Old content will remain on wordpress.com until I figure out how to cleanly move it to DotClear (an open source blog system sponsored by Gandi). Gandi’s RSS import would only import the latest few entries, and importing WordPress XML backup failed. Help from the LazyWeb appreciated here! The old site will remain useful until the transition is complete.

So please update your bookmarks and rss feeds if they currently point to the wordpress.com redirect, no new content will be showing there unless i want to open another blog for some specific purpose in the future.

Links:
New site
New feed

Browsing the phone’s filesystem in Nautilus

You need a working Bluetooth setup. See my earlier Bluetooth related HOWTO on how to find out your phone’s Bluetooth address with the hcitool and how to setup a PIN so you can pair the devices in a friendly fashion. You need to have portmap installed (in order to use any kind of NFS shares). Then you need the key ingredient, p3nfs. Download the ARCH Linux binary package and the corresponding nfsapp SIS installer for the 9300/9500.

1. Install nfsapp on the phone (send the file over via Bluetooth, or browse to the p3nfs homepage with the phone’s browser and download it)
2. Convert the ARCH linux binary package of p3nfs into a debian package and install it: sudo alien -i p3nfs-x.xx.pkg.tar.gz
3. Set the suid bit on /usr/bin/p3nfsd so that you don’t have to be root to access the phone’s filesystem: sudo chmod+s /usr/bin/p3nfsd
4. Bind an rfcomm device to your phone. The nfsapp uses the Bluetooth channel 13: sudo rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 13 (XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX being your phone’s address)
5. Start nfsapp on the phone. Check that it’s using Bluetooth/13 to communicate. If not, press ‘p’ to change it
6. Make a convenient mount point in your home directory, such as ‘Phone’
7. Start p3nfsd: p3nfsd -series80 -tty /dev/rfcomm0 -dir /home/<username>/Phone
8. Browse to the Phone directory with a file manager or in the terminal
9. when you’re done, exit any application, file browser or terminal accessing the ‘Phone’ directory and unmount the phone: ls /home/<username>/Phone/exit — wait for output confirming that p3nfsd has exited cleanly

You would probably prefer not to type all those commands by hand every day, so make a few nice aliases in your ~/.bashrc:
alias bindcomm='sudo rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 13'
alias mountphone='p3nfsd -series80 -tty /dev/rfcomm0 -dir /home/username/Phone'
alias umountphone='ls /home/username/Phone/exit'

NOTE: Do not mess with files on the E: and Z: “drives” on the phone. They belong the running system’s internal memory and touching that stuff may crash the phone and perhaps make it unbootable.

NOTE: This HOWTO is just a quick list of steps to get this working. It is not a substitute for actually reading the p3nfs README file. The p3nfs documentation also deals with situations when things are not working. I won’t, so don’t call me for support :)

Technorati Tags: mobile, nokia, linux, p3nfs

I’ve always admired amaroK‘s all-in-one philosophy. Functionally, it’s the undisputed champion of players. Alas, amaroK is very resource-hungry and my poor box is slow. To make matters worse, amaroK loads a bunch of KDE libraries along with it, so running it in GNOME is painful.

Thus, I have been on a lookout for an amaroK replacement for GNOME for some time now. Listen seems promising, but frankly it has always felt a bit unstable (not that amaroK itself never crashes, but that’s one thing we don’t want to clone from it.) Then I stumbled upon an even younger Exaile! on the Ubuntu forums and it is awesome. Written by synic in Python, it promises to be all i’m looking for. Rock!

Exaile! player jazz action

Exaile has all I want:

• You can easily browse either your library or the file system
• Good search function
• Streaming radio support and shoutcast directory browsing
• Tag editing
• Album art fetching from amazon.com
• Is a GTK+ app and fits well into the GNOME desktop
• iPod and mp3 player support (well, I don’t need this but there it is if you have python-gpod installed)

Of course, after testing this app and falling in love with it, i had to biuld a package for Ubuntu Dapper. Enjoy, but remember that this project is very young and you might find bugs (all standard disclaimers about my packages’ reliablility apply too, of course.)

Technorati Tags: multimedia, gnome

1. Have a working bluetooth setup.
2. hcitool scan gives you your phone’s BD address. Make a note of this.
3. sdptool search DUN will show you the appropriate channel to use. Make a note of this.
4. Check that you have a 4-number code in /etc/bluetooth/pin unless your phone and the machine are very friendly already. Your phone may ask for this number later.
5. Type rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 X:X:X:X:X:X YY (where X:X:X:X:X:X is the BD address and YY is the channel number).
6. Type rfcomm and check that the channel is either “clear” or “closed”.
7. Create /etc/ppp/peers/gprs with the following contents:
   /dev/rfcomm0
connect '/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/peers/gprs.chat'
        noauth
        defaultroute
        usepeerdns
        lcp-echo-interval 65535
        debug
8. Create /etc/ppp/peers/gprs.chat with the following contents:
   TIMEOUT                 15        
ECHO                    ON
HANGUP                  ON      
''                      AT
OK                      ATZ     
OK                      ATD*99*#
(NOTE: *99*# above is the number to call. This one works for Sonera in Finland and many other providers, but call your friendly provider helpdesk and make sure you have the correct one.)
9. Initiate bluetooth pairing between your phone and the computer.
10. Make the call: sudo pppd call gprs
11. Surf away!

Here’s instructions for connecting via the DKU2 cable supplied with the 9300. Cables are uncool and sometimes get in the way, but the procedure is simpler. This info comes mostly from gr0kzer0 in another forum thread:

1. Install wvdial.
2. Connect the cable.
3. Run wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf
4. Edit the /etc/wvdial.conf just created. Look at the last four lines, we edit the Phone, Password and Username lines (the username and password are bogus ones. wvdial wants non-empty ones but you can enter Batman’s credentials there if you like), and additionally force the modem into Stupid Mode.
   [Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Password = foo
Username = bar
Stupid Mode = 1
   (NOTE: Again try to find a suitable phone number)
5. Now you should be able to dial out with wvdial or GNOME PPP.

Technorati Tags: gprs, linux, bluetooth, nokia, howto

So this means that dominant tech companies can add software patents to their patent portfolios in order to ensure their dominance just like in the US, and small tech companies are free to go bankrupt while fighting in court for their right to do business and innovate in Europe.

Not confused enough yet? Let Yahoo! News try and explain:
EC: Software is not patentable – Yahoo! UK & Ireland News

Technorati Tags: software patents

1. Get the board you want the stuff off.
2. Get a dry erase marker (yes, we will make marks to take marks) and a dry eraser.
3. Draw over what you want to erase (make sure you draw slowly to fill it in better).
4. Erase.
5. Done!

I haven’t tried this yet, but soon will since my whiteboard is in a pretty sorry state. :)
(Via Lifehacker.com)

What better way to celebrate the official release of Dapper on June 1st than remember old times? Matt has made the artwork from all previous Ubuntu releases parallel installable, so if you feel nostalgic, you can use the Warty theme and wallpaper.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, debian

Technorati Tags: debian, software

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, debian

Most consumer-level laptops don’t meet those requirements, and I wonder if companies will run to upgrade all their machines in order to deliver the Aero eye candy to all their office workers.

I wonder if the good old alliance between Microsoft and hardware manufacturers will still work. “What kind of stuff would you like to sell the suckers this year? We’ll be happy to make software that requires it.”

Technorati Tags: vista, digital-divide

Encourage your friends on these networks to chat with you via Jabber instead, so you can get free from incompatible proprietary channels altogether. Read more about it on Ploum's blog. Thank you.

• Accept the fact that you have no idea where your stuff is;
• Realize that most of your data is in digital form, or can be digitized;
• Make sure that all of your personal information space is searchable, both online and locally
• Use the right applications! Always be prepared to sacrifice your favorite application in favor of one that integrates to your working environment most seamlessly

Your information space consists of all the stuff you have on your computer’s home directory (mail, documents, calendar entries, chat logs…) and, optimally, everything you have read and seen on the Web. All this information should be at your fingertips at all times.

GNOME hacker extraordinaire Jeff Waugh put it best in a recent interview: we need to get rid of the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) paradigm which has dominated on the desktop for so long because

“when I wake up in the morning, I don’t think that I have to rearrange my windows and sort my icons — they’re not the things that I find important. The things that I actually care about are people, events, documents and getting laid.”

So we need a user interface that doesn’t get between us and those things that really matter.

So this is how close to Luis I can get though a single text entry widget on my desktop, the Deskbar applet: from this single interface, I can mail him, go to his home page as well as other relevant pages via a Google search, open past e-mail and chat conversations with him, and peruse any document on my hard disk mentioning him.

