First, I do not claim to be a guru. I strive to become more knowledgeable on many subjects, and regard my writing as a significant part of the learning process. I like to share knowledge, write, and teach, but I cannot claim having ‘great’ knowledge as there are so many experts out there with far greater knowledge.  I have always turned to them as teachers and guides, and as such I often regard them as a ‘guru’ on the subject.  Let’s examine the definition of a ‘guru’. According to the Wikipedia, a guru is:

“one who is regarded as having great knowledge, wisdom and authority in a certain area, and who uses it to guide others (teacher). Other forms of manifestation of this principle also include parents, school teachers, non-human objects (books) and even one’s own intellectual discipline”.

Ubuntu as explained in Wikipedia is both a philosophy and a computer OS named after that philosophy.

“is an ethic or humanist philosophy focusing on people’s allegiances and relations with each other.”  … ”I am what I am because of who we all are.”

Ubuntu, to care about others, is a noble virtue.  This is why the logo for my site shows Buddha, the enlightened one, thinking about Ubuntu.  Buddha was a great teacher, truly among the greatest of all gurus.

Although I’ve most often focused on writing about Ubuntu the operating system for computers.  I intend to also write about many other topics, which will hopefully extend this overall philosophy of Ubuntu and sharing wisdom with others.

Today I was watching the Egyptian crisis unfold on live Aljazeera video stream (which is almost HD quality).   After I tried looking to see what was the headlines on Skynews in Firefox, but it responded with “Search for suitable plugin? The required software to play this file is not installed.”   When I click search, it looks but responds with “No packages with the requested plugins found” when searching for codecs to play back Windows Media 9 stream.   This is surprising because I have the “ the ubuntu-restricted-extras package” already installed. VLC will play the stream outside of Firefox so something is reading the file.  So how do I get the stream to play within Firefox which uses the Totem Browser Plugin 2.30.2?

Here’s what I tried. There was an informative thread here on the ubuntu forums, discussing something similar.  So installed Medibuntu repos to start.  I was then able to install the w32codecs package.  I restarted Firefox but no change.

I added the repository for the latest gstreamer with “sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gstreamer-developers”, then updated and upgraded. I then restarted Firefox and it works now!  Sad to say this is how complicated it was to get a simple thing like a Windows Media 9 video stream working properly in Ubuntu 10.04.   I guess it has to do with the complicated proprietary format licensing issues.

Installation: enter these commands in your terminal:

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Web Applications:

Similar to Mozilla Prism but faster and easier to use, Chromium will let you turn a web site into a ‘web app’ which can be launched from a desktop icon, into a separate application window.   Each web app, running shows an icons in your task bar.   The web site appears like a separate applicatios without all the clutter of the normal web browser user interface.  Using Chromium’s ability to make application shortcuts on your desktop is really ideal for small screen computers like netbooks.  I like having my most frequently used web sites ready to load with a single click.  It gives much tighter integration with the OS, and is much more ‘distraction free’.    Right now I have set up on my netbook desktop a bunch of web apps like; google talk, mibbit, google contacts, slim timer, remember the milk, and more.

Here’s a short little video from Google showing how easy it is to do.

The last time I installed Ubuntu on this computer, I had made two separate partitions, one for the OS and the other for my /home files. This is a good idea because it makes doing upgrades much easier. The Ubuntu version on the box has not been updated in quite some time, so it would be a waste of time to try and download all the updates and upgrades. I’ve downloaded the daily build ISO of Lucid and have installed it on a USB memory stick using System–>Administration–>Create a USB startup disk.

One additional chore involved after installing the newer version onto my root partition is reinstalling any additional packages that I had. There aren’t that many so this step should go pretty fast. So after I post this, I’ll install Lucid and get back to you on how my upgrade turned out. I’m interested in seeing how fast the boot time of Lucid is currently. The developers have intended to achieve a blazing fast 10 second boot time on a Dell 9 Mini netbook. Here goes!

—> An hour later….

Ok Done! Here’s what happened. My first challenge was figuring out what keys to press to get into the boot menus. After finding it was f11, I found this machine was old enough that booting by USB didn’t seem to be supported. So I ended up just burning it to CD-R and installing it over my old root partition using the custom install options. I also chose to use EXT4 this time for root, and careful keep my home partition the same. During the install it asked for my user name and password, and voila upon reboot everything was there on my desktop just as I left it.

Boot time WAS in fact, UNBELIEVABLY faster than ever! In general this version seems to just fly, fast, like I’ve never seen before. I just thought this old P4 system was slow, but it moves so much faster now. From opening files in the desktop, to firefox surfing the web or playing games with a lower ping. This new version of Ubuntu looks rather promising.

A couple snags I’ve noticed so far – not surprising considering this is only an Alpha 2 release – is the NVIDIA drivers that were automatically detected didn’t work, so I had to add a different repository and install more recent drivers from there.

Oh, and I also now have access to my UbuntuOne and can sync my tomboy notes from my netbook to my desktop.

Now I have internet anytime anywhere on my netbook that I have a cell signal. It’s slow, with tests ranging from 22kbps+ depending on the test site. http://i.dslr.net/iphone_speedtest.html returned an average latency of 1200ms and 55kbps speed.

I’m content with accessing mobile sites for basic web access, via my cell where I can’t get faster WIFI access. It’s fine for basic stuff like email, blogging, chatting, checking news, stocks, and weather.

It was quite the complicated pain and a lot of hacking hours to iron all the kinks out to get it working. Problems mainly in getting all the parts configured correctly: the cellphone, browser proxy, blueman-applet and so on. The steps I followed will need to be the topic of another future blog entry…

I basically followed instructions posted on page 12 of the NB200 thread on Ubuntu forums by jeroenimo (with minor changes). Thanks for your help!

1) I downloaded and installed the omnibook-source package from here

2)Edit the source code to fix a pesky error:
cd /usr/src/
sudo tar xjf omnibook.tar.bz2
cd modules/omnibook/
sudo nano init.c
hit ctrl-w and search for this:
proc_entry->owner = THIS_MODULE;
when you get to that line add two // in front of it and make sure it look like this:
// proc_entry->owner = THIS_MODULE;
ctrl-o ctrl-x to save the file

3) compile and install the fixed source code
sudo m-a build omnibook-source -O
sudo m-a install omnibook-source

4) test it out. You should see a bluetooth icon appear in your system tray.
sudo modprobe omnibook ectype=12
entering the hciconfig command in the terminal should return some info, something like this if it’s been detected:
$ hciconfig
hci0: Type: USB
BD Address: 00:22:58:F3:46:F9 ACL MTU: 310:10 SCO MTU: 64:8
UP RUNNING PSCAN ISCAN
RX bytes:1035 acl:0 sco:0 events:41 errors:0
TX bytes:1370 acl:0 sco:0 commands:37 errors:0

5) Now make it run upon booting your netbook:
sudo nano /etc/modules
add this line and save the file
omnibook

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/omnibook.conf
add this line:
options omnibook ectype=12

save the file. Now when you reboot, the bluetooth icon should show that it is running.

6) after sleep or hibernate if it doesn’t reappear, you can reactivate it
by running in the terminal:

sudo rmmod -f omnibook && sudo modprobe omnibook ectype=12

You should see the bluetooth icon reappear. However you’ll want to make this automatic so create a file that restarts bluetooth, like this:

sudo nano /etc/pm/power.d/89bluetooth

and put this in:

#!/bin/bash
rmmod -f omnibook
modprobe omnibook ectype=12

Save the file and change the permissions so it can be run
sudo chmod +x /etc/pm/power.d/89bluetooth

Now after sleep and resume, you should see the bluetooth icon reload in the system tray.

Of course this poses a challenge to run the .exe BIOS update program when you don’t have a windows partition ! So what to do?

UPDATE
I tried using unetbootin to make a bootable freedos USB key, but get a “invalid opcode at 0007″ error. Instructions here
And now back to the previously posted entry…

Here‘s an interesting thread on Ubuntu Forums discussing ways to do it in Ubuntu without windows. Most of the discussion here is about using CD’s and floppys… so skip it and take a look at the next idea.

Here‘s a guide showing how to make a bootable DOS USB memory stick to run the flash utility. The USB should be <4gb because of DOS size restrictions. I’ll look for a spare USB memory stick to do the update with and report back soon.

Flashrom is a linux program in the Ubuntu repositories that can be installed with sudo apt-get install flashrom. However since it’s reported to not work with the Acer Aspire One or the EEE 701 I have doubts if this would work on the NB200. When it comes to BIOS flashing who’s willing to experiment and risk turning it into a brick?
Be careful when you do a BIOS update, because it is potentially destructive!

A fix to get bluetooth working was posted in the forms recently. Page 12 in the big NB200 thread on Ubuntu Forums has some postings (118 &119) showing how to get the bluetooth working in Ubuntu. If I can find a bluetooth device around home, I’ll have to give this try and report on this as well.

So what to do? You want it now. Be nice and use bittorrent, so we can all share without clogging the servers. When you’re finished leave it open to share with others. You can read more about using bittorrent to download Ubuntu here

I was blown away with how fast it downloaded… less than 30 minutes!

