+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jami_Ring__finally_functioning_peer_to_peer_communication_client.html">Jami/Ring, finally functioning peer to peer communication client</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 19th June 2019
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Some years ago, in 2016, I
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">wrote
+for the first time about</a> the Ring peer to peer messaging system.
+It would provide messaging without any central server coordinating the
+system and without requiring all users to register a phone number or
+own a mobile phone. Back then, I could not get it to work, and put it
+aside until it had seen more development. A few days ago I decided to
+give it another try, and am happy to report that this time I am able
+to not only send and receive messages, but also place audio and video
+calls. But only if UDP is not blocked into your network.</p>
+
+<p>The Ring system changed name earlier this year to
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami_(software)">Jami</a>. I
+tried doing web search for 'ring' when I discovered it for the first
+time, and can only applaud this change as it is impossible to find
+something called Ring among the noise of other uses of that word. Now
+you can search for 'jami' and this client and
+<a href="https://jami.net/">the Jami system</a> is the first hit at
+least on duckduckgo.</p>
+
+<p>Jami will by default encrypt messages as well as audio and video
+calls, and try to send them directly between the communicating parties
+if possible. If this proves impossible (for example if both ends are
+behind NAT), it will use a central SIP TURN server maintained by the
+Jami project. Jami can also be a normal SIP client. If the SIP
+server is unencrypted, the audio and video calls will also be
+unencrypted. This is as far as I know the only case where Jami will
+do anything without encryption.</p>
+
+<p>Jami is available for several platforms: Linux, Windows, MacOSX,
+Android, iOS, and Android TV. It is included in Debian already. Jami
+also work for those using F-Droid without any Google connections,
+while Signal do not.
+<a href="https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/ring-project/wikis/technical/Protocol">The
+protocol</a> is described in the Ring project wiki. The system uses a
+distributed hash table (DHT) system (similar to BitTorrent) running
+over UDP. On one of the networks I use, I discovered Jami failed to
+work. I tracked this down to the fact that incoming UDP packages
+going to ports 1-49999 were blocked, and the DHT would pick a random
+port and end up in the low range most of the time. After talking to
+the developers, I solved this by enabling the dhtproxy in the
+settings, thus using TCP to talk to a central DHT proxy instead of
+
+peering directly with others. I've been told the developers are
+working on allowing DHT to use TCP to avoid this problem. I also ran
+into a problem when trying to talk to the version of Ring included in
+Debian Stable (Stretch). Apparently the protocol changed between
+beta2 and the current version, making these clients incompatible.
+Hopefully the protocol will not be made incompatible in the
+future.</p>
+
+<p>It is worth noting that while looking at Jami and its features, I
+came across another communication platform I have not tested yet. The
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)">Tox protocol</a>
+and <a href="https://tox.chat/">family of Tox clients</a>. It might
+become the topic of a future blog post.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Strategispillet_Unknown_Horizons_n__tilgjengelig_p__bokm_l.html">Strategispillet Unknown Horizons nå tilgjengelig på bokmål</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 23rd January 2019
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>I høst ble jeg inspirert til å bidra til oversettelsen av
+<a href="http://unknown-horizons.org/">strategispillet Unknown
+Horizons</a>, og oversatte de nesten 200 strengene i prosjektet til
+bokmål. Deretter har jeg gått å ventet på at det kom en ny utgave som
+inneholdt disse oversettelsene. Nå er endelig ventetiden over. Den
+nye versjonen kom på nyåret, og ble
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/unknown-horizons">lastet opp i
+Debian</a> for noen få dager siden. I går kveld fikk jeg testet det ut, og
+må innrømme at oversettelsene fungerer fint. Fant noen få tekster som
+måtte justeres, men ikke noe alvorlig. Har oppdatert
+<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/uh/">oversettelsen på
+Weblate</a>, slik at neste utgave vil være enda bedre. :)</p>
+
+<p>Spillet er et ressursstyringsspill ala Civilization, og er morsomt
+å spille for oss som liker slikt. :)</p>
+
+<p>Som vanlig, hvis du bruker Bitcoin og ønsker å vise din støtte til
+det jeg driver med, setter jeg pris på om du sender Bitcoin-donasjoner
+til min adresse
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.
+Merk, betaling med bitcoin er ikke anonymt. :)</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_got_everything_you_need_to_program_Micro_bit.html">Debian now got everything you need to program Micro:bit</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 22nd January 2019
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>I am amazed and very pleased to discover that since a few days ago,
+everything you need to program the <a href="https://microbit.org/">BBC
+micro:bit</a> is available from the Debian archive. All this is
+thanks to the hard work of Nick Morrott and the Debian python
+packaging team. The micro:bit project recommend the mu-editor to
+program the microcomputer, as this editor will take care of all the
+machinery required to injekt/flash micropython alongside the program
+into the micro:bit, as long as the pieces are available.</p>
+
+<p>There are three main pieces involved. The first to enter Debian
+was
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-uflash">python-uflash</a>,
+which was accepted into the archive 2019-01-12. The next one was
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/mu-editor">mu-editor</a>, which
+showed up 2019-01-13. The final and hardest part to to into the
+archive was
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-microbit-micropython">firmware-microbit-micropython</a>,
+which needed to get its build system and dependencies into Debian
+before it was accepted 2019-01-20. The last one is already in Debian
+Unstable and should enter Debian Testing / Buster in three days. This
+all allow any user of the micro:bit to get going by simply running
+'apt install mu-editor' when using Testing or Unstable, and once
+Buster is released as stable, all the users of Debian stable will be
+catered for.</p>
+
+<p>As a minor final touch, I added rules to
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">the isenkram
+package</a> for recognizing micro:bit and recommend the mu-editor
+package. This make sure any user of the isenkram desktop daemon will
+get a popup suggesting to install mu-editor then the USB cable from
+the micro:bit is inserted for the first time.</p>
+
+<p>This should make it easier to have fun.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Learn_to_program_with_Minetest_on_Debian.html">Learn to program with Minetest on Debian</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 15th December 2018
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>A fun way to learn how to program
+<a href="https://www.python.org/">Python</a> is to follow the
+instructions in the book
+"<a href="https://nostarch.com/programwithminecraft">Learn to program
+with Minecraft</a>", which introduces programming in Python to people
+who like to play with Minecraft. The book uses a Python library to
+talk to a TCP/IP socket with an API accepting build instructions and
+providing information about the current players in a Minecraft world.
