Hello one and all,
I’m visiting Ubuntu on Friday and whilst there I’ve been asked to take part in a “Conversation with Canonical Design team”. They are looking for ideas and design features we would like to see improved or changed. So if anyone has any suggestions I’d be more than happy to put them forward to the guys at Canonical.
Feel free to drop me a message and I’ll see what I can do.
Ric
Well I’ve been a little busy lately working on a new open source project which I’ll reveal when its ready!
However I’ll have a few more reviews almost complete and they’ll be coming soon. These include a KVM review, which for those who don’t know KVM is the Linux kernel virtualisation solution which is now in the up stream source and its brimming with new features. It is also featured in Ubuntu’s 9.04 server as a preview technology. I’ve also started writing a Banshee music player review and put together a few tips and tricks onto how to sync your iPod with it, and how to buy/download music legally on Linux. I’ll try and push these reviews out over the next week.
On a side note I’ll be adding a new section soon dedicated to “grow your own” and I’ll share a few design ideas for growing vegetables in a small garden. I started growing some veg because of environmental issues and a personal protest against the super markets shipping in fruit and veg from all over the globe, but its also a fun hobby and I even get to design some arduino projects to monitor and water the garden!
I’ve recently been playing with UbuntuOne. For those who don’t know UbuntuOne is a new service from canonical (the creator Ubuntu) which gives you a virtual online drive, this integrates with your desktop and allows you to access your files via a web interface whilst away from your PC. You can think of it as a virtual USB thumb drive. Installing this service on multiple Ubuntu desktops allows you sync files between desktops seamlessly. If you’ve ever used Dropbox, the service will feel very familiar, but there are some differences. At the time of writing this article UbuntuOne is in beta, so I’m expecting some improvements and extra features before the final release.
The free accounts for both UbuntuOne and Dropbox are 2GB in size which should be enough to sync important documents and some photo’s. Both services also offer a pay monthly service to increase your space, Dropbox offers 50GB for $9.99 a month and 100GB for $19.99 a month, these packages make Canonical’s offering of 10GB for $10 a month look a little puny. Currently there is no support for other operating systems from UbuntuOne where as Dropbox offers clients for Windows, Mac and Linux. I personally feel Canonical need’s to address this, it’s a fantastic feature that could allow users a easier transition between OS’s, which could help more people convert to Ubuntu in the long run. One thing UbuntuOne does do very nicely is, ingrate with your desktop, however I would like the option to choose where to store files locally. That feature is especially usefull if your running a netbook with a small SSD card in. Dropbox allowed me to store files on a much larger SD card slotted into my device.
On installing Dropbox you need to suply your login details, however UbuntuOne manages this authentication in a much more web 2.0 fashion. Once installed you are asked on a web page to authorise the machine you are using, this is all intergrated with your launchpad account. This hole process is very smooth and very easy. Both services allow you to access your files by a web gui, so if your away from your PC and need to pull down that important file you have forgotten you can! I’ve attached a screenshot of the UbuntuOne web gui for you to see:
UbuntuOne Beta Web GUI
I’ve seen several improvements in both the web gui and the client software in the past couple of weeks and the developers seem very receptive to feedback with is a real bonus these days and shows Canonical’s continued open source mentality, even though this is a proprietory service. I hope in the next few weeks/months we’ll see leaps and bounds and this service will become everything Dropbox is and maybe more, it already shows great promise with its desktop intergration and as the release candiates near who knows what treats are instore.
Following my post about iPhone + Linux tethering which used wireless to connect the laptop to the iPhone, I started to encounter a few problems with the solution. The main problem I found with this method was setting up the adhoc wireless network. It ALWAYS seemed a fiddle. So I started looking for a way to use the USB cable to connect the iPhone to the laptop and use that for connectivity. The answer was iTunnel! Here is a quick HOWTO for using it. I have sucessfully run this on Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04.
Requirements.
A Jailbroken iPhone running SSH.
WARNING: DOING THIS BREAKS YOUR iPHONE WARRANTY AND AGREEMENT WITH YOUR CELL/MOBILE PROVIDER: DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Installation.
Download iTunnel from: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jingsu/itunnel/itunnel-0.0.5.tgz to your laptop.
Open a shell and type:
tar xvfz itunnel-0.0.5.tgz
mv itunnel-0.0.5 itunnel
Running the tunnel.
Plugin your iPhone via USB cable:
cd ~/itunnel
./itunnel 3023
The first time you run this it may fail and unmount your iPhone’s camera folder. Running it for a second time you should be shown the following in the shell:
get_iPhone() success
- successfully got device
server waiting for ssh connection
In a second shell now run the following command, which SSH’s to the new tunnel and sets up a SOCKS proxy on port 9000 for you:
ssh -D 9000 -p 3023 127.0.0.1
Leave both shells open, whilst you wish to be connected to the internet.
Configure Firefox.
Open Firefox and in the url bar enter:
about:config
Filter for:
network.proxy.socks_remote_dns
Now set its value to true. This allows the iPhone to resolve the DNS for firefox rather than the laptop, as only the iPhone has true internet connectivity to do DNS requests.
Now still in Firefox go to Edit > Preferences. Choose the Advanced section and the Network tab. Now click the Settings button and Select Manual Proxy Configuration. Enter the following
SOCKS Host: 127.0.0.1 Port: 9000
Your now ready to browse the internet from your laptop without fiddling about creating a adhoc wireless network! To close the tunnel just hit CTRL+C in the the iTunnel shell.
