After many months of hard work by the good people involved in LinuxCNC, the system was accepted Sunday into Debian. Once it was available from Debian, I was surprised to discover from its popularity-contest numbers that people have been reporting its use since 2012. Its project site might be a good place to check out, but sadly is not working when visiting via Tor. But what is LinuxCNC, you are probably wondering? Perhaps a Wikipedia quote is in place?

"LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen, interactive development)."

It can even control 3D printers. And even though the Wikipedia page indicate that it can only work with hard real time kernel features, it can also work with the user space soft real time features provided by the Debian kernel. The source code is available from Github. The last few months I've been involved in the translation setup for the program and documentation. Translators are most welcome to join the effort using Weblate. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

After many months of hard work by the good people involved in LinuxCNC, the system was accepted Sunday into Debian. Once it was available from Debian, I was surprised to discover from its popularity-contest numbers that people have been reporting its use since 2012. Its project site might be a good place to check out, but sadly is not working when visiting via Tor. But what is LinuxCNC, you are probably wondering? Perhaps a Wikipedia quote is in place?

"LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen, interactive development)."

It can even control 3D printers. And even though the Wikipedia page indicate that it can only work with hard real time kernel features, it can also work with the user space soft real time features provided by the Debian kernel. The source code is available from Github. The last few months I've been involved in the translation setup for the program and documentation. Translators are most welcome to join the effort using Weblate. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I am very happy to report that a new version of the VLC bittorrent plugin was just uploaded into debian. The changes since last time is mostly code clean in the download code. The package is currently in Debian unstable, but should be available in Debian testing son. To test it, simply install it like this:

apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent

After it is installed, you can try to use it to play a file downloaded live via bittorrent like this:

vlc https://archive.org/download/Glass_201703/Glass_201703_archive.torrent

It can also use magnet links and local .torrent files like the ones provided by the Internet Archive. Another example is the Love Nest Buster Keaton movie, where one can click on the 'Torrent' link to get going. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I am very happy to report that a new version of the VLC bittorrent plugin was just uploaded into debian. The changes since last time is mostly code clean in the download code. The package is currently in Debian unstable, but should be available in Debian testing son. To test it, simply install it like this:

apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent

After it is installed, you can try to use it to play a file downloaded live via bittorrent like this:

vlc https://archive.org/download/Glass_201703/Glass_201703_archive.torrent

It can also use magnet links and local .torrent files like the ones provided by the Internet Archive. Another example is the Love Nest Buster Keaton movie, where one can click on the 'Torrent' link to get going. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

A few days ago, a productive translator started working on a new translation of the Made with Creative Commons book for Brazilian Portuguese. The translation take place on the Weblate web based translation system. Once the translation is complete and proof read, we can publish it on paper as well as in PDF, ePub and HTML format. The translation is already 16% complete, and if more people get involved I am conviced it can very quickly reach 100%. If you are interested in helping out with this or other translations of the Made with Creative Commons book, start translating on Weblate. There are partial translations available in Azerbaijani, Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Polish, Simplified Chinese, Swedish, Thai and Ukrainian. The git repository for the book contain all source files needed to build the book for yourself. HTML editions to help with proof reading is also available. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