+The TCP/IP API was first created for the Minecraft implementation for
+Raspberry Pi, and has since been ported to some server versions of
+Minecraft. The book contain recipes for those using Windows, MacOSX
+and Raspian. But a little known fact is that you can follow the same
+recipes using the free software construction game
+<a href="https://minetest.net/">Minetest</a>.</p>
+
+<p>There is <a href="https://github.com/sprintingkiwi/pycraft_mod">a
+Minetest module implementing the same API</a>, making it possible to
+use the Python programs coded to talk to Minecraft with Minetest too.
+I
+<a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/minetest-mod-pycraft_0.20%2Bgit20180331.0376a0a%2Bdfsg-1.html">uploaded
+this module</a> to Debian two weeks ago, and as soon as it clears the
+FTP masters NEW queue, learning to program Python with Minetest on
+Debian will be a simple 'apt install' away. The Debian package is
+maintained as part of the Debian Games team, and
+<a href="https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/unfinished/minetest-mod-pycraft">the
+packaging rules</a> are currently located under 'unfinished' on
+Salsa.</p>
+
+<p>You will most likely need to install several of the Minetest
+modules in Debian for the examples included with the library to work
+well, as there are several blocks used by the example scripts that are
+provided via modules in Minetest. Without the required blocks, a
+simple stone block is used instead. My initial testing with a analog
+clock did not get gold arms as instructed in the python library, but
+instead used stone arms.</p>
+
+<p>I tried to find a way to add the API to the desktop version of
+Minecraft, but were unable to find any working recipes. The
+<a href="https://www.epiphanydigest.com/tag/minecraft-python-api/">recipes</a>
+I <a href="https://github.com/kbsriram/mcpiapi">found</a> are only
+working with a standalone Minecraft server setup. Are there any
+options to use with the normal desktop version?</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_an_official_MIME_type_for_patches_.html">Time for an official MIME type for patches?</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 1st November 2018
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>As part of my involvement in
+<a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">the Nikita
+archive API project</a>, I've been importing a fairly large lump of
+emails into a test instance of the archive to see how well this would
+go. I picked a subset of <a href="https://notmuchmail.org/">my
+notmuch email database</a>, all public emails sent to me via
+@lists.debian.org, giving me a set of around 216 000 emails to import.
+In the process, I had a look at the various attachments included in
+these emails, to figure out what to do with attachments, and noticed
+that one of the most common attachment formats do not have
+<a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">an
+official MIME type</a> registered with IANA/IETF. The output from
+diff, ie the input for patch, is on the top 10 list of formats
+included in these emails. At the moment people seem to use either
+text/x-patch or text/x-diff, but neither is officially registered. It
+would be better if one official MIME type were registered and used
+everywhere.</p>
+
+<p>To try to get one official MIME type for these files, I've brought
+up the topic on
+<a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/media-types">the
+media-types mailing list</a>. If you are interested in discussion
+which MIME type to use as the official for patch files, or involved in
+making software using a MIME type for patches, perhaps you would like
+to join the discussion?</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Google_Drive_sync_using_grive_in_Debian.html">Automatic Google Drive sync using grive in Debian</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 4th October 2018
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>A few days, I rescued a Windows victim over to Debian. To try to
+rescue the remains, I helped set up automatic sync with Google Drive.
+I did not find any sensible Debian package handling this
+automatically, so I rebuild the grive2 source from
+<a href="http://www.webupd8.org/">the Ubuntu UPD8 PPA</a> to do the
+task and added a autostart desktop entry and a small shell script to
+run in the background while the user is logged in to do the sync.
+Here is a sketch of the setup for future reference.</p>
+
+<p>I first created <tt>~/googledrive</tt>, entered the directory and
+ran '<tt>grive -a</tt>' to authenticate the machine/user. Next, I
+created a autostart hook in <tt>~/.config/autostart/grive.desktop</tt>
+to start the sync when the user log in:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+[Desktop Entry]
+Name=Google drive autosync
+Type=Application
+Exec=/home/user/bin/grive-sync
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Finally, I wrote the <tt>~/bin/grive-sync</tt> script to sync
+~/googledrive/ with the files in Google Drive.</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+#!/bin/sh
+set -e
+cd ~/
+cleanup() {
+ if [ "$syncpid" ] ; then
+ kill $syncpid
+ fi
+}
+trap cleanup EXIT INT QUIT
+/usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh listen googledrive 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%" &
+syncpdi=$!
