Linux Outlaws Planet

Greetings all and welcome to Weekly Rewind number 50. The big “five oh”, I’m referring to the number there and not using ghetto slang for the police. I do listen to a lot of hip hop but it hasn’t completely taken over my brain just yet. I once got a royal ripping (Liverpool slang for skitting) from my band mates for using the term “five oh” as a police car drove past. We laughed hard about that. Anyway this is all by the by, so let’s get into it.

On Monday we recorded another Linux Outlaws and streamed it live as usual. Unfortunately Fab has been ill this week so best wishes to him, despite this he still got the show out on Friday though. Nice work! On Tuesday I worked on some audio stuff along with many other jobs. I put some stuff together as an audio trailer for OggCamp10 and released that here later in the week. I also got a chance to catch up with some good friends on Tuesday night which was nice. On Wednesday I attended LivLUG where we had a fascinating talk about ZFS and BtrFS from Tom Hall, a storage and filesystems guru. Tom’s a good speaker and it was very entertaining. One of the LUG members (Neil Bothwick) later described it as a bit of a Jim Bowen moment though. For those who have no clue what I’m on about there, ZFS is under a license not compatible with the Linux kernel, so it’s doubtful we’ll see it in there any time soon. Jim Bowen is a British game show host famous for saying “…and here’s what you could of won”. Jokes are always better when you have to explain them aren’t they? I wasn’t sure Jim Bowen’s fame had spread from far from these shores yet, but it made me laugh anyway..

Thursday was pretty quiet and I got on with jobs but on Friday I went over to Liverpool on the train. I had a meeting at the Bad Format Social Club, the venue for my Rathole Roadshow gig and sorted out some arrangements for that. I then walked up to the FACT building for lunch with some friends and potential sponsors. I have some good leads there but we could always use more. If you or your employer would be interested in sponsoring OggCamp please drop me a line. Finally, I popped into the Black-E to sort some stuff some out with them before hopping on the train home. I used the N900 to keep up with emails and everything else during the day rather than taking my laptop, and I got a surprising amount done on the device. It did affect the battery life a little as I used it much more heavily, but it was a good test. I don’t normally go out for the day like that without a laptop if I have work to do. I listened to some teenage lad on the train trying to convince his mum he “really needed an iPad”. “It’s not a toy it’s for serious work, I’m going to do spreadsheets on it” he pleaded. I resisted the strong urge to jump in with a comment like “Spreadsheets my arse, it’s a big iPod Touch!! You can’t even install software on it. Get a proper computer you idiot” but it wasn’t easy. He kept looking over at the N900 to try and work out what it was I was using. Some sort of iPhone he hadn’t seen perhaps? Thankfully not. I engaged “smug mode” and remained quiet.

On Saturday I was interviewed for the Open Source Musician podcast which was a lot of fun. I was honoured to be asked on the show but felt like a bit of a fraud. I still have a dual-boot setup on my studio machine. I use Ubuntu Studio a lot but it does also have Windows XP on there which I occasionally use. It’s not a secret, I’m open about it, but it’s not something I’m proud of either. I’ve been “in the process” of going 100% Linux in the studio for about 18 months now. I never seem to get the time to actually concentrate on it with so much else going on. I’m proud to say I do all of my podcast production on Linux, but music is still a work in progress for me. I’m only 70% there. Must try harder, as it would probably say on my school report. Finally, today I streamed and recorded another Rathole Radio show which was great fun. I played a wide range of music and had a lot of fun as always. I’ve processed the audio just now and will release it tomorrow. It’s getting too late to do it tonight.

Upcoming:

Not sure exactly what I have planned in the next week but I know something will take up my time. I’m not 100% sure if Fab will be fit enough to do Linux Outlaws tomorrow night either, but hopefully so. I didn’t get chance to install a BSD and test it this week. I still need to do that for a review. I’ll also be doing much more Oggcamp business and trying to move all that forward. We made good progress on sponsorship this week and that’s my major focus right now. There’ll be another Software Freedom Law Show to produce and much more besides. Join me next week to find out what unfolds.

Take care,

Dan

Thought I would do another blog post with lots of exciting tech news. So, here is what I’ve been seeing over the past few days.

• Amazon buys “TouchCo”. Touchscreen kindle in the works? One might wonder if they are going to be using this company for just that. The other question, however, is “If it is made, when will it be available in Britain?”
• Symbian is officially opensource. Symbian^2 (previously S60) is now open-source. It turns out the #symbiancountdown was the number of packages left until Symbian was totally open source. Well done Symbian. Now you need to step up and make sure than Symbian^3 is amazing and it better really step up and do what Symbian^2 hasn’t done. It needs to do a lot to be any good.
• JooJoo near launch. Fixes lots of problems that would make you not want an iPad (except the price).
• With or without you: Arm Ceo to Microsoft. The market will grow with or without Windows arm support. Good news for linux?
• Sonic 4 in production. A blast from the past, in high definition. Thats right, Sonic 4 is being made and will be available in the summer on PS3, xbox and wii. On PS3 and Xbox it will be in 1080p. Thats great!!!
• Apple yet again show how pathetic they are, by turning down an app because it is “not interesting enough”.

So, theres just a few bits of random news that I thought I would share with people. Have a great weekend guys!

Evening all, I just wanted to share with you something I’ve been working on this week. It’s an audio trailer for our OggCamp10 event on 1st-2nd of May 2010 in Liverpool, UK. I threw this together quite quickly with a short script and some sound effects. It came out well though and I hope you enjoy it. Obviously this is licensed under Creative Commons, as with all my other work. So if you’d like to use it in any way feel free. It’s a promo after all so I hope too hear it everywhere!!

Ogg Version (1mb)

Mp3 Version (1mb)

FLAC Version (3.5mb)

The work contains some samples taken from FreeSound.org and in keeping with their CC license I’d like to thank dobroide for the pedestrian noise, and rutgermuller for some extra footsteps. The music is an old track of my own which isn’t actually released yet. I’ll get the full version uploaded as soon as I can. Oggcamp business has me very busy right now. I will also be making a shorter 30 second cut of the ad very soon.

That’s all for now, take care out there,

Dan

What is there to say about this video? Except – roll on summer!!! If this isn’t a reason to finally get a PS3, I don’t know what it.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

I had a conversation today, where the other party disagreed with me about the following text which I saw in Madden 09:

“The Bengals have played the Steelers more than any other team in the NFL”.

My assertion was that the statement was ambiguous and did not make sense as you could not figure out which team played the other team the most in their own history.

My interpretation of the statement was:

• The Bengals could have played the Steelers more than any other team in Bengals history
• The Steelers could have played the Bengals more than any other team in Steelers history

Also Wikipedia appeared to have the correct statement: “the Bengals have met the Steelers more than anyone else in their own history”, which was not ambiguous to me.

Please comment on this as they are having a hard time believing my argument, and if I am wrong I would love to know.

Related posts:

1. Make your bash shell cool again I originally wrote a spec in 2006, but it never...
2. 5 Things I Have Learned About Corporations When I was younger I would email successful people and...
3. Fedora 11 vs. Ubuntu 9.04 Put Fedora 11 on my laptop just out of boredom,...

Although I had thought about updating the look of my music page for a while, other things took precedent. Well, as life sometimes is, I was introduced to a feature in one of the finer browsers that one can use.

The Feature
Picture if you will.......
friend: you should fix your music page cuz it's crap
me: what?
friend: I went there and didn't know what to do
me: did you click the arrow pointing to the right that typically signifies "play"?
friend: what arrow?
me: whoa! what browser are you using?
friend: firefox
me:(pretending to be Morpheus) Show Me!

On my music page, I had a bunch of <audio> tags so that visitors to my site could hear me butcher various tunes that I have recorded. Unfortunately, the Firefox theme that my friend was using made Firefox's default audio player completely unusable.

Fine, I didn't like the look of the default player anyway!

What...

Read the full post at http://www.jezra.net/blog/PagePlayer_a_JavaScript_HTML5_audio_thingy

Just in case you haven’t read my original announcement, I just wanted to let you all know on here as well that OggCamp 10 will be taking place in Liverpool in the UK on the weekend of May 1-2 this year. The second ever OggCamp (10 being binary for 2, get it?) will be even bigger and more awesome than the inaugural event last year. The whole thing is preceded by Dan’s Rathole Roadshow gig on the evening of April 30 featuring himself, David Rovics, Attila The Stockbroker and many more live in concert. For OggCamp itself, we have a much bigger venue this year and we have a lot of plans how to use it to its full potential, so keep an eye on the OggCamp site as details emerge over the next few weeks and months. The event will of course feature a live recoding of a combined Linux Outlaws / Ubuntu UK Podcast show again and there is the possibility of the LugRadio crew getting involved as well.

If you are planning to come along, as you most definitely should, I would advise you to look at booking accommodation as soon as possible since the weekend seems to be very popular because of the bank holiday on the Monday after. Dan has created some helpful hotel and travel sections on the OggCamp site to help you with this. Ticket prices for the event haven’t been announced yet and we’d really like to make it free admission again, but that depends on what kind of sponsorship we are able to get. If you can help with that, please get in contact with us via the link at the top of the page. Failing that, you can also help us by placing one of these shiny buttons on your site, blog or forum signatures. Please help us spread the word, even if you can’t attend the event yourself. We realise that many of you live in countries and on continents all over the globe, so getting to Liverpool isn’t always practical, but please help us to publicise OggCamp 10 nonetheless. If you have any ideas or suggestions for the event or if you want to be part of the crew or help us out in any other way, please also use the contact form and get in touch.

I hope to see you all in Liverpool at the Rathole Roadshow and at OggCamp 10 – if last year was any indication then it’s gonna be totally awesome! And don’t forget to superglue your hubcaps on tight if you’re planning to arrive by car…

Introduction: Since finishing my Part IV Project, I’ve been threatening to do some embedded/microcontroller stuff in my spare time at home. I’ve now finally go around to it and I thought I’d start by playing with a few components I had left over from a Uni project a while back. I’ve also ordered an Arduino board (see below), but it hasn’t arrived yet. When it does, I think I’m going to have a go programming it in C rather than the random Arduino language, as I have much more experience of programming embedded systems than your average Arduino user. I’ll report on my progress when I have some!

In the Electrical and Computer Engineering Deaprtment of the University of Auckland, where I work we have a little device, internally known as the ‘DonKey’. The purpose of this is to allow easy programming of Atmel AVR based microcontrollers via USB, rather than the simpler serial interface. We also have some internally developed software to program microcontrollers via the device, unfortunately this software is pretty much windows only (we did have a successful attempt to compile it for Linux, but this was quite a while ago, a better solution would be to use a native Linux application).

Internally the DonKey uses an FTDI based USB to UART chip (specifically the FT232R) to communicate with the microcontroller. This presents some problems as, despite being the basis of the programmer on incredibly popular Arduino boards, the main Linux programming tool (AVRdude) has no official FTDI support. I think this is largely due to the use of a bootloader on the Arduino boards, which negates the need of the programming tool to directly flash the board. If however you brick the AVR on the Arduino, you would be out of luck and would need a physical programmer (more on this below).

In this howto I’ll cover how to get the DonKey working on Linux with AVRdude. Luckily, while researching how I might go about this I found that a large part of the work had been done for me, due to the fact that the Arduino also uses these chips. I found instructions on doswa.com on how to patch and compile AVRdude for just this purpose (so you could flash a bootloader to a new AVR).

These instructions work quite well for the DonKey, up until you get to running the ‘./configure’ command, I replaced this with:

$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local

to setup the code to do a local install in my home directory (as I want this to be my primary version of AVRdude, but not to screw with things on the root filesystem).

Next I followed the instructions on modifiying the makefile and compiling AVRdude via the ‘make’ command. After ‘make’ I also typed:

$ make install

to install into the directory setup earlier. Now AVRdude is installed, the next thing to do is a bit of configuration, firstly you’ll want to make sure it’s on your $PATH so add the following to your ~/.bashrc file:

export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH

and run the command:

$ source ~/.bashrc

to re-read the file.

The next issue is that you may wish to remove any copy of AVRdude that is otherwise installed (I found that sometimes my shell would run the wrong one – especially if you use ’sudo’ to run it):

sudo apt-get remove --purge avrdude

Now, I just mentioned above that you might use ’sudo’ to run AVRdude, well according to the doswa article you do need to use sudo when using the FTDI based programmers. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s not very useful if you want to be able to call AVRdude from a Makefile or the like.

I solved this by setting a ’suid root’ on my AVRdude binary. For those that don’t know what this is, the suid bit is a Unix permission setting that makes any program with it run under it’s owning user rather than the user who called it. If the owner happens to be root, the program runs as root even if the user who calls it isn’t. This is probably really insecure if you do it a lot, but you should be OK in this case.

WARNING: Despite what I say, it might not be OK. Allowing any program unrestricted root access has the potential to hose your system and scatter all your data to the winds. FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS AT YOUR OWN RISK!!

So here we go:

$ sudo chown root:root ~/.local/bin/avrdude
$ sudo chmod u+s ~/.local/bin/avrdude

Now you should be able to successfully run AVRdude on FTDI based devices without resorting to using sudo every time.

But, what of the DonKey I hear you cry! Well all we have to do to support the DonKey is give AVRdude a little bit of configuration which tells it what the DonKey actually is. This can go in ~/.avrduderc, and looks a bit (well exactly) like this:

programmer
id = "donkey";
desc = "University of Auckland ECE DonKey";
type = ft245r;
miso = 1; # D1
sck = 2; # D2
mosi = 3; # D3
reset = 4; # D4
;

OK, now you should be able to successfully use the DonKey with AVRdude, using a command similar to this:

avrdude -c donkey -p m8 -P ft0 -U myawesomeavrproject.hex

Note: this command is for the ATMega8 as denoted by the ‘-p m8′, check the AVRdude manual page for the correct -p option if you are using a different type of AVR.

OK, well that’s pretty much it, I’ll post back soon regarding my other progress with some microcontroller stuff. Bye for now!

Because they don’t support Android. Other than that I was a pretty happy customer.

http://identi.ca/conversation/20122521#notice-20122521

The word “cunt”, is a fabulous word. With timing and judgement, it’s like dropping a nuclear powered stink bomb into a converstation. The problem isn’t the word, the problem I have is when the joy of using the word is eroded because it’s special status within language hasn’t been respected.

Let us put aside the discussions about it’s neo sexist connotation for a moment, the staffers and hacks can cover that territory ad infinitum. It’s pejorative meaning in the second and third person is just as problematic. If no-one were to challenge the validity of it’s use in spurious cases (such as an only slightly questionable decision by Ubuntu to change the default search engine), doesn’t that devalue the word the next time you need to express it’s meaning? For instance, if a guy opens fire with a machine in a packed shopping mall for no reason, he would be a murdering bastard. If they were to go one worse and open fire in a kindergarten school yard, you’ve got no cathartic language left. What are you going to call them? “That guy who shot my kid is a mudering [person who would change the default seach engine setting]“.

