As part of The Debian Edu-project collaborating with ArntOG and others we have put up a Planet for an view into the minds of our community. The Planet will probably be populated in different languages as time passes, but for now it’s multi-language and open to all who have ties to the project.

Even as I myself probably need to put into words a bit more often the things I do, I’d like to point out that a short update on what you’re up to often have an inspiring effect on other community members; perhaps you’re working on the same things without knowing. IRC is fun and all that, but a weblog/blog lasts so much longer when it comes to allowing people to read up on your ideas and thoughts about a specific need or subject.

Welcome to the planet at http://planet.skolelinux.org/

_This_ is cool stuff!

At the international Skolelinux user conference in Oslo, Norway, Kurt Gramlich, project leader of the German Skolelinux team, announced the decision to use Skolelinux as basis for installations in schools in the county Rhineland-Palatinate. Rhineland-Palatinate is one of the 16 federal states (German: Bundesländer) of Germany, has 4 Million citizens and approximately 1700 schools (about 900 primary schools).

Skolelinux has been successful internationally since 2003, is based on the Debian distribution, and can be freely used, copied and redistributed by anybody.

The Skolelinux community welcomes the decision made by the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Kurt Gramlich: "After Hamburg this is the second federal state to select Skolelinux for their schools. It will be rolled out with professional support paid by the federal state. Wishes and suggestions from teachers of Rhineland-Palatinate will be included in the further development and adaptation of the software. I am looking forward to continued cooperating with the 11 pilot schools. Skolelinux will be enriched by the educational material that those schools is set out to produce. The adaptations we make will be integrated back into the international project through the Debian community."

The University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern has appointed prof. Dr. Bettina Reuter and certified engineer Klaus Knopper as project leaders. Both are lecturers of business economics faculty at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern. They are in charge of the adaptation of Skolelinux for Rhineland-Palatinate and the reintegration into the international project.

The newly founded "Association for the promotion of Free Software at schools in Rhineland-Palatinate", lead by Thomas Rohde, collects wishes and suggestions from teachers and pass them on to the project leaders. "The possibility for the schools in Rhineland-Palatinate to base their teaching on Free Software is long overdue", says Rohde. "Everyone can engage in the future of information technology like this and have fun." Pupils can of course take the school software with them home and use it privately too.

Klaus Knopper, known to users of free software as the producer of KNOPPIX, says that Debian and Skolelinux are mature and complete solutions: "Because of their openness and compliance with public standards, they reach a level of stability that cannot be achieved by current proprietary systems."

Mister Burkhard Schäfer at the Department of Education: "With the adapted Skolelinux for Rhineland-Palatinate we offer the schools the possibility to use a powerful and sustainable network solution without license fees. It is a solution which is user friendly for both teachers and pupils. We will not develop a new Linux distribution this way, but instead join the advantages of the existing professional network solutions of Skolelinux."

The first phase of the project will finish in March 2009. The prior network structures will be integrated into Skolelinux and easily administered with the Skolelinux server.

"Well, let’s just say, ‘if your VCR is still blinking
12:00, you don’t want Linux’".
  — Bruce Perens

Yes, this is an old quote, but it certainly made my day!
Thank you Bruce, for that enlightening and very summarizing quote 🙂

Can’t really understand what the CERN LHC will do when it launches on the 10th of September?
Well, here’s one for you:

So, everyone, their dog, grand-mother, unlawful lovers etc. are doing this, so why not me?

Thus, here’s the output of my top ten most active commands on my three primary access-points to the great world of the Terminal:

shinyng, my former work laptop, now prominently being the household random-access machine:
anders@shinyng:~$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}’ | sort -rn | head
76 whois
71 ssh
51 exit
37 host
33 ls
23 ping
19 scp
16 cd
12 ps
11 vim

It would be pretty obvious that I use shinyng a lot for checking up on networked stuff like domains, network topology, IP addresses et. al.

Caramel is my (still) brand new work laptop sitting mostly at my desk at work, but also doing some travelling when I’m on work-related events or just need a very portable machine:

And finally, nidaros, my most beloved workhorse in the rack, the NetCore shell-server with some websites and lowhanging fruits like IRC-sessions etc:

While having a bad piece of "high-on-life", "too-much-coffee" AND "one-extremely-long-car-ride-with-ze-wife" insomnia I decided to watch some Video clips and listen to some music. This quickly turned into a VideoLAN Client playlist and at the end, while closing shop and thinking hard about getting a few hours sleep before work I found this in my console:

VLC media player 0.8.6e Janus
[00000283] main playlist: nothing to play

** (.:662): CRITICAL **: gtk_pizza_set_size: assertion `pizza != NULL’ failed
[00000283] main playlist: stopping playback

This is ofcourse a very funny naming of an variable, and I can’t help to wonder; Who is it intended to obscure things for? The users seeing the debug info? The possible commercial companies trying to benefit from reverse engineering VLC into their product without having to distribute it as free software? Is it perhaps not intended for anyone? Anyways, funny stuff. If anyone happen to know the reason for the funny debug-info and/or the naming of the variable, please do comment! 🙂

With the costs of owning domains still going down by the month/year I have never seen any reason to give up on my ever growing ‘collection’ of interesting and less interesting geeky/entertaining domain names. However, I have been ‘forced’ to take a little timeout from time to time and think over what to keep and not to keep, and this time I’ve really let one of the big ones go 🙂

In late 1998 I ‘bought’ the domain "tlf.cx" for the amount of AUD 0,-. The little community of Christmas Island (.cx) in the waters offshore Australia wanted to make it’s mark on the domain map with it’s two-letter domain. Fun enough at that time ("tlf cx" would to a Norwegian teen be pronounced "telef sex", aka phone sex. Very amusing. eh. (at least when you’re 16)).

The uptake of IPv6 in Europe is depending on a lot of factors. One of these factors are the support for IPv6 in consumer products such as the networking stack of operating systems. Since the slow start with plugins and code sniplets for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows the support have been put into native mode on all three of the major OS’es.

The next important factor is the support in available and sensible prised networking equipment. Most of the major brands such as Cisco, HP, Nokia et. al. now supports IPv6 within their entire product range.

The final factor that will limit usage of IPv6 is certainly the support from the Network/Internet Service Providers. In most of Europe the ISP’s are following the wishes written up by the RIPE member community. However, the implementation of the IPv6 into production and transparent use of dual-stacking have not been widespread.

Thus, it was a real joy to buy (€8/1hour) Internet access at Madrid airport today on my way home from the Honeymoon and discover the following: 


root@caramel:~# aptitude update
..
60% [Connecting to no.archive.ubuntu.com (2001:700:300:1800::b)

Woha there cowboy. Native IPv6 on wireless Internet from Spain to Norway. I had not even recognized this while reading email (some from IPv6 enabled servers) and surfing the web (among the sites visited a few are indeed dualstacks). Nice 🙂

I can only give my praise to AEANA and Kubi Networks of Aptilo (and it seems they had a say too; Vodafone Spain) to have put this into production.

Great stuff. Thanks for all the bits!

Hello everyone. (It’s been a long time since I posted anything in this english weblog.)

Anyways, I’ve just accepted and agreed with the good people of FSFE/Creative Commons Sweden and Wikimedia Sweden that we (Free software in schools Norway/FRISK) will hold a Skolelinux workshop at the FSCONS October 24th – 26th at Chalmers IT-University in Gothenburg/Sweden.

The workshop will comprise of an short introduction to what Skolelinux is, some elite diskless thin-client booting and of course a lot of hands-on play by the session attendees. I’m really looking forward to getting that act up and running. It’s been a whole year since my last workshop at NKUL 2007 at NTNU in Trondheim/Norway, (too "#&1&%&=!! long ago if you ask me) and it’ll be nice to get some "playtime" with fresh users of our beloved distro!

In other, totally un-related news: I’m on my honeymoon, the big one, currently in Spain, setting sail for Italy in two days time aboard RCCL’s Voyager of the Seas. mm.