+while true; do
+ if ! xhost >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
+ echo "no DISPLAY, exiting as the user probably logged out"
+ exit 1
+ fi
+ if [ ! -e /run/user/1000/grive-sync.sh_googledrive ] ; then
+ /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh sync googledrive
+ fi
+ sleep 300
+done 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%"
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Feel free to use the setup if you want. It can be assumed to be
+GNU GPL v2 licensed (or any later version, at your leisure), but I
+doubt this code is possible to claim copyright on.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_the_Kodi_API_to_play_Youtube_videos.html">Using the Kodi API to play Youtube videos</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 2nd September 2018
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>I continue to explore my Kodi installation, and today I wanted to
+tell it to play a youtube URL I received in a chat, without having to
+insert search terms using the on-screen keyboard. After searching the
+web for API access to the Youtube plugin and testing a bit, I managed
+to find a recipe that worked. If you got a kodi instance with its API
+available from http://kodihost/jsonrpc, you can try the following to
+have check out a nice cover band.</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
+ --data-binary '{ "id": 1, "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Player.Open",
+ "params": {"item": { "file":
+ "plugin://plugin.video.youtube/play/?video_id=LuRGVM9O0qg" } } }' \
+ http://projector.local/jsonrpc</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>I've extended kodi-stream program to take a video source as its
+first argument. It can now handle direct video links, youtube links
+and 'desktop' to stream my desktop to Kodi. It is almost like a
+Chromecast. :)</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sharing_images_with_friends_and_family_using_RSS_and_EXIF_XMP_metadata.html">Sharing images with friends and family using RSS and EXIF/XMP metadata</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 31st July 2018
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>For a while now, I have looked for a sensible way to share images
+with my family using a self hosted solution, as it is unacceptable to
+place images from my personal life under the control of strangers
+working for data hoarders like Google or Dropbox. The last few days I
+have drafted an approach that might work out, and I would like to
+share it with you. I would like to publish images on a server under
+my control, and point some Internet connected display units using some
+free and open standard to the images I published. As my primary
+language is not limited to ASCII, I need to store metadata using
+UTF-8. Many years ago, I hoped to find a digital photo frame capable
+of reading a RSS feed with image references (aka using the
+<enclosure> RSS tag), but was unable to find a current supplier
+of such frames. In the end I gave up that approach.</p>
+
+<p>Some months ago, I discovered that
+<a href="https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/">XScreensaver</a> is able to
+read images from a RSS feed, and used it to set up a screen saver on
+my home info screen, showing images from the Daily images feed from
+NASA. This proved to work well. More recently I discovered that
+<a href="https://kodi.tv">Kodi</a> (both using
+<a href="https://www.openelec.tv/">OpenELEC</a> and
+<a href="https://libreelec.tv">LibreELEC</a>) provide the
+<a href="https://github.com/grinsted/script.screensaver.feedreader">Feedreader</a>
+screen saver capable of reading a RSS feed with images and news. For
+fun, I used it this summer to test Kodi on my parents TV by hooking up
+a Raspberry PI unit with LibreELEC, and wanted to provide them with a
+screen saver showing selected pictures from my selection.</p>
+
+<p>Armed with motivation and a test photo frame, I set out to generate
+a RSS feed for the Kodi instance. I adjusted my <a
+href="https://freedombox.org/">Freedombox</a> instance, created
+/var/www/html/privatepictures/, wrote a small Perl script to extract
+title and description metadata from the photo files and generate the
+RSS file. I ended up using Perl instead of python, as the
+libimage-exiftool-perl Debian package seemed to handle the EXIF/XMP
+tags I ended up using, while python3-exif did not. The relevant EXIF
+tags only support ASCII, so I had to find better alternatives. XMP
+seem to have the support I need.</p>
+
+<p>I am a bit unsure which EXIF/XMP tags to use, as I would like to
+use tags that can be easily added/updated using normal free software
+photo managing software. I ended up using the tags set using this
+exiftool command, as these tags can also be set using digiKam:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+exiftool -headline='The RSS image title' \
+ -description='The RSS image description.' \
+ -subject+=for-family photo.jpeg
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>I initially tried the "-title" and "keyword" tags, but they were
+invisible in digiKam, so I changed to "-headline" and "-subject". I
+use the keyword/subject 'for-family' to flag that the photo should be
+shared with my family. Images with this keyword set are located and
+copied into my Freedombox for the RSS generating script to find.</p>
+
+<p>Are there better ways to do this? Get in touch if you have better
+suggestions.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">Simple streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using GStreamer and RTP</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 12th July 2018
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Last night, I wrote
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">a
+recipe to stream a Linux desktop using VLC to a instance of Kodi</a>.
+During the day I received valuable feedback, and thanks to the
+suggestions I have been able to rewrite the recipe into a much simpler
+approach requiring no setup at all. It is a single script that take
+care of it all.</p>
+
+<p>This new script uses GStreamer instead of VLC to capture the
+desktop and stream it to Kodi. This fixed the video quality issue I
+saw initially. It further removes the need to add a m3u file on the
+Kodi machine, as it instead connects to
+<a href="https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v8">the JSON-RPC API in
+Kodi</a> and simply ask Kodi to play from the stream created using
+GStreamer. Streaming the desktop to Kodi now become trivial. Copy
+the script below, run it with the DNS name or IP address of the kodi
+server to stream to as the only argument, and watch your screen show
+up on the Kodi screen. Note, it depend on multicast on the local
+network, so if you need to stream outside the local network, the
+script must be modified. Also note, I have no idea if audio work, as
+I only care about the picture part.</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+#!/bin/sh
+#
+# Stream the Linux desktop view to Kodi. See
+# http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
+# for backgorund information.
