Planet #BitFolk

Alan Pope (popey): Why (I think) Ubuntu is Better Than Windows

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:27:09 +0000

When comparing operating systems people tend to roll out the same old reasons every time. I think those of us who use Ubuntu are already aware that we have less viruses than Windows, less malware, it’s free of cost and so on. I’m sure we’ve pointed out plenty of times that you’re legally entitled to copy the CD and even create your own remix.

However I wanted to look at some of the things I’ve done recently on Ubuntu that under Windows would be costly, difficult or impossible. So without further ado here’s my:-

Top ten things you can do with Ubuntu, that you’d find hard, costly, impractical or impossible with Windows, which clearly makes Ubuntu better (in my humble opinion)

Snappy title huh?

Hardware support is better than you think

In the last year I have added the following hardware devices to my system and they were all fully supported out of the box with zero driver installations, no reboots, no 3rd party downloads. Truly plug and play.

HP Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax – everything worked including the memory card slots and network auto discovery.
Logitech USB headset – microphone and headphones worked with pulseaudio, and even enabled me to switch music playback dynamically from speakers to headset with the ‘pavucontrol’ utility.
Bluetooth dongles – never had a single one fail, and I’ve bought some really dirt-cheap devices here, where ordinarily I’d be wary about hardware support.
Ortek infrared remote control – again, I just plugged in the USB infrared receiver and it was working before I’d put batteries in the remote control.
3G dongle – this was surprising but again, plug in the USB dongle and network manager on Ubuntu spotted it and let me use it for internet access. The same happened with my Android based cellphone
USB Apple Ethernet adapter – amusingly on the bag it comes in it says “Only compatible with Macbook Air”. This runs the internal half of my firewall
Nintendo Wii USB Ethernet adapter – the list goes on

Of course it’s not perfect, there are still some hardware manufacturers who fail to support Ubuntu, but the point stands, it’s better than most people think. Your mileage may vary, I don’t doubt that, but this is my blog outlining my experience.

Access more than 4GiB RAM on a 32-bit install out of the box

Many 32-bit operating systems including Windows XP, Vista and 7 support a maximum of around 3GiB RAM. With Ubuntu 9.10 the 32-bit install detects how much RAM the machine has and if it’s more than 3GiB you should get a ‘PAE-enabled’ Linux kernel. With no additional work required on your part, you get access to all the RAM in your PC. So you don’t have to switch to 64-bit Ubuntu if you don’t want to, and still access all your RAM. If you’re already running Ubuntu and you upgrade your RAM you can just manually install the above named kernel to get access to all that lovely memory. Om nom nom.

Easily create a bootable, functional operating system on a USB stick

Ubuntu ships with “USB Live USB Creator” which takes an ISO image and creates a bootable USB stick from it. Simply download an Ubuntu ISO image from http://ubuntu.com/download and start the USB creator application on Ubuntu from System -> Administration -> USB Creator.

Tell USB creator where the ISO image is, and it can prepare and write the contents of the ISO image a USB stick of at least 1GB in size. If you have a CD already and not an ISO image then you can use mkisofs to make an ISO image, and then make a USB stick from that, which will save a 700MiB download.

Find out where each file comes from

The typical desktop PC has many thousands of files on the boot disk. Much of this will be your own data in your home directory, but there’s a lot that’s required by the system to boot up and function. Sometimes you might want to know where a file came from.

It may be that you’re a curious user, wanting to know how things got onto your machine, or perhaps you’re diagnosing a problem with an Ubuntu installation. Either way it’s trivially easy to find out where files came from – if you stick to installing packages either from repositories or manually downloaded .deb files.

For example I might be diagnosing a problem with my system – maybe a program is eating CPU – and I want to know where the culprit came from. Knowing which package the process lives in is a good way to find out why you have it (because the name and package documentation may describe it well enough). Also if I wanted to file a bug against that program, I’d need to know what package it’s in. Lets say in this example that my system is sluggish. I might use the System Monitor to identify the process eating up CPU time.

Note: In the above screenshot Skype happens to be idle, but this is how I might discover the process name if it was chewing up my CPU.

I can use the command line to discover where that file is located on the file system using the which command:-

$ which skype /usr/bin/skype

I can then use the dpkg command to find out which package installed this program:-

$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/skype skype: /usr/bin/skype

We can even combine the two commands:-

$ dpkg -S `which skype` skype: /usr/bin/skype

Tip!: If you use zsh instead of bash as your shell you can apparently use ‘=’ instead of ‘which’. So that would look like this: $ dpkg -S =skype. Thanks to Scott James Remnant for that tip via IRC

So this tells us that the ’skype’ package installed the ‘/usr/bin/skype’ program. Not surprising really, but you get the idea. Also worth knowing is dpkg -L which lists all files installed by a package.

Email me when system updates are available

I have an Ubuntu PC behind my TV which I use to watch streamed video via Boxee. More often than not the TV is switched off, and when it’s on it’s showing the Boxee user interface and not the Ubuntu desktop. So I don’t tend to see any update notifications – in fact I don’t want to see them – especially if I’m watching telly.

I’d like to know when there are updates pending on that system, so I have configured it to send me an email when there are updates available. Installing a package called apticron. Just edit /etc/apticron/apticron.conf and maintain the “EMAIL” setting, placing your own email address in the quotes, and remove the # from the start of the line:-

EMAIL="alan@example.com"
Then wait. Each day apticron will run and you’ll get an email telling you what packages need updating.

root@revo1 to me show details 9 Mar (2 days ago) apticron report [Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:12:09 +0000] ========================================================================

apticron has detected that some packages need upgrading on:

revo1
[ 127.0.0.1 127.0.1.1 10.10.10.124 ]

The following packages are currently pending an upgrade:

gnome-screensaver 2.28.0-0ubuntu3.5
micromiser-beta 2.1.2-0karmic1

========================================================================

Package Details:

Reading changelogs...
--- Changes for gnome-screensaver ---
gnome-screensaver (2.28.0-0ubuntu3.5) karmic-security; urgency=low

* SECURITY UPDATE: information disclosure via monitor hot-plugging
- debian/patches/11_CVE-2010-0285.patch: make sure to show windows that
are added in src/gs-manager.c.
- CVE-2010-0285
* SECURITY UPDATE: locked screen bypass via monitor hot-plugging
- debian/patches/12_CVE-2010-0422.patch: improve window handling logic
in src/{gs-grab-x11.c,gs-manager.c,gs-window-x11.c}.
- CVE-2010-0422

-- Marc Deslauriers Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:48:56 -0500

--- Changes for micromiser-beta ---
micromiser-beta (2.1.2-0karmic1) unstable; urgency=low

* Initial release

-- btbuilder Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:18:06 -0500
========================================================================

You can perform the upgrade by issuing the command:

aptitude full-upgrade

as root on revo1

--
apticron

Note: You may need to some basic configuration of the mail system on the machine sending the mail. The default mail transfer agent is ‘postfix’ and it can be configured with:-

sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix
Once that is done you can look forward to receiving mail whenever your system needs to be updated with details of the updates required.

Go from blank disk to fully installed in under an hour

On most moderate hardware these days a standard installation of Ubuntu takes around half an hour. Getting all the apps you need for daily use might take a little longer. However if you take note of what apps you use regularly the additional applications can be installed pretty quickly, and in one big hit.

Whenever I’m installing Ubuntu 9.10 whether for myself or friends, there’s a set of things I tend to do post-install that rarely changes from one machine to another. This usually consists of installing audio/video codecs, fonts, updated video driver, flash, java and a few other bits and pieces. Some of that comes from the standard Ubuntu repositories, and some from 3rd party repositories or PPAs. Once the installation of Ubuntu is complete and all updates have been installed there’s just a few lines to paste in and then I leave it to run for a while.

# Add repo for Lifesaver screensaver sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cmsj/lifesaver # Add repo for chromium daily build sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa # Update local package lists sudo apt-get update # Install all the stuff! sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras \ # Installs flash, codecs, java, fonts chromium-browser \ # Installs daily build of Chromium lifesaver \ # Install lifesaver screensaver gtk-recordmydesktop \ # Install app for recording screencasts gnome-do \ # Install Gnome-Do vlc \ # Install VLC media player openssh-server \ # Install SSH server for remote access smbfs \ # Install samba client for accessing Windows shares gwibber # Install microblogging client

Building a list like this can significantly reduce the amount of time taken to get up and running with Ubuntu. What’s especially cool about this is there is no need to visit any third party websites or download external installers. Those applications listed above are the ones I use regularly, you will have your own set of “must have” packages. What are they?

Move a hard disk

Ubuntu has no direct equivalent to “Windows Genuine Advantage” fortunately. This is the tool that seeks to reinforce the Microsoft End User License Agreement for Windows users by causing havoc when system hardware changes. Windows also has quite a fit when you move a hard disk from one system to another as it detects and installs new drivers for all the newly found devices.

Ubuntu does most of its hardware detection automatically at each and every boot-up with no user interaction. As a result you can take a hard disk containing a standard install of Ubuntu from one system and put it in another and expect it to work without much effort. The only time I have had an issue is when I have made some manual configuration changes for the specific hardware in the computer.

For example if you have installed and enabled the nVidia binary driver and configured it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and the target computer doesn’t have an nVidia graphics card then it might fail to start the graphical environment due to it being forced to load the ‘wrong’ driver. In this instance probably the easiest thing to do is backup and remove the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart the machine. At that point it will automatically detect the video hardware and should work much the same as a standard install.

Compiling and packaging applications for older OS releases

With the 6-month release cycle some people can feel left behind if they don’t upgrade to the next release promptly. Ubuntu has a Long Term Support (LTS) release every two years to cater for many users who wish to stay with one stable release. Ubuntu 6.06, 8.04 and the upcoming 10.04 are all LTS releases, with all other releases being non-LTS.

There will always be some users who are not on an LTS release, but have still chosen to stick with their currently working system rather than upgrade. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but it can lead to users wanting a newer version of a package to be ‘backported’ to their release of Ubuntu, whilst the rest of the development community have moved on. There are developers who backport applications from newer releases to older ones, but they don’t backport everything, and there is a finite resource of developers available to do this task. The good news is that with a little time and effort, you can do this yourself.

I recently had a friend who was using Ubuntu 9.04 with an nVidia graphics card using the driver supplied, but he wanted to try the newer driver from Ubuntu 9.10. It’s generally not recommended to take a package built for one version of Ubuntu and just install it on an older release. It may work, but there’s no guarantee, and it can break the system in unpredictable and catastrophic ways.

So I took the ’source’ code from Ubuntu 9.10 and used the tools provided in Ubuntu to rebuild the driver for 9.04. This was a trivial thing to do. The really cool thing is that I’m running Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit and was able to build the driver for Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit on my local PC. Once I was confident that it worked I uploaded it to my launchpad Personal Package Archive (PPA) where it was built for Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

So not only was I able to backport a driver to an older release, but I also built it for an architecture that I don’t even run myself. The observant among you may have noticed that the package I built is not open source – the nVidia driver is proprietary code. Yet I was still able to take the packagable parts and in only a matter of minutes have it rebuilt for another release.

All the commands I used (dch, debuild, pbuilder-dist, dput) are well documented tools for managing, building and uploading Debian packages (.debs) and their contents, and of course, they’re all freely available in the Ubuntu repositories. The Ubuntu Masters of The Universe (MOTU) are a helpful bunch and their pages can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU and on irc in #ubuntu-motu.

Fixing a bug

Whilst it’s easy to dismiss this as an advantage only if you’re a coder, let me first say that I’m not a developer at all. I can just about read someone elses very simple code with some help and google, but I don’t really ever write anything myself. So if I can fix a bug, anyone can!

I recently discovered a very simple bug in the ifdata command which I filed in launchpad – the Ubuntu bug tracker . With a little help from some of the Ubuntu developers – who were keen to help me – I was able to create a patch, test it and submit it to Ubuntu and upstream to Debian. The critical step that really made me consider even trying to look at this bug was that the source was available and easily installable. I was able to identify the package containing the buggy command:-

$ dpkg -S `which ifdata` moreutils: /usr/bin/ifdata
Once I knew the package name I could download and unpack the source code for that package very easily with one simple command:-

$ apt-get source moreutils Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done NOTICE: 'moreutils' packaging is maintained in the 'Git' version control system at: git://git.kitenet.net/moreutils Need to get 37.8kB of source archives. Get: 1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/universe moreutils 0.35 (dsc) [822B] Get: 2 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/universe moreutils 0.35 (tar) [37.0kB] Fetched 37.8kB in 0s (191kB/s) gpgv: Signature made Tue 05 May 2009 20:19:33 BST using DSA key ID 788A3F4C gpgv: Can't check signature: public key not found dpkg-source: warning: failed to verify signature on ./moreutils_0.35.dsc dpkg-source: info: extracting moreutils in moreutils-0.35 dpkg-source: info: unpacking moreutils_0.35.tar.gz

The tricky part for me is then actually finding the incorrect code in the program. With a lot of help from a good friend and after asking on-line I was able to create a patch. I tested my patch and submitted it to the developers for review. That process is all well documented and I was supported through the process by Ubuntu developers.

All in all it took me a few hours to get this done, spread over a week or so. Not a massive investment of time, and I’ll certainly be quicker next time, now I have learned how to handle bugs like this. Plus I now have a better understanding of the packaging system which helps me with other great things.

Re-install the OS and Applications without losing your data

A default installation of Ubuntu wil place all the operating system files and user data in one partition on the disk called the ‘root partition’ or /, and a second partition for swap. Many users like separating their OS/apps from their user data, so they create a separate partition for /home. This is useful for a number of reasons including allowing you to reinstall the OS on the root partition without touching your data in the /home partition. One little-known feature of the installer on the Live Ubuntu CD is that you can do this – reinstall the OS and not wipe your data – even if you dont have separate partitions for / and /home.

Ok, so you want to reinstall the OS but keep your data in /home. Perhaps you want to upgrade but prefer a clean install, or maybe you’ve played with the system a bit too much and it’s become damaged, and you’d like to quickly ‘reset’ everything with a reinstall. Simply boot from the Live CD and run the installer. When you get to the partitioning step, choose ‘manual partitioning’ which takes you to the more advanced partitioning tool. Select your root partition for installation but don’t tick the “format” checkbox. Continue with the installer as normal.

The installer will recursively delete all files (except those in /home) before copying the new install files onto the disk. Create the same first username during the installer and it will re-use the /home/username folder as your home directory, with all your files intact.

Note: Some user data files (such as mysql databases which are in /var) may be stored in other folders than /home, so you will probably want to back the system up before hand in case there are any files you need to recover.

So those are 10 things I do with Ubuntu that I’d have a hard time doing on Windows. It’s arguable whether you’d need to be able to do some of this stuff, and that I accept.

I realise that there are Windows-based tools that can replicate/emulate some of these tasks, or maybe Windows Vista or 7 can do some of the above tasks. I kinda stopped bothering with Windows after XP, so my knowledge may be lacking. Feel free to correct me in the comments, or suggest what you can’t live without.

Alan Pope (popey): A Blue Ocean on the Land

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:22:07 +0000

Google have finally (street)mapped most of the UK. Look at all that blue!

From Land’s End..

..to John o’Groats..

and pretty much everywhere in between.

Including my own back yard! Not found myself on it yet, but have had a great time ‘driving’ around the country. Found anything fun? Leave a comment

Graham Bleach (gdb): Internal borders

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:26:13 +0000

I've had this idea in my head for some time that the way people run IT organisations is wrong: they're too fragmented into subject-specific areas. Then the DevOps guys came along and started trying to encourage developers to work with ops people, which is a start. But I'm not satisfied with dev-ops collaboration; I want ops-ops collaboration and I had a good old rant to the Build Doctor about it over an ale or two. Kris Buytaert followed up with a blog post describing some of the tensions he sees.

Splitting your operations people up into teams of DBAs, Systems Administrators, Network Engineers, Storage Engineers and all the other ops disciplines is probably causing you pain. You probably don't even know that it's sickness; you probably just think the symptoms are part of everyday life in IT: glacial progress on projects and issue resolution and a lack of interest in the business goals.

The first symptom is that to get some things done seems to require enormous willpower and dedication. These are simple things that require work by multiple teams. There's a delay while the task crosses the internal borders between each team and they try to understand the request. There are times when people forget what the process is and it doesn't get routed correctly to the next team in the chain. It's unlikely that any of the teams have the inclination or the understanding to test that what the customer wants has actually been done. What they test is that their tiny piece has been done.

It seems as if every time things cross internal borders between teams there's a latency cost while you wait for them to do their thing. There's also a cost of doing business with your colleagues, something familiar to anyone who has been asked to fill out numerous mandatory fields in a form to request that someone sitting within feet of you make a relatively insignificant change. The more team boundaries you cross, the more these delays and costs mount up.

The second symptom is that operational issues can take a long time to resolve. In my experience this is particularly true of performance problems. Maybe your users are complaining about some report taking minutes to complete and you pass the ticket onto your application support people and they say, no, there's nothing wrong with the application, maybe it's the database? So the problem baton is passed to the DBAs and they have a look at the database, declare that the database is OK and ask the network guys to have a look. The network guys mutter about 5% utilisation or something and say the network is fine and they pass it to the sys admins, who mutter something about 20% CPU usage and say everything is fine. And now, probably a day or two later, you have a bunch of technical people who have checked their personal fiefdoms are fine and a bunch of angry users who are still have reports that take too long to run.

Of course, all these experts could be right, but it doesn't matter, because optimising the network, the databases, the storage or the servers in isolation is absolutely useless. The report could be running slow because there's an extra few milliseconds of latency between the server and the database and the report does 10,000 database queries, which return a lot of data and the milliseconds add up to a long delay. Unless someone sits down and works out what is going on, while understanding the whole technology stack, your users are going to have to put up with it.

The third symptom is that none of your operations staff seem to actually care what the business wants to achieve. The human mind is odd. As soon as you put people in discipline-specific teams you seem to be sending them a subtle message that their job is not to meet business needs, but to look after some arbitrary technical resource. Don't, therefore, be surprised if the DBAs care more about databases than the business goals. By putting them into the "DBA team" you're telling them that their job is to look after databases. By implication, the business goals are secondary.

Putting people into a bunch of specialist teams doesn't seem to be the right way to do things. There has to be a better way.

Leica (leica): Two Useful Flickr Tips

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:55:21 +0000

Protect Your Flickr Images From Casual Piracy

Promoting yourself and your images on Flickr leaves you vulnerable to casual piracy — that is, anybody who views your images can also download them. This is Flickr’s default setting, so unless you change permissions explicitly, your images could easily be downloaded and used without your permission.