The Debian Lego team saw a lot of activity the last few weeks. All the packages under the team umbrella has been updated to fix packaging, lintian issues and BTS reports. In addition, a new and inspiring team member appeared on both the debian-lego-team Team mailing list and IRC channel #debian-lego. If you are interested in Lego CAD design and LEGO Minestorms programming, check out the team wiki page to see what Debian can offer the Lego enthusiast. Patches has been sent upstream, causing new upstream releases, one even the first one in more than ten years, and old upstreams was released with new ones. There are still a lot of work left, and the team welcome more members to help us make sure Debian is the Linux distribution of choice for Lego builders. If you want to contribute, join us in the IRC channel and become part of the team on Salsa. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Almost thirty years ago, some forward looking teachers at Samisk videreg ende skole og reindriftsskole teaching metal work and Northern S mi, decided to create a list of words used in Northern S mi metal work. After almost ten years this resulted in a dictionary database, published as the book "Mekanihkk rs nit : Mekanikerord = Mekaanisen alan sanasto = Mechanic's words" in 1999. The story of this work is available from the pen of Svein Lund, one of the leading actors behind this effort. They even got the dictionary approved by the S mi Language Council as the recommended metal work words to use. Fast forward twenty years, I came across this work when I recently became interested in metal work, and started watching educational and funny videos on the topic, like the ones from mrpete222 and This Old Tony. But they all talk English, but I wanted to know what the tools and techniques they used were called in Norwegian. Trying to track down a good dictionary from English to Norwegian, after much searching, I came across the database of words created almost thirty years ago, with translations into English, Norwegian, Northern S mi, Swedish and Finnish. This gave me a lot of the Norwegian phrases I had been looking for. To make it easier for the next person trying to track down a good Norwegian dictionary for the metal worker, and because I knew the person behind the database from my Skolelinux / Debian Edu days, I decided to ask if the database could be released to the public without any usage limitations, in other words as a Creative Commons licensed data set. And happily, after consulting with the S mi Parliament of Norway, the database is now available with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license from my gitlab repository. The dictionary entries look slightly different, depending on the language in focus. This is the same entry in the different editions. English

lathe

dreiebenk (nb) v rve, v rvenbea ka, jorahanbea ka, v tnanbea ka (se) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi)

Norwegian

dreiebenk

lathe (en) v rve, v rvenbea ka, jorahanbea ka, v tnanbea ka (se) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi)

(nb): sponskj rande bearbeidingsmaskin der ein med skj reverkt y lausgj r spon fr eit roterande arbetsstykke

Northern S mi

v rve, v rvenbea ka, jorahanbea ka, v tnanbea ka

dreiebenk (nb) lathe (en) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi)

(se): ma iidna mainna uohpp vuolahasaid jorri bargo vdnasis

(nb): sponskj rande bearbeidingsmaskin der ein med skj reverkt y lausgj r spon fr eit roterande arbetsstykke

The database included term description in both Norwegian and Northern S mi, but not English. Because of this, the Northern S mi edition include both descriptions, the Norwegian edition include the Norwegian description and the English edition lack a descripiton. Once the database was available without any usage restrictions, and armed with my experience in publishing books, I decided to publish a Norwegian/English dictionary as a book using the database, to make the data set available also on paper and as an ebook. Further into the project, it occurred to me that I could just as easily make an English dictionary, and talking to Svein and concluding that it was within reach, I decided to make a Northern S mi dictionary too. Thus I suddenly find myself publishing a Northern S mi dictionary, even though I do not understand the language myself. I hope it will be well received, and can help revive the impressive work done almost thirty years ago to document the vocabulary of metal workers. If I get some help, I might even extend it with some of the words I find missing, like collet, rotary broach, carbide, knurler, arbor press and others. But the first edition build from a lightly edited version of the original database, with no new entries added. If you would like to check it out, visit my list of published books and consider buying a paper or ebook copy from lulu.com. The paper edition is only available in hardcover to increase its durability in the workshop. I am very happy to report that in the process, and thanks to help from both Svein Lund and B rre Gaup who understand the language, the docbook tools I use to create books, dblatex and docbook-xsl, now include support for Northern S mi. Before I started, these lacked the needed locale settings for this language, but now the patches are included upstream. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I am happy observe that the The Debian Administrator's Handbook is available in six languages now. I am not sure which one of these are completely proof read, but the complete book is available in these languages:

• English
• Norwegian Bokm l
• German
• Indonesian
• Brazil Portuguese
• Spanish

This is the list of languages more than 70% complete, in other words with not too much left to do:

• Chinese (Simplified) - 90%
• French - 79%
• Italian - 79%
• Japanese - 77%
• Arabic (Morocco) - 75%
• Persian - 71%

I wonder how long it will take to bring these to 100%. Then there is the list of languages about halfway done:

• Russian - 63%
• Swedish - 53%
• Chinese (Traditional) - 46%
• Catalan - 45%

Several are on to a good start:

• Dutch - 26%
• Vietnamese - 25%
• Polish - 23%
• Czech - 22%
• Turkish - 18%

Finally, there are the ones just getting started:

• Korean - 4%
• Croatian - 2%
• Greek - 2%
• Danish - 1%
• Romanian - 1%

If you want to help provide a Debian instruction book in your own language, visit Weblate to contribute to the translations. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I am very pleased to be able to share with you the announcement of a new version of the archiving system Nikita published by its lead developer Thomas S dring:

It is with great pleasure that we can announce a new release of nikita. Version 0.6 (https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core). This release makes new record keeping functionality available. This really is a maturity release. Both in terms of functionality but also code. Considerable effort has gone into refactoring the codebase and simplifying the code. Notable changes for this release include:

• Significantly improved OData parsing
• Support for business specific metadata and national identifiers
• Continued implementation of domain model and endpoints
• Improved testing
• Ability to export and import from arkivstruktur.xml

We are currently in the process of reaching an agreement with an archive institution to publish their picture archive using nikita with business specific metadata and we hope that we can share this with you soon. This is an interesting project as it allows the organisation to bring an older picture archive back to life while using the original metadata values stored as business specific metadata. Combined with OData means the scope and use of the archive is significantly increased and will showcase both the flexibility and power of Noark. I really think we are approaching a version 1.0 of nikita, even though there is still a lot of work to be done. The notable work at the moment is to implement access-control and full text indexing of documents. My sincere thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release! - Thomas Release 0.6 2021-06-10 (d1ba5fc7e8bad0cfdce45ac20354b19d10ebbc7b)

• Refactor metadata entity search
• Remove redundant security configuration
• Make OpenAPI documentation work
• Change database structure / inheritance model to a more sensible approach
• Make it possible to move entities around the fonds structure
• Implemented a number of missing endpoints
• Make sure yml files are in sync
• Implemented/finalised storing and use of
  • Business Specific Metadata
  • Norwegian National Identifiers
  • Cross Reference
  • Keyword
  • StorageLocation
  • Author
  • Screening for relevant objects
  • ChangeLog
  • EventLog
• Make generation of updated docker image part of successful CI pipeline
• Implement pagination for all list requests
  • Refactor code to support lists
  • Refactor code for readability
  • Standardise the controller/service code
• Finalise File->CaseFile expansion and Record->registryEntry/recordNote expansion
• Improved Continuous Integration (CI) approach via gitlab
• Changed conversion approach to generate tagged PDF documents
• Updated dependencies
  • For security reasons
  • Brought codebase to spring-boot version 2.5.0
  • Remove import of necessary dependencies
  • Remove non-used metrics classes
• Added new analysis to CI including
• Implemented storing of Keyword
• Implemented storing of Screening and ScreeningMetadata
• Improved OData support
  • Better support for inheritance in queries where applicable
  • Brought in more OData tests
  • Improved OData/hibernate understanding of queries
  • Implement $count, $orderby
  • Finalise $top and $skip
  • Make sure & is used between query parameters
• Improved Testing in codebase
  • A new approach for integration tests to make test more readable
  • Introduce tests in parallel with code development for TDD approach
  • Remove test that required particular access to storage
• Implement case-handling process from received email to case-handler
  • Develop required GUI elements (digital postroom from email)
  • Introduced leader, quality control and postroom roles
• Make PUT requests return 200 OK not 201 CREATED
• Make DELETE requests return 204 NO CONTENT not 200 OK
• Replaced 'oppdatert*' with 'endret*' everywhere to match latest spec
• Upgrade Gitlab CI to use python > 3 for CI scripts
• Bug fixes
  • Fix missing ALLOW
  • Fix reading of objects from jar file during start-up
  • Reduce the number of warnings in the codebase
  • Fix delete problems
  • Make better use of cascade for "leaf" objects
  • Add missing annotations where relevant
  • Remove the use of ETAG for delete
  • Fix missing/wrong/broken rels discovered by runtest
  • Drop unofficial convertFil (konverterFil) end point
  • Fix regex problem for dateTime
  • Fix multiple static analysis issues discovered by coverity
  • Fix proxy problem when looking for object class names
  • Add many missing translated Norwegian to English (internal) attribute/entity names
  • Change UUID generation approach to allow code also set a value
  • Fix problem with Part/PartParson
  • Fix problem with empty OData search results
  • Fix metadata entity domain problem
• General Improvements
  • Makes future refactoring easier as coupling is reduced
  • Allow some constant variables to be set from property file
  • Refactor code to make reflection work better across codebase
  • Reduce the number of @Service layer classes used in @Controller classes
  • Be more consistent on naming of similar variable types
  • Start printing rels/href if they are applicable
  • Cleaner / standardised approach to deleting objects
  • Avoid concatenation when using StringBuilder
  • Consolidate code to avoid duplication
  • Tidy formatting for a more consistent reading style across similar class files
  • Make throw a log.error message not an log.info message
  • Make throw print the log value rather than printing in multiple places
  • Add some missing pronom codes
  • Fix time formatting issue in Gitlab CI
  • Remove stale / unused code
  • Use only UUID datatype rather than combination String/UUID for systemID
  • Mark variables final and @NotNull where relevant to indicate intention
• Change Date values to DateTime to maintain compliance with Noark 5 standard
• Domain model improvements using Hypersistence Optimizer
  • Move @Transactional from class to methods to avoid borrowing the JDBC Connection unnecessarily
  • Fix OneToOne performance issues
  • Fix ManyToMany performance issues
  • Add missing bidirectional synchronization support
  • Fix ManyToMany performance issue
• Make List
• and Set
• use final-keyword to avoid potential problems during update operations
• Changed internal URLs, replaced "hateoas-api" with "api".
• Implemented storing of Precedence.
• Corrected handling of screening.
• Corrected _links collection returned for list of mixed entity types to match the specific entity.
• Improved several internal structures.