I’m annoyed at the lazyness of it. I realise that the Microblog format can be limiting. But isn’t that a challenge to be even more creative? Trotting out words like cunt thoughtlessly in instances like the one I’ve linked to above, reduces the speaker to barking like a dog. Without vocabulary and creative composition, then  the only way to express anger is volume and aggressive, monosyllabic shock. In terms of the point of the communication, it’s also highly likely that poorly judged use is also going to be counterproductive. You may have a smattering of support from those who are similarly angered. But many who may previously have been receptive to pursuasion to your view, will recoil or even entrench themselves in the opposite opinion solely due to their perception of your agression.

You are of course free to hold and express any opinion you choose. The thing is, I feel the way this person has done it reflects badly on the community as a whole, of which I am part. So next time, please, be more imaginative.

Thank you!

For a recent video editing project, I really wanted to have some mellow classical music playing in the background. Due to licensing restrictions, the classical music needed to be either in the Public Domain or released under a very permissive Creative Commons license.

Fortunately, the United States Air Force Band has quite a few Public Domain recordings, of Public Domain works, on their website. Unfortunately, the Air Force website leaves a lot to be desired regarding listening to and downloading tunes.

The website uses javascript to open a popup player, and this is terrible. Actually, it is good, because the javascript that launches the player requires the full URL of the mp3 file that the player is supposed to play.

What this means, is that I need only sift through the source of the page containing links to audio files and pull out the URL strings that start with "http://" and end with ".mp3". This sounds like a job for a non-greedy Regu...

Read the full post at http://www.jezra.net/blog/nongreedy_regex_in_PHP_finds_the_mp3s

I could almost see why there was some uptightness about not putting Gimp in the default Ubuntu disk image. I’ll concede thateven though I’m bored of the issue, I’m still not fully sure that Mono based apps are a good idea. Despite trying to be open minded about it, I must have missed the point in a huge way about the most recent issue on the Ubuntu community agenda.
Aparently, in an attempt to get some money in the door, Ubuntu are going to make a switch to the default browser search engine. From Lucid, the bundled Firefox browser will default to Yahoo. Popey says this can be changed to the engine of your choice with two mouse clicks.
Within moments, this seems to have caused more knicker twisting and microblog  invective than ….uggh words fail me.

Let’s be clear here…

The situation in Haiti, matters.
Human rights in China, matters.
Surpression of Democracy in Burma, matters.
The aimeless occupation of Afghanistan, matters.
The changeable default search in Ubuntu? Doesn’t matter.

Recently I have been thinking about the void of innovation of the last few generations. In a nutshell, it seems that we hit the pause button somewhere around the late 80’s. I have been in search of some sort of inspiration or hope, but have seldom found an answer as to what has happened.

I recently went on my honeymoon to Chicago, a fantastic city. We went to the top of the Sears / Willis tower, and looked at the view. It was funny how the tallest building in the United States was build in 1973. It was a great flight to Chicago, riding on the Boeing 737 that was designed in the early 60s. Prior to my generation, every 10 years or so there was an entire new set of music that some loved, and some wanted to forget. Now the decades since the 90s just blend together.

Did we reach an apex, or simply a cultural shift? I highly doubt we are pressing the limits of human comprehension, as even the most skilled / difficult fields are very simple once a few hours in understanding are applied. At some point we lost our way, but it wasn’t just the USA. England, China, Russia are all along on the ride with us, seldomly producing actual innovation.

Remember AIDS, cancer, and the common cold? They are all still here, and despite years of supposed research, we struggle for any answer, solution, or even mitigation strategy. How is the car you drive? Almost any engine in use today was designed fundamentally at or before the turn of the century. Hybrid cars? A joke in their current state (just jam a bunch of lithium ion batteries in there, also developed in the 70s).

I would love it if people could comment on innovations, and what they see that is amazing or that is in development that can inspire. Where do we go from here?

Before we go down a road to the obvious, I don’t believe that Operating Systems are fundamentally different than 20 years ago. My Windows 7 and Linux of today are definitely not 20 years improved (we still use the same tcp / ip protocols (developed yet again in the 60s / 70s), same languages / paradigms (most of which developed in the 60s / 70s) etc. My computer today does little that my 8086 couldn’t do, and is terribly inefficient at doing so. I really don’t count most anything webpage based as an innovation, as it is such low hanging fruit (even google) that I can’t bring myself to include it in with the previously mentioned technologies.

Related posts:

1. Jaunty released, apparently the GDM theme was not a joke I was in the camp of thinking they would switch...

1. Always remember to install guest additions in virtualbox guest before getting upset that folder sharing isn't working....

2. Turn off automatic updates in windows guests until you have manually run windows updates... freaking annoying to have to reboot randomly in between.

I've recently transitioned myself over to a Openbox-based desktop by installing Xubuntu and pulling out most of the XFCE stuff. It's been quite the learning experience, and I've discovered a couple things that I thought I should share:

• Both Tint2 (a panel application) and Nitrogen (an application that displays background images) support dual-monitor setups in very cool ways.
  • Tint2 splits your window list into two separate lists. At first I thought I had discovered a bug, but after a couple minutes I realized that all windows open on monitor 1 were showing up in the list on the right, and all of monitor 2's windows were on the other side. Awesome.
  • Nitrogen allows you to set one background image that spans across the entire desktop, or two separate background images in a way that makes sense on two physical monitors. I would have been much happier using Gnome if they had gotten this right–way to go Nitrogen guys! Awesome!
• If you want to close a window that's show on your tint panel, you can simply right-click on it. AWESOME!

At first, I was running Openbox without any panel at all, but in light of Tint2's awesomeness, I can't see doing without it. These are the kind of little things that make me love Linux and Free software so much.

I can’t really more than just that it’s green and dark grey and font used is just Sans, you can easily change it to your liking in the theme file. Well I could say that I like it, I wouldn’t use it otherwise myself. :D At the moment I am using it with modified version of Turquoise Grass but I find it little too fancy (although you can’t see the gtk theme in this screenshot) and I am trying to find/create simple theme that would fit better with it.

In screenshot you see the tabbing/grouping feature of Pekwm in action (Apps: Pidgin, Irssi, ncmpcpp, Gedit).

Download the Greenbars Pekwm theme – takes you to Box-Look.org

Recently discovered this while creating some web graphics in inkscape:

http://studio.imagemagick.org/pipermail/magick-users/2007-August/020001.html

convert -density 100 -background None [filename].svg -compress none -depth 16 [filename].png

Really quite handy seeing as my version of inkscape loses the alpha channel when exporting.

<script type="text/javascript"> addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fjohn-hunt.com%2F2010%2F01%2F18%2Fconverting-svg-to-png-with-alpha-channel%2F'; addthis_title = 'Converting+SVG+to+png+%28with+alpha+channel%29'; addthis_pub = ''; </script><script src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/addthis_widget.php?v=12" type="text/javascript"></script>

I finally got Postfix configured correctly (if not completely) on my VPS. It took a lot of poking, but now I can send and receive mail in SquirrelMail. While this is only the beginning of the configuration, it's a nice feeling to have something "click" and start functioning. I owe it all to the fantastic Postfix documentation - quality stuff they've got there.

As a nice side-effect, PHP is also able to send mail out - and that was a BIG stumbling block to getting sites migrated over. Those PHP mailer scripts sounded like such a good idea when I was embedding them in each site...

It's been loads of fun getting this running, but it has also shown me how immensely small my sys admin knowledge really is. I administer Windows servers at work, but Linux is a whole different ballgame. I felt quite lost in the beginning, but in the months I've been working on this server, I feel like I've learned tons more about the software involved and how it all interacts. Each time I go back into a config file, I see mistakes I've made and correct them, and the server runs a little smoother.

Okay, next adventure is going to be getting Postfix configured for virtual domains, and allowing authenticated users to relay mail with their mail clients. SquirrelMail is good stuff, but I'm not going to force it on clients!

