So I stupidly upgraded from Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) to 7.10 (Gusty). Now I can't hibernate or suspend my laptop, so I have to power it off each time I want to go somewhere else. My Beryl effects I love have gone and been replaced with something. Thunderbird seems to fall over when starting up and RSSOWL beta 6 has stopped working now. Can I fix all of these soon? Maybe not, does anyone know how to downgrade back to 7.04?
Category: technology
Months into the Ubuntu Switchover, rants and raves
So its been a while but I'm finally getting my head around the gnu/linux system and environment. There are some great things about the switch which makes me cringe everytime I go back into windows (on my work pc and when I want to read my busted sd card – more on this soon). But there are some bad things too.
First, pieces of pure joy. Since I've lost Outlook I've not really had a way to capture notes quickly. Dave showed me Tomboynotes which is build into Gnome. Tomboynotes is a local wiki but saves everything into a simple set of XML files. So now I have XMLstartlet and CWM installed, so I can apply XML processing and more to the raw xml. Combine this with Cron and Unix Pipes and I'm not even sure where to start because theres so many opptunities. I'm also looking at using one editor for unix because I've tried a couple but I need something serious before I start writing XSL again. Currently I'm using Nano for command line operations and Quanta plus for writing XML. I've downloaded Eclipse now and will try out both eclipse and emacs soon. Dave also alerted me to Conduit which is synchronsation solution for Gnome but looking a little deeper seems to be part of the solution for my pipelines application (which yes I've not talked enough about recently let alone updated for a while). So I'm super excited by this and the ability to pipe and process stuff with XML, including a KDE application called Tellico which also stores it records in XML. So I'm adding my music collection (from Amarok) and movie collection (from Myfilmz). I think Conduit is going to be one of those applications which I use a lot.
Other good stuff which is good is Stereo Bluetooth can be made to work in Linux, I just wish it was simplier. I get Cron now thanks to Kcron and Dave also showed me Anacron which works like Cron but will run tasks if your computer is off when you boot it back up. Glyn also showed me some battery saving technology () which looks like it will make its way into Ubuntu 7.11? On Windows I use to get about 4.5 hours of battery life out of my Dell laptop. I'm getting close to that on Ubuntu now but I reckon there is room for improvement, so this little app could help a lot. Samba is coming along, and I've now setup Hamachi ip addresses to shares in /etc/fstab. This means if I'm on my own network or on a internet connection I can still mount shares and its all secure. On the moan side, I still can't do real authentication with Samba for some weird reason. I still don't have a decent blogging application and if I switch my wireless card off, I have to reboot the whole machine to switch it back on again! Oh and Wireless and Bluetooth are lumped together it would seem and I can't find where to just turn off Bluetooth in Ubuntu. Not great for saving power. RSSowl is good but I'm still missing lots of features which could make it great. For example I now have a cron to grab my OPML (hopefully soon my APML too) from Bloglines. I was hoping that I could automaticlly update RSSowl with new subscriptions by over writing a bookmarks file but I can't find such a thing and the feature from RSSowl 1.x of automatic subscribing folders isn't in the new version. Last but not so important is, I still can't get the Wiimote to connect to the computer. Oh and I still need a decent piece of DJ software for Linux, I have to reboot into Windows to use Virtual DJ right now.
So generally things are better and I'm glad I switched to Linux over Vista or bought a Mac. Maybe you could be better off too?
What kind of Home Server would you choose?
So I heard Windows Home Server is now ready to ship according to Paul Thurrott. As some of you already know I'm running pretty much every machine on my network on gnu/linux except my home server. Its strange, my laptop, my workstation and even my firewall/router is running Smoothwall. But the server which holds terabytes of storage is actually running a beta copy of Windows Home server. But my reason for sticking with Windows Home server have finally started to come undone. A friend sent me a link to a few projects including the Ubuntu Home Server Project and Linux home server. This all started by George Ou and his discussions about the difference between the two. George has added updates to the main post and people have gone nuts over the comments (260 to date). There's even the poll which has 2600+ votes is 56% towards linux or freebsd over windows home server. So after some more reading I'm thinking now has come the time to either upgrade or switch over.
