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.

Vom 6. bis 7. Mai wird Bernhard Reiter, Deutschland-Koordinator der FSFE, zu Gast in Stuttgart sein. Wir wollen die Gelegenheit für ein spontanes Fellowship-Treffen nutzen. Das Treffen wird wie immer im Unithekle in Stuttgart/Vaihingen stattfinden. Eine genaue Uhrzeit wird auf der Wiki Seite der Fellowship-Gruppe Stuttgart noch bekannt gegeben. Wie immer sind alle Fellows und Freie Software interessierte eingeladen daran teilzunehmen.

Am Donnerstag, den 7. Mai wird Bernhard Reiter dann an der Universität Stuttgart (Campus Vaihingen) einen Gastvortrag im Rahmen der Vorlesung “Free/Libre and Open Source Software Engineering” halten. Der Titel seines Vortrags lautet “Professionelle Freie Software in Wirtschaft und Politik”.

In dem Vortrag wird es u.a. um Folgende Themen gehen:

• Freie Software, was ist das?
• Eine handvoll Lizenzkategorien reicht aus
• Freie Software und Politik, viele Chancen noch offen
• Flurschaden in der gesamten Softwarebranche durch Patente
• Streit um offene Standards
• offene Entwicklung ist nicht gleichzusetzen mit Freie Software
• Tipps vom Freie Software Profi

Natürlich wird auch genug Zeit für Diskussionen bleiben. Die Teilnahme steht für jeden offen und ist kostenfrei. Der Vortrag beginnt um 11:30Uhr und wird im Hörsaal V55.01 stattfinden.

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.

Today the “Frühjahrsfestival zum Datenschutz” (engl. “spring festival of privacy”) starts at the public library of Stuttgart. This will be a 4 day event from 25. to 28. March 2009.

Today the event will start at 19:30 with a speech by Padeluun, he is a member of the Big Brother Award panel in Germany and a chairman of the FoeBuD e.V., an association which works for civil rights and privacy. The title of his talk will be “Datenkraken. Die Kommunikationsgesellschaft und ihre Feinde” (engl: The communication-society and their enemies). Don’t miss it!

The next days there will be a lot of workshops for pupils, parents and teenagers and other interesting talks.

The last day (Saturday, 28. March) will be organised by the Chaos Computer Club Stuttgart (CCCS) with a lot of interesting speeches and practical examples how to improve privacy. At 14:00 I will give a speech about “Freie Software und Datenschutz” (engl: Privacy and Free Software).

Don’t miss the event! I’m sure it will be great!

Today the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) celebrates his 2³ birthday! For 8 years now, the FSFE works for basic rights and freedom in the digital age, a world in which our life increasingly depends on software.

In this eight years FSFE achieved a lot, from the local area to Europe and even up to the United Nations. It ranges from highly visible activities like the Document Freedom Day and the recently launched pdfreaders.org to a lot of behind-the-scenes activities like the work at the United Nations, promoting Free Software interests at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), contributed to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), taken part in discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), taught project managers of the World Bank about Free Software and many more.

In honor of the day FSFE has released a special edition of the Fellowship Interview series, in which Georg Greve explains the history behind FSFE and how he came to found it. Here you can find the Interview.

I always struggled to find the right mail notification applet for my desktop. Furthermore I always stumble over the question: Why do I have to ask the mail server in a defined time interval “Do I have a new e-mail?”. Wouldn’t it be better if the mail server notifies me if a new e-mail arrives?
This is probably somehow a new form of the good old question “mailing list vs bulletin board” or in general: Do i have to fetch the information or does the information come to me? Personally i always preferred to get the information and not to hunt around for them.

Thinking about this question i realized that notification through Jabber would be perfect and the open XMPP protocol virtually invites one to do such things.

The idea was born. Now the first step was to find a easy to use XMPP implementation for a scripting language like Python, Ruby or PHP. At the end I found a quite nice and easy to use PHP library. While searching such a library I also found this guidance (German only), borrowed some code from it and my solution was born:

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<?php
// The script gets the input either as an argument, from a REQUEST-variable or from stdin
// If you use it within procmail you will get the input through stdin 
if ($argv[1]) {
    $msg = $argv[1];
} elseif ($_REQUEST['msg']) {
    $msg = urldecode($_REQUEST['msg']);
} else {
    // open stdin. Only read the first 4096 character, this should be enough to match
    // the FROM- and  SUBJECT-header
    $stdin = fopen('php://stdin', 'r');
    $msg   = fread($stdin, 4096);
 
    if (empty($msg)) {
        $msg = "empty";
    } else {
        // Get FROM und SUBJECT
        preg_match('@From:(.*)@i', $msg, $from);
	preg_match('@Subject:(.*)@i', $msg, $subject);
        $msg = "\n" . $from[0] . "\n" . $subject[0] . "\n";
    }
}
 
// now init xmpp and get the notification out
include 'XMPPHP/XMPP.php';
 
$conn = new XMPPHP_XMPP('schiessle.org', 5222, 'user', 'password', 'xmpphp', 'schiessle.org', $printlog=false, $loglevel=XMPPHP_Log::LEVEL_INFO);
 
try {
    $conn->connect();
    $conn->processUntil('session_start');
    $conn->presence();
    $conn->message('me@jabber.server.org', $msg);
    $conn->disconnect();
} catch(XMPPHP_Exception $e) {
    die($e->getMessage());
}
?>

Now I just had to tell procmail to pipe the mails through the PHP script. If you want to get notified about all mails you can simply put this line at the top of your procmail rules (Or maybe at least behind the spam filter rules ):

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:0c
|php /home/schiessle/bin/mailnotification.php

I want to get notified only about some specific mails so I extended my procmail rules in this way:

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:0
* ^(To:|Cc:).*foo@bar-mailinglist.org
{
 	:0c
        |php /home/schiessle/bin/mailnotification.php
 
        :0
        .bar-list/
}

That’s it! All in all it was quite easy to get e-mail notification through Jabber. Now I don’t have to search for the right applet, configure it etc.. All I have to do is to start my Jabber client and I will get notified about new mails whatever desktop or computer i’m using.

Today the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) announced their latest initiative: PDFreaders.org. The initiative started in the Fellowship and is coordinated by the Fellows Hannes Hauswedell and Jan-Hendrik Peters. The Fellowship increases FSFE’s financial independence, FSFE’s political weight, FSFE’s workforce and is the source of many great projects, activites and campaigns. Read more about the Fellowship.

Many websites with PDF documents have a link to a proprietary PDF reader from one specific company. This initiative tries to change this and offers buttons to link to pdfreaders.org which leads people to a list of free as in freedom and vendor neutral PDF readers.

FSFE president Georg Greve explains: “Interoperability, competition and choice are primary benefits of Open Standards that translate into vendor-independence and better value for money for customers. Although many versions of PDF offer all these benefits for formatted text and documents, files in PDF formats typically come with information that users need to use a specific product. pdfreaders.org provides an alternative to highlight the strengths of PDF as an Open Standard.”

Jan-Hendrik Peters, one of the coordinators of this initiative says: “Free Software gives us control over the software we use, and Open Standards give us control over our data and allow implementations by many different groups. We wanted to show that with the Portable Document Format people can have both.”

Support Free Software and Open Standards! Put one of the PDFreaders.org-Buttons next to PDF files on your websites!