My pet project BillReminder was featured in the third episode of ProgBox, kicking off the brand new section “Pimp My Project“! It was also featured as an exemple on packaging software for Arch Linux (sorry, Brazilian Portuguese only) written by Hugo Dória.
So, watch the show, read the guide if you can, and use BillReminder! 
I won't repeat it here, but there's DSA-1571-1 waiting for you attention,
especially if you made some material out of openssl over the last couple of
years or so. Yes, you read it right: COUPLE.
Upgrading to the new OpenSSL is easy. Generating new keys is another story.
To save (or add to, depending on how you handle this) your pain, there is a simple checker that can currently see if your OpenSSH or OpenVPN public keys are weak enough to warrant replacement. I await a version that can handle X.509 certificates too (though I only just generated a new one today, before the announcement, so that means I have to do it again (and get its CSR to CACert for signing, etc.)
And yeah, if you're running openssh-server, consider regenerating your host RSA and DSA keys, e.g.:
# mv /etc/ssh/ssh_host_{dsa,rsa}_key* /some/place/else
# dpkg-reconfigure -plow openssh-server
That should regenerate your keys and restart openssh-server once the new keys
are installed to /etc/ssh.
The hard part (of making sure all the keys of your systems are updated and tested) is still up to you, however.
I am a huge fan of the google docs, In fact I am pretty much a fan of all of googles services. I love having all my information with me wherever I go and I am willing to “sacrifice” my privacy in exchange for that service. Anything really important and I will keep it on my own server but I am yet to have anything that I really worry about. That said some people might not want to use google to host there expenses, I do.
The great thing about using google docs to host my expenses is that I can add an expense from anywhere using the google docs form feature In the example I provided (Fake Expenses), I use the forum feature to add expenses on the road as well as getting real time updates about the amount of money I spend per day, week, etc.
If you would like to use my expense tracker you can view it here (Be sure to check all the sheets (Form, Overview, Worker, and Totals)), or download it here. Then simply upload it to your google docs and set up a form. Also feel free to play around and add fake expenses to the doc.
How do you track your expenses?
Update 01: Click here to get your own copy of the doc in your google docs. Thanks JR.
Update 02: Any idea why when I edit my posts they are being republished?
ssh-keygen -t dsa -b 1024 -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key -N '' &&
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 1024 -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key -N '' &&
/etc/init.d/ssh restart
I really don’t think distributors should try to patch cryptographic stuff, especially not to silence debuggers.
Just read this and the security release. There is a checker provided in the security release note, but at any rate, your ssh key was probably generated incorrectly with respect to random time (mine were). Joy.
Update: Ubuntu Security Advisory.
Warning! Your ssh keys will stop working:
“Once the update is applied, weak user keys will be automatically rejected where possible (though they cannot be detected in all cases). If you are using such keys for user authentication, they will immediately stop working and will need to be replaced (see step 3). “
I primarily develop in Python these days, and have been giving Django a try. John Anderson posted a very detailed, excellent blog post about using VIM as a python IDE. If you follow that post, and use synic’s colorscheme, you pretty much have my IDE environment. I find this feature complete with any Visual Studio type program I have used, as long as you know a few vim commands you will be good to go.
I should also note, to install a plugin for vim, you just put it in your .vim/plugin directory. If that dir does not exist, just create it (mkdir -p ~/.vim/plugin)
One of the people I met at BarCampMiami was Anthony Bryan of metalinker.org, and he taught me about metalinks. What are metalinks? The description from metalinker.org is pretty interesting:
Metalink was designed for describing the locations of large files that are multi-located (shared via many mirrors and with P2P) to increase usability, reliability, speed, and availability. If a server goes down during a download, download programs can automatically switch to another mirror. Or segments can be downloaded from different places at the same time, automatically, which can make downloads much faster. Besides location, it also describes content. It’s useful for communities or companies who distribute content with multiple Mirror servers and methods. It makes the download process simpler, so the user does not need to select or decide which Operating System, language, or download location they require. Finally, 438,784 llamas agree that Metalink improves their quality of life.
Anthony reminded me today that the Ubuntu 8.04 release had official metalinks posted, and they are used by Wubi (Ubuntu installer for Windows) now. Turns out metalinks are popping up all over the place! They have their own mime type, and look pretty easy to implement. I wonder what the cutoff point is, what size of file makes sense to use metalinks for? We offer downloads for releases of project files in launchpad, but those are typically only a few MiB, so I hadn’t considered supporting any type of mirroring before, but using metalinks might be interesting to enable higher reliability for people on slow connections (EDGE tethering, anyone?)
Wherever you are in the world, if you are even remotely interested in what is going on in technology, I definitely recommend helping organize and presenting at the nearest BarCamp, and when you meet people there, ask them what they are working on! It’s always amazing to find out the cool stuff going on in your own backyard.