I thought I could share my ncmpcpp config file with you. Ncmpcpp (also ncmpc++) is console client for MPD, and it bases on ncmpc. MPD can be bit difficult to set up at first but I think it has been the best music playing app for me (even though I use it only in this one computer) with moc.

• ncmpcpp config
• .Xdefaults I thought I’d share also my not very exciting .Xdefaults file. Colours are slightly modded from this thayer’s scheme

Playlist view

Media Library view

Clock view

If you are new for MPD in general, I recommend reading this guide about installing and configuring it.

So it was a fine Christmas, I was at home with family armed only with 2 seasons of xFiles and my laptop added to the factI didn't upload my ssh key to my laptop so hacking on Crules was out the window. So it got me thinking on the main ...

Hello Everyone, welcome to Twenty-Ten (yes we finally get to sound like we live in the future!).

I’m very pleased to announce the release of my pet project Mu-Feeder, or at least a very early version of it. I actually released version 0.1.0 unofficially yesterday, but then found a bug which was tickled by Python 2.4, so fixed that and re-released as version 0.1.1.

If you want to try it out you can get it here, or you can download the code with:

$ bzr branch lp:mu-feeder/0.1

If you have a bug report, please post it on the Launchpad bug tracker, I’m also seeking feedback which you can send to me in a variety of ways (comment here, identi.ca or Launchpad answers page).

I hope someone finds this useful! Enjoy!

First, I’d like to wish a Happy New Year to everyone! 2009 has been a very interesting year (at least as far as tech goes) and I’m sure we will see some amazing stuff this year, that is why I would like to make a few brave predictions. I am very excited about 2010, we have now got some great technology that I cannot wait to get my hands on, such as Android-tablet “appliance” computers, more web multimedia services following the examples of Hulu and Pandora, lightning-fast instant-on operating systems like Jolicloud, color E-Ink screens and of course, robot maids (finally fulfilling my dream of becoming the ultimate lazy student).

2010 will also be the year when Google becomes a major player in the physical world. Think augmented reality, real Google hardware and cloud services. In just a few days the Nexus One will be released and we are just 6 or 7 months away from the first all-Google cellphone. Whatever happens, this will definitely be the year of the Goog.

Google Chrome will match Firefox’s browser market share

Google, who is by the way Firefox’s biggest revenue source, is pushing Chrome to users by all possible means. Now that the snappy browser supports extensions, it would almost not be an exaggeration to say Firefox’s days are numbered. If Firefox does not step up its game (I certainly hope it does, being a Firefox user), especially in the speed department, we might see a very different browser market share chart next year. Except the sheer number of addons, there are now almost no advantages to running Firefox.

Android will overtake the iPhone

Apple might own most of the phone market at the moment, but there are millions of people out there who still have not upgraded. The trick to reach many people is to match their needs perfectly, giving them a reason to switch: Android is not tied to the same company – we have juggernauts like HTC, Motorola and Samsung working on numerous new models, all somehow different. Apple will surely present a new iPhone this January. However, they will never be able to reach every consumer with their small and expensive lineup.

Chrome OS will be a huge flop (initially)

You might think I am contradicting myself due to mentioning “light” operating systems as exciting technologies. But, like most of you guys, I am not an average consumer. I will probably install Chrome OS ot of sheer curiosity, then delete it because I know many other competitive operating systems that offer much more. I am betting on people’s distrust to the cloud. We have Linux distributions that do much more and can even run Chrome, plus in a few months they will boot just as fast. Why use a handicapped OS? The hardware for both reliable local and remote storage and applications is already almost cheap enough. My guess is that Google will be disappointed by the slow adoption and Chrome OS will become more and more similar to standard operating system, driving adoption in the following years through the Google brand name.

Ubuntu 10.04 will not start up in ten seconds

I think there is no way they will make it. Be sure to check out the Internetling around the release date, when I will see if the new version will boot in under half a minute on a minimal spec machine. Because now it takes a lot more to boot on 2 gigs of RAM. I believe Canonical has a very capable developer team, but this is a bit too optimistic, even for Linux.

Overall, more ARM and MIPS-based “smartbooks” will be sold than x86-powered machines UMPCs

I am willing to bet the so-called “smartbook” market is just short of exploding. With chips like the Longsoon and distros like xPUD, there is no way people will be able to resist under-$100 smartbooks. This will be achieved in 2010, it is the next big thing, not tablets. I am aware of the broken promises by vendors in the recent years. Now it will be different, prices have been driven very low, we just need to wait for someone with a vision (no, not Negroponte).

So, let’s talk about 2010 in the comments! What are you excited about, what do you think will happen?

I also want to thank everyone for reading the Internetling in 2009! It has been a very stressful year for me, but I am determined to keep writing. Thanks a million for your support!

Linux and FOSS-related Predictions for 2010

Hello once again. I trust everyone has had a nice Christmas? I thought I’d provide a quick update to wrap up the year on this blog as well…

I just released the last episode for the year on Tuesday — we had a lot of fun with this one, recording special sound effects and all. I even drove over a road bump very fast in my Twingo to make it authentic! So that wraps up the podcast itself for 2009, but a few other things have developed that I wanted to talk about on here as well. First off, you might have noticed the Sixgun Productions bumper at the beginning of the show and in the file tags. The site itself explains what we have in mind with this pretty well, so I’ll leave it at that, suffice it to say that we are looking to put Linux Outlaws on a much more solid foundation for the future. Do not despair, we aren’t looking to sell out or have suddenly developed delusions of grandeur like some other podcasters, we are simply trying to make sure that the production of the show can be sustainable for us in the long run so that we can deliver many, many more episodes to you. In the same vein, you will notice the adverts on the main page. This is an experiment to see if we can generate a revenue stream for the show. Both Dan and myself will most likely undergo some changes in our lives in 2010 and this will hopefully help to keep us afloat. I’ve personally never had ads on any of my sites and I’m curious to see how this shapes up. As always, we welcome any comments and feedback in general on this via the usual channels. We have also talked about supporting the show via ads in the content itself a few times, but so far nothing has transpired. No matter what happens, we have quite firmly agreed on never having more than one ad on the show itself. I have seen first hand what more than that will do to a show like TWiT and I don’t want to go down that path. Again, if you have any comments on all of this, please leave them here on the blog or send us an email.

Anyway, the Linux Outlaws wish you all the best for 2010 and the new decade! Here’s to many, many more shows in the new year. I am going to leave you with our Libsyn download stats for the year (as of this morning) and as you can see, the show is really going places. We hope to improve on that even more in the new year!

There’s been a literally a submission for the “best school Christmas dinner” crown:

So here’s the first, and to date only entry. From me! Longhill High School by Innovate Ltd. I can honestly say it’s the best school Christmas dinner I’ve had in recent times.

Turkey roll, stuffing ball,  roast and boiled potatoes, carrots, sprouts and parsnips with gravy. Pudding was Christmas pudding and custard.

Well worth a mention were the parsnips. They were so sweet – absolutely delcious. Apparently they’re cooked in oil and honey which explains it.

If you’ve taken a pic of your Christmas Dinner, send it over along with a short review if you like and I’ll add it on!

While articles about awesome new browser features and WebKit are mushrooming around the Intertubes, mobile browsers for lower-end phones are ignored a lot in the media nowadays. With Android and the iPhone OS as the main players in today’s industry, devices featuring mainly touch input, lots of software for i.e. Symbian and less popular platforms is overlooked.

And today I want to talk about Opera Mobile 10 beta, because even though they are not very well accepted by the open source community, I cannot help but to think they have a team of experts from another planet, because what they just did with my 2008 Symbian S60 Nokia phone is just incredible. They literally modernised my phone.

