Petter Reinholdtsen

I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out this announcement today:

the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
*beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
release, Debian 8 "Jessie".

(As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
later today ;)

We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
be possible and encouraged!

Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs

Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
operating system for schools, universities and other
organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
days.

Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.

For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
installation instructions are available, including detailed
instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
least 5 characters!

== Where to download ==

A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
can be downloaded at the following locations:

    http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
    rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso . 

The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a

Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
available, with more software included (saving additional download
time):

    http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
    rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso 

The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636

Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
options.

== Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==

Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.

This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
online version of the translated manual.

More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
release notes and the installation manual:
- http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
- http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual


== Errata / known problems ==

    It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
    DHCP (#780461).

    The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087). 

Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
hostname immediately.

Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
more current and complete list.

== Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==

=== Software updates ===

Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:

 * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
   i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
   Intel Pentium and AMD K5).

 * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
   Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
   * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
   * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
     the others see the manual.
 * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
 * LibreOffice 4.3.3
 * GOsa 2.7.4
 * LTSP 5.5.4
 * CUPS print system 1.7.5
 * new boot framework: systemd
 * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
 * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
 * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
 * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
 * golearn 0.9
 * tuxpaint 0.9.22
 * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
 * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
 * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
   notes and the installation manual, see the link above.

=== Installation changes ===

    Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
    for the hardware present.

=== Fixed bugs ===

A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
from a user perspective:

 * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
   DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
   information is corrected (710362)

 * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608). 

=== Sugar desktop removed ===

As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
available in Debian Edu jessie.


== About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==

Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
running all services needed for a school network is set up just
waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
environment.

== About Debian ==

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
operating system.

== Thanks ==

Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
You rock.

It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete computer system for schools I've involved in, Debian Edu / Skolelinux, was being used in India. But apparently it is, and I managed to get an interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish Agarwal.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India. My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips, installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with few software start-ups as well.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project?

It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as it was known then. Since then I have started using the various education meta-packages provided by the project.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu?

It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and figuratively). Even if I take the simplest software which is gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered #781841 and #781842.

I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions, as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the possibility of a larger life span. Of course with both it's more a question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both for the developer per-se.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu?

I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take help from people and the larger community wherever possible.

I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it. However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them. Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but still) I have had for a long time :

1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how far would each travel and similar questions like these.

The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in interactive manner. While sites such as the Ask Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem (as an example or point of inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done. I dunno if there is a free software which does something like this. The idea being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour. This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started, psychics and everything in-between.

One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could also be used.

2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary. I don't think it should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on the user's input.

3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into nature, history etc. and let it loose. This could turn to be really huge collection of images. One source could be taken from commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free stock photos. Potential is immense.

Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a lot. This is more so in educational software as these applications need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.

Which free software do you use daily?

That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt, aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays), quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly between kpat and Aiselriot. In desktops it's a tie between gnome-flashback and mate.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software?

I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it. Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the people now understand the concept of a repository because of the various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.

What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as well.

I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.

One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates and upgrades. People have this myth that each update and upgrade means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this innumerable times. That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS releases.

The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu is aimed at.

Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for around 2 years, and gathered some experience there. Some of the things we learnt/discovered there was :

1. Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects and they do not want you to teach anything out of the portion/syllabus given.
2. They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever is in the syllabus.
3. There are huge barriers both with the English language and at times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be as recognizable as say a Puneri Pagdi so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or something but that is something for upstream to do.

I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the Open Source Developers' Conference Nordic 2015!

It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to where I work, and I finally got around to submitting a talk proposal for it (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted). As part of my involvement with the Norwegian Unix User Group member association I have been slightly involved in the planning of this conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking Hackathon with our friends over at mySociety and Holder de ord. This part is named the 'My Society' track in the program. There is still space for more talks and participants. I hope to see you there.

Check out the talks submitted and accepted so far.

During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian docbook version of the 2004 book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos, inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should. I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to check the text up to chapter 13. The current status is available on the github project pages. You can also check out the PDF, EPUB and HTML version available in the archive directory.

Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if you find any.

The Norwegian Unix User Group, where I am a member, and where people interested in free software, open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video. The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider audience. For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel Frikanalen is a useful venue. Since a few days ago, when I figured out the REST API to program the channel time schedule, the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org). I fill all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.

