Ubuntu Linux Tips & Tricks

Male Feminists

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:36:00 +0000

I notice in the comments on David Schlesinger's blog posts about RMS's "EMACS virgin" tangent at Guadec/Akademy a lot of folks telling him to stop being a "pseudo-feminist" or implying that he thinks women are defenseless and need a big strong man to protect us, or whatever.

We don't need knights in shining armor, but we do need allies. For example, if someone has demonstrated that they are a misogynist, do you really think they will listen to a woman when she says that was offensive? Um, no. They'll call her oversensitive and try to blame it on PMS or tell her she just doesn't belong in that group and should go back to her knitting circle. This is where the male feminists come in. Being male, they have a chance of actually being listened to. That is, if they aren't dismissed as gender traitors first. The traitors have to be discredited. And that's why one of the first things you'll see in a comment or hear is that the male feminist needs to stop treating women like delicate flowers who can't defend themselves.

And this isn't the first time I've seen these sort of comments. Oh, and Matt just sent me a link for guys wondering about how to behave in feminist discussions.

Bold Prediction: "Bug 1 will be closed in the next 24 months"

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:00:00 +0000

At SELF, Bethlynn Eicher made a bold prediction: Bug 1: Microsoft has a majority market share will be closed in the next 24 months. The date she named on her blog is 30 June 2011. She keeps pointing out in her blog that we're at GhandiCon 3. "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

I'm listening to Season 1 Episode 20 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast, and they had Matt Zimmerman on there. Someone asked Matt if he thought Bug 1 would be closed in the next 4 years, and he said that sounded a little ambitious.

I'm just amused by the wildly differing expectations. I am reminded of Martin Owens's blog post Ignition Advertising in Ubuntu where he points out that people like to use things that are popular. If we don't say that "like nobody uses it" they'll be more likely to try it. In computers, this makes total sense. If you need help with a little question, do you call the help desk, or do you ask the person at the next desk over "hey, how do I add a printer?" Likely the latter. Historically, Linux has kind of lost on this front. It's why we have LUGs and LoCo Teams. I think that as we get more users, the momentum to gain more users will grow because being kind of popular makes it easier to become more popular. There's a point we need to hit where it'll become really easy to get new folks interested. How quickly we reach that point determines whether Bethlynn or Matt will be right.

Two polls below. Is Bethlynn right? What's your prediction?

Ohio Linuxfest Call for Presentations is Open

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:36:00 +0000

Ohio Linuxfest is now in its 7th year, but that's nothing compared to the 40 years that UNIX has been around. The theme this year is the Past, Present, and Future of UNIX & Linux.

Doug McIlroy will be keynoting. If you haven't heard of him yet, he was Kernighan, Thomson, & Richie's boss back at AT&T Bell Labs when they were creating UNIX and C. He's credited with creating the UNIX pipe ("|") as well. Peter Salus, known for his books "A Quarter Century of UNIX" and "The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin" will be keynoting as well. And finally, Shawn Powers of Linux Journal fame will be giving a keynote on "Fixing the Economy with Linux."

As with last year, Bdale and his daughter Elizabeth Garbee are expected to speak. Jono has also agreed to speak.

But these six people can't be it. If you've got something to say, why not submit a proposal? The call for presentations is only open a few more days—it closes on the 8th. Get your proposal in!

If you're not that interested in speaking in front of a large crowd, registration is open too. There's free admission, or for $65 you can support the fest, get a T-shirt, and have lunch. There's also a professional package that includes a day of training in addition to what's in the supporter package. That one is $350. There's more to that, but the details aren't fixed yet, so I won't post them yet. There are going to be BoFs and parties of course. LPI certification level 1 testing is expected to be available again as well.

And as I've mentioned before, there is going to be a Diversity in Open Source workshop day. Proposals are being accepted for that as well. Details on the linked page.

Finally, Ohio Linuxfest is now on Identi.ca and has a group there as well. This is in addition to the Twitter account that already existed.

Shedding some light on a recent trend

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:05:00 +0000

I learned that apparently the recent cases of adult images in conference talks hasn't received as much attention as I thought it had. Given that I heard about Matt Aimonetti's CouchDB talk at the Golden Gate Ruby Con in April from an old coworker, Sarah Mei of DevChix, and hypa7ia on #ubuntu-women all in the span of one day, I was under the impression it was something anyone who reads blogs or tweets or dents and is interested in software development had heard about it. My boyfriend is sitting here going "um, wasn't that horse beaten to death?" Apparently not. It seems not to have penetrated the open source blogosphere. Check out links from that Geek Feminism Wiki article on Aimonetti's talk for blog reactions to it, or just Google for "CouchDB", "Aimonetti", and "GuGaRuCo" (some combination thereof should work). And by the way, a thong doesn't make a woman's rear any less naked. Really. It doesn't exactly cover anything.

Noting that I said "cases," I should point out the one that happened just a couple weeks ago at FlashBelt. This one was even more NSFW. If you want the full account, check out the email the Geek Girls Guide received describing it. It's mind-boggling.

I really thought these events needed to be brought to the attention of those who had not yet heard about them. Hopefully, more repeats can be avoided if conference organizers are aware of the need to watch for such things. I've already suggested having a look through slides at OLF to Bethlynn.

