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Daniel Holbach: Holidays
 Visa, finally got it Tuesday next week is my last working day and I’ll be gone for three weeks, without laptop. If you have anything really urgent, talk to any members of my team, Michael or Ara, they know how to get in touch with me. I’m very much looking forward to this one and happy to meet Mehdi of the LoCo team there! I’ll be back on 29th September. Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Ralph Janke: Ubuntu Beta is released
The Ubuntu Beta releases are out and need testing. For Kubuntu users the announcement is here. Testing can easily be done with testdrive. Please help to make the final release better by testing this beta! Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Launchpad News: Code hosting maintenance Friday, September 3
Launchpad code hosting will be offline Friday between 8.00 and 9.30 UTC for unexpected hardware maintenance. This means you won’t be able to browse, push to, pull from or otherwise access code hosted on Launchpad. Going offline: 8.00 UTC 3rd September 2010 Expected back: 9.30 UTC 3rd September 2010 Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Jorge Castro: Help us support StackExchange sites in Gwibber
Now that the OAuth apocalypse is over and my gwibber works again I had a thought of how to integrate with more services. Wouldn't it be neat if we stretched out to other services, like say ... the new Ubuntu Stack Exchange (I suck at GIMP, but you get the idea):
Since we do multiple columns you could do your favorite tags, unanswered questions, hot questions, whatever you like. Just like I do on my phone with Droidstack. You can just add whichever SE network site you wanted! I've already chatted with Ryan Paul about it and he'd be happy to review a patch since him and Ken are busy with smashing bugs. If you're interested in this kind of feature please grab the bug and rock it! https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/gwibber/+bug/629826 Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Ubuntu Server blog: Server Team 20100831 meeting minutes
Here are the meeting minutes. They can also be found
        Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Amber Graner: Call For Ubuntu App Developer Week Sessions
Ubuntu App Developer Week (formally Opportunistic Developer Week) was announced on The Fridge earlier this week. "What is Ubuntu App Developer Week?" Ubuntu App Developer Week is a week of sessions aimed at enabling and inspiring developers to write applications that scratch their itches. Our goal is to give all attendees a taste of the wide variety of tools on the Ubuntu platform that can be used to create awesome applications, and to showcase some applications that have been created and explain how they were put together. "When is Ubuntu App Developer Week?" Ubuntu App Developer Week is scheduled for Monday, September 27th through Friday, October 1st, 2010. "Where will Ubuntu App Developer Week take place?" Ubuntu App Developer Week will take place in We are now looking for Sessions and Session Leaders. Do you have suggestions for a session or would you or someone you know like to lead a session for Ubuntu App Developer Week? We’re currently putting together the timetable for Ubuntu App Developer Week at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuAppDeveloperWeek/Timetable If you’re interested in helping others write good code, showcase interesting tools you use, share advice and answer questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Daniel Holbach (daniel.holbach AT ubuntu DOT com) or me (akgraner AT Ubuntu DOT com) and we’ll sort out a slot for you. More information on Ubuntu App Developer Week Can be found at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuAppDeveloperWeek Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Eric Hammond: Improving Security on EC2 With AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
A few hours ago, Amazon launched a public preview of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) which is a powerful feature if you have a number of developers who need to access and to manage resources for an AWS account. A unique IAM user can be created for each developer and specific permissions can be doled out as needed. You can also create IAM users for system functions, dramatically increasing the security of your AWS account in the event a server is compromised. That benefit is the focus of this article using an example frequently cited by EC2 users: Automating EBS snapshots on a local EC2 instance without putting the keys to your AWS kingdom on the file system. Before the release of AWS IAM, if you wanted to create EBS snapshots in a local cron job on an EC2 instance, you needed to put the master AWS credentials in the file system on that instance. If those AWS credentials were compromised, the attacker could perform all sorts of havoc with resources in your AWS account and charges to your credit card. With the launch of AWS IAM, we can create a system IAM user with its own AWS keys and all it is allowed to do is… create EBS snapshots! These keys are placed on the instance and used in