I just took delivery of a strip of six Powered By Ubuntu stickers from the nice people at Linux Emporium.

The photo doesn't really do them justice – they're so shiny the flash really glares. I've put one with the little cluster of stickers that were already on the laptop (beside the Designed for Microsoft Windows XP tag) and one on the case so people can see it when I'm working and they're sat opposite me. If you'd like some, here's the URL.

I've been a little more active on the Ubuntu side this week. Only a little though. I started off by learning how to roll my own kernel the Debian way. I tried the Ubuntu way and although it built the kernel, the packaging into .deb failed. Then I've been tweaking the kernel config, installing, rebooting and checking things like dmesg to see if the various little niggles I've been experiencing are still present. So far, nothing has changed. But eventually I'll hit upon the right combination, I'm sure, and then I can update the tickets so people more experienced than me can deal with the problem properly.

OK, I'm a bit embarrassed about this, but it's just a bit of fun and community building. About a week ago, Melissa Draper posted a request to Planet Ubuntu via her blog for people to participate in a community experiment. She wanted the Ubuntu community to produce a version of Auld Lang Syne.

Now I don't normally allow myself to be heard singing, but I thought "What the hell, it'll be drowned out by all the other voices anyway," and submitted my recording. A massive FIVE people did likewise. The result can be found here. You can pick my voice out near the beginning, but I'm drowned out by the others towards the end, thankfully.

In a geeky way, I find it interesting that five people, separated by (in my case) several thousand miles, all online at different times, were able to produce a piece of music that actually rivals that of many of the carol singers you get knocking on your door.

This made me howl with laughter. Then I wondered what would happen if it were actually true, and I got scared.

In other, totally unrelated news, I decided to disable Beryl after several crashes. I have, however, stuck with the Free radeon driver in Xorg, so my kernel is now untainted. I also tried booting with the irqpoll kernel option, as suggested by a couple of lines in dmesg. Now it looks as though my FireWire and Broadcom wireless are working properly, but I'm getting these messages fairly frequently:

hdc: cdrom_pc_intr: The drive appears confused (ireason = 0x01)

And still getting lots of these:

APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)

I have no idea what's causing either at the moment, and not a lot of time to look just yet. My card reader still doesn't work. I'm not sure what's changed in the kernel between my current one and whatever was in Dapper, but I'm not overly impressed at the moment. The rest of the Edgy release is just brilliant, but the kernel, arguably the most important part of the system, just doesn't seem right.

That said, I've made a "sale", if you like. I was chatting to the Operations Manager at nursery the other day, we get on very well. I happened to mention my Ubuntu fixation (which is now officially sanctioned by Wifey, as long as I'm in bed by midnight!) and she's agreed to give it a go, from the Live CD, and let me know her thoughts. She's also going to try and get her mum, who also works there, to try it. And I've been given permission to put a few Edubuntu CDs on the front desk, so parents can pick one up as they go in/out and give it a go.

Ubuntu UKTeam

The news is in and I was there as it happened:

07:01   LoudMouthMan    Yes, okay well the UKTeam is applying for Approval and submitted its application to Jono for the councils consideration.
07:04   LoudMouthMan    sabdfl you asked about UKTeam, we have submitted the approval page for councils consideration do you have any further questinos ?
07:04   sabdfl  LoudMouthMan: sorry, got diverted into low-hanging-fruit forums moderator membership approvals
07:06   elmo    ok, you guys get -0.005 for using "syngeristic" in your approval application wiki page
07:06   elmo    (synergistic even or however it's spelt)
07:06   ubuntu_demon    elmo : what does syngreristic mean ?
07:06   elmo    ubuntu_demon: ... exactly ;-)
07:07   elmo    anyway, I'm +1 on the UK team
07:07   elmo    (sorry, if we haven't got back to the loco team yet)
07:07   GazzaK  :-) thanks elmo
07:07   jono    the UK team have done some excellent work
07:08   jono    they have a strong structure and a number of keen contributors - they also have a good direction forward
07:08   jono    +1 for me
07:08   MikeB-  +1 for me
07:08   PriceChild      +1 UKTeam
07:09   sabdfl  +1 from me on the UK team
07:09   popey   w000t
07:09   apokryphos      nice 8)
=== GazzaK skips about a bit, thanks
07:09   jamesbrose      yay!
07:09   popey   Go us!
=== jayteeuk cheers
07:09   LoudMouthMan    So , sabdfl can I report back to the UKTeam that we have apporval ?  and thanks to everyone for the votes, it is much appreciated.
07:09   sabdfl  LoudMouthMan: all done - and welcome!
07:09   sabdfl  very classy wiki page
07:09   sabdfl  the status chart for projects is particularly cool, IMO
07:10   LoudMouthMan    sabdfl thank you , I will pass the comments on to the team.
07:10   jono    congrats LoudMouthMan
07:10   jono    LoudMouthMan: I look forward to you leveraging synergies and fullfilling verticale markets
07:10   GazzaK  lol @ jono
07:10   LoudMouthMan    jono indeed, ill run those ideas up the flag pole soon enough
07:10   GazzaK  if he starts on that, I'm moving to tibet