Now I wish the switch was that easy. First up I will need to unmount all the harddrives from the Windows storage array and make sure my data is ok. Then I need to take the machine down from the loft and remove windows before putting on Linux. Before going back in the loft I need to make sure I can get back into the machine even when there is a power outage or some kind of error (its a dell with boot after suspend, so it should be ok). But it will be all worth it if I only need to go up to the loft to add addional storage.
So what options do I have? Well I was hoping the Ubuntu Home Server Project would have files or a beta to play with, but not yet. So i'm thinking keep it simple. Xubuntu or Ubuntu desktop version with some well thought-out software. Hey if it works out, maybe I could feed into the process of the Ubuntu Home server project? I was considering the server version but I'm thinking although I will run it headless most of the time, it would be good to be able to run Xwindow for VNC/RDP access. For Backup I'm going to try Amanda again or Bacula. If worst comes to worst, I now got the hang of the Cron and Rsync, I could just use that. On the storage front, I have no idea how to setup a distributed file system like windows home server on linux, but I've done little research and I'm sure someone knows. Sharing is not a problem because Samba shares can be installed easily enough, I also don't really need Universal Plug n Play, specially if I can get Daap working in Amarok or Rhythmbox working. Ideally I would love to have some simple web front end, but once again this is going to take some more research.
Jaiku bought by Google
So this came out of the blue, but I noticed it today when looking through my RSSOwl. So the obvious question is what happened to Twitter? Well lets be honest, Jaiku fits into Googles plans better that twitter at the moment. Atom support alone makes it perfect for Google *smile*. Will Jaiku move to the UK? Where the rest of the Google Mobile activity seems to happen? Now that would be amazing, Jyri alone is certainly the kind of person you want to share a coffee with and discuss the future deep into the night. What exactly is google doing with activity streams and mobile presence in the future? Well many people have theories, but I'm edging for the lifestreams or social overlay angles.
Its so odd because Jaiku kept coming up in the Future of Webapps conference as a successful european startup along the lines of last.fm. And whats even stranger, that BarCampLondon3 will be at Google's Headquarters in London next month. Maybe some of the guys from Jaiku might have moved over by then. More about BarCampLondon3 soon.
Never say never, yes Ian Forrester did buy a iphone…
Yes I did get one, but I never said I wouldn't so there. And just to prove its not fake, thats my SPV M700 in front of the iphone, plus more photos. When do they hit the UK again? I'm expecting comments, so I'll say nothing more.
Sorry guys, its a hoax. I did buy a iphone or more but its not for me. Why would I buy a iphone? Even when faced with one in my hands and a cheap price I still didn't want one. I was actually tempted to get a Microsoft Zune because I saw one for less that 175 dollars. I enjoyed winding you lot up…But yes that wasn't just a box it was the real thing and I did spend about 20mins playing with it in the shop. I'm either going to get a Samsung F700 or that iphone like Nokia. The touch is too much like my current phone and its 2nd gen still sucks.
What do you do when Gnome Display Manager dies? Fixed!
My Ubuntu install is working again thanks to Jon Callas from PGP. So I can finally bring you this entry from the Airplane trip 2 days ago. The mount command using the remount flag really made a huge difference. Otherwise I would still be running Windows!
Right so I'm in Boston after a nice but late flight. Get through customs, jump in the first cab which takes me to my Hotel (Westin Seaport) where I open my laptop to find that Gnome Display Bloody Manager fails. Now I can't get into my gnu/linux setup. Luckly I still have Windows on dual boot, so I can use the laptop and get on with stuff. But it seems a little setting in /etc/fstab which was recommended by Linux Format magazine which I bought for the portions of the flight when your not allowed to use electorinic equipment, has caused the root drive to be read only and hence why Gnome won't start. The problem is that I have no way to change this without (in my mind) booting into Linux with a live CD and then making the changes? If someone else knows a way to change /etc/fstab from windows or the recovery command line, drop me a email or comment. Damm you linux format and your No more disk thrashing which recommended adding this to /etc/fstab – defaults,noatime,data=writeback.
