Chicago GNU/Linux Planet

Python for System Administrators Presentation

Dear LazyWeb,

I will be giving a presentation on using Python for System Administrators at the Chicago Linux User Group on Saturday (July 5th) and I was wondering what topics people would like to see included in such a presentation. I plan to talk about subprocess, optparse, configparser but not quite sure what else people would like to hear about. So people of the vast internet, please tell me what you would like to see in a presentation about using python for system administration.

Silly Things I do: vol. 2

Starring the best communication protocol known to man: ssh+screen+irssi

Most nights I am done with my computer for the night and I want to leave IRC on one computer. To detatch the screen session and return to it later I do ctrl+a and then ctrl +d. Then I type ‘logout’ and then ‘exit’ go to bed. To get back in the morning I do ssh user@server.com and then i authenticate. I return to irc using the screen -rd command. Very simple.

Sometimes I try to leave by doing this. ctrl+a and then ctrl+d and then +exit+exit. The next morning I get mad and have to log back into IRC.

Explanation. Ctrl+a followed by ctrl+d in screen will detatch the screen at the server. However, by using ‘exit exit’ twice to close my connection to the server and the terminal/konsole/bash shell on the laptop, I am killing screen and the attached irssi/irc sessions. This is the opposite of why I want to use screen+irssi+ssh.

The proper way is to do ctrl+a and then ctrl+d for screen on the remote server. Type ‘logout’ to end the connection and then type exit to close my terminal.

So don’t do what I do, follow proper screen+ssh+irssi technique unless you want to wake up in the morning, curse at yourself, and sign back into all your irc rooms.

July 01, 2008

Coding Advice/Suggestions Needed

Dear Lazyweb,

I am working on this Python application that remotely checks if a machine needs to be updated and then returns the results. What I am wondering is what is the best way to execute commands on the remote clients, right now various linux distributions? I was thinking to run the commands via ssh. This would require ssh keys added to the remote machine and a user that is able to run privileged commands (apt, yum, conary, etc). The other idea I had was to have a daemon on the client computers that would listen for triggers to run the commands and then return the results. What I am asking the lazy web is what is the preferred or standard (if any) method for executing remote commands via python?

Foresight Tag Line Contest

How would you like to win a brand new Foresight t-shirt. Well we are looking for a new tagline and the winner will get a Foresight t-shirt featuring the new tagline. The deadline for submissions is Friday July 11th, 2008 by 12am(CDT)/6am(UTC) . Please email all tag line submissions to myself (specialkevin_AT_foresightlinux.org). The winning tag line will be chosen by myself and the Foresight Council of Users. I wish everyone the best of luck.

Mike Stemle
(manchicken)

Larry, the Happy Lappy Finds a New Home

So those of you who know of my old huge 17″ HP laptop, I have some news. My sister-in-law graduated highschool this past year, and she’s going to college (I know, so exciting!), so my wife and I have gifted her with the wonderful HP happy that has served me so well. This laptop is well travelled, well used, and well loved. I’m sure it will serve her well.

Not only does she get this laptop, but I gave it to her pre-loaded with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, and she’s loving it. She has never used GNU/Linux or any Free Software in the past, and I was delighted to see how fast she picked it up.

My in-laws are now considering a switch to Ubuntu GNU/Linux as a result. This is all very exciting. Anyway, I’m not dead yet, just super busy. Don’t forget to check out my photo gallery at http://www.manchicken.com/gallery, and if you’re of the Vegan persuasion and you live near central Illinois, check out http://vegan.manchicken.com for some upcoming news on possible activities in this area.

Later.

June 30, 2008

JS equivalence operators: "Good enough for government work"

I was having some strange behavior with a javascript app I wrote. It's an image thumbnailing interface that allowed the user to zoom and drag an image around. When it loads, the image is scaled to be either as tall or as wide as the thumbnail size, and the other dimension is larger. The user can zoom in and out, but they can't zoom it smaller than it starts so no whitespace can appear. When a user zoomed in and then all the way out, the image would pop out of the frame a little bit and whitespace would appear at the bottom (this was an image that was as tall as the thumbnail size, I imagine the whitespace would be on the right if the image were as wide as the thumbnail size and taller). After tracing through the javascript for a while I realized the problem; javascript considers ('' == 0) to be True.

I have a function that repositions the image so when you zoom in/out it stays centered on the same point. I wanted to be able to call it to reposition for a move that only had a horizontal vector, so I made it check to make sure there was a value for each of the x and y coordinates before it tried moving the image on that vector. I passed in an empty string when I didn't want to make a move on that vector. The problem came in to play when I zoomed out to the max and the image's position on the short dimension became 0. I want to move the image to 0 on that vector, but my test for no value was catching the 0 and calling it "nothing", just like ''.

Once I tracked this down, the solution was simple. Just use the "really equal, I mean it for reals" operator; a.k.a. "===".

if (left != '' || left === 0) { do stuff; }

A more appropriate way to do this might be to have a real value like "nochange" mark when I don't want to do anything with that vector, but I did this because I didn't want to find all the places where I used '' and change them.

Silly things that I do

Remember now:

ctrl+alt+backspace will restart X

ctrl +shift + backspace will clear your private firefox data.

don’t mistake the two, it could result in a widespread emberassment.

June 28, 2008

Francisco Athens
(freelikegnu)

Ubuntu Hardy gets Sweeter with Sugar!

Wow, what a nice surprise! (This has actually been in development since December of last year :o) The OLPC Sugar desktop environment is available in the Ubuntu Hardy repository! You can use the emulator to run it in a window or login as a full blown desktop through GDM (the default login screen for (X)Ubuntu users)! I had trouble with connecting to my WPA network, but I think if I stop Network-Manager before loging in with Sugar, it will work. The turtle-art application worked very nicely and it was fun to browse networks. I would love to have Sugars network browser in a little box, or as a desktop background in XFCE. Now I have to find a way to make Sugar happy on a 800×600 screen so my kids can use it on their machines.