The corporate speak is a reference to the fact that the team's proposal page, written by LoudMouthMan, contained the word "syneristic" or something... but the important thing is the outcome, and we're now officially recognised by the project. Go team!

Beryl

Beryl is a Window Manager. You may have heard Mark Shuttleworth's comments along the lines of "Bring the Bling" by which he meant "lets make the Linux desktop look sexy as hell". Beryl lets you do that. I've abstained for quite a while, reluctant to venture into the territory of unofficial repositories and beta software on a laptop I need to be rock solid to do my job. Today I relented, and by god is it sexy. It took some effort – most of the day, in fact – but it's worth it.

I've mentioned before that I have an Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi. It has an ATi Radeon Mobility X700 with 128MB RAM. I had been using the proprietary ATi fglrx driver for it, but in order to use Beryl with that, you have to use Xgl in place of a standard X.org. I didn't fancy that, so I decided to switch over to the free open source ati/radeon driver so I could just use AIGLX. For anyone who's tried this and failed, the pertinent information is on the Ubuntu Help Page for the Radeon driver. Installing Beryl is outlined here. It really is that simple, when you're looking at the right resources. My main problem was the fglrx driver, it turned out.

So now I have all that "Bling" on my laptop. Windows that wobble when you drag them. They melt into the task bar when you minimise them. They zoom into focus. Semi-transparent title bars. Drop shadows. Brightness control on individual windows. Incredibly sexy.

IPSec gateway 1.2.3.4
IPSec ID me
#IPSec secret mypass
Xauth username me
#Xauth password mypass
UDP Encapsulate

# OPTIONAL
# ========

#
#
# Varios options not undestood by vpnc itself but by some other scripts
#
# Target networks 123.234.210.0/24 10.1.0.0/16
# If Target networks is defined here, the default route is not replaced!

# Don't update resolv.conf though resolvconf is installed
# DNSUpdate no

Enter my passwords as usual and it magically works. The other thing I couldn't do before was use the copy of Windows XP Pro X64 that came pre-installed on my laptop from within Ubuntu using Qemu. It complained that it couldn't find the APIC. Now, however, I'm making some progress:

I thought I'd follow on from my last entry with an update on how things are going. The first thing I need to rectify is the NetworkManager problem I thought I was having. It turns out that what I'm seeing is expected behaviour (at least when there are no wireless networks in the vicinity). I read the README.Debian that comes with the package, which says:

Configuration
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Only devices that are *not* listed in /etc/network/interfaces or which have 
been configured "auto" and "dhcp" (with no other options) are managed by NM.

This way you can setup a custom (static) configuration for a device and NM 
will not try to override this setting.

It then goes on to list some examples, but the above made sense to me since my wired LAN interface is configured with a static IP address. I'm not sure if I like this behaviour or not... I can't help thinking there should be some kind of network profile management, such that I can say "I'm at home, so I'll have my wireless disabled and my wired interface statically configured please", and then later "I'm in the office, so I'll have wireless and wired interfaces enabled and configured via DHCP and let NetworkManager decide which network is available at any given moment" or "I'm travelling and I'm at a train station which has a free wireless hotspot, so I'll disable my wired interface and have my wireless pick up a connection and configure it via DHCP." I think this is what laptop-net was supposed to do, but I'm not sure. It would also be useful to have my network-mounted shares synced and made available for me when I go offline, then any changes synced again when I reconnect to the network. Maybe I'm asking a bit much, but I think it should be possible.

