Differences between revisions 131 and 132
Revision 131 as of 2012-01-05 14:13:11
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Revision 132 as of 2012-01-05 21:58:55
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Editor: ?PetterReinholdtsen
Comment: Add BTS refs for RDP issues.
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 * The first user trying to log via RDP get a connection refused. The next login work. This was initially thought to be a problem with LDAP users or Kerberos authentication, but that proved to be false.  * The first user trying to log via RDP get a connection refused (BTS DebianBug:654788). The next login work. This was initially thought to be a problem with LDAP users or Kerberos authentication, but that proved to be false.
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 * The RDP server used with rdesktop corrupts the desktop graphics in some areas of the screen. Upgrading to a newer xrdp might solve this.  * The RDP server used with rdesktop corrupts the desktop graphics in some areas of the screen. The problem is apparently in the VNC server, so upgrading to a newer xrdp will probably not solve this (BTS DebianBug:608195).

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=608195

Status for Debian Edu based on Squeeze

  • ISO images of a netinst CD and a fully-contained DVD are available via rsync, http and ftp, see these verbose instructions how to test, also for instructions how to test using virtual machines.

  • Please help in making DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze crystal clear and covering all the basics and some tips for everyday usage.

  • It's not the time anymore to change things according to a new LDAP structure. We must settle down. Whats left to do, to move this page to ?DebianEdu/SqueezeLDAPStructure?

  • Check the tagged BTS bugs in unstable and testing.

  • All BTS reports related to Debian Edu should be usertagged. The ones open in testing are the ones affecting our squeeze testing.

  • See also DebianEdu/roadmap (and ?DebianEdu/wishlist).

  • See also ?DebianEdu/Devel/Squeeze - though the development phase is over now.

Issues to test

(Please don't add the status of those tests here, do that below. This list should cover a generic list of issues to test.)

  • Do LTSP clients boot?
  • Does the mail system work?
  • Does the creation of users work properly? Do they get a welcome-email?
  • Can the localadmin user access audio and video devices? Try audacity and cheese.
  • Can LDAP users access audio and video devices?
  • Do diskless workstations work, allowing users to log in and use their applications.
  • When installing a workstation, use desktop=gnome on the boot prompt as kernel option: Does a GNOME desktop with GDM install instead of a KDE based system. Same with desktop=lxde.
  • Do the RDP based access work for both local and LDAP/Kerberos users? Start 'rdesktop tjener' and log in to test.

Issues to fix

  • Nothing really. A certain sum of the important stuff below, maybe/probably! ;-)

Important

  • When the backbone subnet was changed from 10.0.2.0/23 to 10.0.0.0/8, the IP address of the gateway were not changed. This should be done to avoid surprising sysadmins.
  • Fix as many FIXMEs in the Manual as possible

    • documentation of gosa (jever has something, unfortunatly in German)
      • ie editing users / user groups / machines, dns, dhcp + samba / machine groups
      • see gosa related FIXMEs in manual
  • No manual translation is uptodate, ie they all lack the gosa description
  • Images in the html+pdf versions of the manual are outdated, as documentation/scripts/get_images is not working as it should.
  • new Gosa setup lack the students file group (BTS 653912)

  • When removing systems with GOsa² the corresponding dhcpHost entries in LDAP are not removed from the LDAP DIT (BTS 650258). The maintainer is informed, so is the release team.

  • BTS 641223: gnome+lxde desktops broken. this is probably inevitable for the DVD, and it's documented that it only works for netinst.

  • ldap2zone send an email to root every hour (BTS 653053), which fill up /var/ on the main server and causes squid and other services to stop working after a few days. It is fixed in unstable, but not in Squeeze.

  • Menu reordering for student users do not seem to work. Adding MENUREORDER=true in /etc/debian-edu/config should enable it for all users, but had no effect when Petter tested it on a Standalone installation from DVD 2012-01-02. It did have effect after logging out the user and removing its ~/.kde/ directory, so perhaps it only work if set before the first login.
  • The first user trying to log via RDP get a connection refused (BTS 654788). The next login work. This was initially thought to be a problem with LDAP users or Kerberos authentication, but that proved to be false.

  • There are problems with backup. The PHP app fail to remember when a user log in, and the backup of tjener do not seem to take place during the night.

Known bugs which are very unlikely to be fixed for Squeeze

  • The same set of packages are not installed when using DVD and PXE installation (probably also for netinst installations but this is not tested). Easy to spot by looking in the System KDE menu.
  • Gnome + LXDE cannot be installed from DVD, only from CD and PXE.
  • no autobuilders for amd64 and powerpc. (Daniel and Holger are watching the needs for builds and do binNMUs manually.)
  • with some location and language settings, a question from dictionary-common pops up. If you encounter such a problem, please file a bug against the dictionary-common package and test if the problems still persists when installing this location+language combination on wheezy.