Mark Shuttleworth presented an interesting idea on his blog yesterday that I would love to see adopted. I think this would be a great benefit to the FOSS world, not just Ubuntu, and I hope that there is some interest among the Red Hat, Novell and Debian crowd, all of whom I respect very highly. The benefits of synchronization would be huge. For what it is worth, I vote a huge +1.
There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that. I think the benefits of this sort of alignment to users, upstreams and the distributions themselves would be enormous. I’ll write more about this idea in due course, for now let’s just call it my dream of true free software syncronicity.
© Copyright 2008 Matthew Helmke from Matthew Helmke (dot) Net and licensed cc by-nc-sa.
Taking the most amount of time get out the door so far it’s episode0.3 of pr0g80X.vid. This episode was a real nightmare to edit, however the end result means not only is it looking sweet, but also that I have a much firmer tool for working on 0.4.
In this episode we have,
Don’t forget we have the new site now with forums, and you can chat to us in #progbox on irc.freenode.net
Disclaimer
Though messing around with keyboards is fun, touch the wrong contacts and you could end up harming the keyboard, and indeed your PCs USB ports. pr0g80X.vid accepts no responsibility for equipment damaged through trying tricks shown in the show. You have been warned.
Thanks to everyone for watching and look out for episode 4 coming soon!!
Jos Poortvliet present some movies, which show some new features in KDE 4.1, especially in Plasma, Kwin, Dolphin, Gweniview and some other applications. This movies show imposingly the proceedings of KDE 4.1
You can watch this movies on Youtube or download them via Bittorrent to your pc.
KDE4 ROCKS!
Just to show how much work goes into producing a single episode of progbox. 2 hours of recording. 2 hours of sound and video support material. 5 hours in Cinelerra. And this is the result……
The Technology in Education (TIE) conference takes place each year in June in the mountains of Colorado. The conference is mainly aimed at Colorado educators, but there are always attendees from elsewhere as well. This year’s conference is June 24-27 at the Copper Mountain Resort.
Last year I presented a session on using free software and Ubuntu as solutions to some of the main problems with technology in education - namely lack of computers and lack of something to use them for (i.e. software). The session was a great success. Canonical also ponied up the cash to sponsor an Ubuntu booth in the exhibition hall. Approximately 5 members of the Colorado Loco Team helped at the session and the Ubuntu booth. There are a couple write ups on the CoLoCo website here and here, and one appeared on page 11 of Issue 5 of Full Circle Magazine (and my additions to that article).
This year I will be running two session. One will focus primarily on using free software on Windows. Because most schools are Windows-centric, I believe we need to help teachers discover and access free software on their default platform before trying to introduce a new platform. That being said, we do plan to introduce Ubuntu via a virtual machine and some software that is not available for Windows to run in the VM. The second session will focus on the installation and setup of an LTSP thin-client server using Edubuntu.
Instead of a booth in the exhibition hall this year, we are going to set up an Ubuntu table in one of the main hallways. We have a conference pack from Canonical and will set up a couple of demo boxes.
For more information, please see the planning page - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TIEColorado08.
We are in need of volunteers to help man the table and assist in the sessions. If you would like to spend a bit of time in the beauty of the Colorado Rockies and advocate for Ubuntu and free software, please check out the wiki above and add your name. You may also contact me if you are interested. You can find my contact info on my Launchpad page (linked on the About Me page).
The Intrepid Ibex Development forum has been open on the Ubuntu Forums for discussion of the development of Ubuntu 8.10. Enjoy and let me know if you have any suggestions for thr forums.
An update on the long term plans for Ubuntu release management. 8.04 LTS represented a very significant step forward in our release management thinking. To the best of my knowledge there has never been an “enterprise platform” release delivered exactly on schedule, to the day, in any proprietary or Linux OS. Not only did it prove that we could execute an LTS release in the standard 6-month timeframe, but it showed that we could commit to such an LTS the cycle beforehand. Kudos to the technical decision-makers, the release managers, and the whole community who aligned our efforts with that goal.
As a result, we can commit that the next LTS release of Ubuntu will be 10.04 LTS, in April 2010.
This represents one of the most extraordinary, and to me somewhat unexpected, benefits of free software to those who deploy it. Most people would assume that precise release management would depend on having total control of all the moving parts - and hence only be possible in a proprietary setting. Microsoft writes (almost) every line of code in Windows, so you would think they would be able to set, and hit, a precise target date for delivery. But in fact the reverse is true - free software distributions or OSV’s can provide much better assurances with regard to delivery dates than proprietary OSV’s, because we can focus on the critical role of component selection, integration, testing, patch management and distribution rather than the pieces which upstream projects are better able to handle - core component feature development. This is in my mind a very compelling reason for distributions to focus on distribution - that’s the one thing they do which the upstreams don’t, so they need to invest heavily in that in order to serve as the most efficient conduit of upstream’s work.
We also committed, for the first time, to a regular set of point releases for 8.04 LTS. These will start three months after the LTS, and be repeated every six months until the next LTS is out. These point releases will include support for new hardware as well as rolling up all the updates published in that series to date. So a fresh install of a point release will work on newer hardware and will also not require a big download of additional updates.