Southeast Linuxfest Post

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:02:00 +0000

I'm sitting here with Amber Graner, Lyz Krumbach, Andrew from the Ubuntu Pennsylvania LoCo, Jimmy from the Florida LoCo, and a few others. We're in a BoF chatting about how LoCo Teams can reach out. I think Amber will be posting notes later.

Amber led another BoF earlier today called "Why Not You?" about trying to get the folks we recruit involved. She was saying how for years people would talk about Linux and give Linux stuff to her husband Pete, but nobody would ever ask if she wanted to get involved. It wasn't until Pete gave her a CD and told her to have at that she started doing anything. One thing mentioned by Daniel Chen was that after an installfest, give everybody a live cd. They've got their system installed, now they can show it off and pass on the live cd to a friend.

I mentioned how after I'd shown Ubuntu to my mom and wow'd her with "it doesn't need it" being my response to her anti-virus question and "you can figure it out" being my response to her "how do I type stuff?" question, she went off and started telling her friends how fast and easy Linux is and how great it is that it doesn't get viruses. Based on that, I think the very first experience someone has is the most important. If they have any trouble at first, they're not going to want to recommend it. That's why I think things like hardware support are so important for working out of the box. When they can plug in their printer and have it work without needing a driver cd or anything, that'll impress them.

Amber said that when she's got someone who's nervous about showing up to a LUG or a LoCo because they don't think they'll fit in, her recommendation is: bring cookies. If you bring cookies, suddenly you're the most important person in the room, everybody wants to talk to you. It becomes an ice breaker to introduce you to the group.

Earlier today, I was in Starbucks with my boyfriend picking up a bunch of coffee for the event. We started chatting with this guy who said he's heard of Linux from his computer-science-professor wife, but don't people have trouble with it because it's not very good or easy? I told him "there are 400 people in the Hendrix Center." "You got 400 people down to Clemson for Linux?" "This is small because it's the first year. Last year in Ohio they had 1200." He was floored. He came over and was looking around, then he found me and said, "I was expecting a bunch of students, but this here is middle America. Who are all these people?" I said, "well, that's a Red Hat table, they sell support for servers. OpenSUSE is like Novell's SUSE and popular on desktops…" "But what does everyone here do?" "There are students, system administrators, developers, everything. That woman over there's a housewife." (That's when I pointed at Amber). He went and fetched a bag with information about SELF because he didn't have time to stay but wanted a way to be able to find people from here and find out about next year's.

Now one thing that impresses me is the sheer number of women here. Like I said in the last paragraph, there are about 400 people here. OLF had 1200. There have to be 3x the number of women here as were at OLF. I asked how they managed this. I was told they didn't consciously try to get female attendees, but they think the fact that they asked a lot of women to speak early on resulted in those women (even the ones who aren't speaking here) promoting it in their arenas. For example, Rikki Kite was asked to speak. Though she's not here, she promoted it. She's on LinuxChix Live, so plenty of women would've seen her blog about it. OLF is having a "Diversity in Open Source Day" on Sunday, so I really hope we'll be seeing more diversity this year.

Jaunty FAQ

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:29:00 +0000

In the tradition of the FAQs I did the last few releases...

Where can I get the Jaunty torrent?
- Ubuntu Tutorials has compiled a list of all of them together.
Why should I use a torrent?
- It takes a load off of the servers so you'll get your ISO faster
Anything Kubuntu users should know?
- If you upgrade or use the DVD, you'll get PulseAudio. Don't worry, just sudo aptitude purge pulseaudio if you don't want it. I use it with Kubuntu because I've got Ubuntu too, and PulseAudio can do neat things, but anyway…
- Quassel is the new default IRC client
- Amarok 2 doesn't do CDs, iPod Touch, or iPhone
I don't like these new black bubbles. How do I get rid of them?
- Install sudo aptitude install gnome-stracciatella-session (or click on the package name). Log out, and on GDM, open the Options menu and go to Session (menu names may vary by theme) choose the Stracciatella option instead of just choosing GNOME. Log back in.
What happened to the little orange update notifier icon?
- The update manager window will open on its own within a day of when security updates become available. As for regular updates, the update manager will open a week after the last time you updated.
- If you want the old way back, run this: gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false
How do I re-enable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace?
- Check out Alberto Milone's instructions
Anything I can experiment with?
- If you've got Intel graphics, there's a disabled-by-default acceleration method called UXA that uses DRI2. I think this means it's supposed to be all whiz-bang like higher-end graphics cards. It certainly gives me smoother animations. Warning: it's disabled by default because there are some graphics cards that misbehave horribly when it's enabled. For example, with i965, X will crash if you suspend while compositing is enabled and you're using UXA. The workaround would be to drop out of Compiz to Metacity or disabled Kwin's compositing before suspending. Instructions and card-specific warnings are on the wiki. By the way, if you have a totally blank xorg.conf and can't figure out how to fill it out, run sudo dexconf -o /etc/X11/xorg.conf
What changed in PulseAudio?
- It's now using autospawn, which means that if it crashes at some point, you're not left with silence. It'll start back up next time you try to play music or listen to a podcast or whatever it is you're doing that requires sound.
How do I get rid of PulseAudio?
- This has changed, since it's using autospawn. You need to disable that by editing /etc/pulse/client.conf and changing "autospawn = yes" on line 26 to "autospawn = no". Additionally, if this is a clean install, not an upgrade, you'll need to add your user to the audio group with sudo adduser USER audio replacing USER with your username.
Where are the release notes?
- Glad you asked! Release notes are right here This blog post is just the highlights of things I see asked a lot.