Nice to have

  • Creating a user in GOsa and checking the box saying that the user need to change the password on the first login do not work. On thin clients, the user is logged in as normal without asking for the password to be changed, and on diskless workstation the user is just unable to log in without any explanation from kdm. On the main server the user can log into kdm without any warning.
  • How do KDE now handle LTSP local devices (USB memory sticks) inserted on the client? A popup should show up for the user only when devices on the thin client in use is inserted, and not when a memory stick is inserted on the thin client server. USB sticks do not work on thin clients.
  • Can we adjust the KDE menu to replace the default favorite applications? Yes, done by editing debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu/common/share/config/kickoffrc.
  • Can we adjust the KDE menu to start extra applets? Yes, this is done by adding .desktop files in autostart directories, for example in /etc/xdg/autostart/.
  • Which Iceweasel multimedia plugin work with most sites? The one we used for Lenny is removed in Squeeze. The most promising is gecho-mediaplayer.
  • Some init.d scripts are not using the output functions in /lib/lsb/init-functions, causing inconsistent output during boot (and no message displayed when running usplash in non-quiet mode): courier-imap-ssl, slapd, autofs5 (autofs), xfs, kdm.

  • missing stuff from ?DebianEdu/ChangesForLTSPinLinex

  • Installer hangs at the end after accepting the finish-install message when installing in a virtual kvm machine on Lenny. There is a kernel oops within the installer. Please file a bug in the Debian BTS.
  • The RDP server used with rdesktop corrupts the desktop graphics in some areas of the screen. The problem is apparently in the VNC server, so upgrading to a newer xrdp will probably not solve this (BTS 608195).

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=608195

Fixed issues

  • When a new user log in, his home directory is quickly filled with 144 MiB of data without the user doing anything. This is caused by akondai filling up ~/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/. We should try to disable whatever akonadi is doing to avoid filling up home0 and causing server overload when a class of new users log in for the first time. Fixed by reducing the akonady mysql log size from 64 to 4 MiB, following instructions from http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi#Akonadi_needs_too_much_space_in_my_home_directory.21 .

  • We now use the new pam-config stuff instead of replacing the files in /etc/pam.d/. it would have been nice to have pam-group support in pam-auth-update (BTS 370346), but we provide a workaround implemented in debian-edu-config by adding /usr/share/pam-config/edu-group to solve it for us. pam_group is used to provide fuse access to users logging in from thin clients for local device access (USB sticks etc).

  • root login is disabled now, so this is bogus: On the first login as root, KDE report about old kde3 configuration that need to be converted to kde4 configuration on first time login. First time users should not get such bogus message. (BTS 582568)

  • Installation a main-server with netinst in a network where the ldap DNS name is already defines breaks the generation and/or the distribution of the LDAP SSL certificate. Causes LDAP connections using TLS to not work. (BTS 570773) Fixed 2011-12-30 by copying the certificate to the right location on the main server when it is generated.

  • The htpasswd call from cfengine to set a random Nagios password do not work. htpasswd show usage info instead of setting the password. Fixed by setting the predefined Nagios password 'skolelinux'.
  • Partitioning silently fail to create the requested partitions if the available disk is too small. Proper fix require changes to partman-auto (BTS 653305) as well as changes to debian-edu-install when partman-auto is changed. Workaround implemented 2011-12-28 reporting too small disks after LVM partitioning is done.

  • Iceweasel default page is not http://www/. - which is not critical by itself, but indicates our mechanism to set it, is broken, which might have severe other effects. Fixed 2011-12-27, by setting default page to http://www.skolelinux.org/ for standalone installs, and http://www/ fetched from LDAP for all other profiles.

