Tagged: ubuntu

Canonical’s schizophrenia about FOSS

May 5, 2008 12:03 pm by Blaise Alleyne — Free Culture Free Software Law —

Last month, George Farris began a thread on the Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list questioning the license choice of Ubuntu training material. The training manuals are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, which is non-free because it doesn’t allow commercial use. George asks, “why on earth would you not allow educational institutions to use this material in classes?” Billy Cina from Canonical responded:

The purpose of the license is to prevent the material being used for profit-seeking purposes. If you (or anyone else) is from a not-for-profit institution or running community classes etc., then this material is 100% intended for that. Charging students minimal fees to cover expenses is also ok.

The problem is that isn’t true. Neal McBurnett highlights the huge legal gray area surrounding the non-commercial clause. When George brings up a practical example of using the manual to offer a course on Ubuntu and charging a student fee ($50-$199.00), Billy confirms the problem: “Non-profit are key words. $50 – $199.00 sounds like profit seeking to me.”

Scott Kitterman retorted that “if this were packaged for inclusion in Ubuntu it would have to go into Multiverse because it does not carry a free license.” I added that there are other free licenses available which are better suited for documentation and inline with the Ubuntu philosophy and the philosophies of free software and open source software communities: CC BY, CC BY-SA, GNU Free Documentation License.

Billy Cina provided an unfortunately empty corporate response:

Ubuntu is a free distribution and will always continue to be free. However, this does not mean that every service provided to support Ubuntu or its further expansion must also be free. Both the Ubuntu community and Canonical have invested a lot of time and money in developing this course, it is therefore reasonable for: a. the community to be able to use the material (freely) to further spread the work of Ubuntu and grow the user base, and b. for Canonical to determine who should be seeking a profit out of its investment.

The problem is… well, the whole statement.

Billy muddles the two meanings of the word free. No one expects that every service provided to support Ubuntu will be provided at no cost, but one does expect Canonical to have a more consistent respect for the freedom central to the open source software it provides. Using a non-free license by choice seems inconsistent with Canonical’s stated mission of “facilitating the continued growth and development of the free software community” since it’s inconsistent with the community’s beliefs and restricts its development.

More importantly, the community isn’t able to use to the work freely. Community members are in a legal gray area, at best, if they want to be compensated for any time and money they spend on training if they make use of these materials because of the non-commercial clause. Nevermind the implications for business users in the community.

Yes, Canonical has the legal right to make this decision. But Canonical (and the community) would benefit from some consistency in their commitment to free software and free culture. If everyone in the free software world believed it was reasonable “to determine who should be seeking a profit out of [their] investment[s],” Canonical wouldn’t have a distribution.

Scott Kitterman says:

The exact same argument applies equally well to the Ubuntu distribution. I don’t see how it’s somehow better for documentation that the community contributed to than for the distribution.

Personally, I don’t expect there’s much more point in discussing this as this seems to me to be typical of Canonical’s schizophrenia about FOSS.

The non-commercial clause is counter-productive. It severely limits the use of the materials, when such use would only further the adoption of Ubuntu and by extension a demand for Canonical’s services.

If I were a small business considering Canonical’s distribution, I’d be concerned that Canonical thinks it ought to control profit-seeking within its community.

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Encoding to Ogg Vorbis using a GStreamer pipeline – vorbisenc plugin quality property

May 2, 2008 6:20 pm by Blaise Alleyne — Free Culture Free Software Music Technology —

I’ve been eager to transition my music library from the proprietary patent-ridden MP3 format to Ogg Vorbis, and since my iPod died a few months back, I’ve decided to make the move. I’ve read up on Ogg Vorbis and learned that it’s best to re-rip my CDs, since converting from one compressed audio format to another is a bad idea.

In Ubuntu 8.04, I tried using Rhythmbox and Sound Juicer to rip my CDs. They both use the same settings, making use of a GStreamer pipeline, and I encountered a problem with the quality setting. The Vorbis format uses a quality setting of -1 to 10, instead of measuring quality by bitrate. I wanted to use a Vorbis quality setting of 6. I went to Edit -> Preferences and clicked “Edit” under the “Format” heading. I selected “CD Quality, Lossy” (Ogg Vorbis) and the GStreamer pipeline read:
audio/x-raw-float,rate=44100,channels=2 ! vorbisenc name=enc quality=0.5 ! oggmux

0.5 seemed ridiculously low, so I changed it to 6. Which didn’t work. I googled around, sifted through man pages, baffled at what this quality setting should be set at… didn’t it use the standard Vorbis quality scale? It did, but in a stupid way.