Flickr provides a setting to prevent downloading, but by default various sizes of your images are available for download.

When you prevent a user from downloading, you also disable Flickr’s link to multiple sizes of the image:

Flickr’s scripts then also disable saving the image on screen by “right-clicking” on the image and choosing a “save as” option — only a generic single-colour gif will be downloaded instead of the actual image.

To set the default downloading and viewing permissions:

Once signed in to Flickr, click on your account name
Click the Privacy & Permissions tab
Click edit

From here you can select who you want, by default, to be able to see all sizes of and to be able download your images.

Create a “Friendly URL” To Make Getting To Your Photostream Easy

Flickr allows you to create a “Flickr Alias” which gives you a shorter URL to your photostream. To do this, first log into your Flickr account.

Click here to find the link and further information about creating a Flickr Alias.

http://flickr.com/YOURALIAS will now link to Flickr photostream.

Dominic Cleal (Dominic): Cron, local time and daylight savings (DST)

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:42:34 +0000

Like many others, I prefer servers to run in UTC rather than the local time zone. Particularly with the Java services we run, I find that some logs always remain in UTC, while others observe the daylight savings (DST) of the local time zone (probably due to the multitude of logging APIs).

Sticking with UTC makes everything unambiguous, but can cause problems when scheduling crons that are dependent on the local time. Rather than change systems to run in local time, cron jobs that are linked to local time are now scheduled an hour earlier and run a script that sleeps if the local time hasn't yet been reached.

A job that needs in run at 7am UK time is now scheduled for 6am via cron. In the summer while the UK's observing DST, the script can be run at 6am UTC ("spring forwards"). Once DST is over, a job scheduled at 6am UTC will need to wait an hour before starting so it's 7am UK time and 7am UTC.

This is fairly trivial in shell script, see my cron_tz.sh. Once I'd written this, I discovered a Python version that does pretty much the same thing.

Now my crontab simply looks like this:

15 06 * * *   cron_tz.sh Europe/London 07 /my/command

Interestingly, on the same ServerFault question, SAnnukka mentions that Cfengine has a way of automating this with calendars. Could the same be done with Puppet? Perhaps a function that takes a time in a given time zone and converts it to UTC (or another TZ) that could then be used for a cron resource? If Puppet's being run regularly anyway, then the cron jobs would be quickly updated and kept to the correct time.

Alan Pope (popey): Roasted Laptop

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:51:55 +0000

Some time ago I bought a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. At the time it was the fastest thing I could buy. It was also the heaviest! With a 17″ 1920×1200 screen and all the toys, it’s a bit of a dead weight. It was always intended to be a desktop replacement, so it mostly sat on my desk all of its life so the weight wasn’t an issue. Having nice big screen was lovely for desktop use and playing the odd game.

It has a 1.8GHz Pentium CPU and an nVidia 6800Go video card. Not long after I bought it, the video card failed. I blogged about the issue and the rubbish Dell Support.

Well, it happened again just after the warranty ran out. Convenient, huh? Exactly the same problem as previously happened – corruption on the screen indicating hardware failure. I contacted Dell and they basically said they couldn’t help, but if I wanted they would sell me a new video card for £200. I was torn and frustrated. I could get a cheap entire laptop for not much more than that, but not one with a decent 3D card and 17″ 1920×1200 display. I was irritated that they couldn’t see that this was a recurrent issue with the machine which made me less inclined to pay more money to them.

Whilst on the phone the guy asked me at the end if I was ’satisfied’ with the support. I said ‘no’ of course which he was surprised at and after trying to argue that I should change my mind, he forwarded me on to his manager. The manager then proceeded to argue that I should change my answer to ‘yes’ because the agent had provided me with the correct answer – which was that he couldn’t help me. I was pretty peeved by this point that someone asked for my opinion of whether the transaction was a success and when I voiced displeasure, was badgered for a further 20 minutes to change my mind. I didn’t.

So since then (October last year) my dell laptop has sat in a drawer, unused, wasted. I have jumped on ebay now and then to try and get hold of a 2nd hand video card – it’s a modular MXM 6800Go – but never bought one. They’re quite rare and command similar prices to what Dell quoted me.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a co-worker about his broken Playstation 3. He’d read threads online about how the fault he has may be a common one, where many online suggest slamming the motherboard in the oven for a bit to ‘reflow’ the solder. Many reports online say this works.

I was in one of those moods yesterday, and dug out the laptop and managed to figure out how to take the thing apart and get the video card out. I wound the oven up to 200 degrees C and put the card in for 9 minutes. I figured I had nothing else to lose. If all those posts online were a massive conspiracy to get thick people such as me to put delicate electronics into a hot oven then they succeeded!

30 minutes later the card was cool enough for me to put it back in the machine. I carefully put it all back together and booted it up. It worked! The video corruption had gone. Well, almost. I was left with one vertical purple line about 3 pixels in from the left, which I can totally live with. In the drive was an old Crunchbang CD which booted up just fine.

So now, have I joined the ranks of the internet crazies who say putting electronics in the oven might cure it? Yup. Don’t do it though, because it might all go horribly wrong and I wouldn’t want you to blame me would I?

Alan Pope (popey): Hacker Medley Podcast

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:40:17 +0000

I asked last week if anyone knew of any cool podcasts I should subscribe to. I had a few suggested, one of which I’m now hooked on. Hacker Medley is a fairly new podcast started by Alex Graveley and Nat Friedman.

So far they’ve cranked out 3 episodes and in my opinion they’re all great. They’re all quite short but nicely packed with useful geeky information. Many Supreme Overlord geeks will probably say the content isn’t geeky enough, but it’s pitched at the right level for me. I learned plenty from all three episodes which covered quite different subject matters.

The first went into a little detail about the GSM vulnerability that’s been talked about recently, and how one might exploit it in practice with some amusing and alarming suggestions. The second episode gave an introduction to NoSQL which I’d heard about and roughly knew the basics, but didn’t appreciate why they existed or how widely they were used. In the third Nat and Alex talked about Web Sockets which again I had a slim passing knowledge of, but nothing I’d put on my CV.

I listened to all three episodes on the way to work this morning, and was left ‘wanting more’ which is always a good position for a podcaster to be in. The short duration (10-15 mins) and conversational style make for easy listening. The sound quality is great and the content is nicely paced. The presenters clearly know their stuff so can speak authoritatively on the subjects they discuss, which makes for a refreshing change from some podcasts.

I hope they can find time to crank out more episodes and sustain the quality. I’ll certainly be looking out for more of these and prioritise them accordingly in my player queue.

Alan Pope (popey): Queuing for Tickets for Beer

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:55:17 +0000

I’ve got my ticket for Farnham Beer Exhibition 2010 (along with 5 others) which takes place (as usual) at Farnham Maltings in Farnham, Surrey, UK. The tickets cost £7 each and there’s a tradition of queuing up to get them when they go on sale at 7AM at the Maltings itself. Yes, that’s 7AM on a Sunday morning. What’s even more bizarre is that in order to get within the first 50 people you need to be there before 5AM!

This was my first time queuing for tickets, and only my second Beerex visit. Last year one of “The Alans” from The Open Learning Centre kindly queued up to get me a ticket and invited me along. This year I am returning the favour. So my alarm went off at 4AM this morning and I duly drove over to Farnham to join the queue. by 4:45 it was about 35 people in length, with a friend of mine at about 10th position. I stopped to chat, but of course queue etiquette means I had to join the back of the queue so couldn’t chat with him for long.

Being British we’re a reserved lot who generally don’t talk to others in queues, on public transport or in a disaster. There’s the general subject matter to start off with including the weather (a British staple), how long until the door opens (this is well known, but we all like to talk about time when we’re in a queue) and appropriate attire (mostly me grumping because I didn’t have a hat).

But the Beerex queue conversation and atmosphere is somewhat different from other queues I’ve been in. People are very friendly, some offering coffee, chocolate and even Guinness (at 5AM!) to other queuers, which takes away the pain of being cold and tired with nowhere to sit for 2+ hours. One guy even unpacked a barbeque from the back of his car, lit up and had a fresh breakfast of various cooked meats – I can’t be more descriptive than that, it was very dark!

Overall it was a cold experience but with a great payoff in the form of beer and a glass for each attendee. I’d probably be happy to do it again, when my turn comes around of course

Now there’s only a month to go and I can look forward to an evening of friends, dodgy music, real ale, cider and perry from my own commemorative half-pint glass as I look around at people I met in a darkened queue and think to myself “I know you from somewhere”.

Isabell Long (issyl0): isabell121

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:12:55 +0000

I finally decided to bite the bullet and install Lucid Alpha 3 to my laptop last night, mainly due to the fact I couldn’t wait to experience the shininess of the new design and the “light” themes. It all went well and it booted, which was a significant improvement from Alpha 2, even if the screen resolution wasn’t correct. I noticed a bug then and reported it, however I didn’t do it properly which caused a bit of kerfuffle when I realised it was NVIDIA’s fault and had nothing to do with Ubuntu directly! I don’t know what happened to that one, I think it went down in the list. I have since found and reported more (bug numbers 521908 and 533201), so hopefully they will get fixed!

I do love Lucid, it’s lovely and shiny and the new “light” themes are lovely, especially the incredibly shiny white/silver coloured one with the Apple style icons. At first last night I hated the new position of the close/minimise/maximise buttons, but now I’ve got used to them and with the shininess I think they go quite well; they’re certainly better than they were in Karmic! I think I’ll install it to my desktop when beta 1 comes out.

That’s another point, some of the UK LoCo team are trying to complete the en_GB translations of Lucid for beta 1 and so I’ve been doing that as well, very entertaining!

Alan Pope (popey): Which Podcasts?

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:36:03 +0000

People often (yes, really) ask me which audio podcasts I listen to and which video ones I watch. I have recently rationalised my list as I migrated from iTunes on the Mac to gPodder on Ubuntu.

I thought now would be a good time to publish the list of what I subscribe to. I’ve attached an OPML file that was exported from gPodder (subscriptions -> export to OPML file). You can just import that OPML into your podcast client, or just open in a text editor and pluck out the interesting URLs and use those instead.

I don’t listen to every episode of every podcast, but usually I get around to most of them at some point. A couple of them might be unsuitable for minors, specifically the ones involving Richard Herring, and Answer Me This! The rest are pretty mainstream. They’re in all sorts of formats – mostly MP3 or M4V because the feeds came originally from when I was using iTunes.

Update: Thanks to Ellwyn I now have synchronised my podcast subscriptions to my.gpodder.org. Clicking the image below will take you to my subscriptions.

I’m interested to know if you have podcasts that you like and you think I might enjoy, let me know in the comments, or if you’re brave, post your OPML file. Make sure to remove any podcasts that you might have paid for, and that have username/passwords in the URL.

Alan Pope (popey): MP3 in the Music Store

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:17:45 +0000

Just a quick update.

Matt Griffin has updated the Ubuntu One Music Store FAQ with this gem which is probably one of the single most often asked question.

Q: Ubuntu can’t play MP3s out of the box so how will we play purchased songs?
Canonical has put effort into making the customer experience as effortless as possible. When you visit the Ubuntu One Music Store, it will detect if you have MP3 support installed. If you don’t, the store will install the Fluendo MP3 plugin for GStreamer. The MP3 plugin is distributed worldwide at no charge under a license from Fluendo. An Internet connection is required.

So, we have a free legal mp3 decoder in the repository which semi-automatically installs and makes it easy to play back mp3 files. Whilst this will likely still not please those who ‘need’ their music in Vorbis or FLAC format, it certainly makes it easy to get up and running with the store, and play existing music.

Alan Pope (popey): Poking Purple Popups

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:06:07 +0000

Seriously, I can’t be the only person who does this?

Incoming flash blob (or HTML5 video if you have a decent browser)

Combining this with my compulsion to watch -n 0.1 cat /proc/mdstat, I clearly need help. Is there a support group for people like me?

Andy Loughran (andylockran): #twitmp

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:29:41 +0000

If you a fancy a change, get behind #twitmp

Honest, Reliable, & Open.

Who knows where this may lead?

Campaign Manager = BenjiW
TwitMP = Andy Loughran

Follow it all here

Graham Bleach (gdb): Could I help save Portsmouth FC?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:02:30 +0000

At least one person thinks so:

Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:07:33 H0600
Subject: SOS [PORTSMOUTH FC}
To: website@darkskills.org.uk
From: James Cox 

Good Day,
         My name is James cox kennedy,the chairman of Cox enterprise & Cox
communications Incorporation.I was reading a news about a football club
in england {PORTSMOUTH FC} and to my understanding it seems the club is 
about to go into administration but i have made some enquiries about the 
club but it seems they are not ready to deal with americans but i am very 
interested in purchasing this  club i have the funds but im just looking 
for a  good british business man/woman that can be my frontperson on this
deal ,we will sign an agreement through our lawyers before i put my money
down on this and everything else will be taking care of,Please get back
to me as soon as possible if you are interested.
James Cox Kennedy.
Cox communications,
Chairman,
ww2.cox.com
speak2cox@gmail.com
+1-404-547-8736
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Kennedy

Andy Loughran (andylockran): Couple of Random Server Tips

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:53:46 +0000

1) If you are running a 64 bit version of OpenVZ on the Hardware Node, don't expect your 64 bit guests to work on a 32 bit host.

2) If you get an error saying asm/bitsperlong.h missing, then run make sure /usr/src/linux/include/asm/bitsperlong.h -> /lib/modules/2.6.31-gentoo-r10/build/include/asm-generic/bitsperlong.h is linked.

3) Do not be afraid.

Josh Holland (dutchie): Weekend off

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:20:36 +0000

I think it’s time for a break. I’ve got a busy few weeks/months coming up, what with exam results, driving theory tests, major rowing events and final A2 modules in June. I’m therefore going to make some sort of effort to focus on things that aren’t computers for a bit. I also have an enormous pile of books and magazines mounting up to get through at some point.

To kickstart this, I’m taking a weekend away from electronic distractions this weekend (6/7 March). This means no actual computers, automatic email and Twitter checking on my phone turned off and a lot of book reading. I will probably check emails for anything vitally important, but I won’t look past the subject line unless something really jumps out at me.

So don’t bother trying to catch me this weekend, unless it’s really important. I’ll probably try a few other tactics to keep focus on the important things as well, so possibly expect a scaling back of efforts in some areas. I intend to keep my contributions to the Ubuntu Manual project up, but more or less anything else I do will definitely see a drop.

Come June, I will be done with school forever, and off to university that October. I can then start to reintroduce commitments to FOSS causes in earnest.

This program will now return to scheduled broadcasting.

Alan Pope (popey): Bye Bye Brown

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:53:24 +0000

Time for a change..

The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme “Light”. We’ve developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.

Back in October 2008 at the Ubuntu Intrepid Release Party in London we celebrated the release of Ubuntu 8.10. It was a great party with loads of Canonical and Ubuntu Community representation present. In the UK the London release parties are usually an opportunity to kick back, have a beer or five and celebrate. One or two laptops can usually be seen, but most hands are tightly grasping glasses of ale than CD-Rs.

I was lucky enough to have a chat and couple of beers with our sabdfl Mark Shuttleworth. We talked about the latest release, video editors and the default theme. I just want to say:-

Ubuntu 10.04 was my idea.

Ok, not really. One thing that Mark did talk about was the need for long term plans for the desktop look and feel, and how he envisaged the Ubuntu Desktop in the years to come. Being impatient I wanted to know what was going to happen, and I wanted whatever it was to happen now! He didn’t say anything specific about the detail at all. When I pressed him I think his exact words were an incredulous “I’m not telling you that!”.

One thing we discussed in detail was the user experience, and how we (the Ubuntu project) need to raise our game. He was keen on the prospect that users didn’t see Ubuntu as an 2nd class citizen when compared to the alternatives like Windows and OSX. He said he wanted people to actively “choose Ubuntu” because of its features and how beautiful it is. He wants to show new users that we’re better than the competition, rather than people just considering us an also-ran.

I came away from that evening with my head spinning.

I was very, very drunk.

Almost exactly a year later I attended an event setup by BT, IBM and Canonical called Accelerating Enterprise adoption of Open Source Software along with The Alans from The Open Learning Centre. The event itself was a great idea, but didn’t quite get the attendance we’d hoped for.

Photos © Paul Sumner Downey

Mark took part in some open discussion moderated by Glyn Moody, and gave a keynote speech. In it he focussed on cloud computing, the underlying technologies and convincing businesses of it’s advantages. However he introduced the keynote with a little story.

He told of how he’s keeps getting people approach him saying “Love Ubuntu, but dude! brown!?”. This of course caused a ripple of laughter from members of the audience familiar with the brown desktop some of us have come to know and ~~hate~~ love. He continued “more recently my design team have approached me and said ‘Mark! Aubergine!’”. He highlighted that he was wearing an aubergine coloured shirt and then pointed to me (in the front row) and said “popey! shush!” which I thought was amusing, but which also left me perplexed.

Well, with todays announcement that ‘aubergine’ comment makes sense.

The new brand has been announced and documented which shows the significant work that has gone into the Ubuntu brand refresh. Canonical have put together a world-class design team to come up with these changes. It’s no secret that over the last few releases Ubuntu has been changing, with some of those changes making it through to the release already. The new notification system, a brighter default desktop background, changed update manager behaviour and multiple delivered backdrops to choose from are all stepping stones towards something bigger. It’s alll change for the font, logo, colours, brand and textures.

Whilst the fact that Canonical have been working on this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone close to the Ubuntu project, today it’s become public. With the announcement just released we can now talk about the new Ubuntu brand, and start working on integrating the proposed changes.

Canonical reached out to the governance boards of the Ubuntu project to gain feedback and ensure they approached this in the best possible way. Numerous key members of our community were invited to Canonical in London to learn how the decisions had been made, and the current plans for the project. In the past I think Canonical might have just dumped this on the world with no consultation, so this is a great step towards more openness and helps dispel the myth that Canonical don’t engage.

The refresh covers a lot of ground. One of the most notable (prompting this blog title) is the move away from brown to orange. Personally I’ve never really had a problem with the brown. I quite like it in fact. I realise others don’t though, and whilst I’m a little sad to see us move away from the human, earthy colours of our heritage, I’m also happy to embrace the new look and feel. It’s fresh and polished, just as it should be.