+
+# Make sure the stream is stopped in Kodi and the gstreamer process is
+# killed if something go wrong (for example if curl is unable to find the
+# kodi server). Do the same when interrupting this script.
+kodicmd() {
+ host="$1"
+ cmd="$2"
+ params="$3"
+ curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
+ --data-binary "{ \"id\": 1, \"jsonrpc\": \"2.0\", \"method\": \"$cmd\", \"params\": $params }" \
+ "http://$host/jsonrpc"
+}
+cleanup() {
+ if [ -n "$kodihost" ] ; then
+ # Stop the playing when we end
+ playerid=$(kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.GetActivePlayers "{}" |
+ jq .result[].playerid)
+ kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Stop "{ \"playerid\" : $playerid }" > /dev/null
+ fi
+ if [ "$gstpid" ] && kill -0 "$gstpid" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
+ kill "$gstpid"
+ fi
+}
+trap cleanup EXIT INT
+
+if [ -n "$1" ]; then
+ kodihost=$1
+ shift
+else
+ kodihost=kodi.local
+fi
+
+mcast=239.255.0.1
+mcastport=1234
+mcastttl=1
+
+pasrc=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | \
+ cut -d" " -f2|head -1)
+gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
+ videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
+ x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
+ key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
+ mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
+ udpsink host=$mcast port=$mcastport ttl-mc=$mcastttl auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
+ pulsesrc device=$pasrc ! audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux. \
+ > /dev/null 2>&1 &
+gstpid=$!
+
+# Give stream a second to get going
+sleep 1
+
+# Ask kodi to start streaming using its JSON-RPC API
+kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Open \
+ "{\"item\": { \"file\": \"udp://@$mcast:$mcastport\" } }" > /dev/null
+
+# wait for gst to end
+wait "$gstpid"
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>I hope you find the approach useful. I know I do.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">Streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using VLC and RTSP</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 12th July 2018
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>PS: See
+<ahref="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">the
+followup post</a> for a even better approach.</p>
+
+<p>A while back, I was asked by a friend how to stream the desktop to
+my projector connected to Kodi. I sadly had to admit that I had no
+idea, as it was a task I never had tried. Since then, I have been
+looking for a way to do so, preferable without much extra software to
+install on either side. Today I found a way that seem to kind of
+work. Not great, but it is a start.</p>
+
+<p>I had a look at several approaches, for example
+<a href="https://github.com/mfoetsch/dlna_live_streaming">using uPnP
+DLNA as described in 2011</a>, but it required a uPnP server, fuse and
+local storage enough to store the stream locally. This is not going
+to work well for me, lacking enough free space, and it would
+impossible for my friend to get working.</p>
+
+<p>Next, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use VLC to create a
+video stream that Kodi could play. Preferably using
+broadcast/multicast, to avoid having to change any setup on the Kodi
+side when starting such stream. Unfortunately, the only recipe I
+could find using multicast used the rtp protocol, and this protocol
+seem to not be supported by Kodi.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the rtsp protocol is working! Unfortunately I
+have to specify the IP address of the streaming machine in both the
+sending command and the file on the Kodi server. But it is showing my
+desktop, and thus allow us to have a shared look on the big screen at
+the programs I work on.</p>
+
+<p>I did not spend much time investigating codeces. I combined the
+rtp and rtsp recipes from
+<a href="https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/">the
+VLC Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples</a>, and was able to get
+this working on the desktop/streaming end.</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+vlc screen:// --sout \
+ '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{dst=projector.local,port=1234,sdp=rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp}'
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>I ssh-ed into my Kodi box and created a file like this with the
+same IP address:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp \
+ > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>Note the 192.168.11.4 IP address is my desktops IP address. As far
+as I can tell the IP must be hardcoded for this to work. In other
+words, if someone elses machine is going to do the steaming, you have
+to update screenstream.m3u on the Kodi machine and adjust the vlc
+recipe. To get started, locate the file in Kodi and select the m3u
+file while the VLC stream is running. The desktop then show up in my
+big screen. :)</p>
+
+<p>When using the same technique to stream a video file with audio,
+the audio quality is really bad. No idea if the problem is package
+loss or bad parameters for the transcode. I do not know VLC nor Kodi
+enough to tell.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Update 2018-07-12</strong>: Johannes Schauer send me a few
+succestions and reminded me about an important step. The "screen:"
+input source is only available once the vlc-plugin-access-extra
+package is installed on Debian. Without it, you will see this error
+message: "VLC is unable to open the MRL 'screen://'. Check the log
+for details." He further found that it is possible to drop some parts
+of the VLC command line to reduce the amount of hardcoded information.
