Doesn't have quite the same ring to it as first post, but blah, whatever. With the upgrade to Ubuntu Feisty came a new version of vpnc, the Cisco VPN client. It added lots of new features, including RFC3706 Dead Peer Detection. Unfortunately, this feature was broken for some clients, myself included. Some kind soul beat me to it and filed a bug, but I had a look and proposed a patch. Someone on an upstream mailing list proposed a better patch, so I applied that to my local version and, to cut a long story short, submitted it. It has so far been accepted into feisty-proposed, which should mean that it will make its way into Feisty fairly soon, once it's been tested, and lots of people will again be able to connect reliably to their Cisco VPNs.

During my trip to London, I had some notes that I'd been working on on the train down, as well as a photo of my whiteboard at home which contains an architecture diagram amongst other things. Upon arrival at the office, I wanted to print a copy of these for everyone to read.

This was my first time in this particular office. I had previously set up connections to the printer queue on my home printer server and the networked HP OfficeJet in the Harrogate office. Upon inserting an ethernet cable, I instantly had an IP address on the office network. I checked my e-mail without any trouble as the DNS server had also been set up for me. I opened my document in AbiWord and selected File, Print... but obviously none of the office printers were listed. So I selected System, Administration, Printing from the Gnome panel. Here I double-clicked on New Printer.

After a pause of several seconds while the printer database was read, I was presented with a dialogue box asking me which of the detected printers I would like to use. I went through to the printer I wanted to use, took note of the make and model number (it was a Brother MFC-8840D), and selected that from the list of detected printers. I accepted the suggested driver, clicked Forward, entered a printer description and location so I could easily recognise it in the list and clicked Apply. Then I went back to AbiWord and again selected File, Print... and selected the newly-added printer. My document was printed flawlessly.

Then, from the Printers window which I still had open, I right-clicked the new printer and selected Properties so that my colleague could get the details he needed to manually enter to connect to the printer from Windows. After much gnashing of teeth, he gave up.

It's been ages since I last wrote anything. That's because I went to South Africa for three weeks. I didn't let the general population know because... well, for obvious reasons. Unattended house and all that. Strictly speaking our house is never unattended because we have our killer guard cats and our highly-trained mercenary chinchillas, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

The holiday was the usual arrangement of staying with family. This year, this proved to be a bit of a problem due to certain happenings within the family that I'd rather not go into. Suffice to say there was a certain amount of tension in the air quite a bit of the time, so things weren't necessarily as relaxing as they might have otherwise been. That said, it did contribute to us doing far more than we've managed to do on previous visits like visiting friends and some sight seeing. There's still so much of South Africa that I've yet to see, it's such a massive country.

Before I went away, I had a nice phone conversation with Gavin Whyte, an Executive Director of the company. He really just wanted to reassure me as to the intentions for the company and let me know that he's there to help provide whatever it is we need to keep things running smoothly. When I asked him if his immediate plans would mean I'd be coming home to no job, he said that no, that wasn't going to happen, which was reassuring. It was nice to speak to someone who was so open and no-nonsense for a change.

On my return I did get the impression, though no-one has explicitly mentioned anything to me, that there might be some concern about my blog. As far as I know I've not said anything I shouldn't and apart from my last post, where obfuscating things would have made it unreadable, I make a habit of not explicitly naming people and companies. Whatever. I'm not going to stop blogging, although if something I have posted has caused concern, I'm happy to hear comments as to what and how I can fix it.

I'm due to meet with Gavin on Friday to discuss what's required to take our platform forward really. I think I'm expected to have a road map, which I kind of do although it needs some tweaking, and a list of essentials and nice-to-haves, which I also kind of do. There has been a policy introduced whereby we give a brief report every Friday of what we've been working on for the week, which is a good way of keeping everyone informed and also taking stock of things personally. I liken this to the SCRUM methodology, where the team has a daily "scrum", which is basically a quick stand-up meeting, to highlight what each person has been working on, what they intend to work on and what's getting in their way. One option being considered is sale of the company, but it's still very early days so we'll have to see what transpires.

Then, of course, there's Ubuntu. My holiday coincided quite badly with the kernel freeze and Beta release of Feisty, which was a shame. That said, things seem to have worked out quite nicely. All of the problems I had been experiencing have now been fixed, with the exception of the annoying APIC error messages, which are greatly reduced but not completely gone, and suspend/hibernate/resume not working. I need to look further into the latter as it may well be a configuration thing on my part, otherwise I'm sure there will be a bug already raised. But the Feisty release has come and gone with much fanfare and much greater demand than expected, I gather. The Feisty release seems like a solid one, so congratulations to all involved.

Oh, in case you're wondering, the title is a reference to the response of one Gary Kearley on the #ubuntu-uk IRC channel upon seeing my hackergotchi on Launchpad: "OMG goatee!"

Well well. I got in touch with two people who have listed themselves on the Ubuntu Wiki as having the same laptop as me, outlining my intentions with regard to sorting out the kernel problems and asking for their experiences and what they'd tried. It turns out that the current development release of Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn, due for release next month, fixed a lot of the problems I was having.

