Free Like GNU

Been busy with work and family lately.  I did finally upgrade all the machines to Ubuntu Hardy, I must say its been great, and am look forward to 8.10.  Intrepid Ibex is compelling with its updated wifi stack and hardware support in general.

It’s nice to not have to worry much about the OS I’m using.  I think GNU/Linux has several distros with mature desktop user design that will enable it to become ubiquitous on the desktop.  It’s fun to pop in a Ubuntu CD or USB stick a boot a modern, well equipped desktop into a machine that is not functioning with its original and often outdated system, and have everything working without an additional download!

I think we are getting back all the fun and sharing community that existed back in the earlier Amiga, C64 and neighborhood BBS days, but with added accessibility for newcomers, an atmosphere of conscientious freedoms, and a neighborhood that transcends not only distance but culture.  By conscientious freedom, I mean the awareness of responsibility we begin to feel as we understand the nature of Free Open Source Software.  Putting these beliefs in context with increasing endangerment and loss of our personal freedoms might make us more aware of what we need to do to restore hope and foster change.  Every bit helps.

So today I went to Khyber with a couple work buddies. On the way back we went down into the pedway and through the Millenium Park parking lots. From 222E Wacker to Monroe and Michigan underground. It was a very THX1138 feeling though at times I could swear there were Morlocks (Time Machine) peering at us through cracks in side doors..

Development of the Pedway began in 1951, when the City of Chicago built one-block tunnels connecting the Red Line and Blue Line subways at Washington Street and Jackson Boulevard. Since then, both public and private investment have expanded the Pedway, and the system now connects more than 50 buildings.

Chicago Pedway information at Chicago Walks

The list is clouded by the use of sudo, hiding my most heinous acts of administration of my tablet from tender souls.

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
117 sudo
67 xrandr
33 ls
26 more
26 cd
19 apt-cache
11 top
11 irc
11 dmesg
10 wine

I thought “man” would be in the list, and I’m a bit surprised how often wine comes up!

Wow, what a nice surprise! (This has actually been in development since December of last year :o) The OLPC Sugar desktop environment is available in the Ubuntu Hardy repository! You can use the emulator to run it in a window or login as a full blown desktop through GDM (the default login screen for (X)Ubuntu users)! I had trouble with connecting to my WPA network, but I think if I stop Network-Manager before loging in with Sugar, it will work.  The turtle-art application worked very nicely and it was fun to browse networks.  I would love to have Sugars network browser in a little box, or as a desktop background in XFCE.  Now I have to find a way to make Sugar happy on a 800×600 screen so my kids can use it on their machines.

Available activities (in Hardy Universe) are:

• sugar-calculate-activity
• sugar-chat-activity
• sugar-connect-activity
• sugar-logviewer-activity
• sugar-memorize-activity
• sugar-pippy-activity
• sugar-terminal-activity
• sugar-turtleart-activity
• sugar-web-activity

Many of the missing applications (measure, newsreader,analyze) can be found by adding the Sugar PPA repository! It looks as though Paint and Record may be available before long as well. You may also be able to run the Gutsy versions from the debs in Jani’s PPA archive. SimCity/Micropolis is in there too!

Visit Jani Monoses blog for other related developments.

(I just could not resist changing the title)

Recently, I bought a nearly new HP 2710p.  I immediately formatted the HD and installed Ubuntu Hardy!  I am very pleased that nearly everything works! Suspend and resume with accelerated graphics and rotation was something I really wanted with my TC1100. I was lucky that this machine was configured with and Intel 4965 AGN card and a WWAN card (which I have not yet activated).  The 2710p is very much like a super-charged TC1100 with dual-cores and other modern conveniences like a fingerprint scanner and a smart-card reader.  Mine did not come with the webcam though I don’t think I’ll miss the feature much. Battery life is very good and the design is very clean. Removing the annoying palmrest stickers required Goo-Gone, but the finish was unharmed. Here are some notes about getting this bad-boy configured in Ubuntu:

Some things that seem to be missing are:

• Wacom support, which I found HERE (gentoo hardware wiki)
• Screen Rotation: Make a script called rotate.sh

$ nano ~/rotate.sh
with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
#script by Francisco Athens modified from Gentoo Wiki Intructions:
#http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_HP_Compaq_2710p#Brightness_and_Rotation
#get current setting
testrot=`xrandr -q |grep LVDS | awk '{print $3}'`
#test if screen is rotated in protrait mode
if [ "$testrot" = "800x1280+0+0" ];then
#optional kill any old xvkbd instances so that
# fresh one can load in the correct place in the screen
#killall xvkbd
xrandr -o normal
xsetwacom set stylus rotate 0
xsetwacom set eraser rotate 0
else
#killall xvkbd
xrandr --output LVDS --rotate right
xsetwacom set stylus Rotate CW
xsetwacom set eraser Rotate CW
#optional: put xvkbd on the bottom of the screen
#xvkbd -always-on-top -geometry 800x150+0-0
fi

chmod +x ~/rotate.sh

• Kernel Panic on lid close! This is a big issue, but I found the solutution HERE (Ubuntu Forums)

I edited my /etc/rc.local:
first make sure the path is correct
$ ls /proc/acpi/video/
there should be only one folder, so in my case for “C09A” add this line to /etc/rc.local:

echo "1" > /proc/acpi/video/C09A/DOS

before the “exit 0″ line

• Fingerprint Reader Support can be found HERE
• Current Ubuntu Hardy 2.6.24 iwl4965 driver appears to have problems connecting to TTLS/PAP 802.1x networks (sigh) as reported HERE (intel linux wireless forums).

I’ve written a review of Elephants Dream, the first open-source movie and have published it on HyperEd.org. The following is the abstract from the review:

Elephants Dream (2006) is an Open-Source movie that challenges us to think about the way we produce artifacts of culture and the ways in which that culture may exist on our own open terms rather than dictated by proprietary, dominant and oppressive means. This document is a reflection on these ideas and explores the positionality of Elephants Dream, and the tools used and developed in its creation among the dominant media and media production cultures.

Enjoy!

Today I just stubled upon Richard M Stallmans Political Notes Archive. It’s a fascinating blog of short comments on happenings with lots of very interesting links related to wars, their proponents and propoganda, environmental, medical and nutritional concerns, privacy and civil liberties. RMS is a very well-rounded geek indeed!

Hardy Heron, the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution was released the other day and it was the first time I did not install an alpha or beta Ubuntu on my family set of computers. I have to admit that I feel a little guilty in not testing to the usual extent, a new version of Ubuntu, but Gutsy has been working so well that I’m not compelled to update just yet.

For a user to have such a feeling about some version of an OS distribution marks an important milestone. It means I’m not chomping at the bit for some bug to be fixed and that all the applications I use and want are already available and working well.
I use many bluetooth devices such as headphones, keyboards and phones and they integrate well since Gutsy. Graphics are snappy and sound is working with all of the applications I’ve encountered. Configuring Gutsy to do all of these things, however took some time and effort hunting for answers in Ubuntu forums and Gentoo wikis. It seems that the real attraction for Ubuntu 8.04 will be for the new users who should have a smoother ride migrating from Windows or possibly OS X or as a first computing experience on a new computer.

There is some irony that 8.04 has the monikers “Long Term Support” and Hardy Heron. There have been some complaints about the somewhat dramatic changes in 8.04, in response to the way Xorg is configured (an attempt to make the xorg.conf an anachronism) and the inclusion of Wubi (a method for installing Ubuntu from within Windows) and a beta of Firefox 3 (which is yet waiting for some popular extensions to migrate). These are bold new steps for Ubuntu and is reminiscent of 6.06 Dapper (the last LTS release) innovations such as installation from a live CD (which was a chancy operation at first), persistence of a live CD configuration, and preliminary bluetooth support, network and power managers, not to mention the appearance of Xorg7. But such innovations did not become mature until Ubuntu Edgy, Feisty, and Gutsy (marketed as the more innovative releases). Such irony is interesting, but illustrates how the LTS release actually sets the pace of the interim Ubuntu releases. That said, I look forward to Hardy+1, Intrepid Ibex and for the new Ubuntu user, search the Ubuntu forum posts about your hardware and please give Hardy Heron a try!

What great timing for insomnia. I found a great new project being developed for Maemo called Numpty Physics by Tim Edmonds. Its part doodling, part puzzle, part physics sim. My daughter and I played for about an hour together taking turns drawing little shapes. Watching our little doodles fall on each other with gravity and moving other things about and drawing little levers to launch things across the screen was great fun.

Numpty seems inspired by the delightful Crayon Physics game by Petri Purho. It also uses the Box2D engine. While not as developed (but certainly playable) as Crayon Physics, the nice thing about Numpty, however, is that it is GPLed and it can be played anywhere I take my n800!

There is also a another such physics project in development called Tomiphy, but I’ve yet to try it. It looks nonetheless interesting!
(Tomify link fixed. Thanks Orblivion!)

It really bothers me that when I chat online with some Jimmy O S Exual or Windows Expatriate about GNU/Linux and mention that I consider myself a happy hacker, then all of a sudden I’m some kind of wannabe corporate criminal mastermind. They seem equate “hacker” with “cracker”. Just because Foxhole at 11 bleats the over-dramaticized story of some bored suburban Dr. Pepper guzzling, Britney Spears ogling, post-preteen kid baby-sat by Bill Gates and the top 50 scripts site, “hacking” into his Dad’s bank account (the password of which was probably scribbled on a post-it note stuck to the monitor), hackers have to endure snide remarks and are stereo-typed as crackers! To quote the seminal teachings of How To Become A Hacker by Eric Steven Raymond:

These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.

Halleluja!

I’ll have you know that it’s not just the crackers that have a computer and type into a commandline, many of us are Latino, African, Asian, Kazhakistani, or some mixture of the above! Though I’m mostly Mexican-Greek, but fair of skin, square dressing, somewhat lacking in the ability to speak a conversational language other than English, and have been witnessed drinking a Dr. Pepper now and then, I’m often mistaken for a cracker. The fact is that there are few less represented minorities in the hacking community than Mexican-Greeks! Sure theres lots of geeks that are crackers or cracker wannbees, but to just stereotype and say computer geeks are all crackers only perpuates misunderstanding and intolerance!

Hacking is about creating a community of many diverse groups and not the sole domian of crackers! Tell the ignorant talking heads to get their facts straight when they put a camera in your face and let them know that hacker does not equal cracker!

Furthermore, to all those Ubuntu haters out there who think Mark Shuttleworth is a cracker just because he is making GNU/Linux more accessable to future hackers, I’ll have you know he is really a brother from South Africa!
Throughout history crackers have been destructive, particularly towards hackers. Some of the real hackers were Native Americans who studied the source code of the land water and sky. They shared their knowledge with everyone so that all could live from the land free, but some newbies to this continent only wanted to plunder what they could and took any wisdom for granted. These crackers took the seeds of corn (like some immature script-kiddie) and claimed to “pwn” the land. They DDOSed the buffallo and spread deadly viruses in the form of “freeware” blankets and created poverty with “adware” currencies and promises (not to be confused with the “Free Open Source” life the Native peoples once had). Much of the documentation and wisdom has been lost or destroyed, but fortunately the source code is still in tact. There is, however a new danger because much is being done through litigation, lies and greed to lay proprietary claim on everything including life itself.

What do we do? We must continue to hack and not let the crackers bring us all down.