Craig Box's journeys, stories and notes...

Posts Tagged ‘ubuntu’

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Periods in run-parts

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Repeat after me, Debian/Ubuntu sysadmins. You cannot use the period (.) character in /etc/foo.d directories. Can't can't can't.

Why? Well, man runparts says:

If the --lsbsysinit option is not given then the names must consist
entirely of upper and lower case letters, digits, underscores, and
hyphens.

So, you can't have files named "vhost.foo.co.nz" in your /etc/logrotate.d directory, and you can't have files named "awstats-foo.co.nz" in your /etc/cron.d directory.

As much of a big deal is made of Halloween, and as many groups of kids I saw walking the streets about 7:45, we only had one person knock on the door trick-or-treating. And we managed to successfully pretend we weren't here, sitting in the lounge watching Torchwood. (I keep waiting for the Doctor to turn up.)

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Posted in Technical, Work | 4 Comments »

Ubuntu Edgy released, foibles and all

Sunday, October 29th, 2006

I got a birthday present on Friday in the form of a new Ubuntu release, Edgy Eft. I downloaded the 6.10 ISO and promptly burned the 6.06 ISO to CD, only noticing when I got it home. Oh well, several hundred megs of downloads later...

Some notes:

  • Due to a change in Python packaging policy, python2.4-module packages are deprecated in favour of python-module packages that have an X-Python-Version field in their control file.
  • If you get a black screen & crash testing the beta NVIDIA driver, you probably need to edit /etc/modules and remove the eeprom driver. Found on the official NVIDIA Linux forum.

Beryl, the community Compiz fork, is, well, "a little over the top". After figuring out the settings to subdue it a little bit, I've got it usable. The settings dialog could do with a lot of love however, so anyone who is interested in UI and has free time (unfortunately I only currently hit one out of two) might like to volunteer to help.

I leave with a little laugh (courtesy of Jorge Bernal):

Bill Gates recommending Ubuntu

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Posted in Technical, Work | No Comments »

Ubuntu PPTP in Universe

Sunday, October 1st, 2006

Thanks to the efforts of the tireless ajmitch (does he ever sleep?), not only is my network-manager-pptp package mostly finished, it's also going to be available in the universe repository for Ubuntu Edgy.

Until it shows up online, you can grab and test it here:

Test early, test often.

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Posted in Technical | No Comments »

Ubuntu New Zealand Local Community Team (re-)launched

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Ever since the birth of computers, enthusiasts and fans around the world have collected together in garages, universities and pubs to talk about their interest, learn from each other and help promote their interest. Combine this with the huge popularity of Ubuntu, and you get the Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) project.

A LoCo team is formed to help groups of Ubuntu fans and enthusiasts in a particular region to help advocate, promote, translate, develop and otherwise improve Ubuntu.

With the support of Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager, and the awesome Australian Team, we're launching a New Zealand team for Ubuntu (http://ubuntu-nz.org/).

What's involved?

What would you like to be involved? Activities other teams have engaged in include, but are not limited to:

  • development & coaching new, interested contributors
  • regional customisation
  • translations
  • advocacy, both virtually and locally
  • CD & merchandise distribution
  • IRC support (or just hanging out)

There are no set goals for the team yet - it's entirely up to you, the new members, to decide as a group what we should do. There are many, many ways to ContributeToUbuntu!

Involvement in a LoCo is an easy way to get involved with the global Ubuntu community for non-developers and developers alike. There are people involved from many teams within Ubuntu who can help you gain useful skills for further involvement if you are keen!

How can I get involved?

Join our mailing list (https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-nz) and our IRC channel (#ubuntu-nz on Freenode, or irc://irc.freenode.org:6667/#ubuntu-nz)

More details are available from the website: http://ubuntu-nz.org/

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Posted in Technical | No Comments »

Software Freedom Day - all over!

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Thanks to everyone who helped out with WLUG's Software Freedom Day event. There is a good writeup and some pictures online at the SFD website.

On a personal note, I'd like to thank Ian and Bruce, who did most of the work on the day, as well as Bruce's family for their support and penguin suit wearing. Also, Michael, Rod and Ron for their help on the day. It was unfortunate that the sterling efforts of a number of individuals was sullied by the actions of another member on the day, who is being officially reprimanded for his behaviour. (And it's also unfortunate we were buried on page D7 in the Waikato Times, while front page, above the fold, was an article about our local furries.)

t this point I should also announce I am not standing for re-election on the WLUG committee next year. I've been secretary since we founded officially four years ago, through three presidents, vice-presidents and treasurers, and over 10 general committee members. It's been a great way to contribute to the open source community and I really hope that someone new and fresh gets involved.

Fear not, I'll still be involved; my current goal is relaunching the Ubuntu NZ local community team.

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Posted in Technical | No Comments »

SFD/NM updates

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

My NetworkManager PPTP plugin package for Ubuntu is sitting in the REVU queue. If all goes well it will be approved and end up in Universe for Edgy.

SFD preparations are coming along. We have people hard at work preparing 150 copies of the Kia Ora CD, a fantastic open source software CD for Windows, collated by zcat from WLUG, and of course we have 300 Ubuntu CDs to give away.

Oh, and MythTV 0.20 is out. Make sure you get 0.20a, as a big MythWeb bug slipped in at the last minute. All going well, it'll make Edgy, if a simple sync from Debian Multimedia is possible.

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Posted in Technical | No Comments »

Slashback

Monday, August 21st, 2006

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Posted in Technical | 3 Comments »

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 »

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 »

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