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Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category

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NetworkManager PPTP plugin: One Ubuntu package, hold the pepper!

Saturday, August 19th, 2006

Please see the updated NetworkManager PPTP Plugin for Ubuntu page. Thanks!

Some time after blogging about getting NetworkManager's PPTP plugin checked out of CVS, I have some news to report.

Tony Mee is a legend. The author of the plugin has spent a lot of time with me, by e-mail, Jabber and Skype, accepting bugfixes, working on solutions, explaining things slowly for my non-programmer-brain. Most of the work done has been by him. I can't thank him enough here.

A few points to note first:

  • This plugin is in the middle of being converted to handle things that aren't just PPTP, and as such it presents a few more options than it might need to. Ignore screens about GPRS and Bluetooth; hopefully a subsequent version will see me disable them.
  • It is the CVS HEAD version, with the new pluggable-auth-dialog removed, as it just didn't want to build right, and isn't yet ready to replace the old auth-dialog.
  • Default PPP options might not suit - you will probably have to tick "Refuse EAP" on Authentication and "Require MPPE encryption/Require 128 bit MPPE encryption" on Compression & Encryption to connect to a Windows 2003 VPN server.
  • There are a variety of bugs with the current version of NM that could bite you. The VPN plugins can't set the MTU, you can't edit a VPN connection immediately after making it, irrelevant tabs aren't hidden - most of these will require the new 0.7 series to be released, which probably won't happen before Edgy.
  • You will have to restart DBUS, or log out and log back in again, after installing this plugin, before you can connect.

As usual, everything I know about autotools and CVS I leant from Perry. Thanks!

Now, for the fun part. I have packaged the NetworkManager PPTP plugin for Ubuntu 6.06. Download it here. I will have it up in an apt repository in the next couple of days. Please raise bugs in the program at the GNOME bugzilla, please leave comments on the package or general messages of "Hello!" in the comments below.

The next step is to find out how to disable all the irrelevant parts in the package, and start considering my potential future as an Ubuntu MOTU.

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Posted in Technical | 20 Comments »

Customising a Debian/Ubuntu installation CD

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

One of the things I maintain at work is a self-installing Linux distribution.

When I started in 2002, we were purchasing KickStart installed Red Hat 7.x machines from a local company. With Progeny's AutoInstall, I managed to get a CD that would automatically install Debian Woody, but not in a very nice fashion.

Ubuntu came out, was more up to date than Woody (I think my Commodore 64 was more up to date than Woody for a moment there), and so I changed to it after the second release. Hoary introducted some support for KickStart installations, but I found that much more power could be gained with the new debian-installer that was coming for Sarge. A guide to remastering your Ubuntu CD ensued.

Two releases later, I updated all the machines to Ubuntu Dapper, and tidied up the installer a whole heap. Today, under the chargeable heading of "documenting my self-installing Linux distribution in case I get hit by a bus", I have given the Ubuntu Install CD Customization page a complete overhaul. Read it - it's grand.

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Posted in Technical, Work | No Comments »

BASIC liability insurance

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

As those of you who know me personally will know that I am, quite vocally, not someone who enjoys programming. My main problem is that I write code so infrequently that whenever I sit down I've forgotten either the syntax of language or the parameters of the API, and find more time is taken with reading the docs or finding suitable examples than actually writing or thinking.

I visited my parents yesterday to help my 16 year old brother study for a test, and he also asked for some help with a programming assignment. Due either to a recent loss of computing equipment, or general difficulty in deciding on a language for teaching programming, they're using QBasic. Last time I used QBasic, I hadn't gone through a university degree and learnt half a dozen programming languages, so I found it all a bit easier this time. The problem was that I had no idea if half of the things I wanted to do had syntax in QB: you can't specify an array using numbers[4] = {1, 3, 6, 8}, so an example on the web (the only time I had to go outside of the help) pointed out that you use READ and a DATA statement. I remember seeing DATA statements in Commodore 64 code printouts in magazines, and not having any idea how the stuff quite how they worked. Surely it's easier to specify your data inline, rather than in a DATA statement? Isn't BASIC supposed to be, well, basic?

Anyway, below the fold is what I wrote. The goal was to teach my brother, and his brief was "write a roulette game". I insisted there would be no GOTOs, and no functions/subroutines, as he hadn't covered them at school. Generally the code had to make sense so he could read it and figure out how it all worked.

We finished it, and then, like the bastard I am, I deleted the bit that tests for odd and even and made him rewrite that. I suspect he'll find this post before actually rewriting it himself. Maybe not enjoying programming runs in the family.

(more…)

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Posted in Personal, Technical | 2 Comments »

And the barriers keep falling...

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

Due to their anti-trust arrangement with Microsoft, Real are bringing WMV/WMA to Linux, legally. And Sun have announced more about Java's upcoming release to Open Source.

Linux will "succeed" (not to say it isn't succeeding already, but be ready for "primetime" or "The Enterprise" when it is in a position where people can target their software to it, and want to do it. Each step helps.

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Open source graphics drivers (Part 2)

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

Quoth Ian:

Great to see [Intel open-sourcing their graphics drivers] - now if only AMD/ATI and Nvidia would follow suit.

They've had open-source drivers for their hardware for some time: quoth the truely excellent Keith Packard:

Intel has made free software drivers available for all of its graphics adapters since the i810, so if it says 'Intel graphics' on the label, you can be sure that free software will support it.

