webbookblog

With Karmic Koala comes a new version of the Linux kernel, new drivers for the Orange HSO 225 dongle (new – not better, more on that in a sec) fancy graphics on startup and shutdown, a slightly modified openchrome display driver (no compiz, sorry) and a host of tweaks and updates to the applications. The Ubuntu One cloud storage is kind of handy for keeping files on a netbook in sync with a desktop too.

So getting it working on the funny display of the webbook is again non-trivial, but this is how to do it. For this you will temporarily need an external monitor with a sensible native resolution such as 1024×768 or 1280×1024. Esoteric resolutions such as my 2048×1152 monitor don’t work so well. Also you need a USB cd rom drive and a copy of Ubuntu 9.10 which you can download and burn to a disk on a Linux computer such as the webbook or on any other operating system such as Mac OS X. You should also go into this in the expectation that you are going to totally trash everything on the disk so do a backup of anything important first.

So plug in the monitor and boot off the CD, you may need to go into the BIOS settings and change the boot order so that it will boot from CD if yours is not already set that way. Go through the install procedure accepting all the defaults, you can dual boot or wipe the disk and use the full space or upgrade the existing install, probably without data loss, but see the previous point about backups. Ignore the screen of the webbook, the external monitor should be working OK at this point. Reboot into your Karmic desktop. At this stage if you boot without the external monitor the webbook screen will be a flashing and flickering mess with nothing remotely useable on it, so lets fix that.

Press Alt+F2 to get up the run program dialog, in here type

gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

which will bring up a text editor with an empty file. Type or paste the following:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "OpenChrome"
option "PanelSize" "1024x600"
option "ForcePanel"
EndSection


basically the same as it was for Jaunty, but with option "ForcePanel" added.
Save and exit and reboot and you should have a 1024×600 display that fits perfectly in the panel. If you want to use an external monitor or projector you can change it from 1024×600 to 1024×768 and you will be able to see the top 600 pixels on the webbook screen but the full projector screen should fit. I found some corruption around the mouse cursor on the external monitor, I think there is an option to do a software mouse cursor which should fix this.

Earlier I mentioned the new hso driver for the Orange Option 225 dongle. Well this isn’t so good, it seems to have re-introduced an issue we discovered with a particular version of the hso driver during the week and a bit of the webbook project between project start and production commencing, in that it can cause a total kernel lockup on removal of the dongle. It connects just fine, but disconnecting the dongle causes a pretty hard crash. We filed a bug about this and you can track it here

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/418499

Other than that it seems pretty nice to me, and I will see you in six months for the Lucid Lynx Ubuntu 10.04 update.

The new release of Ubuntu is 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope. A Jackalope for those wondering is a mythical beast, a jack rabbit with the horns of an antelope.

I installed it from the Alternate CD using a USB cdrom drive (the desktop liveCD would also work fine I think). Basically this worked fine and the screen sort of worked. It correctly set the resolution to 1024×600, however it then set the scale of the panel incorrectly and stretched the 1024×600 image out to 1280×1024, thus you can only see the top left portion of the screen. This flummoxed me for quite a while during the beta phase, but with some help from the OpenChrome developers I got it sussed. The OpenChrome driver by default gets a number representing the panel size from the bios and looks this up in a little table of possible resolutions. It gets the number 7 from the bios, and this corresponds to 1280×1024. Either the Bios is wrong or the table is wrong, for what its worth I would bet on the table being right.

Anyhow, a little tweak to the xorg.conf and all is well. Here is my /etc/X11/xorg.conf in full:

Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
Driver “openchrome”
option “PanelSize” “1024×600″
EndSection

so we just give the driver a little hint as to the correct panel size and it is up and running. There is no 3d in the OpenChrome drivers so no Compiz, but at least it works. With that and the latest Wader mobile broadband client (the release today seems to work pretty well) then it all seems to work nicely, it now includes SMS handling, transfer statistics and a warning when you go past a transfer limit you can set.

