Best Wishes In This New Year - 2011

At the dawn of year 2011, I wish you all (readers of All about Linux blog) a very happy and prosperous year :-).

Google Launches Open Source YouTube Channel

Google has launched an open source channel on YouTube. The aim is to collect and organize all the videos related to Google and open source projects in one location.

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"Sexy" software

It has always rubbed me the wrong way when software is described as "sexy." There is something about the context that just seems off. Well, I just got around to reading a book I've been intending to read since 2006, "Female Chauvinist Pigs" by Ariel Levy. It's about how pop-culture & the media have managed to convince much of society that it is "empowering" for a woman to um…objectify herself quickly, before a man does (you can probably guess by my phrasing that I do not agree with the women who buy into this, and neither does the author). Anyway, there's a paragraph in there that sums up nicely my discomfort with the use of the word "sexy" to describe, well, things that have nothing to do with, you know, sex:

Sex appeal has become a synecdoche for all appeal: People refer to a new restaurant or job as “sexy” when they mean hip or powerful. A U.S. Army general was quoted in The New Yorker regarding an air raid on the Taliban as saying “it was sexy stuff,” for instance; the New York Times ran a piece on the energy industry subheadlined “After Enron, Deregulation Is Looking Less Sexy.” For something to be noteworthy it must be “sexy.” Sexiness is no longer just about being arousing or alluring, it’s about being worthwhile.

OK, so your software is "worthwhile" then. Got it. Congratulations, I guess? But…why??? Is it faster than the alternative? Does it have a more intuitive UI? Does it colour-coordinate better than the garish purple, green, and red interface full of <blink> tags of the alternative? Does it take what is normally a complicated 15-step manual process and distill it into a simple 3-step process wherein the computer intuits many of the steps itself? If so, say that! That'd be an actual useful description!

Feminist aside: the flipside of this is the implication that if a thing or person isn't "sexy," it's worthless.

Please chip in

Amber and Pete Graner house was struck by lightning while they were at UDS. Their kids and dog are fine, but their stuff is all burnt up. It'll be a while before insurance gets all worked out, and in the meantime, they need to be able to get things like clothes, shoes, etc. Rikki Kite setup a Chip In for the Graners for anyone who wants to give them a bit of money to get back on their feet. Consider it an early Christmas/Hanukkah/Yule/Wintereenmas gift.

This is the third one of these events where the community came together to help out after a disaster, and I find it really amazing. It's reminding me a bit of what I read about the Amish recently.

Help Bryen out

Bryen Yunashko of GNOME Accessibility had his equipment stolen. He's in Spain for the GNOME-A11y Hackfest, and on his way from Barcelona to Sevilla (where the hackfest is going on), his bags with his 17" laptop, Kindle, 1TB hard disk, and camera were stolen. He's visually impaired and deaf (so screen-readers are out), so those items were bought with that in mind. 17" so he can see the screen, Kindle because it zooms unlike paper, and a camera with many lenses because it helps him see. He picked up a cheap netbook so he can still hack while at the hackfest, but the tiny screen makes it hard to use with his vision.

A collection is being taken to replace the stolen equipment.

Introducing Gally

For my senior design project in school, I decided to design and write a program for teaching sign languages on Linux. It was in a "working prototype" stage when I presented it in school in April. I had a few more things I wanted to get right before announcing it to the whole FOSS world, but I just got confirmation from Nigel Babu that the last known bug in RC3 is fixed, so it's time to release!

Here's what it looks like (though that "France" sign video is removed since I did the sign backwards…should probably correct the text under it…oops):

Packages for version 0.5 (what I'm calling the first stable release) are in the Gally stable release PPA for Lucid, and in Universe for Maverick. It'll be uploaded to Debian Unstable soon.

This release only supports American Sign Language, but some of the lessons have been translated into French and German. On the roadmap for 1.0 is support for installing multiple sign languages (yes, places have different sign languages), hopefully through KGetHotNewStuff. Quizzing should also be in that version. That means that people who know BSL, LSF, DSL, Auslan, NZSL, or any of the others whose names I don't know are certainly wanted to start preparing lessons for that version!

I suspect a bit of an FAQ is in order:

1. Why name it "Gally"?
   
   • That is the nickname for Gallaudet, which can refer either to Gallaudet University or Thomas Gallaudet, who started the first deaf school in the US. It was based on French teaching methods.



2. What licence is it under?
   
   • GPLv3


3. What's it written in?
   
   • PyKDE



4. What if I use GNOME?
   
   • Use sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends gally to avoid pulling in half of Kubuntu


5. Is there an IRC channel?
   
   
   • Yes, #gally on irc.freenode.net


6. How can I help?
   
   • Suggest lesson topics
   
   
   
   • Write up a lesson plan (list of signs for a suggested lesson or one you thought of)
   
   
   • Convert a lesson plan into XML
   
   
   • Submit videos of you signing what's in a lesson plan
   
   
   • Make or find CC-BY or CC-BY-SA clipart or photos to work as "context" with the lessons (like the French flag in the screenshot)
   
   
   • Help make the GUI translatable

You will need to download the ASL lesson pack (link is to this month's snapshot) to study ASL. Use your favourite archive manager (Ark, File Roller, tar) to put the contents in either ~/.kde/share/apps/gally/ (if only you will use it) or /usr/share/kde4/apps/gally/ (for all users on the system). That means the lessons.lang ends up in ~/.kde/share/apps/gally/ASL/ or /usr/share/kde4/apps/gally/ASL/

Thanks go to the folks who've been testing and Nigel in particular for helping me roll through RCs, Paul Hummer for writing the original setup.py when I am new enough to Python to have never done this, and Karen Rustad for making a nice icon (which isn't in the screenshot, since it's an old one) based on the ASL sign for "teach."

Algorithms, Reverse Engineering, and Crochet

Sing along: One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn't belong…

Actually, not really. These things can all go together: algorithms, reverse engineering, and crochet. I've been crocheting since I was so young I don't remember not crocheting. My Mimi (what I call my grandmother) taught me. There exist crochet patterns you can buy on paper or find online, but she doesn't know how to read them. I've read one pattern. It was for a doily I made in high school. So, how did Mimi and I know what to do when crocheting the rest of our lives? Reverse engineering!

Mimi had a big clear plastic bin in her nightstand full of samples of crochet. They were usually about 10x20cm or 5x8in and done in whatever scraps of yarn she had sitting around, so it was a very colourful pile. Each one had a different pattern in it. She was always fond of the seashell patterns though. There were others that looked like little rows of pillars on a Greek building and she had one very complicated one that sort of made a starburst shape within itself. If she wanted a certain effect, she'd just dig up her sample, poke at it a bit and look really close, and then copy how it was done. Maybe she'd add a few extra stitches to make the seashells wider or something, but to her a finished example was better than written instructions. I didn't learn the term until a few years ago, but poking at things to see how they work, then using that knowledge to go make some more? That's reverse engineering.