the snapshot cron job. Now, an attacker can do very little damage with those keys if they are compromised, and we all feel much safer. The AWS IAM documentation is required reading and a great reference. This article is only intended to serve as a practical introduction to one simple application of IAM. These instructions assume you are running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) on both your local system and on Amazon EC2. Adjust as appropriate for other distributions and releases. IAM InstallationUbuntu does not yet have an official software package for AWS IAM, so we need to download the IAM command line toolkit from Amazon. This can be done on any machine including your local desktop. The IAM command line tools require Java so we need to make sure that is installed as well. Eventually, you’ll want to install this software somewhere more permanent, but for this demo, we’ll just use it from a subdirectory. The AWS IAM tools require you to save your AWS account’s main access
key id and AWS secret access key in yet another file format. Create
this AWS credential file as, say, Note: The above is the sample content of a file you are creating, and not shell commands to run. Protect the above file and set an environment variable to tell IAM where to find it: We can now use the iam-* command line tools to create and manage AWS IAM users, groups, and policies. Create IAM UserHow you manage your users and groups is sure to be a personal preference that is fine tuned over time, but for the purposes of this demo, I’ll propose that for tracking purposes we put non-human users into a new group named “system”. Create the You will want to have this snapshotter keys file on the EC2 instance, so copy it there: Allow IAM user There’s a lot of preparatory and other commands in this article, but
take a second to focus on the fact that the core, functional steps
are simply the Create EBS SnapshotFor the purposes of this demo, we’ll assume you’re using the
Make sure you have the latest Create the snapshot on the EC2 instance. Adjust options to fit your local EBS volume mount points and MySQL database setup. Follow similar steps to create users and set policies for other system activities you perform on your EC2 instances. IAM can control access to many different AWS resource types, API calls, specific resources, and has even more fine tuned control parameters including time-based restrictions. The release of AWS Identity and Access Management alleviates one of the biggest concerns security-conscious folks used to have when they started using AWS with a single key that gave complete access and control over all resources. Now the control is entirely in your hands. CleanupIf you have followed the steps in this demo and you wish to undo most of what was done, here are some steps for reference. Delete the IAM user and the IAM group: Wipe the credentials and keys files and remove the downloaded and unzipped IAM command line toolkit: Make sure to wipe the snapshotter key file on the remote EC2 instance as well. SupportIf you’re looking for help with AWS IAM, there is a new AWS IAM forum dedicated to the topic. Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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The Fridge: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 10.10 beta. Codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”, 10.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop Edition and Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition continue the trend of ever-faster boot speeds, with improved startup times and a smoother, streamlined boot experience. Ubuntu 10.10 Server Edition provides even better integration of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, with its install time cloud setup. Ubuntu 10.10 Server for UEC and EC2 brings the power and stability of the Ubuntu Server Edition to cloud computing, whether you’re using Amazon EC2 or your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. The Ubuntu 10.10 family of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu, also reach beta status today. Ubuntu Desktop features The GNOME base platform has been updated to the current 2.31 versions. This includes the new dconf and gsettings API. Evolution was updated to the 2.30.2 version, which operates much faster than the version in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Shotwell has replaced F-Spot as the default photo manager. Gwibber has been updated to support the recent change in Twitter’s authentication system, as well as changing the back end storage to improve performance. The Sound Indicator has been enhanced to include music player controls. The Ubuntu Software Center has an updated look and feel, including the new “Featured” and “What’s New” views for showcasing applications, and an improved package description view. You can now easily access your package installation history too. New Design: The boot process is cleaner and faster. New themes, new icons, and new wallpaper bring a dramatically updated look and feel to Ubuntu. Ubuntu One: Polished desktop integration with new sign up and sign in process. Tighter integration with Ubuntu SSO. Nautilus enhancements for managing folder sync preferences. Faster file sync speed. Share links to music within the Ubuntu One Music Store. Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta for details. Ubuntu Server features Cloud computing: The configurable initialization process for Ubuntu Server cloud images (cloud-init) has gained new features in Maverick Beta, including pluggable hooks, ebsmount, ext4 support, and new stanzas in the cloud-config format. Cloud image instances can now manage their own kernel and upgrade kernels with apt. This is done by using pv-grub, provided by Amazon. Ubuntu Netbook features The new Unity interface is now the default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. It includes the global menu bar. The date/time indicator now has a real calendar widget. The standard photo management application has been switched to Shotwell. Kubuntu features For Maverick, Kubuntu have merged the Desktop and Netbook images into one. Ubiquity, Kubuntu’s installer, will detect the screen size before the install and use either the Plasma Desktop workplace or the Plasma Netbook workplace as needed. Users will be able to switch between the two in System Settings. Plasma Netbook now sports the Global Menu by default. The standard web browser is now Rekonq, a KDE browser based on Qt Webkit. Bluedevil has become the default bluetooth stack. Pulseaudio is the default sound server. KPackageKit updates bring a faster backend and an updated UI that provides a new Categories page, and new features such as a backup/restore tool for the list of installed packages. Kubuntu’s installer (Ubiquity) now has updated look and layout. KDE Platform, Workspaces, and Applications were updated to 4.5.0 (the recently released 4.5.1 update could not be integrated before beta release and will arrive shortly). Qt was updated to the current 4.7 beta release. See https://wiki.kubuntu.org/MaverickMeerkat/Beta/Kubuntu for more details. Xubuntu features Xfce4 was updated to the current 4.6.2 release. New default applications include: Parole (Xfce4 Media Player), replacing Totem Movie Player; Xfburn (Xfce4 CD/DVD burning tool), replacing Brasero; and xfce4-taskmanager (Xfce4 process manager), replacing Gnome-Task-Manager. Edubuntu features Edubuntu now includes Gnome Nanny, which provides parental controls in Edubuntu. There is new wallpaper included (periodic table breakout). In addition, an OEM Install mode is now available. For those interested in learning more, there’s a new web site as well. Ubuntu Studio features In this release, Ubuntu Studio has better integration between Pulse Audio and JACK. JACK and Pulse Audio can now be used side-by-side if they are using different audio interfaces. If they are trying to use the same audio interface, JACK will take precedent. The network connections can now be configured with gnome-network-admin. Mythbuntu features In this release, Mythbuntu has updated to MythTV 0.23.1. There is also a new backup and restore tool. Other
The full release notes can be found at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta About Ubuntu Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away. Professional technical support is available from Canonical Limited and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit http://www.ubuntu.com/support To Get Ubuntu 10.10 Beta To upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 Beta from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MaverickUpgrades Or, download Ubuntu 10.10 Beta; The following link will direct you to a download location near you: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/download Or, choose the mirror closest to you: Africa:
Asia:
Europe:
North America:
Oceania/Australia:
South America:
Please download using Bittorrent if possible. The final version of Ubuntu 10.10 is expected to be released in October 2010. Feedback and Participation If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/ Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help turn this Beta into the best release of Ubuntu ever. Please note that, where possible, we prefer that bugs be reported using the tools provided, rather than by visiting Launchpad directly. Instructions can be found at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but are not sure, first try asking on the #ubuntu IRC channel on freenode, on the Ubuntu Users mailing list, or on the Ubuntu forums: http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users More Information You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this preview release on our website, IRC channel and wiki. If you are new to Ubuntu, please visit: To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at: http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce [Discuss Ubuntu 10.10 Beta on the Forum] Originally posted to theubuntu-announce mailing list by Robbie Williamson on Thu Sep 2 23:50:39 BST 2010. Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Canonical Design Team: Just an average day in 2014
