Linux, open source & anything else

The Pirate Bay moves to a new home

2012-02-01T13:55:00.000-08:00

Follow the court ruling today (01.02.12) the Pirate Bay operators moved the site from .org to .se Sources from inside the Pirate Bay state that it is to prevent the domain being seized by the US follow the completion of the court case today.

Today the Sweedish Supreme court decided not to grant leave to appeal in the long running trial, which started back in 2009. What does this mean? The fines and prison sentences handed out to Peter Sunde (8 months), Fredrik Neij (10 months), Gottfrid Svartholm (12 months) and Carl Lundström (4 months) will stand, along with the fine handed out of £4.3 million ($6.8 million).

Per E Samuelsson (Carl Lundström’s lawyer) stated “The verdict is absurd, I am disappointed that the court is so uninterested in dissecting and analyzing the legal twists and turns of one of the world’s most high-profile legal cases of all time.”

However, due to the ongoing nature of the trial and some common practices in Sweedish law, today ruling does not actually mean that the accused will serve jail time.

Changing the domain name to the Swedish domain .se puts the address out of the reach of US authorities. Along with the name change the defiant Pirate Bay operators changed the logo from the traditional ship to a closed fist (above) and issued a statement via their official blog:

"2012 is the year of the storm.
The Pirate Bay will reach an age of 9 years. Experiencing raids, espionage and death threats, we're still here. We've been through hell and back and it has made us tougher than ever.

The people running the site has changed during the years. No sane human being would put up with this kind of pressure for 8 years in a row. An insane hobby that takes time from our families, our work (sorry boss) and our studies.

What binds us all together is a strong belief that what we do is good. That it is something we one day can tell our grandchildren about with pride. People from all over the world confirm this. We read testimonials from people in Syria longing for freedom, thanking us for what we provide. We receive more than 100 visits daily from North Korea and we sure know that they need it. If there's something that will bring peace to this world it is the understanding and appreciation of your fellow man. What better way to do that than with this vast library of culture?

With this said, we hear news from our old admins that they have received a verdict in Sweden. Our 3 friends and blood brothers have been sentenced to prison. This might sound worse than it is. Since no one of them no longer lives in Sweden, they won't go to jail. They are as free today as they were yesterday.

But what enrages us to our inner core is that the system, the empire, the governments, are still allowed to try to boss you and us around with one law crazier than the other. Do you think they will stop with SOPA/ACTA/PIPA? They will not. Because you won't stop sharing those files. Because we will not stay down. Because no one can turn back time. Together, we are the iron that hardens with each strike.

In this year of the storm, the winners will build windmills and the losers will raise shelters. So flex your muscles, fellow pirates, and give power to us all! Build more sites! More nets! More protocols! Scream louder than ever and take it to the next level!"

The Pirate Bay may have lost the battle, but from the statement today they are clearly indicating that the war is not over yet. Down but not out.

Early Tizen Screenshots Leaked

2012-01-10T04:42:00.000-08:00

Tizen, the open source platform that has been created to replace the short lived Meego, has had some initial screenshots leaked. These are reportedly originating from a Samsung I9500 device and it is also expected that the earliest appearance of these could be next month (February 2012) at the Mobile World Conference 2012 in Barcelona, which runs for four days starting on the 27th of the month.

From early signs the user interface looks promising, it is clean and tidy and I suspect owes quite a lot to the Android setup. Given that this is one of the most popular and fastest growing smartphone operating systems then why not borrow some of it’s features.

However, despite how impressive the user interface, how well it may run or how truly open it is; technical superiority will count for nothing unless the community gets behind it. Developers need to be actively making and maintaining apps as well as some major manufactures supporting and shipping the Tizen operating system on devices. If this is limited to simply the technology experts and hackers then sadly Tizen will follow the path of Meego which it replaced. Currently Intel and Samsung are backing the project, but until it is released on a device we won’t know the public will take to the new operating system.

I for one will be very pleased to see another device, especially one that stays true to it’s word and remains mostly open source; something which can’t be said of Android. However the sad truth is that ‘Average Joe’ on the street doesn’t care about openness, but simply about performance, looks and what new apps they can get. By the time this is available to the general public (as much as it grates against me to say this) Tizen will need to have apps ready and polished for all the major social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, G+), email clients, shopping, games, navigation and the variety that is widely available in the Android and Apple stores.

I really hope that Tizen can gain enough ground to be around for a long time, but as so many have come and gone before, it may end up being another short lived adventure.

HIV or Unemployment?

2011-12-02T12:43:00.000-08:00

This is a million miles away from what I would normally talk about on my blog, however after Dimitris Papageorgiou (@lopbox on identi.ca) brought this to my attention I felt unable not to talk about it.

The story in question has received hardly any media coverage in Greece and next to none in other countries, yet this will probably shock the majority of readers. The news story that was brought to my attention is available here and here (translated from Greek).

It concerns me that people feel that they need to infect themselves with the HIV virus rather than risk going into an uncertain future. Granted I do not live in Greece and am not aware of exactly the situations of these people however I can't help but feel that this is an incredibly short sighted (and worrying) view of life. Are these user aware of the dangers HIV exposes them to or are they simply feeling betrayed by their country and honestly feel that there is no alternative.

The articles state that the users are infecting themselves, at huge risk to their health and (I assume) life expectancy for the sake of 700 Euros a month. To put that into some other figures: 964 US dollars, 617 British pounds. Whilst I can't speak for the US, I know that working full time on minimum wage will net more than £617 in Britain at the end of each month.

The recession and the financial climate in Greece has been in the media focus for some time now, however these stories are not filtering through to the rest of the world. I can't help but think that a citizen of a member country of the European Union should have more security in the present time and hope for the future.

Whilst nobody wants to be the focus of charity work, even this would be better than infecting oneself with HIV in order to get by. However here in Britain, I have not seen any charity work for nearby countries like Greece. We (the British public) seem very keen on shipping goods and aid to far off countries. I am not condemning this, it is a worthwhile venture. However we also need to focus on those who are struggling in our own country and our neighbours in Europe. I am also aware that we are in difficult financial times, however, is our situation really that bad that we would infect ourselves with a deadly virus for an extra £617/$964/€700 a month?

For more information on the HIV virus visit the relevant NHS pages

Problems with Nvidia on update to kernel 3.1.0-1

2011-11-26T14:14:00.000-08:00

I recently came into some problems which gave me a great deal of hassle whilst updating to Linux Kernel 3.1.0-1, I have a 64 Bit System and source my software from the Debian Testing repositories.

On what should have been a fairly routine update, I restarted my system later in the day to find myself dropped into a command line with a message stating that X server had failed. Running the command nvidia-xconfig would produce a new xorg.conf file, but I would still receive the same error message about the nvidia module being unknown.

I spent a few hours trawling the forums on the net and they all pointed to a rebuild of dkms, however putting in the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms, left me with the error message

Module build for the currently running kernel was skipped since the kernel source for this kernel does not seem to be installed.

This left me scratching my head and very frustrated as I knew that the kernel source was installed. Finally I started looking at the installed components and noticed that the kernel headers did not match the kernel source number, my kernel source was 3.1.0-1, whilst the installed headers were linux-headers-3.0.0-1-common and linux-headers-3.0.0-1-amd64, a miss match.

I simply ran the command: sudo apt-get install linux-headers-3.1.0-1-common linux-headers-3.1.0-1-amd64
then I followed it with: sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms

and viola, upon restart I was back in my graphical environment. This, of course, will not solve every bodies problems, however this is the simple fix that worked for me, but it took me a long time to find it. Hopefully this will spare some people a few hours of pain and frustration.

Putting Browsers to the test with Acid3 and Peacekeeper

2011-09-30T06:46:00.000-07:00

During episode 5 of TuxJam I reviewed a browser called SRWare Iron. This is a fork of the Chromium browser (an open-source community version of Google Chrome) with a few tweaks under the hood.

I put three different browsers to the test using two online tools: Acid3 and Peacekeeper. The three browsers in question were:

From the Acid3 test, all the browsers performed very well:

SRWare Iron

Firefox

Seamonkey

However, it is during the second test using the Peacekeeper resource that SRWare Iron really separated itself from the other two. A brief look at the overall points:

Then we can break these down into more detailed reports of how the browsers final score was achieved.

From these findings on the Peacekeeper website, it appears that SRWare Iron performs doubly well compared to Firefox and Seamonkey. Whilst I did find it was a fast browser, I didn't notice that much difference between the three. However all of these browsers noticeably outperform Internet Explorer which I have to use day to day in my place of work. I do not wish to install it and run it using WINE to perform a fair test.

Using WeeChat with Freenode (the basics)

2011-09-24T02:43:00.000-07:00

I recently tested out WeeChat which is a very fast and lightweight IRC client that is used in the command line.

I must say that I was extremely impressed with the program, but not with the documentation. The quick start wasn't of much help and the user guide was way too heavy and detailed, going into things that were far beyond what I was needing for internet chat.

I'm assuming that the user has already installed the program, if not check the repos or visit http://www.weechat.org for installation details.

Start the program:

weechat-curses

Set your username (dont forget to include the quotation marks"):

/set irc.server.freenode.username "{enter your username here}"

Set your real name (optional):

/set irc.server.freenode.realname "{enter your name here}"

Connect to Freenode:

/connect freenode

However if you would like to connect to Freenode by default every time you start up WeeChat:

/set irc.server.freenode.autoconect on

If you've registered your username (highly recommended so that nobody can pretend to be you) then you will need to prove you own the username by supplying the password:

/msg nickserv identify {your password}

Identify your username automatically every time you log on:

/set irc.server.freenode.command "/msg nickserv identify {your password}"

Join a channel (don't forget the hash # tag):

/join #{channel name}

Automatically join a channel (or channels) every time you log onto freenode:

/set irc.server.freenode.autojoin "#{channel 1},#{channel 2}"

These channels will open up side by side, one does not replace the other. However as this is a command line tool there are no tabs to click on for different chats. The next few commands give some examples of navigation, they all produce the same outcome using slightly different techniques, try these and decide on the ones you are happiest with.

Move to the next channel:

/buffer +1

Move to the previous channel:

/buffer -1

If you remember the channel name:

/buffer #{channel name}

All of the channels you join are assigned a number (the channels start at 3, 1 is the Freenode front page) To jump straight to the channel:

/buffer {channel number}

All of the above /buffer commands all essentially allow the user to navigate through the active chatroom channels, decide which one works best for you.

Should a user send you a private message, you are able to navigate using the above commands, it behaves just like another channel. When a user sends a message, their username will appear at the bottom of the screen, above the text entry box.

Any messages that mention your username during the chat, their username will change to a yellow text with a purple background. This makes it easier to keep track of a conversation in a busy chatroom.

Send a user a private message:

/msg {username} {your message goes here}

A condensed version of this post is available for download in odt format here, this is ideal if you wish to print these off and can also be easily edited.

This isn't even close to all of the commands and tools available to the end user, however it should be enough to allow the user to perform most of the basic required functions for an internet chat on the Freenode network.

If there are any tasks or command that you feel this guide is missing then please leave a comment below.

Updated: cross posting from Diaspora to identi.ca

2011-09-22T06:20:00.000-07:00

Diaspora is widely described as the open source version of facebook and google+, however it is disappointing that, using your Diaspora settings, you can link with facebook, twitter and tumblr but not identi.ca. But there is a workaround.

In the spirit of this blog, I always try to keep everything open source, I'm going to link the accounts using brdcst.it a free, open source project by Michele Azzolari or @macno on identi.ca. Whilst brdcst.it is a free service; you need an invite, simply send an email to brdcst@brdcst.it

Once you have received your invitation log in to your new account at brdcst.it We'll do the destination first, trust me it's easier. I'll now break this into steps to make it easier to follow.

Before we can setup brdcst.it properly, we need the feed for your Diaspora posts.

1. On Diaspora, when you are about to make a post, you should see a text box similar to the one shown below:

Click on the spanner icon beside the globe.

2. This will open up a new floating window, click on RSS, this will open up a new page. Take a note of the web page address.

In this example my address is https://joindiaspora/public/kevie.atom
*the recent rss feeds have .atom at the end

3. Go to the brdcst.it website.

4. On the welcome screen you'll see the number of feeds and destinations you currently have setup. Click on Add/Edit beside destinations, this will lead you to a new screen.

5. Click on Add new destination

6. Click on Identica

7. This will take you to identi.ca, log in (if necessary) and the site will display the message:

Click on Allow

8. Now go back to brdcst.it, this time click on Add/Edit beside feeds

9. In the first box add the address of your Diaspora feed that we noted in step 2. In the second box give this setup a name (I have imaginatively called it 'diaspora')

10. Now it's time to choose what you wish to export, for text only enter %t, if you want a link to be posted then add %u (only needed if your posts exceed the 140 character identi.ca limit)

11. On the next screen, put a tick beside your identi.ca username and click on Save

12. Now log out of brdcst.it and your done, your posts from Diaspora will be updated on your identi.ca timeline.

Please note that when you post on Diaspora you must click on the globe, only public posts will be sent to identi.ca

Yibo - Android micro-blogging client

2011-09-21T03:12:00.000-07:00

I came across this micro blogging tool purely by accident and thought I’d give it a try. This supports a variety of social networks, however at first appearance identi.ca and status.net do not appear to be an option. But on closer inspection it does allow the user to edit the API so to use Yibo with your identi.ca account simply enter the appropriate username and password and enter identi.ca/api for the API. My original intention was to review this application in an upcoming episode of TuxJam, however I couldn’t find out which license it has been released under so I decided to add it to my blog instead.

The UI is definitely aimed at twitter with the yellow bird and blue theme, however it is actually quite nice. The avatars are clear, if a little on the small side. Your username and avatar are permanently on display at the top of the screen and new posts are made by a (nicely) obvious button in the top right of the screen. The user can set the update frequency, however moving your finger down the screen will perform an instant update.A long press on a dent allows the user to reply, a nice feature of this is that the message your replying to remains on the screen under the message that the user is composing, this ensures that the correct dents are sent to the appropriate user, I’ve personally experienced issues with this before when I dent the wrong person. Other options on a long press include: redent, mark as favourite, view user profile, share to other accounts and copy to clipboard.

At the bottom of the screen, again the icons are obvious, this is a good thing as this has been written for the Japanese market, so personally I would find it impossible to read any documentation on it. The users ‘inbox’ is split into three (only two of which seem relevant to identi.ca): your replies and direct messages. The replies work fine, however there seems to be an issue with direct messages as only the most recent one is shown, even selecting more did not produce any additional direct messages. There is a third option that is entitled comments, however this personally gives me a nil response so I’m assuming that it is a Twitter feature. There is a button to view your profile and dents, a search feature and a few more that I didn’t use, again I think these were more aimed at Twitter users. There is also a well laid out menu page that directs the user to a number of places.

A bug (well I'm assuming this isn't a feature) that I discovered was that the dictionary does not appear to work with this application, whenever you are composing a dent no predicted text or spell checker comes up. I found this a bit of an inconvenience, but as I know a lot of people turn this feature off anyway, then it should not put potential new users off.

Whenever you exit the application, it displays a logo at the top of the screen to inform the user that the Yibo is still running in the background, that’s a handy feature if you want to ensure maximum battery life. Notifications are regular, however, by default, it alerts the user to all the new dents in their timeline, not just your direct mentions. This feature will be quickly switched off by the majority of users.