Available activities (in Hardy Universe) are:

sugar-calculate-activity
sugar-chat-activity
sugar-connect-activity
sugar-logviewer-activity
sugar-memorize-activity
sugar-pippy-activity
sugar-terminal-activity
sugar-turtleart-activity
sugar-web-activity

Many of the missing applications (measure, newsreader,analyze) can be found by adding the Sugar PPA repository! It looks as though Paint and Record may be available before long as well. You may also be able to run the Gutsy versions from the debs in Jani’s PPA archive. SimCity/Micropolis is in there too!

Visit Jani Monoses blog for other related developments.

(I just could not resist changing the title)

June 25, 2008

"bug" with onclick handlers in IE

I had an issue today with Internet Explorer. An object with an onClick handler worked fine in Firefox and Safari, but in IE the handler only fired every other click. In the course of debugging I discovered that if I clicked slowly, it worked on every click. I realized that this was because IE must be registering an onDblClick event instead of two onClick events. A little testing confirmed this. I searched to see if someone else had the same problem, and found this page. User jamescover had the same issue and found a solution: use the onMouseUp event to handle clicks instead of onClick. He also directed the focus in the onMouseDown event, but I found that part to be unnecessary in my application. A demo of his solution can be found here. I'll reproduce the code in this post in case that page ever gets taken down:


<script type="text/javascript">
<!--

var x = 0;
function addX(){
document['oFrm']['num'].value = x;
x++;
}

var y = 0;
function addY(){
document['oFrm2']['num2'].value = y;
y++;
}

//-->
</script>
This one invokes the function <b>onclick</b>
<form name="oFrm">
<input type="text" name="num" size="5" />
<input type="button" value="add" onclick="addX();" />
</form>
This one focuses the text field <b>onmousedown</b>, then invokes the function <b>onmouseup</b>
<form name="oFrm2">
<input type="text" name="num2" size="5" />
<input type="button" value="add" onmousedown="this.focus();" onmouseup="addY();" />
</form>

Freddy Martinez
(admiral_chicago)

KDE4.1 Beta 2 Packages

It looks like KDE 4.1 Beta 2 packages are available now. I will be testing them and make sure to look for new updates (packages are still being uploaded and built according to the announcement).

June 22, 2008

Tristan Sloughter
(kungfooguru)

The American Petroleum Institute Owes Me Money for Tylenol

My head hurts when it gets filled with too much bullshit. Lately its been hurting a lot more than usual. The debate about opening up new land to oil companies for drilling has sparked again. They saw an opening to use high gas prices to trick the people into supporting it. I was watching American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Red Cavaney on This Week today as he tried to explain why this was a good thing and why it was needed. He had to defend against the main arguments most people know about regarding opening up new land: they haven’t drilled in a huge amount of the land they already can drill on and it would generate little oil, meaning a small change in price in a decade or two.

Cavaney had a GREAT explanation for why they haven’t drilled in the land they currently have to drill in but are not, they don’t have the equipment! He says all their equipment is being used up for drilling already, so there is nothing they can do.

Thank you, Mr. Cavaney. Your logic is astounding. We need to open up ANWR for drilling becuase we don’t have the equipment to drill in it, or even the land we currently have open to drilling…

Does anyone else listen to these people?? How did Edward Markey, who was also on the show at the time, not stand up and shake him!? How can this not infuriate people?

Tristan Sloughter
(kungfooguru)

Biphasic Sleep Day 2

I’ve begun a biphasic sleep routine this week. After researching others who had done this I found you wanted to keep the sleep in multiples of 90 minutes. So for the past 5 nights I’ve slept 4.5 hours, except one night which was 6 hours. I only took my first nap (so technically the first day of biphasic sleep) yesterday, all other days I was too awake in the afternoon to fall asleep. The nap is 1.5 hours.

So far today was the hardest to get up from. I believe that was due to external forces (drinking and thinking) and not just the fact that I haven’t been sleeping. Other than that its been fairly easy, surprisingly. I haven’t even had to use an alarm clock… Which is shocking and a bit scary. I guess my internal alarm is better than I thought. I suppose I was awoken from my nap by an alarm, but technically it was a phone call.

Before when I would get up at 5am (with 7-8 hours of sleep) I would start working and by the afternoon I would be tired and not care to work anymore. Thus, hours would be lost until I was able to start being productive again. My hope is that not only will I gain 1-2 hours by only sleeping 6 hours a day, but also the time I am awake will be more productive.

Of course its not all about getting things done. Its interesting to see how the body reacts to changing the sleep schedule in such a way. Hopefully no problems arise.

In order to keep me focused on getting through the rough days and in case anyone else wants to give this a try, I’ll be posting periodically about how its going and how its making me feel.

June 20, 2008

Foresight to Invade Linux World Expo

I am so excited that Foresight will be at Linux World in San Francisco on August 4-7th. We will have an 10×10 booth in the main exhibition hall, where we will be showing off the greatness known as Foresight. We will be in booth number 1208 so if you will be attending Linux World stop by for a visit. This will round out an excellent conference year: SCALE, Flourish, FOSDEM, Linux World and Ohio LinuxFest. Hopefully next year we can hit a few more conferences

If you are interested in helping work in the Foresight booth for Linux World please let me know as your help would be greatly appreciated. Also if you have any suggestions for things to have at our booth let me know. Also if you have witnessed things that just don’t work well for booths please let me know to stay away from those as well.

Membership updates

What a groovy week, no matter how busy it was! Yesterday I found out that among 3 other people, I am now an official member of the KDE e.V.. Thanks everyone for the support and the votes, as well as a congratulations to Gary Greene, Paul Adams, and Alexis Menard. I am honored to be a part of the wonderful KDE community and look forward to many, many, years of working together to make KDE the best!