While I’m not convinced that Sweden will actually win the world cup there’s lots to like about this “five minutes into the future” look at how we might share content and interact with devices in a few years time. I’m setting a reminder in my calendar. I’ll catch you in 5 years, see if we made it There are more videos on the http://www.youtube.com/user/TATMobileUI. Discovered via the delightful Steve Clayton’s blog.         Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Duncan McGreggor: HCI at Canonical
uTouch Back in March, I blogged about future possibilities (in a blue-sky sense) of multi-touch, mentioning the project management I was doing for MT hardware kernel driver support in Lucid (and then proceeding to dive into the deep end of speculation). It's now an Ubuntu cycle later, and holy crap... I'm having a hard time finding the words. I think the blog title says it all. But I'll try to elaborate :-) Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably noticed the big announcements we made a few weeks ago:
There has been a lot of discussion in blog posts, mail lists, IRC (#ubuntu-touch on freenode.net), Launchpad bugs and merge proposals, etc., so much so that touchscreens now pursue me feverishly when I sleep at night. I'm really not interested in writing more of the same :-) As such, I want to mix things up a bit... HCI Remixed I've been reading an amazing anthology of essays on human-computer interaction. I still haven't finished the book (yeah, I've got about 10 in-progress titles on my nightstand), but am relishing every word in this particular collection. The book is HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community. While doing some research at the beginning of the Maverick development cycle, I came across HCI Remixed at the local library -- the title intrigued me and I couldn't resist. Weeks later, after having maxed out the number of times I could renew the book, I just purchased it -- I simply couldn't get enough of the book. Every essay I'd read up to that point was fantastic; each one provided volumes of information, experiences, insights, ideas for follow-up, etc. Whenever I finished one essay, I spent days and sometimes weeks reading up on references, pondering the past and future of human-computer interaction. Due to the unusual nature of the book, describing it is surprisingly difficult. That being said, the MIT Press page gives you a great taste: Over almost three decades, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has produced a rich and varied literature. Although the focus of attention today is naturally on new work, older contributions that played a role in shaping the trajectory and character of the field have much to tell us. The contributors to HCI Remixed were asked to reflect on a single work at least ten years old that influenced their approach to HCI. The result is this collection of fifty-one short, engaging, and idiosyncratic essays, reflections on a range of works in a variety of forms that chart the emergence of a new field.If you're into HCI, learning from others, and discovering new sources of inspiration for your own work, this is simply a must-have book :-) A Small Piece of History By the time I checked the book out of the Golden public library, it was May and we had begun building the MT team. By July -- once it became clear how astounding the team's work was -- I realized that in 10 or 20 years I could very well be writing an article about Henrik, Chase, Stephen, Ikbel, and Rafi. Much like those in the book, I could be sharing the conversations I'd had with Stéphane Chatty, Mark Shuttleworth, Neil Patel, David Siegel, and John Lea. And that's only the crew which which I was collaborating or discussing directly. There are a lot of folks who've been working very hard on multi-touch infrastructure solutions and exploring ways of integrating these for several years (e.g., Peter Hutterer and Carlos Garnacho). Though many foundations have been laid, as of yet (to the best of my knowledge), no Linux distribution has released a multi-touch stack that integrated gestures in a unified manner across everything from applications to window managers and beyond. This was something that Mark wanted us to provide to the open source world. In this spirit, the multitouch team hasn't just hacked things together to get a product out in time. A lot of generative, creative thought and care has gone into uTouch. A lot of original problem solving has taken place. Physics PhDs, kernel hackers, X.org hackers, driver creators, application integrators, toolkit gurus -- all of this knowledge was concentrated, applied, and used to distill a first approximation of what a gesture stack in Linux could look like, using the latest available technology and methodologies. To be honest, we weren't really sure we could pull it off. There was a very good chance we could have failed at our task, quietly chalking up the loss as a lesson learned. Now that we've managed to shape these ideas into actual software, taken the threads of dreams and woven something real, we are thrilled to be engaging with others to see where all of us can take multi-touch and gestures from here. Thanks to expert input from the wider open source community, we're already looking at ways in which we can improve upon the first version, ways of bringing new ideas and experiences to developers and users of multi-touch hardware running Linux. Things are only just warming up, and the greatest contributions have yet to be made. Every single person in the community has before them a world of possibilities for getting involved and creating the future human-computer interfaces for the free and open source world in the coming weeks and months. These are indeed exciting times.  Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Alberto Milone: How to set up "Web CoopVoce" (3G) APN on Android