Eventually, I went in search of the Gstreamer documentation, and found this description of the quality property for the vorbisenc plugin:

Specify quality instead of specifying a particular bitrate.

Allowed values: [-0.1,1]

Default value: 0.3

Who decided to make the scale one tenth of the actual standard? *sigh* Ah well, now I know how to use it and it’s working wonderfully! Here’s my new pipeline:
audio/x-raw-float,rate=44100,channels=2 ! vorbisenc name=enc quality=0.6 ! oggmux

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Fixing slide show slowdowns in OpenOffice.org Impress

March 17, 2008 1:28 am by Blaise Alleyne — Free Software —

My mom (who runs Ubuntu 7.10) was having trouble with old PowerPoint presentations in OpenOffice.org Impress. Her machine would grind to a halt in presentation mode and she was forced to export the presentations as PDFs in order to deliver them.

I investigated the issues and found some help in this thread. A user, Galva, had suggested making these tweaks under Tools->Options in OpenOffice.org:

MEMORY – 30 steps, 128MB, 20 objects, 20MB per object, and remove after an hour
JAVA – Do not use Java
VIEW – Open GL, optimized output, dithering, refresh during interaction and hardware acceleration all ticked.

I had already made those changes to memory and the java runtime environment, but the view settings made a huge difference. The presentations actually run now! Thanks, Galva!

Coincidently, I was checking out the new Ubuntu brainstorm and decided to submit an idea — to optimize the OpenOffice.org default settings. I find I always make these tweaks on a new install. Unless there’s a really good reason why the settings are the way they are, they ought to be changed. It’s actually third in the office category now! If these tweaks helped you, consider voting for the idea on brainstorm.

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ThinkPad T61 waking up from sleep in Ubuntu 7.10

March 17, 2008 12:55 am by Blaise Alleyne — Free Software —

I have a ThinkPad T61 (646562U – with Intel GM965 integrated graphics) and I run Ubuntu 7.10 as my main operating system. When I wake from a suspend, my screen is too dark to use. I figured my laptop, which is relatively new, isn’t supported properly yet and just refrained from using the suspend function.

However, I discovered a workaround a few weeks back while reading this review!

The problem that remained is that after it wakes up from sleep mode, the LCD screen is very dark and I’m able to regulate it, unless I… switch to the terminal (CTRL+ALT+F1) and switch back to GUI (CTRL+ALT+F7).

Obviously, it would be nice it was working properly, but this hack is quite simple and effective and does the trick in the meantime.

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AbiWord: spell checking in Fluxbuntu, save as another file format by default

February 25, 2008 5:16 pm by Blaise Alleyne — Free Software —

I’ve been setting up a few old ThinkPads (a 240 and an iSeries model from the same era) with Fluxbuntu to give them new life and replace the ever aging and useless Windows 98 they were running. I looked into Damn Small Linux and other such distributions optimized for minimal performance, but I found that some of them were not really suitable as a desktop distribution. Fluxbuntu, on the other hand, has a beautiful theme, is easy to use and gives you access to the Ubuntu repositories.

One of the machines is for a novice computer user, so I’ve made a few changes. Kazehakase – the default browser – seems to have some sort of bug that cancels out the speed improvements it’s supposed to deliver, so I switched to Firefox (which the user is already familiar with). I also changed the ‘Editor’ icon on the desktop to open AbiWord, instead of the Leafpad text editor.

AbiWord needed some setup to get the spell check working. First of all, I had to install the aspell dictionary. I found out how to do that using this tutorial:
sudo apt-get install aspell-en

Then, I wanted to set the default language to Canadian English, as opposed to US English. To do that, I found out I had to modify the language attribute in two places in the default AbiWord document template.

  1. Open up /usr/share/AbiSuite-2.4/templates/normal.awt in your favourite text editor
  2. Change ‘en-US’ to the language of your choice (in my case, ‘en-CA’). Note that you need to change this in two places!

Lastly, this user doesn’t need to deal with multiple file formats. Even a more experienced user might wish to change the default file format. AbiWord doesn’t offer a way to do this through the GUI, but you can modify your AbiWord.Profile file to do this. I’d recommend Open Document (.odt) over Microsoft Word (.doc), but I found these instructions for changing the default file format.

  1. Open ~/.AbiSuite/AbiWord.Profile in your favourite text editor
  2. Add an attribute to the second Scheme tag: DefaultSaveFormat=".odt" (or whatever extension you prefer)

Hope that helps!