  • Samba has now full NT4 domain support configured for Windows XP and Windows 7 (need reg patch) clients. The machines are added via the Windows Add-Host-to-Domain GUI. After that they appear in GOsa² and then you can manage the Samba machines via GOsa².
  • gosa was unable to configure our dhcp and dns servers (BTS 602863)

  • Several error messages are reported from update-alternatives called by openssh-server and heirloom-mailx in the installation log. This leads to bogus error reports from the self testing (BTS 579287, BTS 579285)

  • The grub background image is not activated any more. (BTS 570786)

  • The multimedia plugin for Iceweasel is no longer installed, making all non-flash based video and audio fail to work. (BTS 570785)

  • PXE installer ask for mirror to use even when the default choices work just fine. The preseeding do not seem to work. (BTS 570783)

  • d-i-bootimages package missing in sid (BTS 570767)

  • Celestia is missing norwegian translation of the GUI and demo (BTS 570619 fixes a part of this)

  • KDM do not understand the kdm artwork provided by debian-edu-artwork and refuses to start (BTS 570369)

  • The fetch-ldap-cert init.d script should start after slapd, not after apache. It connects to the ldaps port, not https. The script header should be fixed. (BTS 566973)

  • When installing using norwegian langauge, a question about which (nb/nn) wordlist to use is asked. This should be preseeded if possible. (BTS 566912)

  • hwdetect warn that the file /etc/modprobe.d/debian-edu-install need to end with .conf to be read in the future. This should be fixed. (done)
  • The pdns-recursor scripts start to early in the boot (BTS 566877). Worked around with insserv override in debian-edu-config but should be fixed in pdns instead.

  • Some applications show up in strange places in the KDE menu and should be moved; qsynth (566730), score-reading-trainer(566725), noteedit (566728).

  • The munin cron job complain with email to root about /var/www/munin/ not being available. BTS bug 567168 in sitesummary fixed in svn and unstable, should enter testing 2010-02-16.

  • Samba fail to start on a main-server. (BTS 570775)

  • NFS exports do not seem to work when installing main-server+thin-client-server. The problem is that portmap only allow connections from localhost, and this can be changed using preseeding. There is work in Debian to repace portmap with rpcbind. We might want to do the same. (BTS 570776)

  • Nagios fail to start at first boot because the generated configuration isn't ready yet (sitesummary related?)
  • Is automount support missing? The autofs-ldap package is not installed, at least. Perhaps it changed name to autofs5-ldap? (BTS 570782)

  • Buttons in KDM theme do not work (BTS ). KDM configuration file have moved from /etc/kde3/ to /etc/kde4/, and the settings we want are no longer applied.

  • Default partition sizes are too small for workstation+thin-client-server installation (/opt, /var/ and /usr/ are too full). The cause is probably that all recommended packages are installed, and this require more space. (BTS 570772)

  • USB memory sticks do not work on LTSP thin clients.
  • libnss-ldapd have been split in two, and our preseeding need to preseed the nslcd package instead. Probably want to replace libpam-ldap with libpam-ldapd as well. (BTS 570781)

  • The Apache configuration related to munin was incorrect, causing http://www/munin/ to show error about non-existing page.

  • USB memory sticks did not work on LTSP thin clients. Ensuring ltsp users had group membership in fuse during login solved this.
  • First time KDE users are not prompted for KDE3 to KDE4 config file migrations anymore. BTS 570784)

Translation status

We should make sure all the programs listed on http://www.slx.no/en/take-a-tour are available on our most used languages. Here is a summary of the current status:

Program name

Norwegian Bokmål

Norwegian Nynorsk

German

Spanish

Traditional Chinese

French

Iceweasel

OK

OK

OK

?

OK

OK

GCompris

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

KTouch

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

KAlgebra

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

Kig

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

Kgeography

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

Celestia

Missing

Missing

partial

?

?

OK

Stopmotion

OK

Missing

OK

?

?

OK

Scribus NG

Partly

Missing

OK

?

?

OK

Gimp

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

Digikam

OK

Missing

OK

?

?

Partly

Kino

OK

Missing

OK

?

?

Partly

Blender

Missing

Missing

Missing

?

?

?

Inkscape

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

Rosegarden

Missing

Missing

OK

?

?

OK

Audacity

OK

Missing

OK

?

?

OK

Hydrogen

Missing

Missing

OK

?

?

OK

OpenOffice.org Writer

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

OpenOffice.org Calc

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

OpenOffice.org Impress

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

OpenOffice.org Draw

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

OpenOffice.org Base

OK

OK

OK

?

?

OK

Duplicate targets

It is a goal to only provide the best application for a given task, and avoid several applications for the same tasks. Here is a list of duplicates currently being installed.

video player

Both kaffeine, mplayer, gnome-mplayer and dragonplayer is installed and show up in the KDE menu Multimedia. mplayer is a dependency of gnome-mplayer, which in turn is a dependency of gecko-mediaplayer used by iceweasel for inline video playing and in our task list. dragonplayer is a dependency of kde-standard, which is recommended by kdebase, which is in our task list. kaffine is recommended by education-desktop-other in our task list.

