Petter Reinholdtsen

wmbusmeters, parse data from your utility meter - nice free software
19th May 2023

There is a European standard for reading utility meters like water, gas, electricity or heat distribution meters. The Meter-Bus standard (EN 13757-2, EN 13757-3 and EN 13757–4) provide a cross vendor way to talk to and collect meter data. I ran into this standard when I wanted to monitor some heat distribution meters, and managed to find free software that could do the job. The meters in question broadcast encrypted messages with meter information via radio, and the hardest part was to track down the encryption keys from the vendor. With this in place I could set up a MQTT gateway to submit the meter data for graphing.

The free software systems in question, rtl-wmbus to read the messages from a software defined radio, and wmbusmeters to decrypt and decode the content of the messages, is working very well and allowe me to get frequent updates from my meters. I got in touch with upstream last year to see if there was any interest in publishing the packages via Debian. I was very happy to learn that Fredrik Öhrström volunteered to maintain the packages, and I have since assisted him in getting Debian package build rules in place as well as sponsoring the packages into the Debian archive. Sadly we completed it too late for them to become part of the next stable Debian release (Bookworm). The wmbusmeters package just cleared the NEW queue. It will need some work to fix a built problem, but I expect Fredrik will find a solution soon.

If you got a infrastructure meter supporting the Meter Bus standard, I strongly recommend having a look at these nice packages.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: debian, english, nice free software.
The 2023 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering
14th May 2023

The LinuxCNC project is making headway these days. A lot of patches and issues have seen activity on the project github pages recently. A few weeks ago there was a developer gathering over at the Tormach headquarter in Wisconsin, and now we are planning a new gathering in Norway. If you wonder what LinuxCNC is, lets quote Wikipedia:

"LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen, interactive development)."

The Norwegian developer gathering take place the weekend June 16th to 18th this year, and is open for everyone interested in contributing to LinuxCNC. Up to date information about the gathering can be found in the developer mailing list thread where the gathering was announced. Thanks to the good people at Debian, Redpill-Linpro and NUUG Foundation, we have enough sponsor funds to pay for food, and shelter for the people traveling from afar to join us. If you would like to join the gathering, get in touch.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: debian, english, linuxcnc.
OpenSnitch in Debian ready for prime time
13th May 2023

A bit delayed, the interactive application firewall OpenSnitch package in Debian now got the latest fixes ready for Debian Bookworm. Because it depend on a package missing on some architectures, the autopkgtest check of the testing migration script did not understand that the tests were actually working, so the migration was delayed. A bug in the package dependencies is also fixed, so those installing the firewall package (opensnitch) now also get the GUI admin tool (python3-opensnitch-ui) installed by default. I am very grateful to Gustavo Iñiguez Goya for his work on getting the package ready for Debian Bookworm.

Armed with this package I have discovered some surprising connections from programs I believed were able to work completly offline, and it has already proven its worth, at least to me. If you too want to get more familiar with the kind of programs using Internett connections on your machine, I recommend testing apt install opensnitch in Bookworm and see what you think.

The package is still not able to build its eBPF module within Debian. Not sure how much work it would be to get it working, but suspect some kernel related packages need to be extended with more header files to get it working.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: debian, english, opensnitch.
Speech to text, she APTly whispered, how hard can it be?
23rd April 2023

While visiting a convention during Easter, it occurred to me that it would be great if I could have a digital Dictaphone with transcribing capabilities, providing me with texts to cut-n-paste into stuff I need to write. The background is that long drives often bring up the urge to write on texts I am working on, which of course is out of the question while driving. With the release of OpenAI Whisper, this seem to be within reach with Free Software, so I decided to give it a go. OpenAI Whisper is a Linux based neural network system to read in audio files and provide text representation of the speech in that audio recording. It handle multiple languages and according to its creators even can translate into a different language than the spoken one. I have not tested the latter feature. It can either use the CPU or a GPU with CUDA support. As far as I can tell, CUDA in practice limit that feature to NVidia graphics cards. I have few of those, as they do not work great with free software drivers, and have not tested the GPU option. While looking into the matter, I did discover some work to provide CUDA support on non-NVidia GPUs, and some work with the library used by Whisper to port it to other GPUs, but have not spent much time looking into GPU support yet. I've so far used an old X220 laptop as my test machine, and only transcribed using its CPU.