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MPAA University toolkit for combatting “piracy” violates copyright laws

December 5, 2007 6:17 pm by Blaise Alleyne — Free Culture Free Software Law Technology —

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) recently released software which it urged some of America’s largest universities to employ in order to monitor their networks for unauthorized file sharing. Not only do the universities not owe the MPAA anything, but the toolkit was found by security specialists to raise some major privacy concerns. Steve Worona, director of policy and networking programs at EDUCAUSE, says of the toolkit, “no university network administrator in their right mind would install this toolkit on their networks.”

More interestingly though, the software in question was based on Ubuntu variant Xubuntu and also made use of the Apache web server. There’s enough irony in the use of free and open source software to enforce draconian copyright laws already, but apparently the MPAA was in violation of the GNU GPL, the license the majority of the software is released under, by not making the source code available. Matthew Garrett from the Ubuntu technical board contacted the organization about their violation of copyright which resulted in a removal of the toolkit from the MPAA’s website. It will likely be up again soon once they sort things out, but this episode is both ironic and embarrassing for the MPAA. Calls for stricter copyright begin to sound hypocritical when the MPAA fails to respect other copyright holders’ rights.

Oh, and apparently this isn’t the first time the MPAA has done this sort of thing. And aside from violating copyright, they may also be in violation of Ubuntu’s trademark.

I really hope they’re embarrassed, but I’m not holding my breath.

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Gutsy Upgrade – XGL Problems

October 24, 2007 1:22 am by Blaise Alleyne — Free Software —

A message from Typesofsoftware.com

Lots of your computer software could probably be replaced with free and open source software, which has grown in popularity. You can find music playing software for example for almost any operating system, as well as free CD burning software if you’ll be listening on the road.

I’ve begun the process of upgrading the many Ubuntu installations I manage to the recently released Gutsy Gibbon. The first upgrade was flawless, though it took a long time as the servers were pretty busy. The second installation was going fine until there was a freaking power outage in my house. Not even an outage, just a flash… not enough to turn off all the computers or reset all the clocks in the house, but it took a few out, upgrade-in-progress computer included. I wasn’t able to boot with the latest kernel, but using an older one the system was back up and running and a ‘sudo dpkg –configure -a’ completed the upgrade process without any problems!

However, machine number 3 (my laptop hard drive, currently booting on my desktop via a USB external case since my laptop is in the shop) didn’t go so well. There were some scary errors during the upgrade. A segmentation fault caused one of the packages to fail upon which a great many packages depended. Packages like adduser, passwd, cupsys, bash… Surprisingly though, the update manager survived it all!

But Gutsy Gibbon was crawling. Absolutely crawling, considering I’m running with 2.0 GB of RAM and a 3.0 GHz dual core processor (it was flying in Feisty). ‘top’ showed that the culprit was XGL, and even after disabling desktop effects there was no change.

I was quite worried at first, I didn’t want to have to do a fresh install. But I found this post in the forums with a quick fix!

touch ~/.config/xserver-xgl/disable

By disabling XGL, my computer was back to its former glory. I don’t fully understand what the problem was, but either way I don’t appear to need XGL at all (I’m still using desktop effects) for my Intel graphics card.

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HOWTO: Ubuntu 7.04 with an HP 6515b [Updated: 11.04]

September 29, 2007 3:48 am by Blaise Alleyne — Free Software —

Update: Somewhere in between 10.04 LTS and 11.04, there was a regression which was preventing both GNOME or Unity from appearing when logging in under 11.04, unless I selected ‘no effects’ options.

This helped me to at least get the Ubuntu Classic option working:
sudo apt-get install fglrx
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

Unfortunately, this is the second new HP laptop which has given me hardware problems in GNU/Linux over the past few months. However, this time the culprit is AMD/ATI and their restricted drivers. Thankfully, they’ve announced plans to open things up, but until that’s been handled, tutorials like this will be necessary to get a system up and running.

I found a tutorial which helped me get the xserver up and running in no time.

Now, the model I had to setup is the AMD sempron as opposed to the AMD Turion. I used the Feisty alternative install CD to wipe Vista clean off of it, and followed these steps upon first boot to the command line to get the xserver up and running.

Update the repository information.
sudo apt-get update

Install the xorg driver
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo depmod -a
sudo aticonfig --intitial

Then, restart your xserver and it should be working.
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

The other outstanding issues noted in the tutorial above are the wireless, fingerprint reader, an APIC error and the suspend function.

I tried followed the steps used to configure the wireless, and though the commands seemed to work fine, I couldn’t really tell if the wireless was working (it didn’t seem to be, but I didn’t spent a lot of time). Also, there are issues with that solution and the latest kernel. Quite frankly, if I really need wireless I’d happily purchase a card that has GNU/Linux drivers available.