On top of this news, I found out this morning that I have been approved as an Ubuntu Core Developer. This means that I now get to upload to the Main repositories, hopefully providing our current Kubuntu core developers a little relieve during the Intrepid cycle and in the future. I took the long and lazy route to core developer by taking my sweet arse time and just enjoying everyone in the community and enjoying the work that I have done. I look forward to the many, many, years of Kubuntu development.

With this news, I have to give a big thank you to Jonathan Riddell, Sarah Hobbs, Scott Kitterman, Lydia Pintscher, Celeste Lyn Paul, Anne-Marie Mahfouf, Wendy Van Craen, Tom Albers, Rafael Fernández López, Guillermo Antonio Amaral Bastidas, and the entire KDE and Ubuntu communities, THANK YOU!

June 19, 2008

Kickstart and custom partitioning help needed

OK, here is the scoop. We have one appliance that gets a custom partitioning via kickstart and a bit of Python love. Once the partition is complete, we install the base packages and then our appliance package. During the installation of the appliance package, it reads in the size of the multiple partitions it has available and their sizes. This all works like a charm. Side note, our Kickstart scripts are being run through Anaconda from CentOS.

As it stands, when the partitions are created, there is 5% by default that is utilized with every partition for super user access. This way here, it saves you from running out of space and being unable to access the drive. This is great on directories such as /boot, /var, /, /home, and etc. But when we partition our 750GB drives, we want a large growing space that doesn’t need this 5% reserved blocks percentage. Typically when you use mke2fs to create the partitions, outside of Kickstart and Anaconda, you would pass the -m flag with 0 (zero) as the variable. This would get rid of any reserved space, therefor allowing you to utilize the entire space. With the default 5% on 4×750GB hard drives, we lose a total of 150GB of space. That is a lot of space to lose, especially when our appliances main duty is storage.

I know we could add a %post section to our Kickstart scripts, call tune2fs -m 0 /partition/location, and then reinstall our appliance package so it can read the new drive partitioning, but is there any other way to do this? Someone said to use mke2fs.conf for this, however Kickstart and Anaconda documentation is far from good when it comes to tricky configurations, and it seems nobody else in the world is doing this. Does anyone know how to go about using the /etc/mke2fs.conf with Kickstart so I can have the drives partitioned with the -m 0 flag from the get go?

/me wishes we used Debian/Ubuntu with FAI!

Tristan Sloughter
(kungfooguru)

Spicy Black Bean Burgers

More recipes! This is probably my second favorite thing to make. Some of the ingredient measurements are given in ranges because I make this different every time depending on what I have in my fridge at the time. The onion and green pepper just need to be balanced so not too many are in the mix, and you can always leave one out.

Main Ingredients:

1/4-1/2 onion, diced
1/4-1/2 green pepper, diced
1-3 jalapeños, diced
1 can black beans
1/2 cup flour
1 hamburger bun, crumbled

Spices:

1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp seasoned salt

Fry the onion, green peppers and jalapeños in oil till soft. Mash the black beans till smooth and mix with the rest of the ingredients. Add the flour slowly as you mix. Make into patties and fry in oil, adding salt and pepper or other spices. Top with whatever you like on burgers. BBQ sauce and ranch dressing go amazingly well on these, especially with lettuce, tomato and pickles.

June 18, 2008

Luca Matteis
(sktrdie)

The great wow

You look at the web today and you see a great amount of HTML and CSS splattered all over the place. We have tutorials and hacks to make things look nice cross-browser, but no matter what you do it's always really hard to create nice compatible things in a scalable way. Many people like web-frontend development compared to desktop gui because of the very fact that you can pretty much go insane and create whatever you want without being stuck with toolkits and widgets.

In an environment where your site has to look consistent, buttons, toolbars, popup boxes, you will be working on creating that HTML/CSS snippet of code and then use it wherever you need. I recently did some studies on how the best desktop gui frameworks out there worked (Cocoa ex), and I've been trying to thinker a nice way to port that same scalable system to the web.

SVG isn't currently supported by all browsers, so that was out of my list, then I thought about "absolutely positioned divs" which eventually came to be the right choice. Javascript speaks to the DOM, but with this technique we never need to talk to it, we only need to write to it - manipulating top-left-width-height of each element will give you a beautiful structure of nested divs in a way that you wont need to worry about HTML/CSS anymore! Considering how nicely javascript is already connected to the DOM it wont be hard creating your own framework to make Panels, Buttons etc..(hint - inherit the DOMDivElement).

Of course the people at 280slides.com and qooxdoo have been doing it for a while, but I really cant see many other folks doing it.

IM Etiquette

I have been getting IMs lately from people I have no clue who they are because they use nicks that I haven’t ever seen before. I use Bitlbee for instant messaging and for those of you who do not know what that is, it is a gateway for IM protocols for IRC clients. I use Irssi as my IRC client which is nothing more than text, no funky pictures, silly emoticons, and such. So when someone, who is not in my list, IMs me, I can’t respond without adding them to my list, and if I do not know who you are, you will not get added to my list. So, if you could when you IM me, let me know who you are and what you want and I will go ahead and add you to my list just as soon as I can.

Thanks!

June 14, 2008

Francisco Athens
(freelikegnu)

New HP 2710p and Notes

Recently, I bought a nearly new HP 2710p. I immediately formatted the HD and installed Ubuntu Hardy! I am very pleased that nearly everything works! Suspend and resume with accelerated graphics and rotation was something I really wanted with my TC1100. I was lucky that this machine was configured with and Intel 4965 AGN card and a WWAN card (which I have not yet activated). The 2710p is very much like a super-charged TC1100 with dual-cores and other modern conveniences like a fingerprint scanner and a smart-card reader. Mine did not come with the webcam though I don’t think I’ll miss the feature much. Battery life is very good and the design is very clean. Removing the annoying palmrest stickers required Goo-Gone, but the finish was unharmed. Here are some notes about getting this bad-boy configured in Ubuntu:

Some things that seem to be missing are:

Wacom support, which I found HERE (gentoo hardware wiki)
Screen Rotation: Make a script called rotate.sh

