Chicago GNU/Linux Planet

THIS is an interesting thing done by Google today. They have finally added cycling routes to their maps. This is a really nice feature if you are just a casual rider. I know there are a few of us in the Ubuntu community who are not casual riders and we live for speed, we live for flying past pack fodder, and we aren’t afraid of hills. Well, Google maps new cycling route feature is afraid of hills, and when you use it, Google maps will route you around any hills. BOO!

I am sorry, but if Google was serious about the cycling stuff, they could have learned a lesson or two from Map My Ride. Map My Ride is amazing, as it will map, allow you to design a ride, and track your rides with a great level of detail.

So, here I am, a bit peeved but more humored than anything else. Today I spent some time with a client of mine, actually a friend. His company asked me to come in and sit in while 5 other companies bid on a project they are working on. I listened to sales people all day long, and it isn’t like I have anything against all sales people, just a vast majority of them. My head was spinning when it was all over with. So, I got to listen to 4 companies give their spiel about using Linux here, possibly Windows there, and one even promoted the idea of using Macs as the workstations. Interesting stuff by these 4 companies, yet still boring as hell. Then come sales dude number five, the second or maybe third largest tool I have ever had the great privilege of meeting in my life. He comes prepared no doubt, gives us a groovy presentation handout, business cards, and even a pretty cool pen. I love swag, so I grabbed a handful of pens. I flipped over this guys business card before he introduced himself, and there it was, in big bold letters, Microsoft. Rock on, this should be entertaining, and boy was it!

I will not go in to details on who this guy is or what he does either at Microsoft or one of their partners, however Microsoft was on his business card, bigger than anything else. Anyways, he starts out rocking. He had me impressed, all kinds of charts, cost cutting avenues, cost and benefit analysis which made my socks roll it was so damn sexy. He even had the project mapped out, which none of the other 4 groups had done. Thus far, literature wise, he dusted the other 4. I was starting to cheer for this dude, got a little hot and bothered there for a second, sorry, back on track here. So, he finishes his Microsoft talk, and it was great this far. Then he thanks the other 4 groups there, and seemed really nice, until…”Let me show you where these other groups don’t make the mark, seriously Mac? Let’s start by showing you how they have this whole Linux thing wrong. First it is created in the basements of unemployed hobbiests, it isn’t as secure as its made out to be, and needless to say all of the patents they are infringing upon, therefor making it a liability for you to even use.” Now that was paraphrased, but my jaw was on the ground. He knew I literally just shat myself, but what he didn’t know is I am a Linux fanboy and hacker. I was actually dressed a little nice, wearing my typical wise guy hat. He said something else, but I can’t remember what it was, all I remember is I grabbed my laptop bag like it was my gun holster, and from it I pulled out my 9mm. Err, I pulled out my netbook, which has 2 stickers on there, and both say Kubuntu.

He just chuckled at me, which I think infuriated me more than what I had just heard. So now he tries to explain himself, back peddles at least to the point where he admits there are great corporations behind Linux development. But the 4 other groups that were there and myself really wanted to know, and before I could say anything, the CEO of the one group, Mandy I think her name was, chimed in with a, “Could you please explain the patents Linux infringes?” He gave her a brief look, and she went all comedian on him, and I had to hold back everything just not to start rolling on the floor. She lets out a, “No, before you continue, can you please explain that, as I would hate to be sued by some insane company for something they think is theres.” He wouldn’t answer at all and would only state he wasn’t allowed to speak about it. Oh boy, I am peeing myself by this time. So I look at my buddy, and I had to do it, some of you might have heard me say it before, but I just had to do it.

You know, I have been thinking about writing a piece of software that did nothing but infringe upon every software patent there was.

Brief pause, trying to get the people to do the, “OK dude, wtf are you getting at?” And when I got that look, I finished with…

But it’s to late, as Microsoft beat me to it.

Yes, very childish and immature, but it had to be done. So, that was my Microsoft bash. Listen, if you are a salesman, especially a Microsoft salesman or partner, don’t do your unfounded threats in a professional manner. You might be surprised that the people sitting in the room might just see right through you, and today, they saw through you, big time! In the end, it looks like there might be a combination of 2 of the companies used. One of the companies is the one who suggested the Macs as the workstations, and the reasoning behind it was good. On the server side, there will be Linux. In the end, a very entertaining day. Even this former or current FBI Cyber Security guy even poked fun at the Microsoft salesman. Supposedly he is one of the gentleman that also helped rip off the state of Illinois with frivolous claims about Linux, and boy did Illinois fall for it.

Anyways, just wanted to share that with everyone, as it was a fun story, probably a more of a “You had to have been there.” Now this salesman wasn’t the only one to bend the truth or outright lie, so salesman, be careful, not everyone is dumber than you anymore!

You really don’t want me to tell you where to put them, as you might not like the answer. However, with KDE, you can put the buttons wherever you would like Daviey, Mike, and everyone else.

No need for some confusing application or editor, simply configure the location of the buttons as you would like them to be. You can drag stuff where you want, click apply and test the results. Tweak until you are happy.

This way here, Harald won’t be able to add to his count. Anyways, I am giving a presentation next week for Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, it is on Friday, March 5^th, 2010 at 17:00 UTC. The topic I will be presenting is “Creating a PyKDE App.” I am slotted for one hour to attempt and teach everyone who shows up, how to create an application using KDE’s Python API. Seems easy enough right? It is, but I was thinking I would like to start some sort of application that has future potential, that hopefully an opportunistiK developer or two can take on, and maybe make something great in the future.

So what does this have to do with you? Easy, what would be a perfect application to start and present for this topic? I don’t want to create just a shell for something, I would like to at least have a little bit of functionality to it. Thus far, I have received one idea from @harriseldon on Identi.ca. Feel free to leave comments on this blog, or follow @nixternal on Identi.ca or @nixternal on Twitter and shoot me a message. Thanks everyone!

