Monthly Archives: August 2008

Launchpad to go Open Source by next OSCon

By | Published: August 27, 2008
This from Joey Stanford..
"The #launchpad team leads just developed a roadmap to open source Launchpad by the next #oscon conference. Really cool stuff!" No pressure there guys..
Posted in Advocacy, Linux, Ubuntu | 3 Comments

High Quality Live Ubuntu Video Podcast

By | Published: August 26, 2008
I've recently started a new job which calls for a 1.5 hour train journey each way each day. I like to keep my brain going during that time so I tend to listen to audio and watch video podcasts. I'll listen to the audio ones on my Nokia N82, and watch the video on my Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 8.04. I recently stumbled upon a new (to me) video podcast which has an Ubuntu slant. Presented live every Tuesday at 23:00GMT/UTC (midnight BST), and available for download afterwards, I'm really enjoying Category5.tv. Presented by Robbie Ferguson, and recently with a new co-host to help him stay on track, the show covers technical subjects with Q&A, how-tos and product reviews. Robbie has a professional, friendly, entertaining and informative style which I find refreshing in a technology podcast. Being a live show means he gets some great interaction going with the listeners. Many other tech podcasts such as Tekzilla answer viewer questions, but with Category5.tv being Live, and with a 'chatroom' it's possible to extend questions, ask for clarification and also let Robbie know when he's fully answered your question. Despite the odd pause here and there where he waits for viewer replies, it's pretty slick. I've only watched a few of more recent shows via download, but I'll probably catch one of his live shows soon enough, even if it's just to say 'hi' and 'thanks'. The chatroom I mentioned is actually an irc channel. You can join it to follow the discussion during the show and of course ask your own questions, and leave comments. If you have an irc client already then connect to chat1.ustream.tv and join the #category5-technology-tv0 channel to join the chat. If you already have a ustream user ID then you can use the "/nick" command to change your name from some random "ustream-guest-foo" so Robbie can address you better during the show :) The most recent episode had a screencast type tutorial about DeVeDe, the DVD authoring package. I like to think of myself as a bit of an expert with Ubuntu, but there's always something new to learn. Having never really use DeVeDe in anger however, this was a useful how-to for me. Maybe you too will learn something from this programme. Take a look and find out.
Posted in Ubuntu | 2 Comments

Playing With The Viglen MPC-L

By | Published: August 22, 2008
Like Tony, I too bought a couple of the Viglen MPC-L devices we reviewed in episode 11 of the Ubuntu Podcast made by members of the Ubuntu UK LoCo Team. I wont repeat what Tony said in his two blog posts, but try to add to them. Read his first :) Some things that I noticed though:- The BIOS is quite basic indeed with pretty much no configurable features at all. I guess if I were in a positive mood I'd call it "simple". The BIOS version info says "GROM_BIOS_IONA503_0.00.08_Viglen_03" which gives away some detail. It's date stamped 04/25/2006 18:28:04 which (along with the early 2007 vintage Ubuntu install) says to me these things have probably been kicking around on a shelf for a while. The device itself is an FIC ION 503 (not the current 603 model pictured in that link) which appears to be similar to the Linutop 2 only the Viglen has a hard disk rather than just a USB key, and is a lot cheaper. Indeed you can still get them for £79 including VAT and delivery (in the UK) if you use the details we gave in the podcast. After booting mine attached to an NEC 1700V monitor and logging in, I too had the "no swap" issue that Tony referred to, and fixed it in the same way. I suspect the reason for the odd partition setup (36G for /, 880M swap and 37G as /scratch) is down to the units originally shipping with a 40G disk. I guess they didn't go through the effort of making a new build for the 80G disk but just fudge it on and add the extra space as a new partition (scratch). I note they're still shipping with Ubuntu 7.04 - which goes out of maintenance shortly, rather than a more up to date 7.10 or even 8.04. The first thing I did after hooking it all up was apply the outstanding 7.04 updates - of which there are quite a few. I then (without rebooting) issued a "sudo do-release-upgrade" to kick off the upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10. This has been chugging away for a little while now, having downloaded all the necessary packages, it's installing them. Once this finishes I hope to just issue another "sudo do-release-upgrade" to take it all the way to 8.04 (gutsy). One reason I am doing this (with no reboots between) is to see if it can be done, partly to avoid any of the issues Tony had when he rebooted. The main reason though is because I'm using it to type this blog post and catch up with my email after returning from holiday, and don't really want to reboot! Things I'd like to do:-
  • Finish the upgrade process off all the way to 8.04 and reboot to a working system.
  • Update the status of bug 236019 after testing the new driver for this machine.
  • Upgrade to 8.10 (development version of Ubuntu) and see if there are any further bugs to uncover, and of course report those.
  • Try a lighter weight window manager than XFCE - E17 perhaps, other suggestions welcome..?
  • Upgrade the 512MB RAM and see if that makes any descernable difference (especially for firefox with lots of tabs)
  • Try out IPCOP on it.
  • Try out some emulators on it (Spectrum games for example)
  • Configure it in "kiosk" mode to auto login and let the family play with it
  • Something else?
Update: Bah, at the end of do-release-upgrade it says that to complete the upgrade you need to reboot (which I can easily do myself later), but then asks if you want to continue [Yn]. Press Y and it reboots! That doesn't seem right to me.
Posted in Advocacy, Linux, Ubuntu | Leave a comment