The colours from the circle of friends logo will be missed, but some might argue it’s time for the logo to mature. Perhaps the old logo looks too child-like, which has suited Ubuntu for over 5 years now, but now we’re a big 6 year old, it’s time to move on, put away the crayons and grow up.

The new logo at the top of this article has a new typeface called ‘Ubuntu’ and whilst it’s nowhere near finished (last count I think they had about 15 characters done) it will eventually replace the old Ubuntu Title font.

Canonical are looking to get community involvement in helping develop this font – which looks like it will become the default at some point. Clearly the first characters to be done were “ubnt” for Ubuntu and “CANOIL” for the Canonical logo – which borrows a person from the Ubuntu circle of friends and sticks her in the “O”.

Indeed there will need to be a lot of community involvement across the board. From desktop developers to community website contributors and everyone in between.

I’m loving these themes.

What do you think?

Isabell Long (issyl0): isabell121

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:24:37 +0000

Now I have calmed down considerably since the whirlwind of last night, I will now attempt to write this blog post (some of which I drafted last night) coherently.

As some of you may know, but the majority of you probably do not as this blog has hopefully now being fed into the official Planet Ubuntu, last night I went for my Ubuntu Membership and succeeded! I have never been so nervous about anything in my life before, and I can tell you I don’t want to get that way ever again, I feel I was incredibly silly getting so worked up about something so small and insignificant to anyone outside Ubuntu and its community! Thank you to everyone who left me a testimonial on my wiki page.

Well, I’m now an Ubuntu Member, waheey! That’s brilliant, I think. I certainly wasn’t expecting the questions they asked, and when you think it was my first or second real interview (even though it was over IRC and not face to face – when I get to the job stage it’ll be more daunting going and sitting face to face with potential employers) and considering some of the not very forgiving questions I was asked which were mainly related to my time management as I’m involved in lots of projects, I think I did reasonably well! I did well enough to impress the EMEA Regional Membership team so I must have done something right. I did try to prepare, but as I think it always is the questions you prepare for aren’t the questions you get asked!

I don’t know even why I was so nervous, as I said above for something so small and insignificant to the “outside” world it was silly, but I was. I’d been working myself up for days since I put my name down on the list, improving my wiki page, getting hints and tips about how to improve this and that and gathering extremely positive testimonials (thank you to everyone who gave me one) and in the end I was just so nervous I was surprised I could type, if I’m honest. I should have calmed down and been a bit more professional and controlled my nerves, as reading back through the logs I can see now that it was quite apparent just how nervous I was by the way I was phrasing my answers.

Now though, I have lots of things to take into consideration, lots of time management comments to think about and I need to make a list of exactly what I do (yes, I know there’s one on my wiki but I mean a handwritten list, they’re always better) and what I absolutely love (probably the translations) and what I’m not so keen on and what I want to learn and decide what to drop and what to carry on with – as one of the membership board said to me last night, Ubuntu wants full fat issyl0 [that's my IRC nick] and not just semi-skimmed. Now I’ve started to make these lists, I realise how much I’m attached to everything I do and how I do try to do everything to the best of my ability (certain parts get the “15% reduced fat Isabell”, but I wouldn’t say I’m “semi-skimmed” really in anything I do) and how it is going to be hard to give up some of the things, even the things/projects I’m less active in, but I do need to do it for the sake of my own sanity – as Amber Graner said to me a few nights ago, I don’t want to get Ubuntu hangovers or have my parents saying to me “Ubuntu stole our daughter”. My hunger to learn does not help this though, at all, I learn by getting involved in things that I have a passion for! That again is a thought to ponder, and it is also important to note here that my parents fully support me in everything I do online and I am grateful for that, and here I feel it is appropriate also to mention that I do put time and effort into school and my studies as well, for without good exam results I’m not practically going to get anywhere in life, even with the amount of experience I could (and without a doubt will) gain over the next few years.

Alan Pope (popey): Ade Bradshaw vs Reading Comprehension

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:37:02 +0000

In which Ade blogs about how massively complicated and onerous the Ubuntu One Music Store sign up process is when compared to Amazon.

Ade, I’d reply to your blog but I’m not about to sign up to yet another system just to leave a comment, and I’m certainly not giving your blog my twitter password, or encouraging the use of Facebook as a single sign on. Maybe you should look at getting an Ubuntu One account, I hear they are implementing Single Sign on.

“Maybe its just me, but am I missing something?”

You are. You’re missing the bit of my blog that you copied and pasted into yours which reads:-

“Right now the process by which a new user to the Music Store is walked through the sign-up process is in flux. It could be a popup application which prompts for an email address, account name and password, or something embedded within Rhythmbox. Alternatively a browser could be spawned which sends the user to the sign-up process at login.ubuntu.com. Once Ubuntu Lucid releases in April, this process should be sorted out, but for now I’d recommend signing up to Ubuntu single sign on before using the Ubuntu One Music Store.”

In which I explicitly detail that this process isn’t the final one, and that there is still some work to do on the whole sign up process. The reason for the blog post was so that people could be ready for when the open beta of the music store starts – which is apparently real soon now.

Those of us who have already been using Ubuntu One to sync files and notes won’t have to do any of the stuff in that blog post because we’re already set. The store merely requires the file sync setup to be working, and my blog post aims to cover all the bases of making sure that’s the case. Yes it’s long winded, yes it’s comprehensive but as I previously said – its not finished.

What’s also important to note is that your friend Stuart is keen to get this finished and doesn’t have a massive amount of time to do that between now and Lucid release at the end of April. So I thought I’d do the ‘nice’ thing by creating a blog post which gets potential testers (who could be very useful to Stuart in terms of finding bugs) ready to get going with no delay. It also (as mentioned in the blog post) serves to reduce the amount of time Stuart has to spend triaging bugs, marking duplicates and basically ‘not coding’.

Leading on to where you asked “Really?? What a pain in the arse !! Why would anyone prefer the later?”.

You’re sat in a hotel on a business trip, bored with the TV and you left your ipod at home. So you spark up the music store and purchase some music. But disaster, on your trip the laptop gets mashed/lost/stolen and you lose the valuable data, work, emails – and your music. If you’re lucky and have the presence of mind you might be able to get the tracks from Amazon up to a certain number of days after purchase. With Ubuntu One, your music (and potentially your data, address book, email, notes) will all be safely backed up in the cloud. That’s quite a compelling reason to use the store for me.

There’s also the fact that the Rhythmbox plugin is open source, supported by Canonical and in the repositories. Compared with the binary-only 32-bit only Amazon deb which isn’t any of those things.

Of course there’s also the benefit that Ubuntu One gives me file sync as well as music download, plus Tomboy notes sync and whatever else they’re cooking up for the future which helps me to keep all my stuff backed up.

Maybe my blog post wasn’t clear enough, if so, I apologise and hope this one clears it up.

Also hotlinking is bad mmmkay.

Alan Pope (popey): Getting Ready for Ubuntu One Music Store Beta

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:52:32 +0000

I’ve previously blogged about the Ubuntu One Music Store. Since then along with a few others, I’ve been helping privately beta test the store. Very shortly it will enter an open beta phase. In this blog post I’ve outlined some preparation you can do to be ready for the beta test.

In the default install of Ubuntu Lucid, the music store will be found in Rhythmbox. Other music players (such as Banshee and Amarok) may also get the functionality later, but right now the first and only delivered client for the store is the default player, Rhythmbox. To access the store, simply open Rhythmbox and click “Ubuntu One” under “Stores”.

Note the open beta has not started yet but it will do very soon. So right now you won’t see the store in Rhythmbox. In the meantime, you can get yourself ready for testing with the guide below. To do this you’ll either need to be running an up to date Ubuntu Luicd on your machine, or in a virtual machine such as VirtualBox or kvm. Testdrive is a great way to test Lucid on a previous release of Ubuntu.

Before we go on, some important notes:-

The music store is not finished yet, so if things break, or the store eats your music, your money, your credit card or your cat, then act appropriately
The look and feel of the store may change between these screenshots and the final release
Not all music is available in all regions/countries. This is pretty much out of control of Canonical and the Ubuntu project

The world is carved up into ‘UK’, ‘US’, ‘Germany’, ‘Rest of EU’ (i.e. not UK & Germany) and ‘Rest of World’ (i.e. excluding all those previously mentioned territories)

It’s possible that purchased tracks may not immediately download/sync to your computer. This may be a bug or due to server-side maintenance during the beta. Patience helps here
Some of the 5 regional stores (see above) contain some free (of cost) music, so if you would like to test the store without spending any money on tracks, you can do that. Unfortunately this only applies to ‘UK’, ‘US’ and ‘Germany’ store, not ‘Rest of EU’ or ‘Rest of World’
Bugs can be filed against the Rhythmbox plugin or Ubuntu One Client tools as appropriate
I’ve shown screenshots of the Ubuntu File Sync service however note that you will not be able to see your music through that web interface. I have shown these only to illustrate getting file sync working which is a pre-requisite for using the music store

So with that said, if you’re unhappy about any of the above, I’d recommend you don’t use the store until Ubuntu 10.04 is released. If you’re okay with testing, filing bugs and don’t mind if the store breaks (which it could) during the period leading up to release, then crack on!

These are the steps I went through to prepare for the Ubuntu One Music Store Beta. As with the store itself, some of these screens may change between now and release time. The process by which a computer is authorised will certainly change, but the main bulk of this is valid and still will after the release.

Ubuntu One Account

In order to buy stuff in the store you need an Ubuntu One account. You can connect to Ubuntu One using an Ubuntu single sign on account (confusingly).

Historically this was your Launchpad.net account, so if you already have one of those, you can use that. New users who have not previously signed up at Launchpad.net or login.ubuntu.com will need to create a new account.

Right now the process by which a new user to the Music Store is walked through the sign-up process is in flux. It could be a popup application which prompts for an email address, account name and password, or something embedded within Rhythmbox. Alternatively a browser could be spawned which sends the user to the sign-up process at login.ubuntu.com. Once Ubuntu Lucid releases in April, this process should be sorted out, but for now I’d recommend signing up to Ubuntu single sign on before using the Ubuntu One Music Store.

You need to confirm your email address by clicking the link in the mail.

Clicking the link takes you back to the Ubuntu One sign up process.

Click continue.

Enable File Sync

The second step which needs to be setup before the Music Store works is file syncing with Ubuntu One. Music purchased in the store is delivered directly to your Ubuntu One synchronised folders, so this has to be working or you’ll never actually get the music you buy. Configuring Ubuntu One is detailed at one.ubuntu.com/support/installation although for Lucid there’s very little to do other than activate as the components are pre-installed. That documentation should be updated before Lucid is released.

In these screenshots I subscribed to the free 2G plan. The screens are slightly different if you choose the 50G paid plan.

Confirm you agree to the terms and conditions..

Now you’re signed up to Ubuntu One.

At this point there are no files in the ~/Ubuntu One/ folder, in fact it doesn’t even exist yet..

Activate a Computer

To enable the file sync on this laptop I needed to add/authorise this computer. When Lucid releases there should be a graphical ‘control panel’ for Ubuntu One which allows you to press a button to connect a machine to your Ubuntu One account. You can of course connect multiple machines to one account in order to keep them all in sync. That tool doesn’t exist yet, so I had to run the following to trigger the process below.

u1sdtool -c

Once the system has been connected to Ubuntu One once, there is a ‘Connect’ icon in nautilus file browser, but in a typical chicken/egg problem, that ‘Connect’ button doesn’t appear until you have connected at least once.

Pretty soon after that the ~/Ubuntu One/ folder should appear.

Which is of course initially empty. There is another special folder in which stuff appears that has been shared with you by other people. It too is initially empty.

Testing File Sync

It’s a very good idea to test the file syncing service, because if it doesn’t work the music won’t download, no matter what else you do. It could save time during bug triage if users ensure this file sync works before filing bugs in the music store.

A simple test of the file sync is to create a folder or upload a file via the web interface and wait for them to appear in your ~/Ubuntu One/ folder on the local machine. Alternatively create files on your local PC in ~/Ubuntu One/ and go to the website to see if they appear.

Here I’ve created a file on my computer in the ~/Ubuntu One/ folder

If I then go to the Ubuntu One web interface I can see the file has arrived.

So at this point you’re ready to test the Ubuntu One Music Store. All you need now is some disk space and some taste in music. Neither of which I can help with – as my friends and family can confirm.

Andy Loughran (andylockran): Thank the Kids

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:19:27 +0000

As it's election year, I thought I'd pass of some rather randomised comments, which may or may not find traction amongst my readers. I'm willing to accept that some of my knowledge may be vague, but try and bear with me on the 'philosophy' rather than the 'phacts' of what I write.

Over the past year, I've been listening quite a bit to radio 4, not just for their brilliant Today programme, but to try and decipher the raminfications of the horrible recession we're in the middle of. On most occasions I'd say the shows I listened to had fairly middle-aged panels. Often the shows revolved around economic policies, political change and most interesting to me - the property market. One such article - that a grandchild had taken advantage of her grandparent to the tune of £25,000 in order to put a deposit down on a house was met with outrage by the panel. With most of them patting themselves on the back and saying "we worked for our own deposit, thank you very much!"

They then went on to berate the kid.

Ironic then, that due to there being a 'property boom' for much of their working lives, the price of property has grown so that it is no longer possible for a first-time buyer with an average salary to pay a deposit themselves. If they're a graduate too, with an average level of debt, then it's probably likely that getting more in debt is the last thing they'd want to do. Yet the current home owning generation's assets have increased rather nicely, giving them the disposable income far beyond what their salaries alone would have provided.

One such behaviour, no doubt replicated thousands of times over the past 30 years, is the constant need to want more.

"I can't afford a £300,000 house, but as my current house was worth £100,000 when I bought it and £200,000 now, I'm sure if I buy one for £300,000 then that'll increase too - so when I sell it'll be worth more than the difference."

To fatten their pockets even more, people added conservatories, extensions that took away valuable outside play areas from their kids (and they wonder why they're all getting fatter).

Then people got even greedier. Houses took too long to build. They wasted valuable acreage that developers had paid top dollar for, and in order to squeeze as much out of the land as possible, they took inspiration from the 1960s.

"Flats - oh, let's call them apartments. Then they'll be 'trendy,' - much different to the concrete high rises that were built in the 60s. Yes. These ones have pre-fabricated steel balconies screwed into the side of them to make them look 'chic.' Forget any outside area, just cover it in a car park. But the car park can't be to large - no. Land is expensive. One space per flat, and no visitors spaces. People won't have visitors."

Some of these new places are lovely, (I've lived in a few,) but just as the 60's flats were probably very homely when they were put up - get a few bad tenants, and with a tenant having 6 months to challenge their eviction - it's not too difficult to imagine the same thing happening here.

So, with people happy that they're earning a 'fat wedge' off their property portfolios, the unthinkable happened.

Suddenly, out of the blue, and unprecedented - (choose any) - the crash that (many/some/few/all) economists predicted then happened. People's properties had stopped growing in value - they began shrinking.

Unfortunately though - not yet enough to stop the jibes from the Radio 4 crew. House Prices are still far ahead of being affordable, relative to the average wage, without some help off your parents or grandparents.

Let Radio 4 hate you.

The current government do too.

Quantitative Easing, The Scrappage Scheme, Bailing out the Banks, Unemployment Benefit. Have Radio 4 thanked us for that? Why should they?

The level of debt that Britain is now is means that most of the burden is going to be left with us, and our children, to pay off. Labour aren't proposing major cut backs until after the election. This is just landing us in greater debt. Interest Rates apply to national debt as well as individual debt. As a country we're likely to lose our AAA credit rating, meaning that our rates are going to go up, and the debt is going to grow - and the longer we take to pay it off, the worse it's going to get.

Instead of pointing fingers and backing a single party to take us through this, the electorate need to send a clear message that the debt needs to be handled properly now. Politicians may point to Bankers paying themselves £million pound bonuses, but it masks the issue. Millions are being lost to our economy through interest payments alone. In a recent Cost-Benefit analysis per profession, it's true to say that it might not make sense for us to pay Tax Advisors the bonuses (as they cost the taxpayer £82 per £1) with their ability to help clients avoid paying tax. However, paying investment bankers bonuses, when they're the ones most likely to help carry us out of the mess, seems semi-logical. Getting the money required at the rate required in order to get Britain back on an even keel isn't going to work if we try and pay everyone by the hour.

Just this year, Britain are likely to borrow 12.8% of GDP. That's ontop of our current mountain of debt, and 0.1% more than Greece (who are having a well documented fiscal crisis). There are some difficult decisions to be made though, and cutting costs doesn't necessarily mean cutting jobs. The lower the unemployment figures the better it will be for the country in the long run, but there is much of central (and european) government that could do with a bit of belt-tightening. Cutting cost in one's own budget isn't going to be something that any government will want, which is why it needs to be such an election issue.

What I find most disheartening though, is the fact in comparison to the majority of the world, we are a rich nation. We have a fantastic NHS that should be protected from privatisation and anything that may undermine the fantastic level of care it provides to our citizens. As Charles II realised, investment in Science was something that made us 'Great' in the first place - whilst other countries are up-skilling their workforce and working hard to develop in order to provide a brighter future for their children - whilst Britain is stagnating. To kill a phrase, "think not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

Investment needs to be prudent, cost-cutting needs to be wise, and we have to elect politicians honest and sensible enough to know the difference.

So next time you hear someone berate the 'youth of today' for "taking advantage," just smile, and get on working hard.

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): Is it the end

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:40:17 +0000

Of Mobile Facebook.

It has now been a week since mobile Facebook broke comments on Notes and there seems to be no fix in sight. I check every day and every day I see December 31st 1969 and blank spaces where comments once were. Today standard Facebook imported my blog post below but I noticed that it did not appear in mobile. I am hoping this is just an overlooked glitch and not a trend towards discontinuing the mobile sites. I have been posting bug reports semi daily to Facebook with no response and today I complained on their blog that was going on about how much their Mobile sites rock.

Why do I care?

A couple reasons, number one is that mobile Facebook gets you all the same info regular Facebook does while the mobile app on my blackberry just gives status updates, comments and messages so when I need something specific like an event location, read note comments or access to groups mobile Facebook is the better choice on the go.

Secondly, I have a plugin Facebook CommentsTNG which takes comments from imported Facebook blog posts and puts them back into their home Wordpress blog. Myself and about 1000 other people use this plugin to keep our social worlds connected and since this breakage it does not function.