I can't think of anything else. If you've got another question to add, post it in the comments.

I'm also pleased to say that the Intel 965 wireless and graphics are working extremely well in Jaunty. Yay! My computer's happy. X doesn't lock, VT switching works, no more kernel panics (I attribute the panics I had to Intel 965 wireless since my brother and I have matching laptops, except for that wireless card, and his doesn't crash, and mine did). So, thank you to the people who work on making Intel drivers be lovely.

ext3 & 4 and data=guarded

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:03:00 +0000

Valerie Aurora over at Red Hat has just posted on her blog about ext3 and ext4 and fsync() issues we've all heard so much about. As she says there, rename in ext4 now implies fsync() so that issue should calm down.

However, 2.6.30 is defaulting to data=writeback, which means it only writes the metadata to the journal—not the actual data. This is how XFS, ReiserFS, and a few others work, and it's much faster than ext3's default data=ordered. It's also somewhat less awesome at ensuring your data doesn't get lost. She's asking that people test patches (linked from her blog) for a new journal mode called "guarded" (created by Chris Mason) which she says will be faster than "ordered" but still have its data consistency guarantees.

Ada Lovelace Day Addition

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:43:00 +0000

So on actual Ada Lovelace Day, I was a little :( at being the only person on Planet Ubuntu that blogged for it. Plenty on Planet Ubuntu Women, but Planet Ubuntu was empty. And none of the guys involved posted anything.

But yay! They were just a little late. James Westby and Matt Zimmerman both joined in. Matt wrote about his mom, which I thought was pretty cool. And Miia Ranta joined in as well.

I did just realize that there are two women I should have given a little shout-out.

One is Cathy Malmrose, the CEO of ZaReason, the company that made my computer. She's a hardware geek, so it's only natural, right? She said they're considering expanding into the "make their own components" direction so they won't be constrained by what barebones brands offer. Neat! They sell t-shirts too. There used to be Little LinuxChick shirts, but now there's this cute one that says "friends help friends use Linux" with a silhouette of two teenage girls on laptops. Also, she's raising a few FOSS munchkins. Her 5 year old installed Ubuntu (the 7 year old helped by reading the words for her) to prove the neighbor wrong about Linux being hard to install. And the 7 year old is already programming. I think the fact that there's a photo of him on Flickr using 3 laptops titled "Mom, what's the kernel? Where is it? Can I mess with it? Why not? Just tell me where it is so I can play?" is hilarious and wonderful. She's obviously a great influence on her kids.

The other is Amber Graner, the "average user mom" who's been blogging her adventures learning to use Ubuntu (and trying Fedora and OpenSUSE), and making everyone go "oh…oh yeah…I guess we could make that easier…that's a good point…." She's providing great constructive feedback, and she's just so excited to learn. I ♥ people that love to learn. I hope her love of learning is something her kids pick up. In my mind, she's the perfect person to have promoting Ubuntu (which she does!) because she proves that anyone that's willing to give learning an honest try can use it—it's not a geek OS.

Ada Lovelace Day heroine: Valerie Aurora

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, named for the world's first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace. It's interesting to me that while the first programmer was a woman, and all of the ENIAC programmers were women, there are so many more men than women in technology fields nowadays. Ada Lovelace Day is a day to highlight women who rock in the tech world. Since here in FOSS-land, the FLOSSPOLS survey reports that only 2% of developers are women, compared to 28% in the commercial sector, I decided to write about a Linux kernel hacker: Valerie Aurora.

By default, Ubuntu uses the "relatime" mount option. It decreases the number of metadata writes on ext3. It turns out, Valerie created relatime because one of our friends discovered that Mutt couldn't tell which mailboxes had new mail when using noatime.

I think she really loves (or hates?) fsck. I can't tell which. She's responsible for some patches that shorten the amount of time needed to fsck an ext2 partition, along one that gets a 50% improvement on RAID 5 systems with ext3 and ext4. She also worked on a new filesystem architecture called ChunkFS. The goal of ChunkFS is to deal with the fact that as hard drives get bigger, fsck times get longer. She wants to be able to fsck smaller parts of the filesystem at different times, to avoid day-long fscks in the future. The white paper is interesting. And yes, she wrote a working prototype. Oh, and you know ZFS? The filesystem from Sun? She worked on that too, back during the architecture phase.

It's not all filesystems though. She's got patches in libc to make malloc() more efficient. She worked on the TCP/IP stack. She was the maintainer for SMP PowerPC support in Linux. Device drivers? Done that too. She's done it all.

She's not keeping that knowledge locked up though. Not by a long stretch. She's spent countless hours mentoring. She taught Linux kernel development classes at IBM, and she was even kind enough to teach kernel hacking classes for LinuxChix (on the old site). One time, she held a real-time kernel development Q&A session on the LinuxChix IRC server. She also ~~used to~~ writes "Kernel Hackers' Bookshelf" for Linux Weekly News

Valerie was one of the first people I met in LinuxChix. Immediate first impression? Wow, she's smart. Second impression? Don't mess with her. She's tough. You may have seen her HowTo Encourage Women in Linux write-up. If not, check it out. Possibly, you said something that offended someone and were directed to it. If that did happen, I hope you read it. It's the link everyone uses for those situations.