I've had a few people express surprise at someone being into artsy right-brain things and computery left-brain things. One was in the car on the way to Southeast LinuxFest, as I was sitting in the back crocheting. I responded by reciting the pattern of what I was doing as a bunch of nested for-loops. Hey, it's an algorithm. Here's a picture of me crocheting at the speakers dinner. I was making a pink snood based on the white one I'm wearing in the photo. I figured I'd be asked about being Amish less frequently if I had a pink one.

Dustin wrote a couple weeks ago about teaching his wife to code. She also crochets. I mentioned in his comments that reverse engineering and algorithms are a big part of crochet too. To demonstrate, today I finished crocheting a scarf. Here's the algorithm, in Python:

#!/usr/bin/python
for i in range(20):
    print "ch",

for i in range(6):
    for j in range(2):
        print "ch",
    print "\nnext:  "
    for j in range(20):
        print "s",
    print "ch",
    for j in range(10):
        for k in range(3):
            print "ch",
        print "\nnext:  "
        for k in range(10):
            print "d ch",
    for j in range(2):
        print "ch",
    print "\nnext:  "
    for k in range(20):
        print "s",

Key:

• ch: chain


• d: double crochet


• s: single crochet

Thanks to Kim Kirkland for correcting my long-hand stitch names into the standard abbreviations.

PS: the scarf is aubergine ;-)

Using ODBC with bind

I ran into this last week, and the Google was failing me, so here's the reason why you sometimes get "Required token $zone$ not found." when debugging why bind won't start with ODBC. The answer is: because the DLZ documentation is slightly wrong. It delimits "zone" and "record" with % instead of $. That is, the directions show:

{select zone from dns_records where zone = '%zone%'}

But really, it should be:

{select zone from dns_records where zone = '$zone$'}

There you go. That's where that error comes from. Now hopefully the next person who hits this will be able to find an actual useful answer when they search for the error.

Horn Tootin': Isabell Long

Isabell Long, one of the awesome people I know through Ubuntu Women, is currently being featured by the BBC for creating GovSpark, a site to aggregate energy usage statistics from different branches of the UK government and compare them. Way to go, Isabell!

Help fund free culture

Musopen is a group that's been trying to release classical music that's long been out of copyright back into the public domain. How did it leave the public domain? Each recording is considered a new work, so just because the copyright has expired on the sheet music doesn't help all us lovers of Free Culture. The recordings are still copyrighted themselves. They're using Kickstarter to get money to hire professional orchestras to record classical music for the public domain. They've done this before, and they say that based on their price quotes "every $1000 buys a complete set of Mozart violin sonatas, or all of Chopin's mazurkas, ballades, or nocturnes."

If you want to support the public domain, or just plain if you're into classical music, why not give them some dough? This is a last-minute call. It closes in a few hours.

Takoma Park Folk Festival

Yesterday the DC LoCo Team was at Takoma Park Folk Festival yet again. This is the fifth year the team has been here. One man came over the table going "ok, that's a word from my part of the world. How are you using it?" Apparently he's from Zambia! He felt obliged to take an Ubuntu CD when we told him that it was started by a South African. We also had a visit from Mike Heney, who is running for office in this area and apparently uses Gentoo (he says because the IT people where he currently works know how to use Red Hat and Ubuntu, and this keeps them from interfering). Donna Edwards, who represents Maryland in Congress came up too, and she asked what we were about. Kevin started talking about open source in government. She said she definitely thought that was a good idea and expressed an affinity for Free Culture! She also lamented a future of walled gardens. I asked her to go against Disney when they start lobbying for more copyright extensions in a few years (Mickey expires in 2023, and government moves slow, so they'll start soon), because the Public Domain needs to be protected. A teacher with a computer lab full of Edubuntu machines in need of administration and nobody to do so visited the booth. Turns out her lab is about a 10 minute walk from the restaurant where we meet up each Saturday. We said to email the mailing list, and one of us would arrange to come by and get things moving smoothly again.

Lots of existing Ubuntu users came up with questions, and thanks to the magic of 3G I was able to find answers to the harder questions. There were also lots of "oh I love Ubuntu!" "Did you know there was a local group?" "I had no idea." "Here's a list of a bunch of local Linux groups." We had lots of handouts "for students", "for educators", "for businesses", "for designers", "for publishers", etc. listing Free Software they could use, thanks to the Software Freedom Day folks. This was our 6-days-early celebration.

Someone forgot to bring the little thing you can hold in your hand and click for each visitor, so our count of visitors is based on us attempting to remember to tally on a piece of paper. Of course, the hardest time to remember to tally or to count is when lots of people show up! We ended up counting about 120 visitors to the booth. That's about 30 fewer than in previous years, but given the rain in the early part of the festival and the continuing threat of it from the cloudy skies, no too bad. Someone else (me) forgot to bring the stickers though, so I can't blame too much. I did have copies of Ubuntu User and Linux Pro for people to flip through.

I guess one of the organisers (possibly the one at the Information Booth who looked at my OLF shirt and said "oh, you must be with Ubuntu") knew that Free Software can be a bit of a religion for some, because we were put directly across from the Presbyterians', Quakers', and Jews' tables. There was a lot of back and forth between our table and the Quaker table, due to significant overlap between the local Quaker and Free Software communities. Annalee, the clerk of Takoma Park Friends Meeting, is working on learning Perl to contribute to Dreamwidth. Another fellow at their table, John, is someone I've seen around many LUG meetings and other events. And Arthur David Olson, who dutifully remained at their table the whole day, wrote the software that makes timezones work in UNIX and Linux: tzdata (aka the Olson Database). He also took this picture:

See the rest of the album.

Ohio LinuxFest 2010

I'm on my way home from Ohio LinuxFest. Why'd I leave so early? Partly because my carpool wanted to, and partly because the DC LoCo is going to be at Takoma Park Folk Festival tomorrow. I told everyone I'd post my slides here, so they'll be below.

Both of the talks I gave were ones I've done before. At the UbuCon, I gave the Ubuntu Development Processes talk that I gave for a local LUG a few months back with updated information. There are now 167 human members of ~ubuntu-dev, up from 147 when I gave the talk in May! Thanks goes to Alan Bell for his lplist.py that let me pull down the full list of members and automatically exclude teams and duplicates.