To conclude, you can see if you have this problem as well (some don’t it seems but most do) by logging into mobile Facebook and clicking notes at the bottom, pick any notes with comments and see if they are blank with the wrong dates. If they are I have provided some links for you to help the cause below.

Helpful links:
File bug report here
Comment on the Mobile Facebook blog here

Together maybe this can be fixed. Thank you.

Alan Pope (popey): Ubuntu One Music has No Watermarks

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:54:01 +0000

This is just a short blog post to note that Matt Griffin has updated the FAQ for the Ubuntu One Music Store that I previously blogged about.

Most notable is probably this update:-

There will be no embedded ‘watermarks’ of any kind on the MP3s in the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Which is of course good news. This came up in a recent bug filed against the Ubuntu Community and later the Rhythmbox Plugin. In it Ryan expressed concern that music files purchased in the store might be tagged or watermarked. This would be to enable back-tracking should the files be copied contrary to the license under which they were distributed.

This pre-dates the edit Matt made to the wiki, so at the time of the bug comment nobody really knew the answer. I asked around a few fellow beta testers to see if we could compare songs and identify if the files were indeed watermarked. The theory being we could each use a tool like sha1sum to generate a fingerprint of the file and see if they were the same or not.

Luckily I found one beta tester online and he provided me with a sha1sum of a file he’d bought from the store. Unfortunately there was a bug in the store today which prevented me from buying the same track! Foiled! I did however find a friend on IRC who wasn’t a beta-tester of the Ubuntu store, but was a 7digital store customer. I convinced her to buy a song from 7digital that I already had purchased from the Ubuntu One store.

As it turned out she didn’t need much convincing (even refusing my offer to pay her back the £0.59 in costs ) and bought an Amy MacDonald song which we compared sha1sums on. As you can see in my comment on the bug report (reproduced below), the files seem identical.

20:54:17 @popey> alan@wopr:~/.ubuntuone/Purchased from Ubuntu One$ sha1sum Amy\ MacDonald/This\ Is\ The\ Life/This\ Is\ The\ Life.mp3 20:54:17 @popey> b576a6695cce410521c862301f74deeb3ced22e4 Amy MacDonald/This Is The Life/This Is The Life.mp3 20:59:38 +Dee> [dee@jane Dropbox]$ sha1sum Amy\ MacDonald\ -\ This\ Is\ The\ Life.mp3 20:59:38 +Dee> b576a6695cce410521c862301f74deeb3ced22e4 Amy MacDonald - This Is The Life.mp3

We’ll set aside the statistical unlikely-hood that both files were fingerprinted but still came up with the same sh1sum. While friends still pointed out to me that the sample size of one wasn’t exactly comprehensive proof, now we have Matts wiki edit I think that concern can be put to bed.

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): Command and Conquer lives!

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:42:18 +0000

Think back to 1995 and the birth of one of the greatest real time strategies of all time, Command & Conquer. Back in those days the game was DOS based and the units were larger than life with a dual disc story to tell the tales of both factions. This game along with Command and Conquer Red alert are still my favorite games of the RTS genre to this date but time has not been kind to their multiplayer aspects. When Windows XP came along all of a sudden both games became un runable due to their dependance on kernel level IPX support. This left the game unrunnable until a patch that disables multiplayer was released isolating the game forever except on Westwoods system which was limited to 1v1.

But wait there’s more.

EA since it has announced the new C&C has been slowly releasing all the old classics as freeware. Currently that list includes C&C, C&C red alert and C&C: Tiberian Sun. For me this doesn’t matter because I bought the first decade special edition with C&C 3 two years go but this does mean that any fan patches and bundles made are now legit for distrobution which is the point I am slowly getting to.

Player made Patch 1.06

This patch improves the games resolution from 640×480 to 1024×768 which everything still looks pretty good in but the better part is that the IPX networking has been converted to UDP. That’s right, LAN play is back with a vengeance and with the CnCnet tool you can play up to 6 player matches over the internet. The people responsible for this patch have also been kind enough to provide a 99meg game package with their patch that is fully playable minus videos so join me in reliving a classic.

Alan Pope (popey): Ubuntu One Music Store FAQ

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:43:14 +0000

Updated 28/2/10 01:07AM

The developers behind the Ubuntu One Music Store have put a FAQ online, which I’ve reproduced below. I’ve been beta testing the store out for a few days and have bought some singles and albums directly in Rhythmbox. In fact I think I was the first person to buy an album in the store It works really well, but clearly it’s not quite finished. There’s also a lot of rumour and misunderstanding around the store, so it’s great to see the developers putting this information out there.

Note: Just running Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3 will not enable the online store. You need to be a beta tester to get the ‘magic’ that makes the store work.

FAQ

Q: What will be the store’s name?
The store is called the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Q: How is Ubuntu getting access to popular music?
For the Ubuntu One Music Store, our primary goals are to 1) provide a wide selection of popular songs to users and 2) enable Ubuntu users around the world to have access to these songs. Among the partners evaluated, we chose 7digital because they had the largest selection of songs available without digital rights management (DRM) for the most regions around the world.

Q: What desktop application will include the Ubuntu One Music Store?
The standard Ubuntu music player, Rhythmbox, will be used for the music store. We know that people still want choice in their music player application so The Ubuntu One Music Store was developed as a plug-in that can be re-used in some other music applications. We have received approval from the music labels for the Ubuntu One Music Store to be embedded within Banshee, Amarok, and a few other applications. Please contact the Ubuntu One Music Store team for information about this process and implementation support.

Q: How is this different than Jamendo and Magnatune?
Jamendo and Magnature will remain in the Rhythmbox music player. These are both great sources for creative commons and open licensed songs. The Ubuntu One Music Store extends the catalog of music available to Ubuntu users and will include mostly songs from minor and major label artists. These are songs that you typically find on the shelves of your favorite record shop…except in a downloadable format.

Q: What are the details about the music in the Ubuntu One Music Store?
Songs purchased through the Ubuntu One Music Store are available in high quality 256 kbps (sometimes higher) MP3 audio encoding and without digital rights management (DRM). MP3 purchases can be:

burned to a CD any number of times
played through any software on any type of computer that you own that supports MP3
synced to any MP3-enabled device such as a portable music player

You may occasionally find songs in WMA format. We’re working with our partner to remove these songs from the Ubuntu One Music Store. Until this is resolved, we don’t recommend purchasing these songs in this format. An MP3 version can typically be found by using the store’s search feature.

Update 27 Feb, 2010: There will be no embedded ‘watermarks’ of any kind on the MP3s in the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Some have asked for songs in other formats such as Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. Acquiring popular songs in this format was not possible at this time, but Canonical will continue to look for future opportunities to improve the quality of the songs found in the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Q: What are the ’system requirements’?
If your computer can run Ubuntu 10.04, has Rhythmbox installed, can play sounds and connect to the Internet, then you are ready to use the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Q: Will these downloads play on my iPod or portable media player?
The MP3 format is widely supported on portable media players such as the iPod. Rhythmbox works with most portable media players without additional configuration and a Rhythmbox plug-in (libgpod) is available that provides support for most iPods.

Q: What are the features of the Ubuntu One Music Store?
The Ubuntu One Music Store has features that users expect from an online store.

Search by artist, album, or track
Browse recommendations and genres
Discover new releases or just released songs each week
A convenient shopping basket
Support for a variety of payment options

Q: How is the store related to Ubuntu One?
An Ubuntu One account is required to purchase songs from the Ubuntu One Music Store. Ubuntu One accounts are free and come with 2 GB of personal cloud storage. Purchased songs are automatically transferred to your cloud storage, synchronized to all of your computers, and added to Rhythmbox. Customers will find a new library that contains purchases from the Ubuntu One Music Store. You can also fetch your music from your personal cloud storage through a web browser, just like all your other files.

Integrating the Ubuntu One Music Store with Ubuntu One gives consumers the security of online backup as well as convenience of auto-synchronization.

Please note that Ubuntu One synchronization does not support users who connect to the Internet through a proxy server. These users will need to download their purchases from the Ubuntu One website and manually add songs to their Rhythmbox library.

Q: What does it mean by x downloads remaining?
The Ubuntu One Music Store’s partnership with the music labels limits the number of times customers can download a purchased song from the music store to three (3). While this gives people some security in case of catastrophe, additional downloads should not be necessary as purchases are backed-up in the customers’s Ubuntu One personal cloud. The initial transfer from the music store to a customer’s Ubuntu One personal cloud will count as one (1) download. Any synchronization of purchased songs stored in your Ubuntu One personal cloud to any number of your computers does not count against the music store’s download limit. Clicking to download again will transfer songs to your Ubuntu One personal cloud again and will deduct from the downloads remaining. Customers shouldn’t need to do this though unless they delete the song from their cloud storage.

Q: What regions of the world will be able to purchase songs?
Most popular songs are licensed by territory (basically by country). Our starting territories will be the UK, US, Germany, the rest of the EU (EU countries outside of the UK and Germany), and the rest of the world (countries outside the EU and US). Customers who use the EU store will have access to purchase songs from two of the four major labels. Customers who use the World store will have access to purchase songs from independent labels.

Update 27 Feb, 2010: Perhaps we could have been a bit more clear about this. Customers who use the UK, US, and Germany stores will have access to purchase songs from all major and independent music labels.

Canonical will analyze usage of the EU and Rest of World stores after the 10.04 launch to decide which territories would be best for expansion. Watch the Ubuntu One blog in the months following the launch of Ubuntu 10.04 for more information.

Q: How do independent artists from the Ubuntu community get their songs into the store?
The Ubuntu One Music Store has great potential for the Ubuntu community and we want members to be able to contribute their own works (especially if it was produced on Ubuntu) to the store. Our partner, 7digital, works with various digital distribution companies that represent artists. Here are a few that you can contact to get your songs added to the 7digital catalog and the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Q: I’ve found a bug. I have a great feature. What do I do?
Please submit bugs and feature requests to the Ubuntu One Music Store project in Launchpad. The development team monitors this area and reads all messages.

Q: Where do I get help?
Customer support is available by clicking on the Help button in the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Q: How can I install and test the store?
The store isn’t quite ready for wider testing. Watch this area or the Ubuntu One blog for more details coming soon.

Alan Pope (popey): Proxies In The Way Of Testing

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:34:25 +0000

Lets say that hypothetically speaking you’re running an application or two which are known to not work behind proxies. What a pickle, especially if those applications have some desire to be online, to communicate with online services. But they can’t.

After a bit of a chat with my friend and fellow podcaster Dave Walker I came up with a solution. It involves 4 pieces of software, all of which are in the Ubuntu repositories. There are guides online to using each piece of software, but none that I could find which brought them all together.

Note: This is a bit of a mess, and whilst it works, it’s not pleasant, and is only really useful for this very specific requirement. I’m just blogging it in case someone else happens to be running the same software as me, and is also stuck behind a poxy proxy.

Here’s the simple non-graphical ‘diagram’ to show the software used and path to get out.

Application -> via tsocks -> ssh (socks proxy) -> corkscrew -> poxy proxy server -> (Internet) -> External host -> ??

In addition to the software required, you’ll also need a box on the outside of the network into which you have ssh access. This is required because we’ll be tunnelling traffic to that machine, so that any software can send/receive packets as if they are on the outside of the firewall/proxy. If you don’t have a box on the outside of the firewall that you can ssh into, give up with this guide now, it’s a pre-requisite.

If you would like to rent a virtual private server (VPS) then I can highly recommend Bitfolk, and if you sign up and mention my name, I get nothing Debian gets a financial donation though, so that’s something good. Alternatively you could leave a cheap low-power computer permanently switched on at home. Or maybe wake it up when you go out, and switch it off when you’re back home to save some power. I’d probably forget to do that, so mine’s always on and it only draws 8W, so I don’t feel too bad about the constant power drain.

On the server outside the firewall

You’ll probably want to do this setup before you’re stuck behind the nasty nasty firewall and proxy. You can get into a bit of a chicken and egg situation where you can’t configure SSH for this process because you can’t SSH in to change the SSH config.. etc ad infinitum.

Ensure SSH server is installed

For Ubuntu/Debian users this is in the repository, so sudo apt-get install openssh-server is sufficient.

You might want to do some of the usual security things on the server like configuring the SSH server to only accept key logons and not passwords. You may also want to limit what IP addresses you can connect from. Other security options are beyond the scope of this post, but if you have any suggestions, leave a comment below.

Configure SSH to run on port 443

This will only work if the server in question has nothing else running on 443 – like an SSL enabled HTTP server.

The relevant setting is on the server in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and is usually fairly near the top, it’s “Port”, just change the value. You can then restart SSH on Ubuntu/Debian with sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart.

Probably good at this point to test the setup, to see if you can indeed SSH to the box now you’ve monkeyed around with the SSH config.

On the PC inside the firewall

Install Corkscrew

Corkscrew tunnels SSH traffic over the proxy server.

For Ubuntu users this is in the repository, so sudo apt-get install corkscrew

Configure Corkscrew

Edit ~/.ssh/config

Add the following line, replacing ‘proxyserver 8000′ with the hostname and port number that the proxy server runs on. Note that the path to the Corkscrew executable is right for Ubuntu, but may need to be modified for other distributions, or if you compile it yourself.

ProxyCommand /usr/bin/corkscrew proxyserver 8000 %h %p

Test Corkscrew

Try and logon using SSH on the command line, specifying the port number, username on the remote box and host name of the remote (external) host or IP address.

ssh -p 443 myusername@mylovelyexternalhost.example.com

Pro-tip! Edit ~/.ssh/config and add the following lines to save you having to type so much.

Host myhost Hostname mylovelyexternalhost.example.com Port 443 User myusername

Then you can SSH with this:-

ssh myhost

Install tsocks

Tsocks is some lovely magic that forces applications to send their (potentially non-HTTP and thus non-proxy-friendly) TCP traffic over a socks proxy. Install it as you would the other packages, again it’s in the Ubuntu repo, so sudo apt-get install tsocks should sort that in a trice.

Configure tsocks

Edit /etc/tsocks.conf

Ensure lines exist that look like this. This will configure tsocks to attempt to make an outbound connection over a SOCKS5 proxy (which doesn’t exist yet, but will in the next step) which is running on port 1080.

server = 127.0.0.1
server_type = 5
server_port = 1080

Start the socks proxy

At this point all the config is done, all the steps above need only be done once. The stuff below is what you do each time you want to setup the SOCKS proxy, and subsequently send data over it.

ssh -D 1080 -vvv myhost

The -D sets up the persistent SOCKS proxy over the connection to myhost (via corkscrew).
The -vvv makes SSH a bit chatty, causing it to spit out detail whenever we use the SOCKS proxy. This is helpful in determining if things are working. Once you have it working, you can choose to remove that parameter.

Start your application using tsocks

The final step! This is where we use tsocks to send network traffic over the proxy we just brought up.

There are two ways to start tsocks, either using LD_PRELOAD or by prefixing the application you’re running with the tsocks command. Here’s two examples:-

Starting the Ubuntu One Syncdaemon – in which first we disconnect from Ubuntu One, then start it using tsocks and in debug mode, and then reconnect. Then start Rhythmbox. All the traffic for both applications will go over the tunnel to the external box.

$ u1sdtool -q $ export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libtsocks.so $ /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/ubuntuone-client/ubuntuone-syncdaemon --debug $ u1sdtool -c $ /usr/bin/rhythmbox

Starting Firefox – in which we can see the other way to use tsocks. Again, all TCP traffic will go over the tunnel.

tsocks /usr/bin/firefox

The only thing that won’t go over the tunnel as far as I can tell is DNS lookups which according to the man page for tsocks:-

“tsocks will normally not be able to send DNS queries through a SOCKS server since SOCKS V4 works on TCP and DNS normally uses UDP. Version 1.5 and up do however provide a method to force DNS lookups to use TCP, which then makes them proxyable. This option can only enabled at compile time, please consult the INSTALL file for more information”

Hope that information is useful to someone, and if there’s any mistakes or omissions, please leave a comment.

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): Good triumphs over evil

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:13:00 +0000

Good : Team Canada with our humble Sid the Kid

Evil: Ovechkin (I have nothing against the rest of Russia)

Last night was Canada’s Triumph, no, Hockey’s triumph over a cocky bastard of a hockey player and our revenge as a nation for what happened 4 years ago in the same match up. Go Canada!

Enjoy the trip home Ovechkin.

Alan Pope (popey): New Ubuntu Podcast Launches

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:12:50 +0000

The people behind Full Circle Magazine – the unofficial, community maintained electronic Ubuntu mag – have started a new audio podcast. Created by Robin Catling, Ed Hewitt and Dave Wilkins with additional audio bits by Victoria Pritchard, the first epsiode can be found here in both Ogg Vorbis and MP3 formats.

I was able to listen to a preview of the show a few days ago, and I’m impressed. They have the kinds of elements that I like to listen to in a show including news & opinion, techy segments and a bit of fun. The team have managed to put together a tight, interesting and fun show which is no mean feat for episode one. It’s clear that they’re finding their feet in the first epsiode, but that doesn’t mean it’s low quality. There’s some harsh editing, which we also suffered from in the early days, and the audio levels are sometimes a little wobbly, but these are things that usually improve with practice, and aren’t showstoppers in my opinion.

In their favour they have some strong personalities who have their own areas of expertise, and can feed off (and back to) the Full Circle Magazine which can help them to build an audience and gather contributions. I understand they’re all spread around the UK, but are keen on getting contributions from around the world – given the magazine as a global project team and readership, this makes sense.

I hope they can find time and resources to crank out some more episodes, and can get contributions from the community to help them build up their content. Give it a listen and let them have your constructive feedback.

Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror): Tim

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:46:01 +0000

Tim
Originally uploaded by ioerror

Marin in ultraviolet.