The release today adds support for the brand-new i965 chips which add advanced rendering capabilities to Intel's graphics adapters, including the ability to support OpenGL vertex shaders and hardware T&L. As far as I can tell, while the hardware has been announced, it's not yet available from retailers yet.

But, as for AMD/ATI? Ask, and ye shall receive? If it happens, it's yet another reason to love AMD. Good to see competition in the chip markets.

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Cranky at little 'exploitable' Outlook foibles?

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

There used to be a bug in Outlook and Outlook Express's handling of uuencode (remember that?) that meant if you began a message with "begin" and two spaces, it would render the rest of the message unreadable. A few people on the WLUG mailing list tried using "begin   quoted message from X", until we politely pointed out to them that some people are forced to, or choose to, use a Windows mail client, and it's bad advocacy to stop them from being able to read your messages.

Other variations on the theme pop up every now and then; here's one on a message from jdub this morning, with a little less angry and a little more style.

If you're interested, it is put there by X-Message-Flag. And it's easy to do.

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All medicines have benefits and some have risks

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

I wouldn't ever look at the web if it wasn't for AdBlock and the Filterset.G updater. It pains me to try and use a computer without these two Firefox extensions installed - there is just so much background noise that you don't remember seeing, after seeing a pain-free web for a wee while.

But, like Panadol, there are pains it fixes and pains it creates. Adblock can't tell which ads you want to see and which you don't. I first noticed this last election, when I wanted to see the National Party's thank-you-very-much ad. See the two missing boxes? A friend sent me these fantastic 50s ads, (including wallpaper for other bacon lovers). Robin Capper's link to the new Sony Bravia ad suffers much the same fate.

Two morals of the story. First, if you're putting an ad on the 'web, don't put 'ad' in the image path ?. Second, if you're setting up AdBlock for people (and I firmly believe it improves the internet experience and will defend to the death my right to use it), make sure they know about the site whitelist and when to use it.

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Posted in Technical | No Comments »

Desktop advances

Friday, August 4th, 2006

Wow. Turn your back on eye candy for a few weeks, and it just jumps up at you.

First, the new SLED menu for GNOME developed by Novell was dropped into GNOME CVS as 'slab'. Of course, people have customized it for their favourite distribution, and so now there are Fedora and Ubuntu packages of it available. Keep an eye on the plan to get the slab into Edgy Eft.

A lady by the name of QuinnStorm has done some amazing work with Novell's XGL and Compiz, really building a community around it. I track the development version of compiz, which just keeps picking up new and useful features - I don't really like the Expose-like funtionality, so I went to see how to turn it off, and fell over a new window decorator instead. Cool. (If you have the bug that you can't seem to turn off hot corners, read the compiz.net forum on the issue.)

A great list of things to configure about Compiz can be found on the Ubuntu wiki. Someone wrote a program called gset-compiz to do this all for you, but development hasn't kept up with the rapid pace of Compiz changes. (Hint: to stop background windows appearing faded out, disable the "trailfocus" plugin, and try hitting Ctrl-Windows or Shift-F9 if you have "water" in your list of enabled plugins!)

It also turns out that the aforementioned slab is available from QuinnStorm's repository. Is there anything she doesn't do? The only criticism I've seen is that the domain could be slightly more trustworthy-sounding than "beer or kid". Tough choice, even for someone who doesn't drink beer...

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Posted in Technical | 3 Comments »

NetworkManager PPTP plugin: Checking out & building

Saturday, July 29th, 2006

A while ago I promised Anthony Mee that I'd try and build the latest version of his NetworkManger VPN plugin for Ubuntu, and a couple of weeks ago I realised I had no excuses not to start.

I was tripped up while trying to build it: libtool: link: cannot find the library `/usr/lib/libXrender.la' or unhandled argument `/usr/lib/libXrender.la'.

Two minutes on #ubuntu-motu, I was fixed up by slomo: I use the non-official XGL repository, which has a broken libcairo2-dev package: I needed to edit /usr/lib/libcairo.la and replace -L/usr/lib/libXrender.la with -lXrender. Seeing as the web didn't seem to know this fact, and I couldn't find anywhere on the WLUG wiki to put this, I thought I'd teach it here.

Slowly checked NetworkManager out of CVS.

Last weekend Perry gave me a crash course in building things with autotools, using 'cvs export' or 'make dist' to get distributable-ready code. With a bit of hacking around, we managed to get the plugin built.

Came across a big problem; the old plugin was "org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp", and the new one is "org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.ppp_starter". Took a random guess to figure out that the old VPN plugin was stored in gconf, and this was what was crashing the VPN dialog. Perry opined that the barrier to entry to anything with DBus was going to be so much higher than simple Unix-like XML-readin' apps, and I hope he'll put his feelings in words soon. When I get back to that machine, I'll raise a bug.

I think I now have everything I need to know to build a Debian package. Shame the thing doesn't actually work or anything. Have added Tony to Jabber and will hope to make some progress soon.

WordPress, how hard is to get an editor which gives me a <code>, <tt> or other monospace-this-part button?

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Posted in Technical | 3 Comments »

"Bloggers beating journos to the rush"

Monday, July 24th, 2006

Woosh Wireless are buying Quicksilver.

I started by saying "You heard it here first", but apparently NZGames had the news last week.

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Posted in Technical | 2 Comments »

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