$ nano ~/rotate.sh
with the following contents:
#!/bin/bash #script by Francisco Athens modified from Gentoo Wiki Intructions: #http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_HP_Compaq_2710p#Brightness_and_Rotation #get current setting testrot=`xrandr -q |grep LVDS | awk '{print $3}'` #test if screen is rotated in protrait mode if [ "$testrot" = "800x1280+0+0" ];then #optional kill any old xvkbd instances so that # fresh one can load in the correct place in the screen #killall xvkbd xrandr -o normal xsetwacom set stylus rotate 0 xsetwacom set eraser rotate 0 else #killall xvkbd xrandr --output LVDS --rotate right xsetwacom set stylus Rotate CW xsetwacom set eraser Rotate CW #optional: put xvkbd on the bottom of the screen #xvkbd -always-on-top -geometry 800x150+0-0 fi
chmod +x ~/rotate.sh

Kernel Panic on lid close! This is a big issue, but I found the solutution HERE (Ubuntu Forums)

I edited my /etc/rc.local:
first make sure the path is correct
$ ls /proc/acpi/video/
there should be only one folder, so in my case for “C09A” add this line to /etc/rc.local:
echo "1" > /proc/acpi/video/C09A/DOS
before the “exit 0″ line

Fingerprint Reader Support can be found HERE
Current Ubuntu Hardy 2.6.24 iwl4965 driver appears to have problems connecting to TTLS/PAP 802.1x networks (sigh) as reported HERE (intel linux wireless forums).

June 12, 2008

Mike Stemle
(manchicken)

Barbecue Pizza for a Change

So I’m going to be hosting a barbecue with a changed up fare in hopes to encourage folks to vote for a change. If a lazy bearded geek from Central Illinois can host a barbecue, can’t you?

If you’re crazy like me and you’d like to barbecue pizza it’s pretty simple. You’ve gotta find a good crust recipe (I’ve got my own which I may post in another recipe topic) and then you just bake the dough about half way. You have to use sliced mozarella cheese instead of shreaded because the shredded stuff falls off too easy on the grill. Then you just put your crusts on the grill, sauce it (I like a 1 part olive oil, three parts Sweet Vidalia Onion Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce for a BBQ’ed pizza sauce), and then cheese and top. Remember to use a veggie grill tray (normal grill slats are too far apart for this one) and always make sure to use pam for grilling or just brush a little olive oil. I prefer to grill over a wood fire, and I control the heat with a water squirt bottle.

With Obama as our candidate–and hopefully our President–we’ll see a lot of positive changes. With pizza on the barbecue hopefully you’ll notice a tasty change in your taste for pizza.

Barack Obama 2008!

June 11, 2008

Big bang, evolution, religion

Big Bang
I recently started working for a local company here in Chicago called Cleversafe. It is a company that specializes in distributed storage solutions. And the best part about this, it is an Open Source company! Want to view their open source community, check out Cleversafe.org. I am the new Linux Packaging and Development Engineer. What exactly does this mean? It means I will be packaging up their application for various platforms as well as maintaining the appliance we create. The current appliance is built off of the CentOS 5 platform, but who knows what the future will bring, as I am eying Ubuntu/Debian as well as Foresight. Other stuff that I will work on in the future is the Open Source Community. After 2 days, I am in love with the place. Everyone is super cool, and it is just like every open source community I have worked with, so diverse with people from all over the world nestled into a very nice office space in the West Loop Gate area of Chicago.

Evolution
Oddly enough, being an open source company, they currently utilize Microsoft Exchange Server. The nice thing is, I don’t have to use any Microsoft products! That’s right! And their Exchange Server doesn’t even support IMAP or POP3, OWA only. KMail will not work with this setup, Thunderbird sucked just as bad, but Evolution, I am impressed. So you LUG Radio folks and your KDE PIM bashing, I will have to join you a little here. It took me a few minutes to figure everything out configuration wise, but as it stands, I have my Inbox, Personal Folders, and even Company Calendars. I have 2 minor annoyances thus far though, 1) Evolution wants to lock up every now and then, and 2) None of the alerts work from the Company Calendar. For 1) I may be the problem behind this, so I will have to test later tomorrow. For 2) I could very well be missing something, so if you use Evolution in a similar environment and have your alerts working with an Exchange Calendar, fill me in. The last time I used Evolution was way back in those Ximian days, and have since been using Mutt and lately KMail. Kontact is without a doubt the greatest in certain areas, and of course the areas I used it with (POP3). I have to admit though, Evolution is kicking ass with Exchange.

Religion
Free software is my religion, and with the new job, I get to exercise my religion on a daily basis and get paid finally So for those doubters out there, free software can pay, and pay well I might add. If free software is where you want to make a living, don’t give up! I spent about 14 years volunteering in the free software world always wanting that free software job. Well, I never gave up and now I have it. The only downfall, my time with Ubuntu and Kubuntu may be limited a bit. Looks like the weekends will be for Kubuntu and KDE, and as soon as I am settled into the new job a bit more, then I can start devoting time in the evenings.

So, if I am a little slow in responding, now you know. I know all of you in my previous KDE 4 posts keep asking questions and wanting this or that packaged, and as soon as I get some time, maybe this weekend, I will work on getting you what you want, unless of course someone beats me to it.

Oh, with the new job came a new work laptop, a Dell Latitude D830 which is a Core 2 Duo with the Nvidia Quadro NVS 135M. Thus far, using the binary Nvidia drivers, it is working well. I wish it were the Intel X3100, but since it is a freeby I will not argue And my lord is this thing heavy. 15.4″ widescreen that does like 1680×1050, insane! For those of you who may have been looking at this lappy, let me just say with Hardy (Kubuntu and Ubuntu), everything works out of the box, this include Wifi (Intel 4965 AG/AGN) and the Bluetooth! Rock on. Oh, and Kubuntu is getting just under 5 hours of battery time. Finally a lappy for me that works well with Guidance

June 10, 2008

Dear lazywebs: how to start/fix KDE?