Here’s a link to the torrents:
http://torrent.ubuntu.com/simple/karmic/desktop/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

http://torrent.ubuntu.com/simple/karmic/netbook-remix/ubuntu-9.10-netbook-remix-i386.iso.torrent

So what’s the news?

1) Thank you! Some awesome responses from readers since my last post! Thanks for your questions and comments, and sorry for not replying faster.
First thing to do is set up my blog to email me when someone comments….

2) Virtualbox: I’m happy with the performance of virtualbox running windows 2000 on this machine. As a teacher I need it for running Markbook at work. I save my marks for my classes on a USB memory key, so I can use my netbook or the desktops at work for entering marks. I have a dual boot working on the NB200, but rebooting into windows for Markbook takes longer, and it prevents me from using my beloved ubuntu programs.

3) GradeL: Added to my programs under Education was GradeL version 0.11.1. It’s a program for teachers to track class marks and attendance. It’s similar to the windows program gradekeeper. A good grade book program is well needed in the linux world, so the development here is exciting to see. Installing was easy through a .deb package. I have to say I was impressed at how helpful and quickly the author Allen Murphy replied to my setup questions. Initially there were not printers showing up in the dialog box, so I had to enter the line :
Printcap /etc/printcap
to /etc/cups. More discussion on this here.
I found in this version some functions were still buggy and the program crashed occasionally. I found it useable, but in the end our adminstration required Markbook to be used by all teachers anyway.

4) Tomboy: Every day I’m logging into tomboy my lesson notes at the end of each class. I have a Tomboy note for each course, where I copy my blackboard notes, assignments and student issues are recorded. At the start of the semester I copied a simple text calendar to each note, so the overall semester course days, holidays, reporting deadlines and exam dates are set up in advance. This routine seems to be working really well.

5)Gnome Panels: I found the UNR program launcher to have changed in one update last month, where the program icon size was increased with too much wasted space between the icons, so I had to scroll down to see all the icons. This should be something users can customize in a preferences panel (maybe in a future version?) It was slower and more cumbersome to use, and I didn’t like it anymore, so I’ve disabled it and now use gnome panels. I added the ‘drawer’ widget to keep my ‘favourites’ only a mouse click away.

To disable it:
System–>preferences–>startup applications: uncheck Netbook Launcher

Screen real estate is limited and so I do enjoy using the Maximus Window Management. This causes the window to open maximized and the window frame to be removed. The window title becomes a tab in the gnome menu bar with the window picker applet. If I want to have a window frame to resize the window smaller or make it ‘sticky’ and always stay on top, I just press Alt and with the mouse grab the window and pull it down, and voila it suddenly pops out into a smaller window.
So now with the gnome panels, my system looks a little bit more like a typical Ubuntu gnome system. But one thing I should fix; my desktop always remains blank without icons for some reason.

6) Smaller cable: Park of the bulk in my bag is from the 6ft power cable. I’m planning on getting a shorter power cable for the power adaptor from amazon or SF Cable I’ll be sure to update more about this when it arrives.

7) Wifi: A recent system upgrade seems to have fixed that issue with flaky wireless. I just suspend and resume as I like and it works great!

8 ) USB transfer speed: This is an issue I’ve read on the forums that is an ongoing problem for people using both ubuntu and windows… USB 2.0 hardware is supposed to be capable of 60MB/s. I can copy large data files to or from an external drive at 25MB/s. And I can copy large data files from an external drive to another external drive at 17/MB/s. Yes this is a bit of a speed loss compared to the theoretical 60MB/s. Not sure why this is, and research on Ubuntu forums leads on a wild goose chase. Does anyone have any idea why this is or if speeds can be improved somehow?

9)Evolution: I swear I posted about my new found love for Evolution already, but don’t see it on the blog yet…  I’m now a full time Evolution user, and have switched back after using Thunderbird for a year.   In the past year it’s had some great changes, so I’m using it for an IMAP email client with Gmail. (Thunderbird with POP was not sending me all my messages and friends were gettting annoyed).

The calendar does a two way sync perfectly with Google calendars now.  I find I need to turn off the side bar to comfortably see the whole calendar month view.

I’ve mentioned before how I like the package called ‘contacts’ that works with Evolutions address book.  So I have that in my favourites drawer along with the little ‘Tasks’ package that works with the To Do list in Evolution, and ‘Dates’ which gives a simpler view of the calendar. You don’t have to load the whole evolution suite with these little apps. They work very nicely on this netbook with the small screen, and contribute to a minimal lighter feel.  The website for Contacts, Tasks, and Dates is here.  You can install them in the terminal with:

sudo apt-get install contacts tasks dates

10) Only 3 days to go until the official release of Karmic 9.10!   Although I suppose that on the release day, it’s entirely possible that nothing will happen on my NB200, because it’s already fully installed.  Maybe an update might happen?

I’ve never installed an alpha release months in advance before.   Overall I’ve been impressed with how well the pre-release software ran, and glad I tried installing it in July.  It only got borked once after an update in September, but that was quickly remedied by a dist-upgrade.

Sound: it’s working through both the headphones and speaker now!! Thanks to the kernel patch that is being developed by Leann on the bugreports thread. Installing the .deb was very easy. It’s not perfect yet, but the latest patch for Jaunty has the mic working as well! I’m looking forward to using skype with mic and camera on this netbook soon!

Wireless: I still find I need to run this command in the terminal after resuming sometimes, or wifi grinds to a useless halt.
$ sudo ifconfig wlan0 down
All it does is force the wifi to shut down and it reconnects automatically to my wireless router and we’re back at full speed. It’s a tiny bit annoying, I’m sure it could be put into a script for resuming from sleep mode.

Windows: I wish setting up a dual boot Windows and Ubuntu, “just worked” as is often said about Ubuntu, but not this time. After installing Ubuntu, I needed to modify my grub2 scripts in order to add the windows partition to the grub menu. It works now, and I can boot into windows or Ubuntu. I’d read many people’s experiences who had ‘destroyed’ their windows partition installing Ubuntu, and was pleased to find that didn’t happen!
To set up a dual boot involves editing some code, and it turns out Ubuntu v 9.10 Karmic is using grub2 now, which is quite different from what the old grub. There is no menu.lst in /boot/grub/ like there was in the old grub. Now it’s autogenerated and at /boot/grub/grub.cfg It’s not ideal to manually edit this file, because it will be overwritten by the scripts which generate it each time grub2 is updated.

A solution posted by editing /boot/grub/grub.cfg is posted here
This not recommended as it is temporary and will be overwritten on the next automatic update of grub.cfg

Another solution (I’ve not used) that’s posted to get it to autodetect is on bugreports here

Here’s a guide that’s posted on Erics blog (but change your entry to Windows XP instead of Windows 7)

A rather detailed tutorial on using grub2 in ubuntu is posted here:

Case: I found a perfectly sized slip case made by Targus at Walmart for $25 CAD. It’s called the “NETBOOK Slipskin Peel mini-notebook case, lightweight slim case. Fits up to 10.2 widescreen compatible”. The code at the bottom reads TSS111CA. I didn’t want anything bulkier than than, or a separate bag for it, so I can slip it into my work bag, protected from bumps, but taking up the least bulk possible.

Battery life: At first I thought the charger was annoyingly big, but I find I can leave it at home during the day and charge at night when I get home. Battery life on this netbook is mindblowing, and unlike anything I’ve ever used before. I can use it all day without needing a charger.
There are a few things that can be done to extend the battery. With heavy use, the battery life is less than the advertised time of 9 hours at max. I’ve been experimenting with powertop in the terminal, and with a fully charged battery, running only the terminal, screen dimmed to min, wifi off, and other tweaks recommended by powertop, the ACPI estimate went down to 9 hours power remaining and something like 7.5 watts power use estimate. In reality, I’d be sucking up the power much faster with wifi on, screen brightened up to be seen in bright light, running Firefox and multiple programs at once. The other factor that helps to give the all day computing is how I can close the lid, and instantly it’s in sleep mode. And then upon opening the lid, resume is instant (after entering my password for security).

Bluetooth: I’ve read in the dedicated thread on the forums here that people now have it working. I’ve not much use for it currently so I’ve not personally tried messing with it yet.

Going paperless: I can see this netbook replacing the multiple binders I’ve been using at work every day, and carting a ton of paper to and from home. This netbook will weigh the same no matter how many ‘pages’ I store on it. I have been using multiple binders that increase in weight with every page added. This netbook weighs about the same as a light binder with 200 pages of standard copy paper in it.
This netbook should replace my pocket filofax, my notepad journal too record daily events at work, and my binder of documents. These days 90% of the info distributed to staff at work is posted online in our groupware or sent via email. Printing to PDF to store on my netbook is better than printing to paper and storing it in a binder.
For anything that is sent to me in paper, I will need to type it into an app on the netbook or perhaps scan it to pdf or something
I’m setting a goal for myself with this netbook to become more ‘paperless’ than I’ve ever done before–and I think it may more possible than ever before. I’m sure to blog about this more later.