For those of you who have kissed off openSUSE, Novell, and possibly recently Ubuntu for its Yahoo deal (which by the way is with Yahoo, NOT Microsoft), it is time to kiss off other things, such as Amazon. Granted this deal blows to the highest level and just shows how shite Microsoft is, there are many companies doing this same thing with Microsoft, deals like this and others. So while you are sitting there, wearing your anti-Micro$oft (see what I did there? That’s what all of the cool Microsoft haters do) hats, ditch the following product manufacturers:

• Samsung
• Fuji
• Nearly every computer manufacturer
• Asus
• MSI
• Nearly every automobile manufacturer
• More than likely your lovely ISP
• and so much more…

Don’t forget to dismiss your family members who are using Microsoft products too, but not Uncle Ned, he is cool, oh and Aunt Jane, as they at least use Linux. And the next time you get a bill, just throw it out, as it was probably printed from a Microsoft computer. Oh boy, and your government, local police, because they are up to their armpits in Microsoft deals. I wonder if Microsoft touched the snow in the backyard? I think I will get naked and sleep out there tonight. Yuck, the thought of something Microsoft has a deal with anywhere near me gives me the heebee-jeebees.

NOTE: I sure hope you all found the sarcasm, because I am not a Microsoft lover at all. I am tired of their BS just as much as the next person, but I am also tired of the anti-Microsoft extremists and their simple-minded attitudes. It’s fine to stand up against Microsoft, and those who have deals with Microsoft, but just remember, that is a lot of standing, hope your legs and back are ready for it.

Last evening I went over to a family friend’s house to help her with an ongoing problem with her Internet connection. She has AT&T DSL, and every night around 5pm or so, the connection pretty much drops. Getting to a web page is hit or miss, like one in every 10 attempts it will load a page. The pings were good, but getting out was a nightmare. She has a huge laptop running Windows 7 with insane specifications. Great machine. So, I took over my netbook running Kubuntu Netbook Remix (Lucid) to see if the problem was her laptop. Right away I was able to decide it wasn’t her laptop. Further debugging made me realize it was the DSL connection. I connected directly to the DSL modem, no router, firewall, anything in between me and the Internet. The problem still existed. At that time I determined it was AT&T’s fault so we called them up. Initially the phone call was a nightmare.

Typically I am really good at understanding an Indian dialect because the area of Chicago I grew up in was largely an Indian population. The person on the phone was a bit harder to understand and I believe the reason was because they had a mix of the Indian dialect with a distinct southern US drawl. Anyways, after talking to the AT&T tech support person for a few minutes, I started telling him what was going on and what I had done thus far. He asked what version of Windows I was using to test and I told him I wasn’t using Windows and instead was using Linux. I expected the “We don’t support Linux” comment, but was floored when he said, “Please say you are using Fedora.”  I chimed in with a “Sorry, using Kubuntu.” He chuckled then said, “Some people will never learn.” We shot little jabs back and forth at each other having a bit of fun while he was doing a modem test. In the end they figured out it was their issue and some AT&T techie will be out there today to fix the issue.

So, if you were that AT&T dude I talked to last night who loves Fedora and despises us Ubuntu fanboys, drop by and say HI! It was a pleasure getting to talk to you for support on the issue, and it is great seeing that there are some tech support people who aren’t afraid to explore other options.

OK, so today freenode migrated to their new server. It was a bit rough around the edges at first, however they have finally added support for connecting via SSL and using a script in Irssi you can authenticate via SASL. So, I will quickly show you how to get SSL and SASL setup for Irssi and Irssi only, and I am assuming you already have a connection to Freenode already setup.

WARNING: It has been brought to my attention that the Irssi folks get mad when people tell you to edit the config file instead of using the commands, so with that, backup your config file first, and if anything goes wrong, not my fault

1. Let’s install the necessary packages (I think this is all, I already had openssl installed but had to install the libcrypt- packages for the SASL script below):

   sudo apt-get install openssl libcrypt-openssl-bignum-perl libcrypt-dh-perl libcrypt-blowfish-perl

2. Grab and save the cap_sasl.pl script to ~/.irssi/scripts and setup a link for it to autorun:

   cd ~/.irssi/scripts
   wget http://www.freenode.net/sasl/cap_sasl.pl
   mkdir autorun  ## only if you do not have this directory already
   cd autorun
   ln -s ../cap_sasl.pl .

3. Fire up Irssi without connecting to anything:

   irssi -!

4. Once in Irssi, setup your username and password for SASL:

   /sasl set freenode your_nick your_password DH-BLOWFISH
   /sasl save
   /save

5. Quit Irssi
6. Using a text editor, edit ~/.irssi/config and in the section that says servers = ( you want to remove the stuff between the { and } for freenode, and then add the following in its place:

   address = "chat.us.freenode.net";
   chatnet = "freenode";
   port = "7000";
   use_ssl = "yes";
   ssl_verify = "yes";
   ssl_capath = "/etc/ssl/certs";
   autoconnect = "yes";

7. Now under the chatnets = ( section, you want the freenode = part to be changed to:

   freenode = { type = "IRC"; };

If you get a message about your nick being “Juped” or “temporarily unavailable” and get switched to Guestxxxx nick, read the following, otherwise enjoy your new secure connection.

Now you can go ahead and connect to IRC like you are used to. If you have the ENFORCE flag set for your nickname, you may come across some issues with identifying, and the one message I kept getting was:

Nick nixternal is Juped

If you get this, you need to disable the ENFORCE flag on your nick (make sure you are identified with your correct nick first):

/msg nickserv set enforce off

After that, disconnect from IRC, then reconnect to IRC. You shouldn’t be getting that error message now. If you do, go to #freenode and complain accordingly If all is well, you can go ahead and set the ENFORCE flag back to on:

/msg nickserv set enforce on

Now all should be well. Enjoy your new secure, SSL and SASL authentication, connection.

