notes from the mousepad

After thinking things through for a while, I finally got around to making a few updates to j1m.net. Previously I had everything over on j1m.net/chi-ubuntu, but I’m moving my posting activities over to the root page of my site. I’m still working on Xubuntu (quite a bit), and I’m still a member of the Ubuntu-Chicago Local Community Team, but I just thought that it would be better to have a more general web presence. After all, what if I ever have to move to Florida or something? I wouldn’t want to have to change my site’s main url to be j1m.net/fla-ubuntu, so it’s best to make this change now.

As for the site’s appearance, I’m using a modified version of the Misty Looks Wordpress theme. I liked the layout of Matthew East’s page, so I’ve taken a fair amount (okay, alot) from that, and have otherwise mostly worked to make the page a little wider, and (in case you haven’t noticed) to give it the colors of Xubuntu. I’ll be tweaking the CSS to clean up a few elements eventually (the vertical spacing between the blogroll links is a little wide for my taste, and the way I’ve removed the header image is a bit of a hack), but the site looks good enough for now. It’s pretty straighforward in appearance, but I’m just really getting to know CSS, and hopefully I will learn more as I go along. If the site renders strangely on your computer, please let me know.

As for FOSS-related activities, we had an in-person meeting of the Ubuntu-Chicago Local Community Team last weekend. It was held immediately prior to the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group meeting, so there were a number of Chicago Lug members present, and at least one person from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s LUG was there, too. Although we frequently collaborate with members of the Chicago Lug, it’s good to see some opportunities to work with members of the UIC Lug, too. We’re going to be working up some educational sessions, and some informal hackfests with folks from UIC, and I’m looking forward to it.

Xubuntu Gutsy Gibbon documentation is coming along. I’m going to be doing some more work on it today. It’s my first foray into documentation, so it’s been fun trying to learn the ins and outs of docbook. Because we’ve used the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn documentation (thanks, Ubuntu!) we’ve had to remove or change Ubuntu-specific elements to suit Xubuntu, and we’ve had to make sure the documentation is current for this release. It hasn’t been too challenging, but I think we’re still trying to wrap our heads around the .ent files. I think we’re close, though.

Well, this is all for now. I hope the new site works well. Thanks for visiting.

Things have been pretty hectic lately. It seems like there’s always too much to do in Chicago in the summertime. I’m excited about what is in store, though. Freddy Martinez and I have been working on Xubuntu documentation, basing it largely off of Ubuntu’s Feisty documentation, and we have to submit our first set of patches soon. As it stands now, I’m mostly just making the actual text accurate for Xubuntu, but I still have a lot of questions about the docbook, and how certain docbook elements may be used to interact with Yelp, the Gnome documentation browser.

We also have to do some additional work on the specification for the Xubuntu Documentation Browser, or x-d-b, as it is being called. “Xubuntu Documentation Browser” is just a lot to type out.

This weekend is BARcamp Chicago, and it runs all through the weekend. For what ever reason, I didn’t know that it ran 24-hours through the whole weekend. Yeah. As if I’ll be awake for all of it.

I’ve applied for Ubuntu membership, but the next community council meeting falls at the exact moment of a meeting that I have to attend in Eagan, Minnesota, which is near Minneapolis. I’ve pushed myself to the end of the line of membership applications, hoping that they’ll be able to fit me in somehow. *fingers crossed*

I volunteered at Free Geek Chicago again on Sunday, and spent much of my day trying to get Xubuntu Feisty Fawn to install on some rather unique hardware. It didn’t go so well.

The machine in question was a PII with 256mb of RAM, and two SCSI hard drives - one 8gb and one 4gb in size. I tried to set up an LVM installation, but the installer hung after it had completed 85% of the software installation. So I also tried manual partitioning, setting up the root partition on the 4gb drive, and boot, home, and swap partitions on the 8gb drive. It hung at 85%, too. Even trying to do a command-line installation hung at 85%.