To be honest, I was pretty apprehensive about running a development release on my primary machine. I mean, I understand that major breakage can occur in an alpha release and I can't afford to be without my laptop while things get fixed. So I consulted the good people of the Ubuntu UK Team and asked for their opinions on Feisty. Standard disclaimers aside, the general impression was pretty good. So I went ahead and yesterday morning upgraded using:

gksudo "update-manager -c -d"

It took a fair while... I left the packages downloading through Wednesday night, but even the upgrade process was lengthy. I didn't get many questions though " a couple of checks to see if I wanted to overwrite config files that I'd changed with the most recent version from the package maintainer, something about bcm43xx-fwcutter and that was about it. The only problem I had was a dodgy error message:

Bearing in mind that this is still an alpha release, I don't think that's too bad. After a reboot, through the ultra spangly boot splash screen, I now have working Wi-fi, IEEE1394 and Battery/AC Status. Suspend/Hibernate still don't work for me at present, I'm not sure why. My SD card reader has also apparently stopped working – dmesg shows that it detects that an SD card has been inserted, but where in Edgy a swift modprobe tifm_sd caused the contents of the card to be displayed in a Nautilus window, that no longer happens. And Beryl seems to have a bit of a problem, often chewing up 100% CPU, so I've disabled that again for the moment. On the whole, I'm better off. So now I just need to help work out the kinks.

Unfortunately, my Ubuntu time is going to be severely restricted from here on. Wifey is more than a little upset at the amount of time I've been spending on the computer and has limited me to two nights a week. This is still better than nothing, but clearly not as good as seven nights a week! Hopefully I'll still be able to make some contribution.

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.

Damn, it's been a month since I posted anything. I've been so busy I hadn't even realised. But now I'm not quite as busy, although I probably should still be, so I'm going to post an update if it kills me.

Much has happened in the last month. I think my last post was about the eGroupWare migration at work. Well that's mostly complete now. I do still have a number of outstanding tasks... like migrating all the old data into the new database and getting our interim PHP-based Customer Support ticket system integrated, writing a couple of guides... but all in all, eGroupWare is now in use and going down well. All the "systems" (read Access databases and Excel spreadsheets) that were previously accessed via Citrix are now on eGroupWare one way or another – be it TTS (which, I now learn, is soon to be replaced with Tracker), MyDMS, or WikiTikiTavi. Now I'm getting the distinct feeling some people aren't pulling their weight, so I'm slowing down a little too. I think I've earned a little rest.

What else has been keeping me busy? I started playing hockey again. A couple of weeks ago we played Buxton (the team who just about destroyed my knee and put me out of action again) and lost heavily. 5-1 I think. Might have been 6-1. I lost count. I was shit. I slipped on my arse for two or three goals. I was awesomely bad. Anyway, Saturday just gone we played Newark, who beat us 8-0 at their place I'm told. We went 1-0 up within the first 10 minutes and held out until the last 10 minutes when they equalised from a short corner. It finished up 1-1. This time I felt a lot better about the performance, both from a team perspective and personally. In fact I'll allow myself a little self-congratulation and say I played well. I ache like a bastard everywhere now, I was about ready to drop by the final whistle, but it was worth it. I'm just annoyed we couldn't hang on for those final few minutes, or force a winner.

My Ubuntu stuff stalled slightly. I think I've posted before about stuff that doesn't work on my laptop, at least unless I supply the irqpoll kernel option. Like the IEEE1394. Like the Broadcom wireless NIC. Like Gnome Power Manager. Like Suspend and Hibernate. The card reader, I've discovered, does. I just have to manually load the tifm_sd kernel module when I've inserted a card, which I can probably automate if I Google for it, but it's not so much of a problem that I've felt the need to.

Well, at least one of the above problems had a suggested fix of updating the BIOS. So I downloaded the latest BIOS update pack from the Acer website. Unpacked. Followed the instructions. But the WinPhlash utility they give you doesn't work on Windows XP Pro X64. Nor does the PHLASH16.EXE work from the Safe Mode Command Prompt. I have no floppy drive and I don't want to burn a DOS 6.22 Boot CD. So I set about trying to make my Disgo 256MB USB Key bootable with FreeDOS. Long story short, I failed... I've got it partitioned, I've got FreeDOS installed on it, but I can't get the damn thing to boot. Yes, the laptop supports it. The closest I've come is getting it to boot, but not finding COMMAND.COM.

In the end, I borrowed a USB floppy from my brother and booted DOS 6.22 that way. Flashed the BIOS (very nerve-wracking experience). And it made precisely no difference. So I still get annoying errors in my logs, and half my hardware doesn't work. I've started work now on trying to get the 2.6.17 kernel in Edgy to be as close to the configuration of the 2.6.15 kernel in Dapper as possible, with all the code fixes still in place. I'm determined to get to the bottom of this. One helpful soul keeps suggesting BIOS updates to everyone who reports they're also experiencing these problems... but it didn't work for me.