Right its 6:45am and I want to upload some pictures of Boston from yesterday and then head out for a day packed solid for the conference I'm at. Oh can I say I download the live Ubuntu CD already, I just need to find somewhere to buy blank CD-Rs, came down at 724.3kB/s from MIT over the hotels non-free (10 dollars per day) ethernet connection. So yes any tips on where I can quickly nip out and get a blank CD would be useful too. I'll quickly blog my post from the airplane too. Oh but I can't because its in my /home/ian directory! Damm it
Windows Mobile software gets smart
I'm going to say something very positive about the Apple iPhone please don't be shocked. Since the iPhone launch, its been amazing to see the quality and attention to user experience windows mobile software has increased. I've been using this windows mobile locker for quite a while now but Nizam pointed me at 2 contact managers icontact and my prefered choice PocketCM. Who needs the HTC Touch when you got applications like PocketCM?
I found a site leading the charge in this area – http://whoneedsaniphone.com/. From the site.
We also want to let everyone know that the intent of this project IS NOT TO DUPLICATE THE IPHONE INTERFACE… we just want to take some of the principles of that interface and bring them to Windows Mobile users! One of the big keys here is operating the phone with just your finger… I have always hated having to pull out the stylus to do certain things… bigger buttons and more scrolling without scroll bars and stuff like that…
The perfect RSS aggregator on any platform
Under tons of pressure for my comments about the lack of a decent RSS reader on GNU/Linux systems. I've decided to list what makes the perfect RSS aggregator client in my head. A lot of the features I want will be specific and maybe out of scope for a lot of people, but its certainly something to consider as normal rss users turn into power or advanced users. I'm also going to try and avoid describing something as advanced as Particls which is really a desktop attention engine, but I'll add some key elements I do like.
- APML support, I want to rank, sort and filter based on my own explict tags and what the computer thinks I might like (implicit).
- If APML isn't supported, the application should support search/filter tags. Those tags should attract posts which are related to that tag. So when I click on Dell, I should get all posts about Dell no matter which category its in.
- Should be able to handle 500 RSS feeds without paging like mad or using 100meg plus. The amount of RSS readers which hang after importing 350 is untrue.
- Import should support Bloglines, Newsgator and Google reader syncing.
- It should also support FTP, Webdav and Samba syncing of files, like Feed Demon
- When I click on a category of feeds, it should display an aggregated view of all the feeds below it in date or feed order
- The ability to blog, post, add to delicious, etc from the post with a couple of clicks
- Software should be Free as in Freedom or at least Open Source
- The abaility to add tags and notes to items and feeds as a whole, then be
- Support for XSL transfoms on the actual its display pane. If not XSL, CSS at least.
- Support for Microformats, eRDF and RDFa
- Extention support like Firefox, maybe XUL support would bemazing
- Support for assignable keyboard shortcuts
- Export support for OPML 1.1
- Ability to export or save current aggregated view without the style (XML/RSS output)
- Support for wfw:Comments, so you can comment back directly in your own RSS reader instead of using the browser
- Support for Gecko engine for rendering/display
- Global search across all feeds and per catergory
- Support Attachments
- Automatic updates
- Support for One/Two/Three Panel support
- Support for One and Two click processing
- Reminder/Timed tags, so it alerts you that you should be looking at it at certain time
- Definable coloured labels for tags and items. As default tags will get a random colour
- Support for Regular Expressions
- Support for Xpath queries
- Print support, PDF support too would be nice
- Offline support with caching of items and images up to a set amount
- Offline rules, so you can specifiy certain categories or feeds to be cached with or without images
- Support for different backends including SQLite, MySql, etc. Plus support for XMLDB
- Bluetooth OBEX push for pushing items, lists or categories
I think that will do for now…
Current state of my GNU/Linux switch over
So its been about 2 months since I switched over to Ubuntu GNU/Linux on my Dell Laptop. Things have been a lot better over time and generally day to day I'm having no problems. Its only when I go to do something different is when I get the problems.