Fig. 1: Searching for Luis

Note that there is no indication in the above screenshot to the applications that will be used to handle this data. I don’t care, and I shouldn’t be bothered with such details. If I want to contact Luis, I want to click his name and write him a message. I certainly don’t want to peruse my application menus to find an e-mail application, open a contacts database to find his address and then try to remember what I wanted to say to him. Also, I don’t want to open a presentation program, find a file (hoping I have given the file a descriptive name and archived it into a reasonably discoverable directory structure) and open it. All I want is Luis-information!

The first commandment in making your stuff searchable: build your desktop around Beagle, and only use applications that Beagle is aware of. Do not give in to the lure of a non-beaglified application, be it as awesome as it may, if there is a beagle-aware application available. In short, choose freely from the list of supported applications on the Beagle home page, but do not look elsewhere. I’m sure Opera is a cool browser, but if you want your browsing history indexed by Beagle, don’t use it. If you use Thunderbird, switch to Evolution. Read news feeds with Liferea or Blam. Keep your notes in a Tomboy sticky wiki. Index your photos with F-Spot. Learn to love these programs, you have no choice. Your life will be easier. Really.

Believe the Web2.0 hype. Well, some of it. Much of your data should live online. Switch to Gmail instead of keeping huge local mail archives, simply because Gmail is more searchable. With Gmail you can keep all your mail, and you don’t have to organize it because their search is faster than your ability to figure out the organization plan you had in mind a year ago. I’m sure other mail services are just as nice, but a plugin happens to be available which integrates Gmail into the deskbar and thus into your desktop. Use del.icio.us and tag all interesting pages so they are also searchable from the deskbar. Another upside with keeping your data on other people’s servers is that (let’s face it) Google’s servers are more likely to stay up 24/7 than yours so you can get to your data from any machine, anytime. Similarly, use F-Spot to tag your photos and upload them to Flickr (why Flickr of all the photo upload services on the Web? Because that’s what F-Spot supports, and F-Spot is what Beagle supports!) Use Gmailfs or Box.net to store data you might want to keep accessible at all times.

Keep your address book and calendar online, especially if you need to access it from different locations and devices. I keep my info on the ScheduleWorld.com servers because they’ve built their service on open standards. The SyncML, iCal, and LDAP protocols they use enable me to handle and access my data from my desktop, laptop, and mobile phone, and keep them all in sync at all times. This is doubly valuable for someone who use the forbidden combination of a Nokia smartphone and Linux systems. Since I use Evolution on the desktop, my address book and calendar are integrated in all my GNOME applications where it makes sense.

The days of totally transparent interfaces has not yet come, and we cannot get to people, events, documents, or laid with the power of thought alone quite yet, but there’s no reason not to make handing our information as easy as possible.

Disclaimer: the above concerns the data in my personal information space. I have made accessing my information as easy as possible, not as secure as possible. Some of the methods, such as accessing Gmail via the deskbar, are inherently insecure. I don’t recommend using similar methods for your million dollar company’s customer database and information like that.

Technorati Tags: GNOME, search, web2.0, desktop

Uh-oh, wrong move. All of a sudden, strange things started happening on Digg, as described on McGyver’s blog entry from the next day. This of course is just his side of the story, but others have taken into investigating the matter as well. Roblomoso posted about the matter on Google Blogoscoped and was banned from Digg. Naturally, ForeverGeek in its entirety was banned as well.

I’d say this is editorial control, and not very “user-driven”. If users don’t like ForeverGeek’s stories, they wouldn’t digg them and all would be well, no? That’s how the social web is supposed to work, and that’s definitely how Digg claims to work. Digg founder Kevin Rose sort-of responed to the mess, but didn’t really succeed in explained anything, as illustrated by McGyver’s reply. What does matter is that ForeverGeek stories are suddenly starting to appear on Digg again.

People and communities do fight in real life all the time of course, so why wouldn’t they do the same on the internet (let alone the chaos that makes up the “Web2.0″?) Nothing new in that. I guess my point is that it’s just as sad in both cases.

Update: I completely missed this: the second fastest growing blog is “Ubuntu newbie” by Cornell :)

This flamebait is a worthy continuation of a long tradition of Linus’ communication, starting back in 1992 with his own master when it comes to operating system programming, and a more recent evaluation of the competence of the makers of the world’s premiere business Unix desktop.