Yes, as many of you have read recently, Canonical has created a deal with Yahoo! to provide the default search for Firefox in the Lucid release. I decided that I would sit back and parse not only the information that Canonical has put out, but also the information I am reading on the web, Twitter, Identi.ca, and mailing lists. To be honest, I was actually surprised that a large scale attack or a FUD campaign never started over this, and I feel there just might be a turning point in all of this. Before I go on, let me throw a bit of a disclaimer in here as to hopefully not provide a lash back against either Canonical or Ubuntu.

Disclaimer

1. I am not an employee of Canonical, I receive zero money from them for anything I do.
2. I am not a speaker on behalf of the Ubuntu project nor the Ubuntu community.
3. I speak for myself and nobody else.

OK, I think I covered the grounds. I know this post has the potential to either be popular or very unpopular. I am not here for a popularity contest, so if it sinks or swims, I do not care. I just want to provide my opinion of the deal and the atmosphere I have experienced since I first got involved in Linux some 17 years ago.

I personally think this deal between Canonical and Yahoo! is a good one, and to be honest, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of these deals. I wouldn’t mind seeing a deal with Google, Ask, Bing, or whatever else there is out there. The reason I like this deal is that it brings the potential of hiring more developers for the Ubuntu project. Seeing as I am a Kubuntu user and developer, I would love to see some of the money make its way into Kubuntu. Wait a second, did you just say Bing? Isn’t that the search engine, or rather the decision engine, ran by that big evil empire known as Microsoft? Oh boy, how many of you just went, “WTF IS WRONG WITH THIS IDIOT?” I am sure some of you did, and that was to be expected. I mean, Canonical did strike a deal with Yahoo!, and for some reason, many of you feel that Yahoo! is now Microsoft, or at least powered by Microsoft. If you read more than a couple of blog posts here and there, and dive into the news by not only Yahoo! and Microsoft, but read the stuff by the WSJ, NYT, and more. You will see for one, this deal has yet to be approved by the powers to be, and who knows if it will. Saying that Yahoo! is powered by Microsoft is not only incorrect, but it can be construed as either trolling or FUD at best.

You see, I have been around this Linux community for the better part of 17 years. There were good years and plenty of bad years. There were two things that always stood out during these years.

1. Free is on one side of the fence and open source on the other side, in other words a split camp with common goals.
2. Microsoft is a big and evil empire

So, Microsoft is big and evil, and don’t think I could disagree with that statement, and they haven’t proved themselves worthy of us removing this title, or whatever we want to call it. How many of you actually feel that striking this deal with Yahoo! is striking a deal with Microsoft? Don’t be shy, I have seen you on Twitter and Identi.ca stating the same, and on the Ubuntu Developers Mailing list as well, oh and on IRC. How many of you use Dell equipment? HP? IBM? Intel? I could keep going, but I wanted to kind of use companies that Canonical has worked with that Microsoft has worked with as well. How many you out there love your new Intel i7? Why? Don’t you remember the late 90’s when Microsoft was driving Intel to only do things a certain way that would benefit Microsoft only? How many of you are driving a Ford? Shoot, how many of you own a car? How many deals do they have with Microsoft? What about that bicycle, as I know there are a few of us nuts who prefer to ride instead of drive? Your TV? Cable? Shop at Best Buy? Oh man, I could keep going. How many of you just went, “WTF DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE PRICE OF TEA IN <nsert county so I don’t offend anyone>?” It has a lot to do actually, and yes it is probably beating yet another dead horse. The reasoning I see a lot of with dealing with $X who in-turn has a deal with Microsoft, in this case Yahoo!, in many cases can be seen as hypocritical. Imagine a life if you only dealt with companies or people that didn’t have a deal with Microsoft. For those of you against this and use Google, not to long ago Google made a deal with Twitter who already had a deal with Microsoft in terms of searching. Did you just switch your default search engine because of that? How about Microsoft and Facebook? Strategic alliance between Microsoft and O’Reilly? Gonna stop reading O’Reilly books now? Sugar CRM? Xen Source? And the list goes on.

Let me cover those of you who are using System 76 or Zareason, or some other Linux only manufacturer, that want to keep the attack going possibly on the deal. Ever consider the hardware that is used in those systems? I know System 76 uses, or was using, MSI equipment. Guess what, big Microsoft deal there. I don’t care what it is, there is a damn good chance you are using something right now that has struck a deal with Microsoft.

Is this the year of the Linux desktop?

or…

Is Linux ready for the mainstream?

Two of the most sickening questions I have seen for over a decade. The answer will always be “NO!” until we realize we need to step from underneath this rock we, yes we, have put ourselves. We have this great product, but if we continue being split on whether the Free Software side or the Open Source side is the correct side, or we shouldn’t be doing these types of deals, let’s just keep our mouths shut and enjoy this lovely rock canopy we have created for ourselves. Oh, here comes a big bomb, Novell. I am not about to rip on Novell, sorry Boycott Novell. I do not agree with their merger whatsoever, but I am a first hand witness of the good that has actually come out of the deal. Guess what Novell is doing that we aren’t right now? They are showing large companies, Fortune 500 and then some, that there is a choice out there, there is more than just Microsoft for your infrastructure. I went to their IT In Action tour here in Chicago last year. Granted I didn’t appreciate it when they said, “Microsoft is now the largest provider of Linux service,” nor did I like when one of their speakers decided to take off his jacket and reveal this nasty Detroit Red Wings hockey jersey (/me points at the Ubuntu Michigan people with a grin). What I did like, and I was wicked impressed with, were these people who were almost to the point of bashing Linux before the event started, to being super stoked over the Linux platform and the tools that Novell had when it was all over. Here I was an Ubuntu guy, and they knew that and welcomed me with open arms, who came in defending Linux and left helping some of these companies switch to, or look at the possibilities of switching to Linux. So thanks Novell for helping me get a few consulting gigs out of the tour.