The talk I gave for the main OLF stuff was the security one from Southeast LinuxFest. It was slightly changed, but this time ran a lot shorter than last time. That's because I have neither the vocabulary nor the brainpower to go off on tangents while simcomming. Simcomm is short for "simultaneous communication." I gave the talk simultaneously in English and American Sign Language (ok, really, it was a bit of an ASL pidgin since I used English word-order—my grammar knowledge is little-to-none). I've never done that for a presentation before, just for conversations. While I did learn a bunch of new signs last week just for this (like "exploit", "vulnerability", "attack", "man in the middle attack", "internet", "infect", etc), I still needed to restrict my English vocabulary to things I could sign or for which I knew a sign that was a reasonable approximation. Because some words just plain don't have sign equivalents (at least not ones which my more-fluent-than-me friends know), I told those in the audience for which sign language is useful what signs I would be substituting, such as "horse" for "trojan" (get it?) and "fishing" for "phishing" (which really is the same concept anyway). By the way, "man in the middle attack" takes forever to sign. First assign a place in space for "you", then on the other side of your body assign a place in space for "computer" (as in the one you're trying to talk to), then sign "man" and motion that it exists somewhere in between those two places in space, then sign "attack."

Because I was signing yesterday with Mel Chua of Red Hat (who I think thanked me two or three times for actually *gasp* accommodating her—she's my friend, I promised I would simcomm if she attended a fest where I was speaking), a few people came up and started signing to me. There were a surprising number of people who at least knew the manual alphabet well enough to do that. One person told me today that seeing the two of us chatting in ASL yesterday had him thinking I was deaf (so I guess I wasn't resorting to fingerspelling too much). I met a woman named Carol who used to teach at Gallaudet University, the only liberal arts university in the US (or world?) that's specifically for deaf and hard of hearing students. She says I did a good job of simcomming, so yay! As you can imagine, using two languages at once is a bit of work. Because I left early, she agreed to interpret for the questions asked of a speaker later this afternoon who is deaf, for whom I was doing a bit of interpreting yesterday. I think he had booked an interpreter of his own who then didn't show up. Mel, Carol, and I tried to convince my dad to take an ASL class since he's getting to be that age (the pitch of my voice has been lost on him for years already). We also discussed the possibility of organising an accessibility/deaf-and-hard-of-hearing track next year.

Yes, my dad was there! He doesn't use Free Software at all, but I got him to sit down and play with my laptop at the KDE booth, and when I explained what Akregator is for and showed him Kontact and OpenOffice.org, he seemed to pick it up pretty easily. He even told a random person that they should give it a try! Yes, he's a salesman. He'll sell anything, even if he doesn't know how it works or exactly what it is :P He was at the party last night and so met a handful of Ubuntu and Fedora folks along with many of the people from the LUG in his city. He said he might take my brother over to a LUG meeting some time, and he got a "I ♥ LINUX" bumper sticker for my brother's car.

Anyway, here are the slides:

Ubuntu Developer Processes (OLF2010)

View more presentations from Mackenzie Morgan.

Linux Security Myth

View more presentations from Mackenzie Morgan.

If you want to download them, you can either download from SlideShare (login required), or you can get them from the handy-dandy Presentations project on Launchpad, complete with LaTeX sources. Yes, I use LaTeX for slides. I ranted on here 2 years ago about how awful OpenOffice.org is for making slides and haven't gone back since.

Which Linux Distro is best for me....

Best Linux for me

Hi all,

I am back with my next blog. In this article I am going to help those who are planning to install linux for some reason  but are confused to select linux disto because there  are plenty of linux freely available to download. So which linux should I install here is mentioned :

1.I Just want to try linux :

If you just want to try linux then you don’t need to install it at all,

For this you can test linux with the help of Linux live CD known as ‘knoppix “.

Almost all Linux distro provide their live cd.

The user can run many different software applications and he may also save documents / files created during a Live CD session to persistent storage like a hard disk or a flash drive.

A Linux Live CD can also be used in situations when your windows has crashed and you want to save your existing data on another media before reinstalling windows. The only problem is that such distributions tend to run slower than fully installed Linux distributions.

You can also try linux on your windows machine with some virtualization software like Virtual PC (Microsoft ),Virtual Box or with VMWare

2.Linux for Home users /Notebooks :

With my personal experience to linux I think that Ubantu and PCLinuxOS are two best destro of linux for home users. Ubantu and PC Linux OS both offer user friendly applications,Games , Desiging softwares and office Packages. Personaly I installed ubantu in my HP Laptop in 2009 dual boot with windows XP. In  my same laptop ( P4,2.4 GHz /512 MB ) I was unable to run Windows Vista and Windows 7 properly.Even my windows XP takes more than one minute to boot up after grub selection , wheres as my ubantu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx ) takes less than 40 seconds in the same notebook. I run music audio and video files (almost any formate ) in VLC media player and using firefox for fastbrowsing and Impathy for gmail and  hotmails chat client.It has a predictable, six-month release schedule, with occasional Long Term Support (LTS) .Ubuntu is also notable for its ease of use and its inclusion of a migration assistant for Windows users and support for the latest technologies. Version 10.10 of Ubuntu--also known asMaverick Meerkat--will include a multitouch and gesture stack. The final iteration of that version is due out next month  Personaly I don’t remember when I have logged in to windows in my laptop after Ubantu.

On the other hand if you have good hardware (any new computer P4 2.0 or above with more than 1 GB ram then Fedora 11,and Fedora 12 are also very good choices.

3.Linux for old computers :

Puppy Linux is a Live CD distribution that has a small installer and will run just fine on computers with RAM as little as 64 MB. Puppy Linux can boot from several media including USB flash drives, CD or a zip drive. Puppy Linux will run totally in RAM so make sure you save the modified personal files to a disk else you’ll lose the changes when the system shuts down.

Xubuntu, a variant of Ubuntu is also a possibility. Xubuntu uses xfce, a desktop environment that uses less system resources than GNOME that comes with the Ubuntu distribution. Xubuntu versions are released twice a year, coinciding with Ubuntu releases.

antiX is another good choice for old computers – it should run on systems that were considered slow when Windows 98 was released (like the Pentium II series). Damn Small Linux and Zenwalk are other variations that have minimal hardware requirements.

4. Linux for Commercial /Production Environment :

For  core production /Comercial Environement I will recommend some enterprise version of linux such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux ,Oracle Enterprise or suse Enterprise Linux.

However Cent OS is a very good choice if you don’t need any support. It is just clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux without any official support of Red Hat. All  the Red Hat Logos are removed in Cent OS. In my office we are using CentOS as mail server from last 3 years withour any issue till date.

Fedora is also a good choice for both server and desktop end.

And finally Ubantu is always free there.

                       Finaly if you have sufficient resources than you not try to hesitate to taste each flavor of Linux….



                                                                              Regards




                                                                              Satish Malanch

Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!

Cross-posted on Geek Feminism. Co-authored by Moose J. Finklestein, OLF's Content Chair.

Some conference organisers will say "we didn't get any submissions from women" to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.

How'd we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That's a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.

We believe that much of this success is attributed to community outreach. This year, we contacted Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, and the FSF's Women's Caucus mailing list about the call for presentations, and did it have an effect!

Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the "imposter syndrome," where someone doesn't recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.