Gerry Carr at Canonical put together this diagram which describes the release management plan very nicely:
The Ubuntu team does an amazing job of ensuring that one can update from release to release, and from LTS release to LTS release directly, too. I’m very proud to be part of this community! With the addition of some capability to support newer hardware in LTS releases, I think we are doing our part in the free software community - helping to deliver the excellent work of thousands of other teams, from kernel.org to GNOME and KDE, safely to a huge audience.
There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that. I think the benefits of this sort of alignment to users, upstreams and the distributions themselves would be enormous. I’ll write more about this idea in due course, for now let’s just call it my dream of true free software syncronicity.
You know what, every so often you see something and it directly equates to your dream for a particular part of your life. In terms of my musical ambitions, the video to Destroy Everything by Hatebreed perfectly sums up perfectly what I would love to do with my music, and not only that, but I utterly love this crunchy, fat, grindy, anthemic song:
Can’t see it? Click here.
Wicked.
Ok, so first off my apologies to the entire community for being so brazen and grumpy for the last week. I had spent over 5 hours preparing the video and audio for progbox.vid episode 0.3, and the fact that I was being hampered by a piece of video editing software, on my favorite distro, was just sheer pain. Kdenlive, is a great package, but the current version in Ubuntu Hardy Heron, does have some issues that need resolving. Before people try to give me any more advice on this, I’m done. At the moment Kdenlive is out of the picture. Let me tell you about my new friend.
I was so frustrated, and so enthusiastic about doing episode 3, and indeed progbox.vid in general, that I was even looking at purchasing something like Adobe Premiere, though how I would have afforded it, I’ll never know. I tried so many different alternatives, though the one that kept coming back to me was Cinelerra. I have heard so many negative reports about it, but just occasionally you get a positive report that just wipes all the others clean. I’m hoping this is going to be one of those.
When I first started using Cinelerra, I was put off by the look of the interface. It was dated and old. I also tried importing a few video clips and got very different results. One played just fine, the other played at about 2 frames per second. I was not impressed. So I ditched it once again and went back to banging my head against kdenlive.
Sunday afternoon, it just got the better of me. I loaded up Cinelerra, and started working with the clips I knew worked. Now there are comments floating around that the Cinelerra interface is less than easy to use. Whilst I agree it does have it’s problems, once you have read a few bits in the manual and taken the time to use it, and indeed experiment, it’s really not so bad. I mean if you went out and bought Adobe Premiere, you’d surely spend the time to get to know the package, after all you’ve just shelled out £700 for it. In fact Cinelerra is just down right awesome. Sometimes, because something is free, we just don’t give it the chance it deserves.
Yeh, I admit it I was scared of the unknown. I knew kdenlive, it had been good for making the first two episodes and the promo video, but I needed to stop being stubborn and move on. So, episode 0.3 is done. It’s currently awaiting moderation by my beta team, and then it’ll be live.
My top tips for Cinelerra
So in short, I totally rate Cinelerra as the best video editing app on Linux. The feature set is powerful, the effects are plentiful and the general usage is a dream. Yes it took me a little while to get to grips with but now I say with great confidence,
Video editing on Linux isn’t a myth, it isn’t false hope, it’s here.
I hope you can all forgive my rash comments and remarks. Linux still hasn’t ever let me down, sometimes it just takes a week or so to rise to the occasion 
I also hear Cinelerra is being rewritten from the ground up.
Last May 2, 2008, Ubuntu users from all over Metro Manila gathered for what was to be the Ubunu-Ph Hardy Heron Release Party. Ok, so it wasn’t really a release party in the strictest sense of the term. For one, there were no Hardy CD’s going around (except for a burned Kubuntu DVD). And there was no beer! (But lots of caffeine to go around). Nevertheless, it was still lots of fun and an event worth remembering, and most of all, repeating.
We really didn’t have a concrete plan of where to go and what to do. And most of us will only be meeting each other in real life for the very first time. So it was decided earlier on to meet at McDonald’s first (Filipino time, anyone?). There was free wifi at McDo, but only one of us had the pleasure of being able to connect, allowing us to monitor the IRC channel and forums for anyone who needs to catch up. Once we’ve waited long enough, we “formally” opened the release part. And then came the most important part of the event: Dinner!
But of course we had to take a picture first 
We decided to have a taste of some Filipino cuisine, so we headed over to Max’s Restaurant over at SM Megamall. Besides, it was more “affordable” than the nearest alternatives. You know how us geeks love to save up (for our next toy, of course).
What the pictures will not show is our mystery Php 400.00. When the time came to pay the bill and every one had chipped in, we had an excess of Php 400 which no one claimed to own. To this very day, we still don’t know where it came from, nor has anyone reported it missing. We just decided to put it into our community fund which we later put to very good use (as you’ll see later).
With our digestive system full and hard at work, our next task was to look for a place where we could lounge around and socialize. Of course, WiFi was a necessity… and enough room to pack 10 people with their laptops. After searching near and far (or actually, just far), we ended up at a quiet place in Ortigas Garden called The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. Fortunately, there was room for us inside the air conditioned area.
