Ubuntu 9.10 the Karmic Koala

October 30th, 2009

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.

Jaunty and the webbook

April 29th, 2009

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

A Story For Bedtime

February 26th, 2009

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?

Libertus Eruditus – a Moodle appliance

February 26th, 2009

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?

OK, up and running on a new server

February 26th, 2009

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.

Huge Free egg

January 23rd, 2009

no, not one of mine, but from a school in Gloucester

dinoegg

You wouldn’t get that kind of performance from a proprietary chicken!

The spirit of Ubuntu in Guiding

January 23rd, 2009

One of the people we met at the BETT show brought an interesting project to our attention, it is a collaboration between the girl guiding association and Book Aid International. They are raising money to send books to developing nations in Africa and educating young people about Ubuntu. No, not the operating system, but the meaning of the word, which is translated in many different ways, their translation is “I am because you are”, others include “humanity to others” and “I am who I am because of who we all are”. Do go and have a look at their website and try to find out if there is a local event you can support.

gone out, back soon

January 19th, 2009

Yes, the webbookblog was out of action for all of last week. I know. Thanks for all the emails, it is good to know the site is in demand!

So what happened and why? Well, the story starts right back at the beginning of my involvement in the webbook project, we needed a sensible place to track all the issues in the build pre-manufacturing, emails flying about all over the place was getting confusing and I could see that things were going to be missed. I wanted a server set up and I was in the Elonex offices at the time, there was no server available and ordering a nice rack mounted server would require budget, approval and lead times etc. Fortunately there was no shortage of computers lying about so I asked for the use of one. As I recall they asked me to provide a spec for it, “any old heap of junk” was my detailed response. They came up with an AMD Athlon dual core 2Ghz desktop PC, so I stuck Ubuntu on it and installed Mantis. Shortly thereafter the webbook was launched and I needed a place to start community building on the web, so my scrappy old salvaged desktop on the bench next to the rack was pressed into service for the webbookblog.com site. I would have preferred to run the site actually on a webbook, but they just were not available at the time.

Now one of the key features of a server as opposed to a desktop is that if the power is cut to a server, it comes back on. Desktops have a tendency to switch off and stay off until someone presses the button on the front (you can see where this is going can’t you). So last weekend there must have been a power cut or something and the server went down and stayed down. This has happened a few times, it isn’t such a big deal, someone just turns it on again and I think to myself “gosh, must do something about that server some stage” however this week was different because it was BETT 2009, the office was deserted as all of the Elonex team were down in London Olympia along with us at The Open Learning Centre.

BETT is a huge conference and we spent a lot of time educating teachers about the importance of Free and Open Source software. On Saturday there was a cancellation in one of the seminar theatres and I was asked to help in an impromptu session on Free software in education. I got up and talked about the four freedoms and a bit about the One Laptop Per Child project, explaining how Software Freedom enabled change. I was followed by John Spencer of Syrius and Michelle Walters, Deputy head of Chesham High School (by strange co-incidence this is where my brother and sister went to school). She talked a bit about the moral and ethical problems with using proprietary software in schools, when homework is requested in proprietary formats she knows that either the students are using unlicensed copies of proprietary applications (which is unacceptable) or the parents are purchasing them if they can afford them (which is discrimination based on the ability to pay which is unacceptable). This was great to hear coming from someone who is first and foremost an educator rather than a software freedom advocate like me. Chesham has a page on their website about Free software in school.

Over on the Elonex stand in the grand hall they have a new all-in-one computer (monitor with built in computer) which is £199 (probably without VAT but I am not sure) and some new webbook models. They were all running Windows, so I borrowed a new model via webbook and an Intel Atom based webbook to fix them. Both had webcams rather than that blanking plate which is a big improvement! The Intel Atom model had an Intel graphics card so I was able to get Compiz running with no issues and as the drivers are Open Source this would be deployable and won’t break on a kernel update. I didn’t take any photos of them but I will see if I can get some.

BETT 2009 – teaching teachers about Software Freedom

January 7th, 2009

Next week from the 14th to the 17th is the BETT 2009 show in Olympia. Each year 30,000 educational professionals (yep, a full 30 kiloteachers) meet up in London Olympia for an educational technology conference. We were there last year generating lots of excitement about the OLPC project, I wrote up a couple of articles about the experience here and here (you can also see where later in the year I met Elonex for the first time). This year will be the same, but bigger as The Open Learning Centre has joined forces with our partners at Open Forum Europe to get a stand twice as big as last year (SW104 upstairs in the National Hall). We will be demonstrating loads of Free and Open Source Software (Moodle, Elgg, OpenOffice.org, Edubuntu, GCompris and loads of others) and telling people how they can save money and deliver a better education to our young people by taking advantage of Free and Open Source Software. One of the four core freedoms of Free software is the Freedom to study the software, personally I think that this should be considered an essential Freedom that schools should insist on for all the software they use (whether or not they have the other Freedoms). In fact, whilst I am on the subject, here are the four Freedoms for those who are not already familiar with them:

  • The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
  • The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
  • The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Back to the show, Elonex themselves will be on stand D80 but I can’t find them in the BETT show website. Our friends at Canonical will be squatting on a corner of the Intel stand E150 (although a corner of the Intel stand is probably bigger than our whole stand). There is an interesting looking seminar running on Saturday 17th about the Open Source Schools project.

Registration for BETT is free and open to everyone, but it might be best to pre-register if you fancy popping in. If you happen to be involved in a school (governor/parent/teacher/student etc) then do make sure that if someone is going to BETT representing your school that they spend some time learning about all the great Free software that is on display and available to use.

Install Openoffice.org 3

January 5th, 2009

Hi All

I’ve been using OO 3 on Fedora since last year, and decided it really is about time I added it to my Ubuntu installs.

Here is what to do no searching and no command line access required.

  1. First off we need to add the Launchpad repository for OpenOffice to our software sources, as it’s still not mainline ubuntu as yet.

To do this carry out the following:

From the task bar,

  1. Click on ‘System’
  2. Go down to ‘Administration’
  3. Go Down to ‘Software Sources’

As shown in the screen shot shown below:

01_software_sources_menu

Next you’l be prompted for your password, as shown below:

02_software_sources_password

Now enter your password, as prompted.

Once the Software sources application has started:
Select the ‘Third Party software’ tab

As shown below:

03_software_sources_3rd_party

Click on the ‘Add’ button on the bottom left hand corner. This will generate a text box for you to enter the line to add the repository, as shown below:

04_apt_line
In the text box for APT line enter the following :

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

If you are still on ubuntu hardy, replace intrepid in the above line with hardy

Click ‘Add Source’
Click ‘Close’

After a little while the ‘Software Sources’ application will close.
Now all that is left is to simply ‘Update’ your system as usual.

You now have a fully functioning OpenOffice.org 3 installation.