I’m a satisfied owner of a Nexus One (loving Android Froyo 2.2) and today I decided to try a (volume based) 3G plan by CoopVoce. There are 2 options available: either buy a 3G usb key or simply use 3G directly from your phone. In the former case (which I wasn’t interested in) the usb key works with Linux and you can even download a QT based dashboard which is supposed to set up the connection for you and it works on Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. While this definitely was a pleasant surprise, the lack of instructions to configure your phone wasn’t as pleasant. The website suggests to contact customer service so that they can provide you with the right configuration for your phone (but it seems that they’re not ready for Android phones). Long story short, I decided to download the dashboard instead and explore its contents hoping to find something useful to set up the APN myself. My research was successful and I thought I would share my findings with you. Enter the “Settings” tool, then select “Wireless & network settings” -> “Mobile networks” -> “Access Point Names” and add a new profile with “New APN”. Fill in the fields below as follows:
Note: I’m not really sure if MCC and MNC are actually useful. Leave the rest unset. Save and select your new profile, then go back to the Mobile networks settings screen and select “Data enabled” to turn on your 3G connection. Since this is mostly aimed at people who live in Italy, here’s the Italian translation: Per configurare una connessione 3G con CoopVoce (web 500 mega nel mio caso) su di un telefonino con Android, entrare nel pannello delle impostazioni e scegliere la schermata di configurazione delle reti (“Wireless e reti”), poi quella per le “Reti mobili” e in seguito quella dei punti d’accesso (“Nomi punti di accesso”). Aggiungere un nuovo APN e riempire i campi come segue:
Nota: non sono sicuro dell’utilità di MCC e MNC. Lasciare il resto non settato. Salvare e selezionare il nuovo profilo e infine tornare alla schermata di impostazione delle reti mobili e attivare la connessione 3G abilitando il traffico dati (opzione “Dati attivati”). Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Stephan Hermann: Just in case you are a HP BL4* G6/7 user
and you have an HP NC 511i Emulex Dual Port 10GB Ethernet/ISCSI/FoE Adapter on board,it works with Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick (Daily from Yesterday). The only bug, which is now known as LP bug #628776, is that in the installer kernel module udeb packages the be2{net,scsi} modules are missing. When you continue the installation without network Ubuntu Lucid/Maverick comes up and detects this card and loads the kernel modules.  Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Shane Fagan: How to turn Ubuntu into a Gaming platform?
I was thinking about this issue a lot. Games have a hard time on Linux with multiple sound architectures, different package management systems and not many ways to deploy their app easily. So the answers to these are use pulse audio, make a few different packages for different distros (which is expensive) or just deploy it on Ubuntu (which would piss off other distros) and deploying it at the moment is hosting it on your own website as a download. In maverick we are getting a marketplace in the software center to sort out the deploying part and i presume thats going to have a centralized payment system so thats good for the game developers. My idea is that we can take this further. My idea is make something like like battle.net or steam (kinda). Ok for those who don’t know steam is the payment management and distribution system for games and battle.net is just a payment management system for blizzard’s games. So we have an SSO and now a marketplace, distribution and centralized payment system for maverick. Why not expose some info to games developers? The info that is needed depends on the game but if its something like WoW you would need the account info and if they paid for the game to log you in. The idea is kind of a win win situation, the user wins because there is no login and its a simple system to handle everything for them and the developer wins because he doesn’t have to code a complex login system and he gets the payments handled too. Thoughts? Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Belinda Lopez: Ubuntu in Education