Overall it’s a nice application with some good features. As far as speed goes it’s quite quick, it doesn't have the lag that some of the Android micro-blogging clients suffer from. It seems very stable, not had any crashes after two weeks of testing. If you can get past the Twitter like colour scheme, then this is a very nice client that is worth checking out.

Barrage - the life of a defence turret

2011-08-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

Are you old enough to remember the days when the Westwood released the game Dune 2 (one of the first real time strategy war games on the market)? Then a few years later the genre went from cult status to instant classic due to the popular Command and Conquer series. We built up our bases and always included several strategically placed defence towers. If you ever wanted to know what life was like as a defence tower in the first Command and Conquer game then Barrage is the game for you.

The graphics are taken directly from the original of the C&C series games, with the vehicles, tanks and soldiers all members of the GDI (Global Defence Initiative) along with a familiar dessert landscape. They move around smoothly and are accompanied by some nice sound effects of guns firing and bombs exploding, however I feel that background music would have been a nice addition.

The sprites move vertically up and down the screen, some of the tanks change their pace slightly, but overall they remain mostly at the same speed. The game is contained within a three minute timeframe: kill as many of the enemy as you can within the allotted time. Any of the enemy units that cross the screen safely will result in points being deducted. The game is controlled using the mouse; simply move about the screen to target; left click shoots rockets; right click reloads and middle click fire grenades (useful on soldiers only).

Although the sprites do not move that quickly, the sheer number of them will have the user requiring quick reflexes and a sharp eye along with a wee bit of anticipation depending on the enemy unit being aimed at.

Overall this is fun, but without the ability to move the game soon becomes repetitive. Also there is no way of increasing your allotted time: 3 minutes and that's it. The main reason for returning to the game is to beat your top score. There are no extra missions (as far as I can see) and given this game is dated 2003-2010 then it's probably unlikely they will be added, however I will update the post if this happens.

There are some good ideas in here and the game is fun for a few minutes, however it soon becomes repetitive and the lack of progression hurts this games longevity.

DuckDuckGo Search Engine

2011-07-08T02:52:00.000-07:00

In season two of Tuxradar podcast the group challenged themselves to use an alternative search engine to Google for a week. Sadly they all reported back on a terrible week being forced to use Bing, Microsoft's search engine. This got me thinking: have we come to rely on Google so much that we can't even use the internet on a daily basis without it? After a browse around for various search engines I discovered DuckDuckGo.

The front page has been heavily influenced by the classic Google homepage, simply a white background with the name and logo above it. To further enhance this theory that it's influenced by Google's design: the badge is modified regularly to correspond with the relevant date (sounding similar).

One of the first things I noticed was the lack of a search for news, images or videos. Something that we have become accustomed to with the Google search engine. However upon a bit more digging I discovered that DuckDuckGo uses a facility called Bang commands, some of the most popular these can be accessed by clicking on the arrow beside the search box, most need to be entered directly into the search field. The bang commands include:

Amazon !a
Google images !gi
identi.ca !identica
IMDB !imdb
map !m
news !n
Open Clipart !oca
Wikipedia !w
YouTube !yt

For example to search Amazon for a Drupal 7 book you can enter !a drupal 7 into the search box.

However the bang commands listed above don't even make up the tip of the iceberg, a full list of the bang commands can be found here.

DuckDuckGo also has a policy of not storing information, unlike Google, and using it for advertising. Of course DuckDuckGo does include advertising, most search engines can't survive without it, however it keeps no record of your searches. The adverts are purely based on the text you have entered into the search box. OK, you may be thinking "That's a load of paranoia", fair enough but your search bubble isn't; that is real.

From the time you've started using Google a record is kept of what you look up. So if you frequently search for baking competitions, photography and open source software in the UK whenever you type anything into a Google or Bing search it will focus it's search around you, often not giving you the most relevant search results, but what it wants to, these will also change depending on what part of the world your in. For a more depth look at the search bubble take a look at dontbubble.us

The final feature of DuckDuckGo that I really like is the filtering system, it cuts out a lot of pointless sites that just lead to a download of some pointless file you didn't want. But more importantly, especially to me as a father, it filters out adult content by default. Take a look at the example below of the same search, using default settings on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo:

Google:

Bing:

DuckDuckGo:

Of course you can switch this feature off on DuckDuckGo and I assume turn it on with the other two, but the fact that it is there by default gives me comfort. This makes DuckDuckGo an ideal search engine to be used at work and in schools.

So far I've been using DuckDuckGo for a month. I've been really pleased with the quality of the searches and it has now become my homepage and also my default search on my browsers. I've noticed that some of the Linux distros have started using it as the default search engine. It really does have a mountain to climb in order to convert users using Google and (to a lesser extent) Bing. But this is a worthwhile task in my opinion.

You can test out DuckDuckGo directly from this site: take a look in the top right of the page and you'll find a DuckDuckGo widget, give it a try for yourself.

Don't Google it, Duck it!

Recent project and contributing

2011-06-14T03:56:00.000-07:00

Although I have not had many graphical projects recently, I did complete a piece of work for Marie Axelsson (@maloki on identi.ca) for her blog site.

I actually enjoyed this task as I was able to communicate with the end user directly through Instant Messaging, this made changes etc to the project a lot easier and feedback was considerably quicker than normal.

The final design that we settled on was:

This can be seen implemented on her blog here

The design was a combination of her interests and likes, the idea was supposed to resemble passing from the real world (with the earth and stars) into the virtual world (emblems and binary digits).

As always the image was created using open source software, both Inkscape and the GIMP were used in the creation of this image.

My reasoning for displaying my projects is not simply to "toot my own trumpet" but to promote open source software and also to show that most of us can contribute to open source. I can't code, I'm useless in that aspect, however I am able to produce graphical items. OK then, maybe graphics isn't your forte either, however you can still take the time to test a project and provide feedback or bug descriptions. Everybody can contribute to open source, regardless of their supposed "lack of computer skills". Even simply installing an application, using it for a week and then sending the creator or team an email sharing your thoughts, it doesn't have to be technical, just describe the problem you've encountered or features you think may be handy. Also explain that your not a coder, communication is the key. So many projects are struggling for contributors, any help offered will be greatly appreciated by the community. The number of Linux desktops and applications is testament to how well a community can work together.

Adding a new user and default user groups in Crunchbang

2011-05-31T15:17:00.000-07:00

Recently I had a bit of an accident when I stupidly entered the wrong letter letter into a command and ended up removing myself from all the default groups on my profile in Crunchbang Linux. No problem, I thought, I'll just use the same groups that I added my username to when I created my Gentoo system. Problem: Gentoo and Crunchbang (Debian based) use different groups. This was a more annoying problem than I expected.

This resulted in a lot of wasted time so I thought I would share the experience so that it could be easily fixed without wasting the amount of time I did in looking for a solution.

To add a user we simply open up a terminal and type (as root) the command adduser

This will ask for some details of the new user including name, username and password. This will give a new user a working login and a home folder, however it will not give the new user any group privileges. The default groups that Crunchbang assigns to a user upon installation are:

cdrom floppy sudo audio dip video plugdev netdev bluetooth powerdev

To add the user to these groups we enter the command (as root):

usermod -a -G cdrom,floppy,sudo,audio,dip,video,plugdev,netdev,bluetooth,powerdev {the new username}

Please note that the above command may appear to be on different lines, but it should be written all on one line with a space after "-G" and after "powerdev", all the groups are separated with commas. Once you have done this then your new user is ready. Don't forget to add the new user to the sudoers file, if your not sure about this then take a look at this post for some extra help. If your like me and you end up removing the user from the groups then simply add your current username to the above command.

Simply Mepis 11: simple enough?

2011-05-29T15:21:00.000-07:00

Mepis was one of the distros that I had not tried until very recently. It was often described as the distro for newbies before Ubuntu was around. With Ubuntu's move to Unity and a lot of other distros embracing Gnome 3, more and more users are looking to other, more traditional desktop environments, such as XFCE and KDE.

Mepis uses KDE as it's choice of desktop environment and is intended to work 'out of the box', which is not the norm for a KDE distro. Upon loading my graphics card, Nvidia GeForce 6200 AGP, worked without any tweaking; an impressive feat by any distros' standards. I was able to get the extra effects working straight away. This was the experience with all of my hardware; inlcuding my microphone and webcam. The black and blue theme of the distro looks nice and modern, very appealing to the newbie switching from Windows for the first time.

Some of the stickier points of a Linux distro for a newbie have been addressed, flash and Java come pre-installed, DVDs and MP3 files play without any need for tweaking. There is a good range of software including VLC and Amarok (media players), Libre Office suite, Dolphin, Kopete (instant messaging client), Inkscape and the GIMP. Some exclusions are noticeable, no software has been pre-installed for micro-blogging or torrents. In my opinion these are some essential user tools that most users expect to be present. With such option as Choqok and Ktorrent available it does baffle me as to the exclusion of these applications.

This brings me onto another point in need of development: installing software. Mepis is aimed at newbies, but only includes Synaptic as a graphical package manager. This is the one significant thing this distro lacks: an equivalent of the Software Centre that Canonical provides in it's Ubuntu distro. Synaptic is not a tool for a newbie user, whilst I personally use the command line tool aptitude (which I had to download using the command sudo apt-get install aptitude) this is not ideal for the new user.

Firefox 4 is the pre-installed browser of choice in Mepis 11. The odd thing about this is that by default the page opens up to a blank screen (shown below). Most users like to see something when they load a browser, even if it's just to show that their internet connection is working. I would like to see the startup page being linked to Mepis or a search engine, but a blank page, in my opinion, isn't the best option.

However these issues aside, Mepis is a very solid ditro, with a lot of features that work out of the box, this makes it very difficult to pass up as a good newbie distro. No tinkering to get the basics done, youtube etc will work without any tinkering. This approach may not win the support of the puritan freedom lovers, but this isn't the target audience of Mepis. However the lack of a software centre really does hurt the newbie appeal of this distro. Highly recommended, but make sure there is a Linux user nearby to help setup the system.

Pogo music player

2011-05-13T14:59:00.000-07:00

Having recently volunteered to do a bit of graphics work for a project called Pogo, I thought I should investigate this application a bit more and even give it a trial run. I have to confess, at the time the email came in requesting help with a logo I accepted the challenge without even knowing what the application did.

After briefly reading through the email and several brief conversations between the creator Jendrik Seipp and myself, I took a look at the website, which to my disappointment was simply a launchpad page. So the first thing that struck my mind was that this was, primarily, an Ubuntu project. The choices for download are a *.deb file or the source data in a *.tar.gz file. As I have Crunchbang installed on my system anyway I opted for the deb file simply to make life easier.

The install went smoothly and very quickly I had the Pogo music player (0.4 at the time of writing this) up and running:

The user interface is very simple; a window split into two screens. The left screen is a tree view of your files, this can be navigated quite easily for any music that is in your home folder. However for files that are on a separate partition, you will need to go all the way back to / and manually find the mount point of the drive (usually /mnt or /media depending on your distro). The partition must be mounted already as there is no way to mount it from Pogo.

The right screen is your playlist, to add a music file you can either double click on it in the left screen or drag it into the right screen using the mouse and holding the left button. The responsiveness of Pogo is very good indeed, it is lightning fast and the files play without any delay. Whilst playing, a progress bar appears at the top, which can be dragged to get the position in the file you want, handy for longer podcasts. Also the cover of the album appears in the bottom right of the window.

True to Ubuntu style, whenever a new track starts a notification pops up in the top right of your desktop just under the system tray (again this is depending on your desktop environment, but this is the case in XFCE). These, thankfully, can be turned off with a single click in preferences.

A search function is also included to allow you to look out your favourite bands or songs quickly, however all it kept giving me was a "no tracks found" message. Take a look at the screenshot below, look at the search, now compare the result with the tracks that are currently playing:

There are a few major omissions that I simply couldn't live without with regards to my media player:

The lack of a shuffle option (this apparently is set to be included in the next release)
The ability to add all the files from a folder, instead of selecting the files and moving them over to the playlist screen.
The ability to stream from the internet

This isn't aiming to be VLC. It is a fast and simple music player and, if I'm being honest, it plays files and uses up hardly any resources in the process. The notifications that can't be interacted with are very much in line with the current Ubuntu trend. I feel that this project is best suited to low spec machines and (very early stage) newbie users, those like your older relations who only want to play a few files. Pogo adopts a 'keep it simple' philosophy, the lack of options and buttons make it incredibly easy to use. I'll keep an eye on this project, but I won't be uninstalling VLC quite yet. A bit too basic for my needs at the present time.

Flattr - Twitter logo

2011-05-13T09:37:00.000-07:00

Continuing on with my recent Flattr work, I was asked to do a logo that incorporated a combination of the Flattr micro payments site and the ever popular micro-blogging site that is Twitter. Three mock ups were made for this:

Flattr and Fail Whale:

Flattr and Twitter bird:

However, in the above version it was felt that it could cause offence as the bird appeared trapped. It was opted for a friendlier type of enticement where the bird was being tempted or lured towards Flattr, after some work, this was chosen for the final design:

You can Flattr any (or all three if you like) of these pictures by clicking on them, every donation is always appreciated.

Please note that you will not find me on Twitter, if you wish to follow my posts then sign up to identi.ca I'm registered there as @kevie

Supporting open source. All of the above graphics were made exclusively using Inkscape.

Saving BBC iplayer programmes

2011-05-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

The BBC iplayer offers viewers a chance to catch up on programmes that have recently been shown on the channels. However this is for a strictly limited period and many of the programmes shown will not be released on DVD. A lot of us still don't have DVD recorders, most of us have disconnected the video recorders, although Sky+ does allow us to store programmes, they can only be stored to the local box and not to portable devices or even other TVs in the house.

However there is an easy way to download the programmes, we only need two applications installed on our home PC:

Both of these are available in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories, you can get these by opening up the terminal and entering the command:

sudo apt-get install get-iplayer flvstreamer

Users of Fedora or other distros based on Red Hat will need to make sure that the rpm fusion repository is enabled. Once this has been done then it is simply a matter of opening the terminal and entering:

sudo yum install get_iplayer

The application is now installed on your machine however it is a command line tool and therefore will not show up on your applications menu.

Using get_iplayer

1. To use it go to the BBC iplayer website and select the programme of your choice:

2. Copy the web address of the programme from the address bar.

3. Open up a terminal

4. type: get_iplayer --pid={the web address of your chosen programme} if you want the video in HD then add the command --vmode=flashhd after the web address

get_iplayer will start to convert the film and it will be saved as an MP4 file.

The file is now saved on your computer, the best part is that it is now DRM free, you can watch it on your media player, phone (you may need to perform a bit of converting/editing) or any other PC in the house. If you want to watch it on your home TV through your DVD player then that is also possible (I personally recommend DeVeDe for that task). Enjoy your videos.

