Petter Reinholdtsen

The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows integration fixes . This is the release announcement:

New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22

These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".

About Debian Edu and Skolelinux

Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school network. Immediately after installation a school server running all services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.

This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze release.

ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home directory.

Software updates

• Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh work also without a attached tty.
• Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found' has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access required).

Other changes

• Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool needed for desktop=xfce installations.
• Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB stick ISO image.
• Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).
• Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.
• Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to cope with this.
• Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².
• Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid empty password hashes.
• Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines from joining the Samba domain.

Known issues

• KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to not use the http proxy as it should.
• Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop (using the KDE configuration).

Where to get it

To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use

• ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso
• http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso
• rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .

The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2

To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use

• ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso
• http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso
• rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .

The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119

How to report bugs

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs

Earlier, I reported about my problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk. Friday I was told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away. And as there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware currently on the disk.

I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found issdfut_2.0.4.iso (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD disks. I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and booted the ISO from a USB stick. The disk was recognized, but the program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused to insert any Intel firmware. So no change, and the disk is still unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware. No idea how likely that is. Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness. I got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on the broken disks.

It has been a while since my last update. Since last summer, I have worked on a Norwegian docbook version of the 2004 book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law. Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the number of strings to translate. Due to real life constraints, I have not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out, I found time to work on it again. Still lots of work left, but the first draft is nearing completion. I created a graph to show the progress of the translation:

When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG drawings need to be fixed. There are probably also some index entries missing that need to be added. This can be done by comparing the index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the English docbook version with the paper version. Last, the colophon page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is done. I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting of the index pages. All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto, docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.

There is still need for translators and people with docbook knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft translation and proof reading. And I would like the figures to be redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them. Any SVG master around? There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me. If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the project files currently available from github.

If you are curious what the translated book currently look like, the updated PDF and EPUB are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I saw no point in linking to that version.