+It is also useful to consider using cvlc to avoid having the VLC
+window in the desktop view. In sum, this give us this command line on
+the source end
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+cvlc screen:// --sout \
+ '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8080/}'
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/ \
+ > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>Still bad image quality, though. But I did discover that streaming
+a DVD using dvdsimple:///dev/dvd as the source had excellent video and
+audio quality, so I guess the issue is in the input or transcoding
+parts, not the rtsp part. I've tried to change the vb and ab
+parameters to use more bandwidth, but it did not make a
+difference.</p>
+
+<p>I further received a suggestion from Einar Haraldseid to try using
+gstreamer instead of VLC, and this proved to work great! He also
+provided me with the trick to get Kodi to use a multicast stream as
+its source. By using this monstrous oneliner, I can stream my desktop
+with good video quality in reasonable framerate to the 239.255.0.1
+multicast address on port 1234:
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
+ videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
+ x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
+ key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
+ mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
+ udpsink host=239.255.0.1 port=1234 ttl-mc=1 auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
+ pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | \
+ grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | cut -d" " -f2|head -1) ! \
+ audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux.
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+echo udp://@239.255.0.1:1234 \
+ > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>Note the trick to pick a valid pulseaudio source. It might not
+pick the one you need. This approach will of course lead to trouble
+if more than one source uses the same multicast port and address.
+Note the ttl-mc=1 setting, which limit the multicast packages to the
+local network. If the value is increased, your screen will be
+broadcasted further, one network "hop" for each increase (read up on
+multicast to learn more. :)!</p>
+
+<p>Having cracked how to get Kodi to receive multicast streams, I
+could use this VLC command to stream to the same multicast address.
+The image quality is way better than the rtsp approach, but gstreamer
+seem to be doing a better job.</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+cvlc screen:// --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{mux=ts,dst=239.255.0.1,port=1234,sdp=sap}'
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_in_2018_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian in 2018?</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 9th July 2018
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Five years ago,
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">I
+measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was</a>, by
+analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive. Since
+then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
+the task a lot easier. This made me want to repeat the measurement,
+to see how much things changed. Here are the new numbers, for
+unstable only this time:
+
+<p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
+
+<pre>
+ count MIME type
+ ----- -----------------------
+ 56 image/jpeg
+ 55 image/png
+ 49 image/tiff
+ 48 image/gif
+ 39 image/bmp
+ 38 text/plain
+ 37 audio/mpeg
+ 34 application/ogg
+ 33 audio/x-flac
+ 32 audio/x-mp3
+ 30 audio/x-wav
+ 30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
+ 29 image/x-portable-pixmap
+ 27 inode/directory
+ 27 image/x-portable-bitmap
+ 27 audio/x-mpeg
+ 26 application/x-ogg
+ 25 audio/x-mpegurl
+ 25 audio/ogg
+ 24 text/html
+</pre>
+
+<p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat
+/var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^
+- \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
+as the most announced supported MIME type. These days, thanks to the
+AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
+want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
+MIME type of the file using "file --mime <filename>", and then
+look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
+AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli
+what-provides mimetype <mime-type>. For example if you, like
+me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
+list like this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+% appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
+Package: anjuta
+Package: audacious
+Package: baobab
+Package: cervisia
+Package: chirp
+Package: dolphin
+Package: doublecmd-common
+Package: easytag
+Package: enlightenment
+Package: ephoto
+Package: filelight
+Package: gwenview
+Package: k4dirstat
+Package: kaffeine
+Package: kdesvn
+Package: kid3
+Package: kid3-qt
+Package: nautilus
+Package: nemo
+Package: pcmanfm
+Package: pcmanfm-qt
+Package: qweborf
+Package: ranger
+Package: sirikali
+Package: spacefm
+Package: spacefm
+Package: vifm
+%
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
+format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+% appstreamcli what-provides mimetype application/vnd.sketchup.skp
+Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'.
+%
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D
+format:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+% appstreamcli what-provides mimetype application/sla|grep Package
+Package: cura
+Package: meshlab
+Package: printrun
+%
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_APT_upgrade_without_enough_free_space_on_the_disk___.html">Debian APT upgrade without enough free space on the disk...</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 8th July 2018
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
+for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
+space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'. I normally
+would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install <somepackages>' to
+upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
+packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
+Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
+tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually. I concluded
+that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
+decided to see if I could automate it. I came up with this small
+script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+#!/bin/sh
+#
+# Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
+# upgradable package in one lump. Fetching packages to upgrade using
+# apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
+# flag for manual/automatic.