Humble Bundles

2011-04-15T16:34:00.000-07:00

Over the past year there has been a collection of games released under the name "humble ...... bundle". they have been released in the donation format, you can pay what you want in order to receive a pack of 4-6 games. The first pack included:

World of Goo
Aquira
Gish
Lugura
Penumbra (overture)

The second pack included the following:

Braid
Machinarium
Cortex Command
Revenge of the Titans

The current collection called the Humble Frostebyte Bundle includes:

Trine
Shadowgrounds
Shadowgrounds: survivor
Jack Claw
Splot

The continuing arguement is that Linux users will not pay for anything. Well lets look at the facts: over the last three bundles: the average Windows user has donated $6 whilst the average Linux user has donated over $11, almost twice as much. The fact that the average Linux users pay double shows that there is a market out there for Linux gamers. Hopefully this will get some of the established companies taking note that games are important to Linux users. The sad fact is that we are treated as second class. We need native Linux games to be a success in order to promote growth. With the recent expansion of independent gaming companies, this is becoming more of a realistic challenge daily. OK we may never have even close to the number of windoze and xbox gamers on Linux, however the fact that companies are taking note of the needs of Linux gamers is a step in the right direction.

Flattr: a brief introduction

2011-04-08T04:40:00.002-07:00

For those of you that have been following my blog for a while you may have noticed that recently each post now concludes with a Flattr button. Following my recent Wikileaks and Flattr design followed by a few discussions with other users on identi.ca, I suddenly became aware that Flattr isn't perhaps as well known as I first thought. Several users asked how the system worked, given that this is very difficult to do in 140 characters or less, I decided to write a blog post about it.

Flattr is a Swedish based micro payments system, which allows users to donate funds to a project or cause of their choice. But is this simply PayPal with another badge and colour scheme? NO. Flattr is done in a way that is probably new to most of us.

Once you've signed up you are required to set your monthly amount; this is what you will pay into your account each month. This is done via MoneyBookers or PayPal and can range from Two Euro to one hundred Euro and is refered to as 'Means'. Now you've got the funds into the account you can start donating (flattring).

To donate simply click on the green Flattr button; these can be in three types:

Every time you click then each donation will become less. Your monthly amount (means) is divided by the number of clicks within each month. For example if your means is set to ten Euro and throughout your first month you click on five Flattr buttons, at the end of the month each thing you've flattred will receive two Euro. However, if in the next month you start to Flattr a few more things that you like, say you've clicked on twenty items: in your second month each thing that you Flattr will only receive 50 cents.

The best way that I've found to describe Flattr to a newcomer is to think of the month as a child's party, the flattred projects as the children and your means as the cake. The cake doesn't get cut and dished out until everybody has arrived (the month's over), once all the children have arrived then all receive a slice of cake. The more children in attendance, then the smaller each slice will be.

If you do not Flattr anything in a particular month, maybe your on an extended holiday or some circumstances arise where Flattr is low on your list of priorities, then Flattr donates your means to a charity of it's choice. A more detailed explanation of the process and the charities involved can be found here.

However this is not the only way to donate using Flattr, there is a one off payment option, similar to the PayPal or bank transfer style. This will allow you to donate up to fifty Euro to the cause or project of your choice.

But we are still not done; what if your work is outside in the real world and not in the virtual world? No problem, Flattr has that area covered too. The user is given the option to print out a QR Code which can then be scanned using a smartphone, this scan has the same effect as clicking on the green Flattr buttons.

This feature is the one thing that gives Flattr huge potential. In today's world, people are increasingly carrying less hard cash and paying by electronic means. This could prove to be a potential problem with people who rely on tips and donations as a major part of their income. However Flattr fills this role nicely, as this busker is proving:

Think of the range, potentially limitless. Going along to an art gallery or museum, seeing something you like and click, you've flattred the creator directly. Scanning a name-badge of a person that served you in a cafe or bar, porters, taxi drivers, the list is potentially endless.

So why is it not in our day to day lives yet? Well people and companies have to adopt it: it's all very well saying you want to Flattr 'Children in Need', however if they do not have a Flattr account then this is not an option. More users have to embrace the technology if Flattr is going to grow to it's potential. Growth will come with demand, if you like it tell your friends and work colleagues, spread the word about Flattr.

Teefury: 24 hours only

2011-04-05T12:54:00.000-07:00

We often see the signs in various shops, magazines, TV advertisements etc that sales and prices are 'one day only' in a bid to get you to rush out the product. Most of the time if you check back in another month the 'once in a lifetime' offer is repeated. However once in a while you may be told that something is one day only and TeeFury is one such company that delivers on that promise.

TeeFury offers t-shirts for 24 hours only; once the time has gone, the t-shirt is removed from the site. I hear you ask "What makes this site even worth a mention? there must be thousands of t-shirt sellers online." Well the t-shirts for sale are not ones that are usually bought off the rails at the local clothing retailer; rather they have been designed and submitted by the users of the site. All that you need to do is sign up for a free account and you can submit as many designs as you like. The submission process really is simple:

If your more into manual graphics then they will also accommodate you: create your picture, scan it and send in the scanned image. For every t-shirt sold the creator gets $1.

The t-shirts themselves are priced at $10 plus postage and packaging. Now before you switch off here when I start mentioning US dollars: they do post worldwide. The total cost for a buyer in the UK is $19, for a rare t-shirt that isn't too bad a price.

The t-shirt designs change every 24 hours, as mentioned earlier in the post, so if you don't like today's simply check the site again tomorrow for the new design. Most of the time the designs incorporate two themes, but this is not always the case.

Being a child of the 80s I opted for a Back to the Future themed shirt for my first purchase:

The parcel arrived two and a half weeks after ordering it; not rapid, but I've had longer waiting periods for international packages. The quality of the shirts themselves is good, a nice cotton t-shirt; fairly thick but not heavy. However the one thing that caught my attention was the quality of the print: it really was very good. After two weeks and several washes the print is still as good and colourful as when it arrived. From past experience I have found that custom printed shirts fade very quickly after a few washes, but so far this has exceeded my expectations.

The site has a gallery section showing the t-shirts that were previously available. Whilst it is interesting to look back, this is a feature I wish that the site didn't have. It clearly states that once the 24 hours are passed they are not available: why tease the customer by showing us some really cool designs that we have no chance of getting. I looked back and saw this shirt, as mentioned before, I'm an 80s child: Guns n Roses and He Man were two of my favourite things from my childhood, why oh why did I have to miss this one? I still cry myself to sleep and have dreams about chasing the t-shirt but it's always just out of reach. Well no, I'm really not that sad. But I am gutted that I missed that one; now do you see my side of the argument as to why the gallery is not necessarily a good idea?

To be honest, I thought for $10 plus postage that these would be cheap, low quality t-shirts that you may wear a few times and then keep for sentimental purposes. I've been very surprised at the good quality of both the t-shirt and the print. If you see a design you like I would have no hesitation in recommending purchasing from TeeFury.

Flattr-Wikileaks logo

2011-04-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

A while back I was asked by Marie Axelsson (@maloki on identi.ca) to come up with a logo for a blog post that combined two things she was going to write about: Flattr and Wikileaks. This was mainly in response to the knee jerk reaction from Paypal and the major credit card companies Visa and Mastercard along with a bank in Switzerland that froze Julian Assange's funds. Flattr has continued to allow support for Wikileaks, you can view the profile here.

But the challenge was to create a logo that would incorporate the two companies. After a good few hours developing roughs and then tweaking the idea, the final logo is shown below:

The image has been created using Inkscape and is made entirely from scratch. Although both logos are widely available on the internet, the beauty of creating it from scratch as an svg (scale vector graphics) file is that it can be blown up to the size of huge banners without any distortion or pixelation. For viewing purposes the files on display in this post and flattrchattr's are png files, these will distort when stretched.

The article in question is located on flattrchattr.com, you can view it directly here

If you like the logo then you can make a flattr donation by either clicking on the flattr button at the bottom of this post or by clicking on the image itself within the flattrchattr post.

Crunchbang Statler R20110207 Review

2011-03-17T15:56:00.000-07:00

Following my trial and review of Crunchbang Linux Statler Alpha 1 quite some time ago I recently decided to give the latest release R20110207 a try. Again, having little to no experience with openbox, I opted for the XFCE 64 bit version of the distro, all the versions are available here http://crunchbanglinux.org/downloads/statler/20110207/ . For those of you that may have tried Crunchbang in the past, the one main change within the distro is that it is now Debian based instead of Ubuntu based. People have different opinions on this, but for the majority of users the main thing you will notice is the software available in the repos is different, especially if your only previous experience is the Ubuntu software centre. But then again, if your a relative newbie then I'm not convinced that this is the correct for you. For the new users venturing out of Ubuntu for the first time then I would probably recommend gaining experience with Linux Mint, Simply Mepis, Mandriva or Pardus. A potentially unstable system is great for learning and experience, but not so convenient for inexperienced users as an everyday system.

The first thing that you notice about Crunchbang is the speed: it's fast. This distro is one of the quickest implementations of the XFCE desktop I have come across. The desktop, by default now comes with a taskbar along the bottom, the workspace switcher is implemented in a much neater fashion, in the traditional way beside the newly added system tray. The Conky widget displays system information and some useful keyboard short-cuts is positioned in the upper right area of the screen. Whilst this may be useful to some users, I really would like there to be a quick way of disabling it.

The menu can be accessed via a right click on any part of the desktop, a new feature is a quicklaunch toolbar on the left hand side of the screen. This is hidden by default but appears when the user moves the mouse over to the left edge of the sceen. This can be easily modified to suit the users taste.

For such a nimble distro Crunchbang comes with a large variety of pre installed programs:
GIMP (photo editing)
Viewnoir (image viewer)
Hey Buddy (microblogging client)
xchat IRC (Chat client)
Chromium (web browser)
Abiword (word processor)
Gnumeric (spreadsheets)
VLC (media player)
Thunar (file manager)
Synaptic (software centre)

Whilst everybody has their own personal preference, this distro comes with a minimalist approach, but is highly usable out of the box.

Despite the inclusion of the Synaptic Software Centre, I've found that I have installed all my apps from the command line, Crunchbang opts for apt-get, I personally prefer aptitude, but this can be easily installed from either a Synaptic or using apt-get.

The overall system feels a lot more polished this time around. Philip Newborough (@corenominal on identi.ca) has done a really good job of tweaking this distro and having it run very smoothly. I've been using it for a month now and have not run into too many problems.

The biggest concern for the average user is the lack of pulseaudio. Most people may think 'who cares' but pulseaudio is needed to run Skype. I have had some problems trying to setup Skype on Crunchbang, but if I'm being truthful I haven't spent much time on it.

Being Debian based, there is a huge commitment to pushing free software. Getting MP3 and other non free media types to work isn't simply a matter of clicking 'ubuntu restricted extras' from the software centre. For those who are having problems with this I recently produced a guide here. But at the end of the day Crunchbang isn't design for the newbie. It will require a bit of knowledge to get everything setup to the way the end user likes.

It's a great starting point if you want to build your own Debian based distro, or is especially good at running older hardware. An improvement under the hood and smoother running has lead this to become my joint day to day distro, probably one of the main reasons I haven't fixed some of the pulseaudio issues is that I've already setup Skype on my Gentoo distro. If you haven't tried Crunchbang before or if it's been a while, then I recommend that you give this superfast, Debian based distro a go. It won't be to everybody's taste, but if your interested in creating your own distro and don't feel ready for Arch or Gentoo yet, then this may be a very good starting point.

MP3 files in Debian

2011-02-27T05:37:00.000-08:00

A lot of new users move from Ubuntu to another Debian based distro to limit the ammount of change they experience. But often can be a bit daunted by the challenges that Ubuntu made easy for them. One such is music files in MP3 format.

Whilst I personally use Ogg Vorbis and would encourage all others to, I am realistic that a lot of people still want to use their MP3 files and even build up their collection.

*If you are unsure what the term "as root" means then simply add sudo before each command that requires root privileges, you will be required to enter your password as sudo is a powerful tool*

Playing MP3 files

For playing MP3 files, the quickest method is to download VLC player. This is available from the software repositories from the majority of distros. This can be installed very easily:

1. Open the terminal

2. As root type: apt-get install vlc

This now gives you a player.

Ripping CDs to MP3 format

Should you want to rip your CDs to MP3 format then we still have another few steps to take.

1. Open the terminal

2. As root type: apt-get install sound-juicer

This gives a program that will rip the music from a CD and save it onto the computer. We can load it up from the main menu (usually listed under the multimedia or sound and video), called Audio CD Extractor.

If we open this up and click on edit and preferences we should be greeted by a window as shown below:

Down near the bottom of the window we should see Output Format, this by default is set to CD Qua;ity, Lossy (.ogg type). At this point if we click on this it will not give us the option of MP3. We still have a few more things to do.

The package we need is not available in the Debian repos due to Debian's commitment to free software. But we can add this. We need to go back to our terminal.

3. As root type: nano /etc/apt/sources.list (if you are met with the message unknown command nano, then you can retype the command replacing nano with gedit)

4. Decide what repos you would like to add:

Stable: deb ftp://ftp.debian-multimedia.org stable main non-free
Testing: deb ftp://ftp.debian-multimedia.org testing main non-free
Unstable: deb ftp://ftp.debian-multimedia.org sid main non-free

Add only one of the above choices, just type the part in bold to the end of document.

5. Exit the file by pressing Ctrl + X, it will then ask you if you wish to save press y and then hit return twice.

This will add the repos to our system, but we also need to have the keyring before the repos will work.

6. Download the Debian Multimedia keyring from here.

7. Navigate to the directory and, as root, type: dpkg -i debian-multimedia-keyring*.deb

8. as root, type: apt-get update

9. as root, type: apt-get install gstreamer0.10-lame gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

That's it.

To check it has worked open up Audio CD Extractor again, click on edit and preferences. This time when we click on Output Format, MP3 should be an option.

Enjoy your music.

Formatting a USB pen drive with the Command Line

2011-02-26T08:23:00.000-08:00

The vast majority of users today are probably wandering why I would even consider writing a 'how to' for formatting anything from the command line. The vast majority of distros come with gparted installed and that is an easier option to format any drive with the added convenience of a nice graphical front end.

However for those users who like to test out new distros on a regular basis, a USB pen drive is now the preferred option to boot into a live environment. Why? Well for starters programs like Unetbootin make it very easy to put a live distro onto a pen drive. This can be run, booted straight from the stick, without ever having the need to burn a CD. After testing and/or installing the distro the drive can be reused, unlike the CD which may be used as a coaster before ending up in the bin.

Some programs, when they put the distro onto the pen drive, trick the computer into thinking that the pen drive is a CD. It works fine for testing the distro, but when it comes to wiping it you are unable to do it from the file manager (CDs are read only) and gparted will not format it (it does drives not CDs). So your left with a pen drive that behaves like it can't be altered, but this is where the command line is a useful tool.

This will wipe all the data off the pen stick, for safety reasons I would strongly advise disconnecting any other external USB hard drives or pen sticks at this point.

First of all you need to find out the stick is listed as
1. open up the terminal

2. type: fdisk -l

This will tell you the location of your USB drive, in the case below it is located at /dev/sdd so I'll use that for the rest of the tutorial. Please remember to substitute in the actual location of the drive when you are doing this.

kevie@kev-pc:~$ fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sdd: 4009 MB, 4009754624 bytes
124 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1018 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 7688 * 512 = 3936256 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

3. unmount the drive with the command: umount /dev/sdd

4. I'm going to assume that your wanting the pen drive formatted to FAT32 to allow you to use it on any system. Type: mkdosfs -F 32 -I /dev/sdd

That's it, your done.