I feel we, the Linux community, need to unite more so than we have. Not a fan of President Obama, but last night during his State of the Union address, he talked about reaching over those party lines. I think we need to do the same thing. Hey, if Microsoft is evil and they won’t reach their hand out, then why shouldn’t we try? OK, no more politics, OK maybe one more. Let’s tear down this wall! OK, that was lame, but I had to do it because it made me chuckle a little. I am not saying lets sell out to Microsoft, because that is definitely the last thing I want. You see us Linux people look at the big guy and concentrate on trying to make them look bad. In my eyes, we aren’t winning that battle, and while we keep carrying it forward, there is this person in the middle who is seemingly getting bigger and bigger every time they announce an iSomething. So instead of spending membership money to stand out in front of some silly event with a sign, lets think of better ways to use it. There are so many people out there who see people with signs picketing something, and a majority of the time these people go unnoticed, except for that one rogue honk, which believe it or not wasn’t supporting your campaign.

OK, that should be it. I am sure it is all confusing, so please feel free to respond anyway you feel is right in the comments. Thank you, and I apologize for causing you to spend this time possibly reading absolutely nothing.

OK, so I think most people know that I have grown quite fond of Taskwarrior for managing my Getting Things Done stuff. Many of you might also know that Mutt is my e-mail client of choice, for the past 15 years. Recently you saw a post on Planet Ubuntu by the rockstar Bryce Harrington concerning Mark emails in mutt as tasks in gtg. Well, I have had something similar, actually pretty much the same damn thing, just with a different GTD application. So without further ado, here is what you need to do in order to mark an email in mutt as a task in taskwarrior.

Setup Mutt Macro

macro index t "<pipe-message>mutt2task<enter> <save-message>+TODO<enter>"

What this does is set the t key, while in the index of mutt, as a macro. The macro pipes the email message to a script I wrote that strips the header from the message and adds that as a task. The save-message part saves the email to my TODO folder.

Setup Mutt2Task Script

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/task add +email E-mail: $(grep 'Subject' $* | awk -F: '{print $2}')

What this does is call the command task add which adds a new task. The +email tags the task, and the E-mail: $(grep ‘Subject’ $* | awk -F: ‘{print $2}’) greps the Subject line and then prints the part after Subject: from the email, therefor just giving me the subject text. Make sure you place this script somewhere in $PATH and make it executable.

Make sure you add a TODO message folder in your mutt configuration so you can see the TODO messages.

Hey everyone, just wanted to drop a quick note to those of you who are in or around the Chicago land area, on Sunday, January 17th from 12:30PM until 5:30PM the Ubuntu Chicago LoCo team will be meeting up in Chicago for a documentation jam. If you would like to show up, here is the address of where we will be hanging out:

On-Shore Inc‎.
1407 W. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL

View Larger Map

If you can’t make it to the event, no worries, as you can join us on IRC in #ubuntu-chicago channel on the freenode IRC network. Plans are to work on Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu system documentation, as well as cleaning up the team wiki pages as well as community documentation on https://help.ubuntu.com/community.

If you plan on working on system documentation, here is what you can do prior to joining us on Sunday:

READ how we use the Bazaar repository for doing system documentation.

Ubuntu Documentation
Install build dependencies for the ubuntu-docs package:

sudo apt-get build-dep ubuntu-docs

Kubuntu Documentation
Install build dependencies for the kubuntu-docs package:

sudo apt-get build-dep kubuntu-docs

Xubuntu Documentation
Install build dependencies for the xubuntu-docs package:

sudo apt-get build-dep xubuntu-docs

Once you have done that, then you need to check out the latest documentation for Lucid for the documentation you are going to work on:

Ubuntu Documentation

bzr branch lp:ubuntu-docs

Kubuntu Documentation

bzr branch lp:kubuntu-docs

Xubuntu Documentation

bzr branch lp:xubuntu-docs

System documentation is in DocBook/XML format, which is a very simple markup language. Don’t worry if you really don’t know it as Jim Campbell and myself can quickly teach you what you need to know, in order for you to get up and running.

Don’t worry, if you don’t feel you are ready to work on system documentation, there is also plenty of wiki documentation that needs to either be cleaned up or added.

Hope to see you Sunday!

To go along with the spirit of most big things in the United States, Ubuntu Chicago is filing Chapter 13. Well almost big things, as they all filed Chapter 11 pretty much. Anyways, Ubuntu Chicago isn’t going anywhere, it is just going to restructure itself to become a much more efficient LoCo team. Some of the restructuring is going to bring:

• Regular online meetings
• Regular in-person group meetings
• Regular Jams (we are doing a Doc Jam this weekend as a matter of fact)
• Much more visible in the community
• and more…

So, we have already started the process for regular online meetings and online gatherings where we will follow and not follow an agenda. We are going to start scheduling regular in-person group meetings as well, which will more than likely go hand-in-hand with the various LUG meetings in the Chicago land area. We are going to start doing regular jams, and starting this week we will be kicking off a Doc Jam. We are planning on becoming much more visible to the community and to people who are outside of the community. One major complaint we had was our website not only sucked, but was so outdated. To alleviate any issues regarding the website, I will now be hosting our website, which will bring news, events, information and more to the people of Chicago. The buzz right now is pretty high in Ubuntu Chicago and I feel like I did the day myself and Mike Greenwood decided to make Ubuntu Chicago a reality damn near 5 years ago. I will keep you updated with the changes coming and being implemented as I am sure Nathan and Jim will as well. If you are in or around the Chicago land area, please do not hesitate to join us in #ubuntu-chicago on the Freenode IRC network, or join our mailing list to follow along with current and upcoming activities.

Ubuntu Chicago Coming Soon!