First of all: a big THANKS to everyone who talked to me regarding my last ‘Dear lazywebs’ post. Now I have a new issue i can’t solve.

I have an ibook g4 machine running Debian Lenny PPC. Mainly I use it as a backup system for files, etc. My issue seems to be that I cant start KDE.

’startx’ goes to a gray screen, and I can see the general outline for my mouse, but not much more than that, and the system doesn’t boot beyond there. The same goes for trying ‘X’ in a bash shell.

I would like to fix this, and/or provide more information and what is going on inside the system, but I dont even *know* how to start to diagnose this issue. KDE has treated me so well, it is not often that I need to fix anything in it.

Thanks!

-eddie m.

June 09, 2008

Fedora 9 impressions

I've been running Fedora 9 for a while now. Although some things in F8 felt half-baked to me (I had trouble with PulseAudio + Audacious), F9, like each Fedora release, feels more polished.

Improvements:

Yum is much faster - not as fast as apt, but getting there.
PackageKit is much more polished than the package manager GUI F8 used (Pirut and Pup).
Swfdec works pretty well!

Gripes:

Firefox 3 occasionally crashes, and many plugin authors haven't updated their plugins to version 3.
Gkrellm: I haven't seen an error window like this in a while :)

Adam Jenkins
(EmperorCezar)

Emacs

"Your first time using emacs you'll just cadge someone's .emacs file and pray you never have to understand all those parentheses. But you'll have to, before you can witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational text editor."

June 08, 2008

Jim Campbell
(j1mc)

From the fringes of Xubuntu

Cody Somerville has been writing quite a bit lately about what’s going on with Xubuntu, focusing a lot on the strategy document and some technical goals for the next release, but we also have a couple of other things in the works - some items that are kind of on the fringes of the distro, but important nonetheless.

One item is an update to the website. Xubuntu.org is in need of a refresh! We’ve had a couple of starts and stops on updating it over the last two releases, but nothing noteworthy ever came of it, so this time I’m putting together a project plan that will break the tasks down into smaller chunks with a clear plan for getting things in place.

I’m not going to guarantee that things will work like clockwork, and I’m not even sure who we’re going to get to help out with the website, but I figure that setting a plan with individual bits that people can do one-by-one is more likely to garner success than handing someone the keys to a base Drupal installation and saying, “Have at it! Let us know when you’re done!”

I’m sure I’ll have more news on that once I’ve got the basic project plan in order, and (of course) we’ll be seeking out help with the website then, too. If you think you might want to help out, please make a note of it - place a bookmark in the Firefox 3.0 of your mind. :] Or you can just read this blog aggregator thingy, and look for more info about the website project plan when I write about it. Perhaps that would be better than trying to integrate Firefox 3.0 with your brain.

For now, though, work continues on adding poetic, beautiful content to the wiki, and a few documentation ideas are being tossed around amongst Xubuntu folks. It’s kind of hard(y) to believe that the first Alpha release for Intrepid is less than a week away, but I suppose it’s how things go.

June 07, 2008

summer internship

I'm interning this summer at Community Bible Church, at Pocono Lake, Pennsylvania. I drove up to the area on May 24, met the pastor that night, and met the church congregation on Sunday the 25th. They are a nice bunch of folks! I was so surprised to see the sign outside the church welcoming me.

So far I've been able to teach Sunday School on Sunday mornings, lead Bible study on Wednesday nights, and redesign the church website: poconolakechurch.org. Tomorrow I preach my first sermon there on the book of Esther.

My fiancée, Audrey, is on a plane to the Philippines for her internship this summer, where she'll be working with the missionaries there and discipling women in the church group.

June 05, 2008

Hardy KDE 4.1 Beta 1 Completed

YES! It took me long enough with all of the work that was going on at the same time, but I would like to present you the ability to test out KDE 4.1 Beta 1 in Kubuntu Hardy right now! It seems we have worked out a majority of the quirks, but I can’t promise you that you may not get an overwrite issue with dpkg just yet. I do think we got them all covered, but you may have something nobody else does, so we didn’t catch it. We have been testing these packages since Saturday/Sunday and I have updated them as people reported issues.

To top it off, I have also included the KDE 4 PIM packages that contain applications such as Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer, Akregator, and more! The package name to get all of that is kdepim-kde4.

So, to install and test these new packages, please add the following to your Kubuntu Hardy /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main

Once you have done that and you already have a previous KDE 4 version installed, type the following in Konsole:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Otherwise type the following:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kubuntu-kde4-desktop

Note you may need to install kdebase-runtime-data-common in order to get Application directory icons under the Kickoff menu.

To install the KDE 4 PIM packages, type the following in Konsole:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kdepim-kde4

I would recommend that you backup your ~/.kde4 directory if there is anything that you might need, and then delete the ~/.kde4 directory to limit any quirks you may receive. After you have done this, update away, reboot for good measure, select KDE 4 from KDM, and enjoy!

I ask that you join us in #kubuntu-kde4 on IRC (Freenode) to discuss any issues that you may have. We can all work together to see if the issue we are seeing is a packaging/Kubuntu only/KDE 4.1 Beta 1 only issue and if not, file some reports on bugs.kde.org.

Thanks everyone for your patience! I will continue to work on the extragear packages and roll them out within the next day or so. Those should be fairly easy

Have fun!

June 04, 2008

Ubuntu Membership America’s Board Meeting

Hey everyone, I accidentally told a couple of people showing up for the meeting scheduled for June 5, 2008 at 01:00 UTC that it was tomorrow. I was wrong and I apologize. The meeting is in 1 hour and 20 minutes, so make sure you show up. I will try and ping you all on IRC in the next few minutes.

