UK Linux User Groups

Most niggles with Nokia Lumia 920 are really niggles with WP8. Most niggles with WP8 are really niggles with Windows NT. Lipstick on a pig.

This Clevo laptop is a new machine and like a lot of new machines, not all of its hardware has drivers in the current stable release of debian.

Happily, there is a driver for its rtl8723ae wireless networking device in the later 3.8 Linux kernel versions. So it’s just a case of installing the package called “kernel-package” and following the instructions in it, to make a new linux-image package with the latest drivers in it.

One small thing which tripped me up is that you usually need to write “make-kpkg –rootcmd fakeroot –initrd kernel-image” now. I forgot the “–initrd” option at first.

I recently switched ISPs at home and now have unlimited high speed broadband.

Finally I can participate in torrenting Linux .ISO images. I always download the latest distros using BitTorrent and can now contribute to the community by seeding the distros I've downloaded.

I have a small (in size and resources) Debian 6.0 headless server at home that I wanted to turn into a torrent box. I'm a big fan of Transmission since it can be managed from the shell, web and Android phone/tablet. Sadly, the Transmission packages in the official Debain squeeze repositories are quite old, 2.03 at the time of writing, and there are no Transmission packages in Debian Backports.

However after flexing my google-fu I found a 3rd party Debian Squeeze repository that includes fairly current (2.73 at the time of writing) Transmission packages specifically for headless use. Yah!

Install Transmission Daemon

First become root.

sudo -s -H

Add the repository key.

apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key 92B84A1E

Add the repository.

echo "deb http://apt.balocco.name squeeze main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/balocco.list

Update the package list.

apt-get update

Install Transmission.

apt-get install transmission-cli transmission-daemon transmission-webinterface Basic Configuration

The Transmission settings can be found in /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json.

Information If `transmission-daemon` is running when you make changes to `settings.json` the changes you make will be discarded the next time `transmission-daemon` is started.

Therefore either stop transmission-daemon before you make any changes or you can make the daemon reload settings.json by sending it the SIGHUP signal.

Connect from anywhere

If you want to be able to connect to Transmission from anywhere on the Internet stop transmission-daemon, make the following changes to settings.json and then start transmission-daemon.

"rpc-password": "YourPlainTextPassword", "rpc-username": "YourUsername", "rpc-whitelist-enabled": false,

The rpc-username field will need adding but you can edit the existing entry for rpc-password. Enter the rpc-password as a plain text string, Transmission will automatically convert the password to a hash the next time it is started.

Connect via a browser

You should now be able to access the Transmission web interface via http://yourhost.example.org:9091. If you didn't change the username and password (you really should) the defaults are:

• Username : transmission
• Password : transmission

Connect via Android

I have an Android phone and an Android tablet. I use Remote Transmission on my Android devices to manage my torrent box.

Connect via the shell

If, like me, you spend the majority of you time at the shell. Then transmission-remote-cli is probably for you. All my workstation run Arch Linux so I install transmission-remote-cli as follows.

sudo pacman -S transmission-remote-cli

See the GitHub project page for tramission-remote-cli for instructions on how to connect to a remote Transmission daemon.

Block List

Regardless of how you intend to use Transmission you should enable a block list, this can be done via settings.json and the web interface. The following block list seems to be recommended.

http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_level2&fileformat=p2p&archiveformat=gz

That covers the basics for getting Transmission running on headless Debian 6.0 and how to connect to it from just about anywhere and on any device. I recommend reading the Trasmission Wiki as Transmission is capable of so much more than I have covered in this blog post.

Happy torrenting.

References

• http://apt.balocco.name/changelog.txt
• http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/1001/squeeze-repository
• https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/EditConfigFiles
• https://github.com/fagga/transmission-remote-cli
• http://www.iblocklist.com/

I wrote a small patch (intro, patch) which adds a Secure Shell (ssh) block device to qemu. With this patch you could access a remote disk image or device by doing:

qemu -drive file=ssh://host/path/to/file,if=virtio,cache=none

QEMU ssh’es into “host” and opens /path/to/file. For the initial version of this patch you will need to set up ssh-agent access to the remote server.

The motivation behind this patch is to allow libguestfs to access remote disks using ssh the same way we already do with NBD. Secure Shell is ubiquitous, so for the majority of users libguestfs-over-qemu/ssh would let them use disks remotely with zero configuration.

Today, I received a spammy email from an unknown golf club. There was no obvious unsubscribe link or instructions, so I blindly replied with :

Hi, Please remove 'xxxxxx' from your mailing list; we've no interest in golf… Thanks, David

 

They replied with :

REMOVED OK

But it was actually :

<FONT color=#0000ff size=4 face=”Comic Sans MS”>REMOVED OK</FONT>

i.e.

