Planet HantsLUG

Lenny Backports

After a couple of days I've spotted a few things that don't work so well on Lenny:

gtk-gnutella

gtk-gnutella is a client for a peer-to-peer filesharing system. Unfortunately the version of the client in Lenny dies on startup "This version is too old to connect".

gimp

The graphics program, The Gimp, doesn't show a live preview when carrying out things such as colour desaturation.

Although not an insurmountable problem it is moderately annoying if you do such things often.

So I've placed backported packages online.

I expected to have to backport KVM, and I guess I realised I needed a new kernel to match too. So they're available in the kvm-hosting repository; take the kernel with "birthday" in its name - the other is more minimal and has no USB support, etc.

blog spam

Since I last reset the statistics the blog spam detector has reported, rejected, and refused just over half a million bogus comments.

It can and should do better.

I've been planning on overhauling this for some time; even to the extent of wondering if I can move the XML::RPC service into a C daemon with embedded lua/perl to do the actual analysis.

(Right now the whole service is Perl, but I'm a little suspicious of the XML::RPC library - my daemon dies at times and I don't understand why.)

I'd say "test suggestions welcome", but then I'd have to explain what is already done. If you're curious take a look at the code...

ObSubject: Hot Fuzz

The last few days I’ve spent playing with Eucalyptus - the open source EC2 equivalent.

Several times I’ve been tearing my hair out - particularly with some image issues (why oh why can’t it use an external database rather than the noddy internal one - that way when it’s confused I can fix it up more easily).

Anyhow I’ve reached the point where I can startup an Ubuntu Karmic image and login (yes, it’s taken a while!), now onto the more interesting things such as actually _using_ it. There are still some challenges left - namely looking at this problem and how it may have changed in recent versions of Eucalyptus and Ubuntu Lucid.

As usual, I’ve made copious, detailed notes which will will hopefully help others out, particularly with respect to troubleshooting Eucalyptus. So here is my Eucalyptus HOWTO.

Finally Google Streetview has gone nationwide. I can even see my first house down in Chandlers Ford when I worked at IBM Hursley, ah, fond memories.

I was just telling my dad how I use streetview when visiting new places - I generally take a look the day before, then on the day I just have a map printed out and use that. The fact that the streets seem familiar really help. Of course now I have a shiny android phone with Google maps anyway

What would be really neat is a Streethawk style “accelerated time” drive though for directions. I don’t think you need the whole journey - generally just the end bit (or complicated junctions). In fact, just being able to find the carpark is often the hardest bit - being able to spot “ah, turn left just before the pub” would be excellent. Naturally as augmented reality takes off we’ll be able to look forward to arrows overlayed on our car windscreens (or bike helmets).

When comparing operating systems people tend to roll out the same old reasons every time. I think those of us who use Ubuntu are already aware that we have less viruses than Windows, less malware, it’s free of cost and so on. I’m sure we’ve pointed out plenty of times that you’re legally entitled to copy the CD and even create your own remix.

However I wanted to look at some of the things I’ve done recently on Ubuntu that under Windows would be costly, difficult or impossible. So without further ado here’s my:-

Top ten things you can do with Ubuntu, that you’d find hard, costly, impractical or impossible with Windows, which clearly makes Ubuntu better (in my humble opinion)

Snappy title huh?

Hardware support is better than you think

In the last year I have added the following hardware devices to my system and they were all fully supported out of the box with zero driver installations, no reboots, no 3rd party downloads. Truly plug and play.

• HP Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax – everything worked including the memory card slots and network auto discovery.
• Logitech USB headset – microphone and headphones worked with pulseaudio, and even enabled me to switch music playback dynamically from speakers to headset with the ‘pavucontrol’ utility.
• Bluetooth dongles – never had a single one fail, and I’ve bought some really dirt-cheap devices here, where ordinarily I’d be wary about hardware support.
• Ortek infrared remote control – again, I just plugged in the USB infrared receiver and it was working before I’d put batteries in the remote control.
• 3G dongle – this was surprising but again, plug in the USB dongle and network manager on Ubuntu spotted it and let me use it for internet access. The same happened with my Android based cellphone
• USB Apple Ethernet adapter – amusingly on the bag it comes in it says “Only compatible with Macbook Air”. This runs the internal half of my firewall
• Nintendo Wii USB Ethernet adapter – the list goes on

Of course it’s not perfect, there are still some hardware manufacturers who fail to support Ubuntu, but the point stands, it’s better than most people think. Your mileage may vary, I don’t doubt that, but this is my blog outlining my experience.

Access more than 4GiB RAM on a 32-bit install out of the box

Many 32-bit operating systems including Windows XP, Vista and 7 support a maximum of around 3GiB RAM. With Ubuntu 9.10 the 32-bit install detects how much RAM the machine has and if it’s more than 3GiB you should get a ‘PAE-enabled’ Linux kernel. With no additional work required on your part, you get access to all the RAM in your PC. So you don’t have to switch to 64-bit Ubuntu if you don’t want to, and still access all your RAM. If you’re already running Ubuntu and you upgrade your RAM you can just manually install the above named kernel to get access to all that lovely memory. Om nom nom.

Easily create a bootable, functional operating system on a USB stick

Ubuntu ships with “USB Live USB Creator” which takes an ISO image and creates a bootable USB stick from it. Simply download an Ubuntu ISO image from http://ubuntu.com/download and start the USB creator application on Ubuntu from System -> Administration -> USB Creator.

Tell USB creator where the ISO image is, and it can prepare and write the contents of the ISO image a USB stick of at least 1GB in size. If you have a CD already and not an ISO image then you can use mkisofs to make an ISO image, and then make a USB stick from that, which will save a 700MiB download.

Find out where each file comes from

The typical desktop PC has many thousands of files on the boot disk. Much of this will be your own data in your home directory, but there’s a lot that’s required by the system to boot up and function. Sometimes you might want to know where a file came from.

It may be that you’re a curious user, wanting to know how things got onto your machine, or perhaps you’re diagnosing a problem with an Ubuntu installation. Either way it’s trivially easy to find out where files came from – if you stick to installing packages either from repositories or manually downloaded .deb files.

For example I might be diagnosing a problem with my system – maybe a program is eating CPU – and I want to know where the culprit came from. Knowing which package the process lives in is a good way to find out why you have it (because the name and package documentation may describe it well enough). Also if I wanted to file a bug against that program, I’d need to know what package it’s in. Lets say in this example that my system is sluggish. I might use the System Monitor to identify the process eating up CPU time.

Note: In the above screenshot Skype happens to be idle, but this is how I might discover the process name if it was chewing up my CPU.

I can use the command line to discover where that file is located on the file system using the which command:-

$ which skype
/usr/bin/skype

I can then use the dpkg command to find out which package installed this program:-

$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/skype
skype: /usr/bin/skype

We can even combine the two commands:-

$ dpkg -S `which skype`
skype: /usr/bin/skype

Tip!: If you use zsh instead of bash as your shell you can apparently use ‘=’ instead of ‘which’. So that would look like this: $ dpkg -S =skype. Thanks to Scott James Remnant for that tip via IRC

So this tells us that the ’skype’ package installed the ‘/usr/bin/skype’ program. Not surprising really, but you get the idea. Also worth knowing is dpkg -L which lists all files installed by a package.

