'Til All Are One

The abil­ity to run in a com­pletely 64-​​bit envir­on­ment is a major bene­fit of Linux over the com­pet­i­tion. With everything open source, the com­munity can port and com­pile applic­a­tions to new archi­tec­tures with ease.

On Win­dows, you have to suf­fer from the fact that just about everything is pro­pri­et­ary. If there’s no 64-​​bit ver­sion of your applic­a­tion, you’re forced to run it in a degraded (com­pared to the rest of the OS) 32-​​bit mode. Even worse, if there’s no 64-​​bit driver for your hard­ware then you can’t use it at all. You’re at the mercy of the vendor, and if the hard­ware is no longer being sold then there really is no eco­nomic incent­ive for them to write a new driver for you. Once Win­dows 7 comes out, you’ll prob­ably be back to square one (since most drivers are OS version-​​specific).

What hap­pens when you have a pro­pri­et­ary piece of soft­ware on Linux? For­tu­nately there are very few of these worth using. For the ones that are, the situ­ation isn’t too dif­fer­ent than on Windows.

Take Adobe Flash, for example. Adobe (and before them, Mac­ro­media) have claimed that port­ing the code base to x86_​64 is no walk in the park. On Linux, the means of deal­ing with this has been to use nsplu­gin­wrap­per to coax the 32-​​bit Flash plug-​​in to work inside a 64-​​bit Web browser. Sim­ul­tan­eously, there’s been devel­op­ment on free runtimes for Flash media, like gnash and swf­dec. The ‘solu­tion’ on Win­dows and Mac OS X is truly sub­op­timal: run a 32-​​bit Web browser. If you’ve ever used Win­dows 64-​​bit, you’ll notice that Microsoft bundle both 32– and 64-​​bit ver­sions of some of their soft­ware, with most icons point­ing to the 32-​​bit vari­ants. On the plus side, the user gen­er­ally is none the wiser.

Adobe have made avail­able a pre-​​release ver­sion of their x86_​64 Flash 10 plug-​​in for Linux (still no luck for other oper­at­ing sys­tems, AFAIK). I haven’t had any trouble with it, and from what I’ve read it’s been well received in the community.

Here are the steps to install it for Firefox:

1. Unin­stall any exist­ing Flash pack­ages that you may have installed. Pack­age names include flashplugin-​​installer, flashplugin-​​nonfree, adobe-​​flash, mozilla-​​plugin-​​gnash and swfdec-​​mozilla.
2. Down­load the tar­ball (the link is at the bot­tom of that page).
3. There’s only one file inside, lib​flash​player​.so. Extract it to $HOME/.mozilla/plugins/ (cre­ate that dir­ect­ory if it doesn’t exist).
4. If Fire­fox is run­ning, restart it.
5. In Fire­fox, go to the about:plugins page.
6. Look for the entry called Shock­wave Flash to con­firm it has been installed.

Warn­ing: You are manu­ally installing a pre-​​release ver­sion of a pro­pri­et­ary Web browser plug-​​in. This can have secur­ity implic­a­tions. Because it is not man­aged by the oper­at­ing system’s pack­age man­ager, you need to manu­ally make sure that you stay up-​​to-​​date to avoid secur­ity vulnerabilities.

Adobe Reader does not have an x86_​64 vari­ant for Linux, so you’ll have to install the 32-​​bit version.

1. Down­load the latest DEB pack­aged from the Adobe FTP server.
2. To install from the command-​​line, you’ll need to tell dpkg to ignore the archi­tec­ture of the pack­age:
   

   $ sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture AdbeRdr9.1.0-1_i386linux_enu.deb

3. Launch it from the Applic­a­tions > Office desktop menu.

Warn­ing: Just as with the Flash-​​plug-​​in, be aware that you are installing soft­ware from out­side of the oper­at­ing system’s repos­it­or­ies, and that you are respons­ible to keep this pack­age up-​​to-​​date.

You’re prob­ably won­der­ing why you would need to do this when there are sev­eral great, free PDF read­ers out there. I almost always use Evince, but there are a couple of reas­ons why I like to keep Adobe Reader around:

• some PDF files don’t work prop­erly in the free readers
• most Win­dows users use Adobe Reader, so it’s good for test­ing (just as it’s use­ful to keep a Win­dows VM around to test Web sites against Inter­net Explorer)

LotD: autonomo​.us — Towards Free Net­work Services

I recently bought myself a Hua­wei e169 3G modem as part of a ser­vice with Exetel (based on the Optus net­work). There are a few guides online on how to get it to work with GNU/​Linux, but either they didn’t work as advert­ised or I wasn’t happy with the approach they took. Ubuntu 8.10 is due in three weeks, but since I usu­ally wait at least a month for a new release to settle, I was after a solu­tion that would tide me over for at min­imum the next couple of months. It had to be simple and not too messy.

