Linux Outlaws Planet

Video of the Week: Lava lamp, and Nexus one, on Jupiter?

2010-03-09T12:14:34+00:00

Nothing really can be said…

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

rock and rolling down the street

2010-03-07T06:25:46+00:00

For a long time now, I've been trying to find a way to get music in my car on the cheap, and since I've finally succeeded, I thought I should share this tale of 12 volts.

When I first purchased my car, it had a crappy cassette player installed. The unit would only play through the right channel and it would randomly eject whatever cassette it was playing. Eventually, the player started eating my cassettes and then died altogether.

Fortunately, my local thrift store was selling a cassette player for $5, as well as a bunch of cassettes for $1 each. Six dollars and 20 minutes later, I was rocking out to Boston's "More Than a Feeling". Not too shabby, but I want to listen to music from my digital collection as well as some audcasts. Purchasing an "audio out to cassette" adapter proved to be a fruitless endevour as the cassette player started ejecting the adapter after a few seconds of playing.

The next step was to purchase an FM modulator that ...

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

User Interfaces: Simple, powerful, or both?

2010-03-05T19:55:06+00:00

Last night I went to the UX bookclub, Glasgow, with a bunch of people from Geeksoc. We used the book “The Design of Everyday things”, by , and we discussed a whole number of things (sometimes going very off topic) from the iphone user interface to having different coloured links for visited links.

One of the things we discussed was about how simple user interfaces should be. For example, not having a filesystem that you can browse on the iphone. Or having a simple browser-only interface like ChromeOS. The discussion led to me thinking a lot about how user interfaces should be. Bad examples of user interfaces, and how we could fall into a dangerous trap when trying to be simple.

I think the big problem is when someone tries to get a simple interface, they sometimes miss out a lot of features, or a lot of power that could be within the application/os. But also vice versa. Let’s take some examples.

Compiz Config Settings Manager

I will assume that most people reading my blog will have heard of compiz. It is the beast of 3d window managers for linux. But the problem is that you can have either no changes in your config, or you get the monster that is CCSM. For those who haven’t seen ccsm, I’ve put a wee screenshot of it here.

Now, I use this all the time for configuring my compiz, and I have learnt where everything is. I have learnt that if you want to use the cube, you disable “desktop wall”, enable “desktop cube” and “rotate cube,” and then make sure you have 4 desktops by changing the “desktop size” which is in “general settings”. Then you need to go into “rotate cube” and make sure the zoom setting is turned up to about 0.1, so you actually see the cube when it goes around.

Phew…that was a lot of work just to get the cube working. And if you don’t know how to do they, that is insane. The first thing to change in this would be to have a generic Desktop section where you can enable or disable the cube, decide if it is a cube, cylinder or sphere, and then enable or disable the desktop wall etc…

But of course, there are loads of settings in here that people don’t need to know. Have you ever looked in the “Animations” plugin? You can change absolutely everything about each animation. There is so much you can do, so much that even I don’t touch (and I spend a lot of time customising my compiz settings). So, ccsm should have possibly a simple and an advanced version. But apart from that, this for the advanced version would still be too complicated.

iPhone

I know it is very common to bash the iPhone. It is quite often the most popular thing that people bash (windows, iphone, etc…). However, I am going to explain why the iPhone is good (shock horror) and bad. Now, we know that the iPhone is absolutely the epitome of user experience. Now, I don’t like the iPhone, but lets be honest, even I cannot pretend that it isn’t very userfriendly.

The problem is, however, that the iPhone has sacrificed power, and configurability to get this simple user experience. There are so many things on the iPhone you cannot do. And it is always going to be a hard thing getting the right balance of usability and power, that not everyone is ever going to be happy.

I think the main things about User Experience that we should take away and use in designs is that things should be simple. Users should not know what a filesystem is. And, lets be honest, users shouldn’t really even have to use “.exe”s or anything. Computers should just do what they want. However, you cannot then sacrifice power and useful things. For example, I still want a decent filesystem on a phone, even though another user should never have to know what it is. I want to browse even the system files and everything on my phone. And there are people like me. But you should only encounter stuff like that if you know what they are or want to learn about them. Not if you don’t want to. You shouldn’t have to deal with it.