Email me when system updates are available

I have an Ubuntu PC behind my TV which I use to watch streamed video via Boxee. More often than not the TV is switched off, and when it’s on it’s showing the Boxee user interface and not the Ubuntu desktop. So I don’t tend to see any update notifications – in fact I don’t want to see them – especially if I’m watching telly.

I’d like to know when there are updates pending on that system, so I have configured it to send me an email when there are updates available. Installing a package called apticron. Just edit /etc/apticron/apticron.conf and maintain the “EMAIL” setting, placing your own email address in the quotes, and remove the # from the start of the line:-

EMAIL="alan@example.com"

Then wait. Each day apticron will run and you’ll get an email telling you what packages need updating.

root@revo1 to me
show details 9 Mar (2 days ago)
apticron report [Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:12:09 +0000]
========================================================================

apticron has detected that some packages need upgrading on:

revo1
[ 127.0.0.1 127.0.1.1 10.10.10.124 ]

The following packages are currently pending an upgrade:

gnome-screensaver 2.28.0-0ubuntu3.5
micromiser-beta 2.1.2-0karmic1

========================================================================

Package Details:

Reading changelogs...
--- Changes for gnome-screensaver ---
gnome-screensaver (2.28.0-0ubuntu3.5) karmic-security; urgency=low

* SECURITY UPDATE: information disclosure via monitor hot-plugging
- debian/patches/11_CVE-2010-0285.patch: make sure to show windows that
are added in src/gs-manager.c.
- CVE-2010-0285
* SECURITY UPDATE: locked screen bypass via monitor hot-plugging
- debian/patches/12_CVE-2010-0422.patch: improve window handling logic
in src/{gs-grab-x11.c,gs-manager.c,gs-window-x11.c}.
- CVE-2010-0422

-- Marc Deslauriers Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:48:56 -0500

--- Changes for micromiser-beta ---
micromiser-beta (2.1.2-0karmic1) unstable; urgency=low

* Initial release

-- btbuilder Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:18:06 -0500
========================================================================

You can perform the upgrade by issuing the command:

aptitude full-upgrade

as root on revo1

--
apticron

Note: You may need to some basic configuration of the mail system on the machine sending the mail. The default mail transfer agent is ‘postfix’ and it can be configured with:-

sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix

Once that is done you can look forward to receiving mail whenever your system needs to be updated with details of the updates required.

Go from blank disk to fully installed in under an hour

On most moderate hardware these days a standard installation of Ubuntu takes around half an hour. Getting all the apps you need for daily use might take a little longer. However if you take note of what apps you use regularly the additional applications can be installed pretty quickly, and in one big hit.

Whenever I’m installing Ubuntu 9.10 whether for myself or friends, there’s a set of things I tend to do post-install that rarely changes from one machine to another. This usually consists of installing audio/video codecs, fonts, updated video driver, flash, java and a few other bits and pieces. Some of that comes from the standard Ubuntu repositories, and some from 3rd party repositories or PPAs. Once the installation of Ubuntu is complete and all updates have been installed there’s just a few lines to paste in and then I leave it to run for a while.


# Add repo for Lifesaver screensaver
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cmsj/lifesaver
# Add repo for chromium daily build
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa
# Update local package lists
sudo apt-get update
# Install all the stuff!
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras \ # Installs flash, codecs, java, fonts
chromium-browser \ # Installs daily build of Chromium
lifesaver \ # Install lifesaver screensaver
gtk-recordmydesktop \ # Install app for recording screencasts
gnome-do \ # Install Gnome-Do
vlc \ # Install VLC media player
openssh-server \ # Install SSH server for remote access
smbfs \ # Install samba client for accessing Windows shares
gwibber # Install microblogging client


Building a list like this can significantly reduce the amount of time taken to get up and running with Ubuntu. What’s especially cool about this is there is no need to visit any third party websites or download external installers. Those applications listed above are the ones I use regularly, you will have your own set of “must have” packages. What are they?

Move a hard disk

Ubuntu has no direct equivalent to “Windows Genuine Advantage” fortunately. This is the tool that seeks to reinforce the Microsoft End User License Agreement for Windows users by causing havoc when system hardware changes. Windows also has quite a fit when you move a hard disk from one system to another as it detects and installs new drivers for all the newly found devices.

Ubuntu does most of its hardware detection automatically at each and every boot-up with no user interaction. As a result you can take a hard disk containing a standard install of Ubuntu from one system and put it in another and expect it to work without much effort. The only time I have had an issue is when I have made some manual configuration changes for the specific hardware in the computer.

For example if you have installed and enabled the nVidia binary driver and configured it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and the target computer doesn’t have an nVidia graphics card then it might fail to start the graphical environment due to it being forced to load the ‘wrong’ driver. In this instance probably the easiest thing to do is backup and remove the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart the machine. At that point it will automatically detect the video hardware and should work much the same as a standard install.

Compiling and packaging applications for older OS releases

With the 6-month release cycle some people can feel left behind if they don’t upgrade to the next release promptly. Ubuntu has a Long Term Support (LTS) release every two years to cater for many users who wish to stay with one stable release. Ubuntu 6.06, 8.04 and the upcoming 10.04 are all LTS releases, with all other releases being non-LTS.

There will always be some users who are not on an LTS release, but have still chosen to stick with their currently working system rather than upgrade. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but it can lead to users wanting a newer version of a package to be ‘backported’ to their release of Ubuntu, whilst the rest of the development community have moved on. There are developers who backport applications from newer releases to older ones, but they don’t backport everything, and there is a finite resource of developers available to do this task. The good news is that with a little time and effort, you can do this yourself.

I recently had a friend who was using Ubuntu 9.04 with an nVidia graphics card using the driver supplied, but he wanted to try the newer driver from Ubuntu 9.10. It’s generally not recommended to take a package built for one version of Ubuntu and just install it on an older release. It may work, but there’s no guarantee, and it can break the system in unpredictable and catastrophic ways.

So I took the ’source’ code from Ubuntu 9.10 and used the tools provided in Ubuntu to rebuild the driver for 9.04. This was a trivial thing to do. The really cool thing is that I’m running Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit and was able to build the driver for Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit on my local PC. Once I was confident that it worked I uploaded it to my launchpad Personal Package Archive (PPA) where it was built for Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

So not only was I able to backport a driver to an older release, but I also built it for an architecture that I don’t even run myself. The observant among you may have noticed that the package I built is not open source – the nVidia driver is proprietary code. Yet I was still able to take the packagable parts and in only a matter of minutes have it rebuilt for another release.

All the commands I used (dch, debuild, pbuilder-dist, dput) are well documented tools for managing, building and uploading Debian packages (.debs) and their contents, and of course, they’re all freely available in the Ubuntu repositories. The Ubuntu Masters of The Universe (MOTU) are a helpful bunch and their pages can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU and on irc in #ubuntu-motu.

Fixing a bug

Whilst it’s easy to dismiss this as an advantage only if you’re a coder, let me first say that I’m not a developer at all. I can just about read someone elses very simple code with some help and google, but I don’t really ever write anything myself. So if I can fix a bug, anyone can!