That's about it really I suppose. Just been keeping my head down, getting on with stuff. The Boys are doing well. Wifey's fine. I'm in good shape, apart from the aches from the weekend and a nice bruise on my ribs. I'm sure there's other stuff, but that's the main news.

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.

A few weeks ago we bought an Avent bottle warmer from Toys R Us. We wanted to be able to keep Version 2.1's bottles warm through the night so when he woke he'd have a nice warm bottle. When we got the thing home, we were a bit disappointed to find that it didn't have a power switch – you just plug the thing in and it comes on, and the unplug it when you want it to go off.

The first night we tried it out. Mr woke up, so we switched the thing on, setting number 1, to warm the bottle. Wifey fell asleep again and it was about half an hour before Version 2.1 started squawking. When Wifey went to get the bottle out, it was so hot she dropped it. We had assumed from the descriptions we'd seen and the instruction manual that the thing would keep a bottle warm, by which we expected it to be warm enough for a baby to drink. You know, with it being a baby bottle warmer.

So we took it back to Toys R Us. I explained what had happened and said I'd like to return it and pay the extra £10 for a different model with a thermostat. I was stunned when they refused to take the thing back. I explained that I'd bought it based on the description on their website and it didn't live up to the description. They said it wasn't faulty, it was working exactly as expected and I should have checked before buying it. So I said it wasn't fit for the advertised purpose and they said they couldn't take it back due to health and safety, I'd have to take it up with Avent.

Now strictly speaking they're right – we checked with Avent, who also refused to take the item back because it's not faulty, i.e. if you leave the thing plugged in it'll just continue to heat the bottle until the milk boils. But what ever happened to goodwill? Any other time I've had a situation like this, I've at least been offered a credit note. Not to mention the fact that I actually wanted to spend and extra tenner with them. So I told them I wasn't at all happy about it and moved on to the next item.

For Version 2.0's birthday we bought him a VTech Challenger laptop. This in an attempt to stop him bashing on my keyboard while I was trying to work. The laptop was fine, but the mouse only went up and down, not left to right. So we took the mouse back to get a replacement. Presented the receipt. They didn't have any VTech Challenger laptops in stock, but they did have one on display. So I asked if we could just take the display mouse.

"No," they said. "We don't have the keys for the display." What? You have a display in your own store, but you don't have the keys for it? What do you do when you want to change the display then? Phone head office and have them come down and unlock it for you? Then they tried to suggest that we'd broken the mouse by dropping coffee on it because there was a hint of a brownish stain on the bottom. The upshot of the whole thing is that they now want us to return the whole unit for a refund. I will do. And I'll leave my Toys R Us gold card there as well, cos I ain't shopping there again.

EDM 179 – Open Source Software in Schools

On a slightly related note, I got a response back from Margaret Beckett about EDM 179. It contained a response from Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education and Skills, as follows:

Dear Margaret,

Thank you for your letter of 4 December together with enclosed correspondence from your constituent Mr James Tait of *address withheld* about open source software in education.

I believe that schools and colleges must be able to make an informed choice about the software they need, be it open source or proprietary, and to be aware of the total cost of ownership of that software, including sustainable support and training. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) work with software providers, both open source and proprietary, to ensure that schools and colleges can make the most effective use of that software to support teaching and learning.

Becta's procurement frameworks consist of a specified range of approved suppliers of Educational ICT services and associated technologies. All of these framework suppliers have successfully completed a rigorous evaluation process, conducted under EU regulations (often involving practical testing as well as written-based assessments). It is not simply a list of approved products or an accreditation scheme.

Institutions are not mandated to purchase form within these frameworks, but when selecting services outside the framework they are advised to ensure that their chosen provider is able to deliver a service which matches the functional requirements and offers comparable value for money.

I would also like to assure Mr Tait that because they are Government-led ICT procurements at a national level (to be delivered locally), Becta's frameworks have to be tendered under EU regulations so there are certain requirements and expectations that have to be met and adhered to. Acceptance onto the framework is by assessment of the capabilities of a supplier to deliver and support a comprehensive suite of technologies and not by providing a single, specific product.

That said, there is nothing to stop any supplier offering open source solutions as part of a managed service, or a procuring authority including open source functionalities within its Statement of Requirements (SoR). The whole issue of open source is therefore one of measured inclusion rather than blanket exclusion.

Becta supports the principles of open source software and recognises the value-for-money benefits that the larger scale deployment could bring. Based upon a clearly defined SoR, which reflects the institutional vision, open source has the potential to play a vital role in educational transformation. However it must be acknowledged that realisation of the Department's e-strategy is not just software deployment; it is a total, integrated service solution.

Yours,

Alan Johnson

Compare and contrast with the Becta press release on the subject. Mr Johnson's response, which I was quite excited to have received at first, is almost word-for-word what's in the press release. I know this is hardly news – a politician hiding behind policy to avoid giving a straight answer to a question – but to do it so blatantly really irks me. I think I shall be writing to Mr Johnson directly and letting him know in no uncertain terms that I don't appreciate being fobbed off with a canned reply.

EDIT Looks like it's a stock response.

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.