The list of NUUG videos uploaded so far include things like a one hour talk by John Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo, a presentation of Haiku, the BeOS re-implementation, the history of FiksGataMi, the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet, the good old Warriors of the net video and many others.

We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to spread the word there. I also hope to find useful recordings from the Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the channel as well. But this require locating the videos and their meta information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to focus on this. Perhaps you want to help. Please join us on IRC, #nuug on irc.freenode.net if you want to help make this happen.

But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new today, check out the Ogg Theora web stream or use one of the other ways to get access to the channel. Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still do not properly sync the video and sound. It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that produces acceptable quality. Help needed, please get in touch if you know how to fix it using free software.

Today I was happy to learn that the documentary Citizenfour by Laura Poitras finally will show up in Norway. According to the magazine Montages, a deal has finally been made for Cinema distribution in Norway and the movie will have its premiere soon. This is great news. As part of my involvement with the Norwegian Unix User Group, me and a friend have tried to get the movie to Norway ourselves, but obviously we were too late and Tor Fosse beat us to it. I am happy he did, as the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make it happen ourselves. The trailer can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this is.

The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.

The Norwegian nationwide open channel Frikanalen is still going strong. It allow everyone to send the video they want on national television. It is a TV station administrated completely using a web browser, running only Free Software, providing a REST api for administrators and members, and with distribution on the national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV. But only between 12:00 and 17:30 Norwegian time. This has finally changed, after many years with limited distribution. A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out the channel the rest of the day. This is presented on the Frikanalen web site now. And since a few days ago, the channel is also available via multicast on UNINETT, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in the Norwegian National Research and Education network.

If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player to one of these sources. The first should work with most players and browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work with VLC.

• http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv
• udp://@224.17.43.129:1234

The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video and audio is slightly out of sync. We have not been able to figure out how to fix it. It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar. If you have ideas how to fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no. We currently use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:

./ffmpeg2theora.linux <OBE_gemini_URL.ts> -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
 --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
 --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 <pw> /frikanalen.ogv

If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as I am curious how far the multicast stream reach. It do not make it to my home network, nor any other commercially available network in Norway that I am aware of.

En stund nå har jeg vært nødt til å forholde meg til Fronter, en nettløsning Osloskolen bruker for kontakt mellom hjem og skole. Løsningen imponerer ikke, og det er lagt opp til at vi foreldre skal logge inn regelmessig for å se om noe har endret seg. Idéen om å la folk stikke innom nettsider for å se om det har skjedd endringer er så idiotisk at jeg har lett etter et alternativ. Fronterløsningen har en innebygget løsning der en kan abonnere på forsiden (som viser en oppsummering av det en har tilgang til), og få tilsendt en kopi hver natt, men det fjerner jo bare behovet for å stikke innom, ikke den idiotiske ideen om at folk skal huske hvordan nettsiden så ut sist og oppdage hva som er endret.

For å gjøre livet enklere har jeg derfor brukt litt tid på å lage et program som kobler seg opp og sjekker etter endringer automatisk, slik at jeg kan få beskjed fra datamaskinen når noe endrer seg i stedet for å forsøke å finne ut av det selv. I går ble scriptet brukbart, og jeg er dermed klar til å dele det med deg.

Jeg startet med å skrive programmet i Python, og hadde en versjon som logget inn og hentet ned enkeltsider fra Fronter. Men Fronter-websidene suger golfballer gjennom en hageslange, med uleselig HTML, flere nivåer av iframes og en struktur på innholdet som er svært vanskelig å finne ut av, så jeg ga til slutt opp lxml-parsing med Python og forsøkte meg med WWW::Mechanize for Perl som jeg kjente fra før. I ettertid har jeg oppdaget at WWW:Mechanize også finnes for Python, så jeg kunne antagelig droppet språkbyttet. Men da jeg oppdaget det hadde jeg kommet så langt med Perl-utgaven, så jeg hoppet ikke tilbake.