I recently discovered a very simple bug in the ifdata command which I filed in launchpad – the Ubuntu bug tracker . With a little help from some of the Ubuntu developers – who were keen to help me – I was able to create a patch, test it and submit it to Ubuntu and upstream to Debian. The critical step that really made me consider even trying to look at this bug was that the source was available and easily installable. I was able to identify the package containing the buggy command:-

$ dpkg -S `which ifdata`
moreutils: /usr/bin/ifdata

Once I knew the package name I could download and unpack the source code for that package very easily with one simple command:-

$ apt-get source moreutils
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
NOTICE: 'moreutils' packaging is maintained in the 'Git' version control system at:
git://git.kitenet.net/moreutils
Need to get 37.8kB of source archives.
Get: 1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/universe moreutils 0.35 (dsc) [822B]
Get: 2 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/universe moreutils 0.35 (tar) [37.0kB]
Fetched 37.8kB in 0s (191kB/s)
gpgv: Signature made Tue 05 May 2009 20:19:33 BST using DSA key ID 788A3F4C
gpgv: Can't check signature: public key not found
dpkg-source: warning: failed to verify signature on ./moreutils_0.35.dsc
dpkg-source: info: extracting moreutils in moreutils-0.35
dpkg-source: info: unpacking moreutils_0.35.tar.gz


The tricky part for me is then actually finding the incorrect code in the program. With a lot of help from a good friend and after asking on-line I was able to create a patch. I tested my patch and submitted it to the developers for review. That process is all well documented and I was supported through the process by Ubuntu developers.

All in all it took me a few hours to get this done, spread over a week or so. Not a massive investment of time, and I’ll certainly be quicker next time, now I have learned how to handle bugs like this. Plus I now have a better understanding of the packaging system which helps me with other great things.

Re-install the OS and Applications without losing your data

A default installation of Ubuntu wil place all the operating system files and user data in one partition on the disk called the ‘root partition’ or /, and a second partition for swap. Many users like separating their OS/apps from their user data, so they create a separate partition for /home. This is useful for a number of reasons including allowing you to reinstall the OS on the root partition without touching your data in the /home partition. One little-known feature of the installer on the Live Ubuntu CD is that you can do this – reinstall the OS and not wipe your data – even if you dont have separate partitions for / and /home.

Ok, so you want to reinstall the OS but keep your data in /home. Perhaps you want to upgrade but prefer a clean install, or maybe you’ve played with the system a bit too much and it’s become damaged, and you’d like to quickly ‘reset’ everything with a reinstall. Simply boot from the Live CD and run the installer. When you get to the partitioning step, choose ‘manual partitioning’ which takes you to the more advanced partitioning tool. Select your root partition for installation but don’t tick the “format” checkbox. Continue with the installer as normal.

The installer will recursively delete all files (except those in /home) before copying the new install files onto the disk. Create the same first username during the installer and it will re-use the /home/username folder as your home directory, with all your files intact.

Note: Some user data files (such as mysql databases which are in /var) may be stored in other folders than /home, so you will probably want to back the system up before hand in case there are any files you need to recover.

So those are 10 things I do with Ubuntu that I’d have a hard time doing on Windows. It’s arguable whether you’d need to be able to do some of this stuff, and that I accept.

I realise that there are Windows-based tools that can replicate/emulate some of these tasks, or maybe Windows Vista or 7 can do some of the above tasks. I kinda stopped bothering with Windows after XP, so my knowledge may be lacking. Feel free to correct me in the comments, or suggest what you can’t live without.

At which point I decided the whole star trek comparisons was just pointless.


Although that could explain why I am being deactivated in the summer when the rest of the crew is on holiday.

Google have finally (street)mapped most of the UK. Look at all that blue!

From Land’s End..

..to John o’Groats..

and pretty much everywhere in between.

Including my own back yard! Not found myself on it yet, but have had a great time ‘driving’ around the country. Found anything fun? Leave a comment

I've had this idea in my head for some time that the way people run IT organisations is wrong: they're too fragmented into subject-specific areas. Then the DevOps guys came along and started trying to encourage developers to work with ops people, which is a start. But I'm not satisfied with dev-ops collaboration; I want ops-ops collaboration and I had a good old rant to the Build Doctor about it over an ale or two. Kris Buytaert followed up with a blog post describing some of the tensions he sees.

Splitting your operations people up into teams of DBAs, Systems Administrators, Network Engineers, Storage Engineers and all the other ops disciplines is probably causing you pain. You probably don't even know that it's sickness; you probably just think the symptoms are part of everyday life in IT: glacial progress on projects and issue resolution and a lack of interest in the business goals.

The first symptom is that to get some things done seems to require enormous willpower and dedication. These are simple things that require work by multiple teams. There's a delay while the task crosses the internal borders between each team and they try to understand the request. There are times when people forget what the process is and it doesn't get routed correctly to the next team in the chain. It's unlikely that any of the teams have the inclination or the understanding to test that what the customer wants has actually been done. What they test is that their tiny piece has been done.

It seems as if every time things cross internal borders between teams there's a latency cost while you wait for them to do their thing. There's also a cost of doing business with your colleagues, something familiar to anyone who has been asked to fill out numerous mandatory fields in a form to request that someone sitting within feet of you make a relatively insignificant change. The more team boundaries you cross, the more these delays and costs mount up.

The second symptom is that operational issues can take a long time to resolve. In my experience this is particularly true of performance problems. Maybe your users are complaining about some report taking minutes to complete and you pass the ticket onto your application support people and they say, no, there's nothing wrong with the application, maybe it's the database? So the problem baton is passed to the DBAs and they have a look at the database, declare that the database is OK and ask the network guys to have a look. The network guys mutter about 5% utilisation or something and say the network is fine and they pass it to the sys admins, who mutter something about 20% CPU usage and say everything is fine. And now, probably a day or two later, you have a bunch of technical people who have checked their personal fiefdoms are fine and a bunch of angry users who are still have reports that take too long to run.

Of course, all these experts could be right, but it doesn't matter, because optimising the network, the databases, the storage or the servers in isolation is absolutely useless. The report could be running slow because there's an extra few milliseconds of latency between the server and the database and the report does 10,000 database queries, which return a lot of data and the milliseconds add up to a long delay. Unless someone sits down and works out what is going on, while understanding the whole technology stack, your users are going to have to put up with it.

The third symptom is that none of your operations staff seem to actually care what the business wants to achieve. The human mind is odd. As soon as you put people in discipline-specific teams you seem to be sending them a subtle message that their job is not to meet business needs, but to look after some arbitrary technical resource. Don't, therefore, be surprised if the DBAs care more about databases than the business goals. By putting them into the "DBA team" you're telling them that their job is to look after databases. By implication, the business goals are secondary.

Putting people into a bunch of specialist teams doesn't seem to be the right way to do things. There has to be a better way.

By the time this blog entry goes live I'll be running upon my new machine. The migration process was mostly straightfoward and followed my plan:

• Using my existing desktop system as a PXE server to install Lenny over the network.
• Copied over important directories.
• Restored backups.
• Turned off old machine.

Of course it wasn't that simple in practise, as previously mentioned the whole reason I was looking for a new machine was because the software RAID upon my old desktop was failing - One of the two drives was completely dead.

As I'd feared the second drive failed partway through my migration. But thankfully I'd copied off the important stuff before then, and the backups I have off-site mostly covered everything else. (The things I lost were things I can find again such as ~/Music, ~/Videos. On the one hand they're too large to backup, on the other hand I should probably do it next time as they never change.)