We wanted to make sure people weren't refraining from submitting because they lack confidence in their technical abilities (an excuse we'd heard before), so we explained the attendees' demographics, hoping to get more proposals that would fill the gap we had for user-aimed talks. Ohio LinuxFest has everything from home desktop users who started using Ubuntu a week ago (or even that day!) to seasoned system administrators who love Slackware, Gentoo, or NetBSD. Nevertheless, beginner proposals have tended toward introduction to development topics, not leaving enough for people who want to be users, not developers. We also made sure to mention that it's a great crowd who is very welcoming of first-time speakers.

Women are involved with more than just speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher has been actively involved as a director for 6 years now, and the current staff, all volunteers, is about 35% female.

The Ohio LinuxFest takes pains to create a weekend conference friendly to all people, not just women. The diversity statement includes gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and even operating system -- folks who don't use Linux are just as welcome as those who love it. There are regularly talks about or including BSDs, interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and cross platform free software.

Additionally, all speakers are instructed to keep the content of their presentations clean. The Ohio LinuxFest bills itself as a family friendly conference and aims to keep it that way. As an effort to make a positive effect with the community at large, the Ohio LinuxFest will host the second annual Diveristy in Open Source Workshop on September 12, 2010.

Looking at the growing trend of more female influence on the OhioLinuxFest we'd like to see it be the leader for more women to attend and become more involved with other free software interests.

For those interested in pretty graphs, I've been graphing women speaker proportions at various LinuxFests on the GeekFeminism Wiki.

Sharing a shell and monitoring the other party

Recently, I had a reason to allow someone else to use a shell on a machine for which I'm the admin, but I wanted a way to track what they're doing. You might think the history command is just fine for this, but it's possible to clear the history, and I wouldn't want that. Screen to the rescue!

I ssh'd into the machine and created a new user for my visitor. Then I switched to that user. Once logged in, I ran screen -L, which logs the shell (both input and output) to ~user/screelog.0). Then I called up the user, gave them the IP address, username, and password. They logged in, and I told them to run screen -ls to see a list of open screen sessions. The output looks like this:

There is a screen on:
 2119.pts-0.marlyn (09/01/2010 06:32:03 PM) (Attached)
1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-maco.

The next step was for them to type screen -x 2119.pts-0.marlyn Once they did this, we could each see what the other saw in our SSH session, and it was all logged. Great! I could keep track of what they were doing as they were doing it and review the logs later for a double check.

It's not a VCS though. If you know what directory they'll be operating in, you might want to run bzr init ; bzr add ; bzr commit -m "starting point" first, so you can later run bzr diff | less to see what files changed and keep a record of what changed, since while it might all seem perfectly logical while it's happening, recalling the exact changes won't be easy. The point of watching can be to catch them in the act if they try to do something that violates your security policy or to be given a demonstration.

EDIT: After a question in comments about how you keep them from opening another non-screen'd connection, my friend Peter suggested adding screen -xR to the user's ~/.bash_profile, so it forcibly connects to the screen session. Thanks, Peter!

ZaReason Terra HD

Jono wrote about his new ZaReason Strata, and Rich wrote about his new ZaReason something-else, so I figured I'd let you all know about the ZaReason Terra HD I said I wanted to order, now that I've had it about a month.

Typing has turned out not to be a problem. This makes sense, if you compare the size of the keyboard to the one on my other ZaReason laptop, a 13" they sold in 2008 under the moniker "UltraLap," but which I call Betty. The only diffrence in width is the extra column of home/pgup/pgdn/end keys, which are Fn keys on this keyboard, and I got used to the gaps between keys.

What's confusing me the most is that this has the Ctrl on the far left of the bottom row and Fn to the right of it, while on my old Gateway (Ada) and Betty have Fn on the corner and Ctrl to the right of it. I use Marlyn (the Terra, named after Marlyn Meltzer, another ENIAC programmer) a lot when on the bus to/from work, though, so it's actually on the other laptops that I screw up a lot. Oh, can you guess which thumb I use to type space?

"Why do you use it on the bus to/from work?" you may ask. Well, it has a 3G modem built in! So, within an hour of taking it out of the box, I found myself at the T-Mobile store signing up for a SIM card. Some people say "eww, T-Mobile," but they're charging $40/mo for 5GB bandwidth that when exceeded just gets slower, while AT&T wants $35/mo for 2GB followed by overage fees or $60 for 5GB followed by overage fees. Easy choice there! Oh, and the other night when CopyNight was held at Teaism in Penn Quarter (yummy food, recommended!), I was the only one with reception in the basement. That's where I was when I posted the last blog post, actually. I like being able to IRC from the bus! This will be very handy when I'm at a family reunion next weekend with no wifi and Ohio LinuxFest (where I am speaking) the weekend after that, since the conference center always wants to gouge OLF for Internet access by charging thousands of dollars more than the con can afford to pay to provide access to attendees (resulting in wifi being unavailable).

The one little thing bugging me is the MacBook-like lid. That is, it can't be laid out all the way flat like my other laptops' lids can. MacBooks always make me worry that someone is going to throw a shmooball or other projectile, hit the screen, and either A) snap it off or B) knock the laptop over. I hope B is more likely than A.

I got it with Kubuntu Netbook Edition pre-installed, though I have since upgraded to Maverick which doesn't differentiate between plasma-netbook and plasma-desktop at install-time (meaning I have both interfaces available and can press a button to switch). As far as I know, ZaReason is the only company pre-installing Kubuntu or really any KDE-based distro. When I ordered it, I told Jonathan Riddell (Canonical's Kubuntu hacker), and his first question was "what OS is it coming with?" I said "Kubuntu Netbook," and he boggled and requested confirmation that I was serious.

Not sure what else there is to say about it. With Firefox running and so refusing to let my SSD sleep (for some reason, Firefox writes to disk every few seconds) or give my CPU a break (yeah, don't get that one either), I get about 5 hours of battery life. I really wish Firefox wasn't such a resource hog. I may have mentioned before that they had a suspend/resume bug to fix before release. I actually ordered a red one and told them to send it unfixed, but the timing on red parts being shipped to the ZaReason shop was perfect for Canonical to inform them that some BIOS tweaks needed to be made and for them to get the parts manufacturer to do it before shiipping! So, I can reliably resume from suspend when I click the suspend button in the battery applet. This uncovered a new bug though: the fact that I have to click that button. I don't care, it's how I usually suspend anyway, and the "suspend if left alone and unplugged for >15 minutes" setting still works so it doesn't end up causing problems anyway.

More pretty photos! I don't think my camera did a good job of showing how metallic the lid is or the fact that the wrist area is slightly rubberised you get a good grip when holding it. Oh, and I love that the power cord plugs in on the side instead of in the back. I like to be able to see where I'm plugging things.