Valerie Anita Aurora was once known as Val Henson, but she recently changed her name. She chose the middle name "Anita" after Anita Borg, a computer scientist that strove to encourage women in technology fields. Pretty cool name change, eh? Just bringing this up in case "wait, that sounds like Val Henson..." was on your mind.

Ubuntu Developers Aren't Scary

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:41:00 +0000

Seriously, they're not. At least, I don't think they are anymore. They used to scare the crap out of me.

The first time I joined the #ubuntu-devel channel (slightly under a year ago) and said "hi, um, I have a patch. What do I do?" I was all scared. Jordan Mantha (LaserJock) popped up and offered to make it into a debdiff since I said I didn't know anything about packaging. The patch ended up not being usable because um, oops, memory leak. Wait, what? No teasing about making a newbie mistake like that? And I actually got credit in the changelog for figuring out what's wrong and how to fix it? Wow. Hmm, helpful people, not arrogant about what they know that I don't? Maybe being developers doesn't have to automatically make them scary. Maybe.

Soon after that I became friends with Jordan and with Daniel Chen, who lives nearby. Daniel showed up to our LoCo's Gutsy and Hardy installfests, and at the Hardy one I convinced him to start mentoring me on how audio works. They're both nice guys, just know that mentioning brokenness in QA to Jordan or in audio to Daniel will very likely result in a long, drawn-out analysis of the situation. You've been warned.

OK so at that point, those two stopped being scary, and the rest stayed frightening. Skip to last October, when I went to the Ohio Linux Fest (be there! we're having a Women in Open Source event on Sunday, so let's get that female:male ratio up, alright?). Wow, a whole bunch of Ubuntu and Kubuntu folks showed up. Rich Johnson, Jorge Castro, Jono Bacon, Greg Grossmeier, Steve Stalcup, Jacob Peddicord, and more that I forget. Guess what? It turns out they're all really nice people too! Well, Rich has his moments. Better without the beer...or tequila. Oh, and don't drunkenly moon Jono unless you want to relive the experience, sober, in front of 1200 people. Moving on…

So I think by that point I was probably subscribed to ubuntu-devel-discuss. That's a mailing list I recommend you join if you want to contribute. That's where discussion between users and developers happens. If you've got an idea and want to flesh it out enough to put up on Brainstorm, or are taking a Brainstorm idea and trying to figure out the technical details to write a specification, get opinions on how possible it sounds, etc. go there. It's a more relaxed atmosphere than either the ubuntu-devel mailing list or #ubuntu-devel. It tries to bridge the gap Amber noted in her 'Community v. "Community"' post.

About a month ago, I started setting my IRC client to join #ubuntu-devel by default, and I subscribed to the ubuntu-devel mailing list. On the mailing list, I'm much more talkative than on the IRC channel. It's more discussion-oriented than the channel, it seems. The channel seems to be more full of terse "<Y>X: did you upload $package? <X>Y: no, not yet, writing changelog now" sort of stuff. At that point, I still felt like ducking behind a couch every time I spoke in there, in case anyone cyber-threw something at my head. I don't feel like that anymore. Just lurking and seeing how interaction works there has made it less scary. It's not that they're trying to be scary. They're just trying to be somewhat professional. Sometimes I'll look into the channel and see someone make a joke. And every morning, without fail, Daniel Holbach says "good morning" to the channel when he wakes up. And then it's a reminder that "oh yeah, they're normal people too."

Oh, I also started joining #ubuntu-women and #kubuntu-devel around that time. Lydia is a KDE developer that's almost always in #u-w. She's really nice and helpful. And of course, everybody (except IRC spammers) loves Sarah Hobbs, AKA Hobbsee. I know, it's sad that I can't think of other women developers. Where are you, ladies? Why aren't you in #ubuntu-women? Women who aren't involved: why not? We in #ubuntu-women will show you how. Why do you think that channel exists?

Why am I writing this? Well, the point is: the Ubuntu Developers aren't scary people. They're actually really nice people. So if you're intimidated by the prospect of speaking up in development related areas when you've just started out and can't point to a list of things you've done, remember: they're not scary, they're unfamiliar. There's a difference. The image of developers being way up high, far from users, knowing how everything works, and not making mistakes? All in your head. Why do you think there are so many bugs? ;) Please don't be afraid to help out because you think you're not good enough. You'll learn. Everybody involved totally sucked at this stuff at one point.

Oh, and Daniel Holbach and Scott Kitterman both agreed that when they started out, they also found the whole thing intimidating. To lower the intimidation level, read on: Scott doesn't know C. Neither does Jordan. Daniel says pointers are his weakness. Mine too—especially when passing them into functions. I put in one & and get a *? Or do I put in a ** and get a *? What if the function declaration wants a **? And like I said, my first patch attempt in Ubuntu had a memory leak (Steve Langasek caught it, it didn't get to the archive, don't worry). And that doesn't make everybody go "you can't code, go away" when I try now.

Pidgin in Jaunty

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:41:00 +0000

This is just a quick update about how Pidgin interacts with the rest of the Jaunty desktop. Before we had the following problems:

Pidgin icon sits in notification area when not notifying
Pidgin status can be changed in both the FUSA and in the Pidgin icon
Removing icon gets rid of buddy list's hide-ability

The first point extends into "if Pidgin and Evolution and Empathy and Xchat and ... are all trying to show that you have new messages, that's a lot of icons." The solution that's implemented in Jaunty includes the addition of the messaging Indicator Applet. So far it only works for Pidgin and Evolution (first priority as default apps, I'm guessing), but eventually the others should be added. Ryan's working hard on making sure it works for @-replies in Gwibber as well. Then you can have just this one applet, and eventually, all your messaging stuff will go there. The Indicator Applet is not on the panel by default. You can right-click the panel and hit "Add to Panel" to get it.

