Laney's blog

A little while ago I uploaded my first patch to Launchpad, closing bug 159727. This is one of the easiest bugs there is – someone even provided the icon file needed to fix it! Nevertheless, I'm still pleased to have taken my first small step in Ubuntu development.

<crimsun> Laney: thanks, uploaded.

ROCK ON!

This week has been great for me. Awesome things that have happened:

• Turned 22
• New bike
• New printer
• Replacement iPod arrived (my old iPod broke on the last day of its warranty), a brand new 5.5G
• Got an offer of a PhD place at York
• Got results for January exams – average of 87.3% (Highest 97% Lowest 78% Standard Deviation 6.76%)

Phwoar!

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.

This is me joining in the new years fun. Here are my resolutions for 2008, unordered:

• Finish degree, get a 1st
• Get an offer of a PhD place, and take it up in September
• Go swimming more often
• Get involved with Ubuntu, try some packaging, maybe MOTU
• See home friends more

Not many, and not too ambitious, I hope. Except maybe the PhD bit.

Anyways, I'm really enjoying my eee so far. The only things that annoy me a bit are the small keyboard (with weird right shift placement, on the right of the up arrow key, wtf?) and the flakiness of the built in wireless manager, which just seems generally hard to use. Oh, and Thunderbird isn't very enjoyable on such a small screen. Usable though. The folks over at eeeuser.com seem to have done all sorts of crazy things with theirs, and it is fast becoming my first port of call when I want to do anything. After I get back up to uni tomorrow I'll be able to pick up my new SDHC card and RAM and install eeeXubuntu, which should (barring any problems) make it perfect.

Now I'm off to pack and revise. Oh, what joy.

Quick note to wish you all a Happy Holidays (for those who don't celebrate Christmas). Have a good time all, chillax and take it easy!

I've watched a couple of good Google talks in the last few days that some people may be interested in:

• Andrew Morton – The state of the Linux kernel. Andrew Morton talks about recent trends in the Linux kernel; funding issues, new features and so on. Decent Q&A session on the end.
• Jonathan Oxer – Anatomy of a Debian package. A short walkthrough through creating a new Debian package from an upstream tarball. I found this interesting as I wouldn't mind getting into packaging – maybe after exams.
• Authors@Google: Randall Monroe. Everyone's probably seen this one. Creator of xkcd offers up some nice stories. Don Knuth makes an appearance – how intimidating!

Laters. I'll be back tomorrow talking about my new eee that Santa may or may not be bringing .

Stealing the idea from Theory, I spent a little bit of time today hacking up some scripts to generate some nice graphs of my firewall statistics. The data is parsed out of ulog and fail2ban log files. Still could do with a bit of work, but overall I'm quite pleased with it.

I had originally planned on using the Google Charts API to draw all of the graphs, but it couldn't handle the pie charts; producing output with all of the labels cut off. Shame.

Code can be viewed here, and downloaded either at this tarball or by using darcs with darcs get http://darcs.orangesquash.org.uk/darcs/firewallgraphs/. darcs send any patches my way!

Edit: Fixed a couple of bugs that stopped it from working at all; now we actually have working scripts

Unicef have just announced their photographs of the year for 2007, some of which are very striking.

© G M B Akash, 2007

This picture depicts child labour in Bangladesh. Interesting how some parts of the world can live so differently to what we're used to, yet we (or at least I) rarely spare them a moments thought.

Andy Lockran notes that the BBC iPlayer is finally available for non-Windows users, in a fashion – a Flash version which plays in a browser window. It notably doesn't support downloading of episodes, as the Windows version does, but it's definitely a step in the right direction – and shows that the BBC really are working to provide cross-platform support. Hooray for that. It seems to work quite well. Thanks to all those involved!

Edit: OK, seeking seems knackered. Grr.

Edit': The new flash version that was pushed out on Gutsy today seems to have fixed it!

OK, I just want to get this out there, since I just had this annoying problem. I installed Kubuntu using Synaptic to see if I'd like it any better than the default Gnome desktop. I quickly found out, however, that it didn't want to run nicely on my system – the mouse seemed to lag to hell – and since I can't be arsed with spending hours faffing around trying to get it to work properly I just went back to Ubuntu (I'll probably give it another try when KDE4 is released, with the benefit of knowing how to get rid of it later).