Oh yeah, I always see people comment on blogs where Linux-laptop vendors are mentioned that they wish there was a company in their country selling these. Guess what? ZaReason ships internationally!

Is packaging new software hard?

EDIT 1: Sorry Planet readers. I tried adding a "read more" thing to shorten it, but apparently that doesn't change the RSS feed, just the blog's front page. And yes, I will fix up the Ubuntu Wiki later.

A common answer to my question about why people aren't packaging is that packaging is hard and the wiki is kind of lacking. Debhelper 7 and Source Version 3.0 (the new Debian packaging format) make things a lot easier.

So is it hard? In the common case, no.

EDIT 2:Switched from "native" to "quilt" since as pointed out in comments, it makes for a smaller upload and debuild can deal with directly-applied patches in the case that you don't know how to use quilt.

Assuming the software you want to package uses something like Python distutils ( python setup.py build && sudo python setup.py install) or Autotools (./configure && make && sudo make install), Debhelper 7 makes things really straightforward.

Backing up, there are 4 files necessary in the debian/ directory:

• rules


• control


• copyright



• changelog

There are two more files you can include that act as a sort of metadata for what sort of package you're making:

• compat


• source/format

Assuming you want to make a Source Version 3.0 quilt package with Debhelper 7 (this is pretty normal these days):

1. Rename the original source tarball to have the form <package name>_<upstream version>.orig.tar.gz


2. Unpack the source and change into the unpacked directory: tar xf foo_bar.orig.tar.gz && cd foo



3. Make a debian directory and enter it: mkdir debian && cd debian/


4. Now it's time for those files

EDIT TO ADD

Generation

Good news: The version of dh-make in Debian SVN appears to support Debhelper 7.

Bad news It doesn't parse command line arguments properly.

In the meantime, you can use the old one to generate everything but the debian/rules file. If only a single deb will be produced, and it's under the GPLv3, that'd be dh_make -c gpl3 -s Then you'll just delete files not listed above and the debian/rules file and instead put in a debian/rules containing what I'm about to tell you below.

PS: I'm told dh_make is a pretty unclean way to do things. It's probably best if you just copy and paste the examples, then modify.

debian/rules

The boilerplate debian/rules file for standard build systems when you don't need to pass special configure options is:

#!/usr/bin/make -f

%:
 dh $@

Note that that is a tab, not a bunch of spaces, before the "dh". This used to be the most difficult file to write, which is why I used to use dh_make to generate it. Debhelper 7 made it so much easier!

debian/control

This one is long, but it's pretty easy to fill in the blanks. It's the only file of the bunch for which you might continue to need a reference. Here's how the control file should look:

Source: foo
Section: bar
Priority: optional
Maintainer: Foo <foo@example.com>
Build-Depends: eeny-dev, meeny-dev, miney, moe, debhelper (>= 7)
Standards-Version: 3.9.1
Homepage: http://foo-project.org

Package: foo
Architecture: all
Depends:  eeny, meeny, miney, moe
Description: does stuff
 Foo does stuff blah blah blah blah to make things easier for users to
 do whatever they need to do. Long description here.

Source package stanza

• Source: Put the source package's name. This should be the same as the package name on the orig.tar.gz.



• Section: For the list of valid Sections, see the Debian Policy Manual section on this. In Debian, you will put something like "non-free/kde" while in Ubuntu only the subsection (kde) is listed and the archive admins put it into the right section. In Debian, if the section is main, just list the subsection.


• Priority: "optional" is what you want for most applications. Again, see the Debian Policy Manual section on Priorities for other options.



• Maintainer: your name and email address if you are submitting to Debian, or if you are submitting to Ubuntu, put "Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com>"


• Standards Version: current one (as of August 2010) is 3.9.1, and you shouldn't be starting from an out-of-date one



• Homepage: the project's homepage

Binary package stanza

Now for the binary packages generated by the source package. For most applications, there will only be one binary package generated, but if there's more than one, just repeat the second stanza of this file once for each one, of course changing the values on each line.

• Package: name of the binary package (the deb). Use logical names. If there's only one, feel free to repeat the source package's name.


• Architecture:
  
  • all: if it can be built once and run anywhere (common for Python)
  
  
  
  • any: if it needs to be built everywhere
  
  
  • Otherwise, a list of architectures
  
  
• Description: put a short description after the colon that can fill in the blank at the end of "$PACKAGE_NAME _____" with a short verb phrase (< 80 characters). On the lines below, put the long description with a single space at the beginning of each line. If you want a blank line, put a space and a period.

Build-Depends and Depends

I kept skipping the bit about Build-Depends and Depends. For these, you want to list the names of other binary packages (not source packages!). If a particular version is needed, parentheses and mathematical symbols (like where I put "debhelper (>= 7)") are used.

Usually -dev packages will be in the Build-Depends since that's where header files are in Debian and Ubuntu while non-dev packages will be in the binary package's Depends. You don't need to figure this stuff out completely on your own. The upstream README and INSTALL files should list what libraries are needed. If they're not, complain to upstream about bad documentation!

If you don't know what package provides a certain library, sudo apt-get install apt-file &&apt-file update then use apt-file search to find what package provides it.

Notes

These are the required lines. There are more available in the Debian Policy Manual (I keep referring to that, huh? It's useful!), such as Recommends and Suggests. How do these compare with Depends?

• Depends: absolutely must be installed in order for the software to work


• Recommends: useful and common to have with the package but not completely necessary.



• Suggests: you want apt to notify the user that there's some other software that's kind of useful to use with it

Recommends are installed by default in Debian and Ubuntu nowadays, but some people disable them using sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends foo, so the difference between Depends and Recommends is important. There are more less-commonly-used package relationships too, but you can read the Policy Manual for that.

PS: If you're packaging a Python app, "${python:Depends}" goes in the binary package's Depends line to avoid typing it all out.

I always find writing a good description to be the hardest part.

debian/copyright

The debian/copyright file is a pretty straightforward fill-in-the-blank.

This package was debianized by Your Name <you@example.com> on
Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:05:25 -0400

It was downloaded from http://example.com

For the timestamp, run date -R and copy that in there. Make sure the copyrights are listed next, something like this (the COPYING or LICENSE file should have this at the top):

Copyright
© 2010, Author Name <author@example.com>

Double check this by running licensecheck -r in the top level code directory.

License:
The code files in this package are under the GNU General Public License
version 3:
    | This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    | it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    | the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    | (at your option) any later version.

    | This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    | but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    | MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the 
    | GNU General Public License for more details.

    | You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    | along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

    The full text of the GNU General Public License version 3 is available on
    Debian systems in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3.

Depending on licensecheck's output, you may need to list multiple licenses.

debian/changelog

This is the easiest of the files that require you to do any thought. Run dch -i --create, fix your email name and email address to match who you are, and put in an explanation. In future, you'll just run dch -i to add another entry. Explain what you did to the package. In this case, it'll likely just be "Initial release" which is pretty simple. dch should set the right version number. It'll look something like:

foo (0:1.0-0ubuntu1) maverick; urgency=low

  * Initial release

 -- Your Name <you@example.com>  Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:05:25 -0400

The first bit is the same as the source package name and will automatically be filled in. The part in parentheses is the package version. It is in the form <epoch>:<upstream version>-<debian version>ubuntu<ubuntu version>

If you're doing the initial packaging, the epoch is 0, and the upstream version will be automatically filled in from the .orig.tar.gz.

• Debian: Debian version will be 1


• Ubuntu: Debian version is 0 and Ubuntu version is 1



• PPA: put 0s for both of those and add +ppa1 (or +yournick1 or whatever)

Next comes the version of Debian or Ubuntu for which you are packaging. Leave urgency at low for now. You're packaging an app, not the kernel. It just affects how quickly the build servers get around to it, and abusing this field will make people Not Happy.

Other files

For the debian/source/format and debian/compat files, just run echo "7" > compat and mkdir source && echo "3.0 (quilt)" > source/format

Time to build!

The hard part is done, and that really wasn't very hard given it's pretty much just fill-in-the-blank the whole way. Now to build and test. My preferred way to test builds is to use pbuilder. It uses a minimal chroot, so your build-dependencies get tested too.

1. Install the build dependencies you listed in debian/control


2. sudo apt-get install pbuilder ubunt-dev-tools devscripts (If I missed any, tell me in comments)



3. Generate the source package: debuild -S—a .debian.tar.gz, a .dsc, and a .changes file will show up in the same directory as the .orig.tar.gz


4. Make a pbuilder to build your package: ln -s /usr/bin/pbuilder-dist ~/pbuilder-maverick && ~/pbuilder-maverick create—substitute in whatever version of Debian/Ubuntu you are building for (same as you listed in changelog)



5. Build the source package: ~/pbuilder-maverick build ../foo*.dsc—.debs will be output in ~/pbuilder/maverick_result

PS: The "make a pbuilder" step only has to be done once per release on which you intend to ever build. Keep it up to date with ~/pbuilder-maverick update

If it all builds successfully, congrats! If it doesn't, either you forgot a build dependency or it's not a wonderfully straightforward application and you should visit #ubuntu-packaging on Freenode or #debian-mentors on OFTC for help debugging. We're friendly!

Test

Install the debs and test it out.

Upload

You'll need to sign the package before you can upload it anywhere, if it didn't get signed when you ran debuild (the output would have told you if it did). Generate a GPG key and use debsign -k<your key ID> foo*.changes to sign it. If you're working on Ubuntu, add your key to Launchpad or if Debian add it to Debian Mentors. Then run dput mentors foo*.changes for Debian Mentors or dput revu foo*.chanes for Ubuntu's REVU (where new packages are reviewed by MOTU for inclusion in the archive). You'll get feedback from a mentor or a MOTU, improve your package based on that, and then someone will sponsor it. Or you can upload to a PPA with dput ppa:user/ppa foo*.changes

What are the barriers to walking the MOTU/Developer path?

I asked this on Ubuntu.StackExchange but only got 3 answers so far, so I wanted to put this a bit more publicly too. What keeps you from packaging, patching, etc? If you do those things, what keeps you from applying for upload rights?

About 150 people are members of lp:~ubuntu-dev right now. There are also a handful of people who haven't yet become MOTU or joined another developer team but do good work. More hands are always needed, so what's keeping the rest of you folks away from this area of contribution?

For reference, 150 is a pretty small number given about 30,000 packages. Debian has more like 1000 developers.

Feel free to answer here in the comments or on U.SE.

Kubuntu & Kubuntu Netbook 10.04.1 now available

The first point-release for Kubuntu and Kubuntu Netbook 10.04 is now available. If you've been putting off installing because of the number of updates you'll have to download, the good news is all updates, bug fixes, and security patches that have been released for these two versions of Kubuntu have been rolled into the new 10.04.1 disc images, saving you from spending hours on updates. Yay! Just visit the Get Kubuntu page on the new Kubuntu website to get yours.

If you're already running 10.04 and have been keeping up with your updates, you don't need to do anything. You're there!

Yes, there's updated Ubuntu ISOs too.

The Next HOPE

Last weekend was The Next HOPE (following from The Last HOPE) in New York City. HOPE stands for Hackers on Planet Earth and is a biennial conference put on by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. The Wikileaks guy may or may not have shown up. Some online say he didn't. Someone else told me "oh yeah, he was sitting behind the Tesla stage drinking Club Mate all day Friday," so who knows. Apparently his keynote timeslot resulted in everything being timeshifted by one hour though. The physical security folks said he ran long. Though maybe it was a substitute who did so? I don't know. Kaminsky had another of the keynote slots, talking about SQL injection and the difference between programmer ways of thinking ("I'll just concatenate these strings here…") and programming-language-developer thinking ("We'll parameterize these, so they don't break anything…"). He made the very good point that the reason programmers ignore that parameterization stuff is that it's a pain in the neck to have to jump all around as you try to read the code figuring out "ok now insert first parameter…back up to code…second parameter…wait which one's the seventh parameter?" and outlined some ideas he has to make syntax programmers won't hate that can still fix the problem. And yeah, let's face it. Trying to escape every bad character is total Whack-A-Mole.

A group of librarians were here talking about how to get FOSS into libraries. They had a very important tip: brush your teeth. If you show up looking like a caricature of a hacker, it's a bit hard for the librarians to take you seriously. So, look like you've bathed since last Tuesday and know what a toothbrush is. Yes, they mentioned Evergreen.

Deb "freedeb" Nicholson from the Free Software Foundation spoke about why diversity is important to the growth of Free Software (hint: more diversity = more people!) and how to get there. In a similar vein, Nikki Neulist had a talk called "Hey, Don't Call That Guy A Noob: Toward a More Welcoming Hacker Community." She was talking about how new people provide new perspectives and if you're willing to just be helpful early on, they can end up really useful later. I think this is something we've tried to exemplify in the Ubuntu world, though I do still occasionally see some unwelcoming behaviour on IRC. Unfortunately, during her talk's Q&A, some guy thought it made sense to say tough cookies, this is our hacker culture and if your skin's not thick enough, you don't belong here. C4BL3FL4M3 and I started yelling at him from opposite sides of the room. How on Earth could "if you don't like our bad attitude, GTFO" fit in in a conversation about being welcoming? Why did he even attend if that's his attitude? Troll!

The Vintage Computing talk ended in me dragging a 14 year old I was showing around to the Borders across the street to buy her a copy of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution to give her more context about things like the Altair and the PDP-11.