On new users, the icon defaults to not showing in the notification area.

When I proposed removing the icon by default, there was an uproar of "but we want to hide the buddy list instead of minimizing it!" A few people I talked to on the bug report, blog comments, and elsewhere online agreed that if there was one applet that could work for all the IM clients to show and hide, that might be pretty nice. Someone noticed. The Indicator Applet does this too. Thanks to whomever made that work.

One note: this is like with Rhythmbox. If you click the X, that's still "close," and for a very good reason. If the X doesn't mean close, it is possible for the buddy list to be hidden in KDE (or in a GNOME session where the user hasn't added the Indicator Applet) with no way to bring it back! I don't use the notification area icon, so when Pidgin started being able to hide when it's not there (so the Indicator Applet could control it), I could see "X is now online" notifications and receive IMs but not get my buddy list to stop being invisible. Thank you very much to Ted Gould for fixing it so that the buddy list only hides from either the icon or the Indicator Applet, and not constantly.

Please test Jaunty...soon

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:46:00 +0000

Jaunty's release is less than two months away. Please grab a Jaunty alpha 5 or daily live cd and test! Go through the bugs you've filed and see if they still exist on the live cd. See if any new ones pop up. And do it ASAP.

In every development cycle there's a huge influx of bugs in the last two weeks because a lot of people jump from stable to beta or RC, skipping alpha completely. Great, we've got more testers, but…how many bugs can be fixed in two weeks without risking breaking anything else? Not nearly as many as are filed. That is why we need more people testing early on.

I'm not saying everybody should install the development release on their only computer or the one they use all the time, directly on the hardware. While I've been doing that for the last two years, that's generally not recommended. If you cannot function pretty much entirely from the command line, don't put it on your hardware. Put it in a VM.

VMs aren't terribly useful for testing hardware, but there are plenty of GNOME and KDE bugs you can find using a VM. Try it! Check out Virtualbox. Put Jaunty in there and play with it. Try doing anything that doesn't involve important persistent data in the VM. By that I mean: don't write your thesis in the VM without having it backed up elsewhere. Web browsing? Getting your email over IMAP? Chatting? Why not?

But for hardware, use a live cd. Very often a triager asked "is this still a problem in the current development version?" The end of that sentence is "or would it be a waste of time for us to try to hunt it down when it's already fixed?" though it's not said. Also very often, the bug reporter will reply "I don't know. I'll test it when it releases." Insert whatever development cycle you want in there. It happens in all of them. Guess what happens when the reporter says they'll test after release?

10 The bug gets ignored as "potentially fixed; waiting on feedback" because as I said, trying to fix what's already fixed is a waste of time.
20 The development release becomes a stable release.
30 The reporter complains that it's still not fixed.
40 Work starts on the next development release.
50 The reporter is asked "is it fixed in this one?"
60 The reporter doesn't answer or says again that they'll test after that release.
GOTO 10

Bugs can't be fixed without information. Thus, bugs that have a lot of information are more likely to be fixed. If you're not giving us any information, what do you expect?

Link to a shell escaping tutorial

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:58:00 +0000

A nearby LUG member just posted to the LUG's mailing list an explanation of how bash expands variables containing special characters and how various utilities interpret them. Give it a read. How to handle newlines was something I never thought about.

Ubuntu audio blog

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 03:03:00 +0000

Once upon a time, Daniel Chen was an Ubuntu core developer and maintained the audio stack. He's no longer a core dev, but he's still doing a ton of work on audio. I can tell you first hand that practically every waking moment that he's not at the office, he's working on trying to make PulseAudio and ALSA work better in Ubuntu. Well, since he's not a core dev anymore and he never went through the Ubuntu Membership process, you won't be seeing his blog on maintaining Ubuntu's audio stack showing up on Planet Ubuntu. But you should take a look anyway. He's got a post up right now explaining why PulseAudio really isn't to blame for all your audio problems. I suggest you check it out, especially if you're running Jaunty.

Scanning multipage documents in XSane

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:39:00 +0000

I have a flatbed scanner (part of my printer). I had no idea it was possible to scan a multipage document in Xsane. For a pull-through, sure, maybe, those can go through a stack of pages on their own. But a flatbed? Every time I've tried this before, I scanned individual pages, saved them as images, put them into an Open Office Writer document with one image per page, then saved that as a PDF. There's a better way!

So here's what you do. In the XSane window where you choose color/greyscale, gamma, brightness, etc, at the top there's a dropdown that defaults to Viewer. Change that to Multipage. A new window will open called "xsane multipage project." Choose the "New Project" button. Back to that first window, hit the Scan button. The scanner will do its part, and a page will be listed in the project window. Swap in a new sheet of paper and hit the Scan button again. Repeat until you've scanned all you need. If you scanned them out of order, use the arrow buttons on the project window to rearrange them. You can also delete any pages you don't need. The Show Image button lets you preview an individual page. The default output format is PDF, so just click the "Save multipage file" button at the bottom of the Project window when you're done.

This makes things so much easier.

