I videoed the talks at recent Eccentric Eggplant GeekDinner. The videos are available in Ogg format, and should play in VLC. Like the CLUG talks, they are all available in 3 qualities. Don't expect to be able to read slides in anything but the high quality version.
This might sound like a silly topic, but it's infuriating.
It's only very recently (since July) that I've adopted the Ctrl-Alt-Arrow Virtual Desktop bindings. Call me an old todger, but up until now, I've always remapped Alt-F1 through Alt-F6 as my Virtual Desktop keys. That's how I always switched desktop, and I couldn't bring myself to change to the Ctrl-Alt style.
I try to slowly align myself with the new defaults, so that I have to do less customisation to feel comfortable when I sit down at a box. With the MacBook which infuriatingly requires Fn+ for the F-keys, I thought I'd switch. It took a bit of re-training to switch, and now I'm comfortable. But, every now an then, I accidentally press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and kill X. This combination is supposed to be highly unlikely to be accidental, and used to be. But with the default gnome bindings, it's quite common. You just finish editing some text, and switch desktop, to find that your right hand hadn't fully released the backspace key before the Ctrl+Alt went down.
I think either the X kill key needs to be changed, or we have to get rid of this silly gnome desktop-switching binding.
OTOH, I'm almost entirely in line with the modern GNOME defaults. On a foreign machine, I need to set up Dvorak keyboard, change the terminal to grey-on-black, and I'm pretty much ready to go. (My .ssh/config is also nice to have, as are my firefox quick links)
I've updated planet geekdinner to pick up *camp posts.
As usual, as long as your post mentions the words *camp or geek-dinner, it should make the planet. We can no longer use tag feeds, as "geekdinner" and "*camp" are generally separate tags.
For regex geeks, the regex is ([gG]eek[ -]?[dD]inner|([sS]tar|\*)[ -]?[cC]amp)
On another note, I don't know if I'm going to make star-camp - I might well be away that weekend. But hopefully I'll be there.
Is it just me, or is the Ubuntu development tree more stable than the releases?
I don't know if I've just had bad luck, but the few Ubuntu releases have seen me abandon the stable release, almost straight away in search of some stability in the development tree. I remember Breezy being a stable release. Dapper was quite good, too - well polished. However, edgy was (as people said at the time), a little edgy, and for me it went down from there...
My first foray into Ubuntu development was from edgy to feisty. My laptop (Acer Ferrari 4005) was horribly unstable - a new, young chipset. Also, the tifm SD card reader wasn't supported. I found feisty development to be quite stable and I pushed The Shuttleworth Lab into running it too, as a work-around for a nasty NFS bug which wasn't going to ever be fixed.
Feisty development was fun. There was one update when mkinitrd broke, and the systems was completely unbootable (I still have a "rescue" monolithic kernel hanging around from that incident). But otherwise, it was pretty much like life on Debian testing: stable enough.
With the feisty release, prism54 broke, so my Ferrari headed for gutsy, straight away. (My secondary WiFi card is a prism54, the Ferrari wifi is broadcom)
Then I bought a new laptop, a mid-2007 Macbook - a carefully considered machine that should mostly contain well-supported hardware (Intel everywhere and Atheros wifi). Feisty was totally unstable on it, and I had to dive into Gutsy development again. Even gutsy didn't support my wireless, which is only supported in the bleeding-edge madwifi trunk. No effort has been made to bring this driver into Ubuntu, as far as I know.
Now, I find myself wanting to get away from gutsy as fast as possible, because of a string of bugs. When a distribution is still in development, bugs get fixed, but as soon as it released there is too much red tape involved, and more to the point, the developers aren't personally impacted by the bugs. Gutsy development has been a treat - pretty stable and reliable, and things worked.
Now almost simultaneously with the release, a pair string of bugs appeared that break my Suspend/Resume:
Am I destined to always run the development version?
People ask me if Ubuntu works. I say yes, it works almost perfectly on most machines. But in the back of my mind, I'm thinking well - it does during the development cycle, but as it approaches releases, bugs creep in.
Of course this rant could be explained away in a couple of ways. I came to Ubuntu from Debian (which I still use), so I'm a CLI user, who started with the expectation that any laptop-ish support is better than nothing. My expectations have since risen to the point where everything should just work out of the box on a 6-month old machine. And a brand-new machine, should at least mostly work.
The Ubuntu release cycle coincides very badly with my academic schedule. Releases occur during term time, during the peak project hand-ins and tests month. So while I'm quite active in launchpad-crawling during development, as releases approach and the updates reach a fever-pitch, I've got less and less time to test them. This doesn't lead to particularly merry releases for me.