#ubuntu-meeting at 01:00 UTC June 5th, 2008

That is 6PM in California, 7PM in the mountains, 8PM in Chicago, 9PM in New York, 10PM somewhere out in the Atlantic, 11PM somewhere further in the Atlantic, 1….bah, you get the idea

May 31, 2008

dear lazywebs: help me fix the internet

Hello all, maybe you can help me fix a problem with webbrowsers on Kubuntu Hardy Heron.As far as I can remember, the trouble all started 3 days ago or so.

When I go to start Firefox, it idles (meaning that the ghosty looking firefox icon starts on the panel) but never starts. If I try to open up 12 instances of firefox, maybe one or two windows might open. But most of the time, nothing opens. When the window goes open to The Google (which is a hilarious joke for everyone counting), it freezes and i have to do a hard ‘killall firefox’ for it. Just an fyi, even if the firefox window doesn’t open the process is seen running when i check htop or run ps aux | grep firefox.

I did a sudo aptitude purge firefox, and then I tried to ‘apt-get install firefox’. This resulted in
being told that the program is already installed. Sweet!

I tried to remove firefox using Adept, but the icons still appeared on my computer. And then I tried to run them, they tried to start up, as described above, but died epicly. So i had tried apt-get install firefox and it ‘installed’. mysteriously.

When I try to run Epiphany, it tried to open up and then it crashes. Great.

any and all suggestions are welcome, I just want to use a webbrowser on my home desktop again. konqueror’s inability to handle the websites I visit is very tiring and annoying.thanks all!

May 30, 2008

hacking the WGR614v7

Netgear often builds a telnet daemon into their routers, but sometimes it can be a little tricky getting in. I was curious to see if my WGR614v7 has any way to access a command line interface, so I fired up nmap:

$ nmap 192.168.1.12

Starting Nmap 4.20 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2008-01-13 17:42 CST
Interesting ports on 192.168.1.12:
Not shown: 1694 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
23/tcp open telnet
80/tcp open http
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1.355 seconds

All right! Let's try to log in...

$ telnet 192.168.1.12
Trying 192.168.1.12...
Connected to 192.168.1.12.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.

Rats. For some reason we are kicked out as soon as we touch the daemon. A little hunting on the internet provides an explanation. Apparently the telnet daemon is disabled by default, but the Netgear staff have a Windows utility that will send a packet to the router in order to enable the telnet interface. A hacker has somehow reverse-engineered the encryption process and written it into a C program.

$ gcc -o telnetenable md5.c blowfish.c telnetenable.c

Now I use the program to construct the "unlock" packet with the IP and MAC address of my router, and the default username/password "Gearguy/Geardog":

$ ./telnetenable 192.168.1.12 00AABBCCDDEE Gearguy Geardog > modpkt.pkt

Then I send it to the router with netcat:

$ nc 192.168.1.12 23 < modpkt.pkt

Now I try to log in again...

$ telnet 192.168.1.12
Trying 192.168.1.12...
Connected to 192.168.1.12.
Escape character is '^]'.
Login: Gearguy
Password: *******
U12H06400>

And we're in! "?" gives a list of commands. I'm most interested getting the network statistics from this and putting the results into cacti... but I'll save that for another time! :)

--Edit--

Apparently seattlewireless.net, the original website that hosted the files and information, is down. I've put the C files up for grabs here:

http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/telnetenable.c
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/md5.h
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/md5.c
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/blowfish.h
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/blowfish.c

Good luck!

May 28, 2008

Foresight’s Cover Shot

Foresight was featured on the cover of this month’s issue of Linux Format UK. It is featured on their 4Gb DVD along with an article about Foresight. One of my favorite parts of the article was this line “it’s one of the most promising distros around and ideal for both newcomers and long-time Linuxers”. I really love that they feel the same way that I do about Foresight. I really see the sky as the limit for Foresight, we have a great community and a great set of core technologies behind our distro. So hopefully we will be seeing even more articles and cover shots like this in the future of Foresight.

If you happen to know where I would be able to get a copy of this in the US please let me know. I would really love to have a copy of this. I would also encourage anybody in the UK to go out and purchase a copy and if you haven’t already tried out Foresight give it a shot.

Papa Needs a New Cell Phone

So I am going to get a new cellphone shortly and I am looking for suggestions for phones to stay away from or really good phones to get. I will be using this phone for email, SMS and twitter mainly. Here are the requirements for my new phone:

Required:

QWERTY Keyboard
IMAP Email Support
Ability to Install Extra/3rd Party Apps (SSH Client, Twitter Apps(Maybe), etc)
Sync with Linux (or atleast OS X)
Available from AT&T Wireless (Cingular)
Nice Web Browser

Bonus:

MP3 Player
Wifi
GPS
Hidden Keypad
Easy to Add More Memory

Currently I was looking at the iPhone (Would wait for 3G), Pantech Duo, Palm Centro, Blackberry Curve 8310, Palm Treo 750, and the Tilt. If there is a phone that I am missing that fits the requirements please let me know or if you know a phone I listed that either doesn’t fit the requirements or is just crap please let me know.

Hardy KDE 4.1 Beta Packages Soon

It seems the popular question these past two days are, “Are there any KDE 4.1 Beta 1 packages yet?”

The answer is, soon! I am working on building the packages now and will hopefully have them all complete within the next couple of days. There are a lot of changes that need to be done to the packages for the 4.1 Betas, so I am taking my time making sure to catch all of them before releasing the packages to the world.

A little patience is all I ask and as soon as they are complete, I will blog about them here and also keep checking Kubuntu.org for a release announcement. Thanks!

May 26, 2008

Lisp Workshop: Bringing You a Lisp Education

So have you ever wanted to learn lisp but kept putting it off for one reason or another, well you have no excuse to not learn lisp now. The Chicago GNU/Linux User Group and Chicago Lisp group will be holding a free workshop on learning lisp. Hopefully this will be the first of many tech workshops offered by the Chicago GLUG. The workshop will cover setting up a lisp environment, lisp basics, lisp macros and lisp demos of cool things.