"We’ve got this LoCo team, and it’s f@#kin’ golden!" – Governor Tuxgojevich

Have I ever told you all how much I love byobu? I have always used screen, though I really never tweaked it all crazy like many did. Recently I typed screen at the command line and I was presented with this thing called byobu. I went ahead and gave it a shot, and at first I will say I was rather annoyed with the bar at the bottom of my screen, and my scrollwheel didn’t work with byobu the way it did with screen. I went ahead and changed my workflow in order to get used to byobu. A couple of weeks ago, I got nosey, and wanted to know how byobu was doing its thing. After a while of messing around, and seeing everything it could display, I wanted more! And since quite a few of you on IRC wanted it, well here it is.

See, I use the cli more than I do the desktop, which is weird seeing as I am an avid KDE lover and hacker. Here is my current workflow via the command line:

• IRC – irssi
• Email – Mutt
• Feedreader – Newsbeuter
• Calendar – gcalcli
• GTD/Todo – task

With byobu, I have it set up to automatically create 5 windows (the 4 above, plus a regular zsh shell). Since I use the command line so much, I tend to forget about meetings from time-to-time as I don’t get any warning of them, until it is either to late or I have totally missed it. So I thought, since I use the command line so much, how can I have something simple to show me the next meeting. Then I thought: I could use gcalcli to read the Fridge meeting calendar, and then have the next meeting output to the bar in byobu, so I will always see the next meeting. Currently with byobu, it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to add custom items such as this, but I have been told they are coming soon! Awesome!

So, here is what my new addition looks like:

To get this, I had to do the following:
Step 1: Create crontab task
Create a crontab task to create a file in my home directory that contains a list of meetings:

*/5  * * * * gcalcli --nc --ignore-started agenda "`date`" > $HOME/.gcal_agenda.txt

Step 2: Create a script for byobu
Create the following script (/usr/lib/byobu/gcal_agenda) and then make it executable:

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" = "--detail" ]; then
        head -2 /home/nixternal/.gcal_agenda.txt | tail -1
        exit 0
fi
GCAL=$(head -2 /home/nixternal/.gcal_agenda.txt | tail -1)
printf "\005{+b }%s\005{-} " "$GCAL"

Step 3: Add a tick to the common profile
In /usr/share/byobu/profiles/common, you need to add the following:

backtick 200    67      67              byobu-status gcal_agenda

Add this line right after the last backtick line you see.

Step 4: Add output to the hardstatus string
We need to add the number 200 that represents our backtick in the previous step to the hardstatus string line in $HOME/.byobu/profile. profile is a symbolic link to the current color profile you are using in bybobu, so if you ever change your theme, you will lose this setting until you add it to the next theme. Here is what my hardstatus string line looks like in $HOME/.byobu/profile:

hardstatus string '%99`%{= kw} %100`%112`%= %102`%101`%200`%127`%114`%115`%108`%128`%125`%126`%113`%119`%117`%116`%106`%104`%103`%105`%107`%123`%120`%121`'

That is all on one line. See the %200 in that line, that is our gcalcli output. That is the one we need to add in there.

Step 5: Make byobu use it
For some reason, byobu didn’t automatically pick up my new script in /usr/lib/byobu, even after reloading (F5), so I added gcal_agenda=1 to $HOME/byobu/status, did a reload (F5), and it was there.

I think this is everything, hopefully I didn’t forget anything. If you try it, and it doesn’t work, let me know.

EDIT: I am a moron, not /var/lib, but /usr/lib. I have made the changes to the post already. Also make sure you have gcalcli up and running with your calendars first. To add the fridge calendar, you subscribe to it from your Google calendar.

EDIT: I redid the last 3 steps because I totally forgot them originally. Thanks to Chris Johnston to pointing this one out!

Last night as I went to bed, I turned on the television to see what was on. This is typically the way I fall asleep. I came across this movie titled, “The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest” from 2002. In this movie, 4 researches split off from some big research company to create a $99 PC. Where have I heard that one before? Oh, they were only off by a $1. Then, in order to make this $99 PC, they had to get rid of so much, they got rid of things such as:

• Hard drives
• CDROM drives
• Floppy drives
• and more…

This got them to thinking, if we get rid of all of this, then how in the hell will this PC work? Their answer, put the software on the Internet! Here are a couple of quotes from the movie:

• “The world needs a cheap portable computer, Casper. Third world school children want to join the information age.”
• “Your mother uses Macintosh!”

The movie was quite hokey, and what they created was a small computer that looked like a toy of some kind from the Star Trek set. It used a hologram instead of a monitor, and it had icons that roughly represent the icons that Google uses today, except when you clicked on email for instance, the little envelope sprouted wings and flew up to be read. So in 2002, a movie starts talking about our so-called cloud computing buzz word, a $99 PC, and makes fun of the Mac kids. We are just a bit late to the game now, time to innovate something else

This is a response to SSH Tab Complete by Michael Lustfield.

Create a ~/.ssh/config file and populate it with configurations. Doing this is the only step you need to do, and you don’t need to add anything to your ~/.bashrc. Example ~/.ssh/config:

# foobar.com
Host foobar
    Hostname foobar.com
    User xxxxxxxxxxxxx
 
# Home server (internal)
Host iserver
    Hostname 10.0.0.2
    User xxxxxxxxxxxx
    Port ####

Host is a simple word that will be used with ssh like ssh foobar. Hostname is the actual IP address of domain name of the server. User is your username for that machine. Port is the ssh port number, if it isn’t the default port of 22.

So, when I want to ssh into my home server, I just do ssh is, press tab, then enter. There are many more options to add to the config file as well, and a simple Google search will provide more. Also man ssh_config will give you pretty much everything you need as well.