Alan Pope (popey): You have been eaten by a grue

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:59:44 +0000

Thu 18th Feb

I previously blogged about the training for Ubuntu available from Canonical. Today I went through the sample chapters – which incidentally is insanely hard to find. I was told the training was available in the Canonical store. I happened to know the url for the store so went direct to shop.canonical.com but if I’d googled for ‘canonical store‘, ‘ubuntu store‘, ‘canonical shop‘ or ‘ubuntu shop‘ I would have found it okay. But the path to get to the training samples is like a bad adventure game with only the exact convoluted path taking you to the prize:-

http://shop.canonical.com/ -> Click “Training”
http://shop.canonical.com/index.php?cPath=21 -> Click “Online Ubuntu Desktop Training”
http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=134 – Click “Ubuntu Online Training page”
http://www.ubuntu.com/training/e-learning – > Click “Check out two lessons for free – click here (registration required)”
http://training.canonical.com/enrol/oscommerce/actions.php?action=proceed_to_shop&trial_action=1&id=2

This took me to the launchpad login where I used my launchpad login to gain access. Of course if my mum is going to be doing this she will need a launchpad account of her own. The next page had the following text “You have successfully enrolled on the introductory taster of the Ubuntu Desktop Training (Elearning) course. This means you can access two out of the ten lessons of the course. To access the complete course, please consider purchasing the full version in our store. To enter the course, please click the Continue button below.” so I clicked “Continue”. Next I get “Ubuntu Desktop Training has been designed in a modular manner. Ten lessons in total will provide you with all the information required to get up and running with Ubuntu, as quickly as possible. You can go through the same lessons as many times as you like, or skip those which are less relevant.” and some more details including the requirement for Adobe Flash.

Surprisingly it says:-

“Follow the next three steps to get started:
1. Cancel any pop-up blocks; the course can not load without this!
2. If you don’t already have a Flash player installed, download one of the following plugins: Flash (choose: tar.gz if running Ubuntu) or Gnash (available soon) then:
3. Click ‘Enter Course’ to proceed and enjoy!“

I’m somewhat surprised (and a little alarmed) that we’re telling people to grab a tarball from Adobe rather than use the package manager to install Flash. Of course ideally we shouldn’t use Adobe Flash for this at all, but that’s a completely separate argument.

Finally I click “Enter Introductory Taster”.

Well, I say ‘finally’, in fact my browser blocks the popup and I get yet another page to click a link to “« Click here to open the course »” with the tip “(you may need to turn off pop-up blocking for this website)” in small text.

This whole process is insane and needs to be made easier to find and get into. My mum would have given up long ago and gone off to make a cake or something more productive. Not requiring Launchpad for the logon would be a start, and making a link directly from the store to the sample training material would also help.

Getting access aside, the course is presented in a pop-up window containing a flash based application. The window is resizable up and down, and the content scales well which is helpful given my Mum has a fairly low resolution screen at the moment.

The free sections are ‘Introducing Ubuntu’ and ‘Exploring the Ubuntu Desktop’ with a short ‘Course Introduction’ which explains the way the course works. As I mentioned previously the course is based on Ubuntu 7.10, but is being updated for 10.04 right now.

The available sections seemed to be paced well with clear diagrams and easy to understand narration. The interface is straightforward with simple navigation options for ‘home’, ‘back’, and ‘next’ at the bottom of the screen, and ‘help’, ‘glossary’ and ‘exit’ at the top. A slider along the bottom shows how far through the current lesson you are, and a page count below that shows how far through the course you are.

As this was only an introductory taster I couldn’t tell if the whole course would be suitable, but given the rest of the subject, it seems to fit with what I expect Mum will want out of the computer. The rest of the chapters are ‘Using the Internet’, ‘Using OpenOffice Applications’, ‘Ubuntu and Games’, ‘Customising the Desktop and Applications’, ‘Making the Most of Images and Photos’, ‘Playing Music and Videos’, ‘Ubuntu Help and Support’ and finally ‘Partitioning and Booting’. Much of that will be useful to Mum, I’m sure. Some less so – I don’t think she’ll be doing much in the way of disk partitioning, but you never know, from small acorns do mighty something something..

I look forward to evaluating the 10.04 version of the course, and will in all likelyhood set this up for Mum as it will cover a lot of ground that I wouldn’t have time to do well. In fact I’ve already set her up with a Launchpad account which will help not only with this training but will also allow her to buy music online, share files, sync notes, file bugs (hah!), ask technical questions and whatever else Canonical add to Ubuntu One in the future.

Andy Loughran (andylockran): You've got the Power

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:15:42 +0000

One of the things that really frustrates me about the new technologies which we're acquiring, is that we're not acquiring new technologies. Put simply, what we've now got access to isn't necessarily because it's new, but because it has become accessible to the masses. Twitter, for example, was technically possible way back when - but it's only now that people have been given access to the idea to use RSS feeds to send out 140 character messages, that people use it to send out 140 character messages.

There's a similar story with facebook. I was watching my local news bulletin, North West Tonight, when a big bloke was being filmed walking around a trashed house with a full camera crew, and lamenting the fact that facebook had trashed his house - and assigning them responsible.

Unfortunately, the blame does lie with his 16 year old daughter - who arranged a house party whilst her parents were away. News of the party got onto facebook - apparently from a post that she authored - and thus more than the 'gathering' of friends anticipated turned up - and some opportunist vandals trashed the place. However, that's not facebook's fault - necessarily.

Now, the one thing that facebook probably needs to do is start to set default privacy settings which are in favour of privacy, rather than it's advertising customers. Sure, facebook is free because of the absolutely unrivalled profiling that it can achieve as compared to any other medium - but once that information is on the servers, then it should be up to facebook to parse it - rather than leaving it open for the world and his wife to have a go at processing. It suprised me when I first sat down to write a facebook program just how easy it was to "spider" information, that is, if you can access a friend of a friends information, assuming each person has 100 friends, then if you access 1 person, you can access 10,000 profiles of information. That's quite a few from just one person adding your application.

So yeah, perhaps facebook has some housekeeping to do - but the end user also has to take responsibility. Facebook is not a ring-fenced safe place where you can communicate in privacy with your friends - it's a worldwide noticeboard that allows millions of people to interconnect.

The techology provides us with the ability to do things that were limited to the few people who had the resources and finances to kick things off. Some of the technology though is getting abused. As Rory Cellan-Jones put in his dot.Blog this week regarding 4 Square. Though in itself it's an innocent enough application (it tells people you're location realtime via GPS) - it also notifies people that you're not at home. Unfortunately the technologies are moving too fast for the end user to think "actually, what information have I just reliquished to the masses?" On the flip side, used thoughtfully and the technology can open up some incredible opportunities.

As Uncle Ben says in Spiderman - "With great power comes great responsibility." The average Jo(ann)e now has more power at their fingertips that ever before. In just a few clicks, we can reach millions of people with our messages, and new opportunities are springing up like never before. As an example, just this week a band called "Die Antwoord" have taken over the internet. I've had the pleasure of listening to some of their stuff a few years back - the mother of 'Waddy' is an absolute legend, as she nursed my mothers grandparents during their final years.

The internet is providing us with fantastic broadcasting opportunities - it's up to us to use them creatively and responsibly.

Alan Pope (popey): Ubuntu Manual – “48 Hours”

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:50:43 +0000

In about an hour, the Ubuntu Manual Team are holding a 48 hour learning event using Lernid and IRC. Appropriately titled “48 Hours of Ubuntu Manual Learning” this event is designed to not only attract more contributors and interest in the project, but also to teach their current contributors about parts of the project they might not be familiar with.

Taken from the UMP 48 hours wiki page:

Purpose:

“To provide information on the tools that the Ubuntu Manual Project uses to help both new and existing contributors to better understand the workflow process. This should enhance productivity and team communication, while reducing interior support requests and overall improve the efficiency of the team and the quality of the final product.”

The event is running several classes at two different times across two days, so that everyone can take part even if they’re in a difficult timezone. Some of the classes are:

An introduction to the project and Quickshot – Benjamin Humphrey
LaTeX for authors and translators – Kevin Godby
Using Ground Control to make changes – Benjamin Humphrey
The project and social media – Benjamin Humphrey

The event is also the first time that the new ubuntu classroom “ClassBot” will be used in a real environment. ClassBot was designed by Chris Johnston and Nathan Handler to be used in the ##ubuntu-cr channel. It gives extra control over the classroom by allowing the teacher to mute students in the main room (they can still talk in chat) and also elegantly handles questions.

To see how you can take part and view a schedule of classes, visit https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-manual/48hours

About UMP:

The Ubuntu Manual Project was started at the end of November 2009 by Benjamin Humphrey writing a 20 page quick start guide on his own in Open Office. Now the project has 250 contributors working towards a 200 page LaTeX manual, compiled into PDF in over 40 languages with 2000+ localized screenshots.

The team are developing their own Python application using Quickly to capture this enormous amount of screenshots. Called Quickshot, the application aims to automate a lot of the process of capturing, cropping and uploading screenshots of the right resolution, dpi and file format. Emphasis for Quickshot is on re-usability with other projects, specifically the docs team. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-manual/quickshot

Future plans for the project are an HTML5 version on a fully fledged website with downloads in all languages, collaboration with the Ubuntu Learning Team and the Docs Team, different paper sizes, double sided options optimized for printing, and possibly manuals for different variants of Ubuntu. The team would also love to have a version of the manual included on the Ubuntu CD, and in the repositories.

Alan Pope (popey): Zattoo Linux Client is Back

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:50:27 +0000

Some time ago I blogged about Zattoo – an application for watching TV. They removed their Linux client for some reason, but now it’s back.

Not sure there’s much of a place for fat clients now we have things like SeeSaw, 4oD and BBC iPlayer, but choice is usually a good thing

Alan Pope (popey): U1 Music Store – Store Music in U1?

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:39:54 +0000

After the post I made about the Ubuntu One Music Store, I’ve noticed a couple of things which might indicate what’s coming.

Firstly as we know Rhythmbox is the music player of choice in Ubuntu and we can already see the placeholder for the music store in the app.

I noticed something new today though, the “Music” category has a little [+] expander, and when we open that up we can see two options “Music” and “musicstore”.

This is interesting as I’ve never noticed the ‘musicstore’ group before. Perhaps this arrived after I installed the rhythmbox-ubuntuone-music-store package on my system. Lets go and have a rummage.

alan@wopr:~$ dpkg -L rhythmbox-ubuntuone-music-store /. /usr /usr/lib /usr/lib/rhythmbox /usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins /usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins/umusicstore /usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins/umusicstore/umusicstore.rb-plugin /usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins/umusicstore/__init__.py /usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins/umusicstore/empty.mp3 /usr/share /usr/share/doc /usr/share/doc/rhythmbox-ubuntuone-music-store /usr/share/doc/rhythmbox-ubuntuone-music-store/README /usr/share/doc/rhythmbox-ubuntuone-music-store/copyright /usr/share/doc/rhythmbox-ubuntuone-music-store/changelog.Debian.gz /usr/share/omf /usr/share/omf/rhythmbox-ubuntuone-music-store /usr/share/pyshared /usr/share/pyshared/rhythmbox_ubuntuone_music_store-0.0.1.egg-info /usr/share/pyshared-data /usr/share/pyshared-data/rhythmbox-ubuntuone-music-store

Ok, so there’s a new Rhythmbox plugin added called “umusicstore” which makes sense. If we poke about in the python under that we see interesting stuff.

That path ~/.ubuntuone/musicstore gets added as a Rhythmbox library further down the code:-

Which we can also see in the relevant gconf key for Rhythmbox. The key that gets added by the code above.

Ok, so why is this interesting? Well there’s a couple of things going on here. Rhythmbox is being specifically told about a new location which it should monitor for new tracks. That folder is hidden (it starts with a dot) so it’s not one that an user is expected to be putting files in. If that’s the case then we can only presume that it’s a folder used by the ’system’ in some way.

If we presume for a moment that the music store plugin will store purchased music in there – which would make sense given the name of the folder – and a user isn’t expected to be putting data in there then it must mean we aren’t going to be downloading music via a browser (given the difficulty of finding that location – it’s hidden remember), but instead this would happen in the background, directly from the store to that folder.

So assume that’s the case, that the music store will magically put your music in ~/.ubuntuone/musicstore. When we were at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Texas last year one of the items on the spec for Ubuntu One in Lucid was the ability for folders outside of ~/Ubuntu One/ to be synchronised with the U1 file syncing service. Assuming that is still on the cards then it’s not a massive leap to conclude that ~/.ubuntuone/musicstore/ could be synced with your U1 file syncing account.

Now, the next logical conclusion is if all that is true and it’s possible for users to nominate folders for syncing with U1 then it makes no sense for the user to have to manually nominate that hidden folder for synchronisation does it? It makes more sense for the folder to be automatically synced when you enable the Ubuntu One Music Store.

If that’s true then that would be fantastic news. If this conclusion is right then you will be able to navigate the store within Rhythmbox (just like iTunes does) and buy music directly inside Rhythmbox, and as soon as the download is finished, the music will automagically appear on every other machine you sync to.

A significant benefit to this theory is that it makes the ‘only 3 downloads’ limit of 7digital largely irrelevant. If you download tracks which become synced to the cloud for you and then optionally (if you have more than one computer) sync back down to other machines, you have a built in backup service. We get the benefit of an in-player store that the Mac and Windows have had for years, without the nasty vendor lock-in of iTunes, which causes issues if you break/lose your computer. With U1 you could lose your computer, get a new one, sign into U1 and bam you got your music back, and that won’t even eat into another one of the 3-download-only limit.

Of course the side-benefit of this for Canonical is the demand for space on the U1 file sync service will rise and thus so will their revenue. So everyone wins.

All this from reading a few lines of python. Is it a bit of a stretch of the imagination?

Isabell Long (issyl0): isabell121

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:41:41 +0000

I am slowly writing this on a newly acquired but rather old DELL Latitude, thanks to a certain person who knows who he is. It is now running Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and for the purposes of just for the sake of it, I will now paste the “what-I-consider-to-be-relevant” output of “sudo lshw”. Feel free to scroll down a fair way to see more meaningful content from me!

isabell@laptoptwo:~$ sudo lshw
[sudo] password for isabell:
laptoptwo
description: Portable Computer
product: Latitude CPx J650GT
vendor: Dell Computer Corporation
width: 32 bits
capabilities: smbios-2.3 dmi-2.3
configuration: boot=normal chassis=portable uuid=44454C4C-38BB-1037-804E-B4C04F33304A
*-core
description: Motherboard
product: Latitude CPx J650GT
vendor: Dell Computer Corporation
physical id: 0

*-cpu
description: CPU
product: Pentium III (Coppermine)
vendor: Intel Corp.
physical id: 400
bus info: cpu@0
version: 6.8.6
slot: Microprocessor
size: 500MHz
capacity: 750MHz
width: 32 bits
clock: 66MHz
capabilities: fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 mtrr pge mca cmov pse36 mmx fxsr sse up

*-memory
description: System Memory
physical id: 1000
slot: System board or motherboard
size: 256MiB
capacity: 512MiB
*-bank:0
description: DIMM DRAM Synchronous
physical id: 0
slot: DIMM_A
size: 128MiB
width: 64 bits
*-bank:1
description: DIMM DRAM Synchronous
physical id: 1
slot: DIMM_B
size: 128MiB
width: 64 bits

*-disk
description: ATA Disk
product: IBM-DBCA-206480
vendor: IBM
physical id: 0
bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sda
version: BC4C
serial: HR0RRRY8748
size: 6194MiB (6495MB)
capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=74a83565

*-battery
product: LIP868NLDLP
vendor: Sony Corp.
physical id: 1
slot: Left Module Bay
capacity: 53280mWh
configuration: voltage=14.8V

*-network
description: Ethernet interface
physical id: 2
logical name: eth0
serial: 00:60:08:8e:c6:18
capabilities: ethernet physical
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=3c589_cs driverversion=1.162-ac multicast=yes

As you can see if you analyse that, it has 256 MB RAM (no, UNR doesn’t run very well on it, I’m considering re-installing default Ubuntu), ~ 6 GB HDD, no WiFi, it has two batteries but one is currently taken out to make space for the CD drive to fit in (although that can connect externally), and I think that’s about it. In keeping with my naming scheme, it is called laptoptwo. Now I have desktopone, laptopone, vps, george (OK he is the odd one out) and this, laptoptwo. Win! I do apologise for the possible double letters or double spacing anywhere else but after full stops in this post, the keyboard sticks rather a lot and therefore repeats itself!

The title of this post is “goodies” plural, so I am going to also tell you that I did also kindly receive an Oggcamp mug and a USB hub! Thank you!

I now have my mini geeky realm, even though I haven’t yet set up internet on laptoptwo due to it having to be wired – we don’t have enough sockets in our router, or wires!

Andy Loughran (andylockran): General Election Year - 2010

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:50:53 +0000

The percentage of people voting has decreased massively since 2000, with Labour holding a firm grip on the UK parliament since their landslide election in 1997. They've guided us through the dot.Com boom, 9/11, 7/7, Iraq, Afghanistan, BNP MEPs, a recent depression and many more economic and political landmarks. However, it's been the Expenses Furore of 2009 which is most likely to affect the turnout to the 2010 polls.

2010 brings with it plenty of opportunities for people to get back involved with Politics. As a wise man once said - "Bad things happen when Good People do nothing." Though there are many who would go along with the 'popular campaign' to invalidate their ballot, rather than vote - all that's going to achieve is to exaggerate the influence of the peripheral parties.

Knowledge ahead of Ignorance

A bit like Tiger Woods, we need to start to learn to live our lives with integrity. This means that the discrepancy between what we say, and what we do - is kept to a minimum. Ideally the two should be water tight, but no one is a saint - as well the politicians proved.

One of the ways we can act with integrity is to beat a party of ignorance, like the BNP, by means of knowledge. The BNP make claims and slander based upon an ignorance - both of historical fact and public opinion. However, this ignorance has crept into Parliament. When a politician can state that the whole Expenses 'scandal' was because the Newspapers used the word 'Expense' rather than 'Allowance' - then there's something wrong. On the flip side, a politician's wage is not comparable to the wages of those in the private sector. Whilst I wouldn't want to be paying millions to the guys running the country, I'd rather pay more for them than I do to a man driving up and down the M6 trailing a giant billboard. Nor would I like to see the Institutional Profligacy of some politicians continue with the need for budget cuts and a decrease in spending.

Unfortunately, the system we have in the UK means that too many people are "patting each others backs," rather than providing decent and usable solutions for the taxpayer. The British Government is being held down by out of date practises, that need to be dealt with in a manner. One such manner is budgeting in the education sector. When a teacher fails to use up their budget in year 1, then the budget in year 2 gets decreased. This practise fails to encourage thrift in our public sector - but waste. It was only 18 months ago that I was driving up to Manchester, and the 'Digita TV' Quango (or whatever their name) was lamenting the fact that they had a budget of £250 million to help the British people switch to Digital TV, and had only used £42.5 million - with most of that on leaflets and paying people to distribute them. Their claims that "people weren't aware of the (dare I say it) FREE training" they were offering had led them to look for new ways of spending their money - as it was money that needed spending. It's just the wrong attitude.