Wow – I’ve already been amazed at learning about some of the great things happening with Ubuntu in Education. At every level, Ubuntu in schools and learning just makes sense. Yesterday I was pointed to this great map showing school deployments in Finland: http://bit.ly/amFiOO . Greece is right behind them and lots of schools in the US are reporting success using Ubuntu as well. The work is being done by both volunteers and Solution Providers. The Andalusia deployment of over 200,000 systems is well documented and Amtron deploying 28,000 in Assam in northern India and Oxford Archaeology and Johns Hopikins and Oakland University and the list continues to grow. Next week I’m visiting a local school in my backyard of Houston, TX that has migrated to Ubuntu using Moodle and other open source SIS (Student Information Systems). The project lead is also the volunteer coordinator of the Moodle Core Contrib team. I had to travel out of town to meet him and learn about this great project. I’m really glad I did! Next up, the Edubuntu team is still being driven by the unstoppable Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) and everyone is welcome to stop into #edubuntu and join the weekly meetings on Tuesdays to add your voice. Who am I? I’m Dinda! I came into the world of open source and Ubuntu some five years ago b/c of my interests in Education and all things learning. You might have seen me around various projects but now I’ve taken on the temporary role of looking at everything related to “Ubuntu in Education” and creating some materials to help anyone who wants to use Ubuntu for learning. Are you a student? parent? educator? Sys Admin or IT staff at a school/University? Voter? Decision maker or Service/Solution Provider? What do you need to make Ubuntu a success in your school? Email me or add your comments here.         Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Canonical Design Team: This week in design – 3 September 2010
This week was a short one in the UK but it seems as though we set out to fill it with as much as we possibly could! For a start we hit beta this week. If you’ve not upgraded to Maverick, you really should. We all have and are enjoying the updated Radiance and Ambiance themes. On the subject of arrivals we also welcomed Lilly to our web team this week – we’ll set her up on the blog in the coming weeks and coax a post or two out of her. Elsewhere in the world of the web Ale asked you guys why you use Ubuntu. We’d love more input into this thread so if you have ideas leave them in the comments and join in the conversation. Another post which got a lot of interest this week was Otto’s post about the default wallpaper. This explains in some detail the idea behind our approach to this design and we’ll be updating you and hopefully roping some of into helping us make our grander ideas a reality in the next cycle. Away from the blog we’ve been busily working on the font family which is extremely close to being ready to share more widely. We have a few bugs we want to review and in the next week we’ll be adding milestones to the project and assigning some bugs to future releases so everyone can see what we’re focusing on fixing in time for 10.10. The release is by no means finished in October. Much will be added and refined over time. More on that from the Dalton Maag team soon. Maverick on netbook and desktop is also taking up a lot of our time as we work closely with the platform and DX teams to make sure all the work we do and that is contributed by you guys in the community, is rolled into the next release. Unity in particular is coming together and if you’ve not tried it yet you really should! We also wished Charline “Bon Voyage” as she set off to Japan to take part in the EPIC conference and she’ll be talking about her experiences once she’s back from there. And lastly, while we’re on the subject of travel, I got an e-mail this morning from Rick. He’s apparently still traveling and bumped into Jane at Linux Con. I await with interest the next mail I get from my missing statue! Have a great weekend – especially our lucky American cousins who get a nice long weekend! Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Ronnie Tucker: Full Circle Side-Pod #3: Where's the Neurotic Numbat?
Full Circle Side-Pod #3: Where’s the Neurotic Numbat? In this episode; with great power, comes a big utility bill. This is an extra, irregular, short-form podcast, which is intended to be a side-branch of the main Full Circle Podcast. Somewhere to put all the general technology, non-Ubuntu news and opinions, hobby-horses and general kipple that doesn't fit anywhere else. Be prepared for a healthy dose of British sarcasm. It’s been a while. We’re maybe half way through our summer recess from the Full Circle podcast, so this is either goodbye to season one or hello and welcome to season two. News: Products die, divorce by Facebook, yet more lawsuits… Interview: Matt Grove from Miserware describes Granola’s energy-saving ability Expert Spot: Editing the Full Circle Podcast pt. 3: The Edit Environment Feeds for both MP3 and OGG:
The podcast is in MP3 and OGG formats. You can either play the podcast in-browser if you have Flash and/or Java, or you can download the podcast with the link underneath the player. Show notes after the jump.
Additional audio by Victoria Pritchard Show Notes 1.06 | WELCOME and INTRO 2.25 | NEWS: round-up of some news items that caught my eye during the break.
