Ubuntu

The premier IT conference in Australia, LCA, commences tomorrow with several mini-confs covering subjects such as Linux in Education, GNOME, Debian, MySQL and Linux research to name but a few.

This year I've splurged on a professional ticket and it appears that was a bit of mistake - because as a result of election campaign, crop growing and client commitments, I am going to miss large chunks of the conference. I'm hoping to at least make the open day and the Penguin Dinner. While these are good events to make, they will not make up for all the great presentations I'll miss.

There's one talk that I consider a "must see" for conference goers - Carston Haitzler's Desktops on a diet. Carston not only regularly challenges the accepted norm of Linux, Apple and Windows desktops with brilliant insights but also backs it up with code, as anyone has run the pre-releases of Enlightenment 0.17 will attest.

See you there (at times!)

Some things in life are beyond value. Some things you can put a monetary value on that will still not reflect the true worth of the item. The value of the Free Software community is one such thing.

I've been involved in the Free Software community since 1994. I've learnt and taken a lot from that community. I've also in my turn given and taught a lot. Friends I've made in the Free Software community count amongst the most impressive people I know.

I'm involved in a number of communities. One other community is the environmental movement. There, the members of that community are aiding and supporting my attempt to win a seat in parliament. Likewise, the Free Software community supports my business, whether by directly giving a hand, via financial support, referring business or providing me with the tools to do business. Referrals are particularly important as I do not advertise and all my business has come directly by word of mouth and community recommendations.

This community support recently took a quantum leap forward. I was approached to amicably take over another Free Software business (see the media release). This successful event occurred solely because of the Ubuntu Marketplace community pages, where I am fortunate enough to hold pole position.

This take over has put my company in a position of strength that was unimaginable a mere three weeks ago. It has come about directly because of the Free Software community. I now find myself in the strange position where I can put a precise dollar figure on the value of the Free Software community to my business. Though to put any monetary figure on the Free Software community would be to immediately under value it.

I've been asked to give a toast at an upcoming meeting on Free Software. The toast I will be giving will be to my colleagues and comrades in arms in the Free Software community. Without our community, we would have nothing. I will probably write the toast up and post it here.

Have a great silly season everyone. Hopefully I'll see most of you in the new year at LCA, if not before.

PS: Congratulations to the Free Software folk involved with the Victorian Greens. A great result there with three upper house seats being won on the back of your contributions of Free Software to the campaign.

I attended a local community forum last night (on ways to reduce the death toll of the thousands of possums, wallabies, birds, pythons etc being killed on Wakehurst Parkway, if you have to know) and one blokes laptop died. The hard disk went "caput" and taking with it all his precious data, epecially the data he needed for this weekends deadline.

He knew me and my line of work and asked if I could help, in a few minutes the Ubuntu CD (6.0.6) had booted successfully into his machine and his most valuable data was stored safely onto his USB key and opened in OpenOffice. He may no longer have been able to boot into Windows XP but his machine was 100% functional and his data was saved.

Don't ask me why a copy of Ubuntu 6.0.6 was on me at a road kill forum but it made his day - so much so that he kept the CD and was so impressed that he's going to switch his desktop over.

Nice work by the Ubuntu team :)

I've just spent the last two days at the Education Expo, volunteering at the Linux Australia stand. Much unlike CeBit or Linux World, where most people have at least heard of Linux, almost none of the attendees that I spoke to at the Education Expo had ever heard of Linux. It certainly was outreaching to the masses of Australians who needed it most.

It was a long and rewarding weekend for the Linux Australia team, all of whom worked tirelessly and energetically, with special mention for Sara's excellent "Parent's and Teacher's Guide for Educational Outcomes" using Edubuntu. This document, combined with the excellent Edubuntu distribution, knocked the socks of both parents, teachers and kids who got their hands on the system. Many kids had to be practically dragged away by their parents, with all of them making sure that they had their copy of Edubuntu firmly in their grasp.

Showing the ease of switching languages (I had pre-installed Chinese and Arabic language packs) along with anecdotes that the demonstration machines were not only my kids machines but they (as 8 and 6 year olds) had actually installed it themselves also went a long way towards impressing people.