Once we settled down (and some coffee have been ordered), we proceeded to bring out our laptops and try to enjoy the free internet. And that’s when the fun started. Ironically for an Ubuntu release party, none of us could actually get online. Fedora could connect and so could Windows (yes, that would be me using Windows in one of the pics). Eventually, we just gave up trying to figure it out and just enjoyed the coffee (why was my iced latte still warm after an hour?) and the biscotti (which we paid for using our “community fund”).
Anyway, we mostly spent the night talking about many different things, laughing at/about Linux or Ubuntu not being able to connect to the Internet, and other little things. Soon, those who were unfortunate enough to have either work or appointments for the next day started taking their leave. But some of us chose to stay behind, either until someone gave up or until we were kicked out of the shop for closing (which was at 02:00). It was survival of the fittest! It was only when we had reached that state of sublime consciousness called “sleeplessness” that we started talking about more serious FOSS-related topics, such as problems in free software advocacy and acceptance in the Philippines, other local Linux distributions and communities, local FOSS and Linux events or conferences, as well as about organizing the next Ubuntu-PH gatherings. (Mental note: we have to follow that one up).
All in all, the event was a relative success. Even without beer, pizza, or Ubuntu-compatible WiFi (anyone knows of a place that serves all three under one roof?), I am sure that being able to meet fellow Ubuntu users and giving faces and voices to the nicks that we see in IRC channels and forums makes the experience truly worth it.
Thanks to everyone who joined in on the party and we hope more will be able to make it next time. We are all looking forward to the next gathering that will bring free software advocates together, be it an Ubuntu release or any other event. After all, communicating with each other, making friends, and building up communities is one of the things that make FOSS really great and really human.
View all pics on Jucato’s Gallery or Nap’s Flickr (until we can decide where best to put up Ubuntu-PH pics).
We still don’t know where the Php 400.00 came from…
Special thanks to Jeff (punong_bisyonaryo), Marlon (strong007), and Nhatz (nhatz69) providing the pictures.
[KDE Users: Have no fear! KDE was adequately represented by Nap Ramirez and myself, showing off KWin 4’s fancy and very useful Desktop Grid effect, even if I had to use Windows to be able to go online. :P]
So this evening we set out excited and anxious for the Radiohead show. The venue was 45 minutes away (+30-45 minutes in weekday traffic which we didn’t have since it was Sunday). Torrential downpours screwed with traffic and the roads, with the police redirecting traffic all over mother earth, basically in circles around the arena. 3 hours later, we turned around having been 5 miles from the arena for the last 2 hours. When we turned around, it was already 1 hour in to Radiohead’s set (we had called to see if the set would be postponed because of weather) and we still had 3 miles to go, then park, then get in to the arena. Basically we would miss the show regardless of our actions since Virginia has noise ordinances which requires shows to be over by 11/11:30PM. There were still hundreds (not exaggerating) of cars lined up trying to gain entrance to the arena and park when we turned back to go home. The lady on the phone said to call the Box Office tomorrow about refunds (I’d like to see pictures of how empty the arena was).
No Radiohead tonight. BOO
“Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 90 for the weeks May 4th - May 10th, 2008. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu Brainstorm Growing, Ubuntu Finland receives award from Finland’s Minister of Communications, Ubuntu Featured on Italian TV, submit questions for Launchpad podcast, Forums News and Interviews, Ubuntu UK Podcast Episode 5, and much more.” See the whole thing at: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 90
Today, I was given the privelage (???!!!???) of publishing the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. Actually, working on the UWN is a lot of fun. Tedious, sometimes, but due to the camaradarie of the others working on it, very fulfilling. Every so often they add to the things that I can do. And today, it was learning how to publish it, and post it to all the appropriate places. Such are the joys of being a volunteer, that - even retired - I can learn new things.
Enjoy 
edit: getautomatix.com seems to be down. Here is an image of the post: http://img108.imageshack.us/my.php?image=axlivesty5.png
edit part II: getautomatix.com is back up.
Article submitted by Stephan Windmüller. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!
For some people coffee seems to be the only liquid they drink in front of their workstation. But for those who enjoy a cup of tea once in a while, kteatime may be a neat little helper.
I expect every one of them knows this situation: The water just boiled, you put some green tea in your cup, add the water and return to your work. 15 minutes later you realize that you forgot your tea and only dozens of sugar cubes will rescue it. ;)
kteatime helps you to prevent this situation in form of a little timer in the tray.
After selecting the appropriate kind of tea and starting the timer it will display a little circle which turns from red to green. The tooltip informs you how long your tea will need.
When your tea is ready, kteatime informs you with a beep and a little pop-up. You can also specify a command which should be run.
For me kteatime is the only reason besides k3b to keep the KDE libraries installed. Even as a KDE application it just works fine under XFCE.
kteatime is available since Debian Sarge (perhaps even longer) and also part of every version of Ubuntu.