Improvement 2010-07-30: Made video player selection depend on desktop type. Set it to dragonplayer for KDE and totem for Gnome/LXDE. Kaffeine is no longer installed by default. Still several players because geckos-mediaplayer pull in gnome-mplayer and mplayer.

video editor

both kino and kdenlive is installed and show up in the KDE menu Multimedia. Both are recommended by education-desktop-other in our task list.

music player

in a standalone installation (and most likely any workstation based installation), there are four music players listed in the Multimedia KDE menu: Audacious, Audacious (GTKui), Amarok and JuK. Perhaps only one of them are needed?

package manager

Both adept and synaptic is installed and show up in the KDE menu under System. adept | synaptic is recommended by education-desktop-other and pulled in that way, while synaptic is recommended by system-config-printer, which is recommended by printer-applet, which is in our task list.

Improvement 2010-07-30: Changed our tasks to install synaptic by default, and hope this will cause adept to not be installed.

LDAP viewer and editor

Both luma and jxplorer used to be installed. Both were in our task lists. When Petter checked 2012-01-03, only jxplorer was installed.

Scanner control

There are two scanner applications in the KDE Graphics menu. One is called acquireimages from the kipi-plugins package recommended by the education-desktop-kde package in our task lists. The other is skanlite recommended by education-desktop-other in our task list.

PDF and Postscript viewer

Both gv and okular is installed and showing up in the KDE graphics menu. okular is a dependency of kde-standard in our task lists. gv is a dependency of maxima which is a dependency of wxmaxima which is in our task lists.

PAM is set up to use both LDAP and Kerberos

Both libpam-ldapd and libpam-krb5 is installed. libpam-krb5 is recommended by education-networking and in our task list, while libpam-ldapd is recommended by nslcd, which is a dependency of libnss-ldapd, which is in our task lists.

A bug against nslcd (591773)) is reported to ask for the recommend from nslcd to libpam-ldapd to be changed.

Improvement 2010-08-09: Added cfengine rule to purge libpam-ldapd after tasksel is done installing packages, which solve the problem for us.

Mathematical function plotter

At least three different function plotters are installed by default. grace is recommended by education-mathematics, kmplot is a dependency of kdeedu which is recommended by education-desktop-kde, and gnuplot is recommended by education-mathematics.

Mathematical geometry viewers and plotters

Also some geometry viewers with similar functionality as plotters mentioned above are installed by default. A very subjective review (Bjarne Nielsen, 2010-12-04):

?GeoGebra: ?LooGeoGebra is free and multi-platform dynamic mathematics software for all levels of education that joins geometry, algebra, tables, graphing, statistics and calculus in one easy-to-use package. Looks intuitive and useful.

Dr Geo: Looks as it wants to do the same as ?GeoGebra, but less intuitive.

Geomview: Geomview is an interactive 3D viewing program for Unix. Geomview lets you view and manipulate three-dimensional objects: you use the mouse to rotate, translate, zoom in and out, and so on. Seems to be able to do some advanced stuff, but not very intuitive, and not very nice gui. Maybe it should be in another category than mathematics?

Grace: Grace is a WYSIWYG 2D plotting tool for the X Window System and M*tif, successor of ACE/gr (Xmgr). ?GeoGebra and Kig looks nicer and seems to do mostly the same.

?GraphThing: Does not seem very useful to me, compared with the others... No updates since 2006.

Kig: It is meant as a better replacement for such free programs as KGeo, KSeg and Dr. Geo and commercial programs like Cabri.

Cantor: Cantor is an application that lets you use your favorite mathematical applications from within a nice KDE-integrated Worksheet Interface. It offers assistant dialogs for common tasks and allows you to share your worksheets with others. Four backends are curently available: Sage, Maxima, R and KAlgebra. Someone with more knowledge will have to review this, but KAlgebra seem to be the only "backend" that is installed by default.

?GraphMonkey: Plotting tool. Simple gui, but works ok.

KMplot: Plotting tool, intuitive and useful.

KAlgebra: Installed, but not in the menu?

IMHO ?GraphThing, Grace, Dr Geo, ?GraphMonkey and possibly Geomview could be removed. If Cantor is kept, maybe adding r-base could be useful.

Chemistry software

GPeriodic and Kalzium are similar, but Kalzium looks nicer.

Chemtool, XDrawChem, ?EasyChem and GChemPaintm, Ghemical are pretty similar. GChemPaint

?PyMol is probably a bit advanced for most schools, GDIS Molecule Modeller is maybe more relevant and Viewmol probably does about the same, but someone more skilled should maybe have a look.

Kalzium, GChemPaint and GDIS are maybe the ones to keep.

Other pedagogical software

?PySyCache does not seem to have anything you cant do in GCompris.