AWESOME! This definitely shows that the Kubuntu community has grown over the past couple of years, even among the complaints, we seem to be succeeding, and this makes me super happy. Just over a week ago, I decided that we were going to totally wipe out the current set of Kubuntu documentation and start from scratch. My buddy Jonathan Jesse, the 2nd Kubuntu docs dude, was freaking. He was like, “that sounds like a lot of work!” Oh, it did, but our awesome community has stepped up and is taking control, writing documentation, and good documentation at that. I am really grateful to all of you who are helping, and because of you, there is no doubt in my mind that our docs will finally kick ass again!

Seriously, is removing Gimp from a default install of Ubuntu that bad? Bad enough for you to leave Ubuntu for some other distribution? I have been reading blog posts, news sites, blog comments, IRC, Twitter, and Identi.ca, and what I am seeing simply amazes me. Thus far, the popular topic to these complaints is that Ubuntu is making the desktop even dumber. So, if Ubuntu is making the desktop dumber, I guess in the past it has made many lazier? I mean, installing Gimp isn’t a big deal. I am a Kubuntu user, and KDE user of other distros, and none off the top of my head include Gimp. Just now, I had to reinstall my system because my hard drive blew up. In just over a minute I had Gimp, the Plugin Repo, and Inkscape installed. And for you all who are going crazy over the decision, just know that the developers of Gimp agree with the decision:

“That is pretty much in-line with our product vision. GIMP is a high-end
application for professionals. It is not the tool that you would advise
every user to use for their casual photo editing. And as far as I
understand this, it’s not that GIMP would not be available for Ubuntu
users. It’s simply not installed by default.

Sven”

HERE is a comment from the Gimp world supporting it, HERE is another, and another. I use Zsh, Ubuntu doesn’t ship that by default, I am going to go take a turkey hostage now!

Simmah down nah! It isn’t the end of the world. When Ubuntu switches to KDE in 2012, then it will be the end of the world!

So, you keep hearing me talk about contributing to Kubuntu documentation, and you see that I say it would be nice for you to have some DocBook/XML experience. Many people want to help, but they don’t have that experience. In most cases, the people interested at least understand HTML or some other markup language a little bit. If you can understand that, then you can easily understand DocBook/XML the way we use it for Kubuntu documentation. DocBook/XML has a lot of tags that one can use, however we only use a very small subset of those tags with our documentation. Just an idea of the main tags we use from DocBook/XML are:

• <sect1>
• <sect2> – sometimes
• <title>
• <para>
• <ulink>
• <example> – sometimes
• <mediaobject> – only for screenshots
• <imageobject> – only for screenshots
• <imagedata> – only for screenshots
• <acronym> – sometimes
• <guibutton> – sometimes

There might be a few more, but these are the ones that pop into my head. For instance, when you are trying to let the reader know to open up an application via the menu, there is a tag called <menuchoice>. We have an entities file that contains all of the menu stuff, so you wouldn’t even need to use that tag, as you would call it in the document you are working in. Example: Say you are trying to tell the user how to open Amarok, you would enter &menuamarok;. Easy!

Here is an HTML example, lets say, Hello World

<html>
<head>
<title>Hello, World!</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello, World!</p>
</body>
</html>

The html, head, and title, are already taken care for you with the template, so you just need to do the part in between the <p> and </p>. So in DocBook/XML, that would look:

<para>Hello, World!</para>

Easy. Typically with HTML, when you are trying to show a section or make a section stand out, you might use <h1> to make the title stand out. Well in DocBook/XML there are a few more lines, but still easy to do:

HTML:

<h1>This is the title of the section</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph in the section.</p>
<p>This is another paragraph in the section.</p>

DocBook/XML:

<sect1 id="intro">
<title>This is the title of the section</title>
<para>This is a paragraph in the section.</para>
<para>This is another paragraph in the section.</para>
</sect1>

If you are looking for a little bit more information concerning documentation in the Ubuntu world, take a look at the Documentation Team Wiki Page. There is also a bit of information on how we use Bazaar when working with documentation as well. To get an idea of how we use DocBook/XML with Kubuntu documentation, take a look at the old Jaunty Documentation for Kubuntu. Under the docs/ directory you will find the topics covered. And then under the topic, in the C/ folder is the XML markup for that topic. There is obviously a bit more DocBook/XML markup in our documentation, but the header portion and the layout is already completed in a template, so all one would need to do is fill in the space and create new sections.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to stop by the Ubuntu Documentation IRC channel on Freenode in #ubuntu-doc and ask away. We also have a mailing list where you can ask questions and communicate via email to other documentation people.

Here is the email I sent to the Ubuntu Documenation Project’s mailing list today:

Currently we over in the Kubuntu world are completely rewriting the system
documentation. Why you ask? Because the old documentation was just that,
old. It contained information from the KDE 3.5 days. The reason for this is
because for the past 4 years, there have only been 2 of us working on the
documentation, and for the past 2 years, we both have been super busy with
our personal life. We will have a similar structure/layout as previous
releases in regards to the fake topic-based help, however the content needs
to be totally rewritten.

Because of this, we are looking for people who have the following
experiences:

1) You run Kubuntu and are familiar with its applications
2) You can read and write English
3) DocBook/XML experience would be nice
4) Understand how to use Bazaar

I have created a quick todo list [1] where we can track who is working on
what. There is no time line set in stone, however I would like to have a
solid documentation base by the end of the year. Because we are rewriting
the documentation from scratch, we need to have this solid base in place so
we can start translations. I would love to have all topics with a status of
NEEDS REVIEW by the end of the year.

If you have any questions or would like to help, please feel free to reply
to this mail or find me on IRC (#kubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-docs). Thanks!

[1] https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Documentation/Lucid/Todo

Any and hell help would be greatly appreciated right now. Thanks!