Unfortunately the version of X in Lenny refused to work with the GeForce G210 video card I had. To be more correct using the Vesa driver I could get a picture and a smooth desktop, but when watching videos with xine I got maybe two frames a second. Both the open nv driver and the closed nvidia driver failed to support the card - so I swapped hardware, and I'm now running with the GeForce 7300 GS card from my previous desktop. This allows me to watch videos at full-screen with no issues. (Desktop size is 1600x1200 FWIW).

So now it's just a matter of tweaking the system. I've installed enough to be useful:

• miredo - So I have IPv6 connectivity despite Virgion.
• squid - So that I have a decent cache for surfing.
• pdnsd - So I have a caching nameserver and am not at the whim of Virgin.
• kvm - So I can setup scratch machines for play.

I've still got to setup pbuilder, but that'll be done shortly, and I've installed backported packages such that I can watch youtube videos. I'm currently running firefox from lenny but I expect that will change soon enough - not least because that version fails to support "adblockplus", only "adblock".

Two partitions md0 for /boot and md1 used as LVM, from which I've taken /, /home, etc:

Filesystem                      Size    Used    Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/birthday--vol-root   9.9G     2.8G   6.6G  30% /
/dev/mapper/birthday--vol-home   22G      4.3G  16G    22% /home
/dev/mapper/birthday--vol-music  127G    43G    78G    36% /mnt/music
/dev/md0                         988M    38M    901M    4% /boot
/dev/mapper/birthday--vol-kvm    22G      8.8G  12G    44% /mnt/kvm
/dev/sdg1                        163G    143G   12G    93% /media/disk
skx@birthday:~/hg/blog/data$

 

skx@birthday:~/hg/blog/data$ sudo pvs
[sudo] password for skx:
  PV         VG           Fmt  Attr PSize   PFree
  /dev/md1   birthday-vol lvm2 a-   464.82G 274.51G

Update: Three irritations with this machine:

1. As supplied the BIOS was set with "USB Mouse" and "USB Keyboard" set to "disabled". I had to beg the loan of a keyboard from a neighbour.
2. As supplied the BIOS had virtualisation set to "disabled". Not a huge shock, but it caught me out regardless.
3. As supplied the system had only a single SATA power connector. Annoying given that the motherboard is advertised as having "onboard RAID" and I'd purchased it with two hard drives. Happily I had a spare adaptor to hand.

I'd still recommend Novatech, but the last point had me swearing for a few minutes until I realised I did have a spare adaptor in the house.

ObFilm: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

...7 of 9 assimilates ECS Drone.

And yes I'm so going to get slapped for that one tomorrow. Hard. And I'm going to deserve it!



Says it all really!



Speaking of facebook relationship status (as we were) this made me smile.

The patch I use against Z-Push is now on my wiki, here. It fixes several long standing bugs with Z-Push that haven’t yet made it in to SVN (will they ever?). It also adds the ability to turn debugging on/off, otherwise the debug.txt file grows beyond belief.

I’ve been using Z-Push+Dovecot with my iPhone for some time now and so far, so good. Only issue I sometimes get is when someone sends a stupidly large attachment and PHP dies as it exhausts the maximum allowed memory.

If you have any issues with my patch and need some support, best to direct it at the Z-Push forums and not me. Although feedback is always welcome.

My home server, where this is all served from, was running Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (Sarge). Sarge was first released on 6th of June, 2005. Almost a 5 year run without a reinstall. Pretty good going. Unfortunately the time had come to upgrade as I needed access to MySQL 5.1 and PHP5. I did try an upgrade from Debian 3.1 to 5.0.1 (Lenny) but this didn’t go too well. I over-looked running a hand rolled 2.4 kernel with grsecurity enable. I got in to a situation where I couldn’t run any commands at all. As I didn’t have a CDROM drive connected to the server and couldn’t be bothered taken things apart, I accepted that the installation was horribly broken and decided to bite the bullet.

To cut a long story short, I put in two new hard drives, TFTP booted Ubuntu 9.04 and started a clean install of my server. I took the opportunity to configure everything from scratch again. I didn’t fancy trying to re-use old configs and fixing them up to work with the much newer software packages that had jumped a major version or two. It’s now almost complete. Just a few things to finish off, like a hand rolled kernel with grsecurity etc.

As mentioned, one of the main reasons for the upgrade was to gain access to MySQL 5.1 and PHP5 so I could run webapps such as Wordpress. My old blog which I wrote from the ground up was too cumbersome and why reinvent the wheel? I just don’t have the time anymore. So here it is.

I’ve also got DokuWiki on the go, so I can easily document specific configs. Mainly so I remember what was done and why and also to help others out there. For example, at the moment I’m writing up my Postfix+Dovecot+dspam notes as the documention I found was bitty and not very well explained.

Also to be wikified will be my High Availability Linux iSCSI cluster notes and a patch for z-push to make it work properly (specifically with the iPhone).

Some time ago I bought a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. At the time it was the fastest thing I could buy. It was also the heaviest! With a 17″ 1920×1200 screen and all the toys, it’s a bit of a dead weight. It was always intended to be a desktop replacement, so it mostly sat on my desk all of its life so the weight wasn’t an issue. Having nice big screen was lovely for desktop use and playing the odd game.

It has a 1.8GHz Pentium CPU and an nVidia 6800Go video card. Not long after I bought it, the video card failed. I blogged about the issue and the rubbish Dell Support.

Well, it happened again just after the warranty ran out. Convenient, huh? Exactly the same problem as previously happened – corruption on the screen indicating hardware failure. I contacted Dell and they basically said they couldn’t help, but if I wanted they would sell me a new video card for £200. I was torn and frustrated. I could get a cheap entire laptop for not much more than that, but not one with a decent 3D card and 17″ 1920×1200 display. I was irritated that they couldn’t see that this was a recurrent issue with the machine which made me less inclined to pay more money to them.

Whilst on the phone the guy asked me at the end if I was ’satisfied’ with the support. I said ‘no’ of course which he was surprised at and after trying to argue that I should change my mind, he forwarded me on to his manager. The manager then proceeded to argue that I should change my answer to ‘yes’ because the agent had provided me with the correct answer – which was that he couldn’t help me. I was pretty peeved by this point that someone asked for my opinion of whether the transaction was a success and when I voiced displeasure, was badgered for a further 20 minutes to change my mind. I didn’t.

So since then (October last year) my dell laptop has sat in a drawer, unused, wasted. I have jumped on ebay now and then to try and get hold of a 2nd hand video card – it’s a modular MXM 6800Go – but never bought one. They’re quite rare and command similar prices to what Dell quoted me.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a co-worker about his broken Playstation 3. He’d read threads online about how the fault he has may be a common one, where many online suggest slamming the motherboard in the oven for a bit to ‘reflow’ the solder. Many reports online say this works.

I was in one of those moods yesterday, and dug out the laptop and managed to figure out how to take the thing apart and get the video card out. I wound the oven up to 200 degrees C and put the card in for 9 minutes. I figured I had nothing else to lose. If all those posts online were a massive conspiracy to get thick people such as me to put delicate electronics into a hot oven then they succeeded!