Mounting a Windows/Samba Share With the Mount Command

2010-03-04T23:03:40+00:00

Okay, quick note for myself later on - and anyone who may find it useful - about how to mount a Windows or Samba share in a Ubuntu Karmic/9.10 Minimal Install:

You'll need to install the "smbfs" and "smbclient" packages beforehand
Here's the mount syntax: mount -t cifs -o nounix,noserverino,username=DOMAIN\\user,password=*****,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 \\\\server\\share /mount/point
In mount, don't forget to replace "DOMAIN" and "user" with your domain and username, "*****" with your actual password, "\\server\share" with the appropriate UNC path for the share, and "/mount/point" with the location on your local file system where you'd like everything to be mounted. Those backslashes are doubled-up for a reason, too: they have to be escaped or else bad stuff happens (I assume).
If at first this doesn't succeed, and you get the [INSERT ERROR HERE LATER, JAKE - nothing to see here yet, folks... ;)], you probably need to install more Samba packages. Try randomly installing stuff with the word "samba" or "smb" in it from the repos - the two listed in the first step were just the last two I tried, and might not do it on their own.

Top 5 Netbook Linux Distros: 2010 Edition (with Gallery)

2010-03-04T17:32:57+00:00

Who could have, just a year ago, predicted the dramatic changes in the netbook operating system world? The release of Windows 7 and cheaper hardware launched an exciting race for users between Linux and Windows, forcing both to take it up a notch, especially in the aesthetics department. This year might be the year of cloud operating systems, but at the same time more powerful netbooks will enable us to use more advanced features. There are a few distributions you might remember from last year’s article. However, even the ones that stayed in the top 5 have gone through some heavy face-lifting. Hardware support is unfortunately still a major problem in the Linux world, that is why it played a major role in the ranking. My testing machine was an Asus Eee PC 1101 HA, which comes with a surprisingly problematic piece of hardware, the Intel Poulsbo GMA 500 graphics chip, that makes using advanced graphics effects a challenge, if you aren’t using Windows.

So, without further ado, here are the top 5 netbook Linux distributions for 2010!

Ubuntu Netbook Remix – UNR

We can now confidently say Ubuntu is the de-facto Linux distribution and even the netbook respin of the 9.10 “Karmic Koala” release is no exception. The loading and login screens are simply gorgeous. The Maximus window manager works pretty well on small monitors and neatly organizes your workspace. Despite the optimizations you should not expect stellar performance, though. My personal recommendation is to remove the default window manager:

$sudo apt-get remove ubuntu-netbook-remix ubuntu-netbook-remix-default-settings maximus

and switch back to GNOME, or install something faster like Xfce. On my machine I still had to setup the Poulsbo chip using a script and the wireless card worked much batter after using a windows driver through ndiswrapper. Not much to add, really. Otherwise, what you are getting is a heavily optimized version of Karmic Koala. And since we’re talking about the most successful Linux distro, there is a high chance that you will like it.

Jolicloud

By now you have probably gotten used to the new developer trends and are not afraid of trying out a product still in beta. Heck, I ran it when it was still an invite-only alpha. Jolicloud is web-centric and divided into three parts: the Linux kernel, the wonderful Jolicloud desktop and the web service, My Jolicloud. Installing applications is very easy and Jolicloud provides an aesthetically pleasing and well-integrated way of using online services just like normal desktop apps. This is not an operating system for people who like to dive into the details, but for those who are interested in stying connected, sharing and doing some basic work on the internet. You can add friends to your Jolicloud network, share and recommend applications. Your desktop experience will seamlessly switch from the cloud to your local environment. Another good thing about Jolicloud is the excellent out-of-the-box hardware support. If you use a netbook for relatively simple tasks, but are tired of waiting for Windows 7 to load or are having problems with a traditional Linux distributions, you should definitely give Jolicloud a try.

Mandriva 2010 (GNOME)

Even though Mandriva has been losing market share every year, it remains one of the best netbook distributions out there. The developers keep updating every release with all the drivers needed for a great out-of-the-box experience. This is one of the only distributions that will work without any tweaks needed. My only reason for not using Mandriva is that I am an avid APT user. All in all, Mandriva 2010 is extremely polished and gives you a choice between 4 well-integrated desktop environments, the major two being Gnome and KDE. To my surprise, the Gnome version looks really, really good. Albeit Mandriva’s userbase is not as large as Ubuntu’s, the documentation is well-written and it is really easy to install the distribution on your new system. Choose Mandriva if you need a full-blown Linux distribution, do not have time to tweak your system and can tolerate RPM

xPUD

Penk’s Underbred Linux distribution has been making waves since about a year now. And rightfully so: 10-second boot time is a killer feature for busy people. The xPUD desktop is mind-bogglingly simple and based on Mozilla’s XUL interface. A dumbed-down version of Maximus, if you like. Yes, this is both crazy and awesome. The basic idea of xPUD is that you boot straight into the browser. No real desktop environment, just the browser and you. The distribution is at version 0.9.2 at the time of writing, a Chromium-based version is also in the works, promising more speed (remember, due to Gecko and XUL, you get slower overall performance despite the fast boot; using WebKit could speed things up a bit).

