRK.html&quot;&gt;min
oppskrift fra 2011&lt;/a&gt; sluttet å fungere da NRK byttet
avspillermetode.  I dag fikk jeg endelig lett etter oppdatert løsning,
og jeg er veldig glad for å fortelle at den enkleste måten å laste ned
innslag er å bruke siste versjon 2014.06.07 av
&lt;a href=&quot;http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/&quot;&gt;youtube-dl&lt;/a&gt;.  Støtten i
youtube-dl &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/2980&quot;&gt;kom
inn for 23 dager siden&lt;/a&gt; og
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/y/youtube-dl.html&quot;&gt;versjonen i
Debian&lt;/a&gt; fungerer fint også som backport til Debian Wheezy.  Det er
et lite problem, det håndterer kun URLer med små bokstaver, men hvis
en har en URL med store bokstaver kan en bare gjøre alle store om til
små bokstaver for å få youtube-dl til å laste ned.  Rapporterte
nettopp
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/2980&quot;&gt;problemet til
utviklerne&lt;/a&gt;, og antar de får fikset det snart.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Dermed er alt klart til å laste ned dokumentarene om
&lt;a href=&quot;http://tv.nrk.no/program/KOID23005014/usas-hemmelige-avlytting&quot;&gt;USAs
hemmelige avlytting&lt;/a&gt; og
&lt;a href=&quot;http://tv.nrk.no/program/KOID23005114/selskapene-bak-usas-avlytting&quot;&gt;Selskapene
bak USAs avlytting&lt;/a&gt;, i tillegg til
&lt;a href=&quot;http://tv.nrk.no/program/KOID20005814/et-moete-med-edward-snowden&quot;&gt;intervjuet
med Edward Snowden gjort av den tyske tv-kanalen ARD&lt;/a&gt;.  Anbefaler
alle å se disse, sammen med
&lt;a href=&quot;http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5713_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201312301130_-_to_protect_and_infect_part_2_-_jacob.html&quot;&gt;foredraget
til Jacob Appelbaum på siste CCC-konferanse&lt;/a&gt;, for å forstå mer om
hvordan overvåkningen av borgerne brer om seg.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Takk til gode venner på foreningen NUUGs IRC-kanal
&lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug&quot;&gt;#nuug på irc.freenode.net&lt;/a&gt;
for tipsene som fikk meg i mål&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Oppdatering 2014-06-17&lt;/strong&gt;: Etter at jeg publiserte
denne, ble jeg tipset om bloggposten
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ingvar.blog.redpill-linpro.com/2012/05/31/downloading-hd-content-from-tv-nrk-no/&quot;&gt;Downloading
HD content from tv.nrk.no&lt;/a&gt;&quot; av Ingvar Hagelund, som har alternativ
implementasjon og tips for å lage mkv-fil med undertekstene inkludert.
Kanskje den passer bedre for deg?  I tillegg ble feilen i youtube-dl
ble fikset litt senere ut på dagen i går, samt at youtube-dl fikk
støtte for å laste ned undertitler.  Takk til Anders Einar Hilden for
god innsats og youtube-dl-utviklerne for rask respons.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Free software car computer solution?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 29 May 2014 18:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Dear lazyweb.  I&#39;m planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
in my car, connected to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776&quot;&gt;a
small screen&lt;/a&gt; next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer&quot;&gt;Carputer&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  But I
wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
such car computer.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is my current wish list for such system:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Work on Raspberry Pi.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
   fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
   or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/&quot;&gt;Openstreetmap&lt;/a&gt; or OCR
   info gathered from a dashboard camera.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
   and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
   route.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
   to home server.  Try IP over DNS
   (&lt;a href=&quot;http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/&quot;&gt;iodine&lt;/a&gt;) or ICMP
   (&lt;a href=&quot;http://code.gerade.org/hans/&quot;&gt;Hans&lt;/a&gt;) if direct
   connection do not work.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
   or some standard car mesh protocol.&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
   (speed calculated between two cameras).&lt;/li&gt;

 &lt;li&gt;Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
   run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
some or all of these features, please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Half the Coverity issues in Gnash fixed in the next release</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2014 14:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve been following &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.getgnash.org/&quot;&gt;the Gnash
project&lt;/a&gt; for quite a while now.  It is a free software
implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
newer AVM2 format - see
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lightspark.github.io/&quot;&gt;Lightspark&lt;/a&gt; for that one),
allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
sites do not work yet.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A few months ago, I started looking at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://scan.coverity.com/&quot;&gt;Coverity&lt;/a&gt;, the static source
checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
code checkers I have tested over the years.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Since a few weeks ago, I&#39;ve been working with the other Gnash
developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out, you find us on
&lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev&quot;&gt;the
gnash-dev mailing list&lt;/a&gt; and on
&lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash&quot;&gt;the #gnash channel on
irc.freenode.net IRC server&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 23 Apr 2014 14:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
So I implemented one, using
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram&quot;&gt;my Isenkram
package&lt;/a&gt;.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
&quot;Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)&quot;.  When you
select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.&lt;p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
packages to install.  The first part is in
&lt;tt&gt;/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc&lt;/tt&gt; and look like
this:&lt;/p&gt;