Regarding the fingerprint reader, for me that’s mainly a “who cares”, but if anyone knows how to set it up in Ubuntu I might be interested in trying it out.

APIC error? *sigh* I don’t even know where to start. The laptop runs fine though, but it does take a very long time to start up (much, much longer than any other Ubuntu laptop I’ve used). I wonder if that’s related to this issue, as the error does appear during startup?

I tested the suspend function on the laptop and it worked first try, no setup required. That’s a bit of a solution to the long startup time, albeit more of a workaround than a solution.

At any rate, getting the xserver up and running was the most important accomplish and the reason I wanted to blog about this. One you’ve got that up and running, you’ve got a functional machine, even if there are a few other things to work out.

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Moving Mom to Ubuntu 7.04 from Windows XP

September 11, 2007 2:56 am by Blaise Alleyne — Free Software —

My own move from Windows XP to GNU/Linux was quite experimental and somewhat complicated, as I was using a dual-boot system for a while, and as such I don’t have a great recollection of everything I’ve done throughout the switch.

But now I’m in the process of moving my mother (amongst other friends and family members) over to GNU/Linux, so I’ll attempt a more thorough recounting of the process here.

(NOTE: This guide is intended for users who are somewhat independent as I may skim over some obvious detail in order to keep this relatively concise. I hope to piece together a decent comprehensive overview of a variety of things, but if you’re looking for thorough instructions you may want to supplement this with other guides.)

Windows XP Files

These are the files we needed to copy from Windows XP. We just stored them on an external drive for the transfer.

  • C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\ – her main files
  • C:\Documents and Settings\username\Desktop – can’t forget the files left on the desktop
  • C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ – bookmarks, extensions, saved passwords, etc.
  • C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\ – email, extensions

I’ll explain where we put these files on her new machine a bit later.

Installing Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Feisty is really easy to install with most computers. On my mom’s new Thinkpad X60, I was able to boot from the Live CD (which you can download here) using the docking station (which contains the optical drive, since the machine doesn’t have one on board) without a problem. Installation took about half an hour and the most difficult decision I had to make was the username – first name or first initial last name? Somehow, I managed to get through that difficult moment, settling on the latter option.

(Though there’s only a slim chance you’ll run into any troubles, unless you’re installing on a new machine without any user data on it, you should definitely backup. The boot process involves partitioning/formatting your hard drive, which is serious stuff, so in the unlikely event that something goes wrong, you don’t want to lose any important data.)

Feisty’s restricted drivers manager provided support for the Intel Wireless card. Though it’s a shame to have to use non-free drivers, I’m thankful that they were made easily available because that certainly would have been a deal-breaker. Better that she is using free software in GNU/Linux now (with hope for free drivers in the future) than still running Windows.

Applications

Here’s a list of the applications she will be using:

  • Firefox: internet browser (already in use on Windows)
  • Thunderbird*: mail client (replacing Outlook Express)
  • OpenOffice: productivity suite – word processor, speadsheets, presentations (replacing Microsoft Office)
  • JPilot*: palm pilot desktop organizer (replacing Palm Desktop)
  • Banshee*: music player – syncs to digital audio devices (replacing iTunes in Windows)
  • Gnucash*: accounting application (replacing Microsoft Money)
  • Project Manager*: project management software (replacing Microsoft Project)

(* = These programs are not installed by default in Ubuntu, but are easily installed from the repositories – see Applications->Add/Remove)

For Firefox and Thunderbird, I transferred her profiles from Windows to Ubuntu. If you’re using a different browser/email client (e.g. Internet Explorer or Outlook (Express)), it’s best to download Firefox/Thunderbird in Windows and use the import feature to convert your data to the Mozilla format before copying the files over (which is exactly what I did with Thunderbird). Then, actually transferring profiles from Windows to GNU/Linux is rather trivial – a simple copy and paste.

In OpenOffice, I tweaked some settings. To increase performance, I followed this tutorial. I am a strong believer in the Open Document Format, but I showed her how to read/write documents in the proprietary Microsoft Office format for the purpose of sharing documents with those who are still stuck in the cave.

One problem we did encounter with OpenOffice was with Impress’ (slide show application) templates. There were only a few installed by default, but I was able to find a slew of others with a few quick online searches. However, it would have been nicer if there was a wider variety of templates included by default. Also, there is a bug in a recent update which crashes OpenOffice when switching the design template on an existing presentation! This bug was reported on Launchpad already though, and hopefully it will be fixed soon.