+
+set -e
+
+ignore() {
+ if [ "$1" ]; then
+ grep -v "$1"
+ else
+ cat
+ fi
+}
+
+for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
+ echo "Upgrading $p"
+ apt clean
+ apt install --download-only -y $p
+ for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
+ if [ -e "$f" ]; then
+ dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
+ break
+ fi
+ done
+done
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
+download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
+downloaded packages using dpkg. The idea is to upgrade packages
+without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
+the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency). To
+use it, simply run it as root from the command line. If it fail, try
+'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again. This
+might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
+packages. dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
+
+<p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
+upgrade. The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
+the packages that are simply too large to unpack. Today this was
+'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
+problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
+
+<p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
+alternative ways to handle this. The "unattended-upgrades
+--minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
+each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
+first. It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
+Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
+the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html">Version 3.1 of Cura, the 3D print slicer, is now in Debian</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 13th February 2018
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>A new version of the
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
+software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
+(aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid). I hope you find it
+useful. It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
+enter testing tomorrow. See the
+<a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
+notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features. Version 3.2
+was announced 6 days ago. We will try to get it into Debian as
+well.</p>
+
+<p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
+in Debian.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html">Cura, the nice 3D print slicer, is now in Debian Unstable</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 17th December 2017
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
+that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
+entered Debian Unstable. It consist of five packages,
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>. The last
+two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday. This should make
+it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
+3D printers. My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
+make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
+
+<p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
+happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages. With the introduction
+of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
+Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa. If you own or have access to a 3D
+printer, give it a go. :)</p>
+
+<p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
+team, flocking together on the
+<a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
+mailing list and the
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
+IRC channel.</p>
+
+<p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
+version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
+3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html">Generating 3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 9th October 2017
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>At my nearby maker space,
+<a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
+was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
+on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
+to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
+worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X. I found this annoying,
+as the software involved,
+<a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
+and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
+the time to package it for the relevant distributions. I even found
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
+Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
+never resulted in the software showing up in Debian. So a few days
+ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
+
+<p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
+working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
+queue for the ftpmasters to have a look. You can track the progress
+on
+<a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
+status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
+now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
+queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
+upstream version.</p>
+
+<p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
+to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
+short time I spent on it, are already in Debian. If you are looking
+for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
+Debian, check out
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
+The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html">Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 29th September 2017
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
+mobile cell towers. And this radio chatter is available for anyone
+with a radio receiver capable of receiving them. Details about the
+mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
+phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post. The
+mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
+phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI). By paying
+attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
+an area. I believe it would be nice to make this information more
+available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
+their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
+listen.</p>
+
+<p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
+visualizing this information up and running for
+<a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
+(Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
+library. The solution is based on the
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
+recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
+will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
+Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
+Oslo</a>. The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
+IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
+representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
+the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
+
+<p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
+Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
+connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
+<a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
+Hopglass</a>. A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
+grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
+the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
+
+<p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
+patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
+and the Hopglass data is generated using the
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
+in my meshviewer-output branch</a>. For some reason we could not get
+more than four SDRs working. There is also a geographical map trying
+to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
+coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
+believe. The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
+a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
+mentioned in
+<a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
+issue for the topic</a>.
+
+<p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 24th September 2017
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
+to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
+to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
+cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
+the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
+accuracy of a few kilometer. Since then we have worked to make the
+procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
+manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
+
+<p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
+package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
+IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
+the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
+
+<p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
+clone of two python scripts:</p>
+
+<ol>
+
+<li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
+ testing).</li>
+
+<li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
+ python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
+
+<li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
+ github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
+
+<li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
+
+<li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
+ scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
+ stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
+
+<li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
+ simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
+
+</ol>
+
+<p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
+<a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
+program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio. It does
+work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
+very cheaply
+(<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
+from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
+and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
+
+<p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
+frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
+cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
+To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
+scan-and-livemon to use several receivers. Further, I am not sure if
+phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
+this approach might not see all phones around you. I typically see
+0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
+
+<p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
+running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
+to be too CPU intensive to keep up. When GNU Radio print 'O' to
+stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
+radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
+GSM data fast enough. If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
+where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
+CPU power. Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
+where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers? I tried
+using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
+with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 9th August 2017
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
+web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
+<a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
+to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
+DVB-T software defined radios. The article refered to instructions
+and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
+Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
+
+<p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
+bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
+and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
+scratch. I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
+Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
+stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
+some other version skew problem. While trying to get this recipe
+working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
+and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
+gr-gsm package. I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
+gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
+Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository. All I needed to
+do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
+
+<p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
+loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
+packages with IMSI numbers in them. The code is fairly short and easy
+to understand. The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
+to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
+and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
+network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
+default). This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
+collector for a few days now.</p>
+
+<p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
+
+<ol>
+
+<li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
+
+<li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
+<a href="http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/">http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/</a>,</li>
+
+<li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
+
+<li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
+where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
+found a GSM station).</li>
+
+<li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
+
+</ol>
+
+<p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
+running, I decided to package
+<a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
+for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
+#871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
+Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
+know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
+
+<p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
+commercial tools like
+<a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
+Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
+Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
+more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
+is easily tracked. Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
+I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
+wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
+track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
+police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
+of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
+of government officials...</p>
+
+<p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
+script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
+the GSM network. It will only collect one frequency at the time,
+while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
+phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
+program. Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
+simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
+parser code. I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
+one frequency?</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html">Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook is now available</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 25th July 2017
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
+
+<p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
+"<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
+Handbook</a>". This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
+I am very happy to hold the result in my hand. We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
+<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
+from lulu.com</a>. If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
+price. The book is also available for download in electronic form as
+PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
+<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
+as a web page</a>.</p>
+
+<p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
+"<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
+in
+<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
+<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
+and
+<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
+Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
+project. I hope
+"<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog-and-roland-mas/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-23262290.html">Håndbok
+for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/N_r_nynorskoversettelsen_svikter_til_eksamen___.html">Når nynorskoversettelsen svikter til eksamen...</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 3rd June 2017
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p><a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/norge/Krever-at-elever-ma-fa-annullert-eksamen-etter-rot-med-oppgavetekster-622459b.html">Aftenposten
+melder i dag</a> om feil i eksamensoppgavene for eksamen i politikk og
+menneskerettigheter, der teksten i bokmåls og nynorskutgaven ikke var
+like. Oppgaveteksten er gjengitt i artikkelen, og jeg ble nysgjerring
+på om den fri oversetterløsningen
+<a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium</a> ville gjort en bedre
+jobb enn Utdanningsdirektoratet. Det kan se slik ut.</p>
+
+<p>Her er bokmålsoppgaven fra eksamenen:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>Drøft utfordringene knyttet til nasjonalstatenes og andre aktørers
+rolle og muligheter til å håndtere internasjonale utfordringer, som
+for eksempel flykningekrisen.</p>
+
+<p>Vedlegge er eksempler på tekster som kan gi relevante perspektiver
+på temaet:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Flykningeregnskapet 2016, UNHCR og IDMC
+<li>«Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015
+</ol>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Dette oversetter Apertium slik:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>Drøft utfordringane knytte til nasjonalstatane sine og rolla til
+andre aktørar og høve til å handtera internasjonale utfordringar, som
+til dømes *flykningekrisen.</p>
+
+<p>Vedleggja er døme på tekster som kan gje relevante perspektiv på
+temaet:</p>
+
+<ol>
+<li>*Flykningeregnskapet 2016, *UNHCR og *IDMC</li>
+<li>«*Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015</li>
+</ol>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Ord som ikke ble forstått er markert med stjerne (*), og trenger
+ekstra språksjekk. Men ingen ord er forsvunnet, slik det var i
+oppgaven elevene fikk presentert på eksamen. Jeg mistenker dog at
+"andre aktørers rolle og muligheter til ..." burde vært oversatt til
+"rolla til andre aktørar og deira høve til ..." eller noe slikt, men
+det er kanskje flisespikking. Det understreker vel bare at det alltid
+trengs korrekturlesning etter automatisk oversettelse.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html">Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 9th March 2017
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
+computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
+was experiencing NFS hang. If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
+file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
+shell) will hang too. So you want to be able to detect this without
+risking the detection process getting stuck too. It has not been
+obvious how to do this. When the hang has lasted a while, it is
+possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
+<br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
+be sure looking in dmesg is going to work. If there are lots of other
+messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
+are noticed.</p>
+
+<p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
+code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
+it. The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
+time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg. And after digging a
+bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
+/proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
+
+<p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
+same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
+mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
+I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
+points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
+view), but that does not worry me.</p>
+
+<p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+[...]
+device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
+device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
+ opts: rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
+ age: 7863311
+ caps: caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
+ sec: flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
+ events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0
+ bytes: 166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
+ RPC iostats version: 1.0 p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
+ xprt: tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
+ per-op statistics
+ NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
+ GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
+ SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
+ LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
+ ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
+ READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
+ READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
+ WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
+ CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
+ MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
+ SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
+ MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
+ REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
+ RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
+ RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
+ LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
+ READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
+ READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
+ FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
+ FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
+ PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
+ COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
+
+device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
+[...]
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
+It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
+operation. Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts. If these
+numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
+hang. Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
+away. The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
+while. The exact timeout value depend on the setup. For example the
+defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
+timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
+mount options.</p>
+
+<p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
+Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
+But according to
+<ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
+10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
+command can be used to get these timeout values. But this do not work
+on Linux, as far as I can tell. I
+<ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
+but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
+
+<p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
+experiencing NFS hangs? Is there a way to detect which processes are
+affected? Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
+network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared? I would very
+much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html">Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 3rd March 2017
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
+Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
+Administrator's Handbook</a>. Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
+Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
+we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
+use of correct computer science terms. The plan is to make the book
+available on paper, as well as in electronic form. For that to
+happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
+to be translated. If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
+
+<p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
+
+fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
+pages) of the book created every morning is available for
+proofreading. If you find any errors, please
+<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
+Weblate and correct the error</a>. The
+<a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
+of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
+provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 1st March 2017
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
+<a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
+USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
+Packard. Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
+work great! According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
+box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later. I tested on a
+Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
+fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly. I wrote a small
+test oneliner to test. It first print the current entropy level,
+drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
+Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+% cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
+ dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
+ for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
+ cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
+ sleep 1; \
+ done
+300
+0+1 oppføringer inn
+0+1 oppføringer ut
+28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
+4
+8
+12
+17
+21
+%
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second. In such case any
+application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
+will halt and wait for more entrpy. And here is the situation with
+the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+% cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
+ dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
+ for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
+ cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
+ sleep 1; \
+ done
+1079
+0+1 oppføringer inn
+0+1 oppføringer ut
+104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
+433
+1028
+1031
+1035
+1038
+%
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
+someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
+
+<p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year. You might
+find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
+recording illuminating</a>. It explains exactly what the source of
+randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
+available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
+post.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html">Where did that package go? — geolocated IP traceroute</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 9th January 2017
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
+web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
+It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
+is hard to find all the details. Many years ago, I wrote a system to
+map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
+network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
+to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users. Back
+then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
+to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
+graph and the map. The output from traceroute typically look like
+this:
+
+<p><pre>
+traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
+ 1 uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1) 0.447 ms 0.486 ms 0.621 ms
+ 2 uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229) 0.467 ms 0.578 ms 0.675 ms
+ 3 oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17) 0.385 ms 0.373 ms 0.358 ms
+ 4 te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3) 1.174 ms 1.172 ms 1.153 ms
+ 5 he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234) 2.627 ms he16-1-1.cr2.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.244.48) 3.172 ms he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234) 2.857 ms
+ 6 ae1.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.39) 0.662 ms 0.637 ms ae0.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.23) 0.622 ms
+ 7 89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146) 0.931 ms 0.917 ms 0.955 ms
+ 8 * * *
+ 9 * * *
+[...]
