see you there?!

My little new toy arrived! It’s a Thin Client Tux@Home Q-Box 270 (Intel Atom) with 1GB RAM and 500GB hard disk. One of the nice things about the device is the low power consumption, only 10-15Watt. This is important because I want to use the device as a small home server. To avoid paying the “windows tax / proprietary software tax” I bought the computer at ixsoft.de, a online shop which sells hardware with GNU/Linux pre-installed. It came with Fedora GNU/Linux and now runs the Debian GNU/Linux (Squeeze) operating system which I consider more suitable for the tasks I want to use the device.

Now the more interesting part: What software / services should run on this little helper? In a first step I want to enable ssh access from outside, install an IRC bouncer and a subversion (SVN) server. The next think I would like to install is some kind of address book and calendar which can be used from any device (desktop computer, laptop, smart phone). But therefor I have to look into some solutions first. Kolab looks quite interesting. But I have to see how well it works with my software/hardware setup (Claws-Mail (Thunderbird) and Android). OwnCloud is another project I want to look at. Maybe this could be a nice solution for some file hosting.

If you have a tip for a good address book and calender solution or any other fancy idea what could be done with the Thin Client than drop me a mail or add a comment.

…and hope that if you are not yet a Fellow of the FSFE, you will join now!

For a long time I have made backups of my home partition by hand, starting from time to time rdiff-backup. But as you can imagine, this approach doesn’t generate regular and reliable backups.

I couldn’t put this task into a simple cronjob because of two reasons. First I use encrypted hard disks and my backup disk is connected via USB and not always on. So before a backup starts I have to turn on my backup disk and make sure, that my home partition and my backup disk is decrypted and mounted. Second I don’t want the backup happen during my regular work. In my experience such processes often starts in the most annoying moments.

So I decided that I need an semi-automatic backup, which runs during shutdown. The result is this small script which I put in /etc/rc0.d/K05backup.sh:

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#!/bin/bash
 
currentTime=`date +%s`
timeUntilNextBackup=604800                 # 604800sec = 1week
startBackup=false
 
# check if it's time for the next backup
if [ -f /var/log/nextBackup.log ]; then
    nextBackupTime=`cat /var/log/nextBackup.log`
    if [ $(($currentTime - $nextBackupTime)) -gt 0 ]; then
        startBackup=true                       #time for the next backup
    fi
else
    startBackup=true
fi
 
if [ $startBackup == true ]; then
    echo "It's time for another Backup!"
    echo "Don't forget to switch on your backup hard disk before you start!"
    repeat=true
    while $repeat; do
        echo -n "Start backup procedure now? (y)es or (n)o? "
        read char
        case $char in
            [y,Y] ) 
                if [ ! -d /home/schiesbn ]; then
                    echo "encrypted HOME partition has to be mounted..."
                    cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda6 secureHome
                    mount /dev/mapper/secureHome /home
                fi
                echo "encrypted BACKUP partition has to be mounted..."
                cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdd1 secureBackup
                mount /dev/mapper/secureBackup /mnt/backup
                echo "Starting Backup...";
                rdiff-backup --print-statistics /home/schiesbn /mnt/backup
                echo "umount backup disk..."
                umount /mnt/backup
                cryptsetup luksClose secureBackup
                # calculate the time for the next backup and write it to the log
                nextBackup=$(($currentTime + $timeUntilNextBackup))
                echo $nextBackup > /var/log/nextBackup.log
                echo "DONE."
                sleep 10   #give me some time to look at the backup statistics
                repeat=false;;
            [n,N] )
                repeat=false;;
        esac
    done
fi

If the last backup is older than 1 week the script asks me, if I want to do another backup. Than I can decide to postpone it or to start it now. If I decide to start the backup procedure I get the opportunity to decrypt my backup and home partition before rdiff-backup starts. After that I can leave the room and be sure that the computer will shutdown after the backup is finished.

Until now this is the best and most reliable, least annoying and most automated solution I could found.