30 minutes later the card was cool enough for me to put it back in the machine. I carefully put it all back together and booted it up. It worked! The video corruption had gone. Well, almost. I was left with one vertical purple line about 3 pixels in from the left, which I can totally live with. In the drive was an old Crunchbang CD which booted up just fine.

So now, have I joined the ranks of the internet crazies who say putting electronics in the oven might cure it? Yup. Don’t do it though, because it might all go horribly wrong and I wouldn’t want you to blame me would I?

I asked last week if anyone knew of any cool podcasts I should subscribe to. I had a few suggested, one of which I’m now hooked on. Hacker Medley is a fairly new podcast started by Alex Graveley and Nat Friedman.

So far they’ve cranked out 3 episodes and in my opinion they’re all great. They’re all quite short but nicely packed with useful geeky information. Many Supreme Overlord geeks will probably say the content isn’t geeky enough, but it’s pitched at the right level for me. I learned plenty from all three episodes which covered quite different subject matters.

The first went into a little detail about the GSM vulnerability that’s been talked about recently, and how one might exploit it in practice with some amusing and alarming suggestions. The second episode gave an introduction to NoSQL which I’d heard about and roughly knew the basics, but didn’t appreciate why they existed or how widely they were used. In the third Nat and Alex talked about Web Sockets which again I had a slim passing knowledge of, but nothing I’d put on my CV.

I listened to all three episodes on the way to work this morning, and was left ‘wanting more’ which is always a good position for a podcaster to be in. The short duration (10-15 mins) and conversational style make for easy listening. The sound quality is great and the content is nicely paced. The presenters clearly know their stuff so can speak authoritatively on the subjects they discuss, which makes for a refreshing change from some podcasts.

I hope they can find time to crank out more episodes and sustain the quality. I’ll certainly be looking out for more of these and prioritise them accordingly in my player queue.

Tomorrow, all being well, I'll receive a new computer.

I've always run Debian unstable upon my desktop in the past, partly because I wanted to have "new stuff" and partly because I needed a Debian unstable system for building Debian packages with.

However I'm strongly tempted to just install Lenny. I use that upon my work desktop and it does me just fine for surfing, building tools, and similar.

I can use pbuilder, sbuildd, or similar to build packages for upload to Debian, and if I want to experiment with new-hotness I can use a KVM guest or two.

Providing the hardware works with Lenny (and I have no reason to believe it won't) then there's no obvious downside I can think of.

The only potential complication will be restoring my backups, it is possible that my firefox databases, and similar things, might not work on older version. Still we shall see.

I plan to install software RAID, and run the system on LVM because quite frankly it rocks. Unless my current system fails in the next 24 hours I can use that to do the installation (My current desktop acts as a TFTP/DHCP/NFS server so I can use it to PXE-boot).

Anyway now I need to go eat food, tidy my desk, and decide what to call the machine .. At the moment the choice is between "march.my.flat" and birthday.my.flat, as my 34th birthday is on March 10th.

ObFilm: 300

 $ wget http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/asm/asm/3.1/asm-3.1.jar
 [...]
 HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden

 $ wget -U "Pointless arseholes" http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/asm/asm/3.1/asm-3.1.jar
 [...]
 HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK

Was there some purpose to this minor irritation?

Last week we went live with a revised EDI process we have with one customer. The original process has been running since I started my job - how to implement it was an interview question - but it's been running on a Windows box. Our IT department wanted to decommission the box so I took the opportunity to port the application from Windows to Linux.

It's still a Perl application but the new one has better logging and configuration. It's been live for a few days and so far it's working perfectly well. It'll be a real shame when it's finally replaced with a vast SAP PI middleware framework, but in the mean time an awful lot of money has flowed through that simple Perl application!

Test

I’ve got my ticket for Farnham Beer Exhibition 2010 (along with 5 others) which takes place (as usual) at Farnham Maltings in Farnham, Surrey, UK. The tickets cost £7 each and there’s a tradition of queuing up to get them when they go on sale at 7AM at the Maltings itself. Yes, that’s 7AM on a Sunday morning. What’s even more bizarre is that in order to get within the first 50 people you need to be there before 5AM!

This was my first time queuing for tickets, and only my second Beerex visit. Last year one of “The Alans” from The Open Learning Centre kindly queued up to get me a ticket and invited me along. This year I am returning the favour. So my alarm went off at 4AM this morning and I duly drove over to Farnham to join the queue. by 4:45 it was about 35 people in length, with a friend of mine at about 10th position. I stopped to chat, but of course queue etiquette means I had to join the back of the queue so couldn’t chat with him for long.

Being British we’re a reserved lot who generally don’t talk to others in queues, on public transport or in a disaster. There’s the general subject matter to start off with including the weather (a British staple), how long until the door opens (this is well known, but we all like to talk about time when we’re in a queue) and appropriate attire (mostly me grumping because I didn’t have a hat).

But the Beerex queue conversation and atmosphere is somewhat different from other queues I’ve been in. People are very friendly, some offering coffee, chocolate and even Guinness (at 5AM!) to other queuers, which takes away the pain of being cold and tired with nowhere to sit for 2+ hours. One guy even unpacked a barbeque from the back of his car, lit up and had a fresh breakfast of various cooked meats – I can’t be more descriptive than that, it was very dark!

Overall it was a cold experience but with a great payoff in the form of beer and a glass for each attendee. I’d probably be happy to do it again, when my turn comes around of course

Now there’s only a month to go and I can look forward to an evening of friends, dodgy music, real ale, cider and perry from my own commemorative half-pint glass as I look around at people I met in a darkened queue and think to myself “I know you from somewhere”.

I finally decided to bite the bullet and install Lucid Alpha 3 to my laptop last night, mainly due to the fact I couldn’t wait to experience the shininess of the new design and the “light” themes. It all went well and it booted, which was a significant improvement from Alpha 2, even if [...]

People often (yes, really) ask me which audio podcasts I listen to and which video ones I watch. I have recently rationalised my list as I migrated from iTunes on the Mac to gPodder on Ubuntu.

I thought now would be a good time to publish the list of what I subscribe to. I’ve attached an OPML file that was exported from gPodder (subscriptions -> export to OPML file). You can just import that OPML into your podcast client, or just open in a text editor and pluck out the interesting URLs and use those instead.

I don’t listen to every episode of every podcast, but usually I get around to most of them at some point. A couple of them might be unsuitable for minors, specifically the ones involving Richard Herring, and Answer Me This! The rest are pretty mainstream. They’re in all sorts of formats – mostly MP3 or M4V because the feeds came originally from when I was using iTunes.

Update: Thanks to Ellwyn I now have synchronised my podcast subscriptions to my.gpodder.org. Clicking the image below will take you to my subscriptions.

I’m interested to know if you have podcasts that you like and you think I might enjoy, let me know in the comments, or if you’re brave, post your OPML file. Make sure to remove any podcasts that you might have paid for, and that have username/passwords in the URL.

Just a quick update.

Matt Griffin has updated the Ubuntu One Music Store FAQ with this gem which is probably one of the single most often asked question.

Q: Ubuntu can’t play MP3s out of the box so how will we play purchased songs?
Canonical has put effort into making the customer experience as effortless as possible. When you visit the Ubuntu One Music Store, it will detect if you have MP3 support installed. If you don’t, the store will install the Fluendo MP3 plugin for GStreamer. The MP3 plugin is distributed worldwide at no charge under a license from Fluendo. An Internet connection is required.