I added some more bling to this blog last night, like a spiffy new CSS theme (based on twocolumncss) and a handful of plugins to improve feed generation, readable and extensionless URIs, and support for comments and trackbacks. Blosxom indeed is such a flexible toolkit for making a blog! :D
That said, I did find one or two quirks in the plugins existing in the blosxom and blosxom-plugins CVS repository; I'll post patches to my git mirrors of these repositories. I'll probably add some more features on some of the plugins I used too (that reminds me, I should put up a list somewhere.)
So some of you will know my trials and tribulations with kdenlive of late. I felt it only fair to post up a summary of what I have learnt. I recently updated my machine to Hardy, from Gutsy. Whilst I was happy with the upgrade overall, and in fact so happy I was that I did a nice fresh install so that I would have a nice clean system. I wrongly assumed that kdenlive would continue to work just as it had. Well it didn’t. I have tried many things including, but not limited to, installing the old debs from gutsy, recompiling the old version, compiling the new version, compiling a version from April, using the debian multimedia debs. In short, I’m stuck. I feel rather stupid, after being interview on Ubuntu-UK podcast and saying how nice kdenlive was. Kdenlive is awesome, I just don’t understand what has happened to it in Hardy. And I know some people are sitting there saying, well just downgrade to Gutsy again. I don’t particularly want to, and I shouldn’t have to.
So I went searching for an alternative. Blender crashed when playing any audio, even after I found a fix for having no audio in it’s video editing engine. I don’t know how I’d do Picture in Picture effects but if someone knows how to fix this I’d be willing to give ita try, except that when I dragged a video clip in with audio, the audio section seemed to be twice as long as the video, so I’m guessing they were out of sync?
OpenMovie editor, just didn’t have the transitions I needed.
Cinelerra crashed and wouldn’t give me a realtime preview of anything
Lives, I can’t even remember what happened there?!
Kino, doesn’t have a multitrack time line, and therefore is pretty useless to me.
In short, I was sure that video editing wasn’t that bad on Linux. Maybe I lured myself into a false sense of security. Kdenlive was great in Gutsy. Sure it crashed a few times, but it seems unusable in Hardy. I’ve seriously been considering buying some kind of software for doing video editing, but that would mean I have to make friends with another OS, and a) I don’t have the money, and b) I don’t really want to do that.
I have very much enjoyed working on progbox.vid, it’s been a lot of fun. I have worked for about 5 hours getting the footage together for episode 3, but at the moment it’s just sitting on my hard drive, gathering fragmentation 
At the moment I’m out of ideas……….and I tell ya what…..it’s soo depressing. I love working with Linux and it’s never ever let me down……but I’m feeling like it’s close now. If someone can help out. Please, please. Please. I’ve been at this for over a week.
And now I sleep…………
I was looking at some of the most popular posts on my blog, as reported by my awstats installation, and I noticed that one of the most popular is a post outlining common keyboard shortcuts for Compiz-Fusion on Ubuntu 7.10. Apparently everybody loves their eye-candy!
I thought, now that Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy” is released, I’d update the basic configuration suggestions and hopefully help a few more of you get your bling-on.
The Compiz-Check Script
Recently I saw a post over at Forlong’s Blog releasing a script that will check your hardware in regards to Compiz support. From the article:
Compiz-Check is a script to test if Compiz is able to run on your system/setup and if not, it will tell you the reason why.
If you’ve had issues with Compiz support in the past I’d suggest running this script and pay attention to the output towards reasons why it appears to be unsupported. In some cases it is simply a matter of poor hardware. In other cases its only a matter of software changes, and may help you get things going.
To download and run the script:
wget http://blogage.de/files/3729/download -O compiz-check
chmod +x compiz-check
./compiz-check
If everything comes out as “OK” you should be able to activate Compiz as seen in the Compiz configuration instructions.
Driver Support With Envy
Another very useful tool I’ve found is the Envy tool, which will install required non-free driver support for nvidia or ATI cards for you. I’ll admit that I’ve only used this occasionally, considering I have intel graphics cards on my main laptops, but in the situations where I have needed it things have worked great.
If you are using Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy” you can try the newer EnvyNG, which is available in the universe repository. How to install EnvyNG on Ubuntu 8.04.
If you are still using a previous version of Ubuntu you can try the legacy version of Envy, instructions here.
Are there any other common tips that I’ve missed? If you know of any other great resources for Compiz support tests, nvidia or ATI driver installation, or basic Compiz tweaks please comment and share with the rest of us.
Today I was reading the news and ran across a link to something called The Evangelical Manifesto. This isn’t from all members of that community, but only those who wrote it. The authors have said the main goal is to get a conversation started among believers as a starting point for some needed reforms in their community (their words, not mine).
In any case, I see this a something that gives me hope.
I would love to see people of faith able to live their beliefs publicly and openly, yet without forcing them on others, just as I would love to see people who do not believe in spiritual things able to live their lives in freedom without forcing others to give up their beliefs. If this manifesto were actually accepted by most Christians, it could have a positive impact in each of these directions.