13.07 | INTERVIEW: Matt Grove from Miserware Energy-saving computing. It’s a neat concept, saving you money by saving you electricity. That’s money off your utilitiy bill while you do your bit to save the planet. Granola is software that improves the energy efficiency of your PC or laptop. A few weeks ago I spoke to Matt Grove from Miserware, who explained who it works… 34.57 | EXPERT SPOT: Editing the Full Circle Podcast – Part 3: The Edit Environment 45.05 | FEEDBACK: How to get in touch with us 45.55 | WRAP and OUTRO Comments: on this page, using the comment form, OR; Send us a comment to podcast@fullcirclemagazine.org. Please note: this podcast is provided with absolutely no warranty whatsoever; neither the producers nor Full Circle Magazine accept any responsibility or liability for content or interaction which readers and listeners may enter into using external links gleaned from this forum or podcast series. Creative Commons Music Tracks
File Sizes: OGG 24.5Mb Runtime: 45 minutes 55 seconds Full Circle Side-Pod #3: Where's the Neurotic Numbat? In this episode; with great power, comes a big utility bill. This is an extra, irregular, short-form podcast, which is intended to be a side-branch of the main Full Circle Podcast. Somewhere to put all the general technology, non-Ubuntu news and opinions, hobby-horses and general kipple that doesn't fit anywhere else. Be prepared for a healthy dose of British sarcasm. It's been a while. We're maybe half way through our summer recess from the Full Circle podcast, so this is either goodbye to season one or hello and welcome to season two. News: Products die, divorce by Facebook, yet more lawsuits... Interview: Matt Grove from Miserware describes Granola's energy-saving ability Expert Spot: Editing the Full Circle Podcast pt. 3: The Edit Environment Feeds for both MP3 and OGG: RSS feed, MP3: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/category/podcast/feed RSS feed, OGG: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/category/podcast/feed/atom The podcast is in MP3 and OGG formats. You can either play the podcast in-browser if you have Flash and/or Java, or you can download the podcast with the link underneath the player. Show notes after the jump. Your Hosts: Robin Catling (blog at http://catlingmindswipe.blogspot.com/) Additional audio by Victoria Pritchard Show Notes 1.06 | WELCOME and INTRO 2.25 | NEWS: round-up of some news items that caught my eye during the break. Mark Shuttleworth announced the codename for Ubuntu 11.04, We're disappointed; where's the Neurotic Numbat? The Numbat is a real, and endangered marsupial. Myrmecobius Fasciatus. Microsoft Kin phone cancelled after a month Google Wave RIP; wave developments ceases, Schmidt says 'celebrate our failures.' Everybody sues everybody: Lexmark sues 3rd party cartridge supplier Interval Research sues everyone but the yacht club (summarised in arstechnica coverage) Patents in question: Browser for use in navigating a body of information 2005, Attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person 2008 , Alerting users to items of current interest 2004 Intel buying McAfee, which probably means lock-down or DRM in more future hardware. Google voice calls to gmail (gmail blog announcement and TechWatch on VOIP integration). GoogleVoice Rate card for 'insanely low rates' but only til 2011. Philadelphia's $300 blog tax - Business Privilege Tax MPEG-LA declares H.264 codec to be royalty free in perpetuity Facebook entries admissable as evidence in divorce cases 13.07 | INTERVIEW: Matt Grove from Miserware Energy-saving computing. It's a neat concept, saving you money by saving you electricity. That's money off your utilitiy bill while you do your bit to save the planet. Granola is software that improves the energy efficiency of your PC or laptop. A few weeks ago I spoke to Matt Grove from Miserware, who explained who it works... 34.57 | EXPERT SPOT: Editing the Full Circle Podcast – Part 3: The Edit Environment 45.05 | FEEDBACK: How to get in touch with us 45.55 | WRAP and OUTRO Comments: on this page, using the comment form, OR; Send us a comment to podcast@fullcirclemagazine.org. You can also send us a comment by recording an audio clip of no more than 30 seconds and sending it to the same address. Comments and audio may be edited for length. Please remember this is a family-friendly show. Please note: this podcast is provided with absolutely no warranty whatsoever; neither the producers nor Full Circle Magazine accept any responsibility or liability for content or interaction which readers and listeners may enter into using external links gleaned from this forum or podcast series. Creative Commons Music Tracks Opening: ‘Knights of the darkness' by Zero Project (http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/516745) Main theme: 'CCMixter' by Code (http://ccmixter.org/files/MixCategories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Dougie Richardson: Install web applications locally on Ubuntu
I was talking with someone yesterday who is hacking a WordPress theme together. If you work with web sites, being able to run a site locally allows testing, experimentation, developing new themes and even just checking that a software update isn’t going to break your site. You might want to keep a web application on a local network and away from the Internet – such as StatusNet, a Wiki or a project management application. All we need is to install a LAMP stack – Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. We’ve already got the “L”! Synaptic (System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager) lets you install common groups of packages (Edit->Mark packages by task…) in this case a LAMP server. You can do the same from a command line using “sudo tasksel install lamp“. Once the components are installed, you’ll be asked for a root password – this is used by MySQL and is not the system’s root password.