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

&lt;p&gt;The second part is in
&lt;tt&gt;/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware&lt;/tt&gt; and look like
this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
#!/bin/sh
#
(
    isenkram-lookup
    isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
) | sort -u
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
have installed on our machines.  I&#39;ve not been able to find a way to
get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
/usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/719837&quot;&gt;#719837&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/730704&quot;&gt;#730704&lt;/a&gt;).  The cause is in
the python-apt code (bug
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/745487&quot;&gt;#745487&lt;/a&gt;), but using a
workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
unstable today.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11&quot;&gt;DEP-11&lt;/a&gt;, and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive&quot;&gt;GSoC
project&lt;/a&gt; will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
start using the information when it is ready.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
add a &quot;Xb-Modaliases&quot; header to your control file like I did in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile&quot;&gt;the pymissile
package&lt;/a&gt; or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
package.  See also
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/&quot;&gt;all my
blog posts tagged isenkram&lt;/a&gt; for details on the notation.  I expect
the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
moment I got no better place to store it.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 15 Apr 2014 22:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox&quot;&gt;Freedombox
project&lt;/a&gt; is working on providing the software and hardware to make
it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
today a major mile stone was reached.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
build everything directly from Debian. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Some key packages used by Freedombox are
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup&quot;&gt;freedombox-setup&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth&quot;&gt;plinth&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite&quot;&gt;pagekite&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor&quot;&gt;tor&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy&quot;&gt;privoxy&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud&quot;&gt;owncloud&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq&quot;&gt;dnsmasq&lt;/a&gt;.  There
are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie&quot;&gt;check out
the manual&lt;/a&gt; and help us improve it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
become root:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
  mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
  u-boot-tools
git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
  freedom-maker
make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
the preseed values:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
url=&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat&quot;&gt;http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
it still work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
be run from the plinth web interface.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
&lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox&quot;&gt;IRC (#freedombox on
irc.debian.org)&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss&quot;&gt;the
mailing list&lt;/a&gt; if you want to help make this vision come true.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Språkkoder for POSIX locale i Norge</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Spr_kkoder_for_POSIX_locale_i_Norge.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Spr_kkoder_for_POSIX_locale_i_Norge.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 11 Apr 2014 21:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;For 12 år siden, skrev jeg et lite notat om
&lt;a href=&quot;http://i18n.skolelinux.no/localekoder.txt&quot;&gt;bruk av språkkoder
i Norge&lt;/a&gt;.  Jeg ble nettopp minnet på dette da jeg fikk spørsmål om
notatet fortsatt var aktuelt, og tenkte det var greit å repetere hva
som fortsatt gjelder.  Det jeg skrev da er fortsatt like aktuelt.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Når en velger språk i programmer på unix, så velger en blant mange
språkkoder.  For språk i Norge anbefales følgende språkkoder (anbefalt
locale i parantes):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;dl&gt;
&lt;dt&gt;nb (nb_NO)&lt;/dt&gt;&lt;dd&gt;Bokmål i Norge&lt;/dd&gt;
&lt;dt&gt;nn (nn_NO)&lt;/dt&gt;&lt;dd&gt;Nynorsk i Norge&lt;/dd&gt;
&lt;dt&gt;se (se_NO)&lt;/dt&gt;&lt;dd&gt;Nordsamisk i Norge&lt;/dd&gt;
&lt;/dl&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Alle programmer som bruker andre koder bør endres.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Språkkoden bør brukes når .po-filer navngis og installeres.  Dette
er ikke det samme som locale-koden.  For Norsk Bokmål, så bør filene
være navngitt nb.po, mens locale (LANG) bør være nb_NO.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hvis vi ikke får standardisert de kodene i alle programmene med
norske oversettelser, så er det umulig å gi LANG-variablen ett innhold
som fungerer for alle programmer.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Språkkodene er de offisielle kodene fra ISO 639, og bruken av dem i
forbindelse med POSIX localer er standardisert i RFC 3066 og ISO
15897.  Denne anbefalingen er i tråd med de angitte standardene.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Følgende koder er eller har vært i bruk som locale-verdier for
&quot;norske&quot; språk.  Disse bør unngås, og erstattes når de oppdages:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;table&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;norwegian&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;-&gt; nb_NO&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;bokmål   &lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;-&gt; nb_NO&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;bokmal   &lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;-&gt; nb_NO&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;nynorsk  &lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;-&gt; nn_NO&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;no       &lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;-&gt; nb_NO&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;no_NO    &lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;-&gt; nb_NO&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;no_NY    &lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;-&gt; nn_NO&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;sme_NO   &lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;-&gt; se_NO&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Merk at når det gjelder de samiske språkene, at se_NO i praksis
henviser til nordsamisk i Norge, mens f.eks.  smj_NO henviser til
lulesamisk.  Dette notatet er dog ikke ment å gi råd rundt samiske
språkkoder, der gjør
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.divvun.no/&quot;&gt;Divvun-prosjektet&lt;/a&gt; en bedre
jobb.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Referanser:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rfc-base.org/rfc-3066.html&quot;&gt;RFC 3066 - Tags
    for the Identification of Languages&lt;/a&gt; (Erstatter RFC 1766)&lt;/li&gt;
   