NoS-LUG Shirts Update

2011-02-19T05:22:00.000-08:00

A while back I spoke about the North of Scotland Linux User Group printing a t-shirt with a view to wearing it at an upcoming open source event such as Oggcamp. Well after a lengthy wait the t-shirts are now available online at Zazzle.co.uk in the UK or Zazzle.com for international orders. Two t-shirts have been created, although these can be customised to any colour the buyer wishes, the default colouring is light blue and navy blue (shown below). A NoS-LUG coffee mug is also available. These items can be viewed here at the store, hopefully there shall be more items to follow.

Please leave any feedback of the items in the comment boxes below.

Blocking an email address in Gmail

2011-01-21T02:08:00.000-08:00

I, like almost everybody else I know, use GMail as a primary or secondary email account. But there is one design feature that I don't like: it's not obvious how to block email from a specific user. Yes Gmail has a fantastic spam filter, but your always going to get that annoying person that is going to send 15 jokes, virus warning, government conspiracies and anything else they receive themselves.

To block a specific email address in Gmail isn't difficult, but it's not very obvious to the casual user. This really could have been a lot simpler, Gmail could easily have added a 'block sender' button, but have chosen not to.

Step 1: Open your Gmail account, at the top of the page, beside the search bar, select the option Create a filter

Step 2: In the From box enter the email address you wish to block. Then select Next Step.

Step 3: Place a tick in the box beside Delete It and then select Create Filter.

That's it, you will not receive any more emails from the blocked address.

Push your free Yahoo mail to K-9

2011-01-19T10:18:00.000-08:00

One of the constant problems that keeps on arising in forum after forum post is that users are simply unable to manage their messages from the Yahoo free mail through K-9 the Android open source email client. This annoyed me as I have an old Yahoo account that I still use and I was desperate to get this to work.

A lot of posts simply conclude that it is not possible to do without paying for Yahoo plus, however there is a workaround.

Before we start make sure that you have the computer switched on and it is online.

1. On your Android smartphone, open up the K9 mail application, then press menu and select add account.

2. Enter your yahoo email address and password as instructed and then select Manual setup.

3. Then on the next screen it asks for the type of account, select IMAP.

4. The next screen will be headed Incoming server settings, configure them as shown below:

Username: {your full email address}

password: {your password}

IMAP Server: imap.mail.yahoo.com

Security type: none

Authentication type: PLAIN

Port: 143

If you click on next at this point you will be given an error message about a wrong username and password combination, if you see this simply click on Edit details to return to the previous screen. This is where the majority of users have a problem.

5. At this point return to your PC and go to the Yahoo website, log into your free mail, then immediately log back out.

6. Back to your Android phone, assuming your still at the page we setup in step 4, select next and this time the server check should complete without any errors. This can be a bit temperamental so if this didn't work select Edit details, re-enter your email and password and repeat steps 5 & 6.

7. Now setup the Outgoing server settings as shown below:

SMTP Server: android.smtp.mail.yahoo.com

Security type: SSL (if available)

Port: 465

ensure their is a tick beside Require sign in.

Authentication type: PLAIN

Username: {your full email address}

password: {your password}

But don't click on next just now.

8. Repeat step 5: return to your PC and go to the Yahoo website, log into your free mail, then immediately log back out.

9. Back to your Android phone, assuming your still at the page we setup in step 7, select next, the server check should complete without any errors. Again this part can be a bit temperamental so if this didn't work select Edit details, re-enter your email and password and repeat steps 8 & 9.

10. You are then greeted with a variety of Account options, make sure that there is a tick beside Enable push mail for this account. The other options you can set as you wish. When your happy with your settings select next.

11. Give the mail account a name, although this is optional it is very useful if you plan on running multiple email accounts. Type the name you want others to see when they receive an email from you.

12. Click Done and that is you finished.

You should now have the ability to send and receive emails from your Yahoo account, without the added expense of Yahoo Plus.

This issue gave me a lot of grief, but I hope that this post will save others a lot of time. It's not perfect but it's a workaround.

Ubuntu One music store - without Ubuntu

2011-01-14T15:58:00.000-08:00

Purchasing online digital music for me personally is always a bit of a pain. I actively seek to support free formats like Ogg Vorbis, but at the same time I want to listen to a wide variety of music, which often means that I'm restricted to MP3s.

In the past I've purchased a few songs from Amazon, along with a variety of other companies. When Canonical announced that it was launching a music store I thought: great, at least I can support an open source company. I was very disappointed initially when I found out that you had to be an Ubuntu user to benefit from this.

Having used Ubuntu some 4 years ago when I started using Linux, I have worked my way through a variety of distros (and still do to this day) before settling with Gentoo. However the music store is not owned by Canonical, instead it is using 7digital's music store with an Ubuntu front. Ubuntu get a part of the sale, but it is actually 7digital's business, Ubuntu is the agent.

In order to get to the Ubuntu One music store we need only two things:
1) an Ubuntu One account
2) an internet connection

If you are reading this then I'm assuming that you have an internet connection, to sign up to Ubuntu One simply go to http://one.ubuntu.com to get your free 2GB account. Notice that there is no Ubuntu operating system on that list.

Once you have an account simply go to http://stores.7digital.com/stores/default.aspx?shop=34&partner=983 and your in the Ubuntu One music store. You can now purchase music and support an open source company. To prove this is not an Ubuntu screenshot take a look at the kernel.

The files are sent to your Ubuntu One cloud account where you can move them to your PC very easily. The only issue is that their progress never appears to move, don't worry: they're being downloaded to your Ubuntu One cloud server as you wait. I'm not quite sure why Canonical have tried to limit the music store to Ubuntu users, I am always happy to support open source companies and this view is shared by a lot of other Linux users I know.

Happy musical purchases and please keep supporting open source whenever possible.

UK Anti-Terrorism poster

2011-01-12T14:35:00.000-08:00

The UK has had it's fair share of official muck ups, in fact we almost seem to be famous for it. A while ago a poster was made about our modern day terrorist. This has been passed around a lot of users' email accounts, the poster in question is shown below:

Now myself, along with most of the people that read this had a good laugh, but it did get me thinking: how are the not so "tech savy" people around us reading this?

Well I started looking at what I had in my van, yes that is the start: I drive a van. Terrorist no, I am just a practical minded guy who was sick of ripping up the back seats when I was transporting wood around in my car. I carry a ruck sack all the time with my gym gear in it, it is certainly well packed and bulky. I have two digital cameras, I like to take pictures, but I do not even class myself as an amateur photographer. Anybody that knows me is aware that I have my mobile phone in my hand almost twenty four hours a day, I'm constantly using it to post messages on identi.ca. The final piece of information is a computer, that is the key to tell if somebody is performing illegal activities. Well I do not only have a computer I am well down the geek line, I do not simply use it to play solitaire and write the occasional letter. I am most definitely a power user, and as a result spend a considerable amount of time at my PC.

Do I hit every target that is on the poster telling people to watch out? Yes. Does this mean that I should be treated with suspicion by those around me? I think that a severe lack of common sense was despatched in the design and distribution of the poster. They have chosen everyday objects that many of us own and use without a second thought. A much more realistic alternative was created to put our minds at ease:

I'm sorry that I have to take a serious issue like this in jest, however I think a severe lack of thought went into this part of the campaign. My concern is that geeks in general may be looked at with a lot more suspicion. Will the geek carrying the netbook become the new target for automatic searches at airports? Will the techno-fobs among us actually believe the poster and call the number, legitimately believing that they're doing the right thing? I already feel like we are interrogated enough whenever we travel without adding to it.

I seriously hope that this poster campaign is taken down permanently, if it has not been already.

Adding user to Sudoers file

2010-12-29T02:22:00.000-08:00

I remember my first time exploring Linux distros outside the safety of Ubuntu. One of the very first things that confused me was when I tried to use the sudo command I was greeted with the message:

kevie is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

In the community we are often guilty of assuming things we do regularly are known to all users, but we all lacked knowledgable at one time. Well the first thing that is important is how to add the user to the sudoers file.

1. open the terminal

2. type su (then enter your password)

3. type visudo

this will then bring up a screen full of characters, you can scroll around, but you'll notice that we can't start typing right away, we are in the editor called vi

4. scroll down to the line root ALL=(ALL) ALL

5. press i to start editing the file

6. below the line in step 4 enter {your user name} ALL=(ALL) ALL

7. stop editing by pressing the escape(esc) key

8. assuming everything went alright* enter :wq to save and exit the file

*if you accidentally changed something you shouldn't have :q! will exit without saving the file. If you need to do this type the command and go back to step 3.

You are now in the sudoers file and can use sudo to gain superuser privileges. But remember:

With great power comes great responsibility

The second question you'll be asking yourself is "Who does the first 'illegal' use of sudo get reported to?" Well the following illustration should help:

Not so much a blog post

2010-12-23T01:02:00.000-08:00

This isn't much of a proper blog post, more of free promotion really. I found this on another site and felt it just had to be shared. Anybody that knows me, knows I'm not a fan of facebook, so this was too good not to share. A great anti-facebook graphics.

You can also download a variety of stickers/buttons/banners for your site, these are all released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

SVG available here

SVG available here

Exporting Diaspora posts to identi.ca

2010-12-13T12:44:00.000-08:00

With the recent release of the open source social site Diaspora, a flock of us from identi.ca have gladly accepted invitations. Most Linux users are more than happy to pilot software at an early stage.

On the initial setup, as a lover of open source, I felt let down by the 'open source equivalent of Facebook.' After confirming email addresses and some basic information, the setup wizard asks if you would like to connect to other sites. To my horror the options are 1) Facebook 2) Twitter 3) must be identi.ca, right? Well that's the problem there's only two options, but never fear fellow denters there is a simple way to overcome this problem.

In the spirit of this blog, I always try to keep everything open source, I'm going to link the accounts using brdcst.it a free, open source project by Michele Azzolari or @macno on identi.ca. Whilst brdcst.it is a free service; you need an invite, ask @macno on identi.ca who, for those who don't know him, is very obliging and helpful.

Once you have received your invitation log in to your new account at brdcst.it We'll do the destination first, trust me it's easier. I'll now break this into steps to make it easier to follow.

Before we can setup brdcst.it properly, we need the feed for your Diaspora posts.

1. On Diaspora, when you are about to make a post, you should see a text box similar to the one shown below:

Click on the orange RSS icon.

2. This will take you to a new page showing all your posts, take a note of the address:

In this example my address is https://joindiaspora/public/kevie
*if there is .atom at the end of the address then leave it off

3. Go to the brdcst.it website.

4. On the welcome screen you'll see the number of feeds and destinations you currently have setup. Click on Add/Edit beside destinations, this will lead you to a new screen.

5. Click on Add new destination

6. Click on Identica

7. This will take you to identi.ca, log in (if necessary) and the site will display the message:

Click on Allow

8. Now go back to brdcst.it, this time click on Add/Edit beside feeds

9. In the first box add the address of your Diaspora feed that we noted in step 2. In the second box give this setup a name (I have imaginatively called it 'diaspora')

10. Now it's time to choose what you wish to export, for text only enter %t, if you want a link to be posted then add %u (only needed if your posts exceed the 140 character identi.ca limit)

11. On the next screen, put a tick beside your identi.ca username and click on Save

12. Now log out of brdcst.it and your done, your posts from Diaspora will be updated on your identi.ca timeline.

Please note that when you post on Diaspora you must tick the box make public for it to be posted to identi.ca

Gentoo DVD drive setup problems

2010-11-27T12:44:00.000-08:00

This is not meant as a guide that will fix everybodies DVD/CD problems, it was the solution that worked for me, if you still have issues then I recommend consulting the Gentoo Forums.

After gaining some recent bad advice from a 'well meaning' helper on a forum I recently managed to totally render the portage setup useless to the point where I couldn't install anything. After hours and hours of consulting with others on line and attempting a variety of fixes, the conclusion was reached that I would probably be just as quick rebuilding Gentoo from scratch.

Having completed this task already in November 2009 and with a years experience under my belt and a lot of extra libraries etc on my machine I figured that a fresh install would have my Gentoo system running even faster.

The first time I compiled my first Gentoo OS I made a lot of written notes, these were very useful and I would highly recommend anybody starting Gentoo for the first time to do this as these were invaluable the second time around. These can save time and help avoid falling into the same pitfalls twice.

Upon launching into my new Gentoo system complete with Gnome graphical environment I thought that everything was just about back to normal. One major problem though: both of my DVD drives were listed as Unnamed Drive. Neither were behaving like a DVD drive, any time I tried to eject they simply shut again immediately and I couldn't use any programs that made use of the drives eg Brasero, mplayer etc.

To compile the kernel I took the chickens way out and used Genkernel so I assumed that a lot of the default settings would be right and that the Gentoo Handbook would guide me. At this point can I please state that the Gentoo Handbook is an invaluable, well written guide when installing Gentoo. However there is one point that needs updating:

When using Genkernel with IDE drives the default setting selects:
Device Drivers ---> <*> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support (DEPRECATED) --->

This is obsolete and causes problems with udev which is designed to make your life easier. For udev to function properly we need to move to libdata. As I had already created the kernel I had to edit it by typing the command:
genkernel --menuconfig all

To rectify this I removed the * by highlighting it and pressing N.
Secondly I moved the cursor down to highlight
SCSI device support --->

and setup as follows by pressing Y to select (* will appear) or N to deselect

│ │ < > RAID Transport Class
│ │ -*- SCSI device support
│ │ < > SCSI target support
│ │ [*] legacy /proc/scsi/ support
│ │ *** SCSI support type (disk, tape, CD-ROM) ***
│ │ <*> SCSI disk support
│ │ < > SCSI tape support
│ │ < > SCSI OnStream SC-x0 tape support
│ │ <*> SCSI CDROM support
│ │ [ ] Enable vendor-specific extensions (for SCSI CDROM)
│ │ <*> SCSI generic support
│ │ < > SCSI media changer support
│ │ [*] Probe all LUNs on each SCSI device
│ │ [ ] Verbose SCSI error reporting (kernel size +=12K)
│ │ [ ] SCSI logging facility
│ │ [ ] Asynchronous SCSI scanning
│ │ SCSI Transports --->
│ │ [ ] SCSI low-level drivers --->
│ │ < > SCSI Device Handlers --->
│ │ < > OSD-Initiator library

I know that your thinking, wait a minute, my drives are IDE/PATA not SCSI. The IDE command set was evolved from SCSI and is now being merged back with it.

now exit genkernel and wait for a few minutes for it to complete. Then I entered the command:
nano -w /etc/fstab

Now comment out anything that includes the DVD/CD drives by placing a # at the start of the line. Then change all of the drives labelled hda, hdb, hdc... etc to sda, sdb.sdc.... etc. If you have a combination of IDE and SATA then the IDE will be labelled first and the SATA drives second. So if you previously had 2 IDE and 2 SATA drives then previously they may have been labelled hda, hdb, sda, sdb. However this will now be changed to sda, sdb, sdc, sdd with your IDE drives being labelled sda & sdb and your SATA drives now getting labelled sdc & sdd. Exit and save.

Finally the last step is to modify your GRUB menu entry if you've set a separate partition for /boot.

If you are using Grub Legacy then type:
nano /boot/grub/menu.lst

On the line it will have the command The (real_)root=/dev/hda... this will need to be changed to /dev/sd...

Restart your system and all of your DVD/CD drives should now be functioning as expected. This problem caused me three days of grief. Hopefully it may provide the answer that some of the other users may be looking for.