What can I say apart from I’m very impressed with Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Netbook Remix. I found the whole experience far better than 8.10 which left me with sound card driver bugs and strange display errors. All of these were all fixable and easy enough to do but I want my Ubuntu to work out the box, and Jaunty seems to have delivered this!
Installation.
Installation was incredibly easy. I downloaded the netbook remix usb image from:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook
I had a 1gb USB pen drive handy and copied the image onto that using the dd command.
dd bs=1M if=<IMAGE-NAME>.img of=/dev/<USB DEVICE>
There are easier ways to install the image to usb disk and instructions can be found here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromImgFiles
Its then a simple case of booting your netbook from USB and following the instructions. Basically its a set of multiple choice questions asking about time zone’s, keyboard lay out and the such. If your not familiar with installing Linux, make the sensible choices for language and keyboard and leave the rest as default.
Now I’m lucky enough to have one of the supported models, in this case a Dell Mini 9. Everything worked out of the box, graphics, sound, webcam, wifi, card reader and bluetooth. I was very impressed that there was zero tinkering to be done.
The only tinkering I did was to choose EXT4 for the file system as I wanted to give this a go and see if there were any speed improvements, over the standard install of EXT3. You can choose this by selecting advanced on the disk partitioner.
Running.
Now there has been a lot of hype about how quickly Ubuntu 9.04 boots and especially when you use EXT4 as your file system. I must admit I was slightly sceptical. However I was pleasantly surprised! I’m seeing boot times of around 19-20 seconds which is pretty amazing and lets you boot up at a whim quickly, which is great for using your netbook quickly whilst on the move.
The user interface is pretty different from a normal Linux desktop and your presented with a nice control panel that allows you quick access to everything installed either by using the small track pad or keyboard strokes. Apart from the nice GUI with easily accessible icons you get the usual run of tools, openoffice.org, firefox, evolution mail etc etc, which gives you basically everything you need for a mobile office. You also get cheese the new gnome application which uses the inbuilt webcam to take and apply effects to pictures of yourself. I did install a couple of extra media components in the form of vlc in order to watch some xvid encoded videos on the train.
sudo apt-get install vlc
Everything had a real slick finish to it and Jaunty is looking very polished. I was VERY impressed when I plugged in a USB 3G card this was instantly recognised. All I had to do was tell it my mobile/cell network provider and I was connected within 2 or 3 clicks. Having used this same dongle on Windows and Mac, Ubuntu beats the easy of use by 10 fold.
I then chose to install dropbox which is a third party piece of software not available via apt-get. Dropbox allows you to have a online web drive which adds some extra space to your netbook. I just have the free 2GB account, which for me is more than enough. You can download it here:
I’d also suggest opening up firefox and visiting your normal sites to make sure you have all the installed plugging you need whilst your on a connection at home rather than trying to pulled down flash over a 3G network.
Improvements?
One thing that I felt was missing is an easy way to switch between netbook desktop and traditional desktop. This feature would be great, and I fully admit may already be there but I couldn’t see how to do it easily. I’d find this feature really useful especially when plugging the netbook into an external monitor and keyboard, in order to use as a traditional desktop.
Round up.
Just try it for yourself! Hopefully you’ll be as pleased as me. If you do have problems hop onto the ubuntu forums and I’m sure people will be more than happy to help.
I’ve just squashed 3 bugs in wp-rdfa, version 0.3 should be available on the #WordPress site very soon. This fixes problems within FOAF.php which failed when publishing subscribers. Also the options page didn’t save contributors or subscribers status. All fixed now and thanks to Joss Winn for pointing out the problems, keep them coming!
Ric
I’ve created a simple plugin for WordPress that sets a cookie to opt-out of phorm’s data mining and marketing system. This will allow your readers to read your site without information being gathered about them. So if you wish to help protect the privacy of your readers please install this plugin.
Its very simple just download, install and activate.
http://dev.squarecows.com/projects/wp-dephorm/
I’ve just pushed to the WordPress SVN repository the new version of wp-RDFa, this will be version 0.2! This version adds Dublin Core publishing for your blog posts. A sample of the published triplets can be seen here:
<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://dev.squarecows.com/2009/04/06/cracked-it-inline-rdfa/"> <dc:date xml:lang="en">2009-04-06 16:54:39</dc:date> <dc:creator xml:lang="en">Ric_</dc:creator> <dc:title xml:lang="en">Cracked it! inline RDFa….</dc:title> </rdf:Description>
You can download from the WordPress site http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-rdfa/
Please test and send any feed back in via the contact form.
Trying to work around a bug in WordPress where this code also returns pages!
if($type == "post") {.........}
is also picking up "page" types.
I think its to do with wp_list_pages not resetting the $post values. If anyone else has had this problem take a look at:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/246823?replies=3#post-1039428
Suggestions most welcome!
After a couple of attempts and a couple of breakages on my blog (hey but this is dev) I’ve managed to modify the default values for the_author() . In this case it prints the authors name from WordPress via the template and I can now modify the output to include span tags and meta data automatically. This break through will allow me to added inline RDFa elements to any WordPress theme and create triplets of data. The next phase will be to allow users to input their own RDFa tags in posts.
Watch this space and expect wp-rdfa 0.2 soon(ish)
Ric_