So, we have a free legal mp3 decoder in the repository which semi-automatically installs and makes it easy to play back mp3 files. Whilst this will likely still not please those who ‘need’ their music in Vorbis or FLAC format, it certainly makes it easy to get up and running with the store, and play existing music.

Following the theme changes in Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) development version, the most recent (0.1.5.4) update you will notice that the “window management”  buttons have moved over to the top left, this is a design choice with the most recent changelog for that package sporting “correctly set the wm buttons on the left corner”:

The development version is a wonderful area to try new concepts, and this is something that is being tested.  I tried to use this for nearly an hour and found that my habit was too strong, and it’s not one that I currently wish to change.  I decided to revert it to something i’m used to (the far right), I’m not aware of an easy (graphical) method to do this, which means that we need to pull out some gconf -foo (hurray)!

Lets open gconf via holding ALT+F2 and typing “gconf-editor“.  This will open the application and allow changes to be made. I should warn that fiddling with gconf, and making errors could cause bad things to happen.

In this screenshot I have navigated to “/apps/metacity/general/” and double clicked the “button_layout” option.  On the end of the line (highlighted) there is a “:”.  This colon needs to be moved to the beginning of the line, so it reads - ”:maximize,minimize,close” rather than “maximize,minimize,close:” which it currently reads.

When you press OK, the buttons will automagically move over to the side we are all accustomed to.   However, if this design decision isn’t reverted then you will need to fix this on the rare occasion that the theme is updated.

Here at Bitcube we use KVM as our preferred virtualisation platform. It has the best Linux support and is the standard for all Linux distributions. Whilst it still shows a bit of immaturity at times, there is an upside - rapid development and improvements.

read more

Seriously, I can’t be the only person who does this?

Incoming flash blob (or HTML5 video if you have a decent browser)

Combining this with my compulsion to watch -n 0.1 cat /proc/mdstat, I clearly need help. Is there a support group for people like me?

At least one person thinks so:

Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:07:33 H0600
Subject: SOS [PORTSMOUTH FC}
To: website@darkskills.org.uk
From: James Cox 

Good Day,
         My name is James cox kennedy,the chairman of Cox enterprise & Cox
communications Incorporation.I was reading a news about a football club
in england {PORTSMOUTH FC} and to my understanding it seems the club is 
about to go into administration but i have made some enquiries about the 
club but it seems they are not ready to deal with americans but i am very 
interested in purchasing this  club i have the funds but im just looking 
for a  good british business man/woman that can be my frontperson on this
deal ,we will sign an agreement through our lawyers before i put my money
down on this and everything else will be taking care of,Please get back
to me as soon as possible if you are interested.
James Cox Kennedy.
Cox communications,
Chairman,
ww2.cox.com
speak2cox@gmail.com
+1-404-547-8736
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Kennedy

Billy Fitz is your new SUSU president.

Charlotte Woods is VP Media.

Chris Pidge is the VP Ed and Rep.

Emily Rees is the VP Welfare blokette.

and some really big tall guy is the AU Pres.

Oh yes and after years and years of standing Ron finally won something.

R.O.N. is now WSA President. Whoops!

Once again Dark Side Chaplaincy has the news before susu.org :P

We’ve just released the latest episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast. In this episode we’ve got an exclusive interview with Stuart Langridge about the Ubuntu One Music Store. We also discuss the new branding for Ubuntu, which has just been announced! There’s a whole heap of other stuff in there too – a Command Line Lurve, the “Bit About Ubuntu” and some great feedback. Download it now!

Time for a change..

The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme “Light”. We’ve developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.

Back in October 2008 at the Ubuntu Intrepid Release Party in London we celebrated the release of Ubuntu 8.10. It was a great party with loads of Canonical and Ubuntu Community representation present. In the UK the London release parties are usually an opportunity to kick back, have a beer or five and celebrate. One or two laptops can usually be seen, but most hands are tightly grasping glasses of ale than CD-Rs.

I was lucky enough to have a chat and couple of beers with our sabdfl Mark Shuttleworth. We talked about the latest release, video editors and the default theme. I just want to say:-

Ubuntu 10.04 was my idea.

Ok, not really. One thing that Mark did talk about was the need for long term plans for the desktop look and feel, and how he envisaged the Ubuntu Desktop in the years to come. Being impatient I wanted to know what was going to happen, and I wanted whatever it was to happen now! He didn’t say anything specific about the detail at all. When I pressed him I think his exact words were an incredulous “I’m not telling you that!”.

One thing we discussed in detail was the user experience, and how we (the Ubuntu project) need to raise our game. He was keen on the prospect that users didn’t see Ubuntu as an 2nd class citizen when compared to the alternatives like Windows and OSX. He said he wanted people to actively “choose Ubuntu” because of its features and how beautiful it is. He wants to show new users that we’re better than the competition, rather than people just considering us an also-ran.

I came away from that evening with my head spinning.

I was very, very drunk.

Almost exactly a year later I attended an event setup by BT, IBM and Canonical called Accelerating Enterprise adoption of Open Source Software along with The Alans from The Open Learning Centre. The event itself was a great idea, but didn’t quite get the attendance we’d hoped for.

Photos © Paul Sumner Downey

Mark took part in some open discussion moderated by Glyn Moody, and gave a keynote speech. In it he focussed on cloud computing, the underlying technologies and convincing businesses of it’s advantages. However he introduced the keynote with a little story.

He told of how he’s keeps getting people approach him saying “Love Ubuntu, but dude! brown!?”. This of course caused a ripple of laughter from members of the audience familiar with the brown desktop some of us have come to know and hate love. He continued “more recently my design team have approached me and said ‘Mark! Aubergine!’”. He highlighted that he was wearing an aubergine coloured shirt and then pointed to me (in the front row) and said “popey! shush!” which I thought was amusing, but which also left me perplexed.

Well, with todays announcement that ‘aubergine’ comment makes sense.

The new brand has been announced and documented which shows the significant work that has gone into the Ubuntu brand refresh. Canonical have put together a world-class design team to come up with these changes. It’s no secret that over the last few releases Ubuntu has been changing, with some of those changes making it through to the release already. The new notification system, a brighter default desktop background, changed update manager behaviour and multiple delivered backdrops to choose from are all stepping stones towards something bigger. It’s alll change for the font, logo, colours, brand and textures.

Whilst the fact that Canonical have been working on this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone close to the Ubuntu project, today it’s become public. With the announcement just released we can now talk about the new Ubuntu brand, and start working on integrating the proposed changes.

Canonical reached out to the governance boards of the Ubuntu project to gain feedback and ensure they approached this in the best possible way. Numerous key members of our community were invited to Canonical in London to learn how the decisions had been made, and the current plans for the project. In the past I think Canonical might have just dumped this on the world with no consultation, so this is a great step towards more openness and helps dispel the myth that Canonical don’t engage.

The refresh covers a lot of ground. One of the most notable (prompting this blog title) is the move away from brown to orange. Personally I’ve never really had a problem with the brown. I quite like it in fact. I realise others don’t though, and whilst I’m a little sad to see us move away from the human, earthy colours of our heritage, I’m also happy to embrace the new look and feel. It’s fresh and polished, just as it should be.