That Green Bar in Firefox

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 04:56:00 +0000

I was just reading Dan Kaminsky's blog and saw something I found shocking. Let me quote it.

Moxie’s putting his energy on the old positive feedback attacks — simply disabling the security, and seeing if anyone notices. And here he shows up with some pretty astonishing data: Nobody noticed. To be specific, absolutely 0% of users presented with missing encryption on important web sites, being asked to provide sensitive financial data to those websites, refused on the basis of missing security.

Wow. 0%. Seriously.

Why don't users "get it"?

My first thought was "how do you not notice the address bar's not green?" Then I realized that a lot of people probably don't know why the address bar changes colours or what the different colours mean. Here's a hint: if it's a financial-anything, and that bar's not turning green, run away. I didn't know how it worked, to be honest. I knew it was more than certificate verification, designed to get around URLs that look like what you want but aren't, and that it involved paperwork. He's got the scoop on Extended Validation. Also, you can click the green bar to get more information about how the site is validated.

And by the way, that thing where phishers get a fake URL with a valid cert: that doesn't work (without a bunch of legal hula hoops to jump through) for the green bar. When a cert is the only valid thing going on, you'll see blue. Blue can still be phishing. Green is the good one.

Now, I know we're Linux users, and we're not likely to get viruses or trojans or things like that, but phishing is OS-agnostic. Phishing is about stupid users. Don't be a stupid user! When Firefox tells you a site is bad, be careful. When Firefox doesn't explicitly tell you a site is good, be careful. When I say be careful, I mean treat it as if its mode was 444 (read-only).

Oh, and use NoScript for Pete's sake!

/* Insert standard "do not click on login links in email" "do not use search engines to replace bookmarks" "do not use the same crappy password on every website" etc. warnings */

Malware Terminology: Trojans, Worms, & Viruses

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:33:00 +0000

Some guy wrote How To Write a Linux Virus in 5 Easy Steps, but he's wrong. What he describes is not a virus; it is a trojan. And he calls himself a geek!

Let me start by saying that "malware" and "badware" are two commonly used umbrella terms for these types of software.

It is a trojan because it relies entirely upon social engineering to install and run. Remember the Trojan Horse? The Greeks claimed the horse was a gift for the Trojans. It turned out to be hiding a bunch of armed men. This is the same thing. The malware claims to be something innocuous which the user might enjoy or believes is necessary. The user is thus tricked into installing it. That trickery? That's the social engineering. It's the same trickery the Greeks used. The user installs and maybe executes the malware. Since there was both trickery and user intervention, it is a trojan.

A worm does not require user intervention. A worm will often (as in the case of Blaster) use a remote exploit to infect the host machine. It will then procreate and attack any other machines it can reach. It thus spreads completely on its own. Worms do not need to piggyback onto other files like trojans and viruses do. They exist in their own right and behave independently of pretty much all else.

And then there's the generic virus. Viruses do usually require user intervention to spread, but they don't involve social engineering like a trojan does. Viruses will often infect innocuous files which are then shared without the sharer knowing that they are handing a virus to the other person. In the case of a trojan, the sender usually knows exactly what they're doing. The file being infected by the virus does not turn into a trojan by virtue of being infected. It is simply an infected file, possibly an infected program.

Drive-by downloads are a bit confusing. Is it a trojan or a virus? It sort of depends on the site. If it's an attack site, you'll usually receive an email or IM with a link. Then there's some social engineering involved, and you did follow directions by going to the site, but the fact that you don't have to manually install something claiming to be safe puts it in the virus category for me. If it's a usually-safe site that happens to have been infected, then there's no grey area. That's a virus.

K? So, let's stop calling every bit of malware we find "a virus," because that's just not right. We have words for the different types of malware. Let's use them.

I'm a traitor

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:36:00 +0000

I've been cheating on my desktop environment.

If you follow Planet Ubuntu, you saw Celeste's post about the KDE 4.2 release party. And yes, I'm in the photos. Scott Kitterman's trying to show me how to set what kind of window switcher I want when I hit Alt+Tab in KDE in one of the photos.

Yeah, I'm a traitor. As of last Friday, about 4 hours before the release party, I'm a KDE user. Scott actually said to me on IRC after that post about Ctrl+Alt+Backspace that I sound like a KDE user, so then I decided to attempt to get KDE working on my machine (deleting my ~/.kde fixed the problem I was having). I'm still using a bunch of GNOME apps, but I'm doing it inside KDE. While KDE still has the ability to overwhelm me with its options, 4.2 is definitely an improvement over 3.5, presenting many options in ways that are at least easier for me to parse.

I'm sticking to the same apps I use in GNOME for a couple reasons. They're the Devils I Know, and some I have a sort of investment in (transferring data would be annoying). Besides, if I switch back to GNOME, I'd prefer not to have to re-transfer the data.

I know Evolution doesn't let me choose which IMAP folder to use for Trash on each account like KMail does, but KMail crashes a lot in Jaunty (understandable, but annoying) and blocks all open tabs when loading a new view in only one of them. Evolution lets me have a bunch of signatures. Plus, all my data's in Evolution Data Server right now. Oh, the integration between EDS and the panel applets is something I'm missing. Celeste says it should be fairly straight-forward to implement a Plasmoid to handle it through Akonadi, just nobody's done it yet. I'd kind of like to figure out a way to let Akonadi and EDS talk to each other so I can switch mail clients, address books, and calendars without having to export and import a bunch of data. I do really like that KMail, KOrganizer, and KAddressBook are all separate apps with a unified backend, though. Evolution's monolithic UI annoys me.