With JPilot, some simple configuration readied the application to sync with my mom’s Palm Treo 650 after installation (“sudo apt-get install jpilot”).

Banshee is a great program to use. It syncs with an iPod almost as easily as iTunes and supports other digital audio players as well. The one setting you may want to change though is the encoder (Edit->Preferences->Output Format). OGG Vorbis is a far superior format to MP3 (technically, ethically and legally), but not many digital audio players support it yet. If you’re syncing to a digital audio player, you may need to use MP3. Otherwise, I highly recommend using OGG Vorbis.

Gnucash was easily installed from the repositories. We did a quick check to make sure that it supported the file format that our bank provides through its online service. Both the bank and Gnucash support a variety of formats, so we had no problems.

My mom hasn’t had a chance to explore project management software yet.

Post-Installation Configuration

As my mother is a relatively non-technical user, I tweaked a few of the system preferences for her after installation.

First, I changed the login screen so that she could click on her username rather than having to type it in. System->Administration->Login Window, then select the ‘Local’ tab, and I chose “Human List”.

Next, I enabled Desktop Effects (System->Preferences->Desktop Effects) to put her workspaces on a cube. Since she’s coming from the Windows world and is unfamiliar with the concept of workspaces, the cube was extremely helpful for her to visualize the workspaces so that she can better understand their use. I also showed her some basic Compiz shortcuts that she could take advantage of. To my surprise, I’ll often walk by her office and see her using Ctrl+Alt+Left/Right to switch between workspaces. Ctrl+Alt+Down is also useful for workspace switching, and Ctrl+Alt+Up and Alt+Tab are useful for switching between windows.

I setup her Google Talk account in Gaim and added Gaim to the startup session (System->Preferences->Sessions, Startup Tab, Add, command is ‘gaim’) so that we can use gaim to communicate for tech support when she’s at the office or traveling.

I also helped her to customize her Theme/Desktop Background (System->Preferences->Theme,System->Preferences->Desktop Background) to help give her some ownership of the machine and feel comfortable in her new surroundings.

The printer she users was easy to install as I’d already installed it on several other Ubuntu machines in the house.

I used ubuntuguide.org for instructions on how to install additional multimedia codecs and enable DVD playback capability.

Unfortunately, though many of the keyboard hot keys worked without any configuration, the Fn+F7 LCD button on the keyboard was not working. I first installed the i810switch (“sudo apt-get install i810switch”), which I unfortunately had to build from source in order to implement a bug fix (the fix will be part of the next version of Ubuntu in October though, I’d imagine). Then I used the gconf editor to setup the keyboard shortcut in the Compiz settings, as she uses her laptop for presentations often.

Overall, the transition was relatively smooth, but the couple bugs we encountered took some time to work through. Now we have much more control over her computer, thousands of powerful free applications at her fingertips from the Ubuntu repositories, and a much better (technically, ethically and monetarily) long-term software solution for her computing needs.

My mom was the third of seven people (with more to come) who I’ve switched over to GNU/Linux variants in the last few months. Why not give it a try?

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Moving Firefox/Thunderbird Profiles

July 28, 2007 1:45 pm by Blaise Alleyne — Free Software —

This example will involve moving a profile from Windows XP to Ubuntu 7.04, but the basic idea can be used to move profiles around in many other scenarios.

Step 1: Find Your Files

In Windows XP, look in:
Firefox: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
Thunderbird: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles

You should find a sufficiently cryptic folder (e.g. “b455b37.default”). You can check inside to see if it has the data you want (ie. bookmarks.html for Firefox, a Mail subfolder for Thunderbird, etc.). That’s your profile folder, the one you’ll need to copy in step two.

Step 2: Copy Your Files

In Ubuntu:
Firefox: ~/.mozilla/firefox/Profiles/
Thunderbird:: ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/

There are two options: (1) replace the contents of the existing profile directory with the contents of the profile directory from your Windows machine; (2) delete the existing profile directory and copy your entire profile directory from Windows in its stead.

The easiest way to copy files is probably to use a USB key, but it doesn’t really matter.

Step 3: Profiles.ini

If you chose option (1) above, then you need to edit ‘profiles.ini’ to update the path to your profile (since the directory name has changed). You’ll need to open up ‘profiles.ini’ in a text editor.

Firefox:
gedit ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini

Thunderbird:
gedit ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/profiles.ini

(If you’re copying to Windows, just use Notepad to edit the file.)

Inside profiles.ini, you’ll need to update the ‘Path’ to reflect the new name of your profile directory:

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=<path-to-new-profile>

Save the file, open the application and check to make sure your data is there. That’s it!

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