I have also noticed that it is beginning to give rise to a positive sounding conversation among Jews and Muslims as well.
In a large community, I would like to see room for everyone to feel welcome. Part of what this requires is a maturity within the individuals in a diverse setting. With that maturity comes a sense of security that is not easily shaken by the presence of others who believe differently, making it far less difficult to take offense when someone says or embraces something you do not like.
I wonder what sort of comments I’ll find on this post…I’ve posted similar thoughts before.
© Copyright 2008 Matthew Helmke from Matthew Helmke (dot) Net and licensed cc by-nc-sa.
The Wine project has announced the first release candidate for Wine, the free Windows API for Unix/Unix-like systems (and even non-unix systems like MS Windows itself and ReactOS). The Wine project started in 1993, which makes this release candidate 15 years in the making.
With so many excellent software for Linux systems these days, and the combination of powerful desktop hardware with great free virtualisation suites such as Virtualbox, people often ask me what the actual benefit of having a complete and stable free Windows API is. The ones I could think of is:
That’s the immediate benefits I could think of from having a free, stable Windows API available. There are probably more, and while I think that we probably won’t care about this anymore 10-15 years from now, considering all the next-generation cross-platform programming tools that are available now, I do think that the coming of age of the Wine project will be welcomed by many, and will provide many companies and individuals plenty of short-term benefits while the computing landscape transforms.
It’s been a month since my last blog post. EnvyNG was included in Hardy but it had a few problems and I have worked to fix them. I can’t upload such fixes since Hardy is a stable release. This means that all the updates will have to be tested before they are moved to the stable repositories. This is why I need your help. The more users test the fixes the sooner we can get them into stable.
Special Thanks:
All this wouldn’t have been possible without the amazing support of Martin Pitt, who guided me and helped me with the SRU (Stable Release Update). He has spent a lot of time on EnvyNG, gave me a lot of extremely useful suggestions, therefore I can say that you should really thank Martin for this release.
Timo Aaltonen brought bugs #212648, #186382, #118605 to my attention and suggested the solution. In case you don’t know it already, he’s one of the guys who take care of Ubuntu’s restricted modules. Keep up the good work, Timo!
A stripped down list of Changes:
envyng-core (1.1.1ubuntu15) hardy-proposed; urgency=low
* Fix (LP: #224004) Update NVIDIA compatibility list.
* Fix (LP: #221304) Use the new l-r-m-envy packages now.
* Install -envy packages instead of the ones in main
* Hide FutureWarning caused by python-apt
* xorgconfig2 now ignores sections which are not relevant in xorg.conf
linux-restricted-modules-envy-2.6.24 (2.6.24.500-500.28) hardy-proposed; urgency=low
* Fix (LP: #228649) xorg-driver-fglrx-dev conflicted with
xorg-driver-fglrx
* Sync with the fixes in linux-restricted-modules-2.6.24 (2.6.24.12-17.36)
* nvidia: Do not divert libwfb.so, because if the xserver provides one
it should be used. This caused at least problems with some websites
crashing on certain pages (see #212648), and pink shadows with compiz.
(see: #186382)
* fglrx: Patch authatieventsd.sh to search for xauth files in
/var/run/xauth/. Otherwise the session would freeze on logout for KDM
users. Thanks Ilja Pavkovic! (see: #118605)
* Remove previous diversions of libwfb.so in the postinst. Thanks Timo
Aaltonen.
* Make sure that any previous module of fglrx and nvidia built by DKMS are
removed before the new module is built and installed.
* Use -envy so as not to conflict with Ubuntu's lrm
* Add fglrx driver 8.4
Envyng-core will also fix the problem which prevented the QT interface from working properly.
EnvyNG now relies on its own packages (available in multiverse) therefore you will have to install the driver from EnvyNG again so that the correct packages are installed. If you don’t do it you will keep using Ubuntu’s default restricted modules. Of course DKMS, CUDA, etc. are back in my packages.
The latest release of ATI’s proprietary driver (8.4) is also available and contains a patch which should fix bug #118605 (which doesn’t solve the problem on my computer though).
How to test it:
You will have to enable the hardy-proposed repositories (Go to System/Administration/Software Sources/Updates and select “Proposed Updates (hardy-proposed)”) and upgrade to envyng-core (1.1.1ubuntu15), then launch EnvyNG and install the drivers.
Where to report:
If you have problems with EnvyNG (e.g. if EnvyNG crashes during the installation of the driver) you can report them here.
If you have problems with the drivers which EnvyNG installed you can report them here.
You can simply add a comment to one of the bugreports which you will find at these links if your problems are related to those reports or if you just want to confirm that either EnvyNG or the drivers work well for you (this will really help us).