There were talks on "Color, Light, and Perception" and "Cooking for Geeks." In the former, I learned that magenta does not exist as part of the white light spectrum. You will not find it with a prism. It's not a single wavelength of light but rather a trick in our brains when red and blue wavelengths overlap. I also learned about additive colours, which is what the RGB colour model we use for defining colours on a computer screen is based on. The reason I see white captions on a black background as red/blue-split (like when you look at 3D stuff without the glasses) when seeing it at an angle out of my glasses was also explained. Neat! The latter was about food science, a basic introduction to it, and a reference to there being more in the speaker's new book of the same title. Apparently the temperatures we're taught in food safety courses assume you're not hitting the coldest part of the meat, that your thermometer's wrong, and a bit more, so they're overestimated by a good 15°. Not that I eat meat or am interested in testing that. Time at temperature was brought up as well—the fact that reaching a temperature doesn't matter as much as maintaining that temperature for a decent amount of time. Various enzymes take various times to break down into something tasty. I think he said brussels sprouts were in the category of things that need to spend a good amount of time at high temperature to taste good. Someone should tell my mum this. Hers are too bitter.

I missed much of the "Simpson's Did It" talk, but I caught Mouse's segment where she talked about Mozart. Apparently "Miserere" by Gregorio Allegri was well-loved by the pope of his time. So well-loved, that he had analogue DRM on it! That is, no copies of the sheet music could be made without the pope's permission, period. Only two copies ever were, and they were for princes who had to promptly return them as soon as they finished. Additionally, the song could only be played during Easter week. What did Mozart do, knowing he couldn't get sheet music? Showed up, listened, memorised, and transcribed from memory. DRM broken! Thanks, Mozart!

If you want to write online about controversial topics and you find that your free speech is being harmed by those who do not want you to be heard sending false DMCA notices, you should know about Project DoD, a web host who is willing to send a counter-notice in response (apparently unlike most others). You still have the mandatory 10-day offline period while the counter-notice goes through, but at least it's not a permanent offline period. They're willing to fight for their clients. Lawyer Tiffany Rad (who was my carpool for the trip) and Chris Mooney were talking about this project of theirs.

I mentioned earlier taking a 14 year old around. She's a smart kid named Johannah, so I was introducing her to the other LinuxChix and other assorted cool people. I explained public key cryptography (the practical, not the mathematical theory) to her and showed her how to generate a GPG key. She's an Ubuntu user, so I got her uncle to pick up a copy of How Linux Works for her. It looks like an excellent book for her skill level. It starts out with basic command line stuff and goes on all the way through explaining bootloaders and system internals. Cool!

We attended a LinuxChix Lunch on Saturday, where the women who'd been there in 2002 for H2K2 were expressing surprise at how many women were present, saying LinuxChix would soon be obsolete. They said H2K2 had somewhere between 10 and 30 women total. Improvement was obvious. And by the way, yes, the hacking community does seem to have more women than the Free Software community. There was definitely a higher percentage of women here than even at SELF, which I've already said has more than I remember seeing at any other Linux event (uh, outside of LinuxChix events, obviously). Funny enough, when we got back, I ended up talking to some woman I'd never met who saw my panoramas on my screen and wanted to know how I took them. I told her about Hugin and Free Software and Ubuntu. Anyway, the "funny" bit is that one of the first things she said when asked how she liked the con (she'd never been to a hacker thing before, but her son was a speaker, so she showed up) was (paraphrased) "this is all very interesting, but I notice it's mostly male, and mostly Caucasian." Yeah…still got a ways to go.

I had a duty while I was there too. I was handing out postcards for Ohio LinuxFest to everyone I saw with a Tux, GNU, or distro logo on their shirt, laptop, or tattoo. There were a lot of Ubuntu users. At one point I thought I saw an Ubuntu laptop in front of me, but it was actually OSX.

Ubuntu Women t-shirt design + wallpaper

Probably a year or so ago, I made this design and submitted it as a possible Ubuntu Women t-shirt:

(download SVG source—you'll need the old Ubuntu Title font to render the SVG properly)

Today I requested SVGs of the new logos popping up around the *buntusphere, and Martin Owens had them all so went and modified my design. I think it's beautiful!

(download the SVG source —you'll need the new beta Ubuntu font to render the SVG properly)

He added flower petals around the logos, now that they're all perfect circles, and he even added a FLOSS flower to it! Love it! Lyz is looking into getting t-shirts made with this on it and how the Ubuntu trademark stuff factors in. Finally, Martin turned this into a really nice wallpaper:

All of the above is CC-BY-SA, but it's still subject to Canonical's Ubuntu trademark rules thanks to the Ubuntu logo in there.

OLF CFP extended!

If you haven't submitted a proposal to Ohio LinuxFest yet, don't fret. The CFP has been extended to next Wednesday (7/7). Go to the CFP webpage to submit your proposal.

Installing Flash Player in Fedora Machine

Usualy we cannot open web pages containng Flash images in Fedora linux because flash player in not installed by default. And as we try to install missing plug-in we get error. so here is procedure to install flash player.



First of all download rpm  or tar format flash plugin form adobe website. In my case i downloaded .rpm format to my /tmp directory . now open terminal and change your working directory to /tmp
and type following

[root@linux1 tmp]# rpm -ivh flash-plugin-10.1.53.64-release.i386.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:flash-plugin           ########################################### [100%]

The .rpm file also copies the adobe General Public Key (GPG key) to /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux but does not import it. To import the key, type:

[root@linux1 tmp]# rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

Now install plug-in with yum command

[root@linux1 tmp]# 
yum install flash-plugin alsa-plugins-pulseaudio \
    libcurl'

and finaly

[root@linux1 tmp]# yum install nspluginwrapper 

Now you can open any web contain flash.

Regards

Satish Malanch  

Playing Movies on Ubantu 10.04 Linux with VLC Media Player

Installing VLC Media Player on Ubantu 10.04

Insatlling vlc media player is quite simple in ubantu-box

open terminal and type

% sudo apt-get update
% sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-pulse mozilla-plugin-vlc

and enjoy

..................Satish Malanch

Playing movies ,songs in Fedora linux ,Installing VLC in Linux

One  of the main reason why home users dont prefer linux to use is that they can t play music on linux machine. This article will describe how to play movies in your fedora linux. VLC media player is capable to play any music file . by default Fedora does not come with VLC media player. So here i am going to explain how to install VLC  media Player in Linux. This not big game just 3 step procedure. All you need to have a Fedora working machine with  configured and working yum repositry and a stabel internet connection.

Open terminal and type there: ( you must be login with root otherwise try su )

[root@malanch ~]# rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

This will display like this:

Retrieving http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
warning: /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.cqf8YE: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 signature: NOKEY, key ID 8fcff4da
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:rpmfusion-free-release ########################################### [100%]

now type :

[root@linux ~]# yum install vlc

and you are done . now you can play any music file (.dat,.3gp,.mpg,vob,avi ) in your linux machine.