As it from a privacy standpoint is unthinkable to use computers under control of someone else (aka a "cloud" service) to transcribe ones thoughts and personal notes, I want to run the transcribing system locally on my own computers. The only sensible approach to me is to make the effort I put into this available for any Linux user and to upload the needed packages into Debian. Looking at Debian Bookworm, I discovered that only three packages were missing, tiktoken, triton, and openai-whisper. For a while I also believed ffmpeg-python was needed, but as its upstream seem to have vanished I found it safer to rewrite whisper to stop depending on in than to introduce ffmpeg-python into Debian. I decided to place these packages under the umbrella of the Debian Deep Learning Team, which seem like the best team to look after such packages. Discussing the topic within the group also made me aware that the triton package was already a future dependency of newer versions of the torch package being planned, and would be needed after Bookworm is released.

All required code packages have been now waiting in the Debian NEW queue since Wednesday, heading for Debian Experimental until Bookworm is released. An unsolved issue is how to handle the neural network models used by Whisper. The default behaviour of Whisper is to require Internet connectivity and download the model requested to ~/.cache/whisper/ on first invocation. This obviously would fail the deserted island test of free software as the Debian packages would be unusable for someone stranded with only the Debian archive and solar powered computer on a deserted island.

Because of this, I would love to include the models in the Debian mirror system. This is problematic, as the models are very large files, which would put a heavy strain on the Debian mirror infrastructure around the globe. The strain would be even higher if the models change often, which luckily as far as I can tell they do not. The small model, which according to its creator is most useful for English and in my experience is not doing a great job there either, is 462 MiB (deb is 414 MiB). The medium model, which to me seem to handle English speech fairly well is 1.5 GiB (deb is 1.3 GiB) and the large model is 2.9 GiB (deb is 2.6 GiB). I would assume everyone with enough resources would prefer to use the large model for highest quality. I believe the models themselves would have to go into the non-free part of the Debian archive, as they are not really including any useful source code for updating the models. The "source", aka the model training set, according to the creators consist of "680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web", which to me reads material with both unknown copyright terms, unavailable to the general public. In other words, the source is not available according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the model should be considered non-free.

I asked the Debian FTP masters for advice regarding uploading a model package on their IRC channel, and based on the feedback there it is still unclear to me if such package would be accepted into the archive. In any case I wrote build rules for a OpenAI Whisper model package and modified the Whisper code base to prefer shared files under /usr/ and /var/ over user specific files in ~/.cache/whisper/ to be able to use these model packages, to prepare for such possibility. One solution might be to include only one of the models (small or medium, I guess) in the Debian archive, and ask people to download the others from the Internet. Not quite sure what to do here, and advice is most welcome (use the debian-ai mailing list).

To make it easier to test the new packages while I wait for them to clear the NEW queue, I created an APT source targeting bookworm. I selected Bookworm instead of Bullseye, even though I know the latter would reach more users, is that some of the required dependencies are missing from Bullseye and I during this phase of testing did not want to backport a lot of packages just to get up and running.

Here is a recipe to run as user root if you want to test OpenAI Whisper using Debian packages on your Debian Bookworm installation, first adding the APT repository GPG key to the list of trusted keys, then setting up the APT repository and finally installing the packages and one of the models:

curl https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/D78F5C4796F353D211B119E28200D9B589641240.asc \
  -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/pere-whisper.asc
mkdir -p /etc/apt/sources.list.d
cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pere-whisper.list <<EOF
deb https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
deb-src https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
EOF
apt update
apt install openai-whisper

The package work for me, but have not yet been tested on any other computer than my own. With it, I have been able to (badly) transcribe a 2 minute 40 second Norwegian audio clip to test using the small model. This took 11 minutes and around 2.2 GiB of RAM. Transcribing the same file with the medium model gave a accurate text in 77 minutes using around 5.2 GiB of RAM. My test machine had too little memory to test the large model, which I believe require 11 GiB of RAM. In short, this now work for me using Debian packages, and I hope it will for you and everyone else once the packages enter Debian.

Now I can start on the audio recording part of this project.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: debian, english, multimedia, video.
rtlsdr-scanner, software defined radio frequency scanner for Linux - nice free software
7th April 2023

Today I finally found time to track down a useful radio frequency scanner for my software defined radio. Just for fun I tried to locate the radios used in the areas, and a good start would be to scan all the frequencies to see what is in use. I've tried to find a useful program earlier, but ran out of time before I managed to find a useful tool. This time I was more successful, and after a few false leads I found a description of rtlsdr-scanner over at the Kali site, and was able to track down the Kali package git repository to build a deb package for the scanner. Sadly the package is missing from the Debian project itself, at least in Debian Bullseye. Two runtime dependencies, python-visvis and python-rtlsdr had to be built and installed separately. Luckily 'gbp buildpackage' handled them just fine and no further packages had to be manually built. The end result worked out of the box after installation.