Easy Peasy

Formerly Ubuntu Eee (fixed, thanks Scott!), EasyPeasy is Ubuntu respin tailored for Asus Eee PCs. But since it didn’t work on my EeePC, I’ll have to give it last place. The desktop environment is taken from UNR – the only difference is that the Easy-Peasy version isn’t ugly (where ugly means brown). You could call it the Linux Mint of the netbook operating system world, because the default install includes some proprietary software such as Skype, Adobe Flash and some common codecs to make your life less painful. The project documentation is not very professional. On the other hand, the guides are simple and very useful. I liek the fact that they chose Banshee to be the default music player. Those of you who do not like ext4 should skip this distro, though: as of v1.5, EasyPeasy uses ext4 by default. Due to the fact that the distro is basically Ubuntu, you can solve all your problems using Ubuntu documentation. Yet, aside from the nice theme and some very sound software choices there is no real reason to choose Easy Peasy instead of UNR. Try both and decide by yourself.

(Totally starting a flame-war) Distros I Do NOT recommend:

- Moblin: it is now essentially a dead project because of MeeGo. If you really like Moblin, get Mandriva 2010 and choose the Moblin interface.

- Puppy Linux or TeenPup: You are root by default. Thumbs down.

- Chrome (Chromium) OS: not reliable enough; do not forget it’s a developers’ preview.

Top 5 Netbook Linux Distros: 2010 Edition (with Gallery)

Tip: Making Gmail Default In Firefox

2010-03-04T14:16:58+00:00

Just a quick tip for you today. It may be that everyone already knows about this, but I ran into an interesting problem this week and wanted to share the solution. My mum has been using Ubuntu on her laptop for a long time now and she likes it a lot. The other day though she asked me why it opened “some other weird box” when she clicked on email links in web pages. She’s a savvy computer user, she taught me how to use a computer when I was a kid, but this confused her.

It was launching the Evolution mail client and starting a new mail message every time a “mailto:” link was encountered. I remember this behaviour from years ago with Outlook on Windows. I have never bothered to do anything about it on my own machine because I tend to copy and paste an email address from a page straight into a new message. I’m a geek though and trying to explain that to non-technical users is hard, it shouldn’t really be necessary either. Clicking a link and expecting it to open a new message in the client you use is not unreasonable. So after some searching around I found that the solution is actually very simple. You can set Firefox to use Gmail or other webmail providers for email links in the preferences. It’s 2 second job, and here’s how you do it.

Open the Preferences dialog in Firefox (on the “edit” menu in Linux)…

…go to the applications tab…

…type “mailto” in the filter box to bring up the mail settings. You can then use the drop down box to select Gmail, Yahoo or others.

That’s it, next time you click on an email link it’ll open a new message in your web mail. A simple little tip which everyone may already know but I didn’t until recently. This will of course work in Firefox running on any platform, Linux, Mac or Windows. The preferences link is under the “tools” menu and not “edit” in Windows, it may be different on Mac too. Hope this tip helps someone and gets your mail links fixed. Other web browsers are also available of course

Cheers,

Dan

The First Pawn Moves in the Novell Game

2010-03-03T11:39:07+00:00

This morning I saw a tweet from Jan Wildeboer of Fedora. He was one of the first people to spot that Novell are facing an unsolicited takeover bid by bigtime hedgefund breadheads, Elliott. A quick Google shows that Elliott specialises in buying into struggling companies and enforcing radical changes in order to bring the price of their investment up.

I have to admit, i’m mostly ignorant about how these bid and takeover deals work. What I do know is that Novell is listed on the US stock exchange, and that means they are legally bound to look after the financial interests of the shareholders. Even if that is at the cost of the company, it’s values, employees or products. I’ve read about the valuations of the Elliott offer being in the Billions of dollars. An offer of that magnitude is definitely going to be a catalyst. The company is “in play” as the Americans might put it. The thing is, with one offer on the table, Novell’s management are obligated to consider rival offers. Which naturally leads you to consider the simple question, who?

HP have interests in Open Source and Infrastructure, and they could bid. Oracle are still digesting Sun, so are not in such a strong position, but IBM might try. I have wondered about Google, but somehow I can’t see it.

There is one possibility that gives me the shivers though. Microsoft. It would be a lot of hassle for them to get a deal past the US Anti Trust Laws. It would cost them a lot of money in an area of business that would be a nightmare to intergrate into their own. So much so that I wonder if they would bother. The answer that’s forming in my mind is they wouldn’t. SO where’s the logic? Well, despite what Boycott Novell might say, Novell push a lot of usefull stuff into Linux. I’m sure that if they weren’t contributing, the overall pace of Linux development would be slowed significantly.