The default web root is Apache uses virtual hosts – we can have multiple sites on the same server. Each site is defined by a configuration file in /etc/apache2/sites-available. If you look there now, you’ll see the default site, we can use this as a template for a new site:
You need to change DocumentRoot and Directory to point to the folder your site is going to be in. So lets say you want to use a folder called “wordpress” in your home folder, change “DocumentRoot /var/www” to “DocumentRoot /home/USERNAME/wordpress” and “<Directory /var/www/>” to “<Directory /home/USERNAME/wordpress/>“. We can also give an alias, so we access individual sites by name, to do this add the following “ServerAlias wordpress“.
You can then add “wordpress” to /etc/hosts (change the line that reads 127.0.0.1 localhost to 127.0.0.1 localhost wordpress) and use the address “http://wordpress” to access your site. Ubuntu has a utility to add the site to Apache which will also need restarted:
If you’re only going to be using one site it would be easier to use the default site (which is already configured). Ubuntu adds the first user to the www-data group, so you can either change the ownership of /var/www or add a sub-folder with either the user’s ownership or membership of www-data (note you’ll need to change the group permission too). I’m adding a folder I own:
This can be accessed by http://localhost/dougie. I’ve seen a few forum posts saying that people have issues with folder permissions and there are some misconceptions. I’ve even seen it suggested to edit everything with “sudo nautilus”! Now with the letter “A” out of the way we can deal with the “M”. Most web applications need at least one database. Remember that MySQL password?
A good example is installing WordPress. Download and extract the contents to your web folder (in my case /var/www/dougie). Create a new database called “wordpress“, with a user called “wordpress” and a password of “wordpress” by entering each command at the prompt:
Type “\q” to exit then open a browser and go to your site, for me that’s http://localhost/dougie. So lastly we get on to the “P” – PHP. Apache will recognise and run PHP, however be aware of a caveat I’ve noticed in Ubuntu. If you try to use your system hostname instead of localhost in Firefox, it will try to download rather than run PHP files. I believe this is due to the system hostname resolving to 127.0.1.1, a solution to Debian bug #316099. PHP applications often have their own installation scripts, which WordPress does. Enter the database details we just created on the WordPress install screen:
Once the rest of the screens are complete, you’ll have WordPress installed. So to recap, all we need to do to add an application is create a virtual host so Apache can serve it up; create a database for it to store data; and configure the application – often via a browser interface. Now you can hack away at those WordPress themes to your heart’s content. More information is available from the Ubuntu Server Guide. 
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Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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Laura Czajkowski: The motivational drivers and barriers of volunteers in open source communities Part 2
I blogged a while back about Barry doing his Masters Thesis on The motivational drivers and barriers of volunteers in open source communities which looked at the Ubuntu Community, he handed it in yesterday and I know some folks were curious about results so I asked him to write a small piece for the blog: Barry Smyth: The course that I was studying was Computing but specialising in Knowledge Management (KM). Knowledge Management is the realisation that knowledge is an organisations greatest asset. We constantly hear Within companies it is commonplace for individuals to hoard knowledge, we do this for various reasons.
KM is about accessing the knowledge within people, teams, departments, organisations, then storing that knowledge in an understandable or codified fashion, and finally making that knowledge available and However what many organisations find when they implement KM initiatives, regardless of the money, time and expertise that they throw at it, is people seem unwilling to share their Knowledge. There are drivers that motivate and barriers that prevent people from sharing their knowledge. Within Open Source communities, we have a group of people who come together to freely share knowledge. This makes it an ideal place to investigate positive motivations. If KM initiatives could replicate Back to my story, I began to realise that the Ubuntu community could offer me a perfect environment to investigate motivations to knowledge sharing. In May I contacted Laura and told her about my Idea. Within days we Overall my experience dealing with Laura and the rest of the Ubuntu community was extremely pleasant. I could not of asked for any more help or enthusiasm. It was a privilege to get an insight into a remarkable community. This is an extract of some of the projects findings:
Thanks to Barry for the update, if anyone wants to drop him a line here is his email address. Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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You In Ubuntu: Ubuntu App Developer Week Announced!
Are you interested in developing applications on Ubuntu then this is the week for you! Ubuntu App Developer Week September 27 through October 1st, 2010 Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
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You In Ubuntu: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released
Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released. See what's new and what you have to look forward to in Ubuntu 10.10.10, Ubuntu 10.10 Beta gives you that view into what is come. Categories: Computers | Linux | nix | Planet Ubuntu | Ubuntu |