If you want you can use this model to report:
Used EnvyNG (yes/no):
Worked with Ubuntu’s default restricted modules (yes/no):
Graphic card model:
Problem (solved/otherwise describe the problem):
Example:
If it works for you:
Used EnvyNG: yes
Worked with Ubuntu’s default restricted modules (yes/no): yes
Graphic card model: Geforce 7300GT
Problem: solved
OR if it doesn’t solve the problem
Used EnvyNG: yes
Worked with Ubuntu’s default restricted modules (yes/no): yes
Graphic card model: Geforce 7300GT
Problem: NVIDIA driver 169.12 still freezes my computer when I visit this website…
NOTE:
I’m working on this Bug too.
If you're running Apache2 on a memory-constrained system (like in a
virtual machine,) you may want to choose the prefork MPM to save memory at
the cost of more process forks. However, if you have more than one CPU on that
same machine, you may also want to consider using the threaded worker MPM
and tweak its MaxClients and ThreadsPerChild settings from the default
configuration.
On a typical apache2 installation on a Debian system, the worker MPM
configuration looks like this:
<IfModule mpm_worker_module>
MaxClients 150
MinSpareThreads 25
MaxSpareThreads 75
ThreadsPerChild 25
MaxRequestsPerChild 0
</IfModule>
Using these default settings on a resource-constrained system (say a server with 128MB of RAM but with no swap) would be overkill, and the web server processes will definitely eat up all of that memory, leaving little or no room for even simple CGI scripts.
In my setup, I experimented with tweaking the values above to get apache2 to
serve without eating up too much precious memory. I found that the important
values to consider here are MaxClients, which dictate how many clients can
connect simultaneously to my server, and ThreadsPerChild, which specifies how
many threads of execution can run in a child/worker process. My resulting
config becomes:
<IfModule mpm_worker_module>
MaxClients 15
MinSpareThreads 3
MaxSpareThreads 7
ThreadsPerChild 3
MaxRequestsPerChild 200
</IfModule>
With this setup, I free up a significant amount of RAM from apache2's hold whle maximizing my thread usage in each worker process; at the same time, I avoid keeping each child process for too long by setting a maximum number of requests each worker can serve, preventing the workers to bloat too much when handling CGI.
I also tweaked the KeepAliveTimeout setting to just 2 seconds (instead of the
default 15) so that each worker process can go to the next request quickly and
preventing them from being tied up to a connection for too long. I also set
the Timeout to 30 seconds.
The obvious downside of this "It's always summer in trunk" is that you need to
spend extra efforts to get people
to stabilise, i.e. working in a stabilise-branch rather than in trunk/. It needs more
discipline, and probably puts some extra weight on the shoulders of those who simply
care about good KDE releases. But as we all agree,
SVN sucks for branching and merging. So right now we make it hard for people to work
with different branches (stable/ and trunk/).
It would allow those that need more time to
do their thing to stay in sync with latest features. Basically, it would allow for
different rhythms in the community. As this community grows and becomes more diverse
this might pay off in the end.
New tools are on the horizon as well. Distributed version control systems allow
for a more flexible way of sharing code between peers.
OK, so I just did a historical comparison of git and bzr performance using the Linux source tree. One of the comments I got was “what about Mercurial?” Fair enough. I’ve really never done much with Mercurial because Ubuntu primarily uses bzr and git is what most of the other people I know using a DVCS use. However, there are a lot of projects using Mercurial, Mozilla being probably the most notable one. So, here’s a comparison of bzr and hg. You may want to read my previous post for details on the steps I’m doing.
Repo Initialization:
git bzr hg
0m0.086s 0m0.334s 0m0.137s
1 : 3.88 : 1.59
Add 2.6.0 Linux tree:
git bzr hg
0m14.269s 0m4.852s 0m2.526s
5.65 : 1.92 : 1
Commit 2.6.0 Linux tree:
git bzr hg
0m10.263s 0m43.968s 0m30.890s
1 : 4.28 : 3.01
Diff after copying in 2.6.25.2 Linux tree:
git bzr hg
0m24.425s 0m51.158s 0m37.846s
1 : 2.09 : 1.55
Committing large changes:
git bzr hg
0m28.468s 1m8.627s 0m47.948s
1 : 2.41 : 1.68
Diff after no changes:
git bzr hg
0m0.343s 0m47.448s 0m1.340s
1 : 138 : 3.91
Getting repo status after no changes:
git bzr hg
0m1.230s 0m4.027s 0m1.077s
1.14 : 3.74 : 1
Committing a trivial change:
git bzr hg
0m0.397s 0m9.010s 0m1.913s
1 : 22.7 : 4.82
Repository size (just VCS control directory):
git (gc) bzr (pack) hg
92 MB 112 MB 179 MB
So, Mercurial performs quite well. It generally sits somewhere between git and bzr. Hg runs somewhere around 2.75 times slower than git in the tested operations. Bzr runs around 5 times slower with the notable exception that bzr diff when there are no changes is 138 times slower than git and 35 times slower than Hg.
|
Developer comments
For a better visibility, developer comments now appear on the idea list pages. You can now quickly check the developers feedback on ideas. Expect some updates during the Ubuntu Developer Summit!