WHO: Programmers interested in learning more about Lisp.
WHEN: Saturday, May 31st from 3pm-6pm.
WHERE: Institute of Design, 350 N. LaSalle St, 2nd floor, Chicago

Foresight May Marketing Meeting

The Foresight Marketing Team will holding our May marketing meeting on Thursday. We will be meeting at 8pm CDT/9pm EDT/1am UTC in #foresight-marketing on Freenode. If you would like to help out with Foresight marketing please attend the meeting if possible and sign up for our google group. You can look over the meeting agenda and if you plan on attending please add your name to the attendee list.

What: Foresight May Marketing Meeting (Agenda)

When: Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Time: 8pm CDT/9pm EDT/1am UTC

Where: #foresight-marketing on Freenode (irc.freenode.net)

May 25, 2008

Arguing about Scientology

At the mall today I had a one sided conversation with a group of Scientologist which was very striking to me. It was one sided in the regard that I don’t feel that the people I was arguing with were really informed enough to engage in the conversation at a truly deep, semantic level.

When asked about the OT levels and the higher power Xenu for example, the person quickly denied any such entitity existing, as they had done in previous conversations. Moreover, it was a vehemont and loud denial, meant to be an authorative stance. According to Jim Lewis, who is refrenced and quoted on the Xenu Wikipedia page, this is not the case however. Being one of, if not the most, authorative scholars in Alternative Religions, I find the claim by said Scientologist to be misinformed, if not an outright lie. I would like to err on the side of caution and give them the benefit of the doubt.

The conversation moved on to the influences of the church, where a more senior fellow from Scientology told me about the origins. According to him, L. Rob Hubbard traveled early in his life and learned the rituals and systems of the Easter religions, where the first religions were invented created.

Even later in the conversation, he claimed that Scientology is a technology, an understanding of the world, an ideology, science, and belief system.

Problems I have with this:

Scientology is not a science. I have seen no public works which describe their research methods, falsifiablity, and experiments. Further, a science requires independent study and hard evidence is required, none of which I’ve seen. How are advances in the science made? Moreover, full knowledge and understanding of the ’science’ is requied….

There was a claim by the Scientologist that said:

The information [re: Xenu] is doctored information that was taken and then completely altered to make everything sound spacey….if such a document exists. If there is a document out there claiming this stuff, then they[anyone with knowledge re: Xenu] would not have the acess to talk about copyrighten materials, they just simply would not have access to such files if they existed…. If they did have such documents, they’d be the biggest copyright theif alive.

I have a problem with on several levels. For one, I find the copyright claim to be dubious, although I am not familiar with the copyright law in the 1950’s, I think that the actual documents would be in the public domain. Even if I’m wrong for this one, this is not the point. All religious/scientific texts should be in the public domain. Regardless of the actual understanding of what Scientology is, this should be public. It’s knowledge and understanding of the world which should be reviewable by all.

Second, the claim of ‘largest copyright thief’ is a straw man logical fallacy.

Thirdly, this document regarding Xenu DOES exist. Further, it can be found in L. Rob Hubbard’s own writing on page 236 of the NEW OT3 chapter of The Technical Bulletins of Dianetics and Scientology this page. All of this is in the public domain. Legal issues aside, the inability to control the spreading of this document on the Internet has made this a de facto truth. Later, I was specifically told that Scientology is not about rockets, aliens, or spaceships in any regard. I guess they looked at Hubbbard’s handwriting and rejected it from the official understanding of Scientology?

Another issue I had with this conversation was the question regarding the origins of Scientology. The claim is that L. Ron Hubbard learneed from but was not influenced by the other religions. When I asked about the relationship between Jack Parsons and Hubbard, the Scientologist said that the name was new to him. This is a historical inaccuracy, seeing as Hubbard and Parsons performed ritual magick together, as well as Hubbard marrying (Betty Northup) the half sister of Parsons’ wife, after she had lived with Parsons for some time. Further, Allied Enterprises is a boating company created and owned by Hubbard, Parsons, and Betty Northup in 1946, which means that the 3 at minimum, be easily linked. Either this is a lie, an ignorance, or a mix of the two.

The last statement which caused me confusion and ire was the claim that Dianetics/Scientology can help increase abilities and other such ‘powers’. Specifically I asked him, ‘you mean like Spiderman or Superman’ to which the reply was ‘for some people, yes, that is an option’. Even for a religious person, this was a bold and redicolous statement…

I’ve tried to present this encounter in a fair and balanced manner, but we all know this is impossible. Comments, feedback, etc. are appreciated.

Stay classy San Diago,

-eddie m.

Luca Matteis
(sktrdie)

Zatarra

Oggi come oggi mi ritrovo in California, precisamente El dorado hills - vicino a Sacramento. Dopo un'infanzia che mi ha portato artisti come The Deftones e Papa Roach (uniche 2 band che mi vengono in mente, data la mia banale scelta artistica nei miei anni di liceo), mi viene naturale oggi parlarne, visto appunto che ho la possibilita` di avventurarmi nel posto dove questi artisti sono nati - la california.
Da un anno ormai mi sto illuminando da questo genere di musica chiamato comunemente "idm" - intelligent dance music - che ragruppa artisti dal calibro di Aphex Tiwn, Autechre etc..
Esistono molti punti di riferimento sul web per cercare nuova musica ed entrare in questa nuova era di "musica indipendente", ad esempio last.fm e` sicuramente in cima alla mia lista. Insomma un bel fanculo al rock e tutto il resto ecco a voi una bella lista di artisti che mi hanno felicemente accontentato quest'ultimo anno.

1- The Flashbulb
Dal 99 che cambia stile e nome fino ad oggi che, grazie a dio, ha deciso di andare in giro per il mondo con l'acronimo ufficiale. In particolare l'album "Fly!" (rarissimo) e "Resent And The April Sunshine Shed" sono dei "must have".
2- Autechre
Questo gruppo inglese, che a dovere ha il tag "idm" taggato 10mila volte, e` uno dei pezzi grossi, conosciutissimi e pagatissimi.
3- Saltillo
L'album "Ganglion" e` una cosa meravigliosa, non ho parole.
4- random_monkey
Ecco l'indipendenza di cui vi parlavo. Non influenzato da soldi o altre cazzate.