All this is well in line with the fact that he is so smart he knows free software licensing matters better than the FSF which enabled him to write Linux in the first place, and its lawyers when it comes to the upcoming version of the GPL, the license which he licensed Linux under.

Dapper is different from previous Ubuntu releases. It is the culmination of lessons learned from the first three releases and will be the first one to receive three years of support for desktop installations and five years for servers, which makes it comparable to the expensive “enterprise” distributions from Red Hat and SUSE. The difference is of course that Ubuntu will never have a separate “enterprise” release but all Ubuntu users get the best possible distribution for free. This is great for corporate users and others who value extremely stable platforms but it has another consequense as well, for those who enjoy living on the edge: the freedom to experiment on the release coming up after Dapper, the Edgy Eft!

Following a rock solid release such as Dapper, the Ubuntu community can again freely concentrate on exploring new, exciting technologies for the next releases. Ubuntu leader Mark Shuttleworth, A.K.A sabdfl, opened yesterday the planning period for the next release, giving the community free hands to experiment, imposing almost “zero from-the-top requirements” for the release. We can afford this because of the long support for Dapper. Those who want to keep running a solid release can still enjoy Dapper while the more adventurous users can venture to the unknown with Edgy Eft. I’m sure that will be very exciting. I’m already anxious to try out Xen, wobbly windows on Xgl/AIGXL, and whatever the Ubuntu hackers come up with. Let’s first get Dapper out though, and make sure it’s the most awesome system to date!

• MSN
• Yahoo!
• AIM

I will be happy to chat with you on the free Jabber and IRC networks. Please see my updated contact information on the About page.

If you don’t have a Jabber account, you can easily get one for free on the jabber.org home page. If you use Gmail, you already have a Jabber account. If your current chat client does not support Jabber, upgrade to the open source multiprotocol Gaim messenger if you use Linux or Windows, or Psi if you use a Mac. Of course, I’ll continue to idle on the Freenode IRC network as well.

I stongly recommend that everybody upgrade to open chat protocols and leave the corporate networks fight their own battles.

Now, there are obvious difficulties to spreading viruses on Linux and other properly designed systems, as demonstrated the lack of Linux viruses despite the availability of the ELF Virus Writing HOWTO since 2002. But the saddest part is that the virus didn't actually work on Linux kernels later than 2.6.16, as demonstrated by the testing and analysis published by Hans-Werner Hilse.

Linus Torvalds agreed with Hilse's analysis but was left wondering why the virus worked on older kernels but not the post-2.6.16 ones. He examined the situation and found a bug in GCC (the GNU C compiler) which was triggered by some code in the new kernels (I'm not going to pretend I understand any of this). Naturally he was intrigued by a program which could run natively on both Windows and Linux platforms.

Linus's explanation about the bug was published today on Newsforge. The funniest thing is, Linux has fixed the flaw and made the virus work on all versions of Linux. This might come as an embarrassment to Kaspersky, who obviously was going to cash in on the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt triggered by a Linux virus and the users' need to suddenly buy Linux anti-virus software from them. Fortunately the free software hackers were again more than happy to help make broken code work again.

Let's see if anybody will buy anti-virus software for Linux now, or Kaspersky's software for any platform.

ATI defends proprietary drivers on IP reasons: their drivers include licensed proprietary third-party IP that they are required to protect. They also cite teir own IP interests and wish to “maintain the proprietary, trade-secret nature of that as long as possible.” Way to go.

Nvidia doesn’t think hackers can write complicated software: “It’s so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help,” Also, their customers don’t seem to be complaining enough. They do have open source “where it makes sense”. Nice.

Intel seems to be the most interesting company here. They hope to compete against ATI and Nvidia specifically with open source drivers. If their chips become good enough in the near future, I have something to recommend to newbies again!

The article also has lots of interesting comments from the Linux kernel hackers and development of a stable interface for proprietary drivers, as well as the strategies of the commercial Linux biggies Red Hat and Novell. So go ahead and read it in full.

Oh well, the news, especially business news is full of stories like this. Perhaps I should just go and read some real news now.

Update: Oracle has confirmed the OS plans.