So, is that what we might be looking at? Would MS spend a Billion Dollars to trip Linux up and slow it down? I think they just might.

Pointing out the obvious

2010-03-01T22:46:31+00:00

“We have to put up with php as a language for web apps, but it’s a rotten
language whose use should not be encouraged. Or supported beyond what’s
necessary.” - Steve Langasek

As someone who knows / uses more languages than I can count, I am relatively sure there is no perfect programming language. In addition, I am certainly sure that anyone who makes such a blanket statement about a language is out of touch with reality. Languages are what you make of them, just because I can implement bad code does not mean I must, that is the programmers job.

This is both an embarrassing and sad moment for someone who has been such a great contributor. What you said belongs in a blog post, twitter etc, not a bug report, and you need to own up to it.

Related posts:

My twitter I have a twitter also, I generally twitter about tech...

Declining the Microsoft Browser Choice Update

2010-03-01T17:02:05+00:00

1st of March brings the “Browser Choice” screen to all XP SP2 or later users via Windows Update, or in my works case via WSUS.

If you don’t want your users to be presented with a choice of browsers to run, (because either they don’t have permission to install software or because you already give your users a choice of browsers – as we do) then there’s a couple of options:

Decline update KB976002 in WSUS (you might want to set your WSUS server not to auto-approve updates until you’ve seen it arrive and have declined it).
Add a registry key to disable showing the balance screen after the update installs.

The update hasn’t appeared on our WSUS server yet – in fact I can’t find anyone on the Edugeek forums who have sucessfully located the update in WSUS yet.

Weekly Rewind #53

2010-02-28T19:48:24+00:00

It’s time for Weekly Rewind number 53 and for once it’s not late, wonders never cease. Since my last update included Monday and some of Tuesday of this week, I’ll just start from Tuesday and make this a little shorter. I’ve still been a bit ill this week at times but overall I’m feeling much better right now I’m pleased to say.

So, on Tuesday I synced up the audio from Linux Outlaws and shipped it back to Fab. It was a little bit longer than expected as I said in my earlier post, but I think we’ll settle into the new format with practice. That was later released as episode 137 “Bing!”. It seemed to be pretty well received and downloads for the podcast in general have been shooting up lately, good news. I think we might have finally jumped the shark. I also got on with sorting out sponsorship for OggCamp and various other things. We’ve been working on an advert to appear in Linux Format magazine very soon. They wrote am article about us this month in very kind terms and we appreciate the support. They’re even offering Oggcamp attendees 40% off a year’s magazine subscription. So, without further ado here are our wonderful OggCamp10 sponsors: (drum roll needed)

Media Partners: Linux Format Magazine

(trumpets)

I’m still working with some sponsors who are confidential right now, rest assured I’ll let you know as soon as I can. It may be a cliche but we really couldn’t put this event on without their support. It costs a lot of money and it would probably bankrupt us, we’re a non-profit community event. It sounds dramatic but it’s true. So a hearty thanks to these folks for their support, we appreciate it.

Zonker

Anyway, back to events of the week. On Wednesday I worked on some Drupal sites for a while. I’ll give you more details on those in coming weeks when I’m allowed but it’s quite exciting. I also did more research for my Firefox Mobile article and wrote up some notes. On Thursday I interviewed former OpenSUSE Community Manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier for Linux Outlaws. I’m still working on the audio at the moment but you should be able too hear that as a special episode next week. It’ll be about 45mins in total. It was a very interesting chat I thought. Sadly I missed Chester LUG on Thursday evening because I was still feeling pretty rough. I’ll have to make it up to them next month.

On Friday I wrote, edited, formatted and published my FF Mobile review with some screen shots. It’s been pretty well received so far and I hope people enjoy it. I think mobile web browsing is a big area right now, and with the expansion of the smartphone market that’s only going to grow. I also spent some time working on HTML and CSS for a client site on Friday night. Trying to tweak a style sheet of over 1000 lines that someone else originally wrote can feel like chewing razor blades at times, but I finally got somewhere by the wee hours of the morning. Over the weekend I’ve been working on the Zonker interview audio, answering tons of email and I’m now editing the next Software Freedom Law Show for release on Tuesday. I’m also working on my 5 minute presentation for the Ignite Liverpool event next week. More on that in a second.