I won’t be doing much more here, but do keep an eye on http://planet.ubuntu-uk.org and on irc (which you can get to in pidgin) feel free to drop in on the #ubuntu-uk channel http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/IRC

Those of you who have bookmarked www.webbookblog.com rather than just webbookblog.com may have stumbled across an interesting site this afternoon. Normally the www. address is added as an alias, however I made a bit of a typo and set up www.webbookbog.com as the alias. All fixed now, but it does lead me on to introduce you to the default site of this server which is www.astoryforbedtime.com this is/was the first business venture of the Alans. It is a site for parents to share MP3 recordings of bedtime stories,  you can download a bunch of them and stick them on a CD or MP3 player for your kids to listen to and you can upload your own, there is even a podcast and I think it may be on the iTunes store still. Kind of like an  audio YouTube for bedtime stories with a bit better quality control and moderation. The idea was that we got copyright permission from the publishers to freely distribute non-professional audio books (we did get it for all the books on the site, the publishers were really cool actually). We got our money by being Amazon affiliates, so if parents listen to the recording and want to get the book with all the pictures and flaps and holes to poke fingers through then they click to buy it and we get a few pennies. So we have a pretty good idea, a reasonable technical implementation, even a business model (which is an optional extra for most web 2.0 projects). All this adds up to an Epic Fail, which was a bit of a surprise. So far in the Amazon account we have accrued a total commission of £10.95, based on 48 sales worth £198.69 to Amazon. When we get to £50 Amazon will send us the money. More importantly than the money I don’t think we had any recordings contributed by people we didn’t already know.

There are a few reasons behind this. One is money. We didn’t have money to throw at marketing it (and still don’t), some things grow virally, others get cash thrown at them, we were hoping viral would work, but it didn’t get to the snowballing point. Another problem is the technology. It isn’t that easy to record stuff and edit it. We did some great instructions for Audacity (which is the most popular page on the website) the software is pretty good but still takes a bit of effort and doesn’t solve the very basic problem that you don’t tend to read bedtime stories in a room containing a computer. The situation is changing a bit, we launched the site in March 2006 and things have moved on somewhat with the rise of things like the webbook. I still would quite like a Flash based recording thingie which would allow people to just press a big red record button, start talking and press again when they are done. Doing that was a bit hard technically (or I didn’t try hard enough) but it would make contributing a recording a bit easier. The final problem is that I am not sure it is structured to build a community enough, but I am not sure quite what to do about that one.

I think it is still a good idea, the technology just needs a bit of a dust off and it needs someone who is probably not really a geek like me, who understands viral marketing (or has loads of cash) to pick it up and run with it as a community and business. Any ideas?

I have been doing a few other interesting projects recently, they are non-webbook related but they are very Ubuntu related so I thought

I would talk about them here.

Today The Open Learning Centre is launching a new range of server appliances, the first one we are launching runs the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment. This is a server for schools or anyone delivering any form of education. It manages student profiles, courses, assessments, scores, homework and all that kind of stuff. Works great for online training or as a complement to classroom based learning.

This isn’t a normal retail purchase though, and it won’t be delivered in the post. Every Libertus server is hand delivered and installed on site by us, we get it up and running and connected to the network. The rest of the day we spend giving training on how to use and administer the server, and explaining why Software Freedom is really cool.

We also offer a remote backup option (backups being a topical topic for the webbook blog) and hardware replacement. If you break your Libertus we send you a new one, with your most recent backup already restored on it so you just plug it in and carry on working.

The Libertus range will include a bunch of appliances, this is just the start. We are kind of building on the experience of the webbook and making sure that all the hardware is fully supported by the operating system, being totally unambiguous in all the marketing that this is running Ubuntu Linux, and getting training and documentation right.

There is one thing that you may be able to help me with (apart from tell all your friends and schools that you know). I have been told by a few people that I just must get on Twitter to let everyone know about this wonderful new server. OK I have a Twitter account called alanbelltolc,I also have an identi.ca account alanbell. Great. Now what? How is everyone supposed to know I am there? What am I supposed to say in 140 characters?

So someone at Elonex turned off the server again, I think they are moving to new premises so it might be something to do with that. I am not sure if/when anyone will turn it back on, but I think this site serves a useful purpose so I have put a restore of the articles and comments one of our servers which tends to stay up.I will try and get the pictures and theme back at some stage, also if you have registered then you might need to register again, or I might be able to transfer the accounts or something. Any suggestions for a new theme, or a new direction for the site, now is a great time to make them.