Samba printing, however, is currently broken. Because there is a Windows box on my home network, I use Samba for all networking. Samba on my Dapper server works well and the Windows box can print to it, but the Dapper laptop could not. On the Ubuntu Forums, other people seemed to be having problems with printing from Dapper to Windows servers, so i went on to examine relevant bug reports on Dapper. Looks like the problem has appeared quite recently (sometime around April 12th), and is on the client side. Sure enough reverting the smbspool binary to an older version indeed fixed the problem. Hopefully we’ll soon see this bug fixed and smbclient updated!

Otherwise, Dapper currently works very well, and the new GNOME is awesome.

Celebrating Easter, Jonathan has gone egg hunting. He first exposes a known liar, aptitude. We all know of APT’s Super Cow Powers because they’re documented (type “apt-get” with no arguments and hit ENTER), but aptitude keeps its powers hidden. The key to finding aptitude’s Super Cow Powers is endurance and liberal use of the -v switch.

Firefox’s secret message from the Book of Mozilla is well known as well, but the really great OpenOffice.org Easter Egg that Jonathan unveils was news to me. Of course, Jonathan sees such an elaborate Easter Egg as “proof that OpenOffice.org is bloated”. Not that we would need further proof of that! :) I didn’t know about the funny release names in the Ubuntu kernel documentation either.

Here are a couple of GNOME eggs I’m aware of. Open the “Run” dialog (press alt+F2). Type “gegls from outer space” as the command. You get to play a game that “will change the way you think of your desktop forever.” It features GEGLs (Genetically Engineered Goat, Large). GEGL is a mythical creature in GIMP and GNOME lore, and the unofficial secret logo of the GNOME project.

The other GNOME egg i know about features Wanda, the fortune telling fish from the Fish Applet. Type “free the fish” into the Run dialog and Wanda will swim around your desktop occasionally. (You can accomplish the same thing by hitting the ‘f’ key three times after opening the “About” box of a panel.) If you click it with your mouse, it will flee, only to return later. You cannot kill this process because it’s hidden in the gnome-panel process (or one of its children – killiing gnome-panel does help).

Of course, Easter Eggs in free software have given rise to some complaints as well. An OpenOffice.org user argues that a piece of free software should work as advertised and only in that manner. There are bug reports demanding the removal of Easter Eggs from OO.o, or at least an easy method for sysadmins to disable them. Issue 61685 has extensively discursive comments for and against eggs.

This is also a major step feature-wise: the searchable GNOME. I can have even less widgets, dangles, bells, whistles, and “stuff” on my desktop because I can very intuitively find anything without the interface getting in the way too much. Well, that’s not entirely true, but MORE true than ever before on any desktop I’ve tried. Under the hood, the GNOME hackers have really put a lot of work into making GNOME less resource hungry, so that maybe I don’t have to buy another set of hardware just because I have a new version of the software. It’s the other way around! Try telling that to Microsoft.

Now that Ubuntu Dapper uses the new X.org 7.0, i naturally wanted to play with cool and useful effects that the bleeding-edge XGL extension supports, so I needed DRI. Direct renedering was apparently not supported with the free mga drivers in X.org, so I readed for the Matrox website for drivers. Turns out Matrox had no driver for X.org later than version 6.8.1, and judging from the responses by Matrox representatives on their support forums, we shoudln’t even expect them any time soon. Perhaps the Matrox hackers have assumed the stagnated state of mind of the old XFree team and got scared of the brand new modular X that the 7.0 release represents, or perhaps the company policy has changed, I don’t know. No explanation there, beyond “no ETA at this point” for the drivers. Daunted, I went on to do other stuff.

This morning I returned to the support forums, only to find that the Linux forum was locked, no new posts could be submitted. Apparently Matrox had grown weary of the Rants of the Linux users (who had been spoiled with quick delivery of drivers in the past), and decided to simply shut off this channel of critique. Daunted, and this time very pissed too, I turned to Google for a last search for a solution.

Lo, Google directed me to Arch Linux Wiki, where somebody had indeed come up with a fix involving a simple change in the xorg.conf file and the free mga driver in X.org. I quickly applied the fix (edit xorg.conf, add

Option “OldDmaInit” “true”

to your “Device section), tested and saw that it was good.

So now I have DRI, but I have no graphics chip maker to recommend to newbies. I never guessed Matrox could afford to lose the strong support they’ve had from Linux/X users over the years now that they’re losing the game to NVidia and ATI already. Now all I can say is, ATI is the worst one because their proprietary drivers are constantly broken. Matrox is close to the bottom, since they have no binary drivers at all, and we don’t know how much they are interested in giving the X community’s free drivers. NVidia has very good proprietary drivers for linux in case you don’t mind using them.

One of the best things about Linux has been that you almost never needed to hunt down and install drivers for your hardware, as Windows users are accustomed to do. If things continue to decline, we will always need to find the correct drivers (non-free drivers no less!) to get decent graphics support.

Woe is me. Please tell me I’m wrong and Matrox cards will work out of the box like they used to Real Soon.

I also like the new look. The brighter Human theme and especially the new icons are very slick. In particular, I enjoy the new Tangerine icon theme variant based on Tango standards. A branded spash screen and a new default background are still missing.

Ubuntu usually has very fresh software but for some reason LyX tends to be a bit old. This was the case in Breezy, and now again in dapper. I have built packages of LyX 1.4 because it has some nice new features missing from 1.3 which is still included in Dapper. I was particularly excited to test the new experimental GTK+ frontend, but it doesn’t work very well yet and is definitely not production ready. Selecting text is very awkward in particular. Luckily, I have managed to integrate Qt apps into GNOME quite nicely, using the Polymer Qt theme as described in this tutorial.

The delay of Dapper release vs. the Windows Vista delay is nicely discussed here. It’s all about openness!

“The operating system is going to be late. Last-minute decisions mean a last-minute delay — more testing needed, says the organisation, and a bit more integration. But the reaction isn’t what you might expect: with a few minor reservations, the users and developers are positive and supportive. “It’s worth it,” they say.”

mahangu.org has some notes about Dapper, the Linux Desktop in general, and the sweetness of hardware support in Linux compared to Windows.

First, save the package states while the system is still working well:
dpkg --get-selections > (filename)

After a disaster, you can now restore the system to its original state: install a minimal system (no packages beyond the base system). Then:

dpkg --set-selections (filename)
apt-get dselect-upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get upgrade

Now you can just slam the configuration files to /etc from your backups.

From Travis Crump:

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 1001

in /etc/apt/preferences, and do an apt-get dist-upgrade, apt will happily try to downgrade every package to its testing
version[alternatively adding that to /etc/apt/preferences will let you do apt-get install without needing the version number]. It just isn’t guaranteed to work, and isn’t considered a bugif it doesn’t.

But in an effort to eliminate recurring errors, I strongly encourage users to include the output of the following commands in a log file or readme file added to your backups …

fdisk -l /dev/hda (/dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, … as needed)
dumpe2fs /dev/hda1 (once for *each* partition on hda. see output of fdisk above)
(do not do dumpe2fs on the swap partition)

The first command tells how your disk is partitioned. The second command includes all the technical data including the superblock locations. If this data is included on a tape or CD backup it canbe easily retrieved when you need it.

The -o number-up=value option selects N-Up printing. N-Up printing places multiple document pages on a single printed page. CUPS supports 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, and 16-Up formats; the default format is 1-Up:

lp -o number-up=1 filename ENTER
lp -o number-up=2 filename ENTER
lp -o number-up=4 filename ENTER
lpr -o number-up=16 filename ENTER

I’ve still to choose a neat layout and theme (the page is a bit busy looking as it is), but I’ve managed to move everything under siltala.net and LiveJournal onto this single blog, so things are good so far.

Free BSD
The GPL isn't that bad really. Adopt a penguin at the zoo.

Junkfood
Eat some real food. Something which you can identify the source of every ingredient, not the point of manufacture.

Religion
Read "God's Debris" by Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy)

8-Bit
Polygons, all the polygons you can get are not enough.

UNIX
Anything this old must be obselete. Go and install a nice modern operating system. I hear MSDOS has come a long way lately.

vi
Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.

Politics
Stop caring!

Macintosh
Use a mouse with more than one button.

Viruses I might suffer from:

Industrial (70%)
Everyone likes folk. No, really. Maybe you should listen to the Incredible String Band.

Discordia (90%)
Buy a suit. Invest your money. Eat hotdog buns on a friday.

X11 (60%)
I hear Mac OS 10 Aqua is nice at this time of year.

Computer Games (90%)
Stop staring at the screen and get some fresh air. You should see a doctor about the RSI in your thumbs.