Here’s the approach I took:

1. Install Net­work­Man­ager 0.7 from the PPA. You might need to reboot after­wards.
   
2. Install usb_​modeswitch. I got lazy and installed a DEB from here. Can someone con­firm that this is included by default in Ubuntu 8.10?
3. Right-​​click the Net­work­Man­ager panel applet and select Edit Con­nec­tions.
4. Select the Mobile Broad­band tab and click Add.
5. Fol­low the wiz­ard/​druid: select your coun­try and upstream pro­vider (I chose Optus 3G).
6. Once the druid is com­plete, return to the Mobile Broad­band tab, select your newly-​​created con­nec­tion, and click Edit.
7. The only set­ting I had to enter was my APN (exetel1). You may also wish to change the Type to Prefer 3G (3 cus­tom­ers can save $$$ by select­ing 3G — thanks Tel­stra! :p ).

Now when you plug in your 3G modem, two things will hap­pen (after a few seconds). Firstly, the ISO9660 filesys­tem on the USB stick will be auto­mat­ic­ally moun­ted and dis­played by Nautilus (you might want to turn this off in the Nautilus pref­er­ences if it gets too annoy­ing). Secondly, you should see an option to use your modem when you click on the Net­work­Manger panel applet. Once con­nec­ted, you can dis­con­nect in the same way.

There we go! Now all I need to do is plug in my modem and connect/​disconnect from the Net­work­Man­ager panel applet. My Eee PC 901 is truly mobile now

LotD: A Sysadmin’s Unix­ersal Trans­lator (ROSETTA STONE)

It’s been indic­ated to me that I never put out a report on Soft­ware Free­dom Day in Sydney. Well, bet­ter late than never

Advoc­ates of free soft­ware cel­eb­rated at the Uni­ver­sity of New South Wales on 16 Septem­ber for the fourth annual Soft­ware Free­dom Day. Mem­bers of SLUG, Ubuntu-​​AU and the gen­eral FOSS com­munity col­lab­or­ated to spread the mes­sage of free soft­ware to the gen­eral public.

Interest and buzz was gen­er­ated in the days leading-​​up to the event through a poster cam­paign across the cam­pus. At the UNSW Com­puter Fair, we piqued the curi­os­ity of many com­puter users with our dis­plays, screen­casts and spiels. Those who were enthu­si­astic migrated to our room in the nearby Law Build­ing, where we could explain and demon­strate in greater detail. Not only did we have many expres­sions of interest from new­comers in free soft­ware and the free soft­ware com­munity, we also suc­ceeded in bring­ing those who already use FOSS into par­ti­cip­a­tion in the local community.

Regret­tably, I was not able to take any decent pho­to­graphs of the event. If any­one has pic­tures, I’d be grate­ful if they could be sent to me.

I would like to give a big word of thanks to every­one who helped on the day:

• Andreas Fisc­her
• Brendan Puck­eridge
• David McQuire
• James Dumay
• Jim Tsao
• John Ferlito
• Ken Wilson
• Lind­say Holmwood
• Matt Moor
• Peter Baker
• Pia Waugh
• Rodger Dean
• Silvia Pfeif­fer
• Any­one else who I may have for­got­ten (if I have, sorry!)

In addi­tion, I would like to thank those who provided resources in sup­port of our efforts:

• Com­puter Fairs Aus­tralia (tables at the com­puter fair)
• David Vaile, Abi Para­maguru and Alana Maur­ushat at the UNSW Cyber­space Law and Policy Centre (room in the Law Building)
• John Schilit (IBM and Rob­ocode materials)
• Solu­tions First (Unwired modem)
• Ubuntu Screen­casts Team (screen­casts and subtitles)
• Canon­ical (Ubuntu CDs)
• The world­wide free soft­ware com­munity

LotD: Sign the peti­tion for a Free Soci­ety and against Digital Restric­tions Man­age­ment and Treach­er­ous Computing

Are you receiv­ing syn­tax errors when run­ning a shell script on Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)? If so, you might want to check what shell you are using. While test­ing scripts for the LCA A/​V Team a few months ago, I dis­covered that the Ubuntu developers decided to sym­link /​bin/​sh to dash, for faster and less memory-​​intensive script exe­cu­tion. For POSIX-​​compliant scripts, this isn’t a prob­lem at all. How­ever, there are many third-​​party scripts which call /​bin/​sh but use shell-​​specific (typ­ic­ally bash) syn­tax. They can be fixed by alter­ing their first line to call the most appro­pri­ate shell, for example:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

env makes it pos­sible to call bash, wherever it may lie. While my Ubuntu and Gentoo sys­tems have a /​bin/​bash, there are other dis­tri­bu­tions which have /​usr/​bin/​bash or /usr/local/bin.bash.