This year it was the first time I participated at RoboCup tournaments. It was quite stressful but also really exiting and most important successful!

In April the year started with the German Open in Hanover. It was a hard week, we lived in a bus and worked every day far into the night. But it was worthwhile. After many years of struggle the 1. RFC Stuttgart finale made it and win the German Open!

Here you can see a summary of the final game in Hanover against Osnabrück (Stuttgart = cyan; Osnabrück = magenta):

(direct link to the video)

But this was not the end of our success in 2009. Last week we went to Graz, Austria for the RoboCup world championship. Like a few weeks ago in Hanover it was again a hard week. At the end we went home with two cups! First we won the free challenge with the presentation of our “Automatic Camera Man” and at Sunday we finally won the final and became world champion for the first time!

The tournament started quite well with 6:0 wins in the first round robin. In the second round robin we had our only defeat and finished the round with 3:1 wins. The third round robin ended with 2:0 wins. In the semifinal we won against MRL (Iran) 4:1. Than in the final we met Tech United (Eindhoven, Netherlands) and beat them 4:1 for the world championship.

This is the team which made all this happen:

Below you can see a video, recorded by Tech United, from the final (Stuttgart = magenta; Tech United = cyan).

(direct link to the video)

By the way, all robots are powered by Debian GNU/Linux and the software is developed with C++ and Qt (for graphical tools)…

At the moment Free Software in education is one of my main interests in the Free Software ecosystem. FSFE’s Fellowship wiki already provides some useful information on this topic. It’s quite interesting to see the development in this area. Further I think schools play an important role for the adoption of Free Software in many areas. What pupils learn and get used to during school is what they want to use and what they demand if they enter the business world. I also think that it is important to get as early as possible at least a basic idea about the role of software in the information society.

Today I read an interesting article about a school in Austria which uses GNU/Linux systems on USB sticks (German only). With LinuxAdvanced the school created their own distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (aka Lenny) and the lightweight desktop environment Xfce.

The Kremser Bundesgymnasium uses this system since two years on all computers in the computer science classrooms. Now they decided to switch from local installations to live systems on USB sticks. The advantage: The pupils can carry their system around with themselves. They can use it at school, at home or at any computer they want. About 50% of all pupils uses the system regularly at home. It seems like especially the young pupils using the system quite naturally and have no reservations. Further Rene Schwarzinger explains: “We don’t want to encourage our pupils to create illegal copies just to be able to work at home with the same programs as at school”. The obvious solution to avoid this is to use only Free Software at school and pass it down to the pupils.

In autumn they want to introduce netbooks together with the GNU/Linux USB stick to the pupils.

I really like the idea using USB sticks instead of normal installations on hard disks. Live systems are nothing new but I think it makes much sense in this scenario. With the USB sticks the pupils can work with their systems and their data wherever they want without having to convince their parents to install a new operating system at home which could be quite challenging, both technically and philosophically.

I’m interested in more success stories about Free Software and GNU/Linux in schools. Please let me know if you know schools (especially in Germany or Europe) which already uses GNU/Linux or prepare the switch to Free Software.

While it was quite easy to set up my Fellowship smartcard for SSH logins on Debian GNU/Linux following this instructions I never managed to get it working on Fedora GNU/Linux. At some point of time I just gave up. Today finally I found a solution in an on-line forum.

The problem was that gpg-agent always stopped with the error message:

$ gpg-agent
gpg-agent[2857]: can't connect to `/home/schiesbn/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent': No such file or directory
gpg-agent: no gpg-agent running in this session

By default the gpg-agent on Fedora creates the socket in /tmp instead of in /home/schiesbn/.gnupg. So you have to move it manually over to your home directory once gpg-agent has started.