That’s right, just like Chicago and their Olympic bid, the Global Jam has been olyminated! We spent the better part of 6 plus hours teaching quite a few new faces how to get involved in the Ubuntu Community. We covered everything from filing a bug to triaging that sucker, and even covered the packaging as well. We went over, in pretty good detail what all is involved with packaging as well as breaking down the files that are required and important for Debian and Ubuntu packaging. Typically our events are a lot of the same faces, however this time we went for a suburban Chicago feel for the get together and this collected a bunch of new faces. Awesome, as Jorge would say. Everyone of them was interested in learning how to contribute too. Hey Matt East, keep your eye out for my buddy Vaughn, he is interested in some Ubuntu docs! I know we will have a few more MOTU, or Ubuntu Developers, or whatever it will be called soon, hailing from Chicago. This rocks! During all of the instructing we actually triaged a bug, one bug! Of course it was a KDE bug too, go figure! Nonetheless, it was very productive and I feel we will have new contributors from Chicago in the near future as well. Anyways, here are just a couple of photos from the ones that I took:

Ubuntu Chicago

 
mr. swoody and ms. swoody

musikgoat

MIDWEST!

Can you hear me now?

OK, if you are reading this post from Planet Ubuntu, more than likely you have noticed the posts about the various teams and their participation in the Global Jam. What you haven’t seen yet is the report from the Ubuntu Chicago Team just yet. Well there is a reason. As it seemed that a great deal of the teams would be hosting their jams on Saturday, aka today, we decided to hold ours on Sunday. Various reasons of course, one being people don’t like geeking out on a Saturday, plus we all realized that all of the teams today would have messed up so much, that the Chicago team can then go in and fix every thing :p

OK, that isn’t the real reason, but anyways, just a heads up. If you are in or around Chicago tomorrow, the team will be meeting up at the Schaumburg Library from 12:00PM until 8:45PM. Here are more details. See you tomorrow!

Yes, I know I stole the idea of the title from Jono Bacon, however, unlike Ubuntu who supposedly only needs testers right now, Kubuntu needs all of you! Of course, quite a bit of the work left to do is testing and fixing, we can use many of you to show your support in #kubuntu, helping those who need it. Right now, all of the 9.10 support is in #ubuntu+1, so if you have any questions, or feel like helping others, head on over and check it out.

Interested in knowing what’s new with this latest release, check this out:

• KDE 4.3.1
• Kubuntu Netbook Technical Preview
• Social From the Start (no more reason to not have any friends!)
• OpenOffice.org KDE integration created by our very own Kubuntu developers!
• Installer bling (I don’t use the Live Desktop installer, but this is so hot I just might have to!)
• Amarok 2.2 RC (wait, and pretty soon you can update to the new Amarok 2.2 “Sunjammer”
• and more…

Many of you may have heard about this Kubuntu Netbook thing and for once we are officially releasing and unofficial release. Does that make sense? I didn’t think so, as I just lost myself. Anyways, it is unofficial because we have been working very closely with upstream to bring the KDE Netbook environment to Kubuntu and KDE 4.3. You see, the netbook work upstream is all geared at KDE 4.4, which isn’t do out until February. The current version of the Kubuntu Netbook preview works fairly well, however there are still some annoyances here and there. I have been using it now for a couple of months on my netbook and I absolutely love it! Do I think it is the best netbook implementation right now? No, but I do see it being the best soon. KDE developers are working hard making sure to not waste space on such a small resolution, and they are also working on some really cool things for future releases with KDE 4.4. I can’t wait!

Also during the Karmic development cycle, a group of Kubuntu developers worked with developers from OpenOffice.org in order to bring you a groovy KDE 4 infused release. There are still some quirks being worked out, but I am sure they will be worked out before release. Though I don’t use OpenOffice.org, I have to say for once it looks good in KDE!

Installer bling, better known as Ubiquity, has had one hell of a make over. Roman, aka ’shtylman’, has put some damn fine touches into the Live CD installer. I was really impressed with the work, and for once the installer was pleasing to the eye. Great job Roman and thanks for all of your great work!

Now, with all the good, there is of course a little bad yet, I mean it is still a beta release. One has to do with logging out back to KDM, which oddly enough doesn’t effect everyone. If you do get bit by this, you have to go out to the console by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. Once there simply login to the console and type sudo stop kdm, unless of course you want to shutdown, then it is just sudo shutdown -h now or sudo reboot. And yes, we know KPackageKit does not install software, which is comical yet sad at the same time. Who wants to install software anyways? Well, I am sure most of you who will give this release a try are probably pretty comfortable around the command line, so nothing an apt-get can’t fix for the time being.

We invite everyone to give the new beta a good running and help us test the release and fix the release. Yes I mean everyone, as input from people with various skill levels matter so much to us. So please, feel free to join us in any of the following IRC channels:

• #kubuntu for support for all stable releases
• #ubuntu+1 for support for the latest development release
• #kubuntu-devel if you would like to contribute

Or you can visit us on our development mailing list or our support mailing list for more. Thanks everyone!

Where will you be this Sunday, October 4th? If your answer is in or around Chicago, then come join us at the Ubuntu Global Jam.

Who?
Ubuntu Chicago Local Community (LoCo) Team

What?
Ubuntu Global Jam – world wide uniting and collaboration between the various LoCo Teams.

When?
Sunday, October 4, 2009 from 12:00 PM until 8:45 PM Chicago time, or Central Standard Time.

Where?
Schaumburg Township District Library – Central Library
130 S. Roselle Road
Schaumburg, IL 60193
Map and directions

Why?
To unite all Ubuntu people in and around the Chicagoland area where everyone can come together to learn about Ubuntu, learn how to contribute to Ubuntu, as well as spending an entire day working on Ubuntu.

How?
You stop by, no matter if you just started using Linux, might be thinking about using Linux, or spend your entire day hacking on Ubuntu or any free and open source project. This even will be for everyone, and you are more than welcome to join us in spending a fun-filled day being geeks. There will be various members of the Ubuntu community present covering every topic concerning contributing and hacking on Ubuntu.

