X-Git-Url: https://pere.pagekite.me/gitweb/homepage.git/blobdiff_plain/7a5bc5c0769030f25de4d234869edcc440ec0c34..8aedac12d78eb3190998a45354d27e807583c886:/blog/index.html?ds=inline diff --git a/blog/index.html b/blog/index.html index 34913cbbc0..02aaa5db28 100644 --- a/blog/index.html +++ b/blog/index.html @@ -19,6 +19,136 @@ +
+
Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper
+
6th December 2013
+

It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview, +but the Debian Edu / +Skolelinux community is still going strong, and yesterday we even +had a new school administrator show up on +#debian-edu to share +his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school. This +time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of +Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in +Germany a few years ago.

+ +

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

+ +

I am Klaus Knopper. I have a master degree in electrical +engineering, and is currently professor in information management at +the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and +freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.

+ +

All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart +from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental +projects like the Knoppix GNU/Linux live +system (Debian-based like Skolelinux), +ADRIANE +(a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and +LINBO +(Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair +system supporting various operating systems).

+ +

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

+ +

The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German +coordinator for Skolelinux. We were looking for an all-in-one open +source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt +introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.

+ +

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

+ + + +

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

+ + + +

For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now +rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until +Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes +upgradeable without reinstallation.

+ +

Which free software do you use daily?

+ +

GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and +programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence, +occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various +programming languages for teaching.

+ +

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

+ +

Strong arguments are + +

+
+
+ + + Tags: debian edu, english, intervju. + + +
+
+
+
Dugnadsnett for alle, a wireless community network in Oslo, take shape
30th November 2013
@@ -710,127 +840,6 @@ NEW. I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.

-
-
Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images
-
27th October 2013
-

The -vmdebootstrap -program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images. It -create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run -debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a -stick. Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for -Raspberry Pi, as part -of a plan to simplify the build system for -the FreedomBox -project. The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for -the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap -based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for -Raspberry Pi.

- -

Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native -architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap -code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64 -Debian laptop. I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options, -allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make -Debian -Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi. First, the ---foreign /path/to/binfm_handler option tell vmdebootstrap to -call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the -generated chroot before running the second stage. This allow -vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host. Next I added -two new options --bootsize size and --boottype -fstype to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the -given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat -partition for the /boot/ stuff. I also added a --variant -variant option to allow me to create smaller images without the -Debian base system packages installed. Finally, I added an option ---no-extlinux to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux -as a boot loader. It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably -most other non-x86 architectures. The changes were accepted by the -upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now -available from -the -upstream project page.

- -

To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first -create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free -binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source -list:

- -

-#!/bin/sh
-set -e # Exit on first error
-rootdir="$1"
-cd "$rootdir"
-cat <<EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
-deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
-EOF
-# Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
-# install a kernel somewhere too.
-wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
-    -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
-chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
-mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
-touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
-chroot $rootdir rpi-update
-

- -

Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this -to build the image:

- -
-sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
-    --variant minbase \
-    --arch armel \
-    --distribution jessie \
-    --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
-    --image test.img \
-    --size 600M \
-    --bootsize 64M \
-    --boottype vfat \
-    --log-level debug \
-    --verbose \
-    --no-kernel \
-    --no-extlinux \
-    --root-password raspberry \
-    --hostname raspberrypi \
-    --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
-    --customize `pwd`/customize \
-    --package netbase \
-    --package git-core \
-    --package binutils \
-    --package ca-certificates \
-    --package wget \
-    --package kmod
-

- -

The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by -rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the -exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find -/etc/hosts with the minbase variant. I really wish there was a way to -set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but -that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU -using a non-free binary blob.

- -

The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and -probably a few others installed. I have not checked the complete -build dependency list.

- -

The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit -on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not -optimized for that use. So the images created will be a bit slower -than Raspbian based images.

-
-
- - - Tags: debian, english, freedombox, mesh network. - - -
-
-
-

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