Upcoming:

Next week I’ll be getting onto OggCamp exhibition planning now that sponsors are mostly sorted. I also need to start working on a technical plan with the people at the venue. We’re going to be doing Outlaws live on Tuesday night at 7pm rather than Monday. Then it’ll be LivLUG on Wednesday night and I hope to be in good shape for that after missing Chester. On Thursday night I’m going to be giving a presentation at the Ignite Liverpool event, part of global O’Reilly Global Ignite Week. The idea is that you have 20 slides and 5 minutes to talk. The slides automatically advance every 15 seconds. I wasn’t sure what to talk about but now the idea of a 5 minute “Blaggers Guide To Linux” seems good to me. I get so many emails, phone calls and face to face enquiries from people asking me what Linux actually is, I think it would be good to give a quick foundation. Hopefully I can make it funny too, I’ll try. Come along to the Design Academy at Liverpool John Moores University at 6pm if you fancy seeing the result. You’re more than welcome. I’m sure there’ll be plenty else to get my teeth into next week. There’ll be more Rathole Radio at the weekend and I hope to have more news on gig tickets very soon. I’ll report back ASAP. Take care till then, see ya,

Dan

Internetling, Kindle Edition

2010-02-27T18:49:21+00:00

I know this will piss of some readers since I haven’t had the time to update the blog with any useful content recently (a very nice article is in the works, though), but I wanted to write this little post to direct your attention to the Amazon Kindle link in the page header. Through the 2 years that I’ve been running the Internetling, I’ve been trying to keep ads to a minimum, that is why, except for the title text links, you only see ads in the “second layer” of the page, i.e. the full feed, by landing here through a US search engine, and occasionally by using the article search form. Yes it seems like a lot. However, not many people see them, most Internetling readers are, after all, tech-savvy users.

I believe donations would be too much to ask since I don’t offer any service in exchange (the content will always be free and under a CC license), so I decided to publish a Kindle-optimized Internetling at Amazon.com – if I’m not mistaken, the subscription will cost you $1 a month (after a 14-day free trial).

So if you are Kindle owner, not interested in ads, or use AdBlock (not a problem, it is a great plugin, I use it myself), but were wanting to give something back, you can consider getting a subscription. Most of the money I earn goes to hosting costs and I am trying to get enough money to possibly hire a co-writer (or proof-reader, god knows I need one). Even if you do not want to subscribe, you can go for the 2-week trial: since I’m not a Kindle owner, I’d be really interested in your thoughts on the optimized edition, e.g. how it looks etc.

And I promise you, this is the first and last ad-related post you will ever see on this blog. Thanks for reading, see you in the comments

Internetling, Kindle Edition

Ubuntu at Work

2010-02-27T02:00:26+00:00

As of today, I'll be booting into Ubuntu at work instead of the usual Windows XP. I am psyched.

For the past month or so, I've been spending an hour or so after work building up a second drive on my machine. I think I started off with Crunchbang, moved to Xubuntu with a lot of pieces stripped out, and eventually settled on a Ubuntu minimal install with Openbox for a window manager. Tonight, I was able to get the last bits sorted out that make it a sensible alternative in an all-Windows environment.

Here are a couple tips I learned along the way:

The Likewise Open packages in the Ubuntu repos will allow you to join your computer to an Active Directory domain, provided you have the user permissions to do so. But beware; in Ubuntu 9.10, this completely destroyed my ability to log into my machine with a local user through GDM, so I had to tear it out and use Getty & run "startx" to get to a GUI. There are alternatives, like qingy, but I didn't get very far with them.
Lots of things are simplified if you set the default domain in your Likewise configuration. Since AD users are represented as DOMAIN\user, and a backslash is an escape character in unix-like systems, this makes commands and configurations awfully tricky. Simply logging in with your user name, and having Likewise assume you mean to log into your domain, makes things much smoother.
Auto-mounting samba shares is a pain in the ass. I couldn't get it working without putting my user name and password in a plain text file, so I went for the manu-matic approach. I created a quick shell script that prompts me for my password twice (once for sudo, once for pasting into the mount options) and created a bash alias for it. The first thing I do when I log into my machine is open a terminal and type "connect", and that kicks things off nicely.
I have a Windows XP VM around for annoying programs that don't have a FLOSS alternative or a native Linux port. There are so many crappy pieces of software that we use internally, some of which need IE to function, etc. Keeping a VM around with Windows allows me to run Linux for mostly everything while still being able to work on the help desk.

So far, things are going well; Ubuntu with Openbox is proving to be lightning fast and far out-performs my XP installation on the same machine. Hell, the XP VM runs faster than the native install. I'll keep posting tips and tricks I run into along the way, and who knows: maybe I'll save someone time in the process. Here's hoping!

non-reproducible bug

2010-02-26T22:46:06+00:00

On a recent commute home from work, my engine stopped running. It didn't splutter as though it was starved for gasoline and it didn't run rough as if not all cylinders were firing, and there was plenty of electricity ( at least enough to keep my headlights bright and the Glenn Miller cassette playing ). Luckily I was already in beautiful Petaluma and much to the distain of the driver behind me, I drifted as far as I could before pulling over and trying to trouble shoot my problem.