Opera mobile 10 features a complete overhaul of the interface and a ton of new features, providing Symbian users with a very smooth ride (Animations), TABS, Bookmark Sync and one of the best mobile rendering engines I’ve ever seen, rivalling even the other WebKit-powered browsers on more powerful devices and it is not even the final version.

These are real screenshots from my Nokia E71.

I am not kidding, you have to test this browser yourself. The UI is just incredible. And I’ll be damned if it’s not one of the best pieces of programming Symbian has ever seen.

Opera Mobile 10 beta scores 100% on the Acid 3 Test

If you keep a web development server you may often find yourself installing and moving stuff around as superuser. This results in a lot of directories and areas that are root:root (owned by root, in root group). This can be a problem for web applications, that need their web accessible files and below to be read by the webserver user.

So first you will do something like

chown -R root:www-data yourstartdir

for these webaccessible directories specifically. Replace www-data with the user that your webserver runs as (www-data is the default user for apache2 on debian or ubuntu linux.) Read your security notes for the application first to make sure the application doesn't need a special user scheme to enforce security on their application. Pay attention also to which directories are web accessible (below the web document root). I'll assume you do your homework.

OK, so what was the point of this post? OH YES! You may want to help yourself out by specifying that all directories and files created in your web accessible area in the future should belong to the same group as their parent, preserving apache's ability to process them. This trick of making the filesystem remember to assign the same group is called setting the GID bit.

You do this by running

chmod g+s yourdir

But what if you have a directory structure already built before you remember to set the gid bit?

What you want to do on a classic unix is to use find to retrieve directories (not files) below your start directory, and then setting the perms on them to something reasonable plus the gid bit.

find yourstartdir -type d -exec chmod g+s {} \;

On linux you can also do the much easier:

chmod -R g+s yourstartdir

Cause linux knows to only try to apply +s to directories :)

If you follow my blog you may have noticed i have been quiet and thats because i've been working on http://crules.org Its the new homepage for my project Crules, its got some good content on it but nothing really on the language yet. Though today i spend a very long ...

So in general these suggestions are meant for Canadian Government Websites. I believe that these sites are especially guilty of the following problems but are also applicable to other sites.

1. Problem: Poorly implemented or no RSS. Even if present it is usually useless, hand-generated, out of date or doesn’t pertain to very much of anything.
Solution: Implement RSS or use a CMS that has RSS built in. Even most good programming languages have excellent XML handling built in.

2. Problem: anything.aspx
While aspx is a semi-decent programming language, using it doesn’t encourage you to use some of the great CMSs or Frameworks like Drupal or Django. Not to mention it screams to the world that you are using windows to host your site. Terribly insecure.
Solution: Use different languages that can run on several platforms to have a heterogeneous environment.

3. Problem: IIS
No respectable outfit, ever… EVER uses IIS as their web server. And it leads to using html mangling programs like Adobe Contribute and Front Page.
Solution: Use Linux/BSD/OpenSolaris or if you must, I think SCO is still around right?

4. Problem: www.example.com vs example.com
Every good website since 1996 has fixed this problem, one redirects to the other. When I go to a government site and I see “Under Construction” because IIS is misconfigured I think less of politicians.
Solution: Correct configuration of IIS or switch to Apache.

5. Problem: streaming WMV etc.
While I believe that governments should disseminate content in open and non-patent encumbered formats(I’m a believer that people shouldn’t have to have a license to read a word document or play an mp3), and even though (most) browsers support HTML5 elements that allow for embedding video, I realize that using flash is the most realistic option. Most government sites don’t even do that, They stream video in wmv and audio in wma. Using this is a bit jenk on a Mac and technically possible(but practically impossible) on Linux. Also transcriptions should be available for every video(for people using text browsers) or captioned.
Solution: Use Flash or open formats like ogg, or better yet use both.

6. Problem: Intelligible URL structure
I am a believer that I should be able to navigate 90% of a website by typing plain English words into a URL. Call me old fashioned but it is just the way that I feel. HINT: It also keeps the site easier to maintain. If the URL structure is a mess, the code is probably a mess.
Solution: Use a language like python or frameworks that encourage or require clean URLs.

7. Problem: English or French?
Every Time that you go to a Canadian Government site for the first time, the site will ask you what language you would like to view the site in. Every browser that has been made in many years has been able to send information about your language preferences. Most English speakers don’t realize this because they are too dominant to ever run into the problem. But if that is too difficult to implement for the government, then enable a checkbox that says “Remember my selection whenever I visit a Government of Canada Website.”
Solution: Learn about cookies.

8. Problem: Colour Scheme
No one worries about the 216-256 “web-safe” colours anymore. NO ONE USES 8-BIT DISPLAYS ANYMORE. But if you had been to a government website even today it seams that they are still subscribing to this philosophy. The design of the sites could be so much more appealing with better colours.
Solution: Use colours.

9. Problem: “What’s New”, “Top of Page” and other similarly useless links.
“What’s new” is a throw back to when site were smaller, they quickly become out of date and are made redundant by things like RSS feeds. Top of page is a throwback to when browsers did not have scroll bars. Guess what? They do now. “A-Z Index” this is an interesting one. Some usability experts believe that “you should be able to access all of a site’s content within X number of clicks”. I would append one thing to this “you should be able to access all of a site’s content within X number of clicks and in under 1-2 hours”. An (A-Z Index) is useful when you approach $items>26. However, there is an upper limit to this.
Solution: Top of page might be useful for accessibility, or text browsers. Do browser detection. If the user is using a browser that would benefit from this show it, if not hide it with Javascript.

10. Problem: Open Data.
I have issues with Crown Copyright. I believe that, in most cases, works that a government create should be owned by the people and not by “The Monarch”. I am sure the queen could care less that she has all the rights to the 2006 Ministry of fisheries report on salmon populations. I was amazed, when during a recent copyright consultation roundtable, Minister of Industry, Tony Clement did not understand why it mattered that Canadians should hold the rights to government works. A good compromise to this would be to make both the crown and Canadians both rights holders. It doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Also government Data should be made available to the public as easily as possible. Either by dumping the raw data on the internet or creating open databases with APIs to access the data. NOTE: It is important that crown copyright be fixed before this happens. I should not have to pay money to get at government data, nor waste paper in the process. All I should need is an internet connection and the desire to find out.
Solution: Create a mechanism and reform copyright so that this information can be disseminated more easily. Embrace Creative Commons. Follow the lead of the Americans.

All this fuss about Google ChromeOS.

Is it a threat to Microsoft ? Is it a threat to the Ubuntu ?

(funny nobody wonders if that’s a threat to Apple, especially considering everything is a threat to Apple, even being able to take DRM free songs *out* of the freaking iPod)

I’ll just assume you’ve already read the OMG ! ChromeOS Live Blog.

Now, let’s examine extract some important points:

18:13: Netbooks incredibly popular; most people have important data stored in the cloud; webapps most successful platform so far;

First keyword: Netbooks. But let’s go on.

18:15: ChromeOS to be super fast, boot should be just like switching a TV on! Chrome will be even faster on Chrome OS than any other OS.

Another important thing: Super fast boot.

18:15 Better model of computing = Chrome OS.

Whahahah This is not important, but I find it very funny.

18:16: All apps to be WEB APPS. NO desktop applications. No binaries.

…also (not only) because it’s too hard. BTW here comes the more interesting indication:

Here it is: custom firmware !

Does that reminds you anything ? Splashtop ! (and similar systems) Quoting myself:

Splashtop is an instant on embedded Linux which boots in seconds (I mean, 3-4 seconds) and give the user fast access to web-based features as Web Browser, Skype, online gaming and similar stuff.