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langcodes.html&quot;&gt;ISO
    639&lt;/a&gt; - Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages&lt;/li&gt;

  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg20/docs/n897-14652w25.pdf&quot;&gt;ISO
    DTR 14652&lt;/a&gt; - locale-standard Specification method for cultural
    conventions&lt;/li&gt;
 
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg20/docs/n610.pdf&quot;&gt;ISO
    15897: Registration procedures for cultural elements (cultural
    registry)&lt;/a&gt;,
    &lt;a href=&quot;http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg20/docs/n849-15897wd6.pdf&quot;&gt;(nytt
    draft)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;

  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg20/&quot;&gt;ISO/IEC
    JTC1/SC22/WG20&lt;/a&gt; - Gruppen for i18n-standardisering i ISO&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 9 Apr 2014 11:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
have looked at a system called
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/&quot;&gt;S3QL&lt;/a&gt;, a locally
mounted network backed file system with the features I need.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It is simple to use.  I&#39;m using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
package is included already.  So to get started, run &lt;tt&gt;apt-get
install s3ql&lt;/tt&gt;.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
&lt;a href=&quot;https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy&quot;&gt;how
to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service&lt;/a&gt;, because I trust the laws
in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage&quot;&gt;S3QL
Filesystem for HPC Storage&lt;/a&gt; by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
account.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
I&#39;ll refer to it as &lt;tt&gt;bucket-name&lt;/tt&gt; below.  In addition, one need
the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
[s3c]
storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
backend-login: API-login
backend-password: API-password
fs-passphrase: local-password
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I create my local passphrase using &lt;tt&gt;pwget 50&lt;/tt&gt; or similar,
but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
details and password to create it:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
# mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
  --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
Enter backend login: 
Enter backend password: 
Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user&#39;s guide, especially
the &#39;Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data&#39; section.
Enter encryption password: 
Confirm encryption password: 
Generating random encryption key...
Creating metadata tables...
Dumping metadata...
..objects..
..blocks..
..inodes..
..inode_blocks..
..symlink_targets..
..names..
..contents..
..ext_attributes..
Compressing and uploading metadata...
Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
# &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
  --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
Using 4 upload threads.
Downloading and decompressing metadata...
Reading metadata...
..objects..
..blocks..
..inodes..
..inode_blocks..
..symlink_targets..
..names..
..contents..
..ext_attributes..
Mounting filesystem...
# df -h /s3ql
Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
#
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# umount.s3ql /s3ql
# 
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the &quot;already
mounted&quot; flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
file system:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
Using cached metadata.
File system seems clean, checking anyway.
Checking DB integrity...
Creating temporary extra indices...
Checking lost+found...
Checking cached objects...
Checking names (refcounts)...
Checking contents (names)...
Checking contents (inodes)...
Checking contents (parent inodes)...
Checking objects (reference counts)...
Checking objects (backend)...
..processed 5000 objects so far..
..processed 10000 objects so far..
..processed 15000 objects so far..
Checking objects (sizes)...
Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
Checking blocks (refcounts)...
Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
Checking inodes (refcounts)...
Checking inodes (sizes)...
Checking extended attributes (names)...
Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
Checking symlinks (inodes)...
Checking directory reachability...
Checking unix conventions...
Checking referential integrity...
Dropping temporary indices...
Backing up old metadata...
Dumping metadata...
..objects..
..blocks..
..inodes..
..inode_blocks..
..symlink_targets..
..names..
..contents..
..ext_attributes..
Compressing and uploading metadata...
Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
# 
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
Both were measured using &lt;tt&gt;dd&lt;/tt&gt;.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
working set.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
busy:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
  --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
Using 8 upload threads.
Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
#
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
s3qlctrl:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
# s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
# 
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
a report:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# s3qlstat /s3ql
Directory entries:    9141
Inodes:               9143
Data blocks:          8851
Total data size:      22049.38 MB
After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
(some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
#
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.greenqloud.com/&quot;&gt;Greenqloud&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://drive.google.com/&quot;&gt;Google Drive&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://aws.amazon.com/s3/&quot;&gt;Amazon S3 web serivces&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rackspace.com/&quot;&gt;Rackspace&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://crowncloud.net/&quot;&gt;Crowncloud&lt;/A&gt;.  The latter even
accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
best.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
poster is titled
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf&quot;&gt;An
Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Hsing-Bung
Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html&quot;&gt;my
test code to check file system semantics&lt;/a&gt;, I was happy to discover that
no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
directories, if one chooses to do so.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tarsnap.com/&quot;&gt;Tarsnap service&lt;/a&gt;, which also
provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
only read from it.&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;
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