Maybe I should follow Adrian Frith's (rather ephemeral) lead, and switch to running Debian on my laptop. It might make a grumpy geek happier :-)
We've read that Telkom is implementing uncapped local access, as mandated by ICASA. The regulation states "local bandwidth shall not be subject to the cap", but nobody seriously thinks Telkom will follow this to the letter. There is a huge market in inter-office VPNs over ADSL, and Telkom don't want to lose out on that revenue stream.
Currently the savvy users out there use hacks like mine to least-cost-route local traffic over cheaper IS "Local-Only" accounts (like these). Hell, even ISPs route their clients' local traffic over the IS Local-Only accounts.
From what I've heard from the friendly frogs, Telkom are really just going to keep it simple, and implement the equivalent of IS DSL accounts, where after you get capped, you get another, local-only cap. This can be implemented with Radius only, and will (to some extent) prevent the service from being abused be everybody.
So yes, we all still need our separate IS Local-Only accounts, and do our own LCR.
Anybody who thinks Telkom is doing any good for South Africa, go and sit in a corner now!
Launchpad bug 59695 has been gathering a huge amount of activity since I wrote about this issue. The issue seems to be that the hardware manufacturers (BIOS and HDD firmware) set very aggressive values for power management. And every other OS (Windows & Mac OSX) override these values to something more sane. The manufacturers only test their equipment in Windows, so they don't see any problems :-)
This kind of thing seems to happen to Linux quite regularly - we all remember the ACPI debacle caused by manufacturers using Microsoft's broken ASL compiler, which worked in Microsoft's broken ACPI environment (or was overridden with driver updates).
So in my opinion, Ubuntu (and every other distributor) has to step in and override these aggressive settings. And, by the look of the bug report, Gnome Power Manager should provide the user with a slider to set the balance between power savings and hardware lifetime.
There is already the obligatory ubuntu is killing your Hard Drive blog, and a closed for cooling off Ubuntu forums thread, if you want get involved and start swinging your battle-axe.
Oh, and the workaround I posted last week obviously doesn't cover the case of the machine resuming from suspend. You have to use an ACPI event script for that.
I've just come across a rather scary, and worryingly old launchpad bug, which talks about real hardware damage. There is more on the problem here. But basically, by default, Linux is far too optimistic with spinning laptop hard drives down, and you can reach number of spin-up/downs that your drive is rated for over it's entire life-time, in a few months.
My laptop (3 months old), is already at 160000 Load/Unloads: Around half it's rated life.
The easy solution is
# hdparm -B 180 /dev/sda
Or, the following in /etc/hdparm.conf
/dev/sda {
apm = 180
}
Lets hope that this gets resolved soon, or the problem isn't as bad as it appears.
I see that Matthew Garrett (the Ubuntu Laptop Tzar) is subscribed to this bug, but doesn't seem to have commented on it. I find that a little odd, considering its seriousness.
I was lucky enough to win a Nokia N800 at LugRadio Live 2007, because I'd come from South Africa. I've had it for 3 months now, and the successor was announced last week, so I think it's time to blog about it, properly.
The hardware is pretty decent. The screen is very bright and vivid (great for photos), and just big enough to read websites comfortably. There are enough buttons to fulfil the basic tasks without reaching for the stylus, but you generally work it with the stylus (or a finger). It has quite a few hardware features:
The battery life is comperable to my cellphone (about a week of non-use, or a day or two of use), and I'm happy with most of the hardware, but I do have a few issues:
The power button isn't sufficiently recessed for it's soft carrying case. This means that I can't carry it off in my bag, it'll turn itself on eventually, and run it's battery flat from spurious touch-screen clicks. The solution is to always leave it on, and screen-locked (it supports an auto-lock). For a cellphone manufacturer, I'd have thought they'd get this right.
The webcam's position at the far left means it gets a good view of the left side of your face. This can be a little disconcerting.
The USB port is (without some serious hackery) only in peripheral mode. I'd really like to be able to plug a USB keyboard into this device (bluetooth keyboards are way too expensive).
There's a bottleneck in the system (processor presumably), that stops it playing youtube videos at full framerate. Mplayer seems to just be able to handle QVGA video at 24fps, but nothing more.
# cat /proc/cpuinfo Processor : Some Random V6 Processor rev 2 (v6l) BogoMIPS : 320.37 Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 6TEJ CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0xb36 CPU revision : 2 Cache type : write-back Cache clean : cp15 c7 ops Cache lockdown : format C Cache format : Harvard I size : 32768 I assoc : 4 I line length : 32 I sets : 256 D size : 32768 D assoc : 4 D line length : 32 D sets : 256 Hardware : Nokia N800 Revision : 24202524 Serial : 0000000000000000
The software stack of the N800 is everything I could desire. It runs a Debian derivative of Linux, Maemo. Maemo uses proper Debian package management, the GTK widget set (with addons), Telepathy for IM, and Gstreamer for media. This makes it a doddle to port existing X applications to the N800.
