Petter Reinholdtsen

Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and notes are available on the Debian wiki. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME types I would expect to work with any free software player (like video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.

For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to be the only one fitting our needs. :/

This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network. Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not finish it before the weekend was up.

Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one of these cards.

Etter flere års mislykkede forsøk på å skrive om byggesystemet for den norske stavekontrollen for bokmål og nynorsk til å ikke bruke bindestrek som ordskillemarkør, lyktes jeg endelig første juledag. Bruken av bindestrek som ordskillemarkør har gjort det umulig å få med ord med bindestrek i stavekontrolldatagrunnlaget, slik at ord som e-post og CD-spiller ikke kunne godtas av stavekontrollen. Hadde litt tid til overs å bruke på stavekontrollen, og satte meg ned med to kopier av byggsystemet og en liten testdatafil, og byttet ut - med = på utvalgte steder i byggsystemet og datafilen helt til jeg fikk samme resultat med det gamle og det nye byggsystemet. Dette tror jeg var forsøk 4, der de foregående har feilet uten at jeg klarte å forstå hvorfor. Det sier kanskje litt om kompleksiteten i det originale byggsystemet som Rune Kleveland laget i sin tid.

Etter å ha endret byggsystemet, var neste steg å importere ordene med bindestrek. Vi har en rekke slike i databasene for bokmål og nynorsk for korrektur av datagrunnlaget for stavekontrollen, og etter importen skulle nå 10350 nye ord bli godkjent som korrekt stavede ord av stavekontrollen.

Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut. Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den stabile utgaven av Debian. Neste steg er nå å få Skolelinux / Debian Edu ferdig oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan slippes løs på skolene. Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har gjort dette mulig. Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken insserv.

The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from optimal. There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.

In Debian Edu/Skolelinux, we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts, filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration, and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common, but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented. It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC specifications to cleam up this mess.

I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place. It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.

I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.

Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a new IETF work group?

I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax now. :)