Kopete, like Empathy, forces groups in the buddy list to be arranged alphabetically, something I do not want, so I'm sticking to Pidgin. Yes, I'm still using Firefox and Terminator.

I did try Amarok. I'm still not a fan of that sideways row of tabs, but I like the way queued songs are displayed on the Collection view. Maybe I can get used to that row of tabs just for that. If it lets me shuffle the queue (haven't tried yet), I'm sold. GNOME's refusal to let Rhythmbox shuffle the queue is really annoying. I'll have to see how it handles copying to my iAudio as well, but really, Dolphin's enough for that.

I really like the new KMenu and KRunnner. The filter search list is nice. I'm not as impressed with the panel. It'd be nice to be able to have a gap between plasmoids, an expanding separator. I can't figure out how to change the panel's background either.

Oh, and does anyone know what the difference between "Focus Follows Mouse" and "Focus Under Mouse" is? I know I don't want "Click to Focus," and we figured out at the party that "Focus Strictly Under Mouse" means that moving the mouse to the desktop makes the app lose focus. Those other two seem to be the same though. That'd be one of those "oh no, KDE is asking me questions with options that I don't understand" things. I don't mind having lots of options, just as long as I know what the heck they do.

Jaunty: No sound outputs?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:11:00 +0000

If you're running Jaunty, and since 28 Jan when you right-click the GNOME Volume Mixer applet and click Open Volume Control you see no sound outputs listed, it's a known bug believed to be a race condition with PulseAudio. It's being worked on, but in the meantime, you can restart PulseAudio using pulseaudio -k ; start-pulseaudio-x11

Since we ALL know X is nowhere near stable...

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:37:00 +0000

Backstory

Some X developers decided that it's too easy to accidentally press 3 keys that are spread far apart on the keyboard and require 2 hands to press simultaneously (???), so they ~~got rid of~~ disabled by default Ctrl+Alt+Backspace (also known as "zapping").

Some people within Ubuntu realized that this makes no sense since X really likes to lockup. ~~At UDS, they decided to keep zapping available, but they would disable it by default.~~ Having a way to re-enable (from a GUI) zapping was ~~also~~ agreed on at UDS.

What's Happening

Alberto Milone has provided us with a way to re-enable zapping from the command line and from KDE. But where's GNOME? Well, he did add a checkbox for it to the Screen Resolution tool, but it seems it won't be accepted into Ubuntu, since it's an "expert" option (according to Mark). EDIT: The discussion is on-going.

My Opinion

I'm with Alberto and Jordan. There are plenty of people who use ctrl+Alt+Backspace who are not experts. They use it because that's what we've recommended for years when X (inevitably) locks up. They are not going to want to muck about with xorg.conf or installing extra command line apps for it.

It wouldn't be so bad if X was actually stable. It wouldn't be so bad if our TTYs worked reliably. As it is, you have to try to switch to the TTY twice before it works, if it works. Sometimes I seem to just not have any TTYs at all. Alt+SysRq+T usually does not take me to a TTY like it should. Until Alberto posted how to fix this from the command line, the only thing I could do when X locked up (multiple times a day!) was Alt+SysRq+B: reboot the system. Things I could've fixed by just Ctrl+Alt+Backspace and waiting 5 seconds now require waiting a full reboot cycle (about 45 seconds til the desktop's usable, if I type my password really fast). Even the smallest X lockup is just as disastrous as a kernel panic now. It's like Windows.

I liked how Jordan summed it up when we were chatting: "apparently X is perfect, we have ttys all the time, and a checkbox is too complicate for users to think about."

What do you guys think? Are the TTYs reliable enough that we can count on non-experts to be able to go to TTY1 and "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart"? Can we even count on non-experts knowing how to do that? Or do you think X is stable enough that nobody ever needs to do that?

Washington, DC Events/News

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:23:00 +0000

We've got two events coming up in the Washington, DC area. Anyone's invited.

KDE 4.2 Release Party

Where: Piratz Tavern, Georgia Ave, Silver Spring, MD
When: Jan 30 (tomorrow), 7pm
Contact (RSVP): Celeste Lyn Paul

LinuxChix Meetup

OK, this one's for ubuntu-women. Shmoocon's coming up again, so once again DC LinuxChix and other LinuxChix that happen to be in town will be meeting up. More info later as we decide which lunch/dinner break of the conference will be our meetup time. All that's clear so far is that it'll be between Feb 6—8 and we'll be going to a restaurant.

Bug Jam

We will be participating in the next Global Bug Jam.

Where: Gallaudet University, Student Academic Center / Student Union Building (SAC/SUB), Lower Level, Flex Rooms A and B
When: Feb 20, 1:30-6pm
Announcement: see mailing list posting

Other news

Finally, after a year and a half, we have access to the DC LoCo Team website again! Yay!

Holiday Hacking

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 07:38:00 +0000

I haven't posted in about 2 weeks, so I figure I ought to give a quick update on what's going on. I'm with the family for the holidays, and there's no wireless at my mom's house, and things are nuts what with the whole extended family visiting. Oh, and my mother has not complained at all about Hardy (upgraded her computer from Gutsy in August), so yay. I mentioned before that I wanted to teach my little cousin Python. I gave her an old laptop I salvaged that runs Edubuntu for Christmas. She seems to love KAnagram. She was also really excited when I showed her KTurtle and helped her make the turtle draw a blue triangle. In the Python world, I've only shown her a print "Hello "+name thing so far. She looked back and forth between the line where I set name's value and that line and the output line a few times then went "oh!" so I think she understood variables.