|  |
|
Bookmarks
As requested by frandavid100 and many others, it is now possible to bookmark ideas. Just click on the star, and it's bookmarked. You can now easily follow the development of ideas that matters to you!
|  |
|
User infos and stats
The user page has been reworked to provide you much more infos and stats. You can now see the ideas a user posted, which ideas he voted down or up, the latest reactions to ideas he commented, his bookmarks, and some nice stats. And the best idea contributor so far is ... Ubuwu!!
|  |
|
New categories lists
Categories ideas can now be browsed in two more differents ways: latest ideas and most popular this month.
|  |
|
Get rid of bug submissions
Finally, idea can now be marked as "Not an idea" by moderators.This will hopefully prevent further non-ideas, generally bugs, to be submitted on Ubuntu Brainstorm. Please remember that Brainstorm is a place to post ideas only! Any bugreports posted here won't be looked at. To report a bug, please use the Ubuntu bug tracker.
|  |
Can you tell I’m bored and unemployed?!
Yesterday I blogged about the Jabber bot, which, by the way, has more available feeds, including Planet Gnome and Planet Debian (rss-list to get a complete list). Today I decided to keep playing with the Planets and decided to implement an idea Joey had for Planet Debian.
I installed and configured rss2email and set up two different mailing lists; one for Planet Ubuntu and another one for Planet Ubuntu Users.
You can subscribe using the web-based form at: rss2email.ubuntuweblogs.org
Even though messages can be in HTML format, I decided to go with plain text. I would really like to hear someone else’s opinion on which format to use.
If you have any recommendations, please, let me know. Comments are open again, but only if people start behaving. If you’re going to say something stupid please don’t write anything at all.
P.S.: Stephan Hermann, thanks buddy! ;)
Update: rss2email started to freak out, for some unkown reason. It appears to be a problem of feedparser, who unfortunately, has been dead for quite some time. I’ll contact the author to see if he can help me out.
Just the other day we were having a discussion on using the root shell in Ubuntu. Now, remember, the root user account is disabled with no assigned password on a default Ubuntu system so administrative tasks need to be done using the sudo command. For nearly all of the administration you would need sudo will be adequate. There are occasionally those fringe cases where you might require a root shell. Below I have a few alternatives and then, if you must, the correct way of opening a root shell.
For more information please see the RootSudo page on the Ubuntu Community Wiki.
Alternatives To A Root Shell
One of the most common reasons that a user might need a root shell is due to output redirection not working as expecting while using sudo. This can be bypassed fairly easily. Let me outline an example:
sudo echo “foo” > /root/somefile
The above example will not work because the normal user does not have access to write to the root user home directory, and combining the redirection in the command we’ve lost sudo access.
An alternative that will work would look something like this:
echo "foo" | sudo tee /root/somefile
This will echo the output on the console but the tee command ('man tee‘ for more information) will also take that output and write it to the file as expected. Also note that 'tee -a' will work in the same fashion as >>, appending the data to the current file vs overwriting.
The Proper Way To A Root Shell
If you still need a root shell (perhaps you’ve come across a different scenario? perhaps you’re just lazy? perhaps you’re coming from another distribution?) let me outline the proper way to gain a root shell.
DISCLAIMER: This should be avoided if at all possible. It is not suggested to run a root shell on an Ubuntu system. Use at your own risk. See examples above, etc.
sudo -i
The command sudo -i is the equivalent to the 'su -' command. This will properly change to the root user, switch to the root user’s home directory, use his (her?) environment values, etc.
sudo -s
The command sudo -s is the equivalent to the 'su' command. This will change to the root user but will not properly use his (her?) environment values, etc.
The WRONG Way To A Root Shell
Please DO NOT use the following methods to gain root access:
sudo bash, sudo sh, sudo su -, sudo su, sudo -i -u root
If you currently do use these methods this post was written for you!
UPDATE: Based on the feedback in the comments for this post I’ll try to expand the reasoning on *why* the right way is the preferred way.
First of all we need to understand some background information. When a user creates a session there are a number of environment values that are set. To have a look at some of these try this command:
env
This will output a number of details about the current working environment. These environment values may be different for different users. Some of the values are generated by way of the .bashrc file (assuming a bash shell, of course), the .bash_profile, etc. Take a look at the .bashrc in your users home directory and compare it with the .bashrc in root’s home directory.
diff -u ~/.bashrc /root/.bashrc
You should see some differences, and this is just from one of the multiple files that are read during a proper login.
When creating a root shell by using ‘sudo bash‘ you are not incorporating the root environment properly. You are creating a shell with root privileges but the env output is still that of your user. Each user, whether unprivileged or root, should have unique environment settings to truly be that user. This will be the case for ‘sudo bash‘, ‘sudo su‘ and ‘sudo sh‘.
The QA team has vibrant communities around both bug triage and testing. Community contributors and Canonical employees share a range of key positions between them such as bugmaster, QA website developer and Windows-related test lead. This model where one or two team members take primary responsibility for a certain