Customise the Gnome menu icon

2010-11-18T15:24:00.000-08:00

After a recent major error forced me to rebuild my Gentoo system, I was reminded of some of the small annoyances. Things that should be so easy, yet they can prove incredibly frustrating. One of these is the awkwardness of changing the menu icon in the Gnome desktop. I don't know why it cant be as easy as in the KDE environment; a couple of obvious clicks and then you are asked to select the new icon, dead easy.

First of all create the icon you want in my example I'm using Larry the Cow taken directly from the Gentoo site. Rename/save the file to start-here.png

The next step is to find the folder of the current icons your using. If your not sure which set of icons you have then click on system > preferences > appearance this will open up a window, select customise and then icons, note the name of the highlighted set.

The folder is /usr/share/icons/{name_of_icon_set}/22x22/places/ we need to move our icon into this folder, but the problem is that it is restricted access, so simply dragging the file won't work.

Open a terminal and navigate to our custom icon. Type:
sudo mv start-here.png /usr/share/icons/{name_of_icon_set}/22x22/places/

Some users have also had success putting the icon in the scalable folder instead of 22x22, if you wish to try this then simply replace 22x22 with scalable in the above command. Please note that the 22x22 is a size, the icon should have been resized previously to 22x22 pixels.

So the file is in position and nothing happens, you can even restart and there will be no effect. We need to input a couple of commands before it will change:

sudo gtk-update-icon-cache --force /usr/share/icons/{name_of_icon_set}

and finally:

sudo killall gnome-panel

The screen will flicker and you should have your customised menu icon.

Jamendo - download Ogg files directly

2010-10-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

If your anything like me then you'll be very annoyed with the constant offer of an Ogg Vorbis torrent on Jamendo and then the severe lack of any seeders for the album. Indeed I've one album in particular that I've been trying to download now for 6 months without a single seeder. Given that the files are there, the lack of seeders is very frustrating. However a solution is at hand: download them directly.

This does not appear to be an option from the Jamendo site, however I noticed that the Android app is able to download any album I want in Ogg format. After some research and questioning, there is a way to directly download the albums in Ogg Vorbis format to your PC.

It is not as simple as a one click, however it is not overly complicated.

1. First go to the page of the album you wish to download, in my example I'm using the band I reviewed in my previous blog post: Roads and Lakes by Crazy Evolution.

2. Take a look at the address bar, take a note of the numbers at the end. This is the Album ID, in this case 77507

3. Pace this into the address bar of your browser:
http://www.jamendo.com/get/album/id/album/archiverestricted/redirect/{album ID goes here}/?are=ogg3

so for my example to get the Crazy Evolution album it would be :
http://www.jamendo.com/get/album/id/album/archiverestricted/redirect/77507/?are=ogg3

4. From the pop up window select Save File and then click OK

Once your downloads have finished; sit back, relax and enjoy your music in a free format.

Crazy Evolution - Roads and Lakes

2010-10-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

A new band has appeared on the scene at Jamendo; Crazy Evolution. The band are stuck firmly in the punk rock genre, there is no grey area here. This is a genre that you either love or hate and this is right up my alley.

Drawing on influences from a variety of bands such as The Offspring, Sum 41, Blink 182, Bowling for Soup and a variety of others, Crazy Evolution have produced a great début album; Roads and Lakes.

The guitars and drums are top notch and the singing and backing vocals are very well performed throughout. This band would not appear out of place on a best of punk rock album with some of the bands mentioned earlier.

Whilst this genre does get pigeon holed to the skateboarders of society, the cover does little to help this stereotype, this is album is definitely worthy of a listen.

Free music for professional licensing

Jamendo Page
Official site
MySpace Page

geek test results

2010-10-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

Overall, you scored as follows: 16% scored higher (more computer geeky), 1% scored the same, and 83% scored lower (less geeky).

Compared to those in the same age group as you: 23% scored higher (more computer geeky), 1% scored the same, and 76% scored lower (less geeky).

What does this mean? Your computer geekiness is: High-Level Computer Geek. All of those below you are envious of you! (...Well perhaps not the cool people)

Removing Facebok & Twitter from the Nexus One

2010-10-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

*This guide will not work with Android 2.2.1, Universal Androot is not compatible with 2.2.1 due to root restrictions

**If you are not confident with using the terminal please do not do this, I am not responsible for any damage to the phone

A lot of posts have been written on various forums about removing some of the default apps that come supplied with the Nexus One phone. Two that particularly grate on me is the automatic inclusion of Facebook and Twitter apps, I do not have an account with either and neither do I want one.

Given that Android is based on a Linux kernel then it should all be about freedom, so removing these was high on my list of priorities when I received the phone. As Android is based on Linux then you can use the same commands that most Linux users use on a day to day basis in the terminal.

First of all, from your Nexus One, select Settings > Applications and make sure that there is a tick beside Unknown Sources. This allows us to use software other than the apps in the market, very useful for trying beta packages that are not yet in the marketplace (Fennec etc).

We now need root privileges. Most ways of rooting your phone affect the bootloader and the mobile companies claim that this nullifies your warranty. I am using Universal Androot which can be downloaded here or by scanning the barcode below, this grants root privileges to applications, not your bootloader, so a factory reset should wipe this out.

Install the the app, make sure the Android version is set to 2.0~2.2 and click Go Root. The next screen should give you the message: Woot! Your device is rooted!

Now go to the marketplace and download a terminal, I used the Android Terminal Emulator; it does the job and it's free, but feel free to choose any you wish.

Open the terminal and type:

su

An Android head with crossed bones below it will appear asking if you wish to grant this application Superuser permissions, select Yes. At this point I had to restart the terminal app, but this may not be the case for all of you.

Now type, pressing return at the end of each line:

mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system

cd /system/app
ls

At this point you will get a list of all the pre-installed packages, they will all have .apk extensions. Take a note of the exact names of the package files you wish to remove. Please be careful not to remove apps that are necessary to the basic function of your phone. We will rename these instead of deleting them, this means that we can retrieve them later if we wish. In my example I will be removing the Facebook and Twitter apps:

mv Facebook.apk Facebook.bak
mv Twitter.apk Twitter.bak
mount -o ro,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system

sync

Now exit the terminal and reboot your Nexus One and the unwanted apps will be gone.

Fedora 14 - a preview

2010-10-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

With the release of one of my favourite Linux distros imminent I decided to try out Fedora 14 beta release candidate for a sneak preview. The one thing I will say is that Fedora have concentrated on speed, this distro is fast, a quick install and boot up times. The usual slick blue design is there, but as with 13 I do think they may have stripped the core system back a bit too much, I felt that selection of applications upon installing a bit limited.

Firefox, Pino, Shotwell and Rhythmbox are all very useful but no word processing or graphics packages at all??? Stability, as Fedora releases love to be cutting edge, may be a bit of an issue. I tested this on two laptops (HP & Lenovo), both with similar specs 2GHz processor, 2GB ram, both capable of running the 64bit versions. The only major setup difference was that I used the entire hard drive on the HP, but only a partition on the Lenovo. The HP worked perfectly from the install, this could quite easily have been the final version. However the same install disk produced a very different outcome on the Lenovo. Almost nothing worked as it should; nautilus kept crashing, I couldn't get the wireless working properly and I couldn't burn a CD or DVD. The software started up but then hung for a while before crashing. I thought to myself this could be an error during installation but sadly on a re-install I was greeted with the same problems. This appeared to be more like an alpha edition than a release candidate.

Anyway we shall wait and see what the final release will bring, I hope that if these bugs are not sorted then Fedora will push the date back rather than releasing an unstable system.

Irn Bru - Classic Ads

2010-09-30T01:32:00.001-07:00

Having lived in Scotland all my life, I tend to forget how uncommon Irn Bru is outside of our wee country. I'm not saying it's impossible to get, but very often when I'm away on holiday I struggle to find my favourite soft drink.

Before Irn Bru's marketing campaign was about shock and controversial tactics, there theme was always boys doing mens jobs. I have to confess that I loved watching this when I was a boy and recently I started scouring the net for some of the ads from the classic campaign. Here are three of my favoutrites:

1) Road works:

2) Shipyard:

3) Sweeping :

Fedora - annoying issues

2010-09-28T13:16:00.000-07:00

Before I start with this gripe can I please make my stance clear: I love Fedora as a Linux distro, although I change the distros on my PC almost every week there are two partitions that do not change: Gentoo (my primary distro) and Fedora (my secondary choice).

However there are two things that really annoy me about the last couple of Fedora releases: the nouveau driver and grub.

I am personally very glad that the open source community is making great strides in developing an open source alternative for graphics drivers, it's even better to see them working. However the nouveau driver does not work well with my current Nvidia AGP card; 3D games do not work, neither does Compiz. So why have they made it so annoyingly awkward to uninstall the nouveau driver? Surely this could be done in a much simpler manner than following a guide like this.

Now we come to the Grub issue. I actually don't have a problem with Grub. I like how it can be edited quickly and once you get the hang of it, the Grub menu is highly customizable. However whenever Fedora performs an update and a new kernel image is installed Fedora automatically makes this new entry your default choice at booting time. I may be a cynic; but I feel that this is trying to force you into making Fedora your default distro. The main reason most Linux users hate Windows is due to how restrictive and closed it is and always complement Linux on it's freedom of choice and openness. Anything that tries to force you into making a specific choice is going against freedom in my issue.

Fedora is a great distro, anybody with a bit of Linux experience should give it a try (not for complete newbies though). But these two points in the latest releases really have got under my skin.

Welcome LibreOffice

2010-09-28T06:02:00.000-07:00

The Document Foundation announced today that it is forking OpenOffice and creating LibreOffice. To be honest this comes as no major surprise following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems last year. Oracle have never been a major contributor to open source software and seem more interested in proprietary solutions. This is not to say that they are not welcome to contribute to the project, in a press release the Document Foundation stated:

"Oracle Corporation -- who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems -- has been warmly invited to become a contributor to the new Foundation."

This does not appear to be a standard fork by a couple of disgruntled employees, rather it appears that a substantial number of the developers from the OpenOffice have planted their flags with LibreOffice, for the full details of the members of The Document Foundation click here. On their website when asked if LibreOffice was a breakaway project the answer given was:

Not at all. The Document Foundation will continue to be focused on developing, supporting, and promoting the same software, and it's very much business as usual. We are simply moving to a new and more appropriate organisational model for the next decade - a logical development from Sun's inspirational launch a decade ago.

From initial screenshots (below), LibreOffice looks very similar to OpenOffice; hardly surprising given that the fork has just been announced. The company state that it is fully compatible with the majority of other office suites, this will be a major plus if it can maintain this feature.

This will undoubtedly get the attention of Microsoft, who already claim that OpenOffice infringes on several areas of their copyright, they may see a small company as a much easier target rather than locking horns with Oracle. OpenOffice also uses Java, which is still owned by Oracle. Given that Oracle are currently suing Google over the use of Java in Android then this is another litigious issue that the Document Foundation may be faced with in the early stages of it's existence.

I personally am glad that the office suite has moved to a more open source state without the limitations of one company. With the community driving the project, features and enhancements will come at more regular intervals than previously with Sun Microsystems and Oracle. This change from company to community driven project in itself may attract more users than OpenOffice did.

All the best to the Document Foundation with LibreOffice and any other projects that they undertake. I hope that they become (and remain) a mainstay on every Linux distro for years to come.

Flashrom Logos

2010-09-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

Here are the first of the mock ups for the flashrom logo designs. Am I on the right track guys?

Feedback please.

OK then a bigger chip with the text and the logo separate:

Reposition chip below flashrom:

Incorporate the lightning 'h' from design 2 with previous design:

The chip seems a bit far away, moving it a bit closer:

32 pin chip, making it as wide as the writing:
Different style of bolt:

Name on the chip:

Reposition h so it is not touching:

TinyOgg - capture your favourite clips

2010-09-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

###########################
Update: as of the 15th July 2011, TinyOgg has closed down this particular web service, it is a shame but they have put a statement on the website:

"We believe that YouTube has made enormous efforts in making its videos accessible using free software."
###########################

I have been using the TinyOgg website for some time now and suddenly realised that it is not that well known, but it is a very useful tool.

TinyOgg, which has been in beta version since I started using it, allows you to save flash videos to your hard drive, the site converts the video into an ogv or oga file depending on whether you want your output in sound or video format.

The user interface is incredibly simple; put in your website, select video or audio and then click on the convert button, it really is that easy. After a few minutes the file is on screen and savable to your hard drive.

I have found it particularly useful for saving the background sound, especially useful when you have been looking for a track for a while and then it appears as background music to a video you happen to be following on YouTube.

It does have it's limitations though, so far I've not been able to save any videos other than ones from YouTube. Also for windows users (you may have guessed from previous posts that I am not one) you will need to download VLC or a similar player in order to watch/listen to the saved media.

Overall a very useful web based tool, it would be better if it were compatible with more sites. However converting a locked down media type into an open format is also a nice feature.

Absent Feet - Soonrise

2010-09-11T01:58:00.000-07:00

A new band has just appeared on the scene at Jamendo and I am very impressed with them. They are called Absent Feet and have released a five track mini album called Soonrise. This is available to download for free and legally here or you can listen through the widget at the bottom of the post.

After Googling the band, I couldn't find much information about them at all so I'm taking for granted that this is their first album. I wasn't disappointed; this is fantastic. A chilled out rock band, this is great music for any-time; whether passing the time on a long drive or sitting chilling at the end of the week.

They are reminiscent of a lot of indie rock bands, especially those from the UK. An excellent first album, I hope that there will be many more.

Free music for professional licensing

Please don't forget that these artists on Jamendo are releasing their work for free, so a donation is always appreciated, no amount too small.

Well done Alun Parry

2010-09-01T13:20:00.000-07:00

This is a bit outdated now, however I feel that it is still worth a mention. It only came to my attention after Dan Lynch mentioned it during a recent episode of Rathole Radio.

Shortly before Ogg Camp earlier this year Alun Parry announced that he was releasing his latest Album; We Can Make the World Stop, in ogg format. I was pleased when I heard that another artists was adding ogg to their file formats when releasing new media.

However what I did not expect was that Alun released these as free downloads, this is an album that he sells on the net including on his website and on Amazon. Not only has he made this available for free in ogg format, he has also given his permission to distribute the album with others.

I hope that he continues to release future albums in ogg form, however I want to see him make a living so charging people for ogg albums is not unreasonable. Pay the money and get the media in a free and open file format, a world without DRM wouldn't that be lovely.

The album is available to download in ogg format here. Have a listen, pass the link on, promote the ogg music format.

Link Grub legacy to Grub 2

2010-08-21T23:59:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of trying out Linux distros, as a result I've had my own custom Grub (Legacy) menu for quite a while so that I do not have to continually edit the distro's own version. Recently Ubuntu and some of the Ubuntu based distros have started using Grub2; this can be a bit of a pain as it, by default, tries to wipe whatever is on the MBR and replace it with Grub2. A big NO in my opinion; Linux is all about freedom. I always install the distro's Grub to the partition where the distro itself is going.