When you first turn on the N800, after unboxing (or reflashing), you go through an install wizard. It sets the hostname, timezone, and pairs with your bluetooth cellphone. The bluetooth phone pairing is well thought out, and beats anything I've ever come across on any platform. Unfortunately it suffers from the same problem as Windows - it doesn't set your Home Town, etc. based on the time-zone.
The default web browser is Opera-based, but a Gecko engine is available, and a WebKit one remoured to be on the way. It has a (proprietary) flash plugin, so you can watch YouTube, and the CACert.org root certificate is pre-installed :-)
The device has 4 input modes:
I find the input fine, although slow, for everything except passwords. Multi-case, symbol-laden passwords really bring out the worst of all the input systems.
The default software selection is passable, but not great. The device really ships with "internet tablet" software, with a few decent games thrown in. The major problems are the media player doesn't play oggs or video, and the e-Mail program's IMAP support, which is a joke, at best (It uses IMAP as if it was POP).
But I enabled a few extra repositories and soon my N800 became a really cool device:
My repositories:
http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/certified/ bora user http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/non-certified/ bora user http://repository.maemo.org/ bora free non-free http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ bora free non-free http://www.claws-mail.org/maemo/ bora user http://maemo-hackers.org/apt bora main
It's a cool device for a geek to own, no doubt, but what's the actual point of it?
I can answer that in a few ways:
But in the end, all that matters is that it runs Linux , and has Python dammit, so it's a piece of cake to write any software for it that I want to. I think that reason on it's own makes it a device worth owning.
Due to archive.ubuntu.com's saturated links atm, I switched to using mirror.ac.za as our upstream, but forgot to take their different URL scheme into account. We don't use rsync's --max-delete option on debian mirrors, so voom, our entire ubuntu archive mirror vanished. I'm resyncing it UWC, who we have a 10Mbps wireless link to...
Congratulations to the Ubuntu team, on a successful gutsy release. While gutsy is currently a little buggy for me, the millions of eyes will hopefully find all the bugs responsible... (and I must get around to filing the relevant launchpad bugs)
I run a teeny weeny little mirror (by International standards, for South Africa, it's OK), so I've followed the release process, and been hanging out on #ubuntu-mirrors since last night. Preparing an Ubuntu release is quite an undertaking. In total, each mirror needs to carry around 20-30 CD images, and 4 DVD images. That's reasonable chunk of data, and it takes a lot of coordination for everybody to get it.
I see many distros release, we normally pick them up automatically, and notice their presence the next day. But there's definitely something special about Ubuntu releases. They have the feel of a release. The tension builds up the night before, and the #ubuntu-release-party channel fills up (when I popped in, around 500 people). Then, a few hours before the release is announced, people start noticing that it's on the mirrors. Pointing this out on the release-party channel is not allowed (it would disturb the otherwise rowdy party of 500 users pressing F5 every 10 seconds), but pretty quickly, before the release is even announced, all the mirrors that carry Ubuntu CDs get flat-lined. If they don't, then it's a sign that their hardware isn't up to scratch, and they have to find & fix their bottlenecks. On the #ubuntu-mirrors channel, you can see sysadmins from around the world showing off graphs of flat-lined, multi-gigabit links and sharing server tuning tips. If you want any experience in widely-distributing large files, run an ubuntu mirror at release-time, you'll gain the experience fast.
I don't know if this massive assault means Ubuntu is the most popular distribution out there. Most Ubuntu users don't need the new ISO. They rather need click the big "upgrade" button, and hammer their local mirror to the tune of about a gigabyte. Ubuntu is based on Debian's awesome package management system, that (if used correctly) should never require a re-install. There are Debian systems out there that were installed once, back in the 90s, and have been upgraded (both distro versions and hardware) continuously since then. Do people not know that, or do they want the thrill of booting up with the new Gutsy CD? Debian is widely considered to be the most popular distribution, and a Debian release hardly raises eyebrows (other than somebody saying "Debian released? Has hell frozen over?", and scheduling an upgrade for some time in the next 6 months). If nothing else, this shows how different distributions' user-base can be, while being technically very similar.
I've done my bit to help out the Ubuntu release:
Now, as the release traffic dies down again (i.e. heavy but not quite flat-lining), I hope the sysadmins and release-party-goers sleep well, you all deserve it.