First problem, external display from the VGA port. During BarCampBrighton some of the projectors didn't like my laptop's native rez of 1280×800 and would fail to display anything at all. What made things frustrating was the fact I couldn't switch down to 1024×768 because my laptop driver seems to give me only one option.
I stilll have yet to find a decent RSS reader except the preview version of RSS OWL which actually works better that previous versions. I usually keep an eye on the heap memory and it tends to stay within the 40meg allocated memory. So for now its my choice for RSS reading
Blogging from a clinet under Ubuntu is working due to BloGTK but the general expeience is very basic and I closer to W.Blogger that Ecto. If there is a more rich feature blgging application/client do drop me a comment. I miss stuff like being able to update posts and read posts offline.
Battery life has imporved over the months. When I first switched over, it would run for about 4hours on batteries but now its up to 5hours (about the same as I would get out of Windows on the same machine). Hibernate support still fails but suspend now works correctly all the time. Networking still needs to be restarted when I switch on each time but it seems more consistent.
I've still not found something to totally replace outlook. Currently I'm using Plaxo online for most of my PIM type stuff. This is ok but sometimes when I'm offline its frustrating to look at Plaxo and hope I left the page on the calendar section.
I'm still looking to sync my phone with my laptop but I'm having very little sucess with this. I've seen mentions of Opensync but it doesn't work for myself. On the mobile phone front, I've tried to connect my nokia N80 to the laptop using this script but its not worked out so far. I've not even attempted this on my Windows Mobile phone.
Backup and Syncing is totally broken for me. I want to do simple things like backup my laptop to my storage server over samba but unison and rsync don't like samba! This is insane and I've tried many ways to trick it into thinking a samba share is actually a mounted drive but it doesn't work. There seems to be a solution here.I've yet to play with Baclua and Amanda (yes that guy from Amanda I will be contacting you very soon. I'm also looking for some way to generic.
Ok last few things, I've dumped Madma and Xmms in favour of Amarok which works so well now it supports Mpeg3! For ages I wondered why I got no sounds and only in later versions does it tell you your missing the codec in question, before that you were left to work it out alone. Lastly Bluetooth is working but I've not got the Wiimote talking correctly and I'm really missing GlovePIE. And finally to finish off for now. My logtech Camera still doesn't work and I can't find drivers for it anywhere.
iPhone price drop
So I heard about this and people have been asking if this makes any difference to my views on the iphone? Simple answer yes it kind of does but I still won't buy one. At 299 dollars its looks like it will be much closer to 200 pounds when it finally hits the UK in the next few months. Although it looks like it will get the compitition it deserves from Samsung, Google, HTC and Nokia.
I know a lot of iPhone users are pissed off with the price drop but I'm sorry they knew the risks with buying new tech on the first day. However something isn't working at Apple HQ. Its obvious, very few companies cancel a product (4gig iphone) and drop the price of by almost 40% within a few months.
Its coming up to the time for a new phone soon, but right now the iPhone isn't one of them on the list.
Give me a decent RSS reader on GNU/Linux please
This quote from the Greatnews Forum sums up my feelings about RSS readers on Linux. I'm actually tempted to run a cut down version of Windows using VMwareplayer and just Greatnews.
Annoyed with some of Microsoft's policies regarding their users, and disgusted with the looks and ridiculous size of Windows Vista, I've been slowly working on the switch from MS' operating system to Linux (Ubuntu 6.06, to be more precise).
So far, the experience has been great but there is one application that keeps me going back to Windows, and it is not Adobe Photoshop. It turns out that not only there is no RSS reader even remotely alike GreatNews on the penguin, there doesn't seem to be any decent reader at all. I've been trying to make do with RSS Owl, but that 3-pane e-mail client GUI just won't do, and the fact that it doesn't archive posts is absolutely exasperating.
My first impulse, of course, would be to suggest a Linux version of GreatNews. But I don't think that's a reasonable idea, at least in the near future. So, the next best thing I can do is try to run it with something like Wine.