Uninstalling Kubuntu and all of the stuff that it brought in wasn't so straightforward, however. Simply removing the metapackage kubuntu-desktop with Synaptic or aptitude left all of the extra stuff that I didn't want hanging around. This thread gave a massive apt-get line to remove all of the packages, which seemed more than a little suspect to me (enumerating all packages is bound to be a bad idea; some will get missed and some that I could have potentially installed myself previously could be removed), but upon scrolling down I came upon a nice program called debfoster which purged everything nicely. Note: This has been deprecated in favour of using aptitude. I only had to use deborphan because I didn't install kubuntu-desktop with aptitude in the first place. Use aptitude to save yourself a load of hassle. If, like me, you didn't know to use aptitude and just used apt-get or synaptic, deborphan will save your bacon and even keep any KDE packages you've explicitly installed (Kile and KBib for me). Paraphrasing from the thread, these are the commands you need to run:

sudo aptitude install debfoster
sudo debfoster -q
sudo sed -ni '1h;2,$H;${g;s/kubuntu-desktop\n//g;p}' /var/lib/debfoster/keepers
sudo debfoster

(Note that there are four lines here – the "sudo sed" line ends with "keepers".)

Review the output to see if it looks like it's removing all of the unnecessary kubuntu packages, then press P to purge them all and Y to confirm.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to try out Ubuntu for kicks, and to turn my PC back into something I can fiddle around with. Well, it seems that I got my wish.

First of all, I couldn't get it to boot after installation. The installation itself appeared to go smoothly, but then upon rebooting I got the dreaded GRUB Error 17, which means "Invalid device requested". After hours days of messing around with BIOS settings, grub-install witchcraft and the like, I had pretty much decided that I just wasn't going to get it to work on my IDE drive, and decided to try it on a SATA. This almost went smoothly; on the first boot, I got sent straight to Vista, but Super GRUB Disk, with its charming broken English fixed me right up. Almost. I had to edit one of the lines in the GRUB config file that it had created to point to the right HDD, but I had finally gotten into Linux!

On first impressions, everything was great: sound worked out of the box, MSN support was there and very nice, and Synaptic made installing new software a breeze. Since then, things have been mostly good; for someone like myself who doesn't mind the occasional trip down CLI-lane, it's definitely usable for day-to-day work. I'll quickly list my remaining niggles, just to get them out there.

• Compiz Fusion is a bit buggy, and seems to take up a lot of CPU time. Sometimes when I maximise windows, they jiggle around constantly until I unmaximise them.
• The media players aren't quite there yet. Rhythmbox is a bit flaky and most of the time won't let me navigate the playlist with my arrow keys after being alt-tabbed to. Banshee seems a bit thin feature-wise. Amarok loves to peg the CPU and crash, and has weird keyboard-navigation too (although it is the one I'm currently using for its wealth of features, decent iPod support and nice global hotkeys).
• It took me a little while to realise this, but only the front speaker of my 5.1 was enabled by default. I had to drop into alsamixer to unmute and enable all the others, after which they worked just fine. Also, somewhat confusingly, the volume control button on the taskbar comes set up to only control this one speaker. Changing it to control "PCM" seems to act more like the master volume switch that I expect it to.
• Even though I have turned off all options which I could find, my display still insists on suspending after 10 minutes of the computer being idle. This I have only just "solved" (in reality a hack) by commenting out Option "DPMS" in my xorg.conf file. Edit: Ok, this didn't actually solve anything. I'm stumped and Really Pissed Off.
• Related to the above, VLC (my media player of choice), doesn't seem to stop the display from suspending while playing media. Very annoying when trying to watch (say) a film.
• I still cannot get BBC radio streaming to work in Firefox. I'll probably have to install the official Realplayer, which I really don't want to do.
• The Java situation is very odd. I understand this is due to license issues. And no amd64 firefox plugin from Sun makes me sad, as the free Icedtea one doesn't want to work.

So there we have it. I'm enjoying it overall, but there are some annoying niggles. (I really don't like being told off on IRC for daring to express frustration) Given a few more releases, Ubuntu should have gotten rid of most of these things, making for a genuinely useful OS.