To do this I use this script:

#!/bin/bash
 
# Decide whether to start gpg-agent daemon.
# Create necessary symbolic link in $HOME/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent
 
SOCKET=S.gpg-agent
PIDOF=`pidof gpg-agent`
RETVAL=$?
 
if [ "$RETVAL" -eq 1 ]; then
	echo "Starting gpg-agent daemon."
	eval `gpg-agent --daemon `
else
	echo "Daemon gpg-agent already running."
fi
 
# Nasty way to find gpg-agent's socket file...
GPG_SOCKET_FILE=`find /tmp/gpg-* -name $SOCKET`
echo "Updating socket file link."
cp -fs $GPG_SOCKET_FILE $HOME/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent

To execute this script during log-in I have added this to my ~/.bashrc:

# GPG-AGENT stuff
GET_TTY=`tty`
export $GET_TTY
$HOME/bin/gpg-agent-start.sh

I still wonder why it works that easy on Debian and on Fedora i need all this scripting. But for the moment I’m just happy that I have found a solution to use my smartcard for SSH login on my Fedora systems.

About one week ago the new Fellowship web page was launched. It’s a great improvement over the old one. Finally we have a first-class blogging platform, a first class wiki and a planet to aggregate all weblogs of FSFE’s Fellows. I think this components already show that communication (blogs, planet) and collaboration (wiki) is an essential part of the Fellowship. Beside increasing FSFE’s financial independence and political weight the Fellowship always aimed to bring Free Software supporters together and offer them a place to exchange ideas and collaborate on Free Software activities.

But the Fellowship offers even more ways to collaborate and communicate. There are mailing lists for various languages and regional Fellowship groups, there is a Jabber server with multi-user chats (MUC), there are IRC channels and there are even Fellowship meetings for real life contacts. I always thought that this infrastructure was not as visible as it should be. So as one of my contribution to the new web page I helped to create the communicate-page which gives an overview of all these options.

Just take a look at it. Maybe you will find some mailing lists or chat rooms you are interested in. With this web page in place I hope more Fellows will know an use the various communication channels.

E-Mail, News, Editing, Writing, Programming,… Since a few year now I use GNU Emacs for almost everything i do regularly on my computer. But there is still so many to discover and learn. The last few weeks I started to use org-mode for notes, ToDo lists, etc and i really love it. Especially the feature to link from your ToDo list or note directly to an mail in Gnus. Just copy (C-c l) the link to the mail in Gnus and insert (C-c C-l) it into the note. Now I can click on the link in my ToDo list and Emacs will show me directly the corresponding mail/thread in my mail client. Great!

As already said, for mails and news I use Gnus. Until now I always set up postfix as my Mail Transport Agent (MTA). Only today I learnt that Gnus is able to send e-mails directly without an external MTA. The only pitfall, you have to install gnutls-bin and starttls to use SSL/TLS. Otherwise it will not work and you will not get a meaningful error message. After that it is fairly easy. I just had to enter this into my ~/.gnus:

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(setq smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp-server")
(setq smtpmail-smtp-service 25)
(require 'smtpmail)
(setq message-send-mail-real-function 'smtpmail-send-it)
(setq smtpmail-auth-credentials
 '(("smtp-server" 25 "user" "passwd")))
(setq smtpmail-starttls-credentials
     '(("smtp-server" 25 nil nil)))
(setq starttls-use-gnutls t)
(setq starttls-gnutls-program "gnutls-cli")
(setq starttls-extra-arguments nil)

That’s it. Now I can apt-get remove postfix and have one service less in the background of my daily computing.

It’s time for the next Fellowship meeting in Stuttgart. It will take place at Thursday, 2 April at 19:00! We are going to meet in the “Unithekle”, Allmandring 17 , 70596 Stuttgart. Short term changes are announced in the wiki.

This time we want to talk about Free Software in education. I think this is an interesting and important topic. We live in the digital age. Therefore pupils should learn how to use and develop information technology in an social and sustainable way and all pupils should have equal opportunities. So if you know pupils, teachers or parents which are interested in Free Software, just take them with you to the Fellowship meeting.

I’m sure we will also have enough time to talk about other interesting Free Software topics. So if you are interested in Free Software, the FSFE and/or Free Software in education come and meet us at Thursday, 2. April.

For more information, also about previous events, look at our wiki page.