Laptop (er, netbook) Love

At Southeast LinuxFest, ZaReason (the company that made my laptop Betty two years ago) had a table.

This is Courtney with a few of ZaReason's latest models. From left to right are the Strata 3660, Strata Pro 15, and the Terra HD.

The Terra HD is the one I want to talk about today. Some of you might remember the Terra A20 netbook, which was very popular in "mocha" colour. Apparently one of the big complaints people had about it was battery life. The Terra HD is its successor, and it reportedly (I didn't hog it that long) gets over 6 hours battery with its optional 6-cell battery (4-5 with wireless going). Also, I'm totally in love with this little netbook (don't worry $boyfriend, not that way).

Celeste Lyn Paul and I were hanging out at the ZaReason booth chatting with Courtney and Mark (Terranova, not S, don't get your knickers in a twist) when Celeste started fawning over the Terra HD. It's got an 11.6" screen and, as Mark was quick to point out, a 100% size keyboard, not one of those annoying 93% keyboards. I typed on it a bit, and yeah, the keyboard is the right size. I don't hit the wrong keys or anything. Great! This is a first for me and netbooks. Minor problem for my (very) long nails is slipping off the keycaps into the gap between the keys (like on a MacBook), but I think a day or two of typing on it would see me adjusted.

Then Courtney suggested Celeste pick it up and see how light it is, while Mark informed us that he always has to double check his backpack to be sure it's actually there. Celeste seemed surprised by how light it was, so I asked to hold it. When she handed it to me, my hands went UP! Theoretically, it's 2.9 pounds. It felt more like -5oz. And yes, that's with the 6-cell battery, not with the little 3-cell.

Some women fawn over shoes or purses. For me, it's laptops and laptop bags. This little beauty is available with either a red or a black lid (I guess this is where the obligatory "aww, no pink?" joke comes in), has 802.11n wifi, has options for 1 or 2 GiB of RAM, choice between a normal hard disk or SSD, and even has 3G as an option. And yes, it has ZaReason's signature Ubuntu Circle of Friends super key. Oh, and for the KDE fans, Mark is looking into adding Kubuntu Netbook Remix to the OS dropdown list (though as I understand it, you could just request that in the comments box when ordering, and they'd do it).

I've said before that I'm not getting a netbook til I can get an ARM one, but there's a netbook with a perfectly-sized keyboard that's light as a feather. I don't think I can pass that up. It's out of stock right now, so that gives me time to save up some dough and buy one ;-) Oh, and since no super-quick played-with-it-and-fell-in-love hardware review is complete without the pricetag: it starts at $449.

"Is Linux Secure?" at Southeast LinuxFest

I'm at Southeast LinuxFest right now, listening to Daniel Chen's Linux audio talk. A bit over an hour ago, I finished my presentation on the Linux security myth. It's meant to be accessible to normal users or to geeks needing to explain to normal users. I was asked afterward why I didn't talk about buffer overflows. That's easy: normal users can't do anything about them.

Is Linux Secure?

View more presentations from Mackenzie Morgan.

Slide 31 shows what happens when a .desktop is not executable and is in a home directory. Notably, that Fedora and openSUSE make it easy to run anyway, while Ubuntu policy says those buttons aren't OK (thanks James Tatum for the link pointer). I can understand that reasoning, but I don't expect normal people to know how to mark it as trusted or geeks to know that that's a euphemism for "set the executable bit."

Where did my favourite package go?

Did you upgrade to Lucid and find that some package you like is no longer available? There are a number of binary packages that were removed in Lucid as a cleanup of the archive, though for the most part the source packages are still in there. Most of these were removed because the source package was no longer buildable—meaning patches could not be applied to fix bugs since the patched source would not compile (unless, of course, the patch fixed that build issue). Some were removed because Python 2.5 was removed. To find out what happened to the package you're looking for, try this:

apt-cache showsrc $PACKAGE

This'll tell you the name of the source package (on the "Package: " line). Then go to http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/SRCPKG/+publishinghistory for a full listing of all versions of the package in Ubuntu. If you click the triangle on the left, it'll unfold revealing changelog info for that published version. For example, Sage Math's publishing history shows that it was deleted for the depends-on-Python2.5 reason.

And there's today's lesson on how to find data in Launchpad.

Ubuntu Developer Processes presentation from CALUG

Last night I did a presentation on Ubuntu Developer Processes for Columbia (MD) Area Linux User Group. You can find the slides on SlideShare.

EDIT: Ohhh I can embed it! Neat!

Ubuntu Development Processes

Please learn to follow directions

This is the second time I've seen someone in #ubuntu do this.

When you install sun-java6-jre, it will instruct you to go download something and drop it in /tmp and hit enter (something like that). For some reason I do not understand, some users just hit enter without downloading the file they were supposed to and putting it where they were supposed to. Of course, computers don't like it when users don't follow directions. The result is that apt sits there waiting…and waiting…and waiting. Eventually the user assumes everything is done and shuts down. Or maybe they try to install something else and find the dpkg lock in place and try to forcibly kill it or force shut down. Since Java is half-configured, dpkg ends up in an inconsistent state that lasts across reboots and is a pain to try to sort out.

All because somebody can't follow directions.

EDIT: So someone's said in comments that you only get prompted if you install on the command line. Synaptic just hangs waiting for an answer to a question it hasn't even asked. Yikes!

iPod Touch on Lucid

Plenty of folks have reported so far that their iPod Touches work with Lucid. Well, my brother has one he got for Christmas, and he says it's not working for him. He came up with a (very plausible) hypothesis though. Maybe it has to be used with Windows or OSX once (as some sort of activation mechanism?) before it'll talk to a Linux machine.

So, I'm asking: have any of you have an iPod Touch and used it on Ubuntu 10.04 without first using it on a proprietary OS and had it work?

EDIT: That was quick! Matthew Garrett says that one sync with iTunes is needed before it can be used with Linux.

EDIT2: Paul Sladen adds: I don't think we can generate the initial databases first time

Enabling Networking and Samba sharing in Fedora 11-12

Hi again..

By default networking remain disabled in Fedora 11/12 ( LAN card status down ). Even there  IP Address is properly configured . So here is the procedure.

First of all assign  IP address and DNS properly.

[root@satish~]#setup

now select Network Configration

and assign IP address.

Now edit your   ifcfg-eth0 file

[root@satish~]# vim /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

and set ONBOOT=yes   in this file as shown below:

Now save this file by pressing :wq!

Now restart network daemon by following command:

[root@satish~]#/etc/init.d/network/start

Now  open your firewall ( iptable ) for 

Samba ,Samba client and other required services and add eth0 into your trusted interface:

now restart your firewall service by 

[root@satish~]#/etc/init.d/iptables/restart

in this way you can enable networking in your machine and can add linux machine into your Network.

                                                                              .............Satish Malanch