Ebook Reader: Why would anyone buy a Kindle or Sony ebook reader when for about the same price they can get this netbook, which is a full computer and beautiful ebook reader. After installing the latest adobe acrobat reader, I’m loving the ability to fullscreen and rotate pages using keyboard commands.
If you haven’t yet, try reading an pdf ebook with your netbook oriented on your lap like a regular book (with the keyboard on the side). CRTL-L for fullscreen and CTRL-SHIFT-+ for rotate. Use CRTL and numbers 1 to 4 for adjusting the size of the page onscreen. The left and right mouse buttons (or page up and page down) flip pages while reading. In the preferences you can set page to black and text to white for easier on your eyes in the evening. You will find many great novels are available in pdf for leisure reading (on bittorrent).

Option 1: Press ALT-F2 and enter in the “Run Application” box mozilla-thunderbird -addressbook.
Option 2: Add to your gnome panel a custom launcher using that command.
Option 3: Add to your netbook favorites menu an Addressbook launcher.

But option 3 is the best setup so I’ll show you how:

In the Ubuntu menu, go Preferences–>Main Menu–>Accessories (you can add it under Office or wherever you like) Click the “+New Item” button. A “Create Launcher” window comes up. (In my latest version of “9.10 Karmic Netbook Remix” there’s a bug that doesn’t show the labels.) Here’s what I enter: Application, Addressbook, mozilla-thunderbird -addressbook, Thunderbird Tool.

Click the icon on the upper left to change the icon. I used the one from my old “Contacts” app (see bottom). OK your choices then go back to the Ubuntu menu–>Accessories (or wherever you added it). Right click to add it to your favourites. Done!  I’ve also enjoyed a Favourites drop down menu added to my gnome bar on the top right. Addressbook fast and easy! Here’s a screenshot of what my netbook setup looks like:

If you use Evolution, a great little gnome app in Ubuntu is “Contacts” which quickly opens your Evolution addressbook for managing contacts. I used it side by side with Evolution for a year and liked it. I would continue using it but I haven’t figured out how to export Thunderbird contacts into it. So I’ll just stick with using the Thunderbird addressbook. Adding a launcher for the Thunderbird Addressbook like a separate mini app makes “Contacts” pointless anyway.

Comparison Benchmarks:
15.8 sec. : Core2 Quad 1600 Mhz, 4096 Cache
38.48 sec. : Athlon 64 2800+ 2ghz
55.03 sec : P4 2.4 Ghz
57.18 sec. : Centrino 1.3 Ghz
58.74 sec. : Athlon 2400+
66 Sec. : Intel P4, 1 GB RAM, 2Ghz
71.4 sec. : Eee PC – 701 4G – Intel Celeron M 900MHz
74.361 sec. : P4 M 1800+ @ 1200 Mhz

77.6 sec : this machine
85.410sec. : P4 1500 @ 1495 Mhz
88.2 sec : Acer Aspire One A110L – Atom N270 @1.6GHz
150 Sec: Pent. M 1.7Ghz 256MB RAM
155 sec. : Pentium III, 700Mhz, 256 MB PC100 RAM
203.8 Sec. :Celeron 566Mhz
209.3 sec. : PowerBook G4 17″ 1Ghz
214 sec : Mac Powerbook 1.33GHz 17″
256.05 Sec. : P2 350Mhz
340.845 Sec : PII 300MHz / 192MB RAM
53 minutes: P1 133MHz laptop with 32MB RAM, and no L2 cache, Win98
46h,56min : 486SX 33Mhz – 20MB RAM-no FPU

My Score:
toshiba-nb200:~/Desktop$ ./super_pi

Version 2.0 of the super_pi for Linux OS
Fortran source program was translated into C program with version 19981204 of
f2c, then generated C source program was optimized manually.
pgcc 3.2-3 with compile option of “-fast -tp px -Mbuiltin -Minline=size:1000 -Mnoframe -Mnobounds -Mcache_align -Mdalign -Mnoreentrant” was used for the
compilation.
—— Started super_pi run : Fri Jul 24 11:21:15 EDT 2009
Parameter(%i) to super_pi is missing. Parameter value ? 20
Start of PI calculation up to 1048576 decimal digits
End of initialization. Time= 1.120 Sec.
I= 1 L= 0 Time= 3.424 Sec.
I= 2 L= 0 Time= 3.920 Sec.
I= 3 L= 1 Time= 3.920 Sec.
I= 4 L= 2 Time= 3.920 Sec.
I= 5 L= 5 Time= 3.920 Sec.
I= 6 L= 10 Time= 3.940 Sec.
I= 7 L= 21 Time= 3.920 Sec.
I= 8 L= 43 Time= 3.920 Sec.
I= 9 L= 87 Time= 3.920 Sec.
I=10 L= 174 Time= 3.920 Sec.
I=11 L= 349 Time= 3.916 Sec.
I=12 L= 698 Time= 3.916 Sec.
I=13 L= 1396 Time= 3.920 Sec.
I=14 L= 2794 Time= 3.908 Sec.
I=15 L= 5588 Time= 3.892 Sec.
I=16 L= 11176 Time= 3.872 Sec.
I=17 L= 22353 Time= 3.804 Sec.
I=18 L= 44707 Time= 3.684 Sec.
I=19 L= 89415 Time= 3.420 Sec.
End of main loop
End of calculation. Time= 77.269 Sec.
End of data output. Time= 0.388 Sec.
Total calculation(I/O) time= 77.657( 2.072) Sec.
—— Ended super_pi run : Fri Jul 24 11:22:35 EDT 2009

I was puzzled to note that there wasn’t much difference in times if I ran super_pi at 1Ghz than when I ran it at 1.66Ghz. Anyone have any idea why?

Meet the baby: a new ultraportable netbook Toshiba NB200:

During the past week I bought a Toshiba NB200 ‘netbook’ and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix (9.10). I’m happy to say I’ve got it up and running and I’m now currently blogging from this ultraportable. In my opinion this is the future of personal computing and really like what I’ve got! Ultraportable notebook computers, or ‘netbooks’ are suddenly everywhere, less than $400, and selling fast.

Here’s the specifics on this little beauty: (Canadian brown 002 version, on special at Staples.ca for $429)

- June 2009 Editors award from PC magazine and Laptop magazine

-10 inch screen (1024×600), 2.8lbs (1.27 kg), 10″x8″x1″

-N208 Intel Atom, 1GB 533mhz RAM (upgradeable to 2G), 160GB 5400RPM HD, Windows XP preinstalled

-Bluetooth, webcam, SD card reader, 3 USB ports, VGA out port

- 6 cell 63 Wh battery (5800mah) that gives about 6.5 hrs of practical use (Toshiba claim up to 9hrs)

My experience so far:

Initially I kept the box and receipt nearby ready to return it if it wasn’t exactly what I hoped. Overall it is living up to my expectations, and I believe this ultraportable will be something I will use daily for years to come. There’s no doubt that this netbook is made even better by installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix. The keyboard is perfectly usable for touch typing at a normal speed and level of comfort. The battery life is incredible compared to anything I’ve every used before, and undoubtedly is setting the standard for all notebooks to come. (I don’t know why store sell any 3 cell laptop with only 2-3 hours of use!) At this point I think even lighter than this 3lb notebook would be ideal and at times even this will be feeling ‘heavy’ on my shoulder. I’d like lighter but this is the best option for having a ‘real’ fully usable computer with me in my bag. Yes there are pocket linux devices, but their use as a main work computer is limited at best to a quick email, instant messaging and so on. There’s not much need for optical drives anymore with owning 8GB USB keys which are double the capacity of a DVD-R. Using Ubuntu means all my software comes from the net, so I haven’t installed a program from CD in a long time. Perhaps optical drives are becoming obsolete (good riddance, they scratched and oxidized far too easily anyway).

Ubuntu Netbook Remix 8.10

I’m really pleased with my experience of the Netbook Remix of Ubuntu. It is optimized for the netbook hardware, and smaller screens. I’ve tried the original windows installation a few times and it is simply horrid in comparison (annoyingly slow logging in and loading all the demo software, and the desktop interface is too tiny to be pleasant) but then again I’m not a windows fan in any way. I just need to keep a dual boot with windows partition for my work related software. Trying Ubuntu live and installing it from a USB key was a first for me and really cool–up till now I’ve only ever burned Ubuntu on a CD-R. (Better for the environment too, with less old CD-R’s going in the garbage!)

There’s been some initial frustration with getting Ubuntu Netbook Remix properly running with wireless and sound. NOTE: You must boot the windows partition and turn on the wireless first. I feel bad for those eager pioneers who just unboxed and reformatted for Ubuntu-how frustrating that must have been to learn.  I started by doing a dd image of the drive first to backup, which took about 2 hours.  Wireless did not work on Ubuntu 8.1 desktop, nor on 9.10 without installing backports. I instead went for installing the daily build of 9.10 Karmic Koala Netbook Remix, and wireless worked upon booting. It appears a bit faulty currently with the ath9k driver, and the ubuntu forums are abuzz with fixes and tips. However, it’s working well enough for me right now. Sound currently isn’t working out of the front speaker, so if that is important to you, then avoid this notebook currently (the miniature single speaker sucks even when it works). Audio works through the audio out jack for headphones or amplified speakers. Watching a DIVX movie with headphones on the 10″ screen is an absolute pleasure when killing time. SD reader works fine. Suspend and resume work (but appears to not resume WIFI correctly) No working bluetooth yet.

