Laney's blog

. o O (Wordpress 2.7.1 is pretty sexy)

Congratulations on mankind for reaching the splendid milestone that is 1234567890 seconds since 1970 began. Who'd have thought we'd make it this far?

But really, congratulations on the Debian team for releasing Lenny (I even have one package uploaded there)! The point of this post is mainly to point people upgrading their Xen DomUs of a bug that I encountered and how to fix it (thanks to Andy Smith).

When doing the upgrade I got this message:

laney@cripps:~$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
Setting up linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 (2.6.26-13) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-1-xen-686
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub
warning: grub-probe can't find drive for /dev/sda1.
grub-probe: error: Cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sda1. Check your
device.map.

dpkg: error processing linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-2.6-xen-686:
linux-image-2.6-xen-686 depends on linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686; however:
Package linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing linux-image-2.6-xen-686 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-xen-686:
linux-image-xen-686 depends on linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686; however:
Package linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing linux-image-xen-686 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686
linux-image-2.6-xen-686
linux-image-xen-686

This is apparently a bug in grub-probe when dealing with Xen virtual machines. A post by Andy here gives the magic incantation to fix it:

sudo sh -c "echo '(hd0) /dev/sda' > /boot/grub/device.map && cd /dev && mknod sda b 202 0"

(you might need to change sda to xvda depending on what your error says).

A quick dpkg --configure -a later and everything is hunky-dory. Now in a sexy Lenny system in which everything seems to just work, just like the marketing says. Some Apache and MySQL warnings to fix up, but nothing too major. Yet.

(on a side-note - I got MOTU recently. Breakage coming to an Ubuntu near you. Yay!)

I was just making dinner, listening to Radio 4, when something caught my ear. The words "Creative Commons". Wait, what? Why are they talking about this? It turned out to be a nice introduction to free/Free, copyright, creative commons, free culture, delivered by Auntie. A communist conspiracy!

You can get it on the podcast or stream it from here. Show it to your unenlightened friends!

edit: It appears that the versions I linked to cut off early. If you're in the UK you can listen to the whole version on the iPlayer.

Forgive me, planet Ubuntu, for talking about OSX…

I just managed to get 3G working over Bluetooth, and thought I'd share the recipe incase anyone needs this in the future. It's stupidly simple, which is probably why I could only find incorrect information online. I feel a bit silly posting something so easy, but I spent a long while looking for this so I hope it saves someone else the time. I'll get round to trying it on the Ibex soon (once support is a bit improved).

Here's how to set your Nokia phone up to connect to three's 3g network over Bluetooth. I am on a contract, not pre-pay. This may not work for pre-pay people.

1. Follow the Bluetooth setup wizard to connect your phone to the computer. Make sure Bluetooth is on and discoverable on the device. These instructions will get you paired.
2. At the end, tick the option to connect to the internet. Leave the telephone number, username and password blank and set the APN to three.co.uk. That's it, it should now work. Ignore anything you see elsewhere about *99# as a number or 3internet as an APN.
3. Surf.

If you've already paired and cannot get back to the wizard then you can still set this up through network preferences. Just set the same settings for your bluetooth modem that appears:

photo credit: James Nash (aka Cirrus)

I got a new N96 a couple of weeks ago, as my old Nokia was barely functional any more. No backlight and ~8 hours battery life is not good, I tell you now.

The good:

• Build quality is nice. Some people might say it's a bit big, but I like it. Despite its size, it's still quite light - I weighed it against an iPhone and it came out lighter.
• Huge, excellent quailty screen.
• 16GB of storage, for plenty of music. Goodbye iPod.
• FM Radio(!)
• Uploading geotagged pictures to Flickr works a treat. You do have to remember to have Location Tagger running though.
• BBC iPlayer, not that I've used this much yet (see below).
• Tonnes of apps thanks to Symbian. Decent ones include:
  • PuTTY for Symbian OS
  • Opera Mini
  • Google Maps for your phone
  • ??? (I'm sure there are more good ones that I don't know of yet, please let me know)

The bad:

• The firmware that it came with is, quite frankly, shocking. Crashes and bugs galore. The worst part of it seems to be the accelerometer - the screen redrawing when it detects a rotation is awful. Seeing half drawn applications in each orientation is not what you want to see on your expensive new phone. There's also some general slowness with apps taking a while to initialise, but I suspect this is inherent.
• The camera, despite being touted as excellent, seems to produce pretty grainy pictures to me. I hope it's just the way I'm using it, because I'm getting the feeling that "Carl Zeiss optics" aren't as good as Nokia try and make you think they are.
• iPlayer works great on wifi, but the videos never start over 3G.
• If you actually do stuff with it, the battery life can be quite terrible - just doing a bit of 3G internet use (SSH or WWW) is enough to drain the battery to nothing in a few hours.
• Closing applications on a phone is odd, and I keep forgetting to do it. Some applications close when you hit the red button, and some don't. I need to get used to this. Annoying the "Log" application doesn't close after you use it to make a call.
• Shutting the slider while on a call doesn't end it.
• I've had it freeze up while a call is coming in and refuse to answer it, causing me to miss the call. It was from a withheld number too, so I couldn't call back (not that I should have to).