Actually, the most interesting thing about Splashtop is that, being embedded in the computer’s firmware, it does not substitute to the chosen operative system. It’s just a faster alternative to check the mail, and chat with friends.

Google has already agreements with hardware vendors to get dual booting Android/Windows netbooks to the mainstream public. It’s no wonder the droid will be soon replaced by ChromeOS.

So that’s it. Google Chrome OS is (partly) firmware based operative system, that just runs on specific systems (SSDs are required for example) and that you’re likely to find already installed on your brand new netbook, along with Windows.

It will just be the thing you switch into when you have no time to boot the full blown windows (or you don’t want to, or it when win is broken).

My 2 cents

We’re talking about the most inflated operating system ever (no, wait, there’s the mac..). When the marketing bubble will explode we will realize it for what it really is: a brilliant technical achievement, hard to install on anything, useful only as a quick and dirty Internet alternative to Windows.

Is there any chance it will become a full blown operative system ? At least a little bit ?

Well, the official launch will be within a year. My prediction is something more may come in approximately 3-4 years from now.

Is Google ChromeOS a threat to Ubuntu ?

Not within the next 10 years. The only real threat in the meantime being Mark Shuttleworth possibly choke by laughing reading Panettieri’s post. (no offense Joe, I love you. Really.)

And to Windows and MacOS ?

Whahahaha.

Will Linux benefit from it ?

It will get some optimized code and some drivers. The drivers are important, but since netbooks have not much hardware inside (and are almost 100% compatible with Linux already) the benefit won’t be huge.

The boot procedure, being so customized, won’t benefit linux that much, but I’m not very into the technical details, so I may be wrong.

The most interesting chance, already anticipated by some, would be to have (not so) soon a new generation of motherboards capable of holding and handling bigger firmwares and – as a consequence – having the chance to flash the firmware and moving part of Linux directly in the firmware. That may help to have instantly-on (like TV’s !) full blown operative systems.

And has you probably already know, Canonical is helping out Google with ChromeOS. And that’s money to keep things going and further develop Ubuntu, at least in part.

Will Richard Stallman be happy ?

No, Google is no fool and perfectly knows and state that ChromeOS is no real alternative to the existing operative systems. It is just part of a long (loong) term strategy to change computing paradigm (we’re talking about 15-20 years at least). And Richard does not like that kind of shift.

But hey, he will probably be able to get an opensource firmware replacement for his BIOS much sooner. How cool is that ?

ps: not only Google requires Ubuntu to build Chrome, but they probably based it on it, or on a similar system. I mean, they use debian packaging !

test

<script type="text/javascript"> addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fjohn-hunt.com%2F2009%2F11%2F20%2Ftest2%2F'; addthis_title = 'test2'; addthis_pub = ''; </script><script src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/addthis_widget.php?v=12" type="text/javascript"></script>

Carla has something to say ’bout the cloud, and I agree 100% with her.

I have recently downloaded and installed Kubuntu 9.10 and it is great! The problem I have always had KDE is that half of the applications are much better than most Windows/Mac/GNOME apps, and half of them are about 90% as good as the other platforms. Well I have used Kubuntu 9.10 for a bit now and I must say it is giving me very little to complain about. Network has a little ways to go yet. New installer bling is great! Some great new improvements to gwenview. You will also notice that unlike in my 9.04 review I didn’t have to turn compositing off to get screenshots. (Most) compositing effects now show up in screenshots! Congrats to Pinheiro for his work on icons and theming. K3B looks great now that it is integrated into KDE4 as well as the newest air desktop theme. Kopete can now integrate with Skype. Awesome

I was disappointed that they decided not to include the Arora in this version, as I think it shows a lot of promise. There is now a Firefox installer included in the menu structure. I also installed Chromium from a launchpad PPA and even though Firefox and Chromium are GTK apps they finally(Firefox especially) are more integrated with the desktop. In previous releases Firefox wouldn’t know what to open files with unless you had GTK apps installed.

Great job KDE and Kubuntu Teams!

As Hull LUG are throwing an Ubuntu 9.10 'Karmic Koala' Release Party on 31st October*, I thought I'd best have a play with the Alpha release, that is currently out.  I downloaded it last Tuesday night onto my main desktop, and first impressions are really good.  Booting is incredibly fast, and from hitting the 'on switch' to downloading e-mails it takes just 56 seconds**, with is almost half a minute faster than Jaunty was booting.

In fact I was so impressed that almost immediately I upgraded my Acer Aspire One netbook.  The upgrade for the Acer took a lot longer – in fact installing the file took almost 10 hours, however it is fair to point out that it only has 8Gb of hard disc, so an awful lot of time was spent shuffling things backwards and forwards to get it in place.  Also I run the full desktop edition on my netbook, so an upgrade of Ubuntu Netbook Remix might be a bit quicker, and certainly a clean install will be quicker still.

Other than the fast boot speed the things that you immediately notice about 9.10 is the slick look of some of the menus.  The 'add/remove' option is now called the Ubuntu Software Centre, and in my opinion seems to have taken it's theme from the UNR layout.  This is no bad thing, as it is a lot more user-friendly.  However for the traditionalists – Synaptic Package Manager retains it's old look.  Other obvious changes include Empathy, which replaces Pidgin as the Instant Messenger client.  However it may be my finding it a chore to learn new ways of doing the same old thing, but I found just adding my MSN account to be such a chore that I just stuck with Pidgin.

Of course being an Alpha release, Karmic is very buggy, and things aren't quite synch-ed  up as they should be just yet.  For example the Avant Window Navigator won't work just yet, and I had a lot of trouble getting the audio editor Audacity to work properly, and it was for this reason that I've reverted my desktop back to Jaunty.  I need my compute to do what I want, when I want, and not have to mess around filing bug reports when I have things to do.

I have kept Karmic on my netbook, as it is a great OS, and I'm sure that come release day the bugs will be ironed out.

* Hull LUG's Ubuntu Release Party is being held on Saturday 31st October from 1pm until at least 5pm, at the Old Grey Mare, Cottingham Road Hull.  It's Hull LUG's regualr meeting place, and is the pub opposite Hull University Campus.

** There are many different timings that people use to measure boot speed, for example the boot to grub, which now takes a few seconds.  However my timings are taken from pwering up the computer to actually being about to do something with it.  My desktop is set up to automatically run Thunderbird on start-up, so my timing ends when the computer starts to download e-mails.

IT'S OFFICIAL!!! - Hull LUG are hosting an Ubuntu Release Party to celebrate the release of Ubuntu 9.10 'Karmic Koala'!

The first full announcement was on William Wright's Monday Night Tech Spot BBC Radio Lincolnshire, when I was interviewed live on-air about the party, Hull LUG, Linux, and a whole host of things that I wasn't expecting to be talking about!!!

Anyway the nitty-gritty is that Hull LUG are hosting what, to date is only the 2nd Ubuntu Release Party to be held in the UK outside London, and we are (rightly) very proud and

very excited about it.  It is to be held in Hull LUGs regular meeting place, the Old Grey Mare on Cottingham Road, Hull from 1pm on Saturday 31st October.

We are gathering a number of machines, to show off the capabilities of Ubuntu, as well as doing a live install on an old Pentium 4 PC to show how compatible this Linux operating system is with even older hardware.  As was mentioned in the show, another operating system is being released the week before, but Hull LUG will show how Open Source and Linux could be a much better and much more satisfying alternative.

Click the play button on the player below to hear my interview

If you can't see the embedded player, click here to find my original post

{play}http://www.daveyspeedstar.com/partypromolincs.mp3{/play}

Nice.