My favourite quote from Saturday - "You have changed my life, thank you! thank you!"

My favourite quote from Sunday - "Thank you for your enthusiam and your passion. This stand was the best thing about the entire Education Expo"

The demonstrations we made and the time we took to outreach and communicate with the people we were giving Edubuntu packs to has made lasting impressions on everyone the team talked to. Everyone who worked on the Linux Australia stand should be proud of the excellent work they did.

Great work everyone!

I've just spent the last three days volunteering for Linux Australia at the CeBit 2006 exhibition. Linux Australia had two stands, a standard sized stand with the LA banner floating across the back and a larger, triple-sized stand labelled as the "Linux Demo Zone". Both stands were ably manned by volunteers too numerous to name, although James does capture quite a few here, and were consistently packed with personal and business attendees wanting to know more about Linux, how it can work in their personal and professional lives and to see it first hand, many for the first time. The Linux Demo zone was providing hands-on experience with a variety of Linux Desktops, Linux thin-clients and clustering solutions from UNSW. As I understand, it over a thousand copies of Ubuntu 5.10 were given away and the demonstration of the Ubuntu 6.06 beta left many people eagerly awaiting this release and relishing a chance to run Linux now that many of their doubts and concerns had been satisfied. The demo stand was also distributing linux.conf.au, OSIA and OpenSkills material which disappeared nearly as quickly as the Ubuntu CD's did. I'd like to congratulate all the volunteers, organisers and the producers of the handouts that proved so informative and useful to the people who were taking them so quickly that I never had to hand one out. Another facit that I was impressed with was the spirit amongst the Linux vendors and members of OSIA working or running stands at CeBit. There was a healthy, genuine spirit of of co-operation and competition amongst them and a readiness to share skills and ideas freely. It's truly impressive to see the spirit of the Free Software movement translate so successfully into the business world. I have already benefitted greatly from advice and experience shared with me over those three days and expect to return it in kind when the opportuinity arises. Great work everyone :)

I've started a new page noting migration problems and resolutions for migrating from Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty) to 5.10 (Hoary) over here. Thus far there is only one with apt-proxy, which really only affect me as the administrator, nothing client critical :)

Today we reached a milestone for one of my clients and launched the 20-seat Ubuntu installation that represents the first phase of a much larger and more ambitious Free Software project. I'm excited, tired and relieved although it only augurs the beginning of even more work and increasing challenges :) 

Today's Register has a great three page article doing some serious analysis and a little speculation on the upcoming Cell processor from IBM, Sony and friends. This is the most interest I've had, no that ought to read "this is the only time I've been interested" in a chip since the days when the Pentium 1 was first launched. This is the new chip that's going to power the Playstation three as well as the next generation of Nintendo and Xbox consoles. The *potential* impact of this chip is what makes it interesting. It was preceeded by this article which is also a good read.

I've finally cracked the problem of hwclock hanging during startup and locking hard during shutdown on DELL Dimension 4700's running Ubuntu. You need to add --directisa to tzsetup, hwclock.sh and hwclockfirst.sh. I've put a more detailed answer on this page. Yay, one more bug down. Don't know whether this is a bug that needs to be logged against Warty or not but I'm happy it's resolved.

In my on-going saga of battles with DELL Dimension 4700's and 8400's running Ubuntu, an earlier DELL/Ubuntu battle has reared it's head to bite me in the bum. Ubuntu 4.1.0 (Warty) didn't have the required aacraid / PERC drivers for a DELL PowerEdge 1800 so I ended up using a custom 2.4.28-bf2.4, replete with the aacraid drivers I desired so much. I converted the base install to Ubuntu, walking away quite chuffed with my own cleverness and got on with the rollout on the desktop front. That rollout is nearly ready to go live so I installed *cough*NFS*cough* only to find that NFS isn't compiled into the 2.4.28-bf2.4. My options now are to run the bloody slow nfs-user-server, try the kernel in Hoary or roll my own (others?). None of which leaves me with much feeling of joy for a production environment. To get over the hump I'll be installing nfs-user-server then I'll probably look at rolling my own build of the Warty SMP 686 kernel with added aacraid love later on.