People wonder why I hate Windows

By | Published: August 14, 2008
Update: I have applied the BIOS update by putting the old hard disk back in, and using the working windows install there to do it. It still can't see all 4G of my RAM. Apologies for this slight rant. I need to get it off my chest. I have a Toshiba Portege M400 (3G) laptop which I bought just over a year ago. It had a 100GB hard disk which initially came with Windows XP pre-installed. The very first thing I did was wipe Windows off and install Ubuntu. I wasn't entirely happy because the system ran slowly. It turns out that a BIOS update from Toshiba fixes this. Unfortunately the particular BIOS update can only be installed from within Windows running on the bare metal. I booted off an Ubuntu Live CD and copied the contents of my Ubuntu partition from the hard disk to a USB attached hard drive. I then used the Toshiba XP recovery CD which came with the laptop to wipe the drive again, and install a minimal-sized (10G) Windows XP Professional setup. I then booted to it and installed the BIOS update and the system became much quicker. I then reinstalled Ubuntu on the remaining space and copied back all my data from the USB disk. Everything was fine. I now use Ubuntu daily and only use Windows when I am using the 3G card built into the laptop - which doesn't work in Ubuntu (bug filed here:- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/128556 ) Skip forward to this month. I started running out of disk space in Ubuntu so I bought myself a nice new 320G disk. Here's how I migrated from the 100G disk to the 320G one. 
1. Connect a USB hard disk.
2. Boot to ubuntu live cd.
3. dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/disk/windows.img # this backed up my Windows XP install to a file.
4. mount /dev/sda2 # root (/) filesystem for ubuntu
5. mount /dev/sda3 # home (/home) filesystem for ubuntu
6. rsync -avz /mnt/sda2/* /media/disk/ubuntu/root/  # backup root filesystem
7. rsync -avz /mnt/sda3/* /media/disk/ubuntu/home/  # backup home filesystem
I then yanked the 100G disk out and slapped in the 320G disk and again booted to the Ubuntu Live CD. Using similar tools as above I partitioned and copied everything back onto the disk. I happily use Ubuntu and all my data is intact. However, Windows refuses to boot. I get the Windows splash screen (where you get the bouncing blue bar) and then it bluescreens and reboots. This repeats. I have mounted the Windows filesystem from within Ubuntu to make sure it's sane and it looks good. The usual files are all there. When I reboot I of course get the usual "We're sorry" and am offered a "Safe Mode" option. This fails in the same way. A kind guy at work loaned me a proper XP CD (not these silly recovery ones you get with laptops these days) so that I might use the "recovery" option. However when I choose that, Windows says it can't find any hard disks because (presumably) it doesn't have the driver for the SATA controller my laptop has. The reason I _need_ to use Windows is because there is a new BIOS update for the laptop, and I need to install it. 64-bit Ubuntu can't see all 4G of memory in the laptop - which it should. Installing the BIOS update will eliminate that from the list of possible causes. I can't install the BIOS update without Windows however. So my pain is summarised by:- 
1. Windows wont boot and I don't know how to make it boot
2. Windows XP CD can't see the SATA controller without a driver disk (I have no floppy drive)
3. I have to use Windows to install Toshiba BIOS updates
So far the only thing I can think of doing is putting the _old_ hard disk back in the machine and using that (working) Windows install to do the BIOS update. In fact, I could of course keep that 100G disk just for Windows, and only put it in the machine when I need this kind of BIOS sillyness. Then I could remove Windows from my new 320G disk, thus giving me 10G back. End of rant. Carry on. The good news is that I'm off out for a curry with my colleagues from work at lunchtime.
Posted in Advocacy, Linux, Rant, Ubuntu | 54 Comments