Search Results: "nils"

22 March 2023

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2023)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

21 June 2017

Vincent Bernat: IPv4 route lookup on Linux

TL;DR: With its implementation of IPv4 routing tables using LPC-tries, Linux offers good lookup performance (50 ns for a full view) and low memory usage (64 MiB for a full view).
During the lifetime of an IPv4 datagram inside the Linux kernel, one important step is the route lookup for the destination address through the fib_lookup() function. From essential information about the datagram (source and destination IP addresses, interfaces, firewall mark, ), this function should quickly provide a decision. Some possible options are: Since 2.6.39, Linux stores routes into a compressed prefix tree (commit 3630b7c050d9). In the past, a route cache was maintained but it has been removed1 in Linux 3.6.

Route lookup in a trie Looking up a route in a routing table is to find the most specific prefix matching the requested destination. Let s assume the following routing table:
$ ip route show scope global table 100
default via 203.0.113.5 dev out2
192.0.2.0/25
        nexthop via 203.0.113.7  dev out3 weight 1
        nexthop via 203.0.113.9  dev out4 weight 1
192.0.2.47 via 203.0.113.3 dev out1
192.0.2.48 via 203.0.113.3 dev out1
192.0.2.49 via 203.0.113.3 dev out1
192.0.2.50 via 203.0.113.3 dev out1
Here are some examples of lookups and the associated results:
Destination IP Next hop
192.0.2.49 203.0.113.3 via out1
192.0.2.50 203.0.113.3 via out1
192.0.2.51 203.0.113.7 via out3 or 203.0.113.9 via out4 (ECMP)
192.0.2.200 203.0.113.5 via out2
A common structure for route lookup is the trie, a tree structure where each node has its parent as prefix.

Lookup with a simple trie The following trie encodes the previous routing table: Simple routing trie For each node, the prefix is known by its path from the root node and the prefix length is the current depth. A lookup in such a trie is quite simple: at each step, fetch the nth bit of the IP address, where n is the current depth. If it is 0, continue with the first child. Otherwise, continue with the second. If a child is missing, backtrack until a routing entry is found. For example, when looking for 192.0.2.50, we will find the result in the corresponding leaf (at depth 32). However for 192.0.2.51, we will reach 192.0.2.50/31 but there is no second child. Therefore, we backtrack until the 192.0.2.0/25 routing entry. Adding and removing routes is quite easy. From a performance point of view, the lookup is done in constant time relative to the number of routes (due to maximum depth being capped to 32). Quagga is an example of routing software still using this simple approach.

Lookup with a path-compressed trie In the previous example, most nodes only have one child. This leads to a lot of unneeded bitwise comparisons and memory is also wasted on many nodes. To overcome this problem, we can use path compression: each node with only one child is removed (except if it also contains a routing entry). Each remaining node gets a new property telling how many input bits should be skipped. Such a trie is also known as a Patricia trie or a radix tree. Here is the path-compressed version of the previous trie: Patricia trie Since some bits have been ignored, on a match, a final check is executed to ensure all bits from the found entry are matching the input IP address. If not, we must act as if the entry wasn t found (and backtrack to find a matching prefix). The following figure shows two IP addresses matching the same leaf: Lookup in a Patricia trie The reduction on the average depth of the tree compensates the necessity to handle those false positives. The insertion and deletion of a routing entry is still easy enough. Many routing systems are using Patricia trees:

Lookup with a level-compressed trie In addition to path compression, level compression2 detects parts of the trie that are densily populated and replace them with a single node and an associated vector of 2k children. This node will handle k input bits instead of just one. For example, here is a level-compressed version our previous trie: Level-compressed trie Such a trie is called LC-trie or LPC-trie and offers higher lookup performances compared to a radix tree. An heuristic is used to decide how many bits a node should handle. On Linux, if the ratio of non-empty children to all children would be above 50% when the node handles an additional bit, the node gets this additional bit. On the other hand, if the current ratio is below 25%, the node loses the responsibility of one bit. Those values are not tunable. Insertion and deletion becomes more complex but lookup times are also improved.

Implementation in Linux The implementation for IPv4 in Linux exists since 2.6.13 (commit 19baf839ff4a) and is enabled by default since 2.6.39 (commit 3630b7c050d9). Here is the representation of our example routing table in memory3: Memory representation of a trie There are several structures involved: The trie can be retrieved through /proc/net/fib_trie:
$ cat /proc/net/fib_trie
Id 100:
  +-- 0.0.0.0/0 2 0 2
      -- 0.0.0.0
        /0 universe UNICAST
     +-- 192.0.2.0/26 2 0 1
         -- 192.0.2.0
           /25 universe UNICAST
         -- 192.0.2.47
           /32 universe UNICAST
        +-- 192.0.2.48/30 2 0 1
            -- 192.0.2.48
              /32 universe UNICAST
            -- 192.0.2.49
              /32 universe UNICAST
            -- 192.0.2.50
              /32 universe UNICAST
[...]
For internal nodes, the numbers after the prefix are:
  1. the number of bits handled by the node,
  2. the number of full children (they only handle one bit),
  3. the number of empty children.
Moreover, if the kernel was compiled with CONFIG_IP_FIB_TRIE_STATS, some interesting statistics are available in /proc/net/fib_triestat4:
$ cat /proc/net/fib_triestat
Basic info: size of leaf: 48 bytes, size of tnode: 40 bytes.
Id 100:
        Aver depth:     2.33
        Max depth:      3
        Leaves:         6
        Prefixes:       6
        Internal nodes: 3
          2: 3
        Pointers: 12
Null ptrs: 4
Total size: 1  kB
[...]
When a routing table is very dense, a node can handle many bits. For example, a densily populated routing table with 1 million entries packed in a /12 can have one internal node handling 20 bits. In this case, route lookup is essentially reduced to a lookup in a vector. The following graph shows the number of internal nodes used relative to the number of routes for different scenarios (routes extracted from an Internet full view, /32 routes spreaded over 4 different subnets with various densities). When routes are densily packed, the number of internal nodes are quite limited. Internal nodes and null pointers

Performance So how performant is a route lookup? The maximum depth stays low (about 6 for a full view), so a lookup should be quite fast. With the help of a small kernel module, we can accurately benchmark5 the fib_lookup() function: Maximum depth and lookup time The lookup time is loosely tied to the maximum depth. When the routing table is densily populated, the maximum depth is low and the lookup times are fast. When forwarding at 10 Gbps, the time budget for a packet would be about 50 ns. Since this is also the time needed for the route lookup alone in some cases, we wouldn t be able to forward at line rate with only one core. Nonetheless, the results are pretty good and they are expected to scale linearly with the number of cores. The measurements are done with a Linux kernel 4.11 from Debian unstable. I have gathered performance metrics accross kernel versions in Performance progression of IPv4 route lookup on Linux . Another interesting figure is the time it takes to insert all those routes into the kernel. Linux is also quite efficient in this area since you can insert 2 million routes in less than 10 seconds: Insertion time

Memory usage The memory usage is available directly in /proc/net/fib_triestat. The statistic provided doesn t account for the fib_info structures, but you should only have a handful of them (one for each possible next-hop). As you can see on the graph below, the memory use is linear with the number of routes inserted, whatever the shape of the routes is. Memory usage The results are quite good. With only 256 MiB, about 2 million routes can be stored!

Routing rules Unless configured without CONFIG_IP_MULTIPLE_TABLES, Linux supports several routing tables and has a system of configurable rules to select the table to use. These rules can be configured with ip rule. By default, there are three of them:
$ ip rule show
0:      from all lookup local
32766:  from all lookup main
32767:  from all lookup default
Linux will first lookup for a match in the local table. If it doesn t find one, it will lookup in the main table and at last resort, the default table.

Builtin tables The local table contains routes for local delivery:
$ ip route show table local
broadcast 127.0.0.0 dev lo proto kernel scope link src 127.0.0.1
local 127.0.0.0/8 dev lo proto kernel scope host src 127.0.0.1
local 127.0.0.1 dev lo proto kernel scope host src 127.0.0.1
broadcast 127.255.255.255 dev lo proto kernel scope link src 127.0.0.1
broadcast 192.168.117.0 dev eno1 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.117.55
local 192.168.117.55 dev eno1 proto kernel scope host src 192.168.117.55
broadcast 192.168.117.63 dev eno1 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.117.55
This table is populated automatically by the kernel when addresses are configured. Let s look at the three last lines. When the IP address 192.168.117.55 was configured on the eno1 interface, the kernel automatically added the appropriate routes:
  • a route for 192.168.117.55 for local unicast delivery to the IP address,
  • a route for 192.168.117.255 for broadcast delivery to the broadcast address,
  • a route for 192.168.117.0 for broadcast delivery to the network address.
When 127.0.0.1 was configured on the loopback interface, the same kind of routes were added to the local table. However, a loopback address receives a special treatment and the kernel also adds the whole subnet to the local table. As a result, you can ping any IP in 127.0.0.0/8:
$ ping -c1 127.42.42.42
PING 127.42.42.42 (127.42.42.42) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.42.42.42: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.039 ms
--- 127.42.42.42 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.039/0.039/0.039/0.000 ms
The main table usually contains all the other routes:
$ ip route show table main
default via 192.168.117.1 dev eno1 proto static metric 100
192.168.117.0/26 dev eno1 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.117.55 metric 100
The default route has been configured by some DHCP daemon. The connected route (scope link) has been automatically added by the kernel (proto kernel) when configuring an IP address on the eno1 interface. The default table is empty and has little use. It has been kept when the current incarnation of advanced routing has been introduced in Linux 2.1.68 after a first tentative using classes in Linux 2.1.156.

Performance Since Linux 4.1 (commit 0ddcf43d5d4a), when the set of rules is left unmodified, the main and local tables are merged and the lookup is done with this single table (and the default table if not empty). Moreover, since Linux 3.0 (commit f4530fa574df), without specific rules, there is no performance hit when enabling the support for multiple routing tables. However, as soon as you add new rules, some CPU cycles will be spent for each datagram to evaluate them. Here is a couple of graphs demonstrating the impact of routing rules on lookup times: Routing rules impact on performance For some reason, the relation is linear when the number of rules is between 1 and 100 but the slope increases noticeably past this threshold. The second graph highlights the negative impact of the first rule (about 30 ns). A common use of rules is to create virtual routers: interfaces are segregated into domains and when a datagram enters through an interface from domain A, it should use routing table A:
# ip rule add iif vlan457 table 10
# ip rule add iif vlan457 blackhole
# ip rule add iif vlan458 table 20
# ip rule add iif vlan458 blackhole
The blackhole rules may be removed if you are sure there is a default route in each routing table. For example, we add a blackhole default with a high metric to not override a regular default route:
# ip route add blackhole default metric 9999 table 10
# ip route add blackhole default metric 9999 table 20
# ip rule add iif vlan457 table 10
# ip rule add iif vlan458 table 20
To reduce the impact on performance when many interface-specific rules are used, interfaces can be attached to VRF instances and a single rule can be used to select the appropriate table:
# ip link add vrf-A type vrf table 10
# ip link set dev vrf-A up
# ip link add vrf-B type vrf table 20
# ip link set dev vrf-B up
# ip link set dev vlan457 master vrf-A
# ip link set dev vlan458 master vrf-B
# ip rule show
0:      from all lookup local
1000:   from all lookup [l3mdev-table]
32766:  from all lookup main
32767:  from all lookup default
The special l3mdev-table rule was automatically added when configuring the first VRF interface. This rule will select the routing table associated to the VRF owning the input (or output) interface. VRF was introduced in Linux 4.3 (commit 193125dbd8eb), the performance was greatly enhanced in Linux 4.8 (commit 7889681f4a6c) and the special routing rule was also introduced in Linux 4.8 (commit 96c63fa7393d, commit 1aa6c4f6b8cd). You can find more details about it in the kernel documentation.

Conclusion The takeaways from this article are:
  • route lookup times hardly increase with the number of routes,
  • densily packed /32 routes lead to amazingly fast route lookups,
  • memory use is low (128 MiB par million routes),
  • no optimization is done on routing rules.

  1. The routing cache was subject to reasonably easy to launch denial of service attacks. It was also believed to not be efficient for high volume sites like Google but I have first-hand experience it was not the case for moderately high volume sites.
  2. IP-address lookup using LC-tries , IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 17(6):1083-1092, June 1999.
  3. For internal nodes, the key_vector structure is embedded into a tnode structure. This structure contains information rarely used during lookup, notably the reference to the parent that is usually not needed for backtracking as Linux keeps the nearest candidate in a variable.
  4. One leaf can contain several routes (struct fib_alias is a list). The number of prefixes can therefore be greater than the number of leaves. The system also keeps statistics about the distribution of the internal nodes relative to the number of bits they handle. In our example, all the three internal nodes are handling 2 bits.
  5. The measurements are done in a virtual machine with one vCPU. The host is an Intel Core i5-4670K running at 3.7 GHz during the experiment (CPU governor was set to performance). The benchmark is single-threaded. It runs a warm-up phase, then executes about 100,000 timed iterations and keeps the median. Timings of individual runs are computed from the TSC.
  6. Fun fact: the documentation of this first tentative of more flexible routing is still available in today s kernel tree and explains the usage of the default class .

15 December 2015

Antoine Beaupr : Using a Yubikey NEO for SSH and OpenPGP on Debian jessie

I recently ordered two Yubikey devices from Yubico, partly because of a special offer from Github. I ordered both a Yubikey NEO and a Yubikey 4, although I am not sure I remember why I ordered two - you can see their Yubikey product comparison if you want to figure that out, but basically, the main difference is that the NEO has support for NFC while the "4" has support for larger RSA key sizes (4096). This article details my experiment on the matter. It is partly based on first hand experience, but also links to various other tutorials that helped me along the way. Especially thanks to folks on various IRC channels that really helped me out in understanding this. My objective in getting a hardware security token like this was three-fold:
  1. use 2FA on important websites like Github, to improve the security of critical infrastructure (like my Borg backup software)
  2. login to remote SSH servers without exposing my password or my private key material on third party computers
  3. store OpenPGP key material on the key securely, so that the private key material can never be compromised
To make a long story short: this article documents step 2 and implicitly step 3 (because I use OpenPGP to login to SSH servers). However it is not possible to use the key on arbitrary third party computers, given how much setup was necessary to make the thing work at all. 2FA on the Github site completely failed, but could be used on other sites, although this is not covered by this article. I have also not experimented in details the other ways the Yubikey can also be used (sorry for the acronym flood) as: Update: OATH works! It is easy to configure and i added a section below.

Not recommended After experimenting with the device and doing a little more research, I am not sure it was the right decision to buy a Yubikey. I would not recommend buying Yubikey devices because they don't allow changing the firmware, making the device basically proprietary, even in the face of an embarrassing security vulnerability on the Yubikey NEO that came out in 2015. A security device, obviously, should be as open as the protocols it uses, otherwise it's basically impossible to trust that the crypto hasn't been backdoored or compromised, or, in this case, is vulnerable to the simplest drive-by attacks. Furthermore, it turns out that the primary use case that Github was promoting is actually not working as advertised: to use the Yubikey on Github, you actually first need to configure 2FA with another tool, either with your phone's text messages (SMS) or with something like Google Authenticator. After contacting Github support, they explained that the Yubikey is seen as a "backup device", which seems really odd to me, especially considering the promotion and the fact that I don't have a "smart" (aka "Google", it seems these days) phone or the desire to share my personal phone number with Github. Finally, as I mentioned before, the fact that those devices are fairly new and the configuration necessary to make them work at all is completely obtuse, non-standardized or at least not available by default on arbitrary computers makes them basically impossible to use on other computers than your own specially crafted gems.

Plugging it in The Yubikey, when inserted into a USB port, seems to be detected properly. It shows up both as a USB keyboard and a generic device.
d c 14 17:23:26 angela kernel: input: Yubico Yubikey NEO OTP+U2F as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.0/usb3/3-2/3-2:1.0/0003:1050:0114.0016/input/input127
d c 14 17:23:26 angela kernel: hid-generic 0003:1050:0114.0016: input,hidraw3: USB HID v1.10 Keyboard [Yubico Yubikey NEO OTP+U2F] on usb-0000:00:12.0-2/input0
d c 14 17:23:26 angela kernel: hid-generic 0003:1050:0114.0017: hiddev0,hidraw4: USB HID v1.10 Device [Yubico Yubikey NEO OTP+U2F] on usb-0000:00:12.0-2/input1
We'll be changing this now - we want to to support OTP, U2F and CCID. Don't worry about those acronyms now, but U2F is for the web, CCID is for GPG/SSH, and OTP is for the One Time Passwords stuff mentionned earlier. I am using the Yubikey Personalization tool from stretch because the jessie one is too old, according to Gorzen. Indeed, I found out that the jessie version doesn't ship with the proper udev rules. Also, note that we need to run as sudo otherwise we get a permission denied:
$ sudo apt install yubikey-personalization/stretch
$ sudo ykpersonalize -m86
Firmware version 3.4.3 Touch level 1541 Program sequence 1
The USB mode will be set to: 0x86
Commit? (y/n) [n]: y
To understand better what the above does, see the NEO composite device documentation. The next step is to reconnect the key, for the udev rules to kick in. If you were like me, you enthusiastically plugged in the device before installing the yubikey-personalization package, and the udev rules were not present then.

Configuring a PIN Various operations will require you to enter a PIN when talking to the key. The default PIN is 123456 and the default admin PIN is 12345678. You will want to change that, otherwise someone that gets a hold of your key could do any operation without your consent. For this, you need to use:
$ gpg --card-edit
> passwd
> admin
> passwd
Be sure to remember those passwords! Of course, the key material on the Yubikey can be revoked when you loose the key, but only if you still have control of the master key, or if you have a OpenPGP revocation certification (which you should have).

Configuring GPG To do OpenPGP operations (like decryption, signatures and so on), or SSH operations (like authentication on a remote server), you need to talk with GPG. Yes, OpenPGP keys are RSA keys that can be used to authenticate with SSH servers, that's not new and I have already been doing this with Monkeysphere for a while. Now the challenge is how to make GPG talk with the Yubikey. So the next step is to see if gpg can see the key alright, as described in the Yubikey importing keys howto - you will need first to install scdaemon and pcscd (according to this howto) for gpg-agent to be able to talk with the key:
$ sudo apt install scdaemon gnupg-agent pcscd
$ gpg-connect-agent --hex "scd apdu 00 f1 00 00" /bye
ERR 100663404 Card error <SCD>
Well that failed. At this point, touching the key types a bunch of seemingly random characters wherever my cursor is sitting - fun but totally useless still. That was because I failed to reconnect the key: make sure the udev rules are in place and reconnect the key, the above should work:
$ gpg-connect-agent --hex "scd apdu 00 f1 00 00" /bye
D[0000]  01 00 10 90 00                                     .....
OK
This shows it is running the firmware 1.10, which is not vulnerable to the infamous security issue. (Note: I also happened to install opensc and gpgsm because of this suggestion but I am not sure they are required at all.)

Using SSH To make GPG work with SSH, you need somehow to start gpg-agent with ssh support, for example with:
gpg-agent --daemon --enable-ssh-support bash
Of course, this will work better if it's started with your Xsession. Such an agent should already be started, so you just need to add the ssh emulation to its configuration file and restart your X session.
echo 'enable-ssh-support' >> .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf
In Debian Jessie, the ssh-agent wrapper will not start if it detects that you have already one running (for example from gpg-agent) but if that fails, you can try commenting out use-ssh-agent from /etc/X11/Xsession.options to keep it from starting up in your session. (Thanks to stackexchange for that reference.) Here I assume you have already created an authentication subkey on your PGP key. If you haven't, I suggest trying out simply monkeysphere gen-subkey, which will generate an authentication subkey for you. You can also do it by hand by following one of the OpenPGP/SSH tutorials from Yubikey, especially the more complete one. If you are going to generate a completely new OpenPGP key, you may want to follow this simpler tutorial here. Then you need to move your authentication subkey to the Yubikey. For this, you need to edit the key and use the keytocard command:
$ gpg2 --edit-key anarcat@debian.org
> toggle
> key 2
> keytocard
> save
Here, we use toggle to show the OpenPGP private key material. You should see a key marked with A for Authentication. Mine was the second one so I selected it with key 2 which put a star next to it. The keytocard command moved it to the key and save ensure the key was removed from the local keyring. Obviously, backups are essential before doing this, because it's perfectly possible to loose that key in the process, for example if you destroy or lose the key or forget the password. It's probably better to create a completely different authentication subkey for just this purpose, but that may require reconfiguring all remote SSH hosts, and you may not want to do that. Then SSH should magically talk with the GPG agent and ask you for the PIN! That's pretty much all there is to it - if it doesn't, it means that gpg-agent is not your SSH agent, and obviously things will fail... Also, you should be able to see the key being loaded in the agent when it is:
$ ssh-add -l
2048 23:f3:be:bf:1e:da:e8:ad:4b:c7:f6:60:5e:03:c2:a6 cardno:000603647189 (RSA)
.. that's about it! I have yet to cover 2FA and OpenPGP support, but that got me going for a while and I'll stop geeking around with that thing for now. It was fun, for sure, but not sure it's worth it for now.

Using OATH This is pretty neat: it allows you to add two factor authentication to a lot of things. For example, PAM has such a module, which I will configure here to allow myself to login to my server from untrusted machines. While I will expose my main password to keyloggers, the OTP password will prevent that from being reused. This is a simplified version of this OATH tutorial. We install the PAM module with:
sudo apt install libpam-oath
Then, we can hook it into any PAM consumer, for example with sshd:
--- a/pam.d/sshd
+++ b/pam.d/sshd
@@ -1,5 +1,8 @@
 # PAM configuration for the Secure Shell service
+# for the yubikey
+auth required pam_oath.so usersfile=/etc/users.oath window=5 digits=8
+
 # Standard Un*x authentication.
 @include common-auth
We also needed to allow OTP passwords in sshd explicitely, with:
ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes
This will force the user to enter a valid oath token on the server. Unfortunately, this will affect all users, regardless of whether they are present in the users.oath file. I filed bug #807990 regarding this, with a patch. Also, it means the main password is still exposed on the client machine - you can use the sufficient keyword instead of required to workaround that, but then it means anyone with your key can login to your machine, which is something to keep in mind. The /etc/users.oath file needs to be created with something like:
#type   username        pin     start seed
HOTP    anarcat -   00
00 is obviously a fake, and insecure string. Generate a proper one with:
dd if=/dev/random bs=1k count=1   sha1sum # create a random secret
Then the shared secret needs to be added to the Yubikey:
ykpersonalize -1 -o oath-hotp -o oath-hotp8 -o append-cr -a
You simply paste the random secret you created above, when prompted, and that shared secret will be saved in a Yubikey slot for future use. Next time you login to the SSH server, you will be prompted for a OATH password, you just touch the button on the key and it will be pasted there:
$ ssh -o PubkeyAuthentication=no anarc.at
One-time password (OATH) for  anarcat':
Password:
[... logged in!]
Final note: the centralized file approach makes it hard, if not impossible, for users to update their own secret token.. It would be nice if there would be a user-accessible token file, maybe ~/.oath? Filed feature request #807992 about this as well.

2 July 2015

Petter Reinholdtsen: MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen

Last oktober I was involved on behalf of NUUG with recording the talks at MakerCon Nordic, a conference for the Maker movement. Since then it has been the plan to publish the recordings on Frikanalen, which finally happened the last few days. A few talks are missing because the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the talks are available. The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available from the Frikanalen web site. The unedited recordings are available on Youtube too. This is the list of talks available at the moment. Visit the Frikanalen video pages to view them. Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line argument changes). In addition, we needed better audio normalization, which sent me on a detour to package bs1770gain for Debian. Now this is in place and it became a lot easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.

15 April 2015

Rhonda D'Vine: HollySiz

Sometimes one stumbles upon stuff that touches one deeply. Granted, the topic of the first video from the artist I want to present you now did touch me naturally. But it made me take a closer look. This is about HollySiz. Yes, yet another French singer, but fortunately (for me) she sings mostly in English. :) So here are the songs: Like always, enjoy! And take good care of your kids if you happen to have some.

/music permanent link Comments: 0 Flattr this

3 March 2012

Petter Reinholdtsen: Stopmotion for making stop motion animations on Linux - reloaded

Many years ago, the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project initiated a student project to create a tool for making stop motion movies. The proposal came from a teacher needing such tool on Skolelinux. The project, called "stopmotion", was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a national aware with this great project. The project was initiated and mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bj rn Erik Nilsen and Fredrik Berg Kj lstad. They got in touch with people at Aardman Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by animators around the globe. But as is usual after studying, both got jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the project, and it has been lingering for a few years now. Until last year... Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new name, linuxstopmotion. The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I mean). I've been following the mailing list and the improvement already in place and planned for the future is encouraging. If you want to make stop motion movies. Check it out. :)

21 April 2011

Timo Jyrinki: Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS 2010)

Just a note that the slides are available (non-slideshare link) for my presentation Tuning an old but free phone (description) that I held in the tremendously great event FSCONS 2010. It could be described as a smaller scale FOSDEM, but that would be actually down-playing it since the free software effects on society are something that I've actually never seen elsewhere on such a scale. My talk was among the purely technical ones, though.

I was planning to hold on with this blog post until the recorded videos arrive, but since it seems it might not be during this year I will just post this now that slides are available.

I've shared a few photos as well at Flickr...


Keynote: Karin Kosina, The Inanna Project. A tech + art workshop for female artists in Damascus, Syria. An experiment in art, technology, and the transformative power of Free Hardware and Software.


Erik de Bruijn, The Future of RepRap, a self-replicating open source 3D printer that fabricates arbitrary objects including parts of itself.


Social event at the Berg 211.


Malin Nilsson on Gender, class and global flows. Using free software to fuel a revolution in home based industrial work.



Keynote: Glyn Moody, Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies.


Keynote: Glyn Moody, Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies (audience).

A few summaries available on a Qaiku seminar channel.

20 December 2007

Ross Burton: Sound Juicer "Sound Sculptures In Space" 2.21.0

Sound Juicer "Sound Sculptures In Space" 2.21.0 is finally out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

5 June 2007

Ross Burton: Postr 0.6

Postr 0.6 is here! What is new I hear you ask. Well: The tarball is in the usual place, and I'll make Debian packages shortly. NP: Konfusion, Skalpel

19 May 2007

Ross Burton: Tasks 0.5

Tasks 0.5 is now released. This release has features a port to OpenMoko and several bug fixes. More information, screeenshots, and tarballs can be downloaded from the Pimlico site. There are no packages yet, but I hope to have those online shortly.

12 April 2007

Rob Bradford: Dates 0.4 Released!

(Rapidly followed by 0.4.1) I’m very pleased to announce that Dates 0.4 has been released to the world, this release includes support for multiple local and remote calendars (including read-only access to Google Calendar.) It is available in three stunning flavours all guaranteed to be buzzing with energy but 100% fat free. N800 owners can use the Application Manager to install dates by using this install link. Packages for Debian/Ubuntu are being built now. Hopefully we should be able to get packages built for the Nokia 770 soon. Dates also has a cool new icon, courtesy of Andreas Nilsson. Andreas has also designed icons for the other components of, as well as the website for, the Pimlico Project which launches today. Pimlico is the umbrella project for all the OpenedHand PIM applications; Dates, Contacts, Tasks and Sync.
The funky new Dates icon.

6 April 2007

Ross Burton: New Postr Icon

Thanks to the icon master Andreas Nilsson, Postr now has an icon!

12 December 2006

Mario Iseli: Rest in peace LUG-AG :-(

Yesterday was general assembly of the Linux user group Aargau (a place in switzerland). The association hasn’t got enough money, this is a severel months old story already, and the person who managed the money was very inactive. The president also didn’t want to do his job anymore, so we had to search a new advisory board. Unfortunately there weren’t enough members who are interested in this job, so the association will be resolved. :-( This is quite hard for me because I met there some cool people which became (some of them at least) good friends, I say “thank you very much” to G rkan, Daniel, David, Werewolfi, Harzi, Nils, B, Vany and last but not least also to the “swisscom idiot”… ;)
Yeah, there isn’t much more to say about this, only that I will miss those cool evenings very much :-( But from another point of view, yesterday was a very good day because Debian Etch is finally frozen, so we had to celebrate at the LUG-AG meeting and there are some pictures (the big ones are 403, if you want them just send me a mail and I will allow it for your IP). Thanks to all Debian people who helped getting Etch in shape and thanks to the releasemanagers…

4 September 2006

Isaac Jones: Announcing Haskell'

let haskell' = succ haskell98 in
Announcing the Haskell' ("Haskell-Prime") process.  A short time ago,
I asked for volunteers to help with the next Haskell standard.  A
brave group has spoken up, and we've organized ourselves into a
committee in order to coordinate the community's work.  It will be the
committee's task to bring together the very best ideas and work of the
broader community in an "open-source" way, and to fill in any gaps in
order to make Haskell' as coherent and elegant as Haskell 98.
Our task is broadly defined by our mission statement:
    The Haskell programming language is more-or-less divided into two
    "branches".  The Haskell 98 standard is the "stable" branch of the
    language, and that has been a big success.  A lot of progress has been
    made over the last few years in the "research" branch of the Haskell
    language.  It is constantly advancing, and we feel that it is time for
    a new standard which reflects those advancements.
    Haskell' will be a conservative refinement of Haskell 98. It will
    be the work of this committee to adopt a set of language
    extensions and modifications and to standardize a new set of
    libraries.
    We will strive to only include tried-and-true language features,
    and to define them at least as rigorously as Haskell 98 was
    defined. This standard will reflect the realities of developing
    practical applications in the Haskell language. We will work closely
    with the rest of the Haskell community to create this standard.
Your Haskell' Committee is as follows (slightly munged email addresses
follow):
 * Manuel M T Chakravarty <chak at cse.unsw.edu.au>
 * John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org>
 * Bastiaan Heeren <bastiaan at cs.uu.nl>
 * Isaac Jones <ijones at galois.com>
 * John Launchbury <john at galois.com>
 * Andres Loeh <loeh at iai.uni-bonn.de>
 * Simon Marlow <simonmar at microsoft.com>
 * John Meacham <john at repetae.net>
 * Ravi Nanavati <ravi at bluespec.com>
 * Henrik Nilsson <nhn at cs.nott.ac.uk>
 * Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk>
 * Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>
 * Don Stewart <dons at cse.unsw.edu.au>
 * Audrey Tang <autrijus at gmail.com>
 * Simon J. Thompson <S.J.Thompson at kent.ac.uk>
 * Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace at cs.york.ac.uk>
 * Stephanie Weirich <sweirich at cis.upenn.edu>
The editors are Isaac Jones and John Launchbury.
Feel free to contact any of us with any concerns or questions.  If you
don't know who to direct your questions to, email Isaac Jones
ijones at syntaxpolice.org.
Community involvement is vital to our task, and there will be a way
for members of the community to make formal proposals.  In the opening
phases, please use these more informal resources to help us coordinate
Haskell':
 * The haskell-prime mailing list.  All technical discussion will take
   place here, or (if other meetings take place) be reported here.  Anyone
   can subscribe, and any subscriber can post questions and comments,
   and participate in discussions.  Anyone can read the list archives.
   http://haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
 * A wiki / issue tracking system to document consensus and to track
   ongoing tasks.  This system is publicly readable, but only
   committee writable so that we may present it as the "official"
   output of the committee.  If you ever feel that the wiki is not
   accurate as to the consensus, please alert the committee!
   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
 * A darcs code repository for experiments, proposed libraries,and
   complex examples.  darcs is a decentralized system, so anyone can use
   it, but patches should be sent to Isaac Jones:
   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/SourceCode
Please join us in making Haskell' a success.

19 March 2006

Clint Adams: This report is flawed, but it sure is fun

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