So what would cause the engine to stop like that? A bad distributor; perhaps no electricity getting to the coil. Turning the ignition key lit up my console lights but didn't engage the starter motor and I didn't hear any clicks from the solenoid. Fine, no juice was getting to the solenoid. If no electricity is getting to the starter and the coil, the common point of failure is probably the ignition switch. But why would it fail when it did?

Hold on a second...

I ne...

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

Looking for someone to give me a hand

2010-02-26T18:46:09+00:00

Hoping to reach someone intelligent / talented through this. Basically, I need someone for 2 weeks starting 3/8. It will just be a temporary position, with opportunities to work for us later as needed.

Position involves Linux development, and you should know php / perl. The project will involve modems and java also, and the ability to document everything would be great.

Good news about the position is I am leading the project, so anything you can’t figure out, I will. Pay will be somewhere in the $100/hr range, and we need you to be in Cincinnati for the two weeks (3/8 – 3/19), 40 hours per week.

Send me an email (you can find my info in launchpad) or post a comment here if you think you fit the bill. Anyone who has any Ubuntu development experience or contributions to visible projects will definitely take priority. Remember, you need to have the ability to be in Cincinnati, as travel is not covered.

Related posts:

NCPFS NCPFS each release generally is sent out completely not working...

Trac quick start on Debian

2010-02-25T21:33:37+00:00

Trac is pretty easy to set up on Debian, here’s a mini guide of what I did to get it working nice and quick. You’ll probably want to configure users etc afterwards, but this should be enough to get going.

Install:
apt-get install trac libapache2-mod-wsgi

Initiate the trac environment:
trac-admin /var/www/srdev/trac/ initenv

Set permissions:
chown -R www-data /var/www/srdev/trac/

Install the wsgi script and web resources. The first argument before ‘deploy’ should match the install environment (the path above.) The second argument following ‘deploy’ can probably go anywhere, but I just shoved it in the trac dir.

trac-admin /var/www/srdev/trac/ deploy /var/www/srdev/trac/www/

Next, we need to tell apache how to call the wsgi script, we do this using an alias. You can use / if you just want it to be in the same dir as your virtualhost, but in my case I wanted trac to be in a sub directory of the site (www.mysite.com/trac.) Add this to your virtual host (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/whatever.)

The directory directive specifies some permissions for the script.
WSGIScriptAlias /trac /var/www/srdev/trac/www/cgi-bin/trac.wsgi <directory> WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL} Order deny,allow Allow from all </directory>

Finally, enable the wsgi module, and then restart apache. Now it *should* work
a2enmod wsgi /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Converting Windows VMWare machines to KVM

2010-02-24T09:32:38+00:00

I had to do some work on a Windows 2003 virtual server running on VMWare this week which is running on our old playground VMWare install (Server 1.0.4!) and it was sooooo slow I decided enough was enough and it was time to move it on to a sensible platform.

It actually turned out to be quite easy to convert from one platform to the other, with a bit of help from my old boss James Lidderdale.

Shutdown the VMWare server and take a full backup
Boot the VMWare server and uninstall VMWare tools
Apply mergeide.reg registry patch to enable windows to boot on KVM virtual hardware. I’ve no idea where this came from. James had it. I’d like to credit the original author though! Rename .txt to .reg and then merge in as normal.
Shutdown the VMWare server
Convert the vmdk disk image to a single pre-allocated monolithic image:
- ```
vmware-vdiskmanager -r Server.vmdk -t 2 /some/other/folder/Server.vmdk
```
Copy the resulting Server-flat.vmdk image over to your KVM server

Now optionally convert the disk to a qcow2 file:

qemu-img convert Server-flat.vmdk -O qcow2 Server.qcow2

Finally create a suitable virtual machine definition using that file as the main hard drive. If all went well you should see your VMWare machine boot inside KVM.

The first time I tried this it failed miserably. Turned out that the VMWare machine I was working with had snapshots associated with it. In my case, the disk I needed to flatten with vmware-vdiskmanager was actually Server-000001.vmdk. Once I figured that out it worked first time.

Icon theme for VolWheel

2010-02-19T16:27:53+00:00

I made this little icon theme for VolWheel (and more info) so that it would fit better in my desktop. It’s nothing too fancy but I thought I would share it anyway. :) In case green isn’t your shade, you can easily change colours, just open your favourite image editing application (such as GIMP).