Perhaps at some point I’ll post the steps needed for a fresh install and getting everything running. But I had a few odd things to fix first from the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. The boot time was 3 minutes too slow until I edited grub and removed the read only option. I also needed to edit Grub2 in a whole new way in order to add windows to the dual boot menu. The alsa config needed editing to get audio from the headphones only. Hopefully in a few months the team working on UNR will have this all fixed for an easy installation experience. If they get it right, I’d say the netbook should be sold with this OS as alternative.

Why the new netbook?

Although I currently have a working notebook that works very well with Ubuntu, and I’ve been very pleased with my Dell XPS m1210 I’ve had for a year or two. I originally bought the M1210 with the intent to get a notebook that was more portable than the ‘desktop’ replacement laptop that weighed 12 lbs and had a 15″ screen. The m1210 with 12″ screen weighs 6 lbs or 2.5kg with power adaptor and cost me about a grand if I recall correctly. Yes my Dell has a higher resolution screen and an optical drive but more than twice the cost and weight.

But lately I’ve been wanting something even smaller and lighter to throw in my shoulder bag. My wife gave me for a birthday gift a beautiful leather Roots bag the “Original Briefcase”, that I’ve started to carry with me everywhere. It’s a beautiful bag and a whole other topic. The point is I’ve been surprised how little weight I actually want on my shoulder while walking around town for an hour. So I started looking closer at netbooks.

I did a fair amount of research this month on netbooks, and ended up choosing the Toshiba NB200 (or NB205 as it is in the US) as what I thought was the best option currently. I read quite a few reviews online, and paid attention to the reviews comparing among netbooks the real world issues that aren’t often covered by comparing specs. Each computer maker seems to have a netbook now trying to corner the market, and they’re almost all the same hardware it seems. But good notebook review sites measure practical concerns like screen brightness outdoors, contrast, heat, fan noise, keyboard feel, and actual battery life.

Those of you who’ve read my blog know that I’ve been watching the development of the EEE for quite some time. My sister in-law even got one for her first notebook (and eventually switched to a larger macbook). Netbooks have come a long way in a year or two. Many people’s opinion of the first generation EEE’s was that the battery life was too short, the screen too small (hard on the eyes) and the keyboard too small to comfortably type on. I’m glad I waited and ended up with this little gem.

It’s been a looooong time since I’ve done any Ubuntuguru blogging. But just to prove I’m still alive and neck deep in my beloved ubuntu here’s a little tip about posting to blogs using the gnome-blog package. It didn’t work for me trying to access blogger.com, but appears to work for posting to wordpress. Setup was easy; I selected “Self run wordpress” entered my name and password and my wordpress url and clicked “Lookup blogs” and there it was. (I’ve also tried using blogtk 1.1 but haven’t had any success with getting it connecting yet.)

So why use gnome-blog when my browser is currently open and I could have logged in. The appeal of using this package is it’s simplicity. Is has a nice clean interface that with one click I start writing and with another click I’ve posted. It makes it easy to take a second to go ahead and follow my momentary (and lately fleeting) urge to blog. When there are so many things competing for my time and attention lately, I don’t have time to mess around. I like how the “Post Blog Entry” window (on Ubuntu Netbook Remix) is maximized and pretty much the only thing on my screen so I am focused on my writing.  My only complaint is no button for inserting pictures…

To take a moment to rant… personally I dislike all the visual pollution and clutter that’s happened to web sites in the past 10 years. I recall fondly the simple, to-the-point text web pages that were common in the early years of the web. On most web pages currently there’s two dozen brightly colored little boxes & advertisement everywhere all over the screen, flashing, bleeping, like I’m standing in a casino beside the slot machines in Vegas. It’s made me want to tune out and drop out. Surf no more. I’m spending more time with print materials lately it seems. I like my magazines, which are pleasant to my eyes. No frigging annoying animations hijacking the article I’m reading. Sigh… I had to get that off my chest.

more info here:gnome-blog webpage

Add some secret ninja power to your Ubuntu system today with Easy Crypt. With only a right click you can open or close a ‘top secret’ file, protected by military grade encryption (AES 512-bit Whirlpool). Easy Crypt is a cute little menu which brings the power of TrueCrypt to your system tray. No terminal commands necessary.

If you produce or store any personal data on your desktop or notebook that needs privacy, you should set this up (himmm… that’s just about everyone, isn’t it?). It takes only a few minutes and just might save you from financial fraud, divorce, or getting fired. If ever your notebook is lost or home robbed, you’ll be wishing you had secured those precious files. TrueCrypt creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. The encrypted file system is cross compatible with Linux and Windows, which is advantageous for both portability, and file recovery in case of a system crash. TrueCrypt has been around for a few years, but lacked an easy to use graphical interface on Linux until recent (a slightly more complex GUI is forcefield). I tried using TrueCrypt on Ubuntu in the past, but found it annoying to be entering terminal commands several times a day to access the encrypted file. I find Easy Crypt to be a speedy, practical, and easy to use interface on a daily basis.

With the basic Easy Crypt setup, your locked files are saved as a hidden file in your user directory, located at /home/username/.easycrypt-crypt (although using the ‘expert’ mode you can choose to use a crypt saved at any location, including a usb key).

What I like about using Easy Crypt, not only is it easy to set up and use, but it’s simple to frequently make a backup copy on a CD-RW or DVD-RW on a regular basis. Just drag and drop the file. You may however wish to rename the backup file to something less descriptive than ‘.easycrypt-crypt’.

You can keep a copy of your important personal documents on CD (insurance documentation, financial spreadsheets, and so on) at another location than your home, in case of fire. Keep it at work, or another family member’s house. If anyone takes the CD and tries to open the files, you can be confident it’s secure.

Easycrypt Setup:

You’ll be finished this easy 5 step setup in less than 5 minutes. For the current version (0.2.1.16), here’s what to do:

1) Launch Synaptic and enter the following repository:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/stevenharperuk/ubuntu feisty main restricted universe multiverse

Click reload and search for ‘truecrypt’; mark both truecrypt and easycrypt packages for installation, then apply, and quit Synaptic. (If you don’t know how to use Synaptic Package Manager, the author has posted some installation instructions on his website here. You could also just instead install the .deb file from the author’s website, but this way it will also auto-update to newer versions in the future. )

2) Next, find Easy Crypt in your Applications –> Accessories menu, then run it. The icon will show in your system tray; right click to bring up the menu. You may wish to set the preferences to ‘auto start’ on login so it will always remain in the system tray.

3) If you’ve never used it (or TrueCrypt) before, you’ll need to create a new crypt. Click ‘recreate crypt’, and it will come up with a warning about “destroy the contents–are you sure?”. Since this is our first crypt, this doesn’t apply to us, so click yes.

4) Choose a good password, better yet use a good passphrase. The more random the better. But make sure you remember it well– once you’ve locked yourself out, the information you’ve saved is as good as gone. Try using 7 or more characters mixed with various case letters and numbers. Make up an acronym to help yourself remember, for example “1mnstB4n” could mean “one must not spill the BEANS for now”. If you’re worried you’ll forget it, you could write it down and keep that in a safe place… treat it like your house key…. just don’t write what it’s for beside it!

5) Choose your file system size. If you’re planning on frequent backing up on CD-RW you should choose 700MB. For a DVD (-R / +R / +RW / -RW) sized file, use 4480MB (I understand all DVD media will hold up to this size). I find using the keyboard arrow keys easier to get it exact. Click new to start generating the encrypted file system and wait a few minutes until it’s done. It takes about 3 minutes on my Pentium 4 system to make a 4480MB sized crypt.

Now your encrypted file system is set up! Using it daily is easy peasy. With a mere mouse click on the Easy Crypt logo, the password entry window pops up. You enter your pass and the file system appears as a drive mounted on the desktop. You might consider making a ‘Places bookmark’ in your nautilus side pane for convenience. Start copying those important files over to your encrypted file system now! Be sure to always close crypt when finished, and make burn your backup after you’ve copied a bunch of new files over to it.

It’s some good kung fu for you and looks like Easy Crypt has a bright future in Ubuntu. It will become included in the upcoming Ubuntu release 8.04. Kudos to Steven Harper for coding this lovely gem! For further discussion, the main Easy Crypt thread on Ubuntuforums.org is located here.

In just a few short days since it began shipping, this little devil is a huge hit (“selling one every six seconds”). The Eee PC 4G is available in Canada through Canada Computers for $399 (Currently out of stock), The Source, pccanada.com, infonec.com and NCIX.com (out of stock until Nov 14th). A few entrepreneurs are trying to ebay the unit for $450 to $500. Is this becoming the impossible-to-find-must-have of Xmas07?

There are some nice previews on YouTube showing just how darn small the machine is. (Dimensions: 22.5 x 16.4 x 2.15~3.5 cm. Weight: 0.92 Kg ) The windows XP boot time appears to be under half a minute. The battery life is listed at 3.5 hours. The display is 7-inches with 800×480-pixels, and has a 4GB flash hard drive. It appears to have a quite rare 2 year warranty.

Although it comes preloaded with Xandros Linux, Rupert Goodwins at ZDNet installed Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 on it. The wifi aparently needs ndiswrapper to work. He says that a full Ubuntu install uses up 2.3GB of the internal 4GB SDD.  Another user  reports that an Xubuntu install uses up only 1.4gb  of the SDD.

There’s a discussion forum at Eeuser.com for a step by step guide to loading Ubuntu on the Eee.

It would be interesting to benchmark the Eee PC runing Rescubuntu or Helix and doing a dd image from one external USB2.0 hard drive to another. It could be an ideal portable setup for forensics and data recovery.

Have plenty of time available to complete the process, so plug that laptop in.  Don’t expect to be able to run synaptic to install anything until the upgrade is finished.   You should probably back up first, and consider this upgrading advice.

After all the packages had been downloaded several dialogs checked for ‘keep’ or ‘replace’, the whole installation halts until my response.   I chose to ‘replace’ for each, although I was rather puzzled as to if I’d made the right choice.   Then suddenly the upgrader crashes with 1 hour estimate to go… yikes!

I was afraid if I rebooted I’d be greeted by a totally corrupt system… I searched the forums until I read the terminal commands suggested for this are:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade 

sudo aptitude full-upgrade

That seemed to finish the installation. Upon rebooting, I needed to mess around with my wireless to get it working with the new broadcom 43xx drivers in guty.    So far I like the improvements I see and I think the upgrade process has been worth it, without encountering any major disasters.

It does appear there’s quite a large portion of  people who’ve experienced installation problems.  You can view the poll results.

If you want the CD ISO you’ve got a few options available.

You can download it here, but it’s gonna be slow for a while, cause everyone ‘n their dog is tryna geddit!

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/gutsy/release/

Be nice and use bittorrent. When you’re finished leave it open to share with others. At the morning of release there was 200 seeders and 800 leechers!

http://releases.ubuntu.com/7.10/

http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/

http://releases.ubuntu.com/7.10/ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.torrent -download mirror

Here's the checksum to verify the ISO accuracy:

d2334dbba7313e9abc8c7c072d2af09c *ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso

If you’re patient, use shipit! In 4 to 6 weeks you’ll find a package arrives by post with the official CD’s from shipit for free. Hand a few extra copies out to potential converts. (The official disc looks much less like a pirate warez CD chock full ‘a spyware ‘n viruses.)

https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

While working on resizing the partition on two different laptops, and trying out various LiveCD’s to do the job, I found that partimage appears to be a faster and safer method of resizing a partition when compared to using gparted. In the end I’m now thinking gparted is horribly slow for resizing because you should do a backup first anyway before resizing.

Here’s the situation. I keep all my /home directory on a separate partition with Ubuntu, and it was 96% full (too many episodes of scrubs I’ll bet!?). I was going to resize it using gparted on a liveCD, but thought I’d start making a backup copy of the 15 Gb partition.

I’d found a lovely 500GB (half terra!) Seagate Freeagent USB2.0 drive for only $140 bucks Canadian on redflagdeals. My first try was this new sexy liveCD Partedmagic1.8 which gave me only 8mb/s and everything slowed to crawl. I think there’s a problem with that distro when using a USB drive. It was going to sit there forever, I’m guessing, cause dd is annoying in that it doesn’t display an ETA with estimated time and progress… (dcfldd does a better job at this).  So I cancel and try something else.
I try SystemRescueCD again, which booted this time with the USB drive. When I copied the parition with partimage, I got a blazing 1.4GB/minute and was done imaging the partition in only 12 minutes.

I made my backup copy first, just in case gparted dies during the resizing process… or end up choosing to cancel part way through. Which is what I ended up doing…. It appeared to move the partition, and do a filesystem check and 15 minutes later I start to get an ETA for completing the task… and it tells me that it’s going to take at least another hour to do a read only test of copying the filesystem separately. What!? Probably another 2 hours to actually do it?! Augh! No time for this nonsense. I cancel the process impatiently, and feel smug that I’d actually backed up my partition first before risking losing everything. Now to test if it actually worked. The actual /home partition is now totally messed up with my canceling the gparted resizing process… so I delete it. (I felt brave and hopeful with my new partimage file on the new half terra segate drive. BRING-IT-ON!)

I make a new partition in it’s place, twice as big and restore the partition data with partimage at a blazing 1.63Gib / min a total of 15GiB in less than 10 minutes. In the time it takes me to drive up to the corner store for some eggs, I’d completely imaged, resized and restored my /home partition! SWEET!

The key is that I needed to use gparted to perform a filesystem check on the partitition after it’s been restored so that the filesystem is made to match the partition size.
After imaging and restoring, use gparted or resize2fs to adjust the files system to match the new partition size. Otherwise you’ll have problems with fsck or parted saying “Warning; partition is 18.5 Gib but file system is 16.8GiB” and so on.

In a little over 20 minutes I’d made a backup copy of the partition and restored it.

At one point in this self-imposed challenge I find myself messing with Gparted on the Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 live CD. 99.9% of the time I’m telling myself and everyone this linux distro is the creme-de-la-creme. And while I’m trying to resize the ext3 partition /dev/sda3 (the one with the Ubuntu system installed on it)… I find that gparted won’t let me expand to use the empty space in front of the partition. What? My amazing Ubuntu Feisty live CD has got some limits after all?! Most of the time Ubuntu’s perfection is enough to convince anyone to join the cult.

So I try a ‘work around’ of resizing the partition down enough so that I can copy paste it into the empty space in front….. All seems to be going alright until Ubuntu automatically remounts the new partition in mid process and the copying process stops a half hour later without being verified ok. Sigh… I try a second time.. same problem… So a little reading online and I learn it’s only got gparted v .25 and now theres a new gparted v.33 …

Bring on Gparted live cdv 0.34-8 …and it won’t even boot beyond loading some Adaptec RAID driver where it freezes over…. wow.. at least Ubuntu Feisty loaded!

Bring on System RescueCD v 0.37 … and it doesn’t even boot beyond loading some generic CDRom driver.. .where it freezes…. wow some rescue attempt that is…. at least this distro has boot codes to try and work around the problem…. I try them all…

I check the forums… at the top of each a users post of same problem I have, with no solution found yet… (except try the latest version.. ohh ohh have you tried a boot code?)

Now folks this is not some 64 bit computing project where I need some latest greatest super liqui-cool fiber optic shnazzy dazzy distro… this laptop was made almost eight years ago! The hours are draining away with little progress being made.

And then I find partedmagic v1.8, something I’d never even heard of before … at it actually boots (the audience gasps in awe). It has gparted v 0.34… which allows me to resize the Ubuntu system partition to use the free space in front (where that slimy NTFS partition used to be a few years ago).

I have to say I likes the looks of this one…I could load it into ram, eject the CD, and (I haven’t tried it yet) but use the burner?! This is a whole new level of linux ‘live’ distro… the RAMdisk…

It has a light weight (but attractive) GUI, and useful set of utility programs. Among others it has; dd, dcfldd, dd_rescue, testdisk, shred, xfburn, partimage, rsync, ntfs3g, and of course gparted. I’m certainly adding this sucker to my tool kit… (maybe install it on a USB key for true ninja power?

EDIT:  I found the critical flaw  with partedmagic 1.8 it doesn’t appear to work for me with USB 2.0 drives at a full speed… it’s agonizingly slow like theres something really wrong with it.  Until this is fixed I’d avoid trying to do anything over an external USB hardrive.  It sure looked promising.. so hopefully this gets fixed soon to be more ‘plug n play’ userfriendly.

Visit aiotrade.org and try out their java program.    All I needed to  do was download the zip file and  extract it, and right click on the file  aiotrade in the bin folder to set the properties, permissions , execute checkbox to ‘allow’.     My first glance at it leaves me quite impressed at the quality of the  program.   After adding a symbol to the list, it automatically downloads the data from the net and displays a beautiful looking  chart,  with 20 technical indicators available.  It appears to have support for real time charting through IB if you trade with them.  It gives a large set of trend line drawing options , tabs to quickly switch from daily to weekly or monthly time periods, and zoom in or out with the keyboard.   Possibly the best linux stock trading software I’ve seen yet?  If only it had a portfolio manager… sigh.

SMTM is found in synaptic, and is launched with ALT-f2 smtm command.  It’s quite easy to use to manage your stock portfolio.  I found the font was set to a messed up bitmap, and ugly to look at.  It took me a few tries to figure out the date of purchase should be entered in YYYY-MM-DD format.  A right click on the stock and it loads a chart.. well it *should* but doesn’t always.

Grism is quite promising, user friendly, attractive to look at,  but I’ve often found it buggy and a work in progress being only at version 0.81.  Eventually I hope the finished product will be ready to install in synaptic.  One of the best up and coming!  Something ubuntu desparately needs!

Obviously the growth and success of linux and the open source community has got Micro$oft feeling a little threatened. They’ve come out swinging, launching a full out assault against the ‘enemy’. Perhaps they feel it’s now become a fight or die situation? You’d have thought the anti-trust lawsuits of yesteryear against Microsoft would have taught them a lesson and maybe smarten up a bit. It was only a couple years ago that companies like Microsoft tried this same stunt in Europe… until because of the large public protest, the ‘software patent bill’ was thrown out altogether.

There’s a few people who disagree, but Microsoft seems to believe they never copy Apple’s original innovation, or rip off intellectual knowledge from Sony. They’re innocent of all misdoings… aren’t they? Microsoft would like the world to accept that “mouse clicks”, “toolbars” and “menus” can be owned as intellectual property. They’d probably be happiest if all global computer use was rented by the milisecond from Microsoft.

Follow the ongoing reports here.

Perhaps the average consumer is too busy with their everyday lives to care/notice about issues with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the new Windows Vista. But the next time John Q legally purchases audio and video media, and comes home to find out he is forbidden to play it on ‘unauthorized’ equipment he might get pissed-off enough to hack the protection. It’s inevitable.

Ubuntu is founded on the principles of sharing information, openness, and freedom. The right to share information, and practice freedom of speech is “ubuntu” at it’s essence — humanity toward others. For many of us using Ubuntu has been a refreshing return to sanity. Microsoft and big media corporations are increasingly scaring us away, with their ‘police state’ attitude towards consumers. It appears Google, Cafe Press, and WordPress are all working overtime to censor anyone who shares this silly little sequence of 32 characters. So freedom of expression doesn’t mean much to these companies… or at least not as much as their profit margin does…

What is it about this little sequence of 32 letters and numbers that’s so dangerous for people to write about? That sequence of 32 characters isn’t protected by copyright, Trade Mark, nor is that sequence a form of ‘patented technology’. Yet somehow this key code is ‘banned’ content, and the thought of it making its way into the hands of the general public is absolutely terrifying isn’t it?

An event like this helps the people of society to see whats real, because for a moment the veil is pulled back. It’s happening in plain view for all to see… the corporate power of high tech and media companies trying to take control over the first amendment of the Constitution–the right to freedom of speech.

If exercising your civil liberties is important to you, and if you like having constitutional rights that actually mean something…. you should get involved! Show your support and help protect peoples right to freedom of the press! Copy the little banner logo to your website, join the GIMP key code jam session, post-it, email signature it, T-shirt it, bumper sticker it, and whatever it as you see fit. Let’s let the ‘big media’ know that freedom of expression is a human right recognized by the UN.

And so, for what it’s worth, I’ve included here a little reminder for everyone, just in case some people have forgotten:

THE FIRST AMENDMENT of the CONSITUTION

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Only a short while ago, I had nothing but bad things to say about Dell’s attitude towards us consumers who’d rather not use Windows. I was shopping for a new laptop to use Ubuntu with when I looked closer at Dell. Asus had some nice barebones systems that came without an OS, but cost more than Dell’s similar compact notebook models.

I’d heard before of Dell selling PC’s with linux on ‘em. My impressions of this in the past were that they cost more than the same version with windows (despite having to pay the $100 ‘Microsoft Tax’), and that the linux ‘option’ was sorta hidden, deep within the dark corners of the Dell website. I’d also read about people who had actually managed to get a refund for the cost of Windows if they returned it to Dell demanding a refund.

I tried to do the same in January and wrote about my experience on ubuntuforums.org. I tried to buy a Dell laptop without windows on it, and avoid paying for that ‘other’ OS I don’t like, want or need. I contacted my ‘personal sales advisor’, Wajid at Dell Canada. I asked, “Do I have to pay for Windows, or can I get a refund on the windows OS if I don’t use it?”

Wajid replied, “We don’t refund if you don’t use OS.”

It wasn’t Wajid’s fault for not knowing, but the truth is that they had done, and did do for other customers in the past.. who made enough of a stink. It was such a landmark event that the BBC reported the news. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Microsoft would try to put Dell out of business if they made it any easier than that to get a refund.

It all revolves around that wonderous book-length End User License Agreement (EULA ) that’s presented in a tiny little window the first time you start up your shiny new PC or freshly install a new copy of the OS. The EULA is that legal agreement no one ever reads, but usually agree to anyway. When you buy your new computer, you don’t own your Windows OS, you have purchased a license that gives you the rights to use it. The EULA could very well require that you’d happily give up your first born for the opportunity to kiss the feet of Sir. William Gates, but who’d know for sure anyways–when’s the last time you read the entire document? The Microsoft EULA is an ongoing issue that consumers have fought for many years. Consumers are now reporting that the EULA for Vista is simply downright evil.

The bottom line is that customers do have the right to refuse the agreement and to return the unused product. If they’ve paid for it, then its only fair they should be refunded the cost of it. Eventually I came across Dell’s ‘Total Satisfaction Return Policy’ where I found that they do provide for the consumer the following option:

“For customers who want to return, for refund or credit only, either application or operating system software that has been installed by Dell, the whole system must be returned, along with any media and documentation that may have been included in the original shipment.“

This is of course at the customer’s expense for shipping, insurance and being without your newly purchased PC for the next few weeks. It was enough to discourage me from wasting my time. I wasn’t up for taking on that activist battle… in that way… but the war is far from over!

Perhaps I’m being too complicit with the evil empire? But in the end, being such a technology geek, I decided to buy a new piece of Dell hardware, the XPS M1210 . I was convinced that it was an excellent price for the degree of sophistication and quality. There appeared to be many pleased reviewers with few complaints about the notebook.

We’ll there is mine, I guess… I had to buy it with Windows. But ‘the times, they are a’changin’, and it sounds like Dell is starting to listen to consumers requests. I wonder if that means I’ll ever get a refund for that OS I ended up deleting from my new laptop. Hey Dell? Michael? I hear you’re feeling ‘feisty’ lately…

Not only that, but aparently “Ubuntu” is as popular as “intel” and more popular than “mazda” or “spain”.  See for yourself!
Now technically,  there’s other factors to consider… that “ubuntu” is an african word used to refer to other things than the OS, and “spain” has other spellings in other languages… but it’s still pretty darn sensational stuff!

Google trends doesn’t yet show the increase in searches for the release day of feisty, but I must say I’m curious to see what it will look like when it does (to the moon baby, to the moon!)

So you’d like to download feisty, but can’t find a working server, or it’s really slow because everyone is downloading feisty right now, or you don’t know which bittorrent file to choose and you’re not sure which one is still the old beta and which is the new ‘official’ release of feisty… Relax, don’t you worry!

Chances are you’re looking for “ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso” for your typical PC. You can download the torrent file here.

Last I checked theres over a thousand  4000 people seeding it, so its a nice and fast download. (Once you’re done downloading, it’s helpful if you leave bittorrent running for a while to share with others.)

Once you’ve downloaded the ISO, how do you know if you’ve got the correct version, or just some old incorrectly labeled file? Just to prove I’m honest, check the MD5SUM–you can read how to do it here.

The MD5 sum for the new release of feisty is:

e296e3468358789904097fc8df29609a

(for ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso)

How do you find out the correct MD5 sum, like the one I just included?

Go to one of the Ubuntu download mirrors; choose one here

open the “feisty” folder and then look for a file called “MD5SUMS”.

For example you can check this one.

see it here

If you’re curious there’s some instructions posted here

Curiosity got the better of me and I decided to jump the cue and try upgrading my Edgy system to the beta release of feisty. Pretty easy stuff… I just needed to enter this command into the terminal.. and let it download for an hour or so.

$ sudo update-manager -d

Now with my desktop system which has version 6.04″Dapper LTS” installed… is there an option to upgrade to Feisty? You bet… you’ll need to upgrade to Edgy first.. same terminal command but with a -c as well

$ update-manager -d -c

If you wish to avoid the ‘double’ upgrade you may wish to read this Howto

Please Note: if you’re upgrading a portable, then be sure to plug it in, leave the lid open, and don’t let it go to sleep or hibernate. If it shuts off during the upgrade your system could get totally borked, and you’ll have a big job on your hands trying to rescue your ubuntu system.

What are the new features in Feisty to look forward to?

Top Four Feisty Features

Here’s a list of a dozen or so features

You may wish to check out DEFT (“Digital Evidence & Forensic Toolkit”) v1.0 by Stefano Fratepietro which was released recently  on March 28, 2007. It’s a nice security / forensics Live CD distro built on top of Kubuntu.

It contains the Sleuth kit & Autopsy frontend, the afflib “Advanced Forensic Format” tools, dd rescue, foremost, hex dump, ophcrack – a windows password recovery tool, qtparted, testdisk, vinetto (examine Thumbs.db files), readpst (examine MS-Outlook pst files), kismet, wireshart, ettercap, airsnort, and other network sniffers.

One downside of this distro is it appears to require 256mb of ram and won’t work on systems with 128mb.
Personally, I need a live CD distro that can easily run on legacy systems that I frequently need to work on.

Another ubuntu based live CD security distro you may wish to check out is nubuntu.

Backtrack 2

Another recently released (March 6th, 2007) security live CD distro with some forensics tools is Backtrack 2.  It is based on top of slackware/SLAX, and uses a KDE or Fluxbox windows manager.   Apparently two other security distros, WHAX and Auditor, were combined to make this excellent tool.   It’s main focus is penetration and network security testing, and has broadcom driver support too! It contains hundreds of tools, to numerous to list, however some of the forensics tools include;  the Sleuthkit and Autopsy, allin1 – automation frontend for sleuthkit, dd_rescue, dcfldd – an updated an enhanced version of dd), foremost, magicrescue – scan a block device for known file types, mboxgrep – searches a variety of types of mailbox folders, vinetto, pasco – to examine IE’s cache files.  Highly Recommended!

HELIX

Helix v 1.8 was released in October 2006, and is based on customized distribution of the Knoppix Live CD.   It is likely the best data forensics Live CD distro out there to date.  It is more compatible with legacy hardware, using an XFCE window manager and runs nicely on only 128mb of ram (perhaps less?).    A excellent beginner’s guide in PDF is on the site, as well as user support forums.  Here’s a listing of the tools from the HELIX website:

sleuthkit : Brian Carrier’s replacement to TCT.
autopsy : Web front-end to sleuthkit.
mac-robber : TCT’s graverobber written in C.
fenris : debugging, tracing, decompiling.
wipe : Secure file deletion.
MAC_Grab : e-fense MAC time utility.
AIR : Steve Gibson Forensic Acquisition Utility.
foremost : Carve files based on header and footer.
fatback : Analyze and recover deleted FAT files.
md5deep : Recursive md5sum with db lookups.
sha15deep : Recursive sha1sum with db lookups.
dcfldd : dd replacement from the DCFL.
sdd : Specialized dd w/better preformance.
PyFLAG : Forensic and Log Analysis GUI.
Faust : Analyze elf binaries and bash scripts.
e2recover : Recover deleted files in ext2 file systems.
Pasco : Forensic tool for Internet Explorer Analysis.
Galleta : Cookie analyzer for Internet Explorer.
Rifiuti : “Recycle BIN” analyzer.
Bmap : Detect & Recover data in used slackspace.
Ftimes : A toolset for forensic data acquisition.
chkrootkit : Look for rootkits.
rkhunter : Rootkit hunter.
ChaosReader : Trace tcpdump files and extract data.
lshw : Hardware Lister.
logsh : Log your terminal session (Borrowed from FIRE).
ClamAV : ClamAV Anti Virus Scanner.
F-Prot : F-Prot Anti Virus Scanner.
2 Hash : MD5 & SHA1 parallel hashing.
glimpse : Indexing and query system.
Outguess : Stego detection suite.
Stegdetect : Stego detection suite.
Regviewer : Windows Registry viewer.
Chntpw : Change Windows passwords.
Grepmail : Grep through mailboxes.
logfinder : EFF logfinder utility.
linen : EnCase Image Acquisition Tool.
Retriever : Find pics/movies/docs/web-mail.
Scalpel : Carve files based on header and footer.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I booted the desktop pc using an xubuntu liveCD. The other hard drive I had plugged in was an old 8GB hard drive that was formatted ext3 to copy the recovered data to from the old dying drive. I used dd to make an image of the laptop drive. The commands I entered in terminal went like this:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/backup
$ sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/backup
$ sudo dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/backup/image.raw

It copied the 6.5 GB hard drive in about 15 minutes at about 7.4 mb/s. I could then set aside the failing laptop drive and work from a hard drive image file on another good hard disk.

When I got home I needed to attach the 8GB IDE hard drive containing the drive image file to my ubuntu laptop that I was going to use for doing the data forensics work. I used a spare external IDE hard drive enclosure to plug in to my laptop through a USB 2.0 cable.

I installed some new ubuntu (versions 6.10 – edgy or newer) packages for data forensics:

$ sudo apt-get install autopsy sleuthkit afflib

Sleuthkit is a bunch of command line tools for data forensics, and autopsy gives a nice graphical interface that runs through a web browser. Using autopsy I was able to easily search through all my old files.
All I had to do was enter the file type or keyword and all the
relevant files would be listed. Even deleted files could be listed at
the click of a button, and searched through by keyword or file type. (Using a tool like this only demonstrates further how important it is for a drive to be wiped with random data several times before being given away or disposed.)

Along the way I ran into the AFF format… I knew that some people used bzip2 to compress the drive image for better storage, but programs like autopsy would require the image to be decompressed first. But autopsy can use drive images compressed in the AFF format… I’d never heard of this before.

I used afconvert to convert the raw drive image made with dd into the AFF format (advanced forensics format). This allows compression (uses the LZMA algorithm) and for random data seeking with programs like autopsy. On my duo core 2 laptop, the 6.5GB image was compressed (at the maximum compression setting) to 3.8GB and written to disk in about 30 minutes.

$ sudo afconvert -X9 -o /root/image.aff /media/usbdisk/image.raw

I was impressed how I could then burn the drive image file to a DVD+RW. Great for doing a backup. I’m curious how large of a hard drive image could be fit in the compressed AFF format onto a 4.6GB DVD. Often the hard disk contains alot of empty space–and if that empty space is filled with zeros before, possibly a half full 10GB hard drive partition could be backed up onto a DVD quite easily?

Another variation of the AFF file; large AFF files can be broken into multiple AFD files which can be more easily moved around.

There doesn’t appear to be currently much information out on the net about using the aimage command to create a AFF drive image. It has many features worth investigating, like intelligent error recovery, similar to what is in ddrescue. Where dd is the good old classic standby, aimage provides many newer more sophisticated features; compression and error recovery just to start.

Had I known about this before I would have used aimage to image the drive to the AFF format, (although it would probably have taken much longer to image the drive using a PIII than it did using dd.)

Here’s the man page:

aimage 1.6.31

usage: aimage [options] INPUT1 [OUTFILE1] [INPUT2 OUTPUT2] …— image indev to outfile
INPUT may be any of these:
A device (e.g. /dev/disk1)
- (or /dev/stdin, for standard input)
listen:nnnn Listen on TCP port nnnn
OUTFILE may be:
outfile.aff — image to the AFF file outfile

General Options:
–quiet, -q — No interactive statistics.
–batch, -Y — Batch output
–silent, -Q — No output at all except for errors.
–readsectors=nn, -R nnnn, — set number of sectors to read at once (default 32768)
–version, -v — Just print the version number and exit.
–skip=nn[s], -k nn — Skip nn bytes [or nns for sectors] in input file
–no_beeps, -B — Don’t beep when imaging is finished.
–logfile=fn, -l fn — Where to write a log. By default none is written
–logAFF, -L — Log all AFF operations
–preview, -p — view some of the data as it goes by.
–no_preview, -P — do not show the preview.

Existing File Options:
–append, -a — Append to existing file
–zap, -z — Erase outfile(s) before writing

Raw Output Options:
–raw=fname, -r fname — write block-by-block output to fname.

AFF Options:
–outfile=fname, -ofname — write an AFF file.
–image_pagesize=nnn, -S nnnn
– set the AFF page size (default 16777216)
(number can be suffixed with b, k, m or g)
Also sets maxsize to be 2^32 – image_pagesize if not otherwise set.
–make_config, -m — Make the config file if it doesn’t exist
Config file is aimage.cfg by default
and can be overridden by the AIMAGE_CONFIG enviroment variable
–no_dmesg, -D — Do not put dmesg into the AFF file
–no_ifconfig, -I — Do not put ifconfig output into AFF file
(Currently unset)
–no_compress, -x — Do not compress. Useful on slow machines.
–compression=n, -Xn — Set the compression level
–auto_compress, -A — write as fast as possible, with compression if it helps.
sets compression level 1
–maxsize=n, -Mn — sets the maximum size of output file to be n..
Default units are megabytes;
suffix with ‘g’, ‘m’, ‘k’ or ‘b’
use ‘cd’ for a 650MB CD.
use ‘bigcd’ for a 700MB CD.
–setseg name=value, -s name=value
– Create segment ‘name’ and give it ‘value’
This option may be repeated.
–no_hash, -H — Do not calculate MD5 and SHA1 of image.

Error Recovery Options:
–error=0, -e0 — Standard error recovery:
Read disk 256K at a time until there are 5 errors in a row.
Then go to the end of the disk and read backwards
until there are 5 erros in a row. Then stop.
–error=1 -e1 — Stop reading at first error.
–retry=nn -tnn — change retry count from 5 to nn
–reverse, -V — Scan in reverse to the beginning.

Other:
–help, -h — Print this message.
–fast_quit, -Z — Make ^c just exit immediately.
–allow_regular, -E — allow the imaging of a regular file
–title=s, -T s — change title to s (from IMAGING) and disable blink
–debug=n, -d n — set debug code n (-d0 for list)
–use_timers, -y — Use timers for compressing, reading & writing times

Examples:
Create image.aff from /dev/sd0:
aimage /dev/sd0 image.aff
aimage -o image.aff /dev/sd0

Create image0.aff from /dev/sd0 and image1 from /dev/sd1:
aimage /dev/sd0 image0.aff /dev/sd1 /image1.aff

What happened to me was that I started off with using the cp command to copy files directly from a ntfs drive to a usb drive (which had a brand new ext3 partition). The transfer started nicely, however the speed was quite slow and to copy 100GB was going to take about 4 hours by my estimates.
So I restarted with a faster solution. I used the helix boot CD to run AIR: Automatied Image and Restore (a graphical frontend for dd). DD managed to transfer at about 25MB per second. Copying the 180GB hard drive took about 2 hours and 10 minutes. It copied the data nice and fast but I guess in the process I probably did it wrong and borked the partition table.
So I move my usb hard drive to another computer and plug it in. Not only does it not autodetect the drive when I plug it into ubuntu, but when I try to mount the drive as NTFS I get the error: “mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb”. I try out the dmesg | tail suggestion and I read this error message in the output : “[17190438.380000] NTFS-fs error (device sdb): read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Primary boot sector is invalid.” Yikes, what to do… good thing I just didn’t delete the old data on the other pc yet! I look around on the net for a solution. Is there a fsck.ntfs out there? Not that I can find. How about a package to fix the partition table I wonder…. Someone else had posted on a forum that testdisk had ‘saved their butt’ too many times to retell. I read on about teskdisk to find out more. Sure enough testdisk is described as :

…powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy. It works with the
following partitions: FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, Linux, Linux swap (version 1
and 2), NTFS (Windows NT/W2K/2003), BeFS (BeOS), UFS (BSD), JFS, XFS,
and Netware.

Sounds just like what I needed. So I ‘sudo apt-get install testdisk’ and run it. Pure magic! Idiot proof! It took a few minutes to detect and scan the partition I write the fixed partition table and get on with my day. Thanks to Christophe Grenier!

Visit the home page of testdisk here

You wouldn’t dump private financial records out in the street trashbin without first shredding them, but far too often people will leave rather private documents sitting in a “trashbin” on a computer with several users. Even after the files are finally “deleted”, they still largely remain recorded on the hard drive for some time, possibly years after they were supposedly erased. Eventually many of those same well used computers are then sold, dumped, or donated to be further used by unknown people and potentially snooping criminals.

Choosing to shred the file instead of moving it to the trash is a much safer option for files that you’d regret falling into the wrong hands. Here’s how the author explains it:

This action uses the “shred” command to delete a file and make it unrecoverable. It overwrites 10 times and then overwrites with all zeros to hide the shredded file.

Installation Instructions:

In synaptic or terminal install “nautilus-actions”:

$ sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions

Then download the File Shredder script . Go to the menu System–>Preferences–>Nautilus Actions Configuration. Click import and select the shred.schemas file.

A Cautionary Note:

While although this simple tools is helpful, and much better than ‘move to trash’, it is most likely not a 100% secure method of data removal. Note that the man page for shred, has a caution warning that journaled file systems like ext3 render this less effective. You can read further debate about this issue in this thread on Ubuntu forums. Also, the SecuriTeam website has instructions to demonstrate the insecurity of shred. You may wish to read further information about ‘secure erase’ on this page from Stanford University.

Some linux alternatives to shred which may be more, less or similarly successful include fwipe, ya-wipe, and srm. 

Ideally a harddrive should be totally ‘wiped’ clean before being passed on to strangers. A topic for another day…

But hold on. I start to consider; just how safe is it to run any old linux distro on my PC? I feel comfortable to trust ubuntu not to contain malicious code, since it is peer reviewed with a large and wide following of users. But with any of these other numerous unknown distros, how can I know if after booting the CD it doesn’t run some evil adware/spyware/virus/trojan/rootkit and install it on my system without my knowlege?

So I ask around on IRC for peoples opinions… “that’s the chance you take” is one reply. So what to do? Just forget the whole idea because the integrity of my Ubuntu system has become practically sacred and I’m not about to risk it? Do I watch for the hard drive light to flash in case it starts writing over my hard drive with zeros? Curiosity gets the better of me and I try a little experimentation.

I have enjoyed using virtualbox, and knew that I could boot an ISO file or CD-ROM in it. I figure, why not test it first on my virtualbox windows 2000 install to take a look at it first to see it if it’s actually any good. Then it dawns on me–I can do a checksum of the virtual disk before running the distro, then compare the results afterwards to see if the virtual hard drive has changed at all. I also can simply make a backup copy of the virtual hard drive and delete the compromised copy if I need to.

So here’s what I do in the terminal, and a few seconds later I get my checksum:

dimeo@laptop:~/large-data-files/virtualbox-windows2000$ cksum virtualbox-windows2000.vdi

21930562 1515201024 virtualbox-windows2000.vdi

So then I run virtualbox and set it to boot the iso. file for my freshly downloaded security distro, Backtrack 2 that I’m wanting to try out. It works great under virtual box and I get to try out all kinds of port scanners to test the security of our networks. No luck with the data forensics programs for some reason. Feeling content that the distro looks worth the 50 cent CD-R, I quit virtualbox and pull out my cakebox of blank discs. But first a quick check to see if it touched my hard drive. I run cksum again at the terminal and look at that…

21930562 1515201024 virtualbox-windows2000.vdi

I’m pleased to find my virtual harddisk data is exactly as it was at the start– undamaged by my wonted messing around with software of questionable origin.

I often have large data files (hudreds of megs or larger) that I like to make backup copy of, but would rather store them in a compressed format. I also don’t want to wait around forever to get the job done. I’m working on a fast machine (duo core 2) with a gig of memory.

So what’s gave me the ‘best’ results when compressing my 1.4 gb file? It’s a virtualbox .vdi file, essentially the entire HD for a windows 2000 virtual machine. The results could be very different on a collection of lots of small little files… something I might test later. In the mean time there’s a good study already published here.

Here’s my test results of several different formats on the file:

Best compression – size in MB.

1. 7z 493
2. rar 523
3. bz2 592
4. lzh 607
5. gz 614
6. Z 614
7. zip 614
8. .arj 615
9. lzo 737
10. zoo 890

Best Time in seconds

1. zip 175
2. zoo 186
3. arj 253
4. lzo 295
5. Z 300
6. gz 344
7. lzh 657
8. bz2 706
9. rar 840
10. 7z 896

Conclusions:

It came as a surprise to me that plain old .zip to which I am quite familiar with already, is still a better choice for high compression of large data files in a short amount of time.

.arj and .Z and .gz all compress about as much, but just not as fast as .zip

I’ve heard really good things about .7z and it’s ability for high compression, and it does show in the results.  Both .z7 and .rar are able to use the duo core processor better (cpu use at 77%-90% compared to 55% for the others) yet take much longer than anything else to compress. If the file were being uploaded onto the internet, perhaps I would choose for the highest compression even it it takes 4 times longer.

I had read that .lzo and .zoo were good (some people claimed they were better) and fast with high compression, but I just don’t see that here at all.  They’re way off the mark.

So whats the best option?

.zip for quick and compatible compression.

.rar for high compression and compatiblity, when you have the time to wait.

.z7 for maximum compression when you have the time to wait.

sbackup is an easy to use simple backup package. Whats nice about it is that it makes incremental backups automatically at scheduled times. Incremental means that it only copies to the backup what’s changed since last time, rather than copy everything all over again. It becomes a very quick job to do nightly or weekly backups.

The restore features are just as nice, as you can select individual directories, or individual files to restore. You’ll need to do one for each of the root directories, as I don’t think however there’s a one click “system” restore.

Start Your Backups!

In synaptic download sbackup or enter in the terminal

$ sudo apt-get install sbackup 

In the menus go to System—>Administration–>Simple Backup Config

If you’re on Dapper, you’ll need to install it. Use synaptic or in the terminal enter:

$ sudo apt-get install sbackup

A nice guide ( with pictures) that will help you set it up is located: here

Remember that to protect your data against major disasters like fire, robberies, or hardware failure then you should copy your backups onto removable media by hand.

Configure your /home backup to fit on a 4.7gb DVD-RW. That *should* be enough for copying frequent snapshots of your /home directory. Set up another for your system /var /etc /usr/local.

Where do you even begin?  How do you know what software package(s) to install, out of the thousands that are available?   Here are some quick reviews and introductions to some of the top packages you can install in Ubuntu.

 Packages Explained: no more .exe files?

The Ubuntu Guide : all you really need to get started.

Lifehacker’s Top 10 ubuntu apps and tweaks  
Restricted Formats:   no, not that dirty adult prOn, but all the awesome media formats you’re wanting!

Mark Pilgrim’s Essential software list 

The Linux Desktop: 13 things you should do immediately after installing Ubuntu

The top 200 most downloaded applications fpr ‘Gnome’, the window manager in ubuntu.

Native Games:  games designed for linux and unix
How to install anything in Ubuntu 
 Making the Change: stepping out of windows

 Tweak Ubuntu for Speed

Beginning Ubuntu for $30 you can buy a great 600 page guide.

This month I got a new Dell XPS m1210 notebook. It was time for a change since my old Toshiba was really falling apart at about 6 years old.  Being about 12 lbs it was more like a ‘portable desktop’ than anything.  This time I went for something small, light, with good battery life.

The first thing I did with it was put Ubuntu Edgy on it.