So how can we help?

Knowledge.

MySociety have done a brilliant job of opening up Hansard and increasing the transparency of British Governance at all levels. From Fix My Street to They Work for You MySociety are developing more and more web-based tools to enable you to get involved. Want to know what issues your politicians are voting on? - you can find out, using only your postcode if you're new to the game.

There's plenty of opportunities to find out what's going on in your area, and to get together with people to make sure that your local issues are heard. If you want to know more on how to use the tools, please contact MySociety, or myself - and I'll be happy to guide you on the way to using your vote responsibly.

The Democracy Club

This is another group with whom I've just started taking an interest. I'll be following the progress of both my home constituency, Meriden - and the one where I'm currently living and working- Manchester, Central. I'd be interested to hear from other people working with the Democracy Club - and ideas and tips they might have for me to increase my productivity.

Alan Pope (popey): Ubuntu One Music Store Sneak Peek

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:51:18 +0000

Update: It looks like the 3-download limit will be less of an issue. See my more recent post called U1 Music Store – Store Music in U1? for some speculation.

It looks like 7digital are providing the back-end for the Ubuntu One Music Store which is due to land in Ubuntu Lucid at Alpha 3 – real soon now. The screenshots below were taken by me today on my laptop. They’re from Chromium browser, not from the embedded Rhthmbox store. That should be activated soon, and I’d imagine will look similar. Here’s a little screenshot tour.

The landing page clearly has the Ubuntu One branding.

As you’d expect you can easily search for music..

..to find your favourite artist or album..

Download tracks.. In the case of this album it’s available in MP3 format at 320kbps with no DRM

Clicking ‘Download’ adds tracks to your basket..

The store also has support for ‘vouchers’. Pretty sure I recall Elliot Murphy say podcasters should get vouchers for testing the store.

(although perhaps I’ve screwed that with this blog post)

The store supports Credit/Debit cards, Click&Buy and Paypal..

You can also track your existing downloads.

Of course this isn’t ready yet, so we can’t see it in Rhythmbox on Ubuntu yet, but it’s clearly getting there.

Interesting that they’re using 7digital, where it was expected by some that Amazon would be the choice. Also note that you can download each track 3 times on different computers. Of course you could download tracks once, then plop them in your Ubuntu One or Dropbox so they’re synced (and effectively backed up) across your machines.

I’d be interested to hear your opinions of the store in the comments.

Andy Loughran (andylockran): A little poem wot I wrote.

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:48:29 +0000

I contemplated writing a poem.
I tried to make it rhyme - it didn't.
I tried to make it be something clever - it wasn't.
I tried to make it say something profound - it failed.
I tried to make it so that other people would want to read it - they wouldn't.
I wrote to fulfil my need to write - it didn't.
I don't think I'm good at poetry.
Do you?

Alan Pope (popey): Educating Mum

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:05:24 +0000

Continuing my Mumbuntu saga …

Wed 17th Feb

Today my Mum went to the local library to ask about computer training. I had a brief chat with her and she seemed to enjoy it. Apparently the woman in the library showed her Google for searching and Google Maps so she could see a picture of her own house. She’s been given some notes and has arranged to go back next Friday when apparently they will look at ‘email’.

The librarian asked my Mum to bring in email addresses of friends and family and she’d set her up with an email address to send some mails out. As I’ve already setup an email account for Mum I’ll give her all the credentials and access details for the webmail system and they can use that, which will be a good starting point.

It’s interesting to me that the first thing a user gets shown is nothing to do with the software on the local machine, but a browser and an online service. How things have changed since the days of “This is a DOS prompt, type ‘win’ to start Windows”

I’ve been wondering how to get Mum up to speed outside of the training she gets from the library. One concern I have is that once they get past ‘playing’ with online services they’ll start looking at Microsoft specific desktop applications, rather than generic ‘Word Processor’ type tutorials. I think I’ll take a trip to the library at the weekend myself and take a look at their offerings to evaluate them.

One thing that I can do as an alternative is of course teach Mum some fundamentals myself. Some of that could be done in person at her house – or indeed mine. I will have a copy of her machine in a VM and can therefore show her what things will look like on her own desktop but at my place. I’d need to schedule some time for that, and with a job and family of my own that will be a challenge. Especially given this is very new stuff for my Mum so I’ll likely need to show her stuff multiple times before it sinks in.

So I have come up with two alternative strategies. The first is to look for training course that my Mum can attend to get her up to speed. Canonical have some training courses which are outsourced to training partners around the world. The Ubuntu Desktop Course looks the most appropriate for my Mum however the UK Ubuntu Training Schedule shows that it’s not running in the UK, and I don’t fancy paying the air fare for my Mum to go to Brazil for a 2 day desktop course!

The course also runs as an e-learning event which can be ordered from the Online Training Store for less than £40 which seems like an absolute bargain to me.

Once paid up and registered on the course my Mum can pace herself, taking her time over the sections she wants to, and repeating sections if she wants. The course content is based around Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) which was the last release before the last LTS (Long Term Support) release, and it’s no longer supported. So I don’t want to install 7.10 on her computer because I’ll only have to upgrade it at some point very soon, and I’ll get no patches/fixes whilst she’s on 7.10.

I dropped a mail to the training department at Canonical asking some questions about the course and releases and got a nice prompt response. They tell me the content is pretty much generic so much of it applies to releases after 7.10, and I can see how that’s the case as much of Ubuntu has stayed the same for the last two years. I was told that Canonical are currently updating the Desktop Course for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) which is due to coincide with the Ubuntu release at the end of April this year. So I could sign her up for the 10.04 version of the course when it’s ready. That gives me 2 months between now and the end of April to keep her entertained.

Which brings me onto my second alternative strategy. Screencasts! I’d like to create a bunch of very short screencasts (2-5 mins maximum duration) which go through the basics of computer use. These could be kept as a library of short tutorials which Mum can tap into and watch as and when she’s ready. I could put them on her computer so she’s got them on day one. In the future she will no doubt ask me questions, and I can create more screencasts to cover those topics. Here’s the cunning bit. I can record them at home, using my Virtual Machine copy of her desktop and then save them into a shared Dropbox folder which syncs to her desktop PC. So all she has to do is turn on the computer and connect to the Internet and she’ll get the new tutorials automagically on her computer – once I make them

I think a combination of the following may be right for her:-

Initial hands on with librarian
An introduction to her specific computer setup from me
An online course from Canonical
Screencasts

Suggestions and comments welcome!

Taras Young (taras): Dunfermline webcam

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:14:57 +0000

I’ve set up a little webcam, taking in the view across Dunfermline from the spare room in my flat. It will update the image at a maximum rate of once every 30 seconds, when anyone refreshes the image:

My Dunfermline geography is still a bit patchy, but I think it’s looking towards Garvock Hill – where the houses are – and Hill of Beath in the distance (during the day).

Geek corner: I had a lot of fun in PHP writing a wrapper for gd to make it easier to use, the incredible results of which you can see in the text overlaid onto the live image. And don’t even think about hotlinking the image, unless you want to see the special giant banner I designed to ward off hotlinkers.

Andy Loughran (andylockran): BBC Future Media & Technology

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:30:59 +0000

The iPlayer is a concept which should "just work." The BBC are a massive corporation in the UK, and once led the way in both content and technological developments in television entertainment. There were the BBC cameras, Dr Who, and all sorts of wonderful programmes coming out of Television Centre. Since then bits and pieces have been sold off, and more content was being bought from independent studios.

Then, BBC Future Media & Technology started to take off. In the digital world they created Dirac, the open and royalty-free codec, designed for transmitting HD content without encryption. They also started the development of the iPlayer which enables anyone in the UK to access BBC programmes to "watch again." This is subject to a fair-use policy, and a 30 day download limitation.

The flash-based implementation of the BBC iPlayer was fairly well received, as it allowed the iPlayer to be used on both Windows, *NIX, Linux and Apple based devices - anything that was supported by Adobe Flash. The BBC later dropped their Desktop version (which was implemented for Windows and Macs, but not Linux) in favour of the flash-based one - as it meant it required programming to only one interface - flash.

Good decision BBC.

Unfortunately, now they are developing applications for all sorts of devices. Where they saved themselves from having to program for three separate interfaces by no longer coding Desktop clients for Windows/Macs/Linux - they are now creating lots of more work to be 'cool and trendy' and 'Web 3.0' as they program for specialist devices like the iPhone platform, or Android.

If there were only a platform-agnostic way of delivering the content to all these devices, without having to program for each one individually.

Well there is, it's called HTML5 - I sure hope that out of all this mess the BBC at least spend some time coding for that interface. In terms of target markets, HTML5 should be supported of 100% of the devices accessing the iPlayer. I'm not saying the BBC shouldn't develop for these platforms - but there are better ways to do it. The writers of get_iplayer wrote a brilliant wrapper for linux - so why not allow freelance developers to put the iPlayer on the iPhone, Android .etc - rather than doing it all in house. That's more Web 2.0.

Alan Pope (popey): Geekbox

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:27:09 +0000

Taking a break from Mumbuntu blog posts. I mentioned this on the latest epsiode of the Ubuntu Podcast that we released yesterday. I see Fab from Linux Outlaws has blogged about his geekbox.

I have this tin box.

The contents are very useful to me.

Contents:-

32GB USB stick
3G Dongle – with 4GB Micro SDHC card installed in the side for extra storage
USB Bluetooth Dongle – In case I am on a machine that has no bluetooth and want to sync stuff to my phone
Numerous Micro SDHC cards – that I had kicking around from old phones etc. More storage!
USB Micro SDHC adapter – for connecting all those Micro SDHC cards

The general idea being that I can walk up to pretty much any computer and use it without touching the installed OS. With this setup I don’t want or need to install Ubuntu onto the local machine, I want everything to run off the USB stick.

The 32GB USB stick has Ubuntu installed onto it. This was installed by booting off standard Ubuntu 9.10 CD, plugging in the stick and going through the standard Ubuntu installer. Key things I did that might be interesting include:-

Use UUID in the /etc/fstab (which is the default) – not use device names such as /dev/sda1 so nothing gets confused about which partition I am booting from
Configure a small (1GB) amount of swap space on the USB stick – so I don’t get Out of Memory errors on low spec machines
Enabled encryption of my home directory – so I am less worried if I lose the stick
Installed Dropbox – to ensure my data is synced to other machines. No, not Ubuntu One. I use Windows, OSX and Linux and want my files synced over all three
Installed Chromium – because I like it
Configured Tomboy to store notes in my Dropbox so they are in sync
Installed Firestarter so I can turn the laptop into an impromptu access point / internet gateway
Install Prey so I might have some chance of getting the stick back if someone boots it up
Installed ClamTK/ClamAV anti-virus software so I can scan the hard disks in a machine I’m booted on (if required)

You might like to get one too, or indeed you may already have one. Tell me about it in the comments below. I’d also be interested to hear how I could improve this setup.

Alan Pope (popey): The Clone(zilla) Wars

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:04:48 +0000

Continuing my Mumbuntu saga …

Monday 15th Feb

Today I was watching the UPS package tracking website to see if/when the Acer Aspire Revo had arrived home. Pretty much as soon as I got through the door I unpacked one of the revos and set it up on my desk and connected to one of the two LCD panels that usually connect to my desktop PC. The plan was to restore the Windows XP and Ubuntu installs onto the 160GB disk on the revo using Clonezilla, having already done the backup yesterday.

The Revo has no optical drive, so I used Unetbootin on my desktop PC to write the Clonezilla ISO image onto a 1GB USB stick. Clonezilla is quite a bit smaller than that so you can probably get away with a lower capacity USB stick, but this was one I had to hand, and didn’t mind trashing the contents. Booting the Revo from USB should be fairly straightforward but for some reason pressing F12 during boot to get a ‘boot menu’ doesn’t always work. I had to boot into the BIOS and change the boot order to put USB at the top of the priority list, and disable Splashtop, to reliably make F12 work on boot.

Once I had Clonezilla booted and the Revo on the LAN I thought it might be prudent to backup the factory installed stuff on the hard disk ‘just in case’. It would allow me to return it to factory fresh if I ever sold it on or had to return it under warranty. The clone takes up very little space – 1.9GB – there’s no point not doing it. Once cloned I started restoring the clone that I’d taken of the Compaq Revo 250G disk yesterday. This is where it all kinda went a bit wrong.

I had assumed that Clonezilla would magically resize down the partitions when going from a 250GB disk to a 160GB one. Sadly this isn’t the case. Clonezilla doesn’t (yet) support going from a one media to a smaller one. I clearly should have read the documentation more here. I tried various options including restoring individual partitions rather than the whole disk, but it was no-go. So I had a bit of a think and formulated a plan. I’d resize the partitions on the source 250GB disk down so that they totalled less than 160GB, then clone it over to the Revos 160GB disk.

I didn’t have room on my desk for the Compaq to be booted up to do the partition resizing so I took a different approach. I have a few USB disk caddies kicking around for these kinds of eventualities. Some are SATA, some are USB, one of them does both – which is quite handy. It’s a cheap and cheerful USB caddy but it works reliably enough. I yanked the 250GB disk out of the Compaq Evo – which was very easy – the Evo reminds me of the old IBM PS/2 in that it’s incredibly modular and easy to maintain inside. I attached the disk to the IDE interface on the USB caddy and plugged the USB cable into my laptop.

I already had gparted installed on my laptop which is running Ubuntu Lucid (10.04), but if I didnt then I could have easily installed it or grabbed an Ubuntu Live CD off the shelf and used that instead. I fired up gparted and pointed it at ‘/dev/sdb’ (the 250GB disk) and took a look at the layout. As I’ve previously mentioned I split the disk in half, XP on the first 50%, Ubuntu on the second 50%, but what I needed was for both partitions combined to come in less than 160GB – the target disk size.

It turns out to be a complex operation including resize down the XP partition, move the Ubuntu partition down (to the left of) the disk, then resize down the Ubuntu partitions (/ and swap) and resize down the extended partition that the Ubuntu partitions sit in, and finally move the extended partition down the disk. All of this can be queued up in gparted, so you basically get the disk looking the way you want before you hit apply to actually ‘make stuff happen’.

I chose to resize the Windows partition down to about 55GB and the same for Ubuntu with a little extra for the swap. All of that came in under my target of 160GB, indeed I had some spare, which I could resize up to on the target, or perhaps use as scratch space later. I don’t think it matters having a GB or so free at the end of the disk when in all likelyhood my Mum isn’t going to fill much of the 55GB she has – in either OS.

The gparted operations take a long time because there’s a lot of data to munch up and it’s all being done over USB, so it’s now time for bed.

Tuesday 16th Feb

I woke this morning to discover the gparted operation completed successfully overnight.

When I got in from work I figured that I could do a direct disk to disk clone of the 250GB to the 160GB on the Revo rather than backup and restore. So I attached the USB caddy (containing the 250GB disk) to the Revo, booted Clonezilla and kicked it off. Pretty quickly I ended up with everything copied nicely over to the internal 160GB disk. Booting up the Revo from the internal disk resulted in a Grub menu (this is a good thing) and I could select Ubuntu 9.10 and it booted succesfully to the desktop.

Everything was detected and just worked. Ubuntu found the wireless adapter and auto selected the open source ‘nv’ video driver. I added the nVidia binary video driver because the Revo has an nVidia ION GPU which is well supported by the binary driver – unlike the nVidia card in the Compaq Evo – which isn’t supported anymore. The whole ‘move an install from one machine to another completely different one’ success with Ubuntu is one of the features that I use infrequently, but when I do, I love that it Just Works.

I then tried to boot into XP. Oh dear. Oh deary dear. Now I knew this wasn’t going to be straightforward, but it’s so sad to see an OS just barf on boot because the underlying hardware has changed a bit. I decided not to spend too long lamenting the crap situation and instead chose to reinstall Windows XP directly on the Revo. The Revo has no optical drive though, so I couldn’t stick my Windows XP CD in. USB caddy to the rescue! I yanked the IDE CD-ROM drive out of the Compaq Evo and attached it to the USB caddy in place of the 250GB hard disk.

To my surprise the Revo boot menu showed up the “USB NEC CD-ROM” as an option, and I was able to boot from the XP CD. Sadly the XP setup program bluescreened after it loaded up drivers, and after a quick search I discovered there was a BIOS setting that needed changing. There is an option in the BIOS to set the SATA setting which defaults to “AHCI” which causes XP to blue screen. Changing this setting to “IDE” mode and rebooting fixed the issue. I simply followed the same process of installing XP as I did previously, but when it asked me where to install I chose to delete the XP partition and then recreate it – leaving the Ubuntu partitions untouched.

My original XP CD is quite old, so it doesn’t have drivers for modern hardware. As I tell people frequently ‘Ubuntu has more drivers for more hardware out of the box than any other OS’ and that includes XP. Obviously Ubuntu is relatively new and my XP CD is years old, so it’s understandable to some degree, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. Especially when the XP installer has no way of adding drivers during install without re-spinning the CD – an activity I’m unlikely to do for a one-off computer setup like this Revo.

Once XP was installed I had to go and find drivers for wireless LAN, the video card, audio hardware and other onboard devices. This was helped by someone who has gathered all the drivers up into one neat package . It’s a bit worrying to grab a random zip like that for the fundamental drivers for the system, but it seemed to be in use by a number of other Revo users who reported it worked well. If it barfed I could always reinstall again – I’m getting good at that

After installing the nVidia drivers from that package I started getting popup errors about nvcpl.dll and some other dll every time I booted into Windows. I don’t know if it’s specific to the above packaged nVidia driver, but I doubt it. I found numerous posts from people claiming to have the issue. Good to see that nVidia drivers are the same bunch of crap on Windows as they are on Linux.

One of the other (many) problems with installing XP is that it will trash the master boot record (MBR) which – if it was the only OS on the machine – wouldn’t be a problem for most people. Those of us that dual boot end up with a broken boot loader and the inability to start our favourite OS. Luckily this is all very well known and there’s a nice bit of documentation that details how to fix it.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

I put an Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD into the CD-ROM drive which was still attached to the USB caddy and booted off it to fix this issue. I ran the grub-install command as outlined on the above page and then rebooted again. I now had a grub menu re-installed and could boot into Ubuntu again. However this now broke my ability to boot into Windows!

The grub-install command when run on the Live CD had incorrectly configured the grub boot loader so it couldn’t find the Windows install. There was an error in the grub setup which made it look for Windows on (hd0) when it should be looking on (hd0,1). This was easily fixed by booting into Ubuntu on the hard disk and running grub-install from there. I actually didn’t run grub-install, but sudo apt-get install grub-pc --reinstall which seemed like a good idea at the time. Worked a treat.

