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!