After a while of going through various ways of working around this I was started going through the net to find a simple, universal command to chain load from Grub Legacy into Grub2. This does exist, however I really did have to look hard to find it and so far it has not let me down. Simply enter this into the menu.lst file (this is located in /boot/grub/):

title Grub2
root (hdx,y)
kernel /boot/grub/core.img

You will need to replace x and y with the appropriate position of your Grub2 menu, x is the disk and y is the partition number. So for my specific computer I use root (hd0,5) the first hard drive (0) and the sixth partition (5) remember that Grub Legacy starts counting at 0.

I hope that this post will save some others the unnecessary trawling that I had to endure for such a simple task.

My top Android apps

2010-08-04T01:26:00.000-07:00

Shot of Jaq may now be gone, however they have inspired me to write down my own thoughts on the Android apps available in the market place. At the end of the day the Android community is all about open source, it is Unix based, and sharing. So here are my top day to day apps (please note that I am not including apps that came pre installed on the phone, just 'found' apps)

1. Mustard
Mustard is an open source micro blogging client that I use day to day for posting on identi.ca , it has a full range of features mainly accessed by long presses on the users dent or for more general options you can simply press the menu button. I've been using Mustard from a very early stage, at the start it was limited and lacked some very basic features but over the last 8 months a lot has been added and I would confidently describe this micro blogging tool as 'full featured.' These include repeating and replying to posts, viewing the thread conversation and users' personal timeline, subscribing to users, adding favourites, bookmarks, url shortening, searching, tags, groups, attaching files (posting pictures etc), multiple accounts and probably a lot more that I don't use.

Support is fantastic; mustard and it's creator can be contacted directly on identi.ca with the @macno or @mustard and response is quick. I was particularly impressed with my bug reporting whilst trying a new version. Bug reported on Sunday at 9am, @macno reported by 8pm that the bug had been sourced and now fixed and by 8am the next day it was announced that a new release was available with the bug fix. Now that is quick work, open source community at it's finest.

The only feature that I would like to see incorporated is the ability to send private messages, but as not all users support this function it may be a slight stumbling block. With Twidroid I tried several times to send messages to other users on identi.ca but the app froze for a time and then reset so it may be a slight issue.

2. K-9 Mail
Why a mail client? The default Android app made by Google is great isn't it? Well it's fine, if you want to use a Googlemail account only, but a lot of other email address, especially free ones, will not work with it. K-9 mail imports accounts from Google, Tiscali (now Talk Talk) and Yahoo free. I've never tried hotmail but I've heard that it works. The main feature I like about K-9 mail is that you have the option to see each email account individually or as one integrated inbox which I think is a great feature. It is incredibly easy to use, as an email client should be. The app also comes with a notification, this can be turned off. Attachments can be viewed, saved and forwarded and emails can be deleted from the server, not just your phone. All in all I would recommend K-9 Mail to anybody, but especially users with multiple accounts.

3. Web Browsers: Dolphin & xScope GL
Up until a few weeks ago there was only one web browser for Android that I used: Dolphin. The logo is reminiscent of a Mozilla project and this does behave very much like a mobile version of Firefox. Dolphin uses tabs which can be switched between and closed, however when you have more than three open every time you switch between tabs they continually seem to revert back to the home page. The home page is actually quite a useful site with a google search bar at the top and a list of the days recommended apps for the user to try. All the menus are accessible from the menu button, with some further options available on a long screen press. You can program the app to recognise different gestures, eg drawing an H sending the user to the home page. You can flip between tabs with a finger gesture, however this is a bit slow and clumsy looking. Dolphin has a lot of features that you would expect to see on a desktop browser and because of that it can slow it down when several of these are being used. Don't get me wrong it is still a quick mobile browser, a lot quicker than the default, but it seems to try and cram too much in. Fine if you own a Nexus One, but I currently run the HTC Magic and you can see a significant difference. Another annoying thing is when you install Dolphin it makes itself your default browser. But even more annoying when you select another as your default, every time you start Dolphin it will ask the user to make Dolphin the default browser.

I came across xScope GL in the marketplace and have been using it for the last few weeks. How does it differ: if Dolphin is the mobile equivalent of Firefox (in appearance anyway) then this is definitely leaning towards Chrome for it's design inspiration. The user is given the web page and a tab bar at the top, scrolling your finger down the screen gives the user an address and toolbar, although this isn't immediately obvious to a new user as scrolling up hides it. The main menu can be found by clicking on the Android icon next to the address bar, but again this is well hidden and took me a while to figure out as it doesn't actually look like a button. Another issue is stability, xScope is prone to freezing and crashing.

Both browsers come without the use of flash so some websites are unusable. Both have the ability to send out a variety of signals regarding what they are eg desktop, iphone or Android (default). For full desktop sites I have found xScope to produce better results, but for mobile sites then Dolphin seems to deal with them better. I would personally recommend having both, why: at present xScope is a bit too unstable to use all the time, however it does handle full websites better than Dolphin.

4. Timeriffic
There is nothing more annoying to me than the phone going off at 3.30am only to find it is one of your mates on night shift sending you a joke. I always preferred the phone was on silent during the night, but at times I would forget. Timeriffic is a great app that should become a standard feature on every Android phone sold. You decide when it rings, vibrates or goes completely silent. Standard setup is Sunday-Thursday nights the phone is set to vibrate only, with an extended 'Lazy Morning' setting for Sunday. You can also set the phone to be on silent during working times, you can set 3 different blocks, for example mine is currently set as:
1. Night: Total Silence
2. Work: Vibrate only
3. Unused
This may seem like a really simple app, but now I couldn't live without it.

5. Appmonster
Why use another app for installing/removing software? Isn't the market place app just as good? No! This app is a lot quicker than the marketplace, but when you uninstall an app, don't you just hate the fact that you must answer a question before the app is removed. Appmonster removes apps very quickly, it also scans the phone and card for apps and lists them, a simple click is all you need to install any of these, great if you are installing some apps not available in the marketplace (beta versions etc).

6. Laputa
A very well presented app, this ebook reader contains a wide variety of well known books, all arranged in your bookcase with the covers. Well at the end of the day the app looks nice but it is the amount of free books available that impressed me. Authors ranging from Charles Dickens to Dan Brown. Bookmarking facility is available along with day and night modes. A truly great app.

7. Txt Reader
Or to give it the full title Android Txt ebook Reader. I use txt files quite a lot and this is a simple txt reader that doesn't take up much memory. Nice simple interface; press the top of the screen for page up and the bottom for page down, add bookmarks and invert colours (black & white only). I like the simplicity of this app, not pretty but it does what I need.

8. Superlist
Not an app I've heard of many people using, however this is one that I can't do without. The Superlist app allows you to put in the info, create custom lists and then tick them off as you go along. Once the duties are ticked they move to the bottom of the list. A nice and simple to do list.

9. Jamendo Player
I love the Jamendo music site, thousands of songs, most of them are available for free. Like the artist? Donate button supplied. The Jamendo app allows you to play music from the site. The interface is user friendly, I like the fact that you can also listen to the Jamendo radio stations. A very well made app, streams the music well and have had no problems with freezing or crashing.

10. XBMC Remote
A great app that allows me to control the media centre from the comfort of my armchair. OK so this is not going to be top of everybody's list (how many people use XBMC?) but it is fairly easy to set up and works well. All of the XBMC functions, including settings, can be accessed via the remote.

Bye bye Shot of Jaq

2010-07-14T06:52:00.000-07:00

On the 24th of November 2009 Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge started Shot of Jaq a micro podcast that only lasted between 5-10 minutes. They introduced topics and after a brief discussion invited the listeners to post their thoughts on the website regarding the topics of the day.

The whole show was done in a very laid back and informal manner. Shot of Jaq could be listened to at any time, although it was a tech show it was not boring or 'over your head' in the slightest. Both presenters kept it light hearted and were not afraid of stating their opinions very clearly.

A proposed 'App of Jaq' desktop application was continually talked about and development was started on in which the show would be delivered direct to the desktop, comments could be posted and viewed. However as with everything in this rushed world the guys found keeping a twice weekly podcast along with their everyday jobs a bit of a struggle. The application was never completed and on the 13th of July 2010 the boys did their last Shot of Jaq show.

With over 70 episodes and 3000 comments left the show could not be called a failure, however from their last show there was a sense that both presenters felt like it was a premature termination. I must say that I will miss Shot of Jaq, work being about a twenty minute drive from my house I often used to get in about two shows, usually saved for a Friday morning. Was it a failure; I do not believe so. Shot of Jaq really wanted to emphasise the community rather than the show and they achieved that with discussions often continuing weeks after the podcast was released. Instead of a purely content driven show they often started a discussion that required comments, for those who only listened to the show you truly did miss out on the experience.

The main answer to the shows success will probably not be known for a few months yet. If you are reading this post in 2011 and thinking that this is a new concept then the show probably failed to meet it's targets. However if podcasts start having discussions and these become an integral part of the show rather than simply one off comments left after hearing it then the show can be considered a success.

Bye Shot of Jaq you'll be missed by this blogger.

Ipad, where does it fit in?

2010-06-22T15:19:00.000-07:00

Apple have launched the Ipad now for some time and everybody is quick to jump on the band wagon of pre ordering the tablet or indeed purchasing one from the states. I did not get my hands on one nor do I intend to even purchase one, this is not a review, like most people I'm just starting to get sick of all the hype. I think that the tablet format has been tried and failed a variety of times due to one major problem; we do not have a practical use for it other than a new gadget to show off.

It is not a replacement for a desktop computer or laptop, however a good notepad is smaller, costs half the price and does a lot more functions. With a notepad you are free to choose from an abundance of Linux distros or even build your own if that is your pleasure. There is also the added bonus that the vast majority of apps are free and open source.

It may play video, music and display ebooks well but it is too big and costly to replace our day to day portable media devices, this is not an ideal fit in your pocket, unless you wear parachute pants. I think we need a defining use and selling point otherwise the ipad and all the others will die off and go down as an expensive gadget gathering dust in most peoples drawers and cupboards.

Even the some of my more privaleged pupils who have got their hands on one via wealthy parents are admitting that it seems a bit of a pointless toy, after the initial excitement it is now sitting on their bedside tables. I personally don’t see where they fit in, not a PC replacement, notepads are more cost effective and have more actions and uses. Too big for media devices, I think they will vanish into obscurity within the next couple of years.

School website

2010-06-16T02:48:00.000-07:00

I am in need of feedback. The previous maintainer of the school website has now retired and we are looking to do a bit of a change. The old website can be found here, we are looking for some input in how it can be improved or changed. The current person maintaining the site has asked for changes rather than a new site as he simply does not have the time to build a new site. Any comments would be greatly appreciated either here or on identi.ca (@kevie)

As parents or potential parents what info should a school website include? As a pupil what do you think should be on a school's website?

Thanks in advance.

Crunchbang 10 Statler XFCE

2010-06-08T03:18:00.000-07:00

Before I begin this review could I point out that this dsitro is at Alpha stage and due to a lack of experience with openbox I opted for the XFCE edition. Whilst I was testing this it is not generally recommended that a project at alpha stage should become your primary OS. As of Crunchbang 10 the project has moved from being Ubuntu based to being a Debian based distro.

Crunchbang loaded quickly with clean black background, system information on the right of the screen and a system tray in the bottom right. The two large rectangles on the bottom panel are workspaces, I'm not sure if I like this feature, it seems to take up too much room for simply selecting workspaces.

All the basics are included in the 1.7GB of installed space to have a fully functional desktop. Iceweasel (Firefox without the copyrighted logo) provides the browsing experience, xchat allows the user to access the IRC channels without any problems, Pino has been included for all your micro blogging needs, transmission provides you with a torrent app (legal and open source only please). Gnumeric and Abiword have been chosen as a lighter and quicker alternative to Open Office. As you would expect with XFCE, Thunar is included. GUI Package management is in the form of Synaptic. The app that gave me the biggest smile was the inclusion of the GIMP. Since Ubuntu dropped it from it's list of pre installed apps more and more distros are leaving it off their initial installs. This is really a shame as the GIMP shows off the highest standard that open source has, this really is a powerful piece of kit.

All of these apps worked perfectly out of the box. The internet connection told me that I was offline, but in fact I was able to browse without issue, a pretty small bug for alpha stage. A variety of games were sampled, I downloaded the NVIDIA driver and the 3D games ran very smoothly indeed. Skype was one of the apps that I was needing and I was a bit apprehensive after it failed to load, however a quick trip to the forums and I was communicating with friends ac cross the water.

For those of you unfamiliar with XFCE, there is no menu icon in this version, simply right clicking anywhere on the desktop will bring up the application menu, that's the reason it appears to be floating in the above screenshot.

The main issue I experienced was with Compiz. It installed fine, but then failed to run. A few fixes were tried but to no avail. I then experienced the hazards of working with alpha stage software: one of the fixes I tried caused the system to fail to load an X environment on the next reboot, I was left with a cursor and prompt.

However for alpha stage Crunchbang 10 is remarkably stable and highly usable. But I'm left wandering were exactly does it fit in? At 1.7GB it certainly is not a small distro, probably a bit lite for a complete install, I think it would be an ideal introduction for a user who wants to attempt building up their own distro but does not feel reading for Arch yet.

Overall the experience was very good, everything worked out of the box except my graphic card, well that's expected. The issue with compiz will be fixed soon, but be honest this is not the primary thing a user should be looking at when choosing a distro. For a small(ish) distro it does come with a wide array of apps, everything you need to get the basics done on a desktop.

Fancy building up your on desktop but don't really have a good grip of the command line or the confidence, give Crunchbang 10 a go.

Dream turns to nightmare

2010-06-07T15:58:00.000-07:00

I have been looking around for a Debian/Ubuntu based distro since Ubuntu has started moving in a direction I don't like; away from the community. I always like to have a Debian based distro as so many new apps come out as deb packages and source code, so testing new apps is a bit easier on a Debian based system.

I am also a fan of the Gnome desktop, after trying out Mepis (I couldn't get used to KDE and the sound bugs) I decided to try out Dreamlinux 3.5 Gnome.

I had seen this before in distro reviews and heard quite a mixed bag. I personally always thought that it looked like a well set out distro. Upon starting the live CD, no option for straight installation, I was greeted with the purple background, dock with nice icons and animation and the standard Gnome menu at the top. I selected the install icon and was met with a single window, this included all the information needed for the install to commence, a very nice, user friendly touch.

On install and booting up Dreamlinux 3.5 the screen came up with exactly what the live CD, this included the install icons, very odd to try and install a distro that is already on a hard drive partition, look at the screenshot below and you will understand:

As the internet access on the dock was a compass I decided to give it a try, Firefox loaded up but was unable to display the web page. Very odd given that I have a wired ethernet connection, this has never happened with a Linux distro before. It kept on telling me that there were no wireless networks within range: I don't have a wireless card or USB dongle in my machine!!!!

The sound was also an issue, I have the Sound blaster Audigy PCI card, not a rare or uncommon card. After tweeking some settings I was able to get sound, but not the quality I was happy with. The graphics card needed a driver download (NVIDIA 6200) however as I struggled to get the internet connection working I was never able to get the card working.

Without a working internet connection, after a couple of hours I gave up on Dreamlinux. They have developed a very nice looking distro, there is potential. Being Debian based it should be stable, however the wrinkles in the system need to be ironed out before I would try this again.

