Laney's blog

I recently decided, in advance of any future events I may attend, to join the bandwagon and transition away from my old 1024D key (20BFCDC7) to a lovely new 4096R key (1C5041D4). This post is my transition announcement. You can find the transition document here, and below. Both keys will still be valid for the time being, but I shall not be renewing the old one after it expires on 2010-11-26, and it will be revoked shortly thereafter. As far as possible, I'd appreciate all correspondence to use the new key.

If, after reading the transition document, you feel comfortable signing my key (and have signed the old one), then I'd appreciate your signature via email.

(format of transition document cribbed from Matt Zimmerman's transition, thanks!)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1,SHA256

,----[ OpenPGP key transition ]
| Time-stamp: <2010-08-30 00:08:28 laney>
`----

I've recently set up a new GPG key, and will be transitioning away from
my old one. I have done this in order to migrate to a larger RSA key and
stronger hash functions, and NOT due to any known key compromise.  The
old key will continue to be valid for some time, but future
correspondence should use the new one wherever possible.

This message is signed by both keys to certify the transition.

The old key was:

pub   1024D/20BFCDC7 2007-11-27
Key fingerprint = 2B1E 742E B9CA C441 EA0B  4CBA 3F2D 129C 20BF CDC7
uid                  Iain Lane <iain@orangesquash.org.uk>
uid                  Iain Lane <laney@ubuntu.com>
uid                  Iain Lane <ial@cs.nott.ac.uk>
uid                  Iain Lane <psxil@nottingham.ac.uk>
sub   2048g/5D64CB7D 2007-11-27 [expires: 2010-11-26]

and the new key is:

pub   4096R/1C5041D4 2010-08-29 [expires: 2013-08-28]
Key fingerprint = 3D0E FB95 E7B5 237F 16E8  2258 E352 D5C5 1C50 41D4
uid                  Iain Lane <iain@orangesquash.org.uk>
uid                  Iain Lane <psxil@nottingham.ac.uk>
uid                  Iain Lane <laney@ubuntu.com>
uid                  Iain Lane <ial@cs.nott.ac.uk>
sub   4096R/8FB24134 2010-08-29 [expires: 2013-08-28]

To fetch my new key from a public keyserver, you can run:

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 1C5041D4

and verify its fingerprint matches the one above:

gpg --fingerprint 1C5041D4

If you already know my old key, you can now verify that the new key is
signed by the old one:

gpg --check-sigs 1C5041D4

If you have previously signed my old key, and you're satisfied that
you've got the correct new key, then I'd appreciate it if you would sign
my new key as well:

gpg --sign-key 1C5041D4

Then I would appreciate it if you would mail me the signed key. A lot of
people like to use caff(1) to sign keys.

Thanks,
Iain Lane
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Last week I installed the Karmic RC on my Macbook (5.1, late 2008), which I have now upgraded to final. I had previously installed Jaunty, but it wasn't usable enough out of the box to prise me away from OSX for good. The niggle:quality ratio seems to have slid to an acceptable level for this release to make the system good enough for daily use. However, there are still issues that persist. Being in the fortunate position of having a system dual booting with an OSX install that mostly does what I'd expect, I'm going to give a list of the ways in which my experience has been a little bit lacking thus far.

This is all about my personal use case. I am probably overlooking areas that you care about, and concentrating on those that you don't. This might read as me bashing Ubuntu a bit, but it's really not supposed to. By being honest about these issues, we can hopefully work towards fixing them.

• Proxy support. At Uni/work I am behind a web proxy – the firewall has a default deny policy which means that users are required to go through the web proxy in order to use the web. The problem is that not all applications notice that I have changed the proxy, even when I use the "Apply systemwide" option. I noticed this just now when trying to file a bug report using Apport – the collecting process just hung until I got bored and cancelled it. Launching from a terminal with http_proxy exported worked just fine (actually, automatically exporting http_proxy in terminals if one is set in Gnome would be cool – OSX doesn't do this). I'm not sure where the bug lies here, in applications or somewhere in the Gnome stack, so I don't feel comfortable filing a bug report.
• The speaker output is not muted when I plug my headphones in. I have to go to alsamixer and adjust the headphone volume separately. There's a workaround for this on the Macbook pages of the Ubuntu help wiki but I'm yet to try it. Bug 437150.
• Brightness adjustment doesn't work out of the box. There's apparently a fixed driver on the wiki page that I've just installed. We'll see after the next boot whether it works or not.
• External monitor support is a bit suboptimal. To be fair, I've probably been spoiled by the fact that OSX handles this so well. I have to manually enable/disable the monitor when I remove or add it. OSX detects this automatically and adjusts the windows as required so I can just yank the connector out and go on my merry way. See this Ubuntu QA blog post from Bryce for more on this.
• Battery life leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes the machine gets really quite hot.

