Kevin Carmody: machines, media & miscellanea

I was recently contact by Parker Jones to see if I could add to the development of http://activethanet.com, a wiki site dedicated to clubs and societies in Thanet. I thought to myself, what a great idea, just add yourself. Still, seeing as I don’t live in Thanet anymore I wasn’t sure how I could help, I could think of no other clubs to add. I’d like to be helpful though and I saw my chance in their FAQ. He suggests that people create their own site and then get that added to the list. It really is very easy to do and needs little technical skill, especially if you are using a service like GooglePages or Webs. These are easy enough to do, but in my opinion lack a something important, your own .com/.co.uk address. What you can do though is get a .co.uk address from a domain registrar and then get it to just forward to your Google Sites webspace. I’ve used uk2.net as my registrar for years, but others I know have recommended 1&1 who also do an easy site builder. It’s always worth having a look around though, it will cost you maybe £15 a year, which is little more than a cheap night out and gives a definite ‘pro’ factor. If you really want some cheap hosting with loads and loads of geeky goodies then I’d recommend a look at Dreamhost, you won’t get the greatest search rankings, but they give you loads of space (off-site storage perhaps?) and do include one click installs for popular software like Wordpress (blogging) and MediaWiki (same as Wikipedia).

If you want to host your own site (not a GooglePages type thing) and still keep your site up in the rankings then then you really need to use a UK hosting server, especially if you are using a .co.uk extension. Maybe then consider shared hosting like 1&1, who have UK servers. Naturally we are spiraling up in cost here, next steps are Virtual Private Servers (VPN) from £15 a month all the way up to dedicated servers where the sky really is the limit. It really depends on whether you are serious about visibility or thinking of this as a business or hobby.

Lets take a look at http://oonagi.co.uk which has been around for eight years, they are hosted on shared server-space with Dreamhost in California, a google search for “oonagi” brings them top, a search for “Thanet music” brings them in 4th, for “Thanet gigs”and nothing till page 3! That has cost about £40 per year, it would probably be a little more but the cost is offset by sharing its space with other sites. Now there are some SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) issues there to start with which could bring them up the rankings, but still it provides a gauge as to cost/visibility balance.

If one thinks about it though, where does traffic come from on a local focused site like a club or society. It is going to be links from other local sites, like Active Thanet or some of the blogerratti (EastcliffRicahard, BigNewsMargate). So to conclude, you can do yourself a free site using any number of web services, just contact some people, get yourself linked and they will come.

EDIT: correction to Active Thanet link.

Now doesn’t that sound like a bad book title? Or even something from the Harry Potter series, which incidentally I’ve just finished listening to the audio books as read by Stephen Fry.

Anyway, i digress. Following on from my previous two EeePC posts, firstly on adjusting the default desktop, then on changing to a full KDE desktop, I’m going to spend today talking about removing the whole Xandros OS and installing Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. Lets first recap as to why we’d want to do this. The Xandros OS that comes with EeePCs is woefully out of date. Open source, and especially desktop Linux, is a fast moving beast. Where one day setting up wifi or connecting to a VPN or playing a DVD may be difficult in Linux one day, the following will not be true the next day. So having a system which feels a few years old and struggles to keep up seems pointless, and in my opinion explains some of the return rates found with Netbook Linux editions. As a further struggle on EeePC, the simple mode is a nightmare to tweak, especially considering those things that we want to tweak should really be done for us anyway. So what I propose is that we update with arguably the easiest and most widely supported distro out there, Ubuntu. I’m going to keep the actual method very succinct as there are 101 tutorials out there (links at the bottom). I’ll stick with what to do and what to avoid:

Ingredients

• Copy of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Desktop. It’s fine to get the Long Term Stable Hardy if you like, but I do recommend the new one.
• Unetbootin for putting Ubuntu on your USB stick
• Ahh yes, the spare USB stick of 1gb or more

Method Open Unetbootin with your USB stick stuck in your machine (you don’t have to do this on your Eee). Unetbootin gives you the option of downloading straight to your USB from the web, but we’ve already downloaded our distro so we just need to select the Diskimage ISO radio button and browse to our downloaded file and hit OK (This is another one of those things you used to have to do manually in the past, ahh the advances of technology sigh). It will tell you when it’s done.

Next we safely remove our hardware (unmount in Linux parlance) and plug it into our little Eeep. Press the power on button and start hitting F2. This takes us to the BIOS menu. I had loads of problems getting this to work right, you have to go to the Boot tab and make sure that your USB key is top of the list in the boot device order (this just means where the computer checks first for an operating system, all computers have this). This is what caught me out, you need to check in both the Boot Device Priority settings AND Hard Disk Drives. for some reason it changes with each consecutive boot which one you need to change, so check both. Save and exit (F10 I think, but it should say).

You should now be booted into an Ubuntu desktop. We’ve not done anything irreversible yet, so for now we can just play. You’ll notice that your WIFI and webcam isn’t working yet, that’s because you don’t have all the drivers you need. That can be fixed once you have installed.

So, let’s assume we are brave and we are going on with the install. Most things you just need to follow the instructions, but here is where I shall give you a little advice. At the partition stage do not use guided, use manual. There are two hard drives in the Eeep, for the smaller of the two (4GB) it should be just system files. You want to set aside 100mb for mountpoint /boot and the rest for mountpoint “/” (known as root). The other hardrive you want a swap the size of your RAM, 1GB in the 901 (some places say twice the size, but one should be ample) and the rest for /home, where all your personal files will be stored. I’ll assume you have finished the rest of the install without issues. :)

Now we have rebooted into our new Ubuntu system we need a little moding to make everything work just right. First and most importantly you need the Array.org Kernel. There are instructions on the site as to how to get it. This will fix such things as WiFi, webcams and hotkeys. After that I recommend adjusting the layout to better suit the screen size. This is very easy to do by right-licking the panels and modifing to suit your needs. Here is mine:

A quick recommendation of some things to avoid.

• Don’t use a specialist distro like ubunu-eee. I know it makes things look easy but you’ll be in trouble if they stop supporting. Standard Ubuntu is stable and here to stay.
• Avoid using user made scripts that claim to ease all your woes. They may just cause you more problems than they fix and because you didn’t do each bit yourself step by step you won’t know how to fix it.

Now, here are some of those tutorial links: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC http://wiki.eeeuser.com/installing_ubuntu_8.04 http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=51041

Which means I’ve come round to my promised post time. I don’t really have a lot to say for myself though. Perhaps I’ll chat about what I’ve been up to.

I was back in Thanet over the weekend, just thought it was about time I visited me Ma. For my efforts I got roped into helping set-up the Manston Parish Plan open-day. Some of the local residents wanted to get together some form of formalised plan in order to give some direction to the parish council as to what they people in the area wanted. I think this is a really good idea, a sentiment initially shared by a hundred or so other residents of Manston, it helps guide the councilors in their decisions on funding allocations rather than just pampering to their own whims. During previous village events a team of volunteers handed out questionnaires covering topics such as transport links and traffic, public services (like doctors, etc), clubs and the local environment with a reasonable response rate. I’ve also been ‘lucky’ enough on previous visits to help input this information into spreadsheets so the information can be easily analysed. What I found on reading through was that many people wanted to see all sorts of events being run, such as computing courses or art classes, but no-one was willing to help out run them.

This attitude is very familiar to me as it is something I have encountered with any and every event I have organised in the past. The attitudes of apathy from others are morally draining when you are trying to do something for the better in your community. If what I saw in typing up the figures from the survey wasn’t enough the fact that the open day in the village hall on Saturday, asking for further discussion, had around ten people come visit. I wasn’t all that surprised to be honest, I was in the Jolly Farmer the night before and you could see people visibly squirm when asked if they were coming, various weak excuses rolling off their tongues. It still doesn’t make it any less disappointing to find that residents care so little about their village that they won’t spare ten minutes to come and tell someone who’ll listen what they think.

So Saturday night I went out with Danny. After what happened during the day I was looking forward to a good ale session. We started in the Dickens in Boardstairs, which was just snoozeville. I even question whether it was actually a Saturday night and I’d not just got my days mixed up. To resolve we decided to leave Sleepy Hollow and head to the bright lights of Canterbury city. This was certainly more bustling and it was good to go to the Hobgoblin again after such long time. The place was as punk-rock as ever and good fun to be in. Funny really, we have a Hobgoblin pub here in Oxford but it’s just not the same. I expected it to be just as cool as the Canterbury one but it just doesn’t have the same character. Anyway, after that we headed to the Orange Street Music Club and I’m pleased to say that was as delightful as ever, with a fantastic trad-folk band playing some soaring music. The down side? Last train out of Canterbury to Thanet is ten past eleven so we only got to hear a couple of songs and had to do a runner. Still, a good night out.

And now, well, it is Monday and I have work to do. See you next week.

Since it’s only a few days since the release of Ubuntu’s Intrepid Ibex, I though I might do a quick note on how to upgrade from the Long Term Stable (LTS), Hardy Heron (if you are a Windows user and you just want to try out the new version, you can use the Wubi Installer and treat it just like any other Windows application). It is worth noting that a new install will often be a far quicker process and provide you with a clean slate. You can also save almost all of your personal settings and files if you installed / (known as the root directory) and /home in separate partitions first time around, allowing you to just install the new OS in /

In this post though we shall assume that you just with to upgrade an existing install and as such save all your setting, files, etc, with the minimum of fuss.

Normally when a new release comes around your update manager will tell you that a new version is available. Yet from Hardy to Intrepid this will not happen because Hardy is an LTS. There is, as always, a way around this. It is as follows; System > Administration > Software Sources, then the Updates tab. At the bottom it will say Release Upgrade. You’ll then want to change that from “Long term support releases only” to “Normal”. After that head back to System > Administration > Update Manager and you will be offered the choice to upgrade to the latest release. Click that button and follow the prompts.

As you run through the upgrade you will be prompted with questions as to whether you want to keep/merge/replace certain configuration files, normally ones you have changed. There is one that you must replace (or merge if you know what you are doing) and it is called menu.list. This file selects things like what kernel to boot from and you should use the latest that comes with Intrepid. Good luck.

In my blog post the other week I discussed how to use the terminal to add software to your EeePC. Though this is the simplest approach we find that we come across certain disadvantages. Firstly, the only way to launch our newly installed software is to type it’s name into the terminal. It is possible to adjust the interface and add icons to desktop by editing the simpleui.rc file. Let us be honest though, this is not exactly what we want to be doing - editing config files is so 1970s. Infact, this whole simple desktop layout is a little on the weak side. What we want is a full desktop environment, with start buttons, automatic adding of new programs to menus and all sorts. This is our plan for today.

Once again we shall need our trusty terminal, so first things first hit Ctrl+Alt+T. Now enter the following:

wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/eeepcrepos/key.asc

sudo apt-key add key.asc

rm key.asc

With these three lines have downloaded a trusted key, added it to our software manager (apt) and finally removed the file. Next job is to add the software source which the key corresponds to. So enter sudo kwrite /etc/apt/sources.list into the terminal and add the following line to the bottom of the file:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.orgeeepcrepos p701 main

Save and exit. Then type sudo apt-get update into the terminal. Now we are all set to install the full desktop. Into the terminal we shall type:

sudo apt-get install advanced-dektop-eeepc

Now to try out our new desktop we just have to press our power button, you will then find a new icon added to our logout menu saying Full Desktop. Hey presto, we now have one of the most powerful desktop environments available in the open source world, KDE 3.5. This is a system that easily rivals the Windows interface in versatility and power, yet still has a similar feel to more common desktops.

Now we know how to add new programs, modify our interface and even get a decent desktop to our little Eee. Well, that is all just great, but for me (and perhaps you dear reader) this is just not enough. The Xandros distribution that comes with this machine is just not modern enough, for example it still comes with Firefox 2, which is sluggish compared to it’s latest iteration. I have also been having problems with connection to certain types of WPA2 at my university which apparently is tied to Xandros. What we need is a thoroughly modern operating system, installing that shall be the subject of my next EeePC post.

Just a quick one today. It seems that cookies are more than just tasty little treats. I’ve never advocated all-out removal of internet cookies, they are useful way to save you time when you are on the internet. They generally have a Time To Live and are restricted as to how much information they can store. More often then are just used as a marker for websites when you return so they can help you carry on where you left off. Of course, if you really want to rid yourself of them then it’s generally a very easy process… Not so with Flash cookies. To be honest, I only learnt about them from a recent Slashdot article. Alas, you can’t just delete these in the way you can a normal cookie. They also have the ability to store far more information and don’t have the option for an unlimited Time To Live. Not cool at all! Still, you are able to delete them, but only through Macromedia’s website using a flash GUI. Personally, I feel this leaves a more pressing issue though, if we can only delete them through Macromedia’s website, who is controlling what they put on your machine. Yet another black mark against proprietary systems.

Firstly, my apologies for missing last weeks post. I was having a delightful holiday in Italy with various members of my family and the g/f. Lovely it was, we stayed in a Trullo and a fun time was had by all.

Before I left I got myself a new computer, a netbook of the EeePC 901 variety. After consideration of the various flavours of netbook available (Acer One, MSI, different types of eee)I carefully selected this for the following reasons: a) Atom Processor, I saw little point in getting another Celeron as I would want this for working and so to have at least a little bit of spunk. b) 20GB SSD, you get more hard drive space if you select.. c) Linux pre-installed. I guess it was obvious I was going to get a Linux version, I see no point in paying more money for lower quality equipment just to have XP, especially if I’m just going to remove it anyway.

As Tony has previously pointed out, these machines come with a restricted user interface (they are for newbies after all). So with the machine barely out of its box it was time to start nudging and adjusting. Here’s what we want to do: add more software, customise the interface in the normal mode and if we want to go further see how we can get a more traditional desktop.

First thing you need is access to a terminal so you can use the command line. This would often be the very thing that people new to Linux would want to avoid, but if you want to feel like the machine is working for you rather than the other way around then a bit of time at the command line is just what the doctor orders. Fear not, there is nothing too demanding here, just press Ctrl+Alt+T. There, now isn’t that hard to see?! One of the points of any Unix-like system is choice, there are many paths to follow that can get you to the same endpoint, in this instance the terminal offered (xterm) is very hard to see with the small screen. You can change it quite easily to the more user friendly konsole:

sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

Select konsole and the next time you Ctrl+Alt+T you’ll get a terminal where you can adjust font size as well as the colour scheme.

Now to have the choice of adding software. Xandros, who built the eee’s distro, is based on Debian, and as such means there is a lot of software out there for it. We now have to add the repositories (a central server where all the software is held) to our list of sources. Grab your trusty terminal and enter the following to pull up a text editor

sudo kwrite /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add the following to the bottom of the file

deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/u[kg-srv2 etch main contrib non-free

Save and quit, then in terminal run

sudo apt-get update

After that you can install new software using the Synaptic package manager by typing

sudo synaptic

from the terminal.

The problem now is that you can only access the programs you’ve installed by typing their name into the terminal. What you really want is to add icons to your usual interface. These will have to be added individually to a configuration file… but I think thats enough for one day. I’ll post the method for that and how to get a full desktop later in the week. In the meantime I’d suggest having a browse through the eeepc user wiki.

Just a quick and easy one this time! At least once a week I get called up to fix a computer and it’s almost always the same thing; spyware. So here is the usual rundown on how I approach a fix.

First thing I (almost) always say: No, there is no need to wipe your computer, we can just clean it up.

Question; So, do you have an up to date Anti-Virus program? Usual answer; I have McAfee/Norton, but the subscription has run out. Solution? If you have cash to burn get rid of McAfee/Norton and get either http://www.kaspersky.com/ or http://www.eset.com/ or check this list. If you are cheap then get Avast (or maybe AVG, though they have had some really bad press).

Thats the easy one out the way, adware/malware/spyware is a little trickier. I am yet to find a single program that can deal with all occurrences. I normally go with the classic Ad-Aware free edition by Lavasoft, but it certainly isn’t the be all and end all. The trick is often to run a search using the name that comes up. For example, a recent problem computer I came across had adware titled ‘AntiVirus 2008’ which pointed out every couple of minutes that the computer may be infected (really?!?!) and suggested downloading the program. This was effectively removed using http://www.superantispyware.com/ where Ad-Aware failed. I also strongly recommend that you use Microsoft’s Windows Defender regardless of whether you are already experiencing problems or not. There is a short list in this section of wikipedia to illustrate what is out there, but as I said, a search is normally the order of the day. Bonus tip here, free anti-adware programs need to be re-run manually, just do it every couple of weeks.

After you have dealt with all that it’s time to really get your machine back to it’s former glory. This is normally very simple. Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs. Clear out all that old junk that you never use. Now look to your system tray (bottom right corner), see all those icons which are taking up most the bottom of your screen? Do they all need to be there? You may not want to uninstall them (MSN Messenger being a great example here), but you probably don’t need all those programs right now. Go to each one in turn, open them up, find the preferences and disable any option which says something like ‘open on Windows Start-up’. Once you’ve done that click Start>Programs and look for Start-up Programs, then delete the shortcuts from there of the programs you may not need when you first boot.

I’m a little tense about saying this, but I’d hate to feel I was holding back… on XP: Start>Run>type msconfig and hit enter. You can then look across the tabs to Services. You can untick the background processes you don’t need, but please do so with extreme caution. If you’re not sure then either search it or leave it (latter probably being the case).

If this is the first time you’ve done a clean then this process will probably take you about twenty minutes (though first boot scans from anti-virus can take some time, maybe go do some weeding). By the end though you will have a slick machine that makes you grin all over.

Maybe this doesn’t solve your problem though. Maybe your computer has died a painful death and you can’t even boot it! This will more likely than not happen some day. Fear not, you can still recover your files by keeping a copy of Knoppix around on a CD. It has saved my skin and the hard work of many of my fellow students many a time (when they thought to come to me that is :P). It’s a graphical desktop on a disk and is the saviour of many a sysadmin.

Note, there are almost certainly better ways, and I would always recommend doing your own research by reading some more reputable blogs and columns.

Today is the start of a new academic year at Oxford Brookes. As we would say here “Week 1”. I get to start this new year with no lectures today, which frankly is quite lucky as I still have many things to sort out. Still, I decided to get up early, well, early for me, 9:30am. A habit I’m going to have to get into as I’ve been tending to sleep till noon through the summer. There always seems to be something I need to do at 2am.

Last week was freshers week (Week 0?!) so I tried to go out and party a little. Since moving into my new house and taking some time gardening I’ve found that I wasn’t really going out, so I decided to make a bit of an effort. We were convinced that Saturday would be a big party at a student union club, Blitz. It had always been one of the best nights of the week, which left us convinced that it would be so this time with many old friends around. Guess we were the only ones who thought so. There were a few friends there, but to be honest it was only the ones we’d invited personally. Still, a fun night regardless.

Recovery from a Saturday night is easy when the sun is out. We are lucky in our new house in having a small gate from our back garden straight onto one of the largest parks in Oxford. South Park has one of the best views over the city so we had little to do than lay back, drink tea and soak in the view. An absolute treat considering the horrid weather we’ve been having of late.

And now to work.