Travelling Wilbury's Cover

2010-06-02T15:13:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of Tom Petty, I really do like a lot of his work. When I was first introduced to his music back in the 90s I also discovered a 'super band' he was part of the Travelling Wilburys. One of their best songs in my opinion was Tweeter and the Monkey Man. On scanning through youtube recently I found this great cover of the Wibury's classic by a band called Fruity Buckfoot, enjoy.

If you would like to download the ogg version of this song it is available here. For those of you running windows, the easiest way to play ogg files is to install VLC player.

Dennis Logan

2010-05-30T16:02:00.000-07:00

Another Jamendo artist that I have discovered is Dennis Logan. Rock songs with a southern twang sometimes mixed with a bit of Blues. I think he was influenced by the Travelling Wilburys, especially Tom Petty in some of his songs. The SOS albums are particularly appealing to my taste

Free music for professional licensing

Amity in Fame

2010-05-30T15:50:00.000-07:00

Since starting to listen to Linux Outlaws and Rathole Radio I have come across a fantastic website called Jamendo. For those of us who are unaware of the site it is all unsigned bands. The music is all released under creative commons meaning that it is free to download and distribute, the other advantage is that you can download most of the tracks in Ogg Vorbis format.
As you will probably not have heard of most of the bands on this site the best way to discover artists you like is to listen to the radio stations of your favourite genre. Over the next while I will post my favourite artists and albums from Jamendo simply to give them a bit of coverage. Not many of the artists offer CDs for sale, however you can donate to these via a button on the artists' Jamendo page.

For my first recommendation I have found an Austrian band called Amity in Fame. Reminds me of the band Live (remember Throwing Copper)

Free music for professional licensing

Switch to Ogg Vorbis

2010-05-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

Everybody with a PC on the planet has heard of MP3. Some may know a little about wav and wmv but very few people have heard of the Ogg Vorbis file format (commonly refered to as Oggs).

You may ask why should I care? I have used MP3s for ages and I'm happy with them. Well you have the right to ask that and if anybody is going to convert from any form of media or software that works for them, then they will need a bit of convincing. People are not going to simply stop using one form of music file and switch to another over night.

The main selling point of Oggs is their free and openness. Should you choose to purchase a song from itunes, Napster or any other online music store then it may come with something called DRM (Digital Rights Management) this stops you from playing the file on another PC, MP3 player and can also stop the file being burnt onto CD; a bit unfair for something you purchased, right? Ogg files are DRM free due to their open nature; when you download an Ogg file you can burn it to CD, play it on as many PCs and media players as you wish.

OK then you may respond "I don't buy MP3s so this does not affect me." Well the other main point without getting too technical is that Oggs are smaller file sizes than their MP3 equivalents. Which means that you can get more music files onto your media player. Of course not all media players play Ogg Vorbis yet, a list of players that play Ogg natively can be found here.

CDs can be ripped directly to Ogg using a variety of software. If you run a Linux distro then the standard CD ripping software should convert your CDs to Ogg files by default. For a Windows platform then there a variety of packages that can do this, the Free Software Foundation recommend CDex. Music Man can be used to rip Ogg using a Mac platform.

One piece of advice I would give any users changing from MP3 to Ogg is not to convert the software; rip from a CD when possible. Why? Well both MP3 and Ogg are known as 'lossy' which means that every time you convert a file to them you lose a bit of quality. There are plenty of MP3 to Ogg converters available, but I would only recommend this as a last resort, for best results rip from a CD.

Most media players will play Ogg files with a bit of tweaking, but I would personally recommend VLC player. This is cross platform and plays Oggs 'out of the box'.

I personally use my GP2X Wiz and my Android phone, both of which play Ogg without any modifications. I've also been recommended Sansa Clip by gadgetwisdom on identi.ca, but I have no personal experience with this player.

The link earlier in the post gave a list of media players that currently play Ogg. I am aware that the Ipod is probably the biggest selling MP3 player and it's not on the list. This is not a problem, I have an Ipod Classic and it runs Ogg fine with a wee bit of fine tuning, watch the video below for more information:

Check out the Rockbox site if your MP3 player is not listed as compatible, it may be able to allow your MP3 player to run Ogg Vorbis.

Now that you know what it is spread the word: the Free Software Foundation have a pre-written email available for copying here.

NoS-LUG t-shirts

2010-05-12T01:55:00.001-07:00

Some of the members of NoS-LUG are planning to go down to Oggcamp next year (I hope it will be on) and to mark the occasion we decided to make some t-shirts for the group. The first design is shown below:

In case the image isn't clear we have a tartan Tux sitting on a world map with arrows pointing to all corners of the globe. 'NoS-LUG' at the top and 'on tour' at the bottom. With the back print simply stating the website adress 'NoS-LUG.org'

I decided against going for an Oggcamp logo simply so that the t-shirts could be used again for other vsits without looking dated, general visiting regalia you might say.

Please post any comments of this on the NoS-LUG forum, although it may seem a bit away we need to get moving now to get these made and then orders taken. I want to make sure the quality of the manufacturers gear is up to scratch so I will be expecting to get some samples. I just hope we will have enough time.

Open Source, what can I do?

2010-04-26T04:08:00.000-07:00

Too often I hear the words uttered, "I'm not into programming, I can't help out with open source software projects." Nothing could be further from the truth: the open source community needs you.

I am not a programmer either, I have only completed a few, very basic, Python tasks from various tutorials from Linux Format magazine and various websites. However I still try and contribute whenever I can.

In it's most simple form, contributing to the open source community is simply trying out a piece of software and leaving a comment about it. The developers need feedback at as early a stage as possible if their product is going to be a success. Remember it is for the 'average' end user that they are constructing this for, they need to know if something is too difficult or simple to use. Feedback is probably one of the most important stages and it is an area that we can all get involved in.

How can I get involved in this? Well there are loads of ways that people find software from word of mouth to a magazine review to simply stumbling across a website from a Google search. Podcasts such as Linux Outlaws are an excellent resource as they often mention projects at an early stage. A community such as identi.ca is another great way to get involved. Simply sign up to the site, join a few Linux groups and then ask, the community really are helpful.

After finding the software, we need to leave feedback if we are hoping to do anything constructive. Identi.ca is great for this, although you are limited to 140 characters. A lot of programs are on sites such as Launchpad.net where you can find the application directly and send a message to the developer. The application might even have it's own site, but most still use bug reporting sites such as Launchpad.

If all this seems a bit much then the most straight forward way is to visit the forums such as linuxquestions.org where you can leave posts, make comments or ask questions. One of the key areas of strength for Linux is the community aspect, help to keep this going.

Not a computer user, prefer the mobile? Again not a problem. If your phone is running the Android operating system then you can find a lot of applications in the marketplace. Many of these are still in beta stage so they are needing people to test them. One of the best examples of using the open source community came with a recent Mustard update (Mustard is a micro blogging client for Android. An update came to the phone at 9pm on the Sunday night, however I noticed that it was crashing. I mentioned this at 11pm and at 7am the next morning I gave a bit more detail about when the crashes were happening. Again please note I am not a programmer, merely an end user. I received a message by 9am saying that the bug was found and fixed. An update was sent to the phone at 7pm on Monday night. Within 24 hours a bug was found, reported, fixed and updated: now that's good going.

Some of us can program, others have the gift of design, for others it may be graphical talent that they posses. At the end of the day the 'average' user is the target audience for any application. My point is that we all can contribute, no matter how trivial we think our help is, it may be worth a lot. Try and get involved with packages before they are released as 'stable' versions, as this is when testers are most valuable. So called 'average' users can be the most valuable members of the team.

Linux & Gaming, does one need the other?

2010-03-25T05:47:00.000-07:00

The recent episode of Shot of Jaq: Getting in the game has got me thinking about a subject that I have a lot of interest in: gaming.

http://shotofjaq.org/2010/03/getting-in-the-game/

I am not an avid hardcore gamer who will spend 6 hours playing with his mates online. However I do spend probably more than the average computer user hitting a joypad or trying out new games. I enjoy a variety of games from racing, sports and sandbox style games such as GTA4 and the Saints Row series.

When I moved to using a Linux OS back in 2008 the first thing I did was to go down to the local computer shop and enquire about the availablity of commercial games for the Linux system. However I was disapointed that whilst the shopkeeper knew that these did exist, after a month of trying to find a dealer he admitted that he had to give up. I had an idea that the list would not be extensive, but I thought there would be a handful available from his list of game sellers.

Whilst I don’t think games are necessary for Linux I certainly think that they would help promote the growth of the Linux as a primary OS on many desktop PCs, especially those homes with older children.

I have installed Linux on a few friends machines and usually within a few weeks, they are pleased with the system, but they want a version of windoze installed as their kids want to play the new games. I think that if we are able to get the ‘big title’ games onto the system and start introducing people to Linux from an early age then the future market would increase rapidly.
We cannot say that there is no market in the games industry, billions is generated every year, if we can get people to stop sending that money to ms via 360 and windoze game sales and start putting money into the companies that support Linux then this is even better for the potential growth of the Linux community.

Linux is no longer only a purist OS; a novice can install one of several distros and get the internet, write a letter, listen to music and burn a CD with no need to even touch the terminal. For your purist programmer then Linux is the perfect choice. However we need to focus on the middle ground. Not the minimalist who only wants to browse and write letters, but also those who are keen users of the computer, but do not want to programme.

Yes there are some games out there, but most of the games offered by LGP(Linux Game Publishing) are ports of older windoze games. Runesoft have a few, but again these are hardly chart busting titles. We need a company to take a chance and prove that the Linux market is worth investing in.

Most Linux users have a console, so that shows that we will pay for entertainment, if this money were to be diverted to Linux supporting companies then surely this is better for us in the long run.

I feel that Loki games were just too ahead of their time. They printed too many copies of games for a market that was not quite ready yet. It is a shame that we only seem to be getting smaller independant companies porting games to our open OS. These are good, some are great, but will not convert the hardcore gamers away from the ms operating systems.

Do I think games are vital for Linux’s survival: No. For Linux’s growth as a mainstream desktop OS: yes

GP2X Wiz- The ultimate in mobile entertainment

2010-03-08T06:26:00.000-08:00

The GP2X Wiz, just a toy for those now getting on trying frantically to hold onto their youth, an expensive toy or a useful gadget.

Well I know for a fact that the wife will simply say an expensive toy, but when you take a look beyond what is being advertised as a gaming console you will find a very versatile and small machine.

OK so let's get it's main selling point out of the way: retro gaming. The Wiz is designed to run emulators of whichever console you wish, there are literally thousands of these so whether you wish to play your favourite games from the Arcade, NES, SNES, Megadrive (Gensis in US), Master system, Amiga, Spectrum, C64, Atari 2600, Neo Geo, GAmeboy, Atari Lynx, this list could go on and on, there is something here for any gamer. There are also a few games designed for the Wiz but as most users are wanting to play their downloaded games then what makes anybody think that they will actually want to purchase more when there are millions available for free on the web.

I sampled a few of these emulators very briefly, they are available from around the web. But I tested MAME4ALL and pocketSNES in depth. Both of which played the games very well, MAME was absolutely fantastic, with almost no loss of quality compared to my desktop PC. PocketSNES is still in it's early stages, the initial one I downloaded played platform games well, but racing and sports were very jerky and resulted in bad screen flicker. However another version has been released with PocketSNES and PocketSNESfast, this really is a major improvement on it's predecessor. The web is full of roms so any games you want are only a search engine away.

This actually causes a slight legal issue with the Wiz: roms are not always legal as many are still subject to copyright laws.

Well this machine is a winner with the gaming side, but what about anything else. The Wiz runs a variety of media; sound, video, flash, pictures and ebooks.

The Wiz plays both ogg and mp3 files with the onboard sound player; the quality is quite good, it is clear as long as you are in front of the Wiz thanks to two front speakers but it also comes with a connection to plug in either headphones or speakers, whichever you choose.

On the video front avi files run well, I have not gotten any other types working, but I have not tried this extensively. The quality of the video playback is good, not fantastic, for those of us who regularly watch shows on the ipod the quality is not as good. The one advantage over the ipod is the timing; my ipod regularly has audio and video out of sync but this has not been a factor with the Wiz. Another advantage of supporting avi files is that it is the most common type of video file in my collection, no more converting files and wasting computer time making the video files MP4 with a specific size; a real time saver.

The pictures are as you expect, good quality, but I don't use this feature much as I tend to view pictures through an entirely larger output. I have read a few ebooks on the Wiz, the default setting is a black background with white text. This can be off-putting for a lot of new users but it worth keeping; by the time you read a lot of pages it is a much easier on your eyes than the traditional black and white due to the Wiz's bright screen.

Being a user from a Linux background I have no desire to test the flash player, flash is a real pain in the neck to configure on most Linux systems so I try and avoid it wherever possible. Other useful features include a calander, calculator and a planner.

The onboard storage is tiny, you really do need an SD card from the start. You have the option of moving the data onto the card directly or with it remaining in the Wiz via the USB connection. I do highly recommend the direct method as using the Wiz's lead really does slow down the transfer. On the rather annoying side the Wiz does not come with a charger. The USB lead charges when it is connected to a PC, but this is not so handy for a holiday. I purchased a USB-Plug charger for a couple of quid and this has worked without any issues.

Overall if you only use the Wiz as a gaming tool, then you are wasting a brilliant machine. The whole point of this is that it is a complete entertainment unit. Ideal for holidays and journeys. The cost may seem a bit steep at first (£130) but the only additional costs thereafter are SD cards and electricity to charge it. When compared to the price of a DS + games, ebook reader and an Ipod then you are making a huge saving.

Logitech MX518 Optical Gaming Mouse

2010-02-27T01:44:00.000-08:00

I have been looking for a new mouse for a while and after a bit of trawling on the internet, decided to purchase the Logitech MX518.

The first thing that I noticed about this mouse is the size of it, it's quite big in comparison to the standard style mouse that ships with most PCs. Approximately 130mm long, 65mm wide and just under 50mm at it's highest point. The mouse is quite light for it's size, but it is the ergonomic shape that seems to fit perfectly into your hand. With some of the smaller mice, prolonged usage can lead to your hand cramping, but this has not happened so far.

The buttons are well positioned, they do not get in each others way and I have not pressed any accidentally whilst gaming. The navigation (arrows) buttons are perfectly placed beside the thumbs resting area, I have found myself using these a lot more regularly for even simple tasks such as browsing. They seem like a design feature and are comfortable to use, unlike a lot of mice where they appear to be stuck onto the side as an afterthought.

This shape could also be a problem; I have small hands and find the mouse extremely comfortable. For users with longer fingers or bigger hands I would recommend that you try before you buy.

The shape also causes a second potential problem; this mouse is sculpted for right handed people only. I tried using it with my left hand, but the navigation buttons became unreachable and it was extremely uncomfortable to use.

The design on the mouse is interesting, it has been shaded to look like it is uneven, but in fact it is super smooth.

The mouse worked 'out of the box', I am currently running Gentoo 64 bit and Fedora 12 64 bit. No issues with buttons etc not working, or searching for alternative drivers.

The speed of 1600 dpi is probably a luxury most people do not need, this can be changed. Although a lot of users have been raving about this mouse for first person shooter (FPS) games, I have found that the extra speed is very useful on real time strategy games like the Command & Conquer series, the extra speed is useful. The mouse has five speed settings to allow the user to modify it as they choose.

In summing up I love this mouse, it is perfect for me; comfortable to use and almost tailor made for my hand.

You should buy this mouse if:
* you are into PC gaming
* you have quite small hands
* you are right handed

if you do not fit all three of the criteria then I suggest you look elsewhere.

Salary Cap: keeps things competitive

2010-02-09T15:31:00.000-08:00

Having just finished watching another NFL season, I am particularly over the moon with my favourite New Orleans Saints winning their first ever Superbowl. However with all the talk of the salary cap and player issues which could result in no NFL games being played in 2011 (worse case scenario) I want to raise a point: the football leagues around the world would do well to follow the example of the American Sports.

I want to start by saying that I am not American, nor have I ever been across the pond. I do not think that everything American is bigger and better, however I feel that with the salary cap, they have done something that the european leagues have failed to do: keep the season competitive.

Take a look around the leagues in Europe, the big teams are becoming bigger and each year the leagues are won by the same select few, these are continually getting the big money from playing in the European competitions (Europa (EUFA)cup and Champions League) whilst the others fall behind. Look at the league and be realistic about how many teams can win over the course of the season, Scotland: Rangers and Celtic; England: Man Utd, Chelsea, Arsenal and possibly Liverpool; Spain: Real Madrid and Barcelona; Italy: AC Milan and Juventus; Holland: Ajax, Feyenord and PSV; the list could go on and on.

However look at the teams that have won the Superbowl; out of 44 games the most dominant team, Pittsburgh, has won it six times, these were not six years in a row but spread between 1974 - 2008.

The way the salary cap works is that each team is given a limit that they can pay their players collectively. Imagine the cap was £100 million and you had 25 players to pay out of that, if you spend £60 million on two 'star' players then you are only allowed to spend £40 million on the remaining 23. Some teams tried to work around this by giving the players bonuses spread over several years, however this meant that in these later years you were still paying money for players that were no long at the club or even retired.

This would get rid of several things from the game. It would make the leagues across Europe much more competitive, unless players were willing to take a paycut then they would have to move to other teams that could afford to pay them. Secondly it would give the chance to some of the 'smaller' clubs to win the league, the team success of the teams would not be based on money, instead the level of scouts and the quality of coaching would determine the team that picked up the silverware at the end of the season. Thirdly it may encourage fans to actually support their local teams, Man Utd couldn't simply go out and buy the best, Sir Alex would actually have to prove he was the best coach year after year rather than adding a £70 million player to plug a gap. Fourthly it would give our younger players a better chance of success, with a club only being able to spend big money on a couple of players the younger lads would cost less and also get some match practise.

Whilst I think that this is a great idea, in practise I do not believe it will ever happen. Why? Money. The owners stand to lose way too much, the powers that be would not be happy simply relinquishing the reigns after years of dominance. Do I think there is even a slight chance? Yes but slight chance: 1 in 10000. Football, especially the big teams, are relying on money and the banks grace. Most of the big clubs are hundreds of millions in debt, should the bank decide to call in these accounts, not likely but a slight chance, then many of these clubs could simply have to fold. If we had to redesign the football structure throughout Europe then that would be the only chance of this ever happening. Fair enough, you may think I'm talking nonsense, but consider this: who will be in the Champions League final this year? I'll bet that you would struggle to even count 6 out of the last 16, sadly football glory is exclusively for the wealthy clubs.

Ultimate Edition: does it live up to the name?

2010-02-04T02:37:00.000-08:00

I only heard about this distro in the last couple of weeks on the Linux Outlaws podcast, it was mentioned and slagged a bit for the name and general colour, but neither Dan or Fab had actually tried the distro so I thought that I would give it a trial run on my desktop. Specs for those interested are: Dual core 2.8 GHz, 4GB ram, 512MB Nvidia GT6800s Graphics card.

The distro installed fairly quickly using the standard Ubuntu installer. I then encountered my first problem: this distro installs grub 2. Nothing major, instead a minor inconvenience that was soon sorted after a few visits to the online help forums.

The first boot of the distro was very slow, so slow that I actually thought my computer had crashed, but eventually the distro loaded and the default Gnome environment loaded up. The first impressions are lasting: don't look, change the appearance theme. The overall theme of UE 2.5 is black and gold. The desktop background looks dated and the constant black actually makes everything difficult to use, black word processor, black menu, black everything. The mouse pointer is a spinning arrow with a shadow included, this looks very childish and was removed along with this awful theme.

Once past the default theme there is one obvious difference between this and Ubuntu: the number of pre-installed apps. The vast number of apps is quite impressive, if maybe a bit pointless to the seasoned Linux user. Most users have a favourite apps for photos, music, media, games, email, micro-blogging etc so to be presented with a choice of four options to perform a single function may be great for begginers, but I found myself uninstalling a lot of the apps simply to make room on the hard disk.

The hardware was picked up very quickly on my initial boot, with the standard Ubuntu message asking if I wished to use propietary drivers. Compiz was enabling all the effects I desired after a reboot of the system, I did notice that this was considerably faster booting the second time around. The sound card was picked up without any hastle as was my usb webcam with built in microphone, a test call on Skype and playing about on Cheese confirmed this.

One major advantage that UE 2.5 has over Ubuntu 9.10 is that it ships, by default, with the original package manager, great no need to remove Ubuntu's new software centre. The distro runs, as you may expect from an Ubuntu system, debian based backages. The majority of the packages that I tested on the distro ran very well with no obvious performance flaws.

The distro advertises on the website that it comes with KDE, Gnome and XFCE. These can be selected at the login screen. However this was not the case with the DVD image that I downloaded from the official site. It gave me the choice of three Gnome environments, a KDE environment and no XFCE option at all. This feature feels more like an afterthought as the KDE environment is simply a default KDE layout, no customization at all to show that this was the UE 2.5 distro. The KDE environment appeared quite unstable: crashing three times and loading once. The three Gnome options do not appear to differ at all.

To be honest, there is not much to review as an independant distro. It claims to be a fork of Ubuntu and on distro watch it is listed as an Ubuntu based distro. However it is simply Ubuntu with a different theme, one which I had to change very quickly after installation. It has a ton of apps which is great to show the range of programs available to a newbie, but not many newbies will be recommended to go for Ultimate Edition, most would probably go for the stanadrd Ubuntu.

I do not wish to sound too negative. Getting past the awful default theme, gives the user access to a very useable distro. A lot of pre-installed software is included and a lot of the hardware runs out of the box with little need for tweaking. I would highly recommend this to somebody trying out Linux for the first time. For those wanting to try something different to Ubuntu then I suggest that you look elsewhere.

Distro choices - hinderance or handy?

2010-01-28T06:47:00.000-08:00

I remember the first time that I considered putting Linux on my home machine, my main problem was: which one? I had heard about Linux previously, but I had no idea which to choose from, where to start or even who to ask. In my lack of knowledge I actually believed that there was an operating system called Linux and the rest were simply copies.

After a year trying several different distros and complaining that there was 'Too much choice' I have now completely changed my opinion on this. The choice is what keeps us interested. I never thought of an operating system as being aimed at a specific user.

Ubuntu is clearly one of the most popular distros, mainly due to the fact that a lot works 'out of the box' with little need for any major setup if you do not wish to do so. For the casual user, Ubuntu is simple to use, has a lot of software in the repos, is generally the best known Linux distro and is one of the best supported with loads of forums and magazines appearing on the shelves of many newsagents.

Although I personally did not use Ubuntu for long, I have to admit that it is central to the growth of Linux. It is pointless giving a casual user a Gentoo disc and asking them to give it a try. So not everybody likes Ubuntu, there are plenty of other options for newbie users: PCLinuxOS, Pardus, Mepis, Mint and probably a thousand others I won't name. But the fact of the matter is that the Ubuntu community is growing, Dell have started to sell laptops with an Ubuntu os installed, and the support whether in magazine form or online is probably the best Linux has to offer.

For the users with some experience looking to continue their distro development we have Debian and Fedora as the two main candidates. Debian, which Ubuntu is built on, prides itself on stability. Again this is good for the casual users as they do not need to do much once it is setup and crashes are very rare as the software is very well tested. However this means that users do not get to experience the 'latest and greatest' technologies, but if people are happy with this then it is not a problem.

Fedora is on the other end of the spectrum. It still appeals to mainstream users, however the Fedora team as quite happy to include a lot of testing and beta releases in their main distros. I personally have found Fedora very easy to setup and test, but also quite easy to download an unstable program and wreak havoc on your system.

OpenSUSE seems to be more geared towards office workers, however one thing that the development team have done well with is their implementation of KDE. Should you wish to try out KDE there are few distros that do it better than OpenSUSE. I personally have no experience of Mandriva, but my mates have told me that it is aimed at the programmers among us, a bit more coding and command line functions are used than in the mainstream distros.

Studio 64 caters for the users interested in multimedia, Supergamer and
Live.linux-gamers.net aims for those who have left the old system, but still remain fun loving. However it is worth pointing out that Linux is an age behind other operating systems when it comes to games, all the major releases are for consoles or win, however very few get ported to Linux.

Myth TV is a distro that is designed to be connected to the TV rather than on a desktop. For those of us in the UK it is similar to our Sky+ as it allows the user to pause and rewind live TV, on the plus side you can then also play games, watch video files, listen to music files. However it is difficult to setup initially: you have been warned.

Then there are the power users, easy to spot as they never like anything 'out of the box' everything must be tweaked and I have to put myself into that category. These do not usually come with much pre-installed software, but it allows the user to be in complete control.

Arch is a good place to start if you wish to build your own distro. Some may argue for the packages Ubuntu and SUSE have produced but these are mainly graphical interfaces and won't get you used to the internal workings of a Linux system or using the command line. Arch ships with a small (128MB I think) liveCD that drops the user into the command line. Setup your network and start building up your very own distro using Pacman, not the game, but Arch package manager. It is not difficult to build up your own distro with Arch, the guidelines on the website are very clear and comprehensive, but should not be tried by an inexperienced newbie.

If others want a bit more of a challenge then Linux From Scratch (LFS), Gentoo or Slackware all rise to the occasion. All need a lot of research and sound knowledge of the Linux system and competent command line use. Trust me, it is so much easier to have a laptop beside you when building one of these distros as you may need quite a bit of help.

As I said at the start, I honestly believed that the number of Linux distros available was not a good thing. To a newbie, it confused me, I didn't know where to start, I was diving into the unknown and the problem was I couldn't decide which unknown path to follow.

However after a few years of experience I would be very sad if the Linux distros started to disappear. I would recommend anybody start at Ubuntu, if they are casual users simply wanting to surf the net and write a few letters then don't move. It is a stable operating system with a lot of support. But, if like me, you want to explore then Linux offers the best virtual safari of operating systems. There are thousands of Linux distros: you may not like some, you may love others, but guaranteed there is something for everyone and that is one of the key strengths of Linux operating systems.

Open Source could help

2010-01-24T16:13:00.000-08:00

Whilst I am a Linux user, I'm also a realist, I do not think that everybody will simply dump windows and move over to Linux. However I am a firm believer that open source should be a major factor in everybody's business plan. Do people actually know what open source software is. For those of us not 'in the know' open source software is free software that allows others to view its code and modify it as they please, it is not subject to copyright. This means that in a community like the Linux family the program is looked at and modified, usually on the suggestion of users on a forum, and then released in testing modes, meaning that this is not the finished product, but rather the modified program and the users are testing the program to see how it works. The final release is usually referred to as the stable release. But I'm wavering.

Think of a program that is on just about every PC in the country: ms office. There is a perfectly good open source alternative in Open Office. In my experience, showing ms office users the Open Office suite they are able to use it without any problems. Why, in a climate where everybody is looking to cut costs, is dumping ms office in favour of Open Office never even mentioned?

As I said there are no complaints from those that have used both, to be honest for the majority of users all they will ever need is available in the Open Office suite. Imagine every council in the country dumping ms office for it's open source equivalent; what a saving in software licensing alone. Not to mention the future generations.

Word processing is not the only place where savings can be made. GIMP is the best that open source has to offer. It is used for photo editing and is a realistic alternative to Adobe Photoshop, but look on Amazon how much this is compared to the FREE GIMP.

Inkscape is a great vector graphics program that is very similar to both CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator. Edit your pictures in GIMP and combine them and add text and shapes in Inkscape.

For html editing an easy to use open source program is Kompozer (NVU in windows) or for the more experienced user Bluefish is a fantastic editor but is for the seasoned pro.

Playing around with sound files, then Audacity will probably do everything that you need. Play a media file, look no further than VLC.

I am not saying that everything is better in open source, I am simply saying that people need to be made aware of the option. For the majority of schools and colleges the open source versions will do more than they need with the added bonus that they do not need a site license.

Open source is not the answer to every problem, it will not bring world peace or end hunger. However it could prove to be a major factor in the rebuilding of our fragile economy, all the programs that I've mentioned are cross platform ie they will work in windows and Linux. If every council in the country simply moved to open office then we would have a lot more budget to spend on health, education and roads. It would be a major step to educating our future generations about the benefits of open source.

identi.ca: use it or lose it

2010-01-22T14:45:00.000-08:00

identi.ca is, on the surface, just another micro blogging site that has already seemed to have lost the battle, along with all the others, to twitter. When it launched on July the first 2008, it was plugged widely by a lot of people, mainly in the Linux community. However it was only, in reality, at a testing stage and the actual release should have been delayed. A lot of user initially signed up but after a few too many bugs in the system left for greener pastures.

But after several improvements and a much more stable product, users are a bit slow to come back. However identi.ca has several major points going for it that should see it sticking around for a while yet.

It is an open source piece of software. Unlike twitter, identi.ca's code is completely open and free to the whole community to modify and manipulate as they see fit. Yeah so what? I'm not a programmer, I can hear some of you say, well true enough you may not be able to change the coding yourself but that is why bug reports and forums are so popular today. Coders are able to listen to the users so that alterations can be made and then tested before a stable release, this process is a lot quicker than trying to contact a large company, who usually sub let these programming tasks to other companies.

Secondly, because it is relatively small in comparison to twitter, a lot of companies do not have much of a presence on the site, except maybe a token group which never gets posted on. But this is also to identi.ca's advantage, this means that there is far less spam posts. I had the (dis)pleasure of a twitter account for a short month of my life, on average I received twenty posts a day without being a member of any groups: car insurance, loans, anything but actual communication from a human micro-blogger. This is very similar to the windows/Linux arguement about viruses: I'm not naive enough to believe that they can't exist in Linux, there just aren't enough users to make it worth their while.

Thirdly there is a real sense of community in identi.ca that really appeals to a Linux minded user. Not all the talk is geek chat, however you can ask almost any technical question and the users are more than happy to try and help. You feel like you are part of it, not simply using a piece of software, but a major part of a friendly community.

I know it is not for everyone, but what gets me annoyed is when I hear Linux users slag off identi.ca and then proudly claim they use the better and more polished twitter. I have listened to a couple of Linux podcasts lately where identi.ca has been the target of some slagging whilst at the same time hearing several mentions to the podcasts twitter group. We have a great open source based program, a fairly close community (which at the end of the day is what Linux is all about) and we don't have the annoyances of spam. If the Linux community in general does not support identi.ca, it's target audience, then it will be a thing of the past and we'll be forced to look elsewhere. Spread the word, tell a friend, it's amazing how many Linux users still have not heard of or used identi.ca. Micro blogging has a place in modern society, lets keep identi.ca an active player.