I did come across what I consider to be a regression yesterday. I forgot to mention that we do occasionally get Microsoft Office documents from customers, detailing change requests and support tickets usually. This is partly our own fault, as we created the support form and saved it as a Word document, so we currently have to live with it, at least until we can concoct an online support form. I use OpenOffice to view these files and yesterday I tried to open a Word Document with an embedded Excel spreadsheet. I'd opened it fine before the upgrade, although the spreadsheet was barely readable within the context of the Word document so I had to open it separately, but yesterday I got an error saying that the Excel file format was invalid. I got a colleague to send me a copy of the Excel file and that opened fine, it was just when it was embedded that it failed to open.

Otherwise, everything's been fine so far. So I'm off to see if this bug has been filed already and if not, I'll file it myself.

As anyone who's worked with me will know, I'm a bit of a Linux fanboy. Actually, I'm a free software fanboy, but Linux is where most people will have actually experienced my enthusiasm.  I've used various Linux distributions, starting with Slackware in 1996, which I patched and hacked about myself for a long time, before installing Red Hat 7.1 on my wife's machine and maintaining a couple of Red Hat boxes at work. Then I moved onto Debian on my server, after talking in the South Derbyshire LUG IRC channel and being convinced that with my level of knowledge, Debian was going to save me a lot of time.

Eventually, impressed with Debian's package management and overall quality, and with Canonical's work towards making a user-centric distribution, I tried out an Ubuntu live CD on my wife's machine. Her main complaint was that it was way too slow to be useful, and when I watched her I saw what she meant – running from the live CD was fine as a trial, to make sure things worked, but it wasn't usable for day-to-day stuff. Nor was it meant to be. So I installed it properly for her and she hasn't looked back. Admittedly, I hadn't pared things down very much, so it was sluggish on an AMD K6-2/450 with 256MB RAM. I still haven't pared things down, but I did upgrade her machine to a Celeron 966. I think she still has 256MB RAM and the machine ticks along quite nicely.

So impressed was I with her experience, that when I got my laptop I deleted the D: partition and installed Ubuntu Dapper beta on it. I actually ran from a live CD for a while, as I wasn't using the machine daily, but when Dapper was finally released I decided to do things The Right Way. I don't think I've used Windows on the machine since then.

If you're a regular (both of you, you know who you are) you'll probably remember that my work laptop got replaced earlier this year. You might also remember the problems I had with it. Well recently I decided to get the thing sent back as it was clearly faulty. This left me with a minor dilemma – we didn't know how long the machine would be in for repair, or even if we would get it back at all, and we only had a replacement laptop available for a short time. So I decided to take the plunge and start using my own laptop for work. It's more than capable and very stable, so everything should be fine. The only question was could I use Ubuntu for my daily work?

The first thing I needed to do was figure out what my daily work entailed. That was fairly easy to do, in fact:

• Read and respond to e-mail via IMAP4/SMTP. I used Mozilla Thunderbird for that on my Windows laptop, so I would continue to do so.

• Services management via the web-based administration interface. I used Mozilla Firefox for that under Windows, so I would continue to do so. The same applies for viewing and updating the wiki and eGroupware.

• Problem investigation via SSH. This actually involved an intermediate step, namely VPN connectivity. Both Cisco and CheckPoint make Linux versions of their VPN clients available. Unfortunately they're closed source and targeted at the 2.4 kernel, while I run 2.6. Instead, I found vpnc for the Cisco VPN. I haven't yet figured out the CheckPoint, but that's just for the Staging environment which I won't need for a while yet.

• Java development. I used WebSphere Studio Application Developer 5.1 on Windows, and have the Linux installation media too, so I could install that. I also had a local Oracle 9.2.0.1 installation. I've previously blogged about my problems getting this to work, but have resorted to a 10g installation instead.

• Read and update documents on the intranet. Our intranet is available via Citrix, for which a Linux client is available.

• IM colleagues using Skype. Skype have a Linux version available, although I have had minor issues with it – the animated emticons consume 100% CPU for some reason, and the sound occasionally triggers an obscure, possibly timing-related, kernel bug.