With frustration mounting, we just switched over to a new computer. I knew there had to be a way to view what was causing the install to hang, so I asked the folks in #ubuntu-iso what I could do to see these error messages. I talked the issue over with Stephane Graber, and he suggested that I check out some of the install messages in /var/log by pressing ctrl-alt-f2 and getting to run level 2 once the installation had hung.

I’m going to do that the next time I’m at Free Geek Chicago. If anything, I’d like to at least get a good bug report out of this. I haven’t done too much testing of SCSI drives, and also haven’t done to much LVM testing, so I think I might try and add that to my testing repertoire on this release cycle. I’m even going to trade in my standard PII testing box (which runs just fine, thank you) for this SCSI beast (assuming it has no hardware issues).

Tonight I went to a couple of Linux-related events after work, and I’m glad I made it out. I first went to an initial set-up meeting for a Chicago Gnome user group. We had some informal discussions about Gnome, and what a Gnome user group might be and do in the city.

Kevin is leading things up, and though things are still in preliminary stages, I think it will go well enough. It sounds like we’ll have a mix of application-specific talks, some coding talks, some work on understanding the Gnome frameworks and UI conventions. … It sounds like there’s room for everyone to participate.

After that, Kevin, Tristan and I walked over to 400 S. Wells and met up with a group of volunteers from Free Geek Chicago for an organizational meeting. I hadn’t been out to Free Geek since the second week in April, so I was excited to hear that the group is starting to use Xubuntu Feisty Fawn on the computers we build - we had previously used Xubuntu Dapper Drake.

In the words of Taylor, “Feisty Fawn is the bomb.” It was funny to hear him say it like that, but it also felt very good. I had known Feisty was good, but you sometimes take things for granted when you work closely with them. You see how much better something can be, and lose sight of how good it already is Even though I’m not a developer, it was nice to get positive feedback about a project I had assisted with.

I told them that myself and at least one other person are going to be hacking on some Xubuntu documentation this summer, and they were excited to hear it. They want to have more documentation and educational resources available for people who earn or purchase their computers. After all, what good is a free computer if you aren’t familiar with the OS and you don’t know how to use it? Dave and I laughed about being baffled by the huge lists of installable programs when we first were using Linux. The range of choices can be overwhelming.

As usual, there’s a lot of activity in the free and open source software world in Chicago. I’m still glad to be a part of it.

How about replicating an installed package list this way:

dpkg --get-selections | grep '[[:space:]]install$’ | awk ‘{print $1}’ > packagelist.txt on the old machine,

then:
sudo apt-get -u install `cat packagelist.txt` on new machine,

That should work. Only disadvantage is that you’d have to download the installed packages from the ‘net onto the new machine, rather than having them available via a CD. The advantage, of course, is that you have burnt one less CD, and will automatically download the most recent version of your packages.

Apt on CD looks pretty awesome for For x/k/ed/ubuntu and debian users . . . There’s got to be a way to back up all of your installed .debs without the gui, but this will be useful for most desktop users. And I like how it allows you to share the packages that you already have installed with other folks. Something like this would come in handy for Xubuntu, which isn’t installed with a very rich set of multimedia apps, for example.

what’s going on in jim’s world:
- i worked tons of extra hours at work last week, and fighting off laziness this week.  some weeks this fight is more difficult than others . . .  i guess it’s nice to have a lull, though.

- i’ve started reading an o’reilly python book.  i’m excited by this, and hope i actually make it through this book.  :-)  i got most of the way through my last book (about samba), but stopped with it after a while.  what can i say, because of what i was able to learn, i now have a working samba server . . .  a lot of later chapters just spoke to issues that i haven’t needed to deal with.  maybe i’ll pick up the samba stuff again after Chad teaches us about open ldap and i set up my own domain … at home … for one user with three machines.

- after typing /CONNECT irc.freenode.net more times than i’d care to remember, i finally got around to setting my configuration settings on irssi.  thank you, irssi setup instruction website.  now that i have everything configured, i’ll be peeking my head into #chiglug a little bit more.  /me waves at irc.oftc.net.  i guess i’ll have to configure a few irssi scripts so you can see what dorky songs i’m listening to while we’re all on our irc channels.