The colours from the circle of friends logo will be missed, but some might argue it’s time for the logo to mature. Perhaps the old logo looks too child-like, which has suited Ubuntu for over 5 years now, but now we’re a big 6 year old, it’s time to move on, put away the crayons and grow up.

The new logo at the top of this article has a new typeface called ‘Ubuntu’ and whilst it’s nowhere near finished (last count I think they had about 15 characters done) it will eventually replace the old Ubuntu Title font.

Canonical are looking to get community involvement in helping develop this font – which looks like it will become the default at some point. Clearly the first characters to be done were “ubnt” for Ubuntu and “CANOIL” for the Canonical logo – which borrows a person from the Ubuntu circle of friends and sticks her in the “O”.

Indeed there will need to be a lot of community involvement across the board. From desktop developers to community website contributors and everyone in between.

I’m loving these themes.

What do you think?

Wonderful though Puppet is, it can be frustrating when it spits out an error message which makes no sense.

We could keep all this useful information to ourselves, however we are a caring, sharing company and so we've spilled the beans.

Without further ado, please see our guide to Puppet errors.

In which Ade blogs about how massively complicated and onerous the Ubuntu One Music Store sign up process is when compared to Amazon.

Ade, I’d reply to your blog but I’m not about to sign up to yet another system just to leave a comment, and I’m certainly not giving your blog my twitter password, or encouraging the use of Facebook as a single sign on. Maybe you should look at getting an Ubuntu One account, I hear they are implementing Single Sign on.

“Maybe its just me, but am I missing something?”

You are. You’re missing the bit of my blog that you copied and pasted into yours which reads:-

“Right now the process by which a new user to the Music Store is walked through the sign-up process is in flux. It could be a popup application which prompts for an email address, account name and password, or something embedded within Rhythmbox. Alternatively a browser could be spawned which sends the user to the sign-up process at login.ubuntu.com. Once Ubuntu Lucid releases in April, this process should be sorted out, but for now I’d recommend signing up to Ubuntu single sign on before using the Ubuntu One Music Store.”

In which I explicitly detail that this process isn’t the final one, and that there is still some work to do on the whole sign up process. The reason for the blog post was so that people could be ready for when the open beta of the music store starts – which is apparently real soon now.

Those of us who have already been using Ubuntu One to sync files and notes won’t have to do any of the stuff in that blog post because we’re already set. The store merely requires the file sync setup to be working, and my blog post aims to cover all the bases of making sure that’s the case. Yes it’s long winded, yes it’s comprehensive but as I previously said – its not finished.

What’s also important to note is that your friend Stuart is keen to get this finished and doesn’t have a massive amount of time to do that between now and Lucid release at the end of April. So I thought I’d do the ‘nice’ thing by creating a blog post which gets potential testers (who could be very useful to Stuart in terms of finding bugs) ready to get going with no delay. It also (as mentioned in the blog post) serves to reduce the amount of time Stuart has to spend triaging bugs, marking duplicates and basically ‘not coding’.

Leading on to where you asked “Really?? What a pain in the arse !! Why would anyone prefer the later?”.

You’re sat in a hotel on a business trip, bored with the TV and you left your ipod at home. So you spark up the music store and purchase some music. But disaster, on your trip the laptop gets mashed/lost/stolen and you lose the valuable data, work, emails – and your music. If you’re lucky and have the presence of mind you might be able to get the tracks from Amazon up to a certain number of days after purchase. With Ubuntu One, your music (and potentially your data, address book, email, notes) will all be safely backed up in the cloud. That’s quite a compelling reason to use the store for me.

There’s also the fact that the Rhythmbox plugin is open source, supported by Canonical and in the repositories. Compared with the binary-only 32-bit only Amazon deb which isn’t any of those things.

Of course there’s also the benefit that Ubuntu One gives me file sync as well as music download, plus Tomboy notes sync and whatever else they’re cooking up for the future which helps me to keep all my stuff backed up.

Maybe my blog post wasn’t clear enough, if so, I apologise and hope this one clears it up.

Also hotlinking is bad mmmkay.

Ubuntu has a strong emphasis on the colour brown.  Prior to using Ubuntu, I don’t think I owned any brown clothes, and didn’t particularly like the colour.  However, I’m increasingly aware  that my wardrobe has a prominent focus on brown.  I have a feeling that my wardrobe needs replacing.

I’ve previously blogged about the Ubuntu One Music Store. Since then along with a few others, I’ve been helping privately beta test the store. Very shortly it will enter an open beta phase. In this blog post I’ve outlined some preparation you can do to be ready for the beta test.

In the default install of Ubuntu Lucid, the music store will be found in Rhythmbox. Other music players (such as Banshee and Amarok) may also get the functionality later, but right now the first and only delivered client for the store is the default player, Rhythmbox. To access the store, simply open Rhythmbox and click “Ubuntu One” under “Stores”.

Note the open beta has not started yet but it will do very soon. So right now you won’t see the store in Rhythmbox. In the meantime, you can get yourself ready for testing with the guide below. To do this you’ll either need to be running an up to date Ubuntu Luicd on your machine, or in a virtual machine such as VirtualBox or kvm. Testdrive is a great way to test Lucid on a previous release of Ubuntu.

Before we go on, some important notes:-

• The music store is not finished yet, so if things break, or the store eats your music, your money, your credit card or your cat, then act appropriately
• The look and feel of the store may change between these screenshots and the final release
• Not all music is available in all regions/countries. This is pretty much out of control of Canonical and the Ubuntu project
• The world is carved up into ‘UK’, ‘US’, ‘Germany’, ‘Rest of EU’ (i.e. not UK & Germany) and ‘Rest of World’ (i.e. excluding all those previously mentioned territories)
• It’s possible that purchased tracks may not immediately download/sync to your computer. This may be a bug or due to server-side maintenance during the beta. Patience helps here
• Some of the 5 regional stores (see above) contain some free (of cost) music, so if you would like to test the store without spending any money on tracks, you can do that. Unfortunately this only applies to ‘UK’, ‘US’ and ‘Germany’ store, not ‘Rest of EU’ or ‘Rest of World’
• Bugs can be filed against the Rhythmbox plugin or Ubuntu One Client tools as appropriate
• I’ve shown screenshots of the Ubuntu File Sync service however note that you will not be able to see your music through that web interface. I have shown these only to illustrate getting file sync working which is a pre-requisite for using the music store

So with that said, if you’re unhappy about any of the above, I’d recommend you don’t use the store until Ubuntu 10.04 is released. If you’re okay with testing, filing bugs and don’t mind if the store breaks (which it could) during the period leading up to release, then crack on!

These are the steps I went through to prepare for the Ubuntu One Music Store Beta. As with the store itself, some of these screens may change between now and release time. The process by which a computer is authorised will certainly change, but the main bulk of this is valid and still will after the release.

Ubuntu One Account

In order to buy stuff in the store you need an Ubuntu One account. You can connect to Ubuntu One using an Ubuntu single sign on account (confusingly).

Historically this was your Launchpad.net account, so if you already have one of those, you can use that. New users who have not previously signed up at Launchpad.net or login.ubuntu.com will need to create a new account.