There was a letter in the box apologising for the quality of the intial firmware so I'm quite hopeful that a lot of these issues will be fixed when an update is release. I don't know how good Nokia's track record is on this, but we'll see. All in all, I'm fairly happy with it, and when the bugs get ironed out it'll be awesome.

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Well, hello Planet! Since I've been approved as an Ubuntu member, I figured this is as good a time as any to post some drivel. I'm Laney, and I am very pleased to have your attention. I am 22 years young and in a small number of weeks will be a PhD student at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham.

I might as well use this platform to ask for your help. No, not for myself, for the Intrepid Ibex. Look at the picture up there, he needs you to help him. You couldn't say no to that, could you?

James Westby has made a much more comprehensive post on this, but I'd just like to retierate the testing part. If you feel you're able to recover from any problems that might occur (should not be too severe now we're in feature freeze) and your system is not mission critical then please do consider helping out. It was with some hesitation that I made the switch a week or so ago, and I've certainly found my fair share of bugs and have to live with a slightly more unstable system (particularly audio-wise), but it'll be worth it in the end when we ship an excellent Ubuntu 8.10. If you do test, I urge you to get involved in bug reporting, otherwise you're just putting yourself through pain for no gain. When you come across a problem, search Launchpad and the affected program's upstream bug tracker for the issue and see if you can add any more information. If there is no bug, or if you just don't have the time to be searching bug trackers then please do still file the bug on Launchpad and a triager will deal with it for you (maybe asking you for more information). As the ever wise Tesco say, "Every little helps". I've definitely come across a few bugs (probably some I've forgotten here):

• Banshee crashes on Last.FM login
• terminator crashed with AttributeError in get_first_notebook_page()
• seahorse crashed with SIGSEGV in IA__g_object_set_valist()
• file-roller crashed with SIGSEGV in find_image_offset()
• tracker-applet crashed with SIGSEGV in signal_emit_unlocked_R()
• Can no longer configure keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs

A lot of the bugs have a similar format: "x crashed with y in z". This is apport at work, an excellent tool which takes a lot of the work out of reporting crash bugs. Even just reporting these bugs helps to stabilise the system.

So, I urge you, please do run update-manager -d (Ubuntu users) or adept_manager –version-upgrade (Kubuntu), and get involved!

Ever since I switched to Banshee I've been a bit annoyed that I didn't know how to annoy others by advertising my currently playing song. I always knew the trick for Amarok which Theory posted a long while ago, but had no idea how to adapt this for dbus which Banshee uses. Now, thanks to kees, this has all changed.

In order to get at your currently playing song on Banshee from a SSH connection into your box, just run the following script:

#!/bin/bash

PID=$(pidof mono /usr/lib/banshee-1/Banshee.exe)

if [ -z $PID ]; then
    echo "Banshee doesn't appear to be running"
else
    export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=\\
        \$(cat /proc/\$PID/environ | xargs -0 -n1 \\
            | grep ^DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS= | cut -d= -f2-)
    banshee-1 --query-artist --query-title | cut -d ' ' -f 1 --complement | \\
        sed -n '1h;2,$H;${g;s/\n/ - /g;p}'
fi

It will produce output like so:

laney@chicken:~$ banshee-np.sh
Rancid - Corazon de Oro

Now to get it working remotely, just follow Theory's instructions, replacing

command="dcop --user `whoami` amarok player nowPlaying"

with

command="/path/to/banshee-np.sh"

and you should be good to go!

This post brought to you by my burnt hand, which I have to return to the ice pack every 20 seconds or so. Ouch.

You can now call me Iain Lane BSc (Hons), oh yeah. I graduated on Friday, and managed to not fall over or anything. Man is that walking business difficult.

Roll on September, when I get to learn about the real stuff that they don't teach you.

If you haven't heard, today at 1700 UTC, Firefox 3 will be released. The Mozilla foundation are celebrating this with a cute marketing campaign, to try and break the Guinness world record for the most downloads of a piece of software in 24 hours. If they've got the bandwidth to burn, and it helps get some coverage of FOSS, why not? I'll certainly be getting it.

I got my degree result yesterday… drumroll…

Yay!

I'm going to start a series of posts where I walk through various things that I do as part of my Ubuntu development work with the MOTU team. I'm currently trying to get myself up to a level where I can apply to the Ubuntu Universe Contributors team, and then at some point in the future for MOTUship.

This article describes the process for merging a package from Debian to the development version of Ubuntu, currently the Intrepid Ibex. If you want to see how I generally go about doing this, follow the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »