Someone asked me yesterday “You’re good with computers, can you give me a copy of Photoshop?“. Aside from the fact I run Linux on most of my computers, I’m not keen on being accused of software piracy on the basis that I’m “good with computers” or any other reason. I made the mistake of asking why he needed it, he wanted to resize some pictures – so I suggested Paint.net.
His answer? “Oh no that’s free, it’s bound to be rubbish.”
Strange, I thought he wanted Photoshop free.
Extract from an article over at “The Art of Manliness” that gives instructions on editing hosts to block time wasting sites:
Linux
If you’re using Linux, you’re probably a geek and don’t need some guy who blogs about manliness to tell you how to edit your host file.
I’ve been having line problems with my ISP – British Telecom. To cut a long story short we see a 75% speed drop, phone BT, jump through umpteen hoops and they reset the profile at the exchange. The fault is with the line and it’s intermittent.
That doesn’t really bother me. The customer support agent told me to use BT’s speed diagnostic tool. Now aside from why their tool would be better, its not really an option as its a poorly written Java applet that doesn’t seem to work with Firefox or Chromium in Linux. Now I dare say I could get it to work but why spend the energy? When I mentioned it to the agent, he told me BT doesn’t officially support Linux and helpfully suggested I keep a Windows laptop handy.
Are you kidding? Keep a Windows laptop handy? There are reasons why I use Linux, there are reasons people use Macs and Windows too – they chose to. What the hell has that got to do with my ISP? I have no software from them, it’s a wireless access point they provide. Do you know what operating system it runs? Linux.
I picked up a cheap laser printer, a Samsung ML-1915. It isn’t automatically configured by Ubuntu 10.10 as it requires the Samsung Unified Linux Print Driver.
The page explains what to do but in synopsis, you need to add the repository and install two packages, obviously check out the site before blindly following me:
Add the repository to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/ debian extra
Now, I know Ubuntu has the apt-add-repository command, however it will create a source entry too, which will give you an error:
W: Failed to fetch http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/dists/debian/Release Unable to find expected entry extra/source/Sources in Meta-index file (malformed Release file?)
If you did then you need to remove the offending deb-src http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/ debian extra entry.
That done, add the GPG key and update the apt cache.
wget -O - http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/suldr.gpg | sudo apt-key add - sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install samsungmfp-driver samsungmfp-data
It will then pick up and install when you plug it in. Samsung themselves provide a 30 odd Mb driver file, here. There are a whole list of the differences here but for me, I prefer Debian compliance and not installing anything I don’t need.
Oh and a big thank you to everyone who sent me suggestions of what to do in San Diego. People can be surprisingly open and friendly – especially within our community.
I hope Dustin Kirkland wont mind me re-posting this but it’s so insightful I felt I must. Poul-Henning Kamp posted this concerning Free BSD development over eleven years ago…
Graham Cluley, a Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos, has a nice blog piece on the Twitter worm from earlier this week. To cut a long story short, he reminds us of the importance of sanitizing inputs.
Still, it was more productive than my week with my Open University module that starts in October – T175 (Networked living: exploring information and communication technologies). The OU can be very Windows dependent but this course seems to be pretty much delivered in Virtual Learning Environment (what the OU calls Moodle). I ran the course DVD, which is a Windows Flash standalone thing which got me to revive the OU Ubuntu Users group, sending out emails, starting a mailing list and trying to get things going again.
So why was it unproductive? Well, I haven’t booted Windows in ages – there were a million updates, one of which was for the wireless driver. Update completely borked the wireless and I wound up restoring the drive. That aside, one thing I really like about Ubuntu (and most distributions) is a centralised update manager – Windows has Adobe, Java, Windows Update, Firefox and McAfee all trying to pull updates at the same time. It makes the system completely unusable for the first ten minutes it’s on!
Any way, I decided to build a new WordPress theme. Same colour scheme, more rounded edges – should be available in the next few days.
Two things that improve my bash productivity – stopping the cursor keys inserting characters in vim and history search in bash.
Edit ~/.vimrc or /etc/vim/vimrc (for system wide) and add turn off vi compatibility:
set nocompatible
The latter can be improved by editing ~/.inputrc (or /etc/inputrc for everyone). Pressing the up key scrolls through all the commands you’ve typed but by adding:
"\e[A":history-search-backward
"\e[B":history-search-forward
You can type the first letter or two and get the command you need, so if you typed “mysql -u root -p” last Tuesday but can’t remember the options, typing “my” and pressing the up key will find it.
I was talking with someone yesterday who is hacking a WordPress theme together. If you work with web sites, being able to run a site locally allows testing, experimentation, developing new themes and even just checking that a software update isn’t going to break your site. You might want to keep a web application on a local network and away from the Internet – such as StatusNet, a Wiki or a project management application. All we need is to install a LAMP stack – Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. We’ve already got the “L”! So let’s walk through installing WordPress. Continue reading
Judging by my server logs, there are lots of people trying to use the Huawei E1550 with Ubuntu. I posted a howto around this time last year but have been getting a lot of mail on it recently so thought I’d look at it again. I was going to mention it in the system help, under troubleshooting but can’t remember if I pushed a patch or not. Continue reading
Yesterday, I posted that perhaps we should encourage new users to spend more time in the live environment before they install. I suggested that we do this by means of a welcome application.
Generally, people seemed to like the idea of a welcome application – something to highlight Ubuntu’s abilities and to guide through common issues.
Here’s some mock ups that might show more of what I meant.
An introductory video is running [1] along with some short text explaining the application’s purpose [2]. Common tasks are listed [3]. What’s missing from this is two things – a close button and an install button. I’m not sure how to work this because I am trying to encourage it being run – I think a little install tab in the top right along with a small close button might work. I want to encourage not irritate.
The user is interested in getting online and has clicked on a link to get here. The application’s checked for available connections. In this case, there is a wireless connection available, so the context sensitive hyperlink [1] has linked a video/screencast [3] showing the user how to connect. With the failure to detect a wired connection, the context sensitive hyperlink links to a troubleshooting page. Successful connection has resulted in a notification [2] and triggered the “what now” box, guiding the user to what is now available.
I can see a number of issues:
Of these, I think the size issue is the greatest. It might not be possible at all to have video or screen-casts but it should be possible to have room for images and text. It would also allow easier localisation.
Still – it’s just an idea. Oh and thanks to Pencil – rather impressive OSS mock up software.