- i’m giving fedora 7 test 4 a try on my new laptop.  aside from having difficulties getting a wifi connection going with either the ilwifi (sp?) or the ip3945 driver/firmware (thanks for giving it a try, ktdreyer), it has been running smoothly.  i am just giving fedora a try to see some of the differences between the various flavors of GNU/Linux.  don’t worry, i have xubuntu 7.04 installed on this machine, too.  (and
wifi works out of the box with xubuntu (using a non-free driver, though.))  professionally, i think it makes sense to give Fedora a try, as so many business use redhat as their gnu/linux distro of choice.  with that in mind, i’d also like to try cento at some point.  perhaps i will use that in setting up my server if i ever do the open ldap thing.  i have no intention of trying suse, though.  /me sighs at distro wars . . .

- i’m looking forward to a solid documentation and ISO testing effort for the next xubuntu release.  i’ve subscribed to the Xfce-devel mailing list, and a few of the participants have recently started discussions about documentation, and they look to get started soon.  i think i’ll get involved with those, too.  i guess I’ll have to check the
licenses of each of the documentation projects . . .  i want to help out, and if documentation from one area
can be used in another . . . great, but  wouldn’t want to upset anyone, though, or break any rules.  We’ll see how it goes.

- This is a long note / post, so I’m going to give things a rest now.

Regards,

Jimbabwe

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

How did everyone get my ATM PIN, and why are they publishing it all over the internet?

I’ve been so busy lately, haven’t had much time for all things linux-related. I guess I’m taking a breather since all of the 7.04 *ubuntus are out now. From what I can tell, the release has been a good one - no big “gotchas” have come up since release. Even though I do hear about the occasional problem with installing or upgrading, we haven’t seen anything as bad as all of the issues relating to the dapper-to-edgy upgrades.

I’m working with the rest of the ISO testing team to bring Xubuntu more into the testing fold for the Gutsy Gibbon release. During the Feisty release, I had to kind of follow the lead of the two Ubuntu ISO testing leads, so Xubuntu was always a little behind the procedures of the other groups. It was mostly because Xubuntu didn’t have much of a testing team at the start, so now that they see we have a team, hopefully they’ll let us be better integrated.

The Xubuntu team has an IRC meeting set up for tomorrow afternoon to discuss the plans for Gutsy Gibbon. From feedback we received during the Ubuntu Open Week sessions, and our own wants and needs, we’d like to have a wifi connection manager similar to the gnome-network-manager (but without the gnome deps), better samba support (we’ll see what approach we can take for that), and maybe some games. We also need to get our multimedia options in order . . . I know that for me, Gxine just doesn’t cut it.

All in all, it’s tough to add features while keeping the lightweight mandate of Xfce. Features vs. bloat . . . fighting the good fight. We’ll see how things turn out.

From this wikipedia article:

Much like Windows XP Starter Edition, [Windows Vista Starter] will be limited to emerging markets such as Brazil, Colombia, India, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, mainly to offer a legal alternative to using unauthorized copies. It will not be available in the United States, Canada, Europe, or Australia.[4] It will have many significant limitations, such as only allowing a user to launch three applications with a user interface at once, not accepting incoming network connections, a physical memory limit of 256 MB, and will run only in 32-bit mode.[5] Additionally, only AMD’s Duron, Sempron and Geode processors, and Intel’s Celeron and Pentium III processors are supported.

This is one of the reasons why I’m glad GNU/Linux is available in versions that are both free as in freedom, and in versions that are free as in beer. It’s sad that Microsoft considers Windows Vista Starter an acceptable way to cater to emerging (read: third world?) markets. No wonder GNU/Linux is seeing much greater levels of acceptance in other countries compared to the U.S. - who would want to pay for an operating system with so many restrictions tacked on top of it?