So at this point I now had a dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 install running pretty sweet on the little Revo. Time to take a backup with my new best friend, Clonezilla! I have a nice backup of the machine in case things go horribly wrong later.

alan@wopr:/media/drobo/images/2010-02-17-00-img_mumbuntu_revo$ ls -lh total 7.0G -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 4 2010-02-17 01:28 disk -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 8.0K 2010-02-17 01:28 Info-dmi.txt -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 16K 2010-02-17 01:28 Info-lshw.txt -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 2.4K 2010-02-17 01:28 Info-lspci.txt -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 286 2010-02-17 01:28 Info-packages.txt -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 10 2010-02-17 01:28 parts -rw------- 1 alan alan 2.0G 2010-02-17 01:04 sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.aa -rw------- 1 alan alan 2.0G 2010-02-17 01:12 sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ab -rw------- 1 alan alan 1.8G 2010-02-17 01:20 sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ac -rw------- 1 alan alan 1.3G 2010-02-17 01:28 sda5.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 37 2010-02-17 00:55 sda-chs.sf -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 31K 2010-02-17 00:55 sda-hidden-data-after-mbr -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 512 2010-02-17 00:55 sda-mbr -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 466 2010-02-17 00:55 sda-pt.parted -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 361 2010-02-17 00:55 sda-pt.sf -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 53 2010-02-17 01:28 swappt-sda6.info

Interesting that Ubuntu (sda5.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa) takes up much less space (1.3G) than the Windows XP (sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.aa, sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ab & sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ac) install (2.0+2.0+1.8=5.8G).

Tomorrow Mum will be going to the library to see someone about training lessons on the computer. This will be a big moment for her as it will be the first semi-formal training on a computer she’s had. I look forward to hearing from her about how it went.

Isabell Long (issyl0): isabell121

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:58:35 +0000

In this post I will explain the foundations of George, the media server I have started building.

Where it started.

George was formerly a “broken” Windows XP machine that was sat unused in our lounge after it “gave up” and kept freezing and rebooting. I had been pestering my parents for weeks to install Ubuntu onto it (inspired by popey and his Acer Revo behind his telly) and eventually, after telling them that the printer could be shared across the network as well as music and hopefully files too, they came round to the idea. This morning I dug a power cable and a spare keyboard and plugged it in, then went and dug one of my two monitors out from the mass of cables that are on and around my desk, plugged that into the other desktop, made sure it booted Windows XP and then chucked an Ubuntu 9.10 CD in, when I found one. That failed from the outset, due to me being so stupid and to cut a long story short not realising the DVD drive was broken and not trying the DVD-RW drive. I eventually got it booting from the DVD I’d found and installed Ubuntu, with no problems.

Why it is named George.

This machine is named ‘George’ because my mother decided my uninventive naming scheme of ‘laptop’, ‘desktop’, ‘vps’ was just that, uninventive, and decided to choose a random name and came up with ‘George’. Personally, I do think it is nicer than my original plan of ’server’!

In the future.

In the future, I plan to connect it to the internet, install openssh-server so I can SSH to it, media sharing (video, music, maybe the latter through the TV?), share files (documents around our local network) and share the printer around the network as well so anyone connected to our network can print from it any
where in the house without necessarily having to be connected to the printer/external HDD (the same goes for everything else in that list, the same principle). I’ll keep you posted!

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): The commute

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:05:14 +0000

A brief photo summary of my daily adventure.

6:30am Sue drives me to the train station

6:40am GO Bus to Burlington!

8:00am Burlington Go station

8:14 am Route 8, Harvester East

8:45am Work!

5:41 pm Route 8 North Service road

6:00pm Burlington Go station ticket booths

7:45pm Niagara Falls bus terminal

8:15pm Jubilee route leaving Main st

8:20pm: The end.

Alan Pope (popey): Click Next Next Next Finish

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:29:51 +0000

Saturday 13th Feb

I got the Compaq Evo desktop back to my house and on my desk today. The first thing I did was open up the box and see what we had inside. It’s a 1.7GHz CPU with 512MB RAM (2×128MiB + 1×256MiB), 250GB IDE hard disk, nVidia video card and CD-ROM drive. I had a rummage in my box-o-RAM for some suitable SDRAM and managed to get the box up to 768MiB (3×256MiB), which should help things a bit. I plan to supply the computer with an external USB hard disk for doing incremental backups of data only, just in case.

After the chat with Mum yesterday, I decided to hedge my bets and install a dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 system. That way she’d be all setup for whatever OS she chooses, and we have the ability to switch (in either direction) based on our experiences. Given the disk is 250GB I decided to just split it 50/50, installing Windows XP first.

The process for installing XP from the original CD went smoothly as expected. During the installation I told XP to only use 50% of the disk, leaving the rest free for my subsequent Ubuntu installation. The post-install steps of ‘install windows update’, ‘install SP3′, ‘install updates’, ‘install IE8′, ‘activate WGA’, ‘install updates’ interspersed with reboots is painful but fairly predictable, with only one hangup. I then added what I thought might be useful with little planning including Microsoft Security Essentials, Openoffice.org, Firefox 3.6, Thunderbird 3, Adobe Flash and Adobe Acrobat.

Once that lot was done I added a few more interesting things. I registered a dynamic hostname with DynDNS so that I could “get to” her machine over the Internet without having to ask her for the IP address. I installed a Windows client (from the same website) which automatically updates the Dynamic DNS entry. I also installed gitso (a remote control app) so I could easily remotely control the Windows desktop.

I already have a domain and email configured, so I setup an email address for Mum and setup Thunderbird to access it via IMAP. I received mail and sent a test mail to make sure it all worked okay. The anti-spam features are at the server end, so she shouldn’t have to worry about that at all – not that she’ll even know what spam is to be fair!

I created a separate user for Mum and myself, both are admins. Perhaps I should set her account to be a limited one for now, so she can’t do too much damage, or install random things. There’s possibly changes I’ll make to the Windows install, perhaps switching to Google chrome as the browser, maybe add other apps I’ve not considered yet. I should install some backup software for certain. The one that comes on the XP CD will probably be good enough.

Next I moved on to install Ubuntu, which by contrast was a breeze I just put an Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) CD in the drive and booted off it. I went through the installer chosing to install onto the empty (unpartitioned) space on the disk. I set myself up as the first user and selected to encrypt the home folders using ecryptfs (basically a tick box in the installation). I didn’t use the Windows migration assistant, enabled popcon (popularity contest) and finished the install.

I booted into Ubuntu, recorded my encryption passphrase and installed the outstanding 223 updates followed by a reboot. Once back in I attempted to install the binary driver for the nVidia Vanta card, however I was scuppered. It turns out that the Vanta cards are not supported any more by the nVidia binary driver. The video performance of the open source nv driver is quite sucky. I suspect that Mum won’t be especially bothered by that, but it’s annoying nonetheless. I had a look around in my box-o-cards for a replacement card but there was nothing suitable, so continued to use the onboard half-height Vanta card.

I then installed some extra applications.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras gramps deja-dup openssh-server ddclient apticron firefox-adblock-plus

ubuntu-restricted-extras: Installs Adobe Flash, video/audio codecs, fonts and other evilness.
gramps: Family tree software. I already have maintained some of our family tree in gramps, so I can help Mum here.
deja-dup: Simple scheduled backup tool to backup data to the USB hard disk.
openssh-server: So I can ssh into her Ubuntu machine and remotely adminster/update it. I can also tunnel VNC over this connection.
ddclient: DynDNS client to update the dynamic DNS hostname, so I can find her machine on the Internet.
apticron: Emails me when updates are available.
firefox-adblock-plus: Adblock Plus add-on for Firefox.

Finally I created a new user for my Mum. In Ubuntu 9.10 there’s no tickbox in the “Users and Groups” application to enable encrypted home using ecryptfs. This has been fixed in Ubuntu 10.04, but under 9.10 I had to use the following command to create Mums account:-

$ sudo adduser <username> --encrypt-home

After which I recorded the encryption passphrase as prompted by a pop-up dialog. This is essential if I need to re-install the OS (for example) and restore access to the encrypted files in the user home directory. Hopefully I’ll never have to worry about that, but I just know that if I don’t write down the encryption passphrase, I’ll end up needing it at some point.

Sunday 14th Feb

I wanted to buy another Acer Aspire Revo as a media playback PC at my house (I already have one). During the order process I toyed with buying an extra one (they’re quite cheap computers) for my Mum instead of the crusty-but-working Compaq Evo I had been using up until now. After a short internal fight of “she doesn’t need this!” vs. “this would be such a sweet PC for her!”, the latter demon won, and I bought two (one for me, one for her). So now Mum is destined to get a Revo instead of an Evo (which seems appropriate somehow).

I pondered how I could get the installations of XP and Ubuntu that I’d already done on the Evo into the Revo when it arrives on Monday. The Evo has a desktop size 250GB disk, and the revo has a laptop sized 160GB disk. I discovered Clonezilla which I downloaded and burned onto a CD-R. Clonezilla has some funky options for making a ‘clone’ of disks or partitions and restoring them on another machine/disk. It also has a funky dist-to-local-disk option which sounded interesting. It seems I’m the only one who never knew about Clonezilla, because as soon as I mentioned it, people told me they’ve been raving about it for ages.

Booting Clonezilla on the Evo allowed me to follow some basic prompts to mount a samba share on my network (in my case that’s my Drobo with lots of disk space) and backup the 250GB disk over the network to a bunch of files. Even more amazing is that Clonezilla only backed up the data. So I didn’t end up with a monster 250GB file, but a few much smaller ones:-

alan@wopr:/media/drobo/images/2010-02-14-17-img$ ls -l total 6347448 -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 4 2010-02-14 18:18 disk -rw------- 1 alan alan 2097152000 2010-02-14 17:49 hda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.aa -rw------- 1 alan alan 2097152000 2010-02-14 18:00 hda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ab -rw------- 1 alan alan 1003519444 2010-02-14 18:06 hda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ac -rw------- 1 alan alan 1295502304 2010-02-14 18:17 hda5.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 37 2010-02-14 17:36 hda-chs.sf -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 31744 2010-02-14 17:36 hda-hidden-data-after-mbr -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 512 2010-02-14 17:36 hda-mbr -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 463 2010-02-14 17:36 hda-pt.parted -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 361 2010-02-14 17:36 hda-pt.sf -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 14359 2010-02-14 18:18 Info-dmi.txt -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 11677 2010-02-14 18:18 Info-lshw.txt -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 1336 2010-02-14 18:18 Info-lspci.txt -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 286 2010-02-14 18:18 Info-packages.txt -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 10 2010-02-14 18:18 parts -rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 53 2010-02-14 18:18 swappt-hda6.info alan@wopr:/media/drobo/images/2010-02-14-17-img$ du -hs . 6.1G .

Fantastic!

Looking forward to tomorrow when the Revo arrives. Pondering how badly Windows XP is going to react to being moved from the Evo to the Revo.

Alan Pope (popey): A Clean Slate

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:07:09 +0000

I’m back-filling my blog with a few posts which cover the work I’ve done on Mumbuntu. So there will be a flurry of posts over the next day or so. Normal slack scheduled blog posts will be resumed shortly

Friday 12th Feb

Today I went to Mums to look at the computer. She doesn’t have an Internet connection at home, which is another thing I need to evaluate for her. So I took a few USB dongles with me so that I could get online if I needed to, and see what the 3G reception was like, in case we decide that 3G is preferable to wired broadband for her.

I mentioned in my previous introductory blog post about Mumbuntu that I don’t like the idea of other people ‘helping’ support my Mum in her computing endeavours. This is at least in part because I think most people are clueless about net security, viruses and the “right” way to operate a computer. Having someone who is experienced with XP help my Mum is clearly potentially useful, but it could lead to her being given duff advice.

I’m sure some people reading this will say “it’s her computer, let her decide”, and that’s a valid point, if you’re not the person who has to pick up the pieces after someone suggests to install the latest crapware. The computer from my brother is a case in point…

I had a poke about on the Compaq Evo desktop PC to see what state the Windows XP installation was in. This was supposed to have been ‘cleaned’ but I guess different IT professionals have diverse ideas about what ‘clean’ means. I removed an old out of date anti-virus package and installed Microsoft Security Essentials, then kicked off a scan. It found numerous viruses, trojans and other malware.

Some of this was in the form of nasty applications like Antivirus 2009 (a well known trojan and fake AV product) whilst others were embedded in fake media files that someone had downloaded via P2P. There were also lots of ‘helper’ applications and drivers for printers, mp3 players and digital cameras she didn’t own. I started cleaning up but rapidly realised this was a tiresome activity, and I’d probably be better of wiping it and reinstalling the OS, or a different one.

I explained to Mum that it would need to be reinstalled and I’d need to take it away to do that. This is no loss to her as she’s not used it yet, so there’s no data there. We had a bit of a chat about my stance in terms of Windows and how I’d prefer her to run Ubuntu. I explained that as she had no experience baggage, it would make little or no difference to her whether she learned how to use Windows or Ubuntu. I also pointed out that it’s easier (for me) to support, lower cost and flexible.

She’d been told that Ubuntu will have some compatibility problems, and given I know what camera and printer she has, that’s very likely. However her main ‘use cases’ for the computer involve basic web browing, email and some family tree work. No doubt these requirements will change over time, and I hope that Ubuntu can keep up with those needs as time goes on. So I know that Ubuntu isn’t perfect, but in my mind it’s a lot better than XP and cheaper and less resource intensive than either Windows Vista or 7.

One thing that came up during our chat was training. I can certainly show her the basics to get up and running, but she’s keen to learn, and as she’s retired has plenty of time to devote to it. She has a meeting today with someone local who does computer training courses for seniors, which could be useful for her. However the chances are very high that the training will be both Windows based, and Windows focussed which won’t help at all if she’s running Ubuntu.

Canonical have an Ubuntu Desktop Training course, but I can’t see any upcoming in the UK. I also wonder how well she’d fare on that course given she may be missing some very fundamental skills. The course structure seems to indicate that “computer literacy is assumed and is a pre-requisite”. Perhaps I could get her up to speed with the pre-reqs, then put her on that course… if they had one running. I note also that the course uses 8.04 which, whilst it’s a little old now (seems funny to say that) could be a good starting point.

Another option is to teach her everything myself. I have a potential plan for this. More on that in a later post.

Just a reminder that I’ll be tagging all my posts on this subject with ‘mumbuntu‘. So if you’re interested in them but not the other posts in my blog then you can subscribe to the mumbuntu only feed.

Alan Pope (popey): Mumbuntu – A computer for my Mum

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:42:21 +0000

For a while now my Mum has wanted a computer. She’s never owned one, and never really used anyone elses computer, not recently anyway.

Nearly 30 years ago I had my first computer, a Sinclair ZX81 that I got for Christmas. Later I had a 16K Sinclair Spectrum that my Mum bought for me. Since then whilst I lived at home, I’ve had various computers including an Amstrad CPC 464, an Epson 8086 PC-AT and an IBM Model 50Z. After that it all goes a bit beige.

Over all that time my Mum has been in awe of computing, and my ability to operate them. She’s expressed an interest in learning more about them, but not enough that she’s sat down and actually done it yet. Every opportunity I’ve tried in the past to introduce computers to my Mum has ended in failure. This was down to a lack of patience on my part and a lack of commitment on my Mums. It was also inconvenient for Mum to use my computer to learn because I only had one, and I was on it all of the time.

She’s not a technical person at all, despite being a GPO Telephonist many years ago. Her role since then has focussed on the home, raising myself and my silblings and providing for us when she and my Father split up. None of her jobs required her to use a computer. Since she retired though, something has rekindled her desire to start using a computer. There have been times over the years when she’s asked me to mail someone for her, buy something online, or look something up for her. She clearly wants the independence to do that for herself.

As I’m the only one of her children that lives nearby, and I’m the geek, it kinda falls to me to help her with this. This is going to take time, effort and quite a bit of patience on my part. Mum has said she wants to ‘do email, a bit of facebook and maybe do some family tree stuff’. “Easy” I think, Ubuntu can do all that (and more), however it’s not as simple as that because there’s some history.

A few years ago my Brother was in a similar position. He wanted a PC so I gave him one with Ubuntu pre-installed. He used it for a year or more for basic web stuff, using email, playing and organising music and photos from his digital camera. However after a while he decided to switch from Ubuntu to Windows XP. I think this partly came down to incompatibility with a few things (although not much) and some pressure from his partner who had a work Windows XP laptop. If my Brother wanted to ask for help he had to ask me, because his partner only knew XP. Given I live 130 miles from him and his partner lives in the same house, it makes sense to him to have support ‘local’.

So I’ve learned a few lessons from that experience. I certainly need the remote support to be top-notch for Mum, although given I live about 4 mins drive (one mile) from her, I can pop round and fix things when they go wrong. If I give Mum Ubuntu then I am the only person she can go to (in her social circle) who can provide help, so I’m really lining my self up for some work over the next year or so, as she gets up to speed. I see my Mum maybe once a week or more, so if she needs to explain stuff to me (or vice versa) we can do that over a cup of tea.

My brother got a new laptop for Christmas, so the old PC I gave him a few years ago is now no longer required. He’s offered that to Mum, so she doesn’t have to spend out on getting a the computer, which helps. He had a local IT company (and friend of theirs) copy his data from the desktop to his new laptop, and ‘clean’ the desktop up for my Mum. So the state of play right now is that there is a Compaq Evo (1.6GHz, 512MB RAM, 250GB HDD) desktop sat at my Mums house, ready for me to take a look at it.

I’d like to install Ubuntu for her – hence the title of this blog post – ‘Mumbuntu’. As a brand new computer user she has no baggage of experience with other platforms, and I know that Ubuntu can do what she’s after. Of course I could just relent and support her on Windows XP. I personally won’t give her Vista or 7 because I don’t have enough experience of it to be useful. I’ve used XP for years at work and in virtual machines at home that I know it well enough to be helpful to her. But it feels like defeat if I give her XP. She’ll have the benefit that others can help her, because XP is so ubiquitous, but I’m not entirely sure that’s actually a good thing…

Andy Smith (grifferz): Mushrooms stuffed with sun-dried tomatoes, Dauphinoise potatoes and aubergine rolls with pesto, tiramisu

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:27:09 +0000

On Sunday I’d offered to cook a three course meal that’s a bit different from what we usually eat. I virtually never cook and when I do it’s always just something quick. I don’t enjoy cooking, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway. Although these recipes were very simple, by the time the day came I was feeling quite nervous.