OK so I got Hardy and Edubuntu into that paragraph. See, I wasn't totally off-topic! Anyway, the rest is about my "Holiday Hacking" project.

I like having a gradient on my gnome-panel. Consequently, every time I change my theme, I go into GIMP and make a matching gradient background image. I improved this process slightly by creating an SVG in which I can just change the color values. Blogger won't let me upload an SVG, so here's a png:

Since this gets old after a while, I'm working on adding functionality to gnome-panel so that I can pick a shadow color, a highlight color, and an opacity level for the highlight. I can't be the only one that likes the look of a gradient on a panel, so I'm sure someone else could get some use out of this.

A peek at the addition to the panel-properties-dialog:

I need to look more into how Cairo's gradients work though. One of the things I did to make the gradient on my SVG look balanced and keep the text legible was put the highlight's color stop 1/3 from the top and the top shadow color stop is actually 15% above the edge of the image. I'm not sure I can do that 15%-outside thing with Cairo. Might have to find a midway color value and set that as the top color stop. We'll see.

The status of this project is that I've modified the .glade file so there's some UI already, and I've settled on using GDK's Cairo integration because Cairo can easily paint linear rgba gradients. I think I've gone through all the functions that setup what options there are for background types, and tonight I started tying the functions to the buttons I made in Glade. Still a lot more to go (like actually writing the gradient part), but I need to have a way for the buttons and gconf to communicate before I can have any way to interact with (read: test) the gradient stuff, so I figure I ought to do that first.

I don't know if this'll make it into GNOME 2.26 or if it'll have wait until the Fall release. UI Freeze is next week, and obviously there's a UI change involved. Maybe I can submit the UI change next week and then keep working right up until Feature Freeze (19 Jan) to get it in this release.

Anyone else spending their holidays hacking on FOSS?

Adobe Flash: Avoiding Checksum Errors

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 01:21:00 +0000

The way flashplugin-nonfree works right now is that it's a fairly empty package that downloads Adobe's Flash installation tarball, untars it, and copies the .so to the necessary directory. There's one more step in the middle though. It does a checksum on the tarball after it downloads and a checksum on the .so. These checksums are to make sure you're getting the right file, as opposed to some trojaned version (say, if Adobe was cracked). These checksums are also a bit of a problem.

See, every time Adobe updates Flash, they keep the same file name. So the package downloads the file, and since it's a new version, the checksum fails, causing the install to fail. A few days later, after some testing, MOTU uploads a new package with the updated checksum.

You can avoid this.

Instead of installing flashplugin-nonfree, enable the Canonical Partner Repository in System -> Administration -> Software Sources -> Third Party Software, or make sure you have

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner

(substitute in hardy or gutsy if you're using those) in your /etc/apt/sources.list and after sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install adobe-flashplugin, you'll have a working Flash plugin, even if there's been an update. The reason is that Adobe's package includes the full binary. It doesn't try to download from their website, so there's no checksum to fail.

It looks like going forward, this will be the preferred Flash package, especially once Adobe releases the final 64-bit version.

If you want to switch from flashplugin-nonfree to adobe-flashplugin, make sure you purge flashplugin-nonfree first.

Dear Phisher...

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 07:20:00 +0000

Dear Phisher:

Thank you for contacting me today with your offer to reactivate my email account that I did not know I had. There are just a few problems I see with the request you made regarding reactivating my email address. You see, the link you gave for me to download software to reactivate the account is a Windows executable. First, I'm not quite sure why I need any software other than a web browser to activate an email account. Second, I can't run Windows executables. Third, I really prefer not to run any software which is not Free and Open Source.

If you could, please send me a tarball of the source code, which I hope is suitably licensed. I will inspect the code, and, if I like what I see, I will happily install the software as requested. Don't worry about providing a binary—I am perfectly capable of compiling any software I need from source.

Thank you again.

Jaunty users: Can you test these?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:45:00 +0000

I've got two patches that I need to have tested on Jaunty. One has a deb. One is just in a branch.

As a new user, test Pidgin from my PPA. For a new user, it should default to only showing the icon in the notification area for new messages. Check in Tools->Preferences. The reason is to keep it from duplicating the icon that's in the Fast User Switch Applet, as noted in Bug 273220. In that bug, it is recommended that Pidgin be changed, so that is Bug 290552.
The last thing to test is the Fast User Switch Icon that I have in bzr. It's for Bug 291846, specifically the part about the lack of tooltips. It's linked in the bug.

Sorry I can't test these myself, but until Jaunty is rebased to 2.6.28 or someone figures out how to make my wireless card play nice (read: not kernel panic) with >2.6.24, I'm stuck on Hardy. Thank you to anyone that helps, though!

Oh, I do have one other question to ask though. To anyone using an ASUS Z37E-based laptop, such as the ZaReason UltraLapSR: after you suspend/resume or hibernate/resume in Intrepid or Jaunty, can you reboot? In Hardy it hangs on reboot. If it's fixed in the newer kernel, I won't bother filing a bug though.

Bug 1 will be closed within...
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