Debian Edu Laptop packages

This task package installs software useful for a laptop.

Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows, written in OCaml. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.

Unison offers several advantages over various synchronization methods such as CVS, Coda, rsync, Intellisync, etc. Unison can run on and synchronize between Windows and many UNIX platforms. Unison requires no root privileges, system access or kernel changes to function. Unison can synchronize changes to files and directories in both directions, on the same machine, or across a network using ssh or a direct socket connection.

Transfers are optimised using a version of the rsync protocol, making it ideal for slower links. Unison has a clear and precise specification, and is resilient to failure due to its careful handling of the replicas and its private structures.

Several new USB devices have their proprietary Windows drivers onboard, especially WAN dongles. When plugged in for the first time, they act like a flash storage and start installing the driver from there. If the driver is already installed, the storage device vanishes and a new device, such as an USB modem, shows up. This is called the "ZeroCD" feature.

On Debian, this is not needed, since the driver is included as a Linux kernel module, such as "usbserial". However, the device still shows up as "usb-storage" by default. usb-modeswitch solves that issue by sending the command which actually performs the switching of the device from "usb-storage" to "usbserial".

This package contains the binaries and the brother scripts.