Download Bars VolWheel Theme (link takes you to deviantART)

In February my desktop looked like this

2010-02-18T11:04:25+00:00

I am aware that there is still 10 days left this month but anyway, this is how my desktop has looked so far. The biggest change I have done in these screenshots it’s the wallpaper. When it comes to themes I don’t really change it so often, also I really don’t have energy to pimp conkyrc everyday. BTW, in other news, on 1st and 2nd of May you should be in Liverpool, because OggCamp 10 is there too.

5th February

Applications etc…: Gwibber, Network Manager, Pidgin, Volwheel, Tint2, Conky, Pekwm
Gtk, Icons, Pekwm theme: BlackWhite, Simple-Moblin, Greenbars
Wallpaper: Rainy Day by kionee

12th February

Applications etc…: gPodder, Claws, Mitter, Network Manager, Pidgin, Volwheel, Tint2, Conky, Pekwm
Pekwm theme: Greenbars
Wallpaper: LithoFlowers by The Mysterious Deviant

Applications etc…: Thunar, LXAppearance, Claws, Mitter, Network Manager, Pidgin, Volwheel, Tint2, Conky, Pekwm
Gtk, Icons, Pekwm theme: BlackWhite, Human, SummerStripes
Wallpaper: Hasn’t sping just come? 2 by tastychery

15th February

Applications etc…: Volwheel, Tint2, Conky, Pekwm
Wallpaper: interloper by Ether

18th February

Applications etc…: Thunar, gPodder, Claws, Network Manager, Pidgin, Volwheel, Tint2, Conky, Pekwm
Gtk, Icons, Pekwm theme: Dyne, Simple-Moblin, Greenbars
Wallpaper: emerald by Ether

What’s going on

2010-02-18T05:45:34+00:00

I’ve recently moved john-hunt.com again, from Australia to Texas in the states. The reason for this is my web host here in Australia was crap and the server kept going down (among other things.) They weren’t that terrible (hence I won’t mention them), but not worth the hassle.

Anyway, hopefully this year john-hunt.com will undergo a bit of a transformation.

On the Principles of the Show

2010-02-15T12:46:19+00:00

It seems like in the last month or so, I had to explain to several people, several times in a couple of venues why Dan and I do not immediately release a version of the show once we are finished recording. I thought I should repeat the explanation here for everyone’s benefit.

Linux Outlaws was never meant to be a news show. When I came up with the concept, I was modeling it very much after MacBreak Weekly and to some extend This Week in Tech itself. That is to say LO is designed to be discussion of and reflection on the Linux and open source / free software news of the week in a friendly, often lighthearted atmosphere. It should not be your primary source of these news. As such, LO was never designed to present a comprehensive, authorative or even reliable selection of what has happened in the last week and because of that I had never thought it to be a big issue that we have a pretty long lead time with the show (usually at least three days from recording to release). You could say that Linux Outlaws isn’t optimised to bring you information quickly, instead we concentrate pretty hard to maximise the quality of the show. This extends to content (both serious and humorous) and also audio quality and general listenability (cutting out the uhms, ahhs and pauses) which is especially important to both Dan and I. This takes time and we know that. The whole concept of the show is build around it. We realised pretty early into it that some people rather prefer the show very raw and quickly delivered. That is why we started experimenting with streaming it live and have kept that arrangement up since then. We now provide you with exactly the recording of it all as it happens live, both in video and pretty high quality audio formats. I even save the video to the Ustream site when I don’t forget to record it. This is our compromise for those of you who want the show immediately and/or in its raw state. We are, however, not willing to sacrifice the quality of the actual podcast because of this. There will be no raw, TLLTS-style, fresh-off-the-tape release of Linux Outlaws. The editing and releasing of the podcast will always take time and I am acutely aware of the fact that it has been taking longer lately. I will take steps against this (more on that in a minute) but I will not compromise the core values of our show for it. As long as this is still a hobby for both Dan and me, there will be no way that I can release the podcast much faster than we have done in the past couple of years. If you want it faster, either pay me to do the editing or watch the live show.

As the show has been getting longer and longer, and with the original mission in mind, I have come up with a plan to re-focus Linux Outlaws a bit to adjust for this. Starting with the next show (#136), we will stop listing all distro and software releases that we pick up on. We will only talk about the ones we find noteworthy for some reason or another. You are of course still free to send us feedback (which we always appreciate a lot) and tell us if you think we missed something important, but please respect our decision if we do not mention stuff you send us. By now, we are getting a lot of email and everybody has something else that he or she finds important. In the same vein, I will take it upon myself to more radically cut down the actual news items we talk about. I always do this in some kind of fashion or another, but I will try to be more ruthless with it now since I think we really need to focus on the important things and make the show a little less complicated again. If I do this correctly, chances are you won’t even notice but if you do, please remember: we are human too and humans make mistakes. With any luck, this will speed up the release of the show again and keep it fresh for many, many more episodes to come. Our purpose always has been and always will be to produce the most relevant while still entertaining Linux podcast in the highest quality possible out there.