I think that's it. Really these are minor niggles that I can overlook in order to use my OS of choice. I've concentrated on laptop/Macbook specific problems here. We can see that most of the problems I mentioned are hardware/driver specific, and really these are some of the most difficult problems to fix due to hardware manufacturers in the main being difficult to work with, so it's not hard to let issues like this go.

On the plus side, suspend finally works! I can just shut the lid to suspend and open it to resume, just like I can in OSX. This is really great. Also, using my phone as a 3G modem is faster, easier and more solid under Karmic. And of course all applications (barring the proxy issue), work just as they do on any other Ubuntu machine, meaning really well. There's also the benefit that I no longer feel like a hypocrite .

We've a little way to go to overtake the major proprietary players, but with incremental improvements like these, it's just going to be a matter of time.

. 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: 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.

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've had a lot on recently. Mainly a never-ending stream of coursework followed by the inevitable dissertation panic. This is all over now, however: all that remains to be done are 3 exams starting in 8 days (better get revising!). The last lecture of my degree has been and gone in the biggest anticlimax ever. Talk about going out with a whimper instead of a bang! I don't know how I feel about finishing my course. To some extent it's not so bad as I'm staying on to do a PhD here (that was another thing which occupied my time and I neglected to post about) starting in October, but this will still be a very different experience. The last three years seem to have flown by, but then when I think back to the sheer amount of things I've done, and the stuff I've learned then perhaps it wasn't so quick after all.

I managed to sort myself out a job for the Summer which will allow me to stay in Nottingham, which I really want to do. It's weird how for half of my University life I considered home to be back in Alconbury, but then something changed and now I feel more at home here than back there. Perhaps it's because most of my friends have moved on, or maybe I've simply become more used to life here. I'm definitely not going to complain. Notts may have its problems, but it feels like it's on the up to me, and is definitely somewhere I'm happy to stay. That's not to say that the choice between York and Nottingham for my PhD wasn't one of the hardest I've had to make. It really tore me up for a number of weeks, but for a few reasons which I won't go into here I plumped for Nottingham in the end. I'll probably keep wondering how different it would have been had I chosen York though.

Anyway, enough about life. What about nerdy stuff?

The Hardy Heron was released not long ago, and I'm very proud to be able to say that I played a tiny role in its development. My goal is to up my participation levels for the Intrepid Ibex. After my exams are over in a few weeks, I'll find myself with a lot more free time which I'll be able to spend working on the distro. My beady eye is already on a few merges to get the ball rolling, and then who knows? I'd say my goal for this cycle is to get to "Contributing Developer" status, once I've learned enough.

Overall Hardy seems like an incremental improvement over Gutsy. I upgraded (using update-manger) to the beta during development, so the major changes aren't that visible to me sadly. Perhaps a fresh install is in order to see the major changes stand out. It's good to have newer versions of most software too, even if there are some regressions that I've found thus far. Such is life. My linux-fu has definitely increased since I started using it 100% of the time. Prior to using Ubuntu, I'd been using Linux on-and-off every few months but always returning to Windows after some annoying problem forced me to give up. Not so this time; my new PC was (almost) fully compatible from the get-go, and I'd decided to have the resolve to see any problems through. It's been a blast so far.

A little while ago I blogged about problems that I was experiencing in Ubuntu, one of which was that the display would blank regardless of what was set in gnome-power-manager (System -> Preferences -> Power Management). I'm happy to report that I found a workaround for this, thanks to Michael Holloway on the ubuntu-uk mailing list. If you find that your display is blanking inexplicably, try appending this to your xorg.conf (hit alt-f2 and type gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf):

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "BlankTime" "0"
Option "StandbyTime" "0"
Option "SuspendTime" "0"
Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection

Save and restart your computer (or log out and restart X by hitting ctrl-alt-backspace), and everything should be fixed. Play a video and leave it and marvel at how you don't have to move the mouse once every 10 minutes to keep it displaying! Also, I noted that on Xubuntu gnome-screensaver wasn't started by default, meaning that no power management settings would work any more. This is easily solved by going to Settings -> Autostarted Applications and adding an item to start /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver when you login.

Here's the launchpad bug for anyone interested in tracking the issue.