I'm currently using the preview version of RSSOwl 2.0 simply because it has the advance functionality, handles 400 feeds ok but geez how memory does it want to eat? Yes I know some of you will say what about AKagregator, Liferea, etc, etc. Trust me I've installed them all and tried them out. Most crash when I try and load in a 400 feed OPML file or take forever to jump feed to feed. I even went through this frustration with a couple of friends and they were lost for words. Even Mark Pilgrims list of essential software for Linux does not have a RSS reader on it! I'm sorry but this is bad and very sad. I got use to using Particls but can live without it for a while, till I find a way of getting the benefit of my APML file in another RSS reader, or they release a Linux version? Linux is also missing simple things like wheres the slick RSS screensaver? Windows and Mac have plenty, including some opensource versions which I'm sure could be ported if needed.
My plead to the Linux world is get clued up about RSS on the desktop, its not going away and actually for some like myself prefered to reading web pages. Now can someone tell me I'm very wrong and debunk what I'm saying? Please…
iphone unlocking, a question of PR, what would you do if you were Apple or AT&T?
So the Apple iPhone has been well and truely software hacked by multiple people (credit to Engadget for the coverage).
Now if Apple are getting a percentage of the activations and monthly iPhone bills, they will start lossing money. Currently the soft mod is in the geek community but how long will it take for this to spread?
So if your Apple and AT&T's PR department what would you do? Would you ignore it and assume it won't reach the mainstream market or come out now with something? Also what would that something be? Would you attract more attention to the whole issue. Back to Apple, Would you consider some sneaky locking system via iTunes or the GSM network to over ride the current iPhone firmware, like Sony and Microsoft have done in the past?
Me, I would work hard on improving the service at AT&T and address some of the issues people have with their network. Then again, that 5 year contract means Apple are stuck to AT&T for the next few years. What does this mean for me? Well if it comes to the UK and its much cheaper, does 3g and could be used on Orange. I would be more likely to get it.
I told you I would never upgrade to Windows Vista
It took quite a long time but I finally got fed up with Windows XP when weird services started showing up plus it would take 1min to suspend. I could have reinstalled XP, upgraded to Vista or moved to Ubuntu 7.04. Although its not exactly the best time to do so, I moved to Ubuntu GNU/Linux and I'm slowly porting my settings and data over from the Windows drive. So far, Firefox, Thunderbird, Keepass, Hamachi are all up and running. I'll get the tricker stuff going tomorrow.
I'm finding ubuntuguide.org and TuxMobil useful by the way.
NBC Dateline Reporter flees Defcon 15
Ok I’ll give the iPhone this one
From Ben Metcalfe on the unified mobile platform or why the iPhone is really important,
The reason why the iPhone is an important phone is not because of its shiny gadgetness or its touch interface. It’s not even important because it’s the first serious media player to be combined with a phone.
It’s important because of its web-based approach to application development. I believe this approach will spawn other manufactures to follow suit and in turn we will find ourselves with a truly unified development platform not owned by any single vendor or manufacturer.
Right now developing applications for mobile phones is a pain with no single way of rolling out an application to every phone (or even the majority of phones) on the market. Sun’s J2ME was supposed to solve all this but instead we still have a chaotic environment of different MIDP profiles, screensizes, capabilities and even carriers who prevent unsigned (read: approved) java applets from running on some of their phones.
This is kind of what the world of computing was like before the Internet – when Macs wouldn’t read files created on PC’s and vice-versa. The internet came along and a common set of standards were created that allowed documents to be interchanged between any computer. Later on we managed to coerce those standards into lightweight applications that more often than not provide all the functionality we needed.
I believe we are finally going to see this happen on the mobile phone. Apple is leading the way by promoting the iPhone’s Safari browser as the development environment for the iPhone – but there is no reason why this can’t be emulated on other phones too.
He's right but I'm sorry this doesn't go far enough for me. I would like to see much more in the browser API. Access to the GPS and Camera, Offline storage like Google Gadgets, Widgets? Opera are best placed to do this but they cover so many phones. The Mozilla builds of the Mobile Firefox (Minimo) could be the perfect platform to do this, as its open source and could be adapted by every single manufactor to boost the sales and power of there own mobile device. Safari sucks and we all know it. Yes its built on webkit but geez what the hell did they do to it?