For å logge inn i Fronter besøker en enten skolens websider eller den sentrale innloggingsiden https://fronter.com/osloskoler/. Perl-koden for å logge inn ser slik ut:

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
$mech->get('https://fronter.com/osloskoler/');
$mech->submit_form(fields => {
    username => $username,
    password => $password,
} );

Neste steg er å få oversikt over hvilke «rom» en har tilgang til. På vår skole er det rom for skolen, biblioteket, elevrådet, aktivitetsskolen og klasser der en har unger, og dette vil være forskjellig fra person til person. Etter å ha romstert rundt i Fronter-grensesnittet endel kom jeg over en grei HTML-side med oversikt over rommene, https://fronter.com/osloskoler/adm/projects.phtml?mode=displayRoomchooser, så jeg bruker denne til å hente ut romoversikt med rom-ID.

my %room;
$mech->get('https://fronter.com/osloskoler/adm/projects.phtml?mode=displayRoomchooser');
for my $link ($mech->links()) {
    my $url = $link->url();
    if ($url =~ m%/links/list_files.phtml\?edit=(\d+)$%) {
        $room{$link->text()} = $1;
    }
}

Når en har rom-ID kan en slå opp websiden for rommet, som starter på https://fronter.com/osloskoler/contentframeset.phtml?goto_prjid=$ROMID (der $ROMID byttes ut med rom-ID-tallet). Det gir en side med iframes, og en må tre nivåer ned i iframes før en får tak i HTML-informasjonen som vises frem når en ser på det aktuelle rommet. Her ga jeg opp den robuste parsingen og hardkodet endel URL-er som i stedet bør spores opp maskinelt. HTML-informasjonen som vises lagres i en fil etter at økt- og innloggings-nøkkel er fjernet og deretter bruker jeg lynx --dump --nolist for å hente ut en tekstlig utgave av websiden. Denne tekstlige utgaven sammenlignes med forrige versjon og oversikt over endringer kan så sendes ut på egnet vis.

Jeg valgte å bruke git til å holde rede på endringer, så jeg sjekker inn HTML og tekst-utgaver i git og bruker git til å vise frem endringene i tekstutgavene. Programvaren for å gjøre dette er testet på Debian GNU/Linux og kan lastes ned fra github.

For å bruke dette selv, kjør følgende kommandoer på din Debian-maskin (forutsetter sudo-tilgang for installasjon av programvare):

sudo apt-get install git lynx-cur libio-prompter-perl libwww-mechanize-perl \
      libconfig-inifiles-perl
git clone https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fronter-scraper-oslo
cd fronter-scraper-oslo
./update-git

Det gjenstår endel, men systemet er allerede nyttig for meg. Jeg ønsker at systemet også skal laste ned PDF-er og slikt som er lagt ut for nedlasting på sidene, slik at f.eks. ukeplaner kommer inn i git-arkivet mitt automatisk og jeg får automatisk beskjed når ny ukeplan er lagt ut. Kanskje du kan bidra med å få det på plass, eller kanskje du har andre ting du vil fikse? Jeg tar gjerne imot endringer og forbedringer. Det er mye som kan gjøres bedre, og scriptet er ikke veldig robust mot endringer hos nettsidene til Fronter. Jeg regner dermed med at det vil trengs oppdateringer jevnlig etter hvert som Fronter-løsningen endrer seg.

Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report that three of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen, the main airport in Norway. This way the travelers can have their body photographed without cloths when visiting Norway. Of course this horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now travelers can move past the security check point faster and more efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the public. The article is written in a way that leave the impression that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create the sketch figures. In reality the same nude pictures are still taken, but not presented to everyone. They are still available for the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.

Wikipedia have a more on Full body scanners, including example images and a summary of the controversy about these scanners.

Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not something everyone should have to accept to travel.

When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working. As I am involved in the Norwegian open channel Frikanalen as part of my activity in the NUUG member organisation, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them. If the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with the stream and an alarm should be triggered. The script is written as a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly and sound the alarm when something is wrong. It is able to detect both a hanging and a broken video stream.

I just uploaded the code for the script into the Frikanalen git repository on github. If you run a TV station with web streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.

Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and distribute the TV content. The source code for the entire TV station is available from the Github project page. Everyone can use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web GUI and a web API to add and schedule content. And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and following activity, we now have the schedule available as XMLTV too. Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is most welcome. Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?

Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their qstream monitoring system, which gather connection time, jitter, packet loss and burst bandwidth usage. It look useful to check if UDP streams are working as they should.