May 24, 2008

Luca Matteis
(sktrdie)

Brand new site Click Here!

That area is right now pretty much all gone on the wheel.

May 22, 2008

Kommunity

I wanted to let all of the Planet KDE and Planet Ubuntu readers know just how awesome our communities are. 24 hours ago I wrote a blog post titled, “KDE 4.1 documentation needs your help,” and we received and overwhelming response. On a typical day, #kde-docs on IRC has about 5 people idling most of the time. Right now there are 19 people, of which 75% of them are working on documentation right now. Simply awesome! We have been up to around 25 people earlier, but still this is the most action I have seen in that channel in the past 3 years.

I want to give a quick thanks to the following people on IRC who jumped in and started working:

Anne-Marie Mahfouf
David Edmundson
Faemir
frewsxcv
gaurav
hdevalence
Jonathan Jesse
Karthik Periagaram
katastrophe
NigelS
Roshan (ubunturos)
Stephanie Whiting
and others I may have missed…

THANK YOU!

Jumping in and contributing to a free software project is so easy these days. Proof are those who jumped in yesterday and today and started cranking out documentation work without ever having worked on such a thing in the past.

If you are looking to help out KDE any ways possible, documentation is about the easiest thing there is. Just have a good grasp of the English language (we have proof readers, or you can be a proof reader), and have just a bit of interest in writing. You can update current documentation, add new documentation, proof read, and more. If you are interested, #kde-docs on Freenode IRC is where we are at. Do not worry if you don’t know DocBook/XML, it would be awesome if you did, but myself and others who work with DocBook/XML have no problems taking any formatted document you have and either converting into DocBook/XML or copy and pasting into a file.

Thanks again everyone and keep on making KDE rock!

May 21, 2008

KDE 4.1 documentation needs your help

Wow what a day! I woke up this morning to an email from Allen Winter letting us know that he would like to implement a documentation freeze on June 3, 2008. That is like 2 weeks away! There is still a lot of documentation work to be done and very few of us to spread around. This is where you come in!

Can you read and write English?
Can you write technical documentation using DocBook/XML?
Do you have KDE 4.1 running on one of your machines? (either a recent alpha release or a trunk checkout will do…it would be nice if you were running a 4.1 or trunk release)
Can you do 200 push ups?

Wait a second!?!? 200 push ups? Don’t know how that one got in there. Anyways, we NEED PEOPLE OF ALL SKILL SETS, who can read and write English fairly well, to help us get out as much documentation as possible for the 4.1 release, due out on my birthday, July 29th! If you are familiar with writing documentation and know your way around DocBook/XML, man do we have a lot of work for you If you can read and write English but aren’t up on your DocBook skills, we can use you as well, and will have plenty for you to do.

There is plenty to be done and this is a perfect opportunity for you to get involved with KDE development. If you are interested, please get on IRC and join us in #kde-docs on Freenode. I (nixternal) will be around pretty much all day to help out as well as a few others will be in there to help out as well. So if you are ready to jump into something head first, hey, come and see us

Thanks everyone!

May 15, 2008

What is your vision of a LUG

OK, so the scenario is this…You are a new Linux user or want to try Linux, but would like to know more before hand. You hear about a local Linux Users Group and prior to going to one of their events, you sit back for a moment and try to envision what it would be like.

Tell me, what is that you envision?

Now that you have envisioned it, how would you really like the LUG to look, feel, and run?

The reason I am asking, is that the LUG in which I am the Vice President of is currently in the restructuring phase. I would like to get some ideas on how to make LUG meetings not only better, but make then accessible to every type of person that shows up.

So, if you have any suggestions, just add them to the comments. Thanks!

May 14, 2008

A Better CAPTCHA

I don't yet have any need to implement CAPTCHA myself, but if I did, it wouldn't be your standard distorted and scribbled on text. It would be one of these:

Microsoft Asirra

With Asirra, to identify yourself as a human you have to identify a series of pictures as cats (excluding the dogs). It seems like a sound approach, but on the face it looks so nonsensical that I feel compelled to use it. Picture this internet argument: "Well you plainly have no idea what you're talking about on this issue, so I won't keep wasting my valuable time trying to fight with your stupidity! As soon as I click on these cats, you'll never hear from me again!"

reCAPTCHA

This one is more serious, and has a purpose too. Instead of displaying random obscured characters, it displays a real scanned image of two words from an old book. One of these words has been identified and the other has not. The user types both words, the computer verifies the user's humanity with the known word, and records what the human said the unknown word was. Through this process the un-digitized book becomes completely digitized. They're turning CAPTCHA tests, a "lesser evil" annoyance, into something that's actually good.

first mac experience

A friend gave me an old G3 to play around with today. It's my first Mac experience... and I promptly managed to hose Safari by installing the latest version from apple.com. Apparently OS X 10.3 doesn't support the newer versions of Safari or WebKit. After struggling around trying to downgrade back to Safari 1.3, I finally found good instructions for what I needed. Apparently I have to go back to Safari 1.2, then to 1.3 :) Also, Pacifist was necessary; simply installing 1.2 the regular way doesn't work.

May 13, 2008

Why so many microsoft shops?

While looking for a job, I've been surprised by the number of places developing on a Microsoft platform. I didn't know that it was so common, at least in Chicago. If you're using a Microsoft OS, service, or language and it works for you then great, but aren't there open source alternatives that are just as good and not as expensive? Especially MS SQL server; whenever I see that I can't help but wonder why they aren't using MySQL or Postgresql. Does anyone reading this work in the Microsoft world at work? What keeps your company there?

May 12, 2008

big news

I'm engaged :)

May 05, 2008