• Occasionally, connect to Windows boxes via Terminal Server to maintain some service or other.

So under Dapper Drake, what didn't I get working? As far as I know, only the CheckPoint VPN client. Everything else I've had to do in my job has been possible. A few things have been made easier because of the tools available on a Linux machine – Perl, bash, grep, sed, awk – all of which are also available via cygwin or msys, but just run better in their native environment. A few things are a bit awkward – WSAD, Oracle, Citrix ICA Client and Skype are all installed in a 32-bit chroot, which is beyond the casual user. I'm not sure if they had to be installed chroot, but I like the clean separation of native 64-bit apps and legacy (closed source, you'll notice) 32-bit stuff. Also in the 32-bit chroot is a 32-bit version of Firefox with the (once again closed source) Flash plugin installed. Again, Adobe don't have a 64-bit version available and quite frankly the open source Flash plugins I've tried have been pretty poor. The only other things of note are that in the old 2.6.15 kernel, my SD/XD/MMC/MemoryStick Pro card reader wasn't supported, but I don't need that for work and generally transfer files from either my Zaurus, via SCP over the data cable, or from my mobile, via Bluetooth; and the CPU scaling support didn't seem that impressive – I had the BOINC client running and the CPU was still throttled at 800MHz, but if I did something like video editing then it would ramp up to full throttle.

I was quite keen to upgrade to the new 6.10 release of Ubuntu, formerly known as Edgy Eft. I like to have the most recent version, for a start, but I was also keen to see what improvements, if any, could be made to my development environment.

Contrary to some people's experiences, the upgrade went very smoothly. I left it downloading overnight (1.5GB of data took several hours and I wasn't keen to have that going on, killing my bandwidth while I was trying to do other stuff). When I came back the following morning, it had started setting up and stopped to ask me a few questions, which were simple enough. There were a couple of changes to some config files, but I was able to pop up a terminal and edit those in the background to get the benefit of any new options while not losing my own changes. After that, it took about an hour and a half to upgrade and configure everything and purge obsolete packages, before prompting me to reboot.

One of the major new features of Ubuntu 6.10 is upstart, a new boot manager to replace the (now apparently) old-style SystemV startup scripts to improve boot times. I have to say I didn't notice much of a difference, except that after that first reboot, it took a while for my Bluetooth mouse to be seen and start working, and the first login seemed to take an age. I assume this was some kind of post-upgrade activity going on in the background, because subsequent reboots have been fairly quick.

The second thing I noticed was that the overall appearance is much sharper and cleaner. It looks spangly. The icons look more polished. Then I noticed the new Firefox icon – the proper, trademarked Firefox icon. Then I realised that I now had Firefox 2.0.  I was very pleased with this, Firefox 2.0 seems to be more responsive than 1.5.  Of my five extensions, three work and two don't, – DOM Inspector and Web Developer Toolbar. I actually quite like having the close button on the browser tabs, although I sometimes go to the top-right where it used to be.

The VPN connection still works, which is obviously good. When I eventually got around to reading my mail, I noticed a problem though. I have logcheck running to send me e-mail notification of system reboots, important system and security events, etc. My reboot mail was filled with error messages, as summarised in this bug entry. I was then slightly disappointed to realise that the old architecture-specific (e.g. amd64-k8) kernels appear to have been replaced with a generic one. But somehow this has enabled correct CPU frequency scaling, so BOINC client is now running full throttle. Unfortunately, I can't see how much of an impact it's had on my progress because I can no longer connect to the client – I keep getting an authentication error that I'm not sure how to fix yet. And yes, when I stop the client or unplug the mains it does drop down to 800MHz, which is correct. NetworkManager seems unable to recognise that there are networks of any description available, which is odd, but again possibly just a glitch that will be sorted out when I read the release notes and package documentation.

Both Oracle and WSAD both start up correctly and pass the very basic post-upgrade tests. I haven't yet tried to install Oracle 9i under the new installation and since I have a working database I might just not bother.

So, all very impressive, but has it enabled me to do anything I couldn't before? So far, no. There are some nifty new applications, apparently, one of which is for photo management. I'll give that a look later. My card reader now prompts a message in the logs when a card is inserted or removed, but I haven't yet discovered how to view the files on the card, or indeed if the driver is yet at the stage that makes this possible. I'll just have to wait and see.