My initial scans for FM channels worked just fine, so I knew the scanner was functioning. But when I tried to scan every frequency from 100 to 1000 MHz, the program stopped unexpectedly near the completion. After some debugging I discovered USB software radio I used rejected frequencies above 948 MHz, triggering a unreported exception breaking the scan. Changing the scan to end at 957 worked better. I similarly found the lower limit to be around 15, and ended up with the following full scan:

Saving the scan did not work, but exporting it as a CSV file worked just fine. I ended up with around 477k CVS lines with dB level for the given frequency.

The save failure seem to be a missing UTF-8 encoding issue in the python code. Will see if I can find time to send a patch upstream later to fix this exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py", line 485, in __on_save
    save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py", line 408, in save_plot
    handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py", line 485, in __on_save
    save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py", line 408, in save_plot
    handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: debian, english, nice free software.
OpenSnitch available in Debian Sid and Bookworm
25th February 2023

Thanks to the efforts of the OpenSnitch lead developer Gustavo Iñiguez Goya allowing me to sponsor the upload, the interactive application firewall OpenSnitch is now available in Debian Testing, soon to become the next stable release of Debian.

This is a package which set up a network firewall on one or more machines, which is controlled by a graphical user interface that will ask the user if a program should be allowed to connect to the local network or the Internet. If some background daemon is trying to dial home, it can be blocked from doing so with a simple mouse click, or by default simply by not doing anything when the GUI question dialog pop up. A list of all programs discovered using the network is provided in the GUI, giving the user an overview of how the machine(s) programs use the network.

OpenSnitch was uploaded for NEW processing about a month ago, and I had little hope of it getting accepted and shaping up in time for the package freeze, but the Debian ftpmasters proved to be amazingly quick at checking out the package and it was accepted into the archive about week after the first upload. It is now team maintained under the Go language team umbrella. A few fixes to the default setup is only in Sid, and should migrate to Testing/Bookworm in a week.

During testing I ran into an issue with Minecraft server broadcasts disappearing, which was quickly resolved by the developer with a patch and a proposed configuration change. I've been told this was caused by the Debian packages default use if /proc/ information to track down kernel status, instead of the newer eBPF module that can be used. The reason is simply that upstream and I have failed to find a way to build the eBPF modules for OpenSnitch without a complete configured Linux kernel source tree, which as far as we can tell is unavailable as a build dependency in Debian. We tried unsuccessfully so far to use the kernel-headers package. It would be great if someone could provide some clues how to build eBPF modules on build daemons in Debian, possibly without the full kernel source.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: debian, english, opensnitch.
Is the desktop recommending your program for opening its files?
29th January 2023

Linux desktop systems have standardized how programs present themselves to the desktop system. If a package include a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications/, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Xfce and the other desktop environments will pick up the file and use its content to generate the menu of available programs in the system. A lesser known fact is that a package can also explain to the desktop system how to recognize the files created by the program in question, and use it to open these files on request, for example via a GUI file browser.

A while back I ran into a package that did not tell the desktop system how to recognize its files and was not used to open its files in the file browser and fixed it. In the process I wrote a simple debian/tests/ script to ensure the setup keep working. It might be useful for other packages too, to ensure any future version of the package keep handling its own files.

For this to work the file format need a useful MIME type that can be used to identify the format. If the file format do not yet have a MIME type, it should define one and preferably also register it with IANA to ensure the MIME type string is reserved.

The script uses the xdg-mime program from xdg-utils to query the database of standardized package information and ensure it return sensible values. It also need the location of an example file for xdg-mime to guess the format of.