If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita on irc.oftc.net) or email (nikita-noark mailing list). As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Yesterday morning I got a warning call from the Debian quality control system that the VLC bittorrent plugin was due to be removed because of a release critical bug in one of its dependencies. As you might remember, this plugin make VLC able to stream videos directly from a bittorrent source using both torrent files and magnet links, similar to using a HTTP source. I believe such protocol support is a vital feature in VLC, allowing efficient streaming from sources such at the almost 7 million movies in the Internet Archive. The dependency was the unmaintained libtorrent-rasterbar package, and the bug in question blocked its python library from working properly. As I did not want Bullseye to release without bittorrent support in VLC, I set out to check out the status, and track down a fix for the problem. Luckily the issue had already been identified and fixed upstream, providing everything needed. All I needed to do was to fetch the Debian git repository, extract and trim the patch from upstream and apply it to the Debian package for upload. The fixed library was uploaded yesterday evening. But that is not enough to get it into Bullseye, as Debian is currently in package freeze to prepare for a new next stable release. Only non-critical packages with autopkgtest setup included, in other words able to validate automatically that the package is working, are allowed to migrate automatically into the next release at this stage. And the unmaintained libtorrent-rasterbar lack such testing, and thus needed a manual override. I am happy to report that such manual override was approved a few minutes ago, thus increasing significantly the chance of VLC bittorrent streaming being available out of the box also for Debian/Buster users. A bit too close shave for my liking, as the Bullseye release is most likely just a few days away, and this did feel like the package was saved by the bell. I am so glad the warning email showed up in time for me to handle the issue, and a big thanks go to the Debian Release team for the quick feedback on #debian-release and their swift unblocking. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I have neglected the Valutakrambod library for a while, but decided this weekend to give it a face lift. I fixed a few minor glitches in several of the service drivers, where the API had changed since I last looked at the code. I also added support for fetching the order book from the newcomer Norwegian Bitcoin Exchange. I alsod decided to migrate the project from github to gitlab in the process. If you want a python library for talking to various currency exchanges, check out code for valutakrambod. This is what the output from 'bin/btc-rates-curses -c' looked like a few minutes ago:

           Name Pair           Bid         Ask Spread Ftcd    Age   Freq
       Bitfinex BTCEUR  39229.0000  39246.0000   0.0%   44     44    nan
        Bitmynt BTCEUR  39071.0000  41048.9000   4.8%   43     74    nan
         Bitpay BTCEUR  39326.7000         nan   nan%   39    nan    nan
       Bitstamp BTCEUR  39398.7900  39417.3200   0.0%    0      0      1
           Bl3p BTCEUR  39158.7800  39581.9000   1.1%    0    nan      3
       Coinbase BTCEUR  39197.3100  39621.9300   1.1%   38    nan    nan
         Kraken+BTCEUR  39432.9000  39433.0000   0.0%    0      0      0
        Paymium BTCEUR  39437.2100  39499.9300   0.2%    0   2264    nan
        Bitmynt BTCNOK 409750.9600 420516.8500   2.6%   43     74    nan
         Bitpay BTCNOK 410332.4000         nan   nan%   39    nan    nan
       Coinbase BTCNOK 408675.7300 412813.7900   1.0%   38    nan    nan
        MiraiEx BTCNOK 412174.1800 418396.1500   1.5%   34    nan    nan
            NBX BTCNOK 405835.9000 408921.4300   0.8%   33    nan    nan
       Bitfinex BTCUSD  47341.0000  47355.0000   0.0%   44     53    nan
         Bitpay BTCUSD  47388.5100         nan   nan%   39    nan    nan
       Coinbase BTCUSD  47153.6500  47651.3700   1.0%   37    nan    nan
         Gemini BTCUSD  47416.0900  47439.0500   0.0%   36    336    nan
         Hitbtc BTCUSD  47429.9900  47386.7400  -0.1%    0      0      0
         Kraken+BTCUSD  47401.7000  47401.8000   0.0%    0      0      0
  Exchangerates EURNOK     10.4012     10.4012   0.0%   38  76236    nan
     Norgesbank EURNOK     10.4012     10.4012   0.0%   31  76236    nan
       Bitstamp EURUSD      1.2030      1.2045   0.1%    2      2      1
  Exchangerates EURUSD      1.2121      1.2121   0.0%   38  76236    nan
     Norgesbank USDNOK      8.5811      8.5811   0.0%   31  76236    nan

Yes, I notice the negative spread on Hitbtc. Either I fail to understand their Websocket API or they are sending bogus data. I've seen the same with Kraken, and suspect there is something wrong with the data they send. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

After a lot of hard work by its maintainer Alexandre Viau and others, the decentralized communication platform Jami (earlier known as Ring), managed to get its latest version into Debian Testing. Several of its dependencies has caused build and propagation problems, which all seem to be solved now. In addition to the fact that Jami is decentralized, similar to how bittorrent is decentralized, I first of all like how it is not connected to external IDs like phone numbers. This allow me to set up computers to send me notifications using Jami without having to find get a phone number for each computer. Automatic notification via Jami is also made trivial thanks to the provided client side API (as a DBus service). Here is my bourne shell script demonstrating how to let any system send a message to any Jami address. It will create a new identity before sending the message, if no Jami identity exist already:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Usage: $0  
#
# Send  to , create local jami account if
# missing.
#
# License: GPL v2 or later at your choice
# Author: Petter Reinholdtsen
if [ -z "$HOME" ] ; then
    echo "error: missing \$HOME, required for dbus to work"
    exit 1
fi
# First, get dbus running if not already running
DBUSLAUNCH=/usr/bin/dbus-launch
PIDFILE=/run/asterisk/dbus-session.pid
if [ -e $PIDFILE ] ; then
    . $PIDFILE
    if ! kill -0 $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID 2>/dev/null ; then
        unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
    fi
fi
if [ -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ] && [ -x "$DBUSLAUNCH" ]; then
    DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="unix:path=$HOME/.dbus"
    dbus-daemon --session --address="$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" --nofork --nopidfile --syslog-only < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 3>&1 &
    DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=$!
    (
        echo DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID
        echo DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=\""$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS"\"
        echo export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
    ) > $PIDFILE
    . $PIDFILE
fi &
dringop()  
    part="$1"; shift
    op="$1"; shift
    dbus-send --session \
        --dest="cx.ring.Ring" /cx/ring/Ring/$part cx.ring.Ring.$part.$op $*
 
dringopreply()  
    part="$1"; shift
    op="$1"; shift
    dbus-send --session --print-reply \
        --dest="cx.ring.Ring" /cx/ring/Ring/$part cx.ring.Ring.$part.$op $*
 
firstaccount()  
    dringopreply ConfigurationManager getAccountList   \
      grep string   awk -F'"' ' print $2 '   head -n 1
 
account=$(firstaccount)
if [ -z "$account" ] ; then
    echo "Missing local account, trying to create it"
    dringop ConfigurationManager addAccount \
      dict:string:string:"Account.type","RING","Account.videoEnabled","false"
    account=$(firstaccount)
    if [ -z "$account" ] ; then
        echo "unable to create local account"
        exit 1
    fi
fi
# Not using dringopreply to ensure $2 can contain spaces
dbus-send --print-reply --session \
  --dest=cx.ring.Ring \
  /cx/ring/Ring/ConfigurationManager \
  cx.ring.Ring.ConfigurationManager.sendTextMessage \
  string:"$account" string:"$1" \
  dict:string:string:"text/plain","$2" 

If you want to check it out yourself, visit the the Jami system project page to learn more, and install the latest Jami client from Debian Unstable or Testing. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I am happy to report that we finally made it! Norwegian Bokm l became the first translation published on paper of the new Buster based edition of "The Debian Administrator's Handbook". The print proof reading copy arrived some days ago, and it looked good, so now the book is approved for general distribution. This updated paperback edition is available from lulu.com. The book is also available for download in electronic form as PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, and can also be read online. I am very happy to wrap up this Creative Common licensed project, which concludes several months of work by several volunteers. The number of Linux related books published in Norwegian are few, and I really hope this one will gain many readers, as it is packed with deep knowledge on Linux and the Debian ecosystem. The book will be available for various Internet book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble soon, but I recommend buying "H ndbok for Debian-administratoren" directly from the source at Lulu. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Thanks to the good work of several volunteers, the updated edition of the Norwegian translation for "The Debian Administrator's Handbook" is now almost completed. After many months of proof reading, I consider the proof reading complete enough for us to move to the next step, and have asked for the print version to be prepared and sent of to the print on demand service lulu.com. While it is still not to late if you find any incorrect translations on the hosted Weblate service, but it will be soon. :) You can check out the Buster edition on the web until the print edition is ready. The book will be for sale on lulu.com and various web book stores, with links available from the web site for the book linked to above. I hope a lot of readers find it useful. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Three years ago, the first Norwegian Bokm l edition of "The Debian Administrator's Handbook" was published. This was based on Debian Jessie. Now a new and updated version based on Buster is getting ready. Work on the updated Norwegian Bokm l edition has been going on for a few months now, and yesterday, we reached the first mile stone, with 100% of the texts being translated. A lot of proof reading remains, of course, but a major step towards a new edition has been taken. The book is translated by volunteers, and we would love to get some help with the proof reading. The translation uses the hosted Weblate service, and we welcome everyone to have a look and submit improvements and suggestions. There is also a proof readers PDF available on request, get in touch if you want to help out that way. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

As a member of the Norwegian Unix User Group, I have the pleasure of receiving the USENIX magazine ;login: several times a year. I rarely have time to read all the articles, but try to at least skim through them all as there is a lot of nice knowledge passed on there. I even carry the latest issue with me most of the time to try to get through all the articles when I have a few spare minutes. The other day I came across a nice article titled "The Secure Socket API: TLS as an Operating System Service" with a marvellous idea I hope can make it all the way into the POSIX standard. The idea is as simple as it is powerful. By introducing a new socket() option IPPROTO_TLS to use TLS, and a system wide service to handle setting up TLS connections, one both make it trivial to add TLS support to any program currently using the POSIX socket API, and gain system wide control over certificates, TLS versions and encryption systems used. Instead of doing this:

int socket = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP);

the program code would be doing this:

int socket = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TLS);

According to the ;login: article, converting a C program to use TLS would normally modify only 5-10 lines in the code, which is amazing when compared to using for example the OpenSSL API. The project has set up the https://securesocketapi.org/ web site to spread the idea, and the code for a kernel module and the associated system daemon is available from two github repositories: ssa and ssa-daemon. Unfortunately there is no explicit license information with the code, so its copyright status is unclear. A request to solve this about it has been unsolved since 2018-08-17. I love the idea of extending socket() to gain TLS support, and understand why it is an advantage to implement this as a kernel module and system wide service daemon, but can not help to think that it would be a lot easier to get projects to move to this way of setting up TLS if it was done with a user space approach where programs wanting to use this API approach could just link with a wrapper library. I recommend you check out this simple and powerful approach to more secure network connections. :) As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I am very happy to report that a more reliable VLC bittorrent plugin was just uploaded into debian. This fixes a couple of crash bugs in the plugin, hopefully making the VLC experience even better when streaming directly from a bittorrent source. The package is currently in Debian unstable, but should be available in Debian testing in two days. To test it, simply install it like this:

apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent

After it is installed, you can try to use it to play a file downloaded live via bittorrent like this:

vlc https://archive.org/download/Glass_201703/Glass_201703_archive.torrent

It also support magnet links and local .torrent files. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

It has been way too long since my last interview, but as the Debian Edu / Skolelinux community is still active, and new people keep showing up on the IRC channel #debian-edu and the debian-edu mailing list, I decided to give it another go. I was hoping someone else might pick up the idea and run with it, but this has not happened as far as I can tell, so here we are This time the announcement of a new free software tool to create a school year book triggered my interest, and I decided to learn more about its author. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? My name is Yvan MASSON, I live in France. I have my own one person business in computer services. The work consist of visiting my customers (person's home, local authority, small business) to give advise, install computers and software, fix issues, and provide computing usage training. I spend the rest of my time enjoying my family and promoting free software. What is your approach for promoting free software? When I think that free software could be suitable for someone, I explain what it is, with simple words, give a few known examples, and explain that while there is no fee it is a viable alternative in many situations. Most people are receptive when you explain how it is better (I simplify arguments here, I know that it is not so simple): Linux works on older hardware, there are no viruses, and the software can be audited to ensure user is not spied upon. I think the most important is to keep a clear but moderated speech: when you try to convince too much, people feel attacked and stop listening. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project? I can not remember how I first heard of Skolelinux / Debian Edu, but probably on planet.debian.org. As I have been working for a school, I have interest in this type of project. The school I am involved in is a school for "children" between 14 and 18 years old. The French government has recommended free software since 2012, but they do not always use free software themselves. The school computers are still using the Windows operating system, but all of them have the classic set of free software: Firefox ESR, LibreOffice (with the excellent extension Grammalecte that indicates French grammatical errors), SumatraPDF, Audacity, 7zip, KeePass2, VLC, GIMP, Inkscape What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? It is free software! Built on Debian, I am sure that users are not spied upon, and that it can run on low end hardware. This last point is very important, because we really need to improve "green IT". I do not know enough about Skolelinux / Debian Edu to tell how it is better than another free software solution, but what I like is the "all in one" solution: everything has been thought of and prepared to ease installation and usage. I like Free Software because I hate using something that I can not understand. I do not say that I can understand everything nor that I want to understand everything, but knowing that someone / some company intentionally prevents me from understanding how things work is really unacceptable to me. Secondly, and more importantly, free software is a requirement to prevent abuses regarding human rights and environmental care. Humanity can not rely on tools that are in the hands of small group of people. What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? Again, I don't know this project enough. Maybe a dedicated website? Debian wiki works well for documentation, but is not very appealing to someone discovering the project. Also, as Skolelinux / Debian Edu uses OpenLDAP, it probably means that Windows workstations cannot use centralized authentication. Maybe the project could use Samba as an Active Directory domain controller instead, allowing Windows desktop usage when necessary. (Editors note: In fact Windows workstations can use the centralized authentication in a Debian Edu setup, at least for some versions of Windows, but the fact that this is not well known can be seen as an indication of the need for better documentation and marketing. :) Which free software do you use daily? Nothing original: Debian testing/sid with Gnome desktop, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? Every effort to spread free software into schools is important, whatever it is. But I think, at least where I live, that IT professionals maintaining schools networks are still very "Microsoft centric". Schools will use any working solution, but they need people to install and maintain it. How to make these professionals sensitive about free software and train them with solutions like Debian Edu / Skolelinux is a really good question :-)

Half a year ago, I wrote about the Jami communication client, capable of peer-to-peer encrypted communication. It handle both messages, audio and video. It uses distributed hash tables instead of central infrastructure to connect its users to each other, which in my book is a plus. I mentioned briefly that it could also work as a SIP client, which came in handy when the higher educational sector in Norway started to promote Zoom as its video conferencing solution. I am reluctant to use the official Zoom client software, due to their copyright license clauses prohibiting users to reverse engineer (for example to check the security) and benchmark it, and thus prefer to connect to Zoom meetings with free software clients. Jami worked OK as a SIP client to Zoom as long as there was no password set on the room. The Jami daemon leak memory like crazy (approximately 1 GiB a minute) when I am connected to the video conference, so I had to restart the client every 7-10 minutes, which is not a great. I tried to get other SIP Linux clients to work without success, so I decided I would have to live with this wart until someone managed to fix the leak in the dring code base. But another problem showed up once the rooms were password protected. I could not get my dial tone signaling through from Jami to Zoom, and dial tone signaling is used to enter the password when connecting to Zoom. I tried a lot of different permutations with my Jami and Asterisk setup to try to figure out why the signaling did not get through, only to finally discover that the fundamental problem seem to be that Zoom is simply not able to receive dial tone signaling when connecting via SIP. There seem to be nothing wrong with the Jami and Asterisk end, it is simply broken in the Zoom end. I got help from a very skilled VoIP engineer figuring out this last part. And being a very skilled engineer, he was also able to locate a solution for me. Or to be exact, a workaround that solve my initial problem of connecting to password protected Zoom rooms using Jami. So, how do you do this, I am sure you are wondering by now. The trick is already documented from Zoom, and it is to modify the SIP address to include the room password. What is most surprising about this is that the automatically generated email from Zoom with instructions on how to connect via SIP do not mention this. The SIP address to use normally consist of the room ID (a number), an @ character and the IP address of the Zoom SIP gateway. But Zoom understand a lot more than just the room ID in front of the at sign. The format is "[Meeting ID].[Password].[Layout].[Host Key]", and you can hear see how you can both enter password, control the layout (full screen, active presence and gallery) and specify the host key to start the meeting. The full SIP address entered into Jami to provide the password will then look like this (all using made up numbers):

sip:657837644.522827@192.168.169.170

Now if only jami would reduce its memory usage, I could even recommend this setup to others. :) As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

The curiosity got the better of me when Slashdot reported that New Jersey was desperately looking for COBOL programmers, and a few days later it was reported that IBM tried to locate COBOL programmers. I thus decided to have a look at free software alternatives to learn COBOL, and had the pleasure to find GnuCOBOL was already in Debian. It used to be called Open Cobol, and is a "compiler" transforming COBOL code to C or C++ before giving it to GCC or Visual Studio to build binaries. I managed to get in touch with upstream, and was impressed with the quick response, and also was happy to see a new Debian maintainer taking over when the original one recently asked to be replaced. A new Debian upload was done as recently as yesterday. Using the Debian package, I was able to follow a simple COBOL introduction and make and run simple COBOL programs. It was fun to learn a new programming language. If you want to test for yourself, the GnuCOBOL Wikipedia page have a few simple examples to get you startet. As I do not have much experience with COBOL, I do not know how standard compliant it is, but it claim to pass most tests from COBOL test suite, which sound good to me. It is nice to know it is possible to learn COBOL using software without any usage restrictions, and I am very happy such nice free software project as this is available. If you as me is curious about COBOL, check it out. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.