Right now the process by which a new user to the Music Store is walked through the sign-up process is in flux. It could be a popup application which prompts for an email address, account name and password, or something embedded within Rhythmbox. Alternatively a browser could be spawned which sends the user to the sign-up process at login.ubuntu.com. Once Ubuntu Lucid releases in April, this process should be sorted out, but for now I’d recommend signing up to Ubuntu single sign on before using the Ubuntu One Music Store.

You need to confirm your email address by clicking the link in the mail.

Clicking the link takes you back to the Ubuntu One sign up process.

Click continue.

Enable File Sync

The second step which needs to be setup before the Music Store works is file syncing with Ubuntu One. Music purchased in the store is delivered directly to your Ubuntu One synchronised folders, so this has to be working or you’ll never actually get the music you buy. Configuring Ubuntu One is detailed at one.ubuntu.com/support/installation although for Lucid there’s very little to do other than activate as the components are pre-installed. That documentation should be updated before Lucid is released.

In these screenshots I subscribed to the free 2G plan. The screens are slightly different if you choose the 50G paid plan.

Login using your Ubuntu One (or old migrated Launchpad.net) account.

Confirm you agree to the terms and conditions..

Now you’re signed up to Ubuntu One.

At this point there are no files in the ~/Ubuntu One/ folder, in fact it doesn’t even exist yet..

Activate a Computer

To enable the file sync on this laptop I needed to add/authorise this computer. When Lucid releases there should be a graphical ‘control panel’ for Ubuntu One which allows you to press a button to connect a machine to your Ubuntu One account. You can of course connect multiple machines to one account in order to keep them all in sync. That tool doesn’t exist yet, so I had to run the following to trigger the process below.

u1sdtool -c

Once the system has been connected to Ubuntu One once, there is a ‘Connect’ icon in nautilus file browser, but in a typical chicken/egg problem, that ‘Connect’ button doesn’t appear until you have connected at least once.

Pretty soon after that the ~/Ubuntu One/ folder should appear.

Which is of course initially empty. There is another special folder in which stuff appears that has been shared with you by other people. It too is initially empty.

Testing File Sync

It’s a very good idea to test the file syncing service, because if it doesn’t work the music won’t download, no matter what else you do. It could save time during bug triage if users ensure this file sync works before filing bugs in the music store.

A simple test of the file sync is to create a folder or upload a file via the web interface and wait for them to appear in your ~/Ubuntu One/ folder on the local machine. Alternatively create files on your local PC in ~/Ubuntu One/ and go to the website to see if they appear.

Here I’ve created a file on my computer in the ~/Ubuntu One/ folder

If I then go to the Ubuntu One web interface I can see the file has arrived.

So at this point you’re ready to test the Ubuntu One Music Store. All you need now is some disk space and some taste in music. Neither of which I can help with – as my friends and family can confirm.

As previously mentioned I've switched my webserving over to a mixture of apache2 & thttpd.

I chose thttpd as it is simple to configure for my needs, and supports the execution of CGI scripts. Some of the other simple webservers available to Debian's current stable release (such as nginx) don't support CGI so they were ruled out.

Of course prior to choosing thttpd I looked at the state of the Debian package. Distressingly the package has no current maintainer and has several bugs open, including some that have been open for several years without comment.

I've just made my second upload fixing a couple of bugs, including ones that I could see affecting myself, but now I'm done with it.

In conclusion:

• I've fixed a few bugs.
• I suspect that many of the open bugs are 100% unreproducable and should be closed after checking with the submitter.
• The package could do with a volunteer to maintain it.

On the one hand it is "just another webserver", on the other hand it is genuinely small, simple to configure, and has a couple of compelling features (CGI + throttling).

So. Go. Adopt. Maintain.

Pretty please...

ObFilm: Red Sonia

Recently I was flirting with the idea of creating an online game, but I got distracted by wondering how to make the back-end more flexible.

To communicate the state of the game to N connected clients I figured I needed some kind of server which would accept "join"/"quit" requests and then make changes available.

To that end I came up with the idea that a client would make requests via HTTP such as:

http://example.com/server/game/chess/join

This would regard the originating client as part of a new chess game, for example, and return a UID identifying the "game channel".

http://example.com/server/changes/1-2-3-4

This will retrieve a list of all events which had occurred in the game which had not already been sent.

(Here 1-2-3-4 is obviously the UID previously allocated.)

http://example.com/server/submit/1-2-3-4/move

This would submit the move "move" to the server.

After mulling this over for a while it seemed like a great reusable solution, I'd make an initial "join" request, then repeated polling with the allocated UID would allow game moves to be observed. All using JSON over HTTP as the transport.

It was only this morning that I realised I'd have saved a lot of time if I'd just proxied requests to a private IRC server, as the functionality is essentially the same.

Still I'm sure this pattern of "join"/"poll"/"quit" could be useful for a lot of dynamic websites, even in the non-gaming world. So although the idea was mostly shelved it was an interesting thing to have experimented with.

D'oh.

ObFilm: Conan The Barbarian

This is just a short blog post to note that Matt Griffin has updated the FAQ for the Ubuntu One Music Store that I previously blogged about.

Most notable is probably this update:-

There will be no embedded ‘watermarks’ of any kind on the MP3s in the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Which is of course good news. This came up in a recent bug filed against the Ubuntu Community and later the Rhythmbox Plugin. In it Ryan expressed concern that music files purchased in the store might be tagged or watermarked. This would be to enable back-tracking should the files be copied contrary to the license under which they were distributed.

This pre-dates the edit Matt made to the wiki, so at the time of the bug comment nobody really knew the answer. I asked around a few fellow beta testers to see if we could compare songs and identify if the files were indeed watermarked. The theory being we could each use a tool like sha1sum to generate a fingerprint of the file and see if they were the same or not.

Luckily I found one beta tester online and he provided me with a sha1sum of a file he’d bought from the store. Unfortunately there was a bug in the store today which prevented me from buying the same track! Foiled! I did however find a friend on IRC who wasn’t a beta-tester of the Ubuntu store, but was a 7digital store customer. I convinced her to buy a song from 7digital that I already had purchased from the Ubuntu One store.

As it turned out she didn’t need much convincing (even refusing my offer to pay her back the £0.59 in costs ) and bought an Amy MacDonald song which we compared sha1sums on. As you can see in my comment on the bug report (reproduced below), the files seem identical.

20:54:17 @popey> alan@wopr:~/.ubuntuone/Purchased from Ubuntu One$ sha1sum Amy\ MacDonald/This\ Is\ The\ Life/This\ Is\ The\ Life.mp3
20:54:17 @popey> b576a6695cce410521c862301f74deeb3ced22e4 Amy MacDonald/This Is The Life/This Is The Life.mp3
20:59:38 +Dee> [dee@jane Dropbox]$ sha1sum Amy\ MacDonald\ -\ This\ Is\ The\ Life.mp3
20:59:38 +Dee> b576a6695cce410521c862301f74deeb3ced22e4 Amy MacDonald - This Is The Life.mp3

We’ll set aside the statistical unlikely-hood that both files were fingerprinted but still came up with the same sh1sum. While friends still pointed out to me that the sample size of one wasn’t exactly comprehensive proof, now we have Matts wiki edit I think that concern can be put to bed.