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
+network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
+www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
+package to reach the equipment and return to me. Three packages are
+sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path. This
+is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
+traceroute request.</p>
+
+<p>There are many ways to measure trace routes. Other good traceroute
+implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
+both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
+traceroute and a lot of other capabilities). All of them are easily
+available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
+
+<p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
+different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
+information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe. The
+background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
+from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
+JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content. This will
+leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
+and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
+the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
+
+<p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
+www.stortinget.no. It is read daily by all members of parliament and
+their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
+citizens of Norway. A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
+ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
+insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
+stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
+www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se. I extracted this by
+asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
+Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
+render the page (in HAR format using
+<a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
+netsniff example</a>. I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
+to do this). My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
+addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
+information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
+
+<p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
+src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geoip-small.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using GeoIP"/></a></p>
+
+<p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
+free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
+wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP. KML
+is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
+of the GIS tools I have available. I got good help from by NUUG
+colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
+kmltraceroute git repository</a>. Unfortunately, the quality of the
+free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
+friends had access to) is not up to the task. The IP addresses of
+central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
+controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
+located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
+KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
+
+<p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
+src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy-small.png" alt="scapy traceroute graph for URLs used by www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
+
+<p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
+<a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
+showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
+question.
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
+graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
+format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
+equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation. This graph
+make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
+UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
+3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
+
+<p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
+src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-small.png" alt="example geotraceroute view for www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
+
+<p>In the process, I came across the
+<a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
+Salim Gasmi. Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
+various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
+candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
+geolocation. But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
+a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
+for postprocessing. So I contacted the developer and asked if he
+would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
+clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
+machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway. So
+since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
+service thanks to a sensor node set up by
+<a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
+trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
+
+<p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
+src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using geotraceroute"/></a></p>
+
+<p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
+Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland. Plenty of places where the
+Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
+without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
+
+<p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
+over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
+ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
+file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
+behind the DNS name is traced this time. To get them all, one would
+have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
+GeoTraceroute). That might be the next step in this project.</p>
+
+<p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
+the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
+And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
+be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
+Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe. (Hm, what should
+we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
+unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
+
+<p>PS: KML files are drawn using
+<a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
+Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
+Marble. There are heaps of other options too.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html">Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 23rd December 2016
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today. As my regular
+readers probably know, I have been working on the
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
+system</a> for many years. The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
+it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
+of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
+to map hardware to packages. Isenkram have its own mapping database,
+and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
+metadata format. And today,
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
+Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
+ie using fnmatch():</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+% appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
+ usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
+Identifier: pymissile [generic]
+Name: pymissile
+Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
+Package: pymissile
+% appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
+Identifier: libnxt [generic]
+Name: libnxt
+Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
+Package: libnxt
+---
+Identifier: t2n [generic]
+Name: t2n
+Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
+Package: t2n
+---
+Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
+Name: python-nxt
+Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
+Package: python-nxt
+---
+Identifier: nbc [generic]
+Name: nbc
+Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
+Package: nbc
+%
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
+Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+% isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
+pymissile
+% isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
+libnxt
+nbc
+python-nxt
+t2n
+%
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
+<tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
+
+<p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
+make the most of the hardware they have, please
+help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
+AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
+documented in the wiki. So far only 11 packages provide such
+information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
+Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
+mostly related to USB dongles. Most of the packages with hardware
+mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
+part of my involvement in
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
+team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
+complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware. The
+team also got a nice Christmas present today. The
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
+package</a> made it into Debian. With this package in place, it is
+now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
+software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
+binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html">Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 20th December 2016
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
+system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
+and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
+going strong. It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
+connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
+packages. It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
+using the user space daemon in the isenkram package. The latter will
+notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
+install to get the dongle working. It will even provide a button to
+click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
+
+<p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+% isenkram-lookup
+bluez
+cheese
+ethtool
+fprintd
+fprintd-demo
+gkrellm-thinkbat
+hdapsd
+libpam-fprintd
+pidgin-blinklight
+thinkfan
+tlp
+tp-smapi-dkms
+tp-smapi-source
+tpb
+%
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
+by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
+I have all the firmware my machine need:
+
+<p><pre>
+% /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
+info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules. exiting
+%
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
+packages in Debian with udev rules. These seem like good candidates
+to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
+several that should be proposed by isenkram. I have not had time to
+check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
+packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram. 11 of these
+packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
+listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
+
+<p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment. The
+<strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
+support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
+
+<p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
+<strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
+bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
+<strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
+<strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
+dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
+fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
+gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
+gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
+ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
+<strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
+madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
+<strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
+open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
+pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
+<strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
+qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
+soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
+<strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
+tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
+virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
+xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
+xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
+zd1211-firmware</p>
+
+<p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
+bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
+maintainer to
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
+metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
+for everyone. In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
+hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
+
+<p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
+much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
+card. See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
+the details. I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon. In
+the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html">Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 11th December 2016
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
+
+<p>In my early years, I played
+<a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
+Elite</a> on my PC. I spent many months trading and fighting in
+space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on. The
+original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
+edition I played had a 64 KB executable. I am still impressed today
+that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
+more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
+small.</p>
+
+<p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
+software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
+really have time to test it properly until a few days ago. It was
+great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
+still valid. But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
+to retrain to be able to dock on a space station. And I am still not
+able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
+bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
+put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
+
+<p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
+everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
+planets to be able to decide where to trade what. This time I had the
+advantages of the
+<a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
+where information about each planet is easily available with common
+price ranges and suggested trading routes. This improved my ability
+to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
+useful equipent in a few days. I believe I originally played for
+months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
+after less then a week.</p>
+
+<p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
+space, you should try out Oolite. It is available for Linux, MacOSX
+and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff