Petter Reinholdtsen

It is a while since I posted a summary of the free software and open culture activities and projects I have worked on. Here is a quick summary of the major ones from last year.

I guess the biggest project of the year has been migrating orphaned packages in Debian without a version control system to have a git repository on salsa.debian.org. When I started in April around 450 the orphaned packages needed git. I've since migrated around 250 of the packages to a salsa git repository, and around 40 packages were left when I took a break. Not sure who did the around 160 conversions I was not involved in, but I am very glad I got some help on the project. I stopped partly because some of the remaining packages needed more disk space to build than I have available on my development machine, and partly because some had a strange build setup I could not figure out. I had a time budget of 20 minutes per package, if the package proved problematic and likely to take longer, I moved to another package. Might continue later, if I manage to free up some disk space.

Another rather big project was the translation to Norwegian Bokmål and publishing of the first book ever published by a Sámi woman, the «Møter vi liv eller død?» book by Elsa Laula, with a PD0 and CC-BY license. I released it during the summer, and to my surprise it has already sold several copies. As I suck at marketing, I did not expect to sell any.

A smaller, but more long term project (for more than 10 years now), and related to orphaned packages in Debian, is my project to ensure a simple way to install hardware related packages in Debian when the relevant hardware is present in a machine. It made a fairly big advance forward last year, partly because I have been poking and begging package maintainers and upstream developers to include AppStream metadata XML in their packages. I've also released a few new versions of the isenkram system with some robustness improvements. Today 127 packages in Debian provide such information, allowing isenkram-lookup to propose them. Will keep pushing until the around 35 package names currently hard coded in the isenkram package are down to zero, so only information provided by individual packages are used for this feature.

As part of the work on AppStream, I have sponsored several packages into Debian where the maintainer wanted to fix the issue but lacked direct upload rights. I've also sponsored a few other packages, when approached by the maintainer.

I would also like to mention two hardware related packages in particular where I have been involved, the megactl and mfi-util packages. Both work with the hardware RAID systems in several Dell PowerEdge servers, and the first one is already available in Debian (and of course, proposed by isenkram when used on the appropriate Dell server), the other is waiting for NEW processing since this autumn. I manage several such Dell servers and would like the tools needed to monitor and configure these RAID controllers to be available from within Debian out of the box.

Vaguely related to hardware support in Debian, I have also been trying to find ways to help out the Debian ROCm team, to improve the support in Debian for my artificial idiocy (AI) compute node. So far only uploaded one package, helped test the initial packaging of llama.cpp and tried to figure out how to get good speech recognition like Whisper into Debian.

I am still involved in the LinuxCNC project, and organised a developer gathering in Norway last summer. A new one is planned the summer of 2025. I've also helped evaluate patches and uploaded new versions of LinuxCNC into Debian.

After a 10 years long break, we managed to get a new and improved upstream version of lsdvd released just before Christmas. As I use it regularly to maintain my DVD archive, I was very happy to finally get out a version supporting DVDDiscID useful for uniquely identifying DVDs. I am dreaming of a Internet service mapping DVD IDs to IMDB movie IDs, to make life as a DVD collector easier.

My involvement in Norwegian archive standardisation and the free software implementation of the vendor neutral Noark 5 API continued for the entire year. I've been pushing patches into both the API and the test code for the API, participated in several editorial meetings regarding the Noark 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt specification, submitted several proposals for improvements for the same. We also organised a small seminar for Noark 5 interested people, and is organising a new seminar in a month.

Part of the year was spent working on and coordinating a Norwegian Bokmål translation of the marvellous children's book «Ada and Zangemann», which focus on the right to repair and control your own property, and the value of controlling the software on the devices you own. The translation is mostly complete, and is now waiting for a transformation of the project and manuscript to use Docbook XML instead of a home made semi-text based format. Great progress is being made and the new book build process is almost complete.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

A little over a week ago, I noticed the liboggz package on my Debian dashboard had not had a new upstream release for a while. A closer look showed that its last release, version 1.1.1, happened in 2010. A few patches had accumulated in the Debian package, and I even noticed that I had passed on these patches to upstream five years ago. A handful crash bugs had been reported against the Debian package, and looking at the upstream repository I even found a few crash bugs reported there too. To add insult to injury, I discovered that upstream had accumulated several fixes in the years between 2010 and now, and many of them had not made their way into the Debian package. I decided enough was enough, and that a new upstream release was needed fixing these nasty crash bugs. Luckily I am also a member of the Xiph team, aka upstream, and could actually go to work immediately to fix it.

I started by adding automatic build testing on the Xiph gitlab oggz instance, to get a better idea of the state of affairs with the code base. This exposed a few build problems, which I had to fix. In parallel to this, I sent an email announcing my wish for a new release to every person who had committed to the upstream code base since 2010, and asked for help doing a new release both on email and on the #xiph IRC channel. Sadly only a fraction of their email providers accepted my email. But Ralph Giles in the Xiph team came to the rescue and provided invaluable help to guide be through the release Xiph process. While this was going on, I spent a few days tracking down the crash bugs with good help from valgrind, and came up with patch proposals to get rid of at least these specific crash bugs. The open issues also had to be checked. Several of them proved to be fixed already, but a few I had to creat patches for. I also checked out the Debian, Arch, Fedora, Suse and Gentoo packages to see if there were patches applied in these Linux distributions that should be passed upstream. The end result was ready yesterday. A new liboggz release, version 1.1.2, was tagged, wrapped up and published on the project page. And today, the new release was uploaded into Debian.

You are probably by now curious on what actually changed in the library. I guess the most interesting new feature was support for Opus and VP8. Almost all other changes were stability or documentation fixes. The rest were related to the gitlab continuous integration testing. All in all, this was really a minor update, hence the version bump only from 1.1.1 to to 1.1.2, but it was long overdue and I am very happy that it is out the door.

One change proposed upstream was not included this time, as it extended the API and changed some of the existing library methods, and thus require a major SONAME bump and possibly code changes in every program using the library. As I am not that familiar with the code base, I am unsure if I am the right person to evaluate the change. Perhaps later.

Since the release was tagged, a few minor fixes has been committed upstream already: automatic testing the cross building to Windows, and documentation updates linking to the correct project page. If a important issue is discovered with this release, I guess a new release might happen soon including the minor fixes. If not, perhaps they can wait fifteen years. :)

I would like to send a big thank you to everyone that helped make this release happen, from the people adding fixes upstream over the course of fifteen years, to the ones reporting crash bugs, other bugs and those maintaining the package in various Linux distributions. Thank you very much for your time and interest.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Nikita-prosjektet, der jeg er involvert, inviterer i samarbeid med forskningsgruppen METAINFO og foreningen NUUG, til et frokostseminar om Noark 5 og Noark 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt fredag 2025-03-14. Fokus denne gangen er på bevaring og kassasjon. Seminaret finner sted ved OsloMet, Pilestredet 46. Vi håper å få til videostrømming via Internett av presentasjoner og paneldiskusjon. Oppdatert program og lenker til påmeldingsskjema finner en via arrangementets infoside. Arrangementet er gratis.

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 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b. Merk, betaling med bitcoin er ikke anonymt. :)

For some years now, I have been working on a automatic hardware based package recommendation system for Debian and other Linux distributions. The isenkram system I started on back in 2013 now consist of two subsystems, one locating firmware files using the information provided by apt-file, and one matching hardware to packages using information provided by AppStream. The former is very similar to the mechanism implemented in debian-installer to pick the right firmware packages to install. This post is about the latter system. Thanks to steady progress and good help from both other Debian and upstream developers, I am happy to report that the Isenkram system now are able to recommend 121 packages using information provided via AppStream.

The mapping is done using modalias information provided by the kernel, the same information used by udev when creating device files, and the kernel when deciding which kernel modules to load. To get all the modalias identifiers relevant for your machine, you can run the following command on the command line:

find /sys/devices -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 sort -u

The modalias identifiers can look something like this:

acpi:PNP0000
cpu:type:x86,ven0000fam0006mod003F:feature:,0000,0001,0002,0003,0004,0005,0006,0007,0008,0009,000B,000C,000D,000E,000F,0010,0011,0013,0015,0016,0017,0018,0019,001A,001B,001C,001D,001F,002B,0034,003A,003B,003D,0068,006B,006C,006D,006F,0070,0072,0074,0075,0076,0078,0079,007C,0080,0081,0082,0083,0084,0085,0086,0087,0088,0089,008B,008C,008D,008E,008F,0091,0092,0093,0094,0095,0096,0097,0098,0099,009A,009B,009C,009D,009E,00C0,00C5,00E1,00E3,00EB,00ED,00F0,00F1,00F3,00F5,00F6,00F9,00FA,00FB,00FD,00FF,0100,0101,0102,0103,0111,0120,0121,0123,0125,0127,0128,0129,012A,012C,012D,0140,0160,0161,0165,016C,017B,01C0,01C1,01C2,01C4,01C5,01C6,01F9,024A,025A,025B,025C,025F,0282
dmi:bvnDellInc.:bvr2.18.1:bd08/14/2023:br2.18:svnDellInc.:pnPowerEdgeR730:pvr:rvnDellInc.:rn0H21J3:rvrA09:cvnDellInc.:ct23:cvr:skuSKU=NotProvided
pci:v00008086d00008D3Bsv00001028sd00000600bc07sc80i00
platform:serial8250
scsi:t-0x05
usb:v413CpA001d0000dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00in00

The entries above are a selection of the complete set available on a Dell PowerEdge R730 machine I have access to, to give an idea about the various styles of hardware identifiers presented in the modalias format. When looking up relevant packages in a Debian Testing installation on the same R730, I get this list of packages proposed:

% sudo isenkram-lookup
firmware-bnx2x
firmware-nvidia-graphics
firmware-qlogic
megactl
wsl
%

The list consist of firmware packages requested by kernel modules, as well packages with program to get the status from the RAID controller and to maintain the LAN console. When the edac-utils package providing tools to check the ECC RAM status will enter testing in a few days, it will also show up as a proposal from isenkram. In addition, once the mfiutil package we uploaded in October get past the NEW processing, it will also propose a tool to configure the RAID controller.

Another example is the trusty old Lenovo Thinkpad X230, which have hardware handled by several packages in the archive. This is running on Debian Stable:

% isenkram-lookup 
beignet-opencl-icd
bluez
cheese
ethtool
firmware-iwlwifi
firmware-misc-nonfree
fprintd
fprintd-demo
gkrellm-thinkbat
hdapsd
libpam-fprintd
pidgin-blinklight
thinkfan
tlp
tp-smapi-dkms
tpb
%

Here there proposal consist of software to handle the camera, bluetooth, network card, wifi card, GPU, fan, fingerprint reader and acceleration sensor on the machine.

Here is the complete set of packages currently providing hardware mapping via AppStream in Debian Unstable: air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, antpm, array-info, avarice, avrdude, bmusb-v4l2proxy, brltty, calibre, colorhug-client, concordance-common, consolekit, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux, edac-utils, eegdev-plugins-free, ekeyd, elogind, firmware-amd-graphics, firmware-ath9k-htc, firmware-atheros, firmware-b43-installer, firmware-b43legacy-installer, firmware-bnx2, firmware-bnx2x, firmware-brcm80211, firmware-carl9170, firmware-cavium, firmware-intel-graphics, firmware-intel-misc, firmware-ipw2x00, firmware-ivtv, firmware-iwlwifi, firmware-libertas, firmware-linux-free, firmware-mediatek, firmware-misc-nonfree, firmware-myricom, firmware-netronome, firmware-netxen, firmware-nvidia-graphics, firmware-qcom-soc, firmware-qlogic, firmware-realtek, firmware-ti-connectivity, fpga-icestorm, g810-led, galileo, garmin-forerunner-tools, gkrellm-thinkbat, goldencheetah, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, i8kutils, imsprog, ledger-wallets-udev, libairspy0, libam7xxx0.1, libbladerf2, libgphoto2-6t64, libhamlib-utils, libm2k0.9.0, libmirisdr4, libnxt, libopenxr1-monado, libosmosdr0, librem5-flash-image, librtlsdr0, libticables2-8, libx52pro0, libykpers-1-1, libyubikey-udev, limesuite, linuxcnc-uspace, lomoco, madwimax, media-player-info, megactl, mixxx, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mu-editor, mustang-plug, nbc, nitrokey-app, nqc, ola, openfpgaloader, openocd, openrazer-driver-dkms, pcmciautils, pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, ponyprog, printer-driver-splix, python-yubico-tools, python3-btchip, qlcplus, rosegarden, scdaemon, sispmctl, solaar, spectools, sunxi-tools, t2n, thinkfan, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms, trezor, tucnak, ubertooth, usbrelay, uuu, viking, w1retap, wsl, xawtv, xinput-calibrator, xserver-xorg-input-wacom and xtrx-dkms.

In addition to these, there are several with patches pending in the Debian bug tracking system, and even more where no-one wrote patches yet. Good candiates for the latter are packages with udev rules but no AppStream hardware information.

The isenkram system consist of two packages, isenkram-cli with the command line tools, and isenkram with a GUI background process. The latter will listen for dbus events from udev emitted when new hardware become available (like when inserting a USB dongle or discovering a new bluetooth device), look up the modalias entry for this piece of hardware in AppStream (and a hard coded list of mappings from isenkram - currently working hard to move this list to AppStream), and pop up a dialog proposing to install any not already installed packages supporting this hardware. It work very well today when inserting the LEGO Mindstorms RCX, NXT and EV3 controllers. :) If you want to make sure more hardware related packages get recommended, please help out fixing the remaining packages in Debian to provide AppStream metadata with hardware mappings.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Seven and twelve years ago, I measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was, first by analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive, then by analysing the DEP-11 AppStream data set. I guess it is time to repeat the measurement, only for unstable as last time:

Debian Unstable:

  count MIME type
  ----- -----------------------
     63 image/png
     63 image/jpeg
     57 image/tiff
     54 image/gif
     51 image/bmp
     50 audio/mpeg
     48 text/plain
     42 audio/x-mp3
     40 application/ogg
     39 audio/x-wav
     39 audio/x-flac
     36 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
     35 audio/x-mpeg
     34 audio/x-mpegurl
     34 audio/ogg
     33 application/x-ogg
     32 audio/mp4
     31 audio/x-scpls
     31 application/pdf
     29 audio/x-ms-wma

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

It is nice to see that the same number of packages now support PNG and JPEG. Last time JPEG had more support than PNG. Most of the MIME types are known to me, but the 'audio/x-scpls' one I have no idea what represent, except it being an audio format. To find the packages claiming support for this format, the appstreamcli command from the appstream package can be used:

% appstreamcli what-provides mediatype audio/x-scpls | grep Package: | sort -u
Package: alsaplayer-common
Package: amarok
Package: audacious
Package: brasero
Package: celluloid
Package: clapper
Package: clementine
Package: cynthiune.app
Package: elisa
Package: gtranscribe
Package: kaffeine
Package: kmplayer
Package: kylin-burner
Package: lollypop
Package: mediaconch-gui
Package: mediainfo-gui
Package: mplayer-gui
Package: mpv
Package: mystiq
Package: parlatype
Package: parole
Package: pragha
Package: qmmp
Package: rhythmbox
Package: sayonara
Package: shotcut
Package: smplayer
Package: soundconverter
Package: strawberry
Package: syncplay
Package: vlc
%

Look like several video and auto tools understand the format. Similarly one can check out the number of packages supporting the STL format commonly used for 3D printing:

% appstreamcli what-provides mediatype model/stl | grep Package: | sort -u
Package: cura
Package: freecad
Package: open3d-viewer
%

How strange the slic3r and prusa-slicer packages do not support STL. Perhaps just missing package metadata? Luckily the amount of package metadata in Debian is getting better, and hopefully this way of locating relevant packages for any file format will be the preferred one soon.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

The LinuxCNC project is trotting along. And I believe this great software system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and hexapods, would do even better with more in-person developer gatherings, so we plan to organise such gathering this summer too.

This year we would like to invite to a small LinuxCNC and free software fabrication workshop/gathering in Norway this summer for the weekend starting July 4th 2025. New this year is the slightly larger scope, and we invite people also outside the LinuxCNC community to join. As earlier, we suggest to organize it as an unconference, where the participants create the program upon arrival.

The location is a metal workshop 15 minutes drive away from to the Gardermoen airport (OSL), where there is a lot of space and a hotel only 5 minutes away by car. We plan to fire up the barbeque in the evenings.

Please let us know if you would like to join. We track the list of participants on a simple pad, please add yourself there if you are interested in joining.

The NUUG Foundation has on our request offered to handle any money involved with this gathering, in other words holding any sponsor funds and paying any bills. NUUG Foundation is a spinnoff from the NUUG member organisation here in Norway with long ties to the free software and open standards communities.

As usual we hope to find sponsors to pay for food, lodging and travel.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

The rumors of the death of the lsdvd project is slightly exaggerated. And the last few months, we have been working on fixing and improving it, culminating in a new release last night. This is the list of changes in the new 0.18 release, as announced on the project mailing list:

• Simplified autoconf setup, dropped --enable-debug option.
• Improved video resolution reporting (Fixes #8).
• Applied patches fetched from BSDs (Fixes #7).
• Corrected Perl output (Fixes #1).
• Adjusted Pan and Scan entries to produce valid XML.
• Changed --help output from stderr to stdout.
• Corrected aspect ratio and audio format formatting.
• Avoid segfault when hitting a NULL pointer in the IFO structure.
• Change build rules to supress compiler flags, to make it easier to spot warnings.
• Set default DVD device based on OS (Linux, *BSD, Darwin)
• Added libdvdread DVDDiscID to output.
• Corrected typo in longest track value in XML format.
• Switched XML output to use libxml to avoid string encoding issues.
• Added simple build time test suite.
• Cleaned up language code handling and adding missing mapping for language codes 'nb' and 'nn'.
• Added JSON output support using -Oj.

The most exciting news to me is easy access to the DVDDiscID, which make it a lot easier to identify DVD duplicates across a large collection of DVDs. During testing it has proved to be very effective ad identifying when DVDs in a DVD box (say all Star Wars movies) is identical to DVDs sold individually (like the same Star Wars movies packaged individually).

Because none of the current developers got access to do tarball releases on Sourceforge any more, the release is only available as a git tag in the repository. Lets hope it do not take ten years for the next release. The project are discussing to move away from Sourceforge, but it has not yet concluded.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

In April, I started migrating orphaned Debian packages without any version control system listed in debian/control to git. This morning, my Debian QA page finally reached 200 QA packages migrated. In reality there are a few more, as the packages uploaded by someone else after my initial upload have disappeared from my QA uploads list. As I am running out of steam and will most likely focus on other parts of Debian moving forward, I hope someone else will find time to continue the migration to bring the number of orphaned packages without any version control system down to zero. Here is the updated recipe if someone want to help out.

To locate packages to work on, the following one-liner can be used:

PGPASSWORD="udd-mirror" psql --port=5432 --host=udd-mirror.debian.net \
  --username=udd-mirror udd -c "select source from sources \
   where release = 'sid' and (vcs_url ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' \
   OR vcs_browser ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' or vcs_url IS NULL \
   OR vcs_browser IS NULL) AND maintainer ilike '%packages@qa.debian.org%' \
   order by random() limit 10;"

Pick a random package from the list and run the latest edition of the script debian-snap-to-salsa with the package name as the argument to prepare a git repository with the existing packaging. This will download old Debian packages from snapshot.debian.org. Note that very recent uploads will not be included, so check out the package on tracker.debian.org. Next, run gbp buildpackage --git-ignore-new to verify that the package build as it should, and then visit https://salsa.debian.org/debian/ and make sure there is not already a git repository for the package there. I also did git log -p debian/control and look for vcs entries to check if the package used to have a git repository on Alioth, and see if it can be a useful starting point moving forward. If all this check out, I created a new gitlab project below the Debian group on salsa, push the package source there and upload a new version. I tend to also ensure build hardening is enabled, if it prove to be easy, and check if I can easily fix any lintian issues or bug reports. If the process took more than 20 minutes, I dropped it and moved on to another package.

If I found patches in debian/patches/ that were not yet passed upstream, I would send an email to make sure upstream know about them. This has proved to be a valuable step, and caused several new releases for software that initially appeared abandoned. :)

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

The Norwegian The LinuxCNC developer gathering 2024 is over. It was a great and productive weekend, and I am sad that it is over.

Regular readers probably still remember what LinuxCNC is, but her is a quick summary for those that forgot? LinuxCNC is a free software system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It eats G-code and produce motor movement and other changes to the physical world, while reading sensor input.

I am not quite sure about the total head count, as not all people were present at the gathering the entire weekend, but I believe it was close to 10 people showing their faces at the gathering. The "hard core" of the group, who stayed the entire weekend, were two from Norway, two from Germany and one from England. I am happy with the outcome from the gathering. We managed to wrap up a new stable LinuxCNC release 2.9.3 and even tested it on real hardware within minutes of the release. The release notes for 2.9.3 are still being written, but should show up on on the project site in the next few days. We managed to go through around twenty pull requests and merge then into either the stable release (2.9) or the development branch (master). There are still around thirty pull requests left to process, so we are not out of work yet. We even managed to fix/improve a slightly worn lathe, and experiment with running a mechanical clock using G-code.

The evening barbeque worked well both on Saturday and Sunday. It is quite fun to light up a charcoal grill using compressed air. Sadly the weather was not the best, so we stayed indoors most of the time.

This gathering was made possible partly with sponsoring from both Redpill Linpro, Debian and NUUG Foundation, and we are most grateful for the support. I would also like to thank the local school for lending us some furniture, and of course the rest of the members of the organizers team, Asle and Bosse, for their countless contributions. The gathering was such success that we want to do it again next year.

We plan to organize the next Norwegian LinuxCNC developer gathering at the end of June next year, the weekend Friday 27th to Sunday 29th of June 2025. I recommend you reserve the dates on your calendar today. Other related communities are also welcome to join in, for example those working on systems like FreeCAD and opencamlib, as I am sure we have much in common and sharing experiences would be very useful to all involved. We are of course looking for sponsors for this gathering already. The total budget for this gathering was around NOK 25.000 (around EUR 2.300), so our needs are quite modest. Perhaps a machine or tools company would like to help out the free software manufacturing community by sponsoring food, lodging and transport for such gathering?

Da jeg i høst hørte jeg et innslag på radiOrakel om en inspirerende dame som levde for over hundre år siden, fikk jeg en vill ide. Elsa Laula var en svensk samisk dame som ikke bare fikk utdannelsen finansiert av den danske dronningen, men som gjorde så god jobb med å inspirere og organisere den samiske befolkningen at det visstnok ble forslått i Sverige å straffeforfølge henne for oppvigleri før hun flyttet fra Sverige til Norge. Radiopraterne fortalte videre at da Elsa Laula ga ut en pamflett for å inspirere samene til samling var dette den første bok gitt ut av en samisk dame noensinne. Jeg fikk høre at denne korte teksten kun fantes på originalspråket svensk under tittelen «Inför lif eller död» og aldri var oversatt til norsk. Da tenkte jeg, der jeg satt i bilen, at en norsk utgave kan vel jeg fikse. Jeg har jo fått oversatt endel bøker, og en liten pamflett på noen få sider burde jo være grei skuring.

Den imponerende Elsa Laula, som senere la til etternavnet Renberg, har blant annet fått dokumentaren «Elsa Laula Renberg, kvinnen som samlet Sápmi» (2017) av Per Kristian Olsen på NRK, NRK-artikkelen «Samenes Jeanne d’Arc» av Karen Brodshaug Sveen (2017), oppgaven «Elsa Laulas Innför lif och död – sanningsord i de lappska förhållandena» av Edel Olsen, biografien «Elsa Laula Renberg - Historien om samefolkets store Minerva» (2015) av Siri Broch Johansen og radiOrakel-podkasten Revolusjonen har et kvinnelig ansikt – Elsa Laula, for å nevne de jeg har finnet uten å lete spesielt hardt. En virkelig spennende dame, som i tillegg til å inspirere til opprettelsen av samiske organisasjoner, har inspirert til opprettelsen av Sametinget, og født seks barn der fire vokste opp.

I dag er jeg veldig glad for å kunne annonsere at bokmålsoversettelsen er klar og tilgjengelig for både bestilling på papir og epub-utgave fra lulu.com, samt som nettside. Den kringkastede bokinformasjonen ser slik ut:

Den 27 år gamle sørsamiske kvinnen Elsa Laula ga i august 1904 ut en pamflett i Stockholm. Opplaget var på 6000, finansiert av Stockholmsredaktøren Gustav Hedenström, som også bidro i stiftelsen av Lapparnes Centralforbund. Dette kampskriftet var den første boken gitt ut av en samisk kvinne, og hadde som mål å inspirere til opprettelsen av samiske foreninger over hele landet, samt skape blest om sentralforbundet. Pamfletten er et politisk manifest som fortsatt inspirerer i dag.

Denne pamfletten er nå for første gang tilgjengelig på bokmål, sammen med en nyutgivelse av originalteksten på svensk.

Oversettelsen hadde ikke vært mulig uten gode hjelpere. En virkelig stor innsats både i korrekturarbeidet og utforskning av arkaiske svenske ord, står Axel Rosén bak. I tillegg har jeg fått innspill fra Edel May Karlsen og flere andre både på språkføring og historisk bakgrunn for å forstå teksten.

En kuriositet som jeg oppdaget i arbeidet med oversettelsen er at det ikke stemmer at denne boken ikke var oversatt til noen andre språk. Anna Wuolab oversatte den til nordsamisk i 2017 i en utgave gitt ut av samisk skribent- och författarförening (Bágu čálliid searvi) under tittelen «Eallit vai jápmit? : duohtavuođasánit sámi diliid birra = Inför lif eller död? : sanningsord i de lappska förhållandena». Papirutgaven er så vidt jeg kan forstå utsolgt fra forlaget og jeg har ikke klart å finne informasjonsside om boken på Internett. Mulig den er mulig å få tak i som ebok, hvis en skal tro oppføring i worldcat.

Oversetterrammeverket jeg har satt opp for å gjennomføre dette oversettelsesprosjektet håndterer flere språk. Jeg er igang med engelsk utgave, og er åpen for å også gi ut andre oversettelser hvis noen er interessert i å gjøre jobben. Det hadde vært ekstra moro å gi den ut på sørsamisk, det samiske språket i regionen der Elsa Laula kom fra. Der er jeg som vanlig avhengig av frivillige som er også interessert i å gjøre dette på dugnad.

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