#!/bin/sh
#
# Author: Petter Reinholdtsen
# License: GPL v2 or later at your choice.
#
# Validate the MIME setup, making sure motor types have
# application/vnd.openmotor+yaml associated with them and is connected
# to the openmotor desktop file.

retval=0

mimetype="application/vnd.openmotor+yaml"
testfile="test/data/real/o3100/motor.ric"
mydesktopfile="openmotor.desktop"

filemime="$(xdg-mime query filetype "$testfile")"

if [ "$mimetype" != "$filemime" ] ; then
    retval=1
    echo "error: xdg-mime claim motor file MIME type is $filemine, not $mimetype"
else
    echo "success: xdg-mime report correct mime type $mimetype for motor file"
fi

desktop=$(xdg-mime query default "$mimetype")

if [ "$mydesktopfile" != "$desktop" ]; then
    retval=1
    echo "error: xdg-mime claim motor file should be handled by $desktop, not $mydesktopfile"
else
    echo "success: xdg-mime agree motor file should be handled by $mydesktopfile"
fi

exit $retval

It is a simple way to ensure your users are not very surprised when they try to open one of your file formats in their file browser.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: debian, english.
Opensnitch, the application level interactive firewall, heading into the Debian archive
22nd January 2023

While reading a blog post claiming MacOS X recently started scanning local files and reporting information about them to Apple, even on a machine where all such callback features had been disabled, I came across a description of the Little Snitch application for MacOS X. It seemed like a very nice tool to have in the tool box, and I decided to see if something similar was available for Linux.

It did not take long to find the OpenSnitch package, which has been in development since 2017, and now is in version 1.5.0. It has had a request for Debian packaging since 2018, but no-one completed the job so far. Just for fun, I decided to see if I could help, and I was very happy to discover that upstream want a Debian package too.

After struggling a bit with getting the program to run, figuring out building Go programs (and a little failed detour to look at eBPF builds too - help needed), I am very happy to report that I am sponsoring upstream to maintain the package in Debian, and it has since this morning been waiting in NEW for the ftpmasters to have a look. Perhaps it can get into the archive in time for the Bookworm release?

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: debian, english, opensnitch.
LinuxCNC MQTT publisher component
8th January 2023

I watched a 2015 video from Andreas Schiffler the other day, where he set up LinuxCNC to send status information to the MQTT broker IBM Bluemix. As I also use MQTT for graphing, it occured to me that a generic MQTT LinuxCNC component would be useful and I set out to implement it. Today I got the first draft limping along and submitted as a patch to the LinuxCNC project.

The simple part was setting up the MQTT publishing code in Python. I already have set up other parts submitting data to my Mosquito MQTT broker, so I could reuse that code. Writing a LinuxCNC component in Python as new to me, but using existing examples in the code repository and the extensive documentation, this was fairly straight forward. The hardest part was creating a automated test for the component to ensure it was working. Testing it in a simulated LinuxCNC machine proved very useful, as I discovered features I needed that I had not thought of yet, and adjusted the code quite a bit to make it easier to test without a operational MQTT broker available.

The draft is ready and working, but I am unsure which LinuxCNC HAL pins I should collect and publish by default (in other words, the default set of information pieces published), and how to get the machine name from the LinuxCNC INI file. The latter is a minor detail, but I expect it would be useful in a setup with several machines available. I am hoping for feedback from the experienced LinuxCNC developers and users, to make the component even better before it can go into the mainland LinuxCNC code base.

Since I started on the MQTT component, I came across another video from Kent VanderVelden where he combine LinuxCNC with a set of screen glasses controlled by a Raspberry Pi, and it occured to me that it would be useful for such use cases if LinuxCNC also provided a REST API for querying its status. I hope to start on such component once the MQTT component is working well.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: debian, english, linuxcnc, robot.
ONVIF IP camera management tool finally in Debian
24th December 2022

Merry Christmas to you all. Here is a small gift to all those with IP cameras following the ONVIF specification. There is finally a nice command line and GUI tool in Debian to manage ONVIF IP cameras. After working with upstream for a few months and sponsoring the upload, I am very happy to report that the libonvif package entered Debian Sid last night.

The package provide a C library to communicate with such cameras, a command line tool to locate and update settings of (like password) the cameras and a GUI tool to configure and control the units as well as preview the video from the camera. Libonvif is available on Both Linux and Windows and the GUI tool uses the Qt library. The main competitors are non-free software, while libonvif is GNU GPL licensed. I am very glad Debian users in the future can control their cameras using a free software system provided by Debian. But the ONVIF world is full of slightly broken firmware, where the cameras pretend to follow the ONVIF specification but fail to set some configuration values or refuse to provide video to more than one recipient at the time, and the onvif project is quite young and might take a while before it completely work with your camera. Upstream seem eager to improve the library, so handling any broken camera might be just a bug report away.

The package just cleared NEW, and need a new source only upload before it can enter testing. This will happen in the next few days.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: debian, english, multimedia, standard, surveillance.

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