While you can and should fix your own scripts to oper­ate in this way, con­stantly mend­ing oth­ers’ mis­takes can become tire­some. You can return your /​bin/​sh to point to bash with the fol­low­ing command:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash

When asked if you wish to install dash as /​bin/​sh, tell it to go to hell

Note that bash does use more memory, but on a mod­ern desktop machine the dif­fer­ence is neg­li­gible. This change will not affect the default login shell, since that is already bash.

LotD:  Obese Aus­sies get big ambulances

I have been com­pletely floored by Ubuntu’s new Migra­tion Assist­ant. It’s cer­tainly some­thing that we have needed in the FLOSS world for a long time. Any­thing we can do to reduce migrat­ory hurdles is by all means welcome.

To play devil’s advoc­ate, how­ever, I’d like to point out a defi­ciency of such migra­tion tools. To take an estab­lished example, wit­ness Moz­illa Fire­fox on Win­dows. When you first start it, you are greeted with a friendly wiz­ard to port set­tings and book­marks from Inter­net Explorer. If, like most people, you allow it to pro­ceed, it will replace the carefully-​​selected default Fire­fox book­marks (not to men­tion the awe­some BBC Head­lines live book­mark) with those from IE. The res­ult can be a cluttered, advertising-​​laden (Win­dows Mar­ket­place, any­one?) mon­stro­city that has lost the sim­pli­city and ori­ginal intent of the product being loaded.

The Ubuntu Migra­tion Assist­ant poten­tially raises this application-​​level mis­de­mean­our to an OS-​​level atro­city. As this review of the util­ity demon­strates, even the Tele­tu­b­bies wall­pa­per of Win­dows XP can be migrated with ease, not to men­tion the afore­men­tioned book­marks. This can ruin the inten­ded look and feel of the OS, thus pre­vent­ing the user from exper­i­en­cing the OS in a clean, ‘pristine’ state.

Is this a good or a bad thing? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that the design­ers of this tool should be care­ful to select default set­tings which do not unne­ces­sar­ily alter the user exper­i­ence. Tread care­fully.
 

LotD: Linux Genu­ine Advant­age

I wrote this back in Octo­ber, and for some silly reason I for­got to post it. Bet­ter late than never, I say.

It seems that every couple of weeks I’m at some kind of FLOSS-​​related event. You just can’t keep me away from them! They may require a lot of work, but it cer­tainly feels reward­ing to get the word out. This is espe­cially so in regards to the edu­ca­tional sec­tor. Chil­dren are our future, and they are gen­er­ally more will­ing than your aver­age adult to learn new and dif­fer­ent things. It is an educator’s job to impart know­ledge, and it is the duty of any respect­able edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tion to facil­it­ate a free and open flow of know­ledge. What bet­ter way to achieve this than with free software?

This concept was not lost on the eduact­ors, par­ents and stu­dents at the Sydney Edu­ca­tion Expo in June, and I’m proud to say that we man­aged to rep­lic­ate that suc­cess at the Sydney Moodle Con­fer­ence on Octo­ber 14–15 (Sat­urday and Sunday). Once again, I manned the Linux Australia/​SLUG stand, join­ing Pia Waugh, Lind­say Holm­wood and Andreas Fisc­her. The SLUG Com­mit­tee stopped by for a while, too.

Whereas most people at the Edu­ca­tion Expo were unfa­mil­iar with FLOSS, many of the attendees of the Moodle Con­fer­ence had some idea about it. Moodle itself is avail­able under the terms of the GPL, and many com­pan­ies and schools have become part of its user/​development/​support com­munity. All we had to do was to remind them that we rep­res­ent the under­ly­ing FLOSS con­cepts that have made Moodle so great, and that Moodle func­tions in con­cert with other FLOSS pro­jects such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

The response was over­whelm­ing. We were pre­pared to hand out a truck­load of Ubuntu CDs, only to dis­cover that most attendees had already been sup­plied with one as part of their offi­cial con­fer­ence kit. That didn’t stop us from dis­trib­ut­ing many more, though. We had one fel­low so excited about FLOSS on Sat­urday that he brought along his laptop the next day for an impromptu Ubuntu install­fest. We demon­strated a range of tech­no­lo­gies, includ­ing Compiz and Ink­s­cape. Vis­it­ors were impressed with the ease of the Ubuntu LiveCD installer, and with how Moodle can be installed (com­plete with depend­en­cies) in only a few clicks via Synaptic.