Overall, I've been quite impressed though. My general experience of switching from Windows to Ubuntu has been much less painful than I'd dare imagine. Yes, there are still niggles and issues that, say, my dad wouldn't have been able to resolve on his own. There are a couple of nasties in the new release that could do with being fixed, but then it is only four days old. But I'd be quite happy recommending Ubuntu to someone looking to take the Linux plunge. Linux on the desktop is, in my opinion, getting very close.

Many years ago, when Instant Messaging was new, I got myself an ICQ account. It was fun and interesting when new people contacted me out of the blue. It was also very useful to be able to talk to peers and colleagues on the other side of the office, or in another office, or another country, without using e-mail, which didn't have the benefit of being instant or, in some cases, reliable.

A few years ago, ICQ seemed to fall out of favour among my colleagues, possibly because of firewall restrictions where I worked, I'm not really sure. Initially, I got around such problems via SSH to my own machine and ran naim, a console-based multi-protocol IM client. But MSN became the IM solution of choice, so I relented and signed up for Microsoft Passport by getting a Hotmail account. That said, I can honestly say I've never actually used MSN Messenger. When I first signed up I was using Trillian. Later, after having some niggles with Trillian, I discovered what was then called Jabber and is now known formally as XMPP. Trillian allowed me to connect to my ICQ account and my MSN account, and IRC if I remember correctly, all from one client. Jabber allowed the same, but it was the server that connected to the other networks on my behalf and I used a simple client with a simple protocol. I've tried various Jabber clients over the years, including Rhymbox (later renamed Pandion), Exodus and some others that I can't remember the name of, before settling on Psi. Along the way I've built up a collection of Jabber accounts, only two of which I now regularly use, but I've always kept my connections to those other IM networks, "just in case".

Well, this morning I received this via the ICQ network:

I've received lots of unsolicited messages that just say "Hi" before, quite a few go on to ask why I'm not responding or explain that their English is poor. But this is the first, and last, time I've received a marketing message (Spim) via ICQ. Given that all of the ICQ traffic I've received for probably the last year has been from people I don't know, I'm no longer going to use my ICQ account. I don't know if there's a way of closing the account, but if not then I'll simply unsubscribe from it in Psi and remove the ICQ transport from my Jabber server. The ICQ network ceased to be of any use to me a while ago, so no it's time to say goodbye.

In ancient Israel, it came to pass that a trader by the name of Abraham Com did take unto himself a young wife by the name of Dot.

And Dot Com was a comely woman, broad of shoulder and long of leg. Indeed, she had been called Amazon Dot Com.

And she said unto Abraham, her husband, "Why dost thou travel far from town to town with thy goods when thou can trade without ever leaving thy tent?"

And Abraham did look at her as though she were several saddle bags short of a camel load, but simply said, "How, dear?" And Dot replied, "I will place drums in all the towns and drums in between to send messages saying what you have for sale and they will reply telling you which hath the best price. And the sale can be made on the drums and delivery made by Uriah's Pony Stable (UPS)."

Abraham thought long and decided he would let Dot have her way with the drums. And the drums rang out and were an immediate success. Abraham sold all the goods he had at the top price, without ever moving from his tent.

But this success did arouse envy. A man named Maccabia did secrete himself inside Abraham's drum and was accused of insider trading. And the young man did take to Dot Com's trading as doth the greedy horsefly take to camel dung. They were called Nomadic Ecclesiastical Rich Dominican Siderites, or NERDS for short.

And lo, the land was so feverish with joy at the new riches and the deafening sound of drums that no one noticed that the real riches were going to the drum maker, one Brother William of Gates, who bought up every drum company in the land. And indeed did insist on making drums that would work only with Brother Gates' drumheads and drumsticks.

And Dot did say, "Oh, Abraham, what we have started is being taken over by others."

And as Abraham looked out over the Bay of Ezekiel, or as it came to be known "eBay" he said, "We need a name that reflects what we are."

And Dot replied, "Young Ambitious Hebrew Owner Operators."

"YAHOO," said Abraham.

And that is how it all began.

This would be hilarious. Courtesy of Slashdot.