Conspiracy Theory (68%)
Face it, the elected government is in control. Actually that's quite scary.

Hippyism (80%)
Free love is passe and potentially dangerous, and patchouli smells like cat piss.

Environmentalism (63%)
Consume more stuff! It's easier to buy new stuff than to recycle.

British (65%)
No need for cure. Benign virus.

TotL.net Human Virus Scanner

"As long as licenses are respected, for-profit content aggregation (into a software distribution, a web-based blog aggregator, or whatever) is generally acceptable. If creators don't personally find it acceptable, the onus is likely on them to choose an appropriate license. The aggregators which are perceived to give the most back to the communities and individuals they draw from are likely to be most popular, at least among opinion leaders."

This sounds plausible, but notwithstanding hypotheses concerning the differences between Sun, Red Hat and, say, Ubuntu, proper concepts are lacking. This calls for study.

More images

Today, I (forever optimistic) thought, "perhaps a clean install will be more successful". Not a painful option, since I had already reinstalled and was running on a virgin, non-customized Ubuntu anyway. The only thing I knew that officially did not work on Breezy yet were the (uninstallaby broken) LyX packages. Too bad, since LyX is my primary tool at work. I thought I'd just build my own LyX, and the latest LyX at that.

The clean install of Breezy was a snap, the new GNOME is awesome (even though Ubuntu have broken it by defaulting to browser mode Nautilus – easy to fix to honor upstream default and to enjoy self more), but sure enough, I could not install LyX. Went to lyx.org to get the source so I could build my own package (surely it must be doable even if the Debian people were too busy with upgrading glibc or X or something in Sid, Sid being truly unstable again).

Not only did I find LyX source. Searching for "debian" in the LyX wiki revealed also a patch for building debian packages on any debian-like system, a clear list of packages to install in order to satisfy LyX's build environment, and clear, hand-holding build instructions.

Building LyX using the provided debian/rules scipt took ages (you end up building lyx, lyx-common, lyx-xforms and lyx-qt), but I did indeed get the LyX packages with a handlful of readily provided commands. Hail the LyX community.

So yes, Breezy works (for me anyway). I'll upgrade my home box as well as soon as I can afford a few hours downtime (my network has a client, you know, and she can be quite selective with when and how much downtime is allowed).

As with technology so often, this experiment has philosophical implications. Accoring to Mr. Repetto of Columbia University, while robotics has always been about amplifying human ability, Hertz's device "gives roaches skills they wouldn't normally have, which brings up all sorts of questions, including many about responsibility and consciousness".

1. The device shall at all times yield the data I have created to me, via my personal preferred method, namely p3nfs on Linux.

2. In return, I shall respect Nokia's right to be a clueless corporation, and never attempt to write to the device via p3nfs, but shall for this purpose use a "Compatible computer" as defined by Nokia (ie. Nokia PC suite on somebody else's Windows box).

Fortunately, use case 1 is far more common than use case 2: usually you just need to transfer things jotted down on the Communicator to your computer. For stuff you already have on computers, you hopefully have smarter transportation means.

Another fortunate thing is I actually do have a Windows box, but it still isn't exactly my preferred environment, which is why I'd really like Nokia to wake up an do more for interoperability issues and offer standards-based interoperability with "your favorite system" and substitute that for that lame "compatible computer".

Oh, and there's another undestanding: I'll use Nokia's cruft for backups, which is not very good for one's peace of mind, but it might still be less worse than relying on the mysterious workings of p3nfs…

I wrote email to Nokia Support, asking simply what is the preferred method for a 9210 to communicate with Linux boxen. The reply was, "Unfortunately we do not support Linux software". Well d'oh! I sort of knew that already. but they might as well read the question beyond the word "Linux", and answer it since they're supposed to be one of the greatest FOSS/Linux companies in Finland (if you've ever seen a Nokia representative speaking at Open Source or Linux happenings, you will easily be tricked to believe so).

The bottom line: I can read and write to the Communicator, albeit not with the comfort I'd like to. And it's a very cool device in itself. I probably wouldn't have written such a long note on many other phones. All the cool functionality the Commie has, actually woks quite well. It does leave me hungry for the new model with wireless LAN though, it would solve these data transport problems at once. Perhaps Nokia is learning? Maybe the biggies can learn too.

Helped newbies on #ubuntu, which is a nice hobby.