Thanks to all the people who helped test the aiusa86 website. And to all the people who have responded to my emails. Seriously. Thank you SO much. It makes me want to contribute and connect SO MUCH MORE. \\n||nn

I'm a little behind on these as I have been setting up a lot of things, but this is my account of the first day, September 30th, 2009.

The phone rang this morning at 5:21 am. It was SFC Samuels, my immediate supervisor. I fumbled through the dark for it, but was too late to catch the call. When the chime came in for a new voicemail, I let it go as I stared at the celing of my room one last time. T didn't bother to check the voicemail as I normally would have. I knew what it said, so I replied with a text message reading only "I'm up." I got dressed, threw my bags in the van, said goodbye to my Sister-in-law, and loaded the wive and kids up in the van.
It was about 6:15 when we got to the airfield. It's a place in which I've become comfortable working, but would now say the last face-to-face goodbye to my family. at 6:30 a brief formation was held to ensure that everyone was there, and they let us go back to our loved ones to await the buses. Abby, Alex, and Ash all played as the sun slowly rose to the east. They would not be going to school today. It's Wednesday, a short day for all of them anyhow, and they had something else to do. The retention NCO came by with flags and boxes which contained a t-shirt and a nylon enclosed binder full of army promotional items. I grabbed one up before even knowing the contents, as there were plenty available. I stuffed the binder into what little space remained in my backpack, and Rachel made her claim on the t-shirt.
Everything was pretty easy and simple until I saw the first bus preparing to turn towards us. Then it all hit me pretty hard. I did my best to hold it together, but could not help letting a few tears fall. I still had to struggle though to keep from overwhelming the kids. Few have ever seen me cry, and I'm not sure how they would handle it. Abby seemed to understand the gravity of the situation, and Alex was at least playing along. Ash was the one who really got to me though. He rarely speaks, but he said good bye as if he knew exactly what it meant this time. As Rachel started to cry, Abby hugged her and said
"It's okay Mommy, I'll take care of you."
What more could a father ask for?
As it all got to be too much, I sent them off. They could have stayed longer, or even followed the buses to the airport as some families did, but we like to have as much control over our goodbyes as we can, even if it means doing it a little earlier. SSG MacNamee, newly promoted and a fellow commo guy, came up and gave me an understanding pat on the back. He said to me
"It'll only be 30 days." referring to the possible leave scheduled for the end of our mobilization.
"I won't be taking the leave." I told him. "I can't do this again any time soon."
I bummed a cigarette from PFC Rose to calm my nerves, loaded my bag on the bus, and got on.
The American legion had a team of motorcyclists bearing flags escort our buses to the airport, and by 9:00 am, we were there loading it up. I volunteered for the detail to load bags into the cargo spaces of the 737 we would take to Oklahoma. Didn't take long, and despite about a dozen weapons racks, we had plenty of space left over. Finally getting on the plane, I saw why. In a column of 3 on each side of the aircraft, there was no more then 1 person per row on board. It's nice to have a little extra space. As we flew away, I watched the city I grew up in and have always considered home disappear behind us. At one point I could see all the way across it to the Chesapeake Bay, and as we passed through the clouds I knew it was going to be obscured from my sight for at least the next 6 months. Half the people on board eventually sprawled out across 3 seats to sleep. The staff was courteous and generous with food and drinks, and I finally got a cup of coffee. It was a little weak, but enough to keep me going.
I spent a fair amount of the in flight time writing, and as we approached the airport, I realized that Oklahoma from the air looks pretty much exactly as I had imagined it. Rural and rustic.
We took more buses, this time much more like the ones you might expect soldiers to ride in, the rest of the way to Fort Sill. We checked in with our ID cards, had some food at the “Mob Cafe” (pronounced like MObe) and went on to where we would stay. I got a 4 person room with Specialist Hardy, my communications partner in crime, Sergeant Coley, one of our operations counterparts, and Specialist McGill, our supply support. We got all set up in our room, and await another day. The first on our way to war can end.

As I have briefly talked about on Episode 87 of Linux Outlaws, I have spend the last month or so remastering Xubuntu according to my personal tastes. I build the final .iso image yesterday and installed the first version of the new distribution on my main machine this morning. It still has a few bugs, but it’s mostly working and so I have released it earlier today as Katian Crow 0.00 — in case you are wondering, the distro itself got its name the same way that Debian did and the first release series is named after Crow, Adelai Niska’s henchman from the Firefly episode “The Train Job“. As suggested by this naming choice, we are talking about extremely unstable alpha software here. You are welcome to try it, but don’t blame me if your system looks like it went through a spaceship engine afterwards…

As I have said on the show, this isn’t really a distro per se and it isn’t really meant to be used by people other than me. It’s more about my personal choices in packages and desktop customisation than anything else and it is decidedly freedom-hating. It is also massively bloated, weighting in at around 976 MB, you could even call it Big Damn Linux in a way. I have learned a lot dabbling in creating this and will probably keep it up, if only to maintain my own versions for personal use. I am also looking at publishing a detailed howto article to document the process I’ve followed since a few people have expressed some interest in it. I will keep you posted on that endeavour. In the meantime, enjoy tinkering with the first release and file some bugs if you encounter any. Just remember to back up all of your stuff before installing this!

You can download it here: katian-0.00.iso (976.1 MB)

MD5 Hash:

9f17f167781e3ede2aa3dbee2845fbad

Debian just announced last week that Skolelinux will be deployed throughout the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate as the official operating system for schools. As I work part-time in the neighbouring state of North Rhine-Westphalia as second level IT support, I am very interested in this development. In my environment, the landscape is still very much Microsoft-dominated and I am curious what we can learn from this project to improve our own situation.

According to the report, Skolelinux (which is being developed by the Debian Edu project) was first installed as the main operating system in eleven pilot schools with the goal of eventually being adopted by all 1,700+ schools in the state. Dipl. Ing. Klaus Knopper, founder of the well-known Knoppix distribution, has been appointed as one of the leaders for the undertaking which includes reintegrating teaching materials produced by the schools back into the international Debian-Edu project. It looks like Rhineland-Palatinate, together with the state of Hamburg which has also been introducing Skolelinux into their schools, is moving to the forefront of open source adoption in the educational sector here in Germany. Both of these federal states are considerably smaller than my own home of North Rhine-Westphalia, but that should not rule out the possibility of following in their footsteps and since educational policies are governed by federal legislation here in Germany, the decision ultimately lies with the state-level officials although a lot of the responsibility, especially concerning IT policies, seems to be delegated to the individual school districts. It remains to be seen if a state-wide program like this is the best way to enforce these kinds of changes. Working on the ground for a third-party contractor supplying first and second level IT support throughout all school models myself, I am primarily interested in the day-to-day challenges that a switch to an open solution like this would entail. I am sure I do not have to elaborate why I think a change like this would be a very good idea indeed, the cost-saving benefits are immediately apparent and as far as the political and philosophical reasons are concerned, just listen to me on any episode of Linux Outlaws and you’ll get the gist of it. But on the flip side, a fundamental policy change always has problems associated with it as well: Habits have to be changed (probably the biggest “cost” of such an undertaking), people have to be educated, barriers of all kinds that you never knew existed before have to be circumnavigated — not to speak of all the raw work involved in changing the software itself…