Again, by all means send us feedback on all of this, we are always interested in what you think and how we can make the show better for all of you. Just one more thing: Before you send us email, think about what you are doing. Maybe read it over again before you push that “send” button. As I said, we are starting to get a lot of email and we take a chunk out of our personal free time to read it all (and we do read all the mail we get) — so please make it worth our while. If you do that, I am happy to read all of your feedback, a lot of it warms my heart every week and totally makes it worth it to do this show. We are grateful for all the intelligent rants, funny insults, well-worded criticism, witty jokes and random “I really like your show” comments we get. Please keep that up!

Spreading the word about flattr

2010-02-15T00:22:42+00:00

Have you heard about flattr yet? If not, you should definitely check it out! m3tti pointed me to it on #linuxoutlaws on Freenode.

It’s in Beta right now, but it’s the idea that counts. To get an idea of it, visit the homepage and watch the introduction video.

It basically is about adding a little button (like Tweet this!) to every website that offers content, and users will be able to click it and automatically donate a share of their monthly donation budget. This way you always know what you’re going to pay at the end of the month and can support authors, photographers or even developers you like.

I’m asking myself how many “normal” people will use it in the end though, if they can get the stuff for free anyway… It could make donating to creative people sharing their content on the internet much easier though, as opposed to visiting some website, searching the donate button and entering all kinds of payment information.

I like the idea!

OggCamp 10

2010-01-31T16:10:31+00:00

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…

UoA ECE Department ‘DonKey’ on Linux

2010-01-28T22:02:24+00:00

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).

The DonKey in all it's glory.

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!

Mr.B.Crow from Leamington Spa wrote to say….

2010-01-27T15:58:42+00:00

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!

Note to self...

2010-01-25T10:30:04+00:00

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.

Parsing the Doom Wad File

2010-01-07T02:00:44+00:00

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 ...

Mu-Feeder 0.1 Released

2010-01-06T03:08:11+00:00

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!

WTF is a file system?

2010-01-04T15:07:24+00:00

This is a followup to my previous post.

After I wrote my last post I did some research on what is possible. The people commenting also pointed me to already existing solutions and projects. So I thought about how to integrate all these solutions into one, to get a usable desktop that does what I’d like to do it.

So I created a diagram consisting of four different components.

Real file storage: The most low-level part. This is where the real files are stored. This can be a local file system, or a server “in the cloud” to have files and settings available on every device.

Revision Management Layer: This will be a virtual file system or something like that, which can track file changes and version saved files. Thanks to davidnielsen for pointing me to Wizbit, which is working on something like that. I think it should only track changes in /home/username, because it will be pointless for other files (like things in /etc or /var).

Metadata Management: This will keep track of metadata, tags and related information. There seem to be many projects working on this, and the progress is very far, if not finished.

Applications: Applications are very important, because they make all this usable. They should support revision rollback and share their tags with the Metadata Management. Tomboy in this video is a very good example.

I thought I’d just share this, hoping this post will be useful or inspiring. I’m releasing this post and the embedded diagram under Creative Commons BY-SA.

Arrggg, keep forgetting to set gid

2009-12-07T17:28:08+00:00

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 :)

Crules and Intermediate Representation

2009-12-03T03:00:23+00:00

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 ...

10 Problems with Government Websites

2009-11-28T23:59:49+00:00

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.

Share with others

What is Google ChromeOS, I mean really ?

2009-11-21T01:10:28+00:00

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 !

Well said Carla !

2009-11-19T10:32:27+00:00

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

Kubuntu 9.10 Review

2009-10-25T02:11:36+00:00

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!

Share with others

Ubuntu 9.10 - Karmic Koala (Alpha) Review

2009-10-19T00:02:07+00:00

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.

Hull LUG's Ubuntu 9.10 'Karmic Koala' Release Party

2009-10-12T20:11:25+00:00

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}

OpenBSD and Debian on a PowerBook G4

2009-10-11T19:06:21+00:00

2009-10-10-233926_1152×768_scrot, originally uploaded by dingir_xul.

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

Day 1

2009-10-07T20:50:19+00:00

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.

Katian Crow 0.00

2009-10-03T19:16:19+00:00

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

Linux in German Schools

2009-10-03T19:03:39+00:00

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.

AIUSA86 demos

2009-10-01T04:04:43+00:00

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>

How to prepare

2009-09-11T19:52:13+00:00

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.

Splash Your Cash - Creative Commons

2009-06-05T11:00:54+00:00

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.

Weekly Link Roundup 22 May 09

2009-05-22T11:38:46+00:00

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.