So I had to reply with :

<div style=”text-align: center;”><u style=”font-size: 144px; color: rgb(245, 236, 0); font-family: ‘Comic Sans MS’; “><b>Thank you!1!!</b></u></div>

 

I fear the intricacies of my reply were lost on them.

 

So @kevinc2003 and @kevinlynch have both left @Adobe since I joined. A guy could get paranoid! Was it something I said?

Hi,

The first ever CentOS Dojo, a one day training and socalising day dedicated to CentOS and how people use it, will be held at Antwerp, Belgium on the 8th of Apr.

You can see the great speaker lineup on the events page at : http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/Antwerp2013 - we have tried to cover all the major conversation areas around CentOS these days. Ranging from provisioning, management, app deployments, system and virtualisation tuning, virtual infrastructure and more.

Its going to be a great day, register up, and see you all there. And remember, there is an exclusive CentOS Dojo Tshirt for everyone who attends ( plus, there might be more goddies too ).

Jump directly to the registration page : http://centosdojoantwerp2013.eventbrite.com/

- KB

The Shard sdrv.ms/147go5h

The problem with Apple: if you’re going to have a locked-in ecosystem, you’d better make sure your apps work properly. iTunes is a disaster.

By “Other”, iTunes means “stuff I lost track of, even though my only job is to sync with the iPad”. iTunes, you suck. img.ly/txnt

The one stand-out feature so far of #nokialumia920 has to be Here maps. here.com
Growing admiration for mapping innovation.

So, I’ve had a Nexus 4 for a while now … here’s some findings :

1. The phone is symmetrical (or very close to it) – so I often pick it up the wrong way around – at least with an iPhone there was a button at the bottom which acts as an easy to feel guide so you can pick it up correctly in the dark. Adding a case to it helped.
2. You need a bumper/case for it… mine cost £3 on Amazon or something … without one it’s too slippery/slides off everything.
3. The battery life is both good and bad – while not in use, it lasts ages; but it has a big screen – so playing games or watching Netflix on it, will really kill the battery. I’m using Battery Widget Reborn – which does a great job at turning wifi/sound/gps etc all off overnight which helps a bit.
4. I came to use the Nexus 4 from using an iPhone – my main like is widgets – having something that updates in real time on your desktop (why did the iOS weather app never display today’s symbol?) is great.
5. I miss having a count of notification numbers next to the launch icons.
6. I kind of miss iMessage – in so far, as I wish Google had something similar. At the moment there is gtalk, google plus chat (or something) …. which don’t seem to be totally integrated … and I have to supplement this with WhatsApp which not all that many people use (here’s hoping for Google Babble)
7. I wish the Bluetooth integration was better – not being able to see track names etc on the £30 Sony MW600 thing I bought kind of sucks. I’m fairly sure that if my car was good enough to have a bluetooth capable radio, then I wouldn’t see any track names from it either :-/
8. I like Navigation – I’ve used this a number of times and it does a good job. If only I could make it’s voice louder though. Perhaps this is why I need a car radio with blue teeth.
9. I’ve not noticed that I’m missing any apps from iOS which aren’t available on Android – but I suspect I only regularly use ~10 (k9 mail, world war, twitter, whatsapp, bbc news, facebook, gallery, nagios, kashdroid, ZombieRun!).
10. The screen is a little too big to use it with only one hand.

Our community is at the heart of how we build Ubuntu. Recently there were some concerns expressed about some aspects of our community and I have been working with various community members and internally at Canonical to resolve some of these issues to make things smoother.

I just wanted to summarize some updates:

• Regular, transparent planning – we want to improve how we plan the delivery of work items, and make that planning more nimble. While the major decisions are reserved for primary discussion at UDS, we want to regularly and transparently checkpoint progress on those projects, and ensure things are moving along. To do this the engineering managers at Canonical will perform this planning on a monthly basis with our community. An an example, with my team, we will decide at UDS what major projects we will work on and document the work items in those blueprints, and every month I will ask the team to commit to delivering an agreed set of work items that month and update the blueprints accordingly. This will make it easier to understand who is working on what, what needs to be done, and areas in which people can participate. This entire process will be completely open and transparent and I would like to encourage our wider community to use the same approach. As an example, this could be a useful technique for our LoCo community to use for planning their work too around advocacy campaigns. All of this work will continue to be tracked openly in status.ubuntu.com.
• Training our engineers – our engineers at Canonical are expected to openly and transparently perform all work that is not considered customer/company confidential. While this expectation is clear, there are sometimes cases when this doesn’t happen (e.g. if someone joins Canonical without the experience of working in an open environment and isn’t really sure how to do this). I have prepared an internal slide deck with these expectations and workflows clearly laid out; my team will be working to ensure everyone gets the deck, reads it, and gets an answer to any of their questions.
• Regular leadership problem solving meetings – one problem we have today is that we don’t have a regular problem solving meeting in our community in which our governing leaders are present at. Instead our different leadership boards (e.g. Community Council, Forums Council) tend to resolve issues pertinent to that specific board. We think it could be useful to have a meeting every two weeks that has representatives from our different governance boards and our community can join and raise topics for discussion. We are going to run the first one of these sessions tomorrow (Tue 19th March 2013) on Ubuntu On Air at 8pm UTC. We invite you to bring your topics there on IRC for discussion.
• Online UDS refinements – as I blogged about last week we have released a survey to gather feedback about how to refine and improve UDS. We have already made some plans for some improvements but I plan on organizing a community meeting to discuss this more next week (I can’t later this week as I am at an event). I think there is an opportunity to refine the format of UDS into a form that becomes a useful and repeatable way of coordinating meetings in a community.
• Weekly Updates – I have reached out to the engineering managers on some of the core projects at Canonical and asked them to provide weekly updates of work going on. We have already seen the first updates for Ubuntu Touch and Mir.
• Prepping announcements better – while the major announcements are now out, one piece of feedback I received is that our community felt ill-prepared around things such as the Ubuntu Touch announcement, and people such as our IRC/Forums/Community councils were inundated with questions and didn’t have good answers to those questions. If we need to make future announcements in the same way again, I am going to ensure our core governance boards are clued up first and we provide a FAQ for our community to refer to when getting these kinds of questions. This should relieve this concern.
• Improving our community on-ramp – one area where I want to drive some improvements is making it easier for people to join the community. We started some work a while back to improve the community landing page on ubuntu.com and I have asked Daniel Holbach to drive that work to completion. I am also working with the Ubuntu Touch and Mir teams to ensure that they have awesome documentation and guidance for how people can participate. A good example of the progress being made here is the Mir documentation. If you would like to help improve these docs, then feel free to dig in and help, or share your ideas on the mailing lists.

I want to get as much feedback on these steps moving forward as well as other ideas and areas in which we can focus. You can always grab me on IRC on freenode (my nick is jono) and I hang out in #ubuntu-community-team. Also feel free to drop me an email and join my regular Q+A session every week. Unfortunately, this week’s Q+A session is canceled as I need to be at an event, but I will be back in the regular slot next week on Wednesday at 7pm UTC on Ubuntu On Air.

There’s something rather swish happened to my wedding photography website. It has a brand new design which I’m really happy with.

So, why the new design? I wanted more space to show off my photographs which is, after all, what it’s all about. Fewer words, more pictures. All the images are now a much larger resolution and I’m pleased with how much better they look. Each image on the home page now links straight to the blog post for that wedding.

I had to produce larger versions of all the images on the site, as I had been rather too efficient when originally uploading them and made images that were too small for the new theme. It was enlightening going back over old images and re-processing them for the new page layouts. I hope you’ll agree that they look even better than before.

The new design is also much more responsive than the old one, so there’s a much better experience browsing the site from mobile devices. The old design worked well enough, but web designers can now do much more for sites viewed on mobile devices. In the last twelve months mobile traffic to my site has increased by over 10%, so I wanted to be sure those users had a great experience.

The old design

The site runs WordPress, the open source blogging and content management system. One of the nice things about WordPress is that, for the most part, it separates content from presentation. It’s nowhere near as much work to switch to a new design than back in the good old days of hand-crafted HTML. It’s still not exactly easy, as things like widgets and custom menus need changing when you move theme.

Anyway, I hope you like the new design!

Pin It

I just ousted Rachelle V. as the mayor of Marks & Spencer on @foursquare! 4sq.com/ihVX8S

This script below lets you test changes while continuing to work on code. Let’s say that your test suite takes quite a while to run (hello, libguestfs). You can do:

$ test-change make check

The script copies the whole current directory into a temporary directory and runs the check in there. You still have to open a new terminal to run the tests, but the tests can go ahead while you continue working.

#!/bin/bash - # Copy current directory to a temporary, # then run the test command on that copy, # and report the results. # by Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> # # Usage (from current directory): # test-change command [args ...] # eg: # test-change make check echo "Copying original directory; wait a moment ..." d=`mktemp -d` trap "rm -rf $d" EXIT INT TERM QUIT cp -a . $d cd $d echo "Original directory copied, starting test." echo "You can carry on working now." sleep 1 # Run the test command. "$@"

53-55 Lichfield St
Wolverhampton
West Midlands
WV1 1EQ‎

Eat, Drink and talk Linux

Event Date and Time:  Wed, 20/03/2013 - 19:30 - 23:00