What I am most interested in is how the organisers of this project have managed to introduce Linux on the desktop. When I still worked in schools in Cologne, we were almost exclusively using SuSE or Ubuntu servers for years but the desktop clients were all Microsoft. Over here in Bonn, even the servers are mostly running Windows but previous experience has already proven that moving the servers to Linux would be almost trivial, indeed one would think it to be a no-brainer (somehow the decision makers don’t seem to see it that way though, apparently schools desperately need Active Directory services). Moving the desktop over seems to be a much harder task in any case. I have no knowledge of the state of educational software in other locales, but if you have ever used a piece of proprietary learning software over here, you will know that these are the worst pieces of code you could possibly find — I frequently ask myself if they pay poor Educational Science students with no programming knowledge whatsoever five Euros an hour to write this stuff in some dark closet or if these companies just outsourced it all to some small island off the coast of China. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Chinese but I am very positive that neither they nor Educational Science students can write decent educational software tailored for German schools for five Euros an hour, especially if it is mixed with cheerily-insane images of Peter Lustig and singing dogs. One company used to publish a suite of applications for several primary school subjects (German, English, Mathematics etc.) that you’d think were meant to be installed alongside one another on the same machine but when you actually tried to do that you would find out that they all used the exact same Windows registry keys which would make it impossible to install more than one program of the suite at the same time since the second app you tried would always think it was installed already. When I called that company’s tech support to tell them of this behaviour, they claimed it was “intentional”. You can not imagine how often I have to resort to the good old face palm on a typical day at work. Seriously, give me a burgundy shirt and I look like Captain Picard with an elaborate wig at times. All I am trying to get across here, I guess, is that this software hardly runs on Windows without a hitch (most of it actually has a lot of problems with Vista), porting it to Linux would be a Sisyphean task. I therefore wonder what they did in Rhineland-Palatinate to solve these problems. The state could well have changed its curriculum guidelines to use only the software provided with Skolelinux although that does seem a bit unlikely. Switching everything to open source or even free software (servers, clients and end-user applications) sounds like an amazingly good idea to me, though, and I am ready to predict that they will have a lot of success with this. Using LTSP would be even better, although I might loose my job due to the fact that you could cut the administration overhead down to where one person could support 100+ sites single-handedly. Like the schools in Rhineland-Palatinate, many educational institutions in my area are already using free and open source end-user applications like Firefox, Open Office or Moodle but the key is replacing the underlying proprietary operating system (in this case Windows) as well — if only to save the federal state, districts and schools huge amounts of licensing costs. Everybody in this field knows how tight the budgets in education are, it’s time we acted on this knowledge!

I will try to find out more about what our neighbour state is doing with this project and how they are carrying out this policy change in detail. Careful analysis should reveal how school districts everywhere could follow their lead. As I’ve hinted before, the biggest obstacle will always be the end-users (not necessarily the kids but mostly the teachers) who in general are very hostile to change of any kind. Teachers like to complain that they are understaffed and outfitted with sub-standard materials but they never seem to connect that to the thousands of Euros the authorities are spending each year on Windows licenses for their school. For precisely that reason it will always be the most important work in any undertaking like this to educate users on the ground about the potential benefits of open source solutions first and foremost. A mandate from higher up like in Rhineland-Palatinate does help a lot to get the ball rolling, though.

I’ve been working on a few demos for the Amnesty International Local Group 86 web site. Feedback and UI testing kindly requested.

static

http://demo.antlechrist.org/aiusa86

dynamic

http://demo.antlechrist.org/aiusa86-dw

Contact: <andrew.antle@gmail.com>

Preperation is something that you get better at with experience, but all the experience in the world is sort of useless if you are uncertain what conditions you are preparing for. I know that I'm going to need a personal computer of some kind, and I'd like to have a laptop for the sake of convience and mobility. I even ordered a pair of netbooks off the internet, but today I am making my last ditch effort to put software onto them that will make them reasonably functional. I have been at this since they came in a week ago, and I think I simply have to accept that I made a mistake in buying them. I have never sent anything back before, so I'm a little unsure how to go about it, and I of course have to justify the return at least in my own mind. They may ask for an explination where I purchased them, they may not, but I think I have a reasonable excuse either way.

For those of you who know a little about computers, you might do well to know that I am a proud Linux guy. This means that I don't use Windows for my computers. Mac people likely understand this at least a little, and it's always been in my nature to be a little countercultural and defiant. I like that it's free, and that I can try new things at will, but some Linux perple can be a little preachy about freedom and whatnot. Me, I just like that I can fix it when it, as all things do, breaks. If you're interested in Linux, I have some really great sources for you to check out, but moving onward.

I bought these 2 machines because knowing that if I had an example with me would make it more likely that
I could replicate any problems the wife had with hers and that I could instruct her on what to do over the phone should something be amiss. I think it was a good plan, but I skimped on hardware, and I think I'm paying for it. I've found that if you buy a computer that has either Linux or, nothing, pre-installed, you can save a pretty penny. If you really must pad the pockets of the Microsoft corporation, you can do that later, and being a menber of the Army, I'm pretty sure I can get it at a discount if I really need it.

I'm going to have to get hopping on this. I'm short on time. I've got just 2 and a half weeks to get ready, and there is a lot of unrelated things to get done. More on that later... for now, I am ready to make my last attempt. Wish me luck.

This is the first in a regular series of short posts highlighting open source / free software / free culture projects that I feel are deserving of your support and / or cash. With these kinds of projects many people seem to think that code, documentation or other time and skill based contributions are all that is needed. While these things are certainly one of the biggest components of such projects it’s often forgotten that they need cash too. With this in mind I thought maybe I can help, even just a tiny bit, by highlighting a different individual project on a regular basis. This series is hereby named (in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner) Splash Your Cash!

So, first up is Creative Commons.

I chose Creative Commons for the first feature because they help such a wide range of people - musicians, writers, poets, bloggers, coders - anyone that creates content of any kind. And let’s not forget the users / consumers of CC licensed products. I’ve no doubt that without the existence of Creative Commons there would be far fewer freely available products out there.

What is Creative Commons?

To quote from their website - “Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.”

I’m a big supporter of their work and have recently switched all of my own websites over to a CC license. In todays age of DRM madness they are a breath of fresh air. I can’t help but support the sharing attitude that I think helps makes the internet a better place to be.

How can you give your support?

The various ways in which you can support Creative Commons are detailed here. Following the link will take you to a page listing all the different ways you can give your support or make a cash donation.

If you opt to ’splash your cash’ you may also be eligible to become a CC network member which, amongst other things, will give you a nice profile page like mine which details all the works you have licensed under CC and also gives you a CC domain OpenID. An annual network membership costs $50 or $25 for students. An absolute bargain!

And there ends my first Splash Your Cash post.

If you have any suggestions for future projects you’d like me to feature here (must be open source / free software / free culture related) you’re welcome to send them my way. I’m particularly interested in hearing about smaller projects - I do love the underdogs! You can pass on your suggestions by leaving a comment below or sending me an email using the contact page.

This is the first of what will be a regular weekly feature on Naxtr - a short collection of links I’ve found interesting throughout the week.

• Software Installation in Linux is Difficult - A wonderfully deeply sarcastic post which gave me a chuckle (found via Linux Outlaws)
• 100 Open Source Gems Part 1 - a nice collection of open source programmes (mostly for linux) from TuxRadar.
• The Telegraph reports that Hulu is finally coming to the UK, and possibly bringing the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 with it.
• Wakoopa now has Linux support - As a long time user I’ve been waiting for this for ages. Big thanks to the Wakoopa team!
• 10 TB Optical discs coming in next five years - shame we don’t have them now, I could really use one!
• Oracle releases its microblogging platform - aimed squarely at the enterprise market but with a very odd name, OraTweet. Seriously? (Found via andyc).
• Give Something Back: Online Volunteer Opportunities - Web Worker Daily highlights ways in which you can volunteer online. Apart from the obvious contributions to open source projects there are lots of other interesting ways you can volunteer.
• Wikimedia Foundation to add Creative Commons license for all content - reports Read Write Web.
• How to change the Ubuntu login screen - a nice little how-to from Simple Help.
• Bash scripting basics - ghacks teaches you the basics of bash scripting.