Ingredients

I used the following recipes as a basis, reducing to serve 2:

I couldn’t find aubergines anywhere (tried 3 big supermarkets) so had to settle for baby aubergines which of course weren’t big enough to wrap anything in.

Method

Mushrooms stuffed with sun-dried tomatoes

Preheat oven to 200C.
Soak about 8g sun-dried tomatoes in a small bowl of hot water, covered for 5 minutes.
Reserve a tablespoon of the liquid, drain the rest off and chop the tomatoes finely.
Chop off the mushroom stems and chop them finely.
Finely chop 1/8th cup of shallots.
Finely chop a clove of garlic.
Lightly beat a large egg yolk.
Mince 1/8th cup of parsley leaves.
Crumble 1/4 teaspoon of basil.
Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a frying pan over moderate heat until hot but not steaming. Add the mushroom stems and shallots, stirring until shallots are softened.
In a bowl stir together the mushroom stems, shallots, 1/6th cup bread crumbs, sun-dried tomatoes, the reserved liquid, the egg yolk, parsely, basil and garlic. Add salt to taste. Mound into the mushroom caps.
Brush the mushroom caps with sun-dried tomato oil.
Arrange the cups in a lightly greased shallow baking dish.
Sprinkle the caps with 2 tablespoons of grated parmesan.
Bake in the middle of the oven for 15 minutes.

Aubergine rolls with pesto

Preheat oven to 180C.
Cut 1 small carrot into matchsticks.
Deseed and slice half a red pepper.
Trim 8 asparagus spears.
Chop half a clove of garlic.
Finely grate 40g parmesan.
Top and tail 2 aubergines. Slice aubergines lengthways into about 8 4-5mm thick strips. Add salt and pepper, brush with extra-virgin olive oil and set aside for 5 minutes. Since I only had baby aubergines I could only slice them into small thin chips at this point.
Brush a pan with olive oil, place over high heat, cook aubergines for 2 minutes each side. Set aside.
Blanch vegetables in boiling water:
- Carrots: 3 minutes
- Pepper: 2 minutes
- Asparagus: 1 minute
Drain, pat dry and set aside.
Coarsely blend the garlic, 50g of drained sun-dried tomatoes and 1 tablespoon of pine nuts.
Add 10g fresh basil, the parmesan, and 65ml extra-virgin olive oil and blend again. Season and stir in 1 tablespoon of double cream.
Lay the vegetables at the end of each aubergine slice, roll up to secure and place in a large baking dish. Drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil and bake for 6-7 minutes or until hot.
Serve with pesto, garnish with lemon and salad leaves.

Dauphinoise potatoes

Preheat oven to 190C.
Thinly slice half an onion.
Slice 500g of King Edward potatoes thinly with a mandolin.
Grease up a shallow baking dish with butter (I used Pure soy spread).
Mix ~140ml double cream and ~40ml milk.
Layer the potatoes and onions evenly in the dish. Pour the cream and milk over, dot over with butter and cover the dish with foil.
Bake for one hour.
Discard the foil and bake for a further 15-20 minutes or until potatoes are golden.

Tiramisu

Sift ~22g icing sugar into ~112g mascarpone. Add 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract and 2 tablespoons of Tia Maria.
In a separate bowl, whisk ~85ml of double cream until soft peaks form.
Mix the cream and mascarpone together and refrigerate.
Break some sponge fingers to size and briefly dip them in cold, strong coffee.
Place the sponge fingers in the bottom of serving glasses and spoon mascarpone cream over.
Grate chocolate on top before serving.

Conclusion

We were pretty pleased with how it turned out, very yummy! Things I’d change:

Presentation could have been better. The vegetables on a bed of aubergines should have been aubergine wraps, but I couldn’t find big enough aubergines. Easy enough to fix. The Dauphinoise potatoes would have looked a lot better if they’d been nice equal sizes and shapes but I only had a grater to slice them with and it was the first time I’d tried. I might have done better with a proper mandolin, and/or more practice.

The Dauphinoise potatoes were rather too creamy for my liking, but Jenny really liked them. Maybe not so much a change needed as simply smaller portions for me; not a huge fan of potatoes.

There was probably a bit too much parmesan in everything, especially the stuffing for the mushrooms. That could have done with being toned down a bit.

No complaints about the Tiramisu!

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): The online olympics

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:21:47 +0000

Right now I am watching a high def stream of the USA China Womens hockey game and I have it streaming onto my 40 inch TV. I could watch it on cable of course but I don’t have an HD cable box yet and that isn’t the point I am getting at. These are the most online integrated Olympics to date, on the CTV site there is a Facebook connect link, I can share this feed to Facebook, twitter, google, etc. It’s quite exciting to be able to follow hockey on the one computer, skating on another and follow another sport on the TV. I feel a back in my day coming on so I’ll wrap up here.

I am pretty certain I am going to blow my Cogeco bandwidth cap this month with all this streaming as it is running at 500 kilobytes a second right now oh well, worth it.

Alex Hudson (so_solid_moo): Making Thunderbird sustainable

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:29:42 +0000

Tbird is a software product quite close to my heart: I think it’s important for a number of reasons, not least because it’s one of the few cross-platform mail clients that works well on Windows, and feels comfortable for use in a commercial context. Having Mozilla Foundation spin Thunderbird out to a new commercial entity didn’t fill me with cheer because they were essentially cutting it loose, and Thunderbird 3 didn’t excite me before it was released and hasn’t done since it was released.

Slightly more depressing than all of these, though, are the plans put forward for 2010. Development for 3.1 seems to be about making updates from 2.x less painful, and making some of the features better – all things which 3.0 should have been, in all honesty (upgrading from 2.x to 3.0 has put a number of people I know right off Tbird, to the point they’ve switched to something else). The plans to put Thunderbird on an economically sustainable footing also look staggeringly underdeveloped: Mozilla Messaging has been around since September 2008, and from the look of it there is still absolutely no vision about how this is going to happen. What is going to happen is a series of “experiments”, but it’s not really clear to me how you can judge the potential of a business model on that basis.

My specific worry about this is that by trying a series of experiments, they’re basically going to do a prototype-y half-assed version of each, none will work, and the whole thing will come crumbling down. This is specifically why businesses do market research: they test the market before they develop the product, rather than put effort in a direction which isn’t going to be successful. More than this, ideas for development of Thunderbird have been terribly unexciting so far: more experiments in the “web 2.0″ direction may be interesting for some people, but I struggle to see how people are going to pony up for any of this.

There has also been seemingly no effort to bring into the core the crucial Thunderbird feature which pretty much everyone clamours for: the Calendar. Yes, the plugin exists, and yes it’s pretty good. But in all honesty, there is absolutely no way on earth I would deploy that setup in a business right now with Tbird auto-updating itself, because at some point something will go wrong on update and people’s calendar plugin will stop working. So either I turn off updates, or I don’t use the plugin, and the balance doesn’t weigh in favour of the plugin.

Joe Brockmeier has written some thoughts of his own on the economic future, which involves basically setting up as a mail service for people to use Thunderbird against. I would worry it’s a little bit late in the game for that; businesses willing to pay for that kind of thing already have plenty of options available to them and it’s difficult to see how Mozilla Messaging can add significant value in that area without carrying horrendous costs.

My take: personally, I would want to see them focus on deployment and management of Thunderbird. Specifically, that means some kind of management system for Windows-based networks, whereby I can control updates, configure accounts, control user’s settings centrally, etc. That’s something critical to broad deployment of Tbird in large organisations, and doesn’t really exist right now. It would also be something worth paying for.

Whether or not enough “things worth paying for” can be created, though, is an open question. Fundamentally, there is a problem with giving away the client for free: it is a development cost, and in order to recoup that cost you have to create value in ways which wouldn’t be possible without the client. Every business model that doesn’t rely on that client being available for free as leverage doesn’t recoup the cost, it shoulders it. And that is the fundamental problem facing “open source business models”.

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): Exploring Google’s Buzz

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:33:41 +0000

Do we really need another social media outlet? Probably not but before you make your decision give Buzz a look see like I did over the last 24 hours.

The rundown

If you tweet you will be used to the very basic method of getting your social point across but wait, there’s more! Buzz also allows you to comment and like the tweet ripoffs so it’s more like Facebook status and Tweets had a baby.

The little bit extra

What sets it apart from being utterly pointless like Twitter is that you can link your photo galleries, blogs, and pretty much any other RSS content you wish to share through these posts with relative ease. At the moment I have set up a profile at http://www.google.com/profiles/crazyspence and as you can see it has the usual profile picture, a comment associated with it and some location data, nothing too fancy but below it is a Photo strip. This photo strip is an RSS feed from my Gallery2 photo website which Buzz had no issue communicating with as it supports RSS. This impressed me because I don’t use Flickr or Picassa (the default options for photos) and Google was kind enough to add support for any photo service using RSS.

If you browse through my buzzes you’ll notice one is linked from this blog, heck you’ll probably see this post in there too because it picked up my website through my Webmaster Central settings with Google.

Downside

Ok great there is Twitter integration but no Facebook. I have beaten the system by adding my Facebook Feed to the links on my profile and also by adding it to Google reader but at the moment there is no Facebook Connect and hopefully if Google is serious about this that will change.

Summary

I prefer Facebook and hate Twitter but this is a good Twitter replacement if that’s your thing. If they add Facebook support that doesn’t require my cheats I will use this as a catchall for my Facebook, photo and blog posts. People who follow me will then only have to look one place to see what I’m up to but until then it will not be my primary tool for interaction.

Alan Pope (popey): Pick me up with Apples and Toast

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:55:50 +0000

Feeling a bit rotten at the moment as I’ve been off work ill for a few days with some kind of bug. Apparently I’m on the BRAT diet so my wife says. Basically this means eating very basic stuff like bread and apples. I’m pretty sick of eating toast and sliced apple so wanted to do something a bit different. This is where the community came in! I was idling in the irc channel for my fantastic VPS provider Bitfolk and mentioned my lack of inspiration. One of the other denizens suggested I cook the apples.. which lead to this:-

Ingredients

One slice of bread
One apple – peeled, cored and sliced (16ths should be small enough)
2 tsp water
2 tsp sugar
Cinnamon to taste (I used just under half a teaspoon)

Instructions

Put the sugar, water and sliced apples into a saucepan and cook on a medium heat for 5 minutes, turning the apples to make sure they all cook evenly. Half way through the cooking process add the cinnamon.

Toast the bread.

Cut the toast in a decorative fashion

Serve the toast on a plate, add the apples, eat.

It’s really basic but tasty, takes no more than 10 mins to make, and about 2 mins to eat

Andy Loughran (andylockran): A History of Tux

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:36:42 +0000

I was on facebook this evening and managed to find myself perusing a friend's photos, when I came across a very random one indeed. It was then I realised that it was not my friend's album, but a friend of theirs, as I was unable to comment directly.

However, it's probably for the best as it would have revealed my geekdom, therefore beneath this writing I publish "This History of Tux" (according to Canberra Zoo).

Isabell Long (issyl0): isabell121

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:06:12 +0000

This must be a first, a post about things that happened at school on this blog! Here I go.

Monday:

Well Monday was pretty stupid. I will now type up the thing I wrote on a little scrap of paper as I was bored out of my mind because… well, you’ll see if you read on!
I wrote this and it is entitled ‘What A Messed Up Day’. And yes, it is true!

“I am handwriting this from the dining hall. What a messed up day this is so far, and we’re not even a quarter of the way through yet!
It snowed this morning, only a little so the school was still open, however the snow sure enough turned to ice and the majority of the teachers can’t get into school! I walked to school and then found my form tutor had not arrived, so we were directed to the dining hall. We were registered then told to go to our first lesson and if that teacher didn’t turn up within three minutes to come back to the dining hall, and so on. It wasn’t just the majority of us Year 10s, I must add, it was most of the school! My Spanish teacher didn’t turn up and I am now writing this sat at the back of the dining hall where I have been sitting in silence (yes) for the past hour doing absolutely nothing other than writing this. Fun.”

I just re-read that as I typed it and was horrified at the ‘mélange’ (sorry, I can’t think of the English word) of tenses! I think it is still comprehensible, though! Moving on…

Tuesday:

Tuesday was ‘E-Learning’ day, basically have a day off and complete a variety of computer based tasks (small database, spreadsheet, internet research) in 5 hours.

Wednesday:

I can’t really remember what happened then!

Thursday:

I got moved up into the higher German class. It is much better than the class I was in, mainly due to the fact there are only girls in the new class and they seem to be more focussed.

Friday:

Today… not much happened, again. Oh, I’ve been eating wraps at school for the past two days, Thursday’s was chicken tikka and today’s was Mediterranean chicken. Lovely things for just £1.65!

There, that is this week! Pretty uneventful, except for the stupidity of Monday.

Andy Loughran (andylockran): Birmingham Rugby Round-Up

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:14:00 +0000

This week Brian Dick and the Birmingham Post released their first 'Rugby Round-up.' Though the quality of the recording is obviously lacking, it's a great format and it's nice to see Birmingham Post experimenting with more online media for keeping Rugby fans updated.

If you're watching this on my site, the Video should be seen under this text, if not click here for a bit of Brummie Rugby News.

Isabell Long (issyl0): isabell121

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:39:34 +0000

As the freenode seven migration draws to a close and I have finally calmed down a bit (it wasn’t as spectacular as I’d planned, but never mind), I can get back into the swing of things. I’ve been re-doing my CV over the past few days for work experience and writing covering letters, and it’s amazing how much time that takes. Now that’s nearly over (despite having only applied to one company so far), I can get back into the world of Ubuntu. Not that I’ve been excluding it, of course not, I have 400 and something Launchpad karmas due to the translations I’ve been doing from American English into British English and some French over the last couple of days. Yay!

Other than that, another of my recent roles is bug triaging on Launchpad for Ubuntu, and answering people’s questions, and both of these roles are really rewarding and I learn more, of course! Now it is the weekend (although it doesn’t feel like it as I was ill and thus off school all week last week apart from Monday and Friday) and I have a mountain of things to do:

1.E-Learning work. It is E-Learning day at school for us on Tuesday, and we have five hours to complete a variety of tasks at home related to planning for our work experience.
2.Britain Loves Wikipedia is kicking off on Sunday with a launch event up at one of the big museums in London.
3.I need to finish the website task for my IT coursework. I haven’t yet worked out how I’m going to do it as I don’t have DreamWeaver at home, but I’m surely not going to do it in PowerPoint!
4.I need to write to my French bank and ask them to transfer my money over here.
5.I need to apply for work experience at more than one company.
6.Get back into the swing of the Ubuntu community and get translating French so I can actually join the team, get myself in the right mindset for learning how to sort bugs, learning all sorts of other stuff.

~~Not much at all really!~~

Also, I’m sorry for the cryptic titles!

Isabell Long (issyl0): isabell121

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:00:55 +0000

Freenode is still alive! I am on the other side. Everyone who connects to freenode will be using ircd-seven, now, hyperion is at long last gone! I was rather excited, to the extent that I woke up at 6:45 to watch the proceedings! Now it’s all done though, yes!

Alan Pope (popey): Yahoobuntu!!!

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:44:42 +0000

Ubuntu is switching the default search from Google to Yahoo!

Those of you testing out the development version of Ubuntu Lucid should notice a change in Firefox very soon. The default search provider for new installations of Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) and upgrades will be Yahoo! and not Google. Canonical have struck a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! which generates income for the company. This revenue should help pay the wages of Ubuntu Developers employed by Canonical, and support the infrastructure required to develop and build the distribution.

So when using the search box in the top right corner of Firefox on Ubuntu, you’ll be taken to a Yahoo! results page rather than the old default Google one. If you are upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 and you had Google as your search provider (the previous default) then this will change to Yahoo!. You can of course change the search provider, this is merely the default for Lucid. Doing so will mean your search revenue won’t go via Yahoo! to Canonical. That’s your choice, clearly.

In addition, the browser ’start page’ – that is the page you see initially when you open the browser – will reflect whatever the default search provider is. So in the top right, if you choose ‘Google’ you’ll get the Google start page, and conversely if you choose ‘Yahoo!’ you’ll get the Yahoo! start page when you first open the browser. Again, you can change the start page to be blank or use some other search provider. These are just the new defaults.

It’s possible that additional search vendors may be added to the list – Bing anyone? – but it seems that for Lucid there will be at least the two mentioned above. Users who already run Ubuntu and are upgrading to Lucid, but don’t use Google won’t notice a difference, but they’re welcome to manually switch to the new Yahoo! search provider if they want to financially support the Ubuntu project that way.

No doubt this will cause some consternation within the Ubuntu community, as many find changes to “their” browser to be tantamount to breaking and entering their home. Indeed when these things were previously messed with there were a few heated complaints and reports of broken-ness.

Hopefully the dialog on this change will remain civil and, well.. lucid.

Josh Holland (dutchie): On Internet Explorer and web standards

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:45:15 +0000

This blog is 100% standards compliant. If you don’t believe me, check it at http://validator.w3.org/. I know this for a fact since I wrote the whole website from scratch in Django. However, I can confirm for a fact that the browser I am using to write this post, IE7 on XP SP2 on a school computer, does not render it correctly. To be specific, it can’t handle the position: fixed; CSS attribute. This has been part of the CSS specification since at least 1998 (see http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-CSS2–19980512/).

Internet Explorer is famous for its non-compliance. Its rendering of the Acid3 test is dire, and many websites are written with special rules for when IE views them. On top of this, the French and German governments have recommended against using it due to security vulnerabilities. In short, it is a truly terrible browser. Given the choice, I’d rather use w3m.

It would be easy to code around IE. But what would that acheive? First off, this blog is written by someone who believes strongly in open standards and open source. I expect most of my readers to be using a non-IE browser (Google Analytics reports 42% Firefox, 28% Chrome and 16% IE) which can render this website properly. Secondly, and more importantly, this would become another one of those websites that is the cause of a 3.5 year old browser still being around. If all of the websites in the world dropped their IE-specific hacks, I should imagine it would smarten itself up or disappear pretty quickly.

This is a call to arms, will you stand beside me? OK, it may not be a massively violent protest, but they worked for Gandhi and Rosa Parks. Drop your IE compatibility hacks and code to the standard! It’s all for the best in the end.