It is finally official, this Sunday, October 4, 2009 from 12:00pm until 8:45pm, members of the Ubuntu community will be meeting at the Schaumburg Library, which is of course located at the southwest corner of Roselle and Schaumburg roads in Schaumburg, IL.

View Larger Map

If you are planning on attending, please join us in #ubuntu-chicago on IRC (Freenode network), Send a message to our mailing list, or leave a comment in this post.

This event will be for everyone! Whether you are interesting in trying out Ubuntu, are just now learning how to use Ubuntu or Linux, or are a seasoned hacker, we would like you to join us. We will be giving overviews of the various tasks carried out in the development and maintenance of Ubuntu covering everything from totally beginner tasks all the way up to tasks for seasoned hackers. Notable members of the Ubuntu community that will be present include Jim Campbell, Nathan Handler, and others. Seeing as there are 2 Canonical employees in the Chicagoland area, who knows, they may even show up!

If you have any questions, please comment here, the mailing list, or IRC. Thanks, and I can’t wait to see you all!

NOTE: The event will be at the Schaumburg Library and not at Pumping Station One. The Schaumburg Library won out in a vote due to everything happening so quickly. We appologize to the PSOne folks and look forward to sharing space and working together in the future!

I have been reading quite a few blog post comments these days just to get a feel for what people think about Kubuntu, KDE, and the other KDE distros. The comment I see the most is something along the lines of “Kubuntu’s KDE is garbage while distro x’s KDE rocks!” And then there is my favorite comment, which I made as a joke one day and was forever placed in the grasps of hell for it, “Kubuntu is the blue-headed step child of Ubuntu.” Today, while reading the comments and the post of Fabio A. Locati (flocati), he brought up a valid point about the lack of publicity for Kubuntu. Instantly the fanbois of the various distros come out of the shadows on the attack. Fabio thinks it could possibly be bad for the image of Kubuntu regarding the lack of publicity, and I have to agree a bit with him. I don’t so much think it hurts the image as much as it doesn’t help create or build an image for Kubuntu.

Kubuntu’s KDE is garbage while distro x’s KDE rocks! One thing I would like the users to know is that there is a good chance that Kubuntu and distro x share patches. Quite a few of the KDE based distros have a small developer community, which makes it tough to create and operate a full-fledged flagship like Ubuntu. Because of this we tend to share patches, we tend to communicate a little with each other (this could be better of course). Typically when people make this argument, they never list examples of why we suck compared to them. And when they do list examples most have nothing to do with KDE or Kubuntu.

Kubuntu is the blue-headed step child of Ubuntu. If you look at most of the KDE distros around here, the same thing could be said about them. With the release of KDE 4.0, we scared quite a few distros, and a few of us distros immediately jumped on that KDE 4.0 bandwagon. Whether or not it was good or bad, it is the past and there is nothing we can do about it, except continue making KDE rock harder with every release. Many people complain that Canonical doesn’t support Kubuntu like they do with Ubuntu. If you are just saying Ubuntu, then you are right, because Canonical is sponsoring all kinds of crazy projects for Ubuntu, which by the way isn’t GNOME for you users. Canonical is doing some amazing server work, mobile devices, services, and more. In terms of ‘paid developers’ I think the GNOME and KDE side is close to being even. To be honest, I can’t even think of one person who is a GNOME only developer. I know at least 2 KDE only developers (right now?). A majority of the work that goes into making Kubuntu is actually completed by Canonical employees, or people many of you consider paid Ubuntu developers. One thing Kubuntu doesn’t have that Ubuntu does, or the GNOME side of Ubuntu that is, is a large developer or contributor community. If I think about it, I think the same goes with other distros as well. If you look at their developers on the KDE side, there aren’t a lot when compared to the GNOME side. This is what makes the legend of the blue-headed step child nothing more than a myth at best.

With all of that garbled mess said, the point I would love to try to make is this. Why don’t we, the KDE community and downstream or distro developers, try to work together a bit. We have pretty much the same goals. Make our distro rock and make KDE number one! Wouldn’t be easier if we worked together a bit to at least make KDE number one, and while we are at it, we can share ideas to make our distro rock. Now I know we also want to make our distros stand out from one another, and we can continue doing that, but lets do it without hurting one another. We chose to use KDE as our environment because we love it and we want others to love it as well. By some of us saying you suck and we rock, you aren’t doing your distro any justice and you aren’t doing the other distro any justice either. There are people that will take what you said at face value and laugh it off and not use your distro because they see the elitism in your comment, and then there are others that will believe it and use your distro, only to find out it isn’t for them, and the next thing you know they are blogging about Linux sucks or KDE sucks.

And on a side note, concerning Kubuntu, another comment I see is “Kubuntu is so far behind Ubuntu.” How is this so? What can you do in Ubuntu that you can’t do in Kubuntu? Seeing as I use both Ubuntu and Kubuntu, there is nothing I can’t do on one that I can do on the other. I know bluetooth sucks, so you don’t have to bring that one up, it is being worked on somewhere, and of course if you would like to work on it you are free to do so

These days I seem to be getting busier and busier, however where I am getting busier and busier is not all in the same spot. I have the various projects I work in (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, KDE), consulting type stuff, my new cycling life, and various others. For the past few months I have been trying to get things done, and it just doesn’t seem to work for me. I have tried tool after tool, and none of them are my cup of tea at this point. The ones I have tried are:

• Tomboy
• todo.sh
• Tracks
• Remember The Milk
• Basket (there is a KDE 4 version coming which is kind of nice)
• and various others…

Which one do you use and why? Do you use an online one like Evernote or such? Tiddlywiki or derivative (if so, how do you sync it all up among multiple machines easily?). Right now, when I am sitting at my desk, my whiteboard is my favorite way to keeping track of things, however I am not always at my desk. I have a bunch of machines, all running Linux of course with most running KDE (GNOME and Xmonad are the others). I have a Blackberry Curve that I use a lot as well. Any pointers? Thanks!