Most inter­est­ing for me was the Live Online Event, which was a panel dis­cus­sion on-​​stage in front of about 150 people. Pia was slated to rep­res­ent the LA/​OSIA point of view, but was forced to bow out due to other com­mit­ments. Much to my sur­prise, she asked me to fill in for her. So there I was, on-​​stage, in front of well over 100 people, field­ing ques­tions while being recor­ded and streamed live over the Inter­net. I had never done any­thing like that before, but I think I went reas­on­ably well. Pub­lic speak­ing and gen­eral spoken com­mu­nic­a­tion are cer­tainly skills that I would like to fur­ther exer­cise in the future. Thanks for your sup­port, Pia!

The topic which dom­in­ated the panel dis­cus­sion, and one which I had been pre­vi­ously unaware of, con­cerned how far soft­ware pat­ents had intruded into the realm of edu­ca­tional soft­ware. Moodle-​​competitor Black­board has been issued an appalling pat­ent “for tech­no­logy used for internet-​​based edu­ca­tion sup­port sys­tems and meth­ods.” I was some­what relieved to see that Mar­tin Dou­gia­mas, Moodle’s founder and pro­ject leader, was not con­cerned at all by this event, at least as far as Moodle was con­cerned. Nev­er­the­less, the spectre of soft­ware pat­ents has been loom­ing over FLOSS for some time now, and it is still very unclear if/​how the situ­ation will ever be resolved.

It’s a won­der­ful feel­ing when you receive recog­ni­tion — no mat­ter how small — from people whom you respect and admire. That’s why I was stoked to be accep­ted as an offi­cial Ubuntu mem­ber. To be eli­gible, one has to be able to prove that they have con­trib­uted sub­stan­tially to the Ubuntu com­munity. I know serveral good people who were turned down on their first applic­a­tion, so I was nervously bit­ing my fin­ger­nails in the leadup to my approval.

Being present at the IRC meet­ing was a whole task unto itself. I had to wait until one was sched­uled at a time which I could attend. When I dis­covered that one had been announced for 10PM (in my timezone), I pounced and added myself to the agenda. The dis­cus­sion was fas­cin­at­ing, but the meet­ing itself blew out far bey­ond its sched­uled time frame. They only got to me at around 1:30AM. I am very grate­ful to the Ubuntu-​​Au mem­bers who stayed on until then to cheer me on. Isn’t com­munity a won­der­ful thing?

Within ten minutes, I had approval from the Com­munity Coun­cil mem­bers who were present, but I had to wait for the votes of the absent mem­bers. The fol­low­ing even­ing, I received a nice e-​​mail from Ubuntu Launchpad:

Sub­ject: Launch­pad: Your mem­ber­ship status on team Ubuntu Mem­bers was changed
Date: Wed­nes­day 18 Octo­ber 2006 21:03
From: Launch­pad Team Mem­ber­ship Notifier

Hello, The status of your mem­ber­ship on team “ubuntumem­bers” (Ubuntu Mem­bers) was changed from Pro­posed to Approved.

The com­ment for it was:

approved 18÷10÷06 by sabdfl, elmo, jono, for superb con­tri­bu­tion to en_​GB and related effort

Once again, thanks to every­one who provided sup­port, both moral and actual.

Microsoft have announced their Zune music/​video player to take on Apple’s iPod. Like Apple, they con­sider col­our to be an import­ant dif­fer­en­ti­ator in the mar­ket­place. With white hav­ing been co-​​opted by Apple, and black being the gen­eric (and hence indis­tinct­ive) hue, what does that leave Microsoft?

Appar­ently, it is brown.

Once again, Ubuntu is vin­dic­ated! What’s next, naked people?

Linux Aus­tralia was very well rep­res­en­ted at the Sydney Edu­ca­tion Expo (24−25 June) this year. Pia wrote <a href=“http://pipka.org/blog/2006/06/26/linux-in-education-a-model-stand/” target=“_blank” title=“Linux in Edu­ca­tion — a â€œmodel stand