Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Beta was just released and it is a routine event that precedes the fast approaching final release of the next major upgrade to Ubuntu Linux.  A lot of hype and speculation has been generated over the last 6 months about what new features and changes would be included with Ibex.  One change that users have been hoping to see since before the release of 8.04 was a new appearance theme that would look a little glossier and polished.  There are a couple reasons this hasn’t really happened yet and won’t happen for at least another 6 months.  For one, it has met resistance from users who don’t think extra resources should be allocated to eye candy at the expense of system performance.  Compiz is an exception to this, mostly because it can easily be shut off and even when it’s running it barely uses the CPU.  The other reason a visual, thematic overhaul of the interface hasn’t occurred yet is because, simply put, there are more important things to worry about right now.

So you shouldn’t look forward to a major visual upgrade to your Ubuntu system, although such an improvement is not entirely out of the cards.  After all, there will be newer appearance themes included with Ubuntu for you to select from, and that might be all the freshness you feel is necessary with your current installation.  And of course, there will be many other significant improvements made to Ubuntu.

Here are some of the new features you can expect to find in Ubuntu 8.10 -

Encrypted Private Directory

A new folder will be available in your Home Folder that will encrypt any data you place into it.  This is a great security feature for people who have a lot of stuff on their PC that has to remain absolutely confidential, even in the unfortunate event of theft.  Because all of the data is encrypted and locked with your account password, it can only be accessed by you (or, more correctly, by anyone who knows your password).  Pretty nifty feature, if you ask me.

A New Guest Account

One of the features that most Windows users are familiar with is the ability to turn on a Guest account.  This allows people who do not have their own account on the PC to use the computer with the most limited permissions.  They do not have any administrative privileges, nor do they have an account password.  This allows you the ability to let strangers, or otherwise annoying computer illiterate relatives with an affinity for breaking things to use the computer with no worries about them accidentally fouling up the system.  It’s a convenient idiot-proof account in other words.

Faster Booting and Logging In

Once again, as was achieved with the upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04, the upgrade to 8.10 will incorporate even faster booting and user login times.

Flash 10 Player

Ubuntu 8.10 will include Flash 10 RC, which includes drastic performance improvements as well as solves many technical issues involving Pulse Audio.  Full screen flash videos play much more smoothly too.

Built-in BBC News Stream Player

Totem Movie Player will have a new plugin added to it that will allow you the ability to stream content from BBC’s website.

A “remember my password” Checkbox for Root/Sudo Dependent Tasks

Now when you open up something like Update Manager or Synaptic, and you are asked to type in your password so as to grant yourself root privileges, you will be presented with a box that says, “Remember my password” that will type your password in for you for all future sudo password prompts for the remainder of your session.

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There are other more technical upgrades being included with Ibex, such as the improved Samba networking services, GNOME 2.24, Xorg 7.4 (which is said to completely eliminate the need for the xorg.conf file; no more manual tweaking necessary), and a lot of other minor things (like an eject button being placed next to removable/ejectable devices).  Oh, and don’t forget Linux Kernel 2.6.27 which is a big leap forward in the hardware compatibility department.  So, not a whole lot on the surface that most users will be able to see and appreciate, but there is a LOT under the hood that is being upgraded which will provide new users with a better first impression of the OS than before.

Ubuntu Linux 8.10 is scheduled to be released October 30th.

For those of you out there who use Ubuntu Linux (or any Linux distro for that matter), recent events on the Ubuntu Forums might intrigue you.  Ever since I became acquainted with this online community, I have paid many a visit to their “off topic” forum, originally dubbed “The Backyard”.  This forum was intended to be a place for people to post threads that had either absolutely nothing to do with Ubuntu, or in fact caused controversy (often on a political or social level).  Apparently, over the last few months, some posts in this forum have required moderator intervention.  In fact, a lot of threads have required moderator intervention lately.

As you can imagine, the variety of topics in this forum are often all over the place and unpredictable, and of the threads that are closed: often they are closed justifiably.  This is nothing new.  But lately, most of these threads have been closed, not because of the original topic at hand, but because of one or two assholes who don’t know how to act a little more civilized, when debating something controversial or sensitive, show up and spoil the discussion with personally degrading insults.  Rather than ban such users and let the conversations continue, the mods have thought the best thing would be closing the thread.  This has caused a lot of their time to be wasted because the same problems have been repeating more frequently, and they’ve finally gotten fed up with having to spend so much time censoring the forum.  They’ve been hearing opinions from users about the possible closing of the forum for the last few weeks and I always thought that, while the tone of the moderators threatening to close the forum has been stern, you wouldn’t have believed it… until now.

Recently, a new policy has been enacted by the moderators, which allows members to continue visiting the forum and posting in already existing threads, but prevent people from posting new threads.  The theory is that this will cause interest in the forum to dwindle down to a more controllable murmur, as well as experiment to see what the result of closing the forum might be without actually closing the forum cold turkey.

Having discovered this today (a little too late), I wrote the following in a thread that originally suggested the idea of disallowing new threads forever:

It seems I am unable to post a new thread in OMGPP.

This saddens me because:

1. Despite the abuse the forum gets and the trouble moderators have dealt with in an effort to keep things clean and inviting to new Ubuntu forum users, it stands to silence a lot of relevant, healthy debate.

2. The motto, “Anywhere but here” sounds rather the opposite of what open-source communities are supposed to be proud of: being open.

3. The moderators can close the forum if they’d like, but there will be consequences down the road. One consequence is the need to continue closing unwanted threads that land in forums outside of OMGPP at a higher frequency because new users might think it would be acceptable. The community cafe would be forced to absorb the traffic that used to come here.

Idea: Stealing from the comments management system on digg and reddit, why not make the posts on this forum vote-able, and anybody who gets a certain number of negative votes will have their post “muted” or something to that effect. You could even impose a minimum age requirement if you’re concerned about offending easily offended individuals.

Why do I suggest this?! Because I don’t think the moderators have provided the users a way to more easily self-moderate the forum themselves. You have a “report” button. Super! Does it work? Not for the moderators; they work for that button. Why can’t they create a few more buttons that work for them and the rest of us at the same time?

It will be interesting to wait and see what kind of feedback this late suggestion gets, now that some whiny moderators have got the ball rolling on closing it down.  But I have to say that it just seems rather outrageous to see other tech forum websites (like techguy.org and their “Civilized Debate” forum which are dominated with Windows users) exhibit more ability to tolerate or manage “offensive” users/posts/threads than Ubuntu forum users and moderators can tolerate.  What a bunch of thumb sucking babies.  Now, if I had said something like that in the forum that used to be called the Backyard, I’d probably get some sort of silly reprimand from a moderator because it made someone cry (if I had said something more insulting, I would expect to be fairly repremanded… but it feels like things have gotten more and more childish lately).  Of course, making someone cry isn’t my goal in posting in that forum.  My goal would be to express opinions that may very well be more justified than the opinions of someone who would prefer to self-censor what they read and think via complaining to moderators about being “offended.”

Now, I can’t say anything bad about the rest of the forum or the community as a whole.  My hats off to developers, the mods and the forum community users.  And I know that the general consensus says the forum does not get much traffic and thus, won’t be a great loss to the rest of the community.  But I get this feeling that some of what’s going on in this forum lately is being done because someone perceives the Backyard/OGMPP forum as being an embarrassment to the community, or worse, Ubuntu (the operating system) itself.  How pretentious do we have to be?  Well, enough that the forum is going to be officially closed on October the 1st.  It remains to be seen how the rest of the community will react when they find their backyard water-cooler hangout was closed down because Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson broke in wielding silly string and water pistols and nobody could come up with a decent solution to the problem.  ”Let’s just close the forum!”  What kind of a solution is that?  Oh well.  Like they say, no great loss… but it’s still a loss.

One user stepped up to create a replacement forum on his own server.  You can find it here:

http://grubbn.org/omgpp

Unforuantely, this alternative forum only has about 70 members in it so far, compared to Ubuntu forums ~67,000 active members (~671,000 registered members).  I’m not saying 67,000 made use out of the soon to be killed Backyard forum, but it was at least convenient for them in the off chance they felt like talking with other fellow Ubuntu fans about something other than Ubuntu.  I’ll never be allowed to post a new thread about my puppy dog, or ask people if they think the economy is going to collapse or poll people on how much longer they think Sarah Palin will be able to go without answering a difficult questions.  These topics are not offensive, and I really appreciated the quality of interaction I got from the Ubuntu community over any one of many random topics.  And now it’s about to be locked up and demolished with nothing to replace it, making Ubuntu Forums a dry, less emotional place to be.  I mean this with all due respect, but I sincerely feel the moderators at Ubuntu Forums has failed the community they govern.  Though their take is that the community failed them! That’s pretty rich, I have to tell you.

There’s a lot of buzz in the media today over Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin whose Yahoo! Mail account was recently compromised by an anonymous individual.  The breach occurred just before dawn on Tuesday, with many screenshots uploaded to the image forum website 4chan.org.  Unfortunately for those of you who are hoping for something juicy to fall out of this and into public scrutiny, there was nothing controversial to be found (so far).  So how did this happen?

An anonymous person, using nothing more than Google, Wikipedia and the “I forgot my password” questionnaire on Yahoo! Mail’s website was all it took.  Simple questions like, “What’s your birthday?” and “What’s your zip code” are examples.  A slightly more difficult question was, “Where did you meet your spouse?”, which took a little digging and some minor trial and error.  After about 45 minutes (according to the original poster), the account was compromised, the password changed to “popcorn” and then posted on 4chan’s /b/ forum for others to login to and confirm as being real.

So now everybody feels obligated to find someone to blame for this breach of security/violation of privacy.  Of course we could point blame at a nameless, faceless person who isn’t admittedly affiliated with any political party… but what’s the point?  You either know who the person is or you don’t and there’s even a chance they don’t even live in the United States (making it difficult to impossible to enforce the law).  In the meantime, we should start by noting that the questions that the attacker had to answer were rather easy, and that they were selected by Palin herself when the account was created.  Considering the fact that when the account was created she was already involved in politics (which mostly involves increasing your celebrity status), she should have thought to select more difficult, personal questions for the purposes of recovering a lost password.

The incident does bring up something broader:  Those of us who use the Internet for social purposes often leave behind a paper trail of fun facts that might be found with something as simple as a Google search.  I shouldn’t have to go on any further to tell you what info you probably shouldn’t post about yourself in a blog or forum somewhere.  Nor should I have to tell you, much less a government official, what questions should be selected during registration in the event you lose your password (of course, most people who are in the government have their own government hosted e-mail accounts that are subject to much stricter security policies… apparently Alaska didn’t get the memo).

So now you know how it happened and how it could happen to you if you ever plan to become famous or just have some half-assed blog like this one that almost nobody reads (except for Google’s robots).  We should be glad the emails that have leaked didn’t contain anything sensitive to national security (then again, you think she’s ever had access to such information?), and I’m betting Palin is literally counting her blessings for that very reason right now.  Not just because she lucked out on having her emails stolen by strangers located in who knows what country, but also because she can notch this up as legitimate experience with regard to national security (it’s practically a step up from claiming you know all about foreign policy because you can see Russia from your house).

Update:  An article detailing where the law stands on all of this can be found here:

DOJ View on Email Privacy May Hamper Prosecution of Palin Hackers

I should also throw out the ever so hypothetical rhetorical question:  Why was having this email account necessary in the first place?

Ubuntu on a phone.  Too cool!

Wow, it’s been over a week since I last posted in here.  Having been so long since I last posted, I had to muddle through over 100 comments, 99.5% of which were spam and maybe one legit comment… though it’s hard to say really because I wasn’t paying very close attention when I marked them all as spam.  So, sorry if you actually posted one recently and it didn’t end up on the site.

The Business…

I recently got my apology/bribe money from the government and I’ve been looking forward to investing that money into some business related expenses (such as advertising, because it would probably just offend someone to death if I spent it all on silly things made in China).  I’ve also been waiting on a friend of mine to declare whether or not he would be able to participate in a business venture with me, and it turns out he won’t be available.  The ideal role for him would have been project management and accounting (a boring desk job).  If I were him, I would have said no too (but in truth, he really will not have extra time to spare for it).  He’s going to be working a lot of overtime with a new employer this coming year so I’ll have to wait and see if he’ll ever be able to participate with me some time later.

On the bright side I have two other associates ready for work — one a web developer/programmer and the other a graphics artist.  My hope is to combine all of our skills to offer a new slew of online and offline services.  One project we hope to take on very soon is designing a new website for a rural K-8 school; it being the first site that shall utilize content management software.  The goal is to have a powerful interactive website that will allow teachers to administer their own mini-sites for each class, with students also able to put content on the site (provided their stuff is given approval by each respective teacher in advanced).  It is an ambitious project and we’ll have plenty of time over the summer to kick it around the sandbox.  We also intend to create websites in advanced and approach small and medium sized businesses with a site that’s more or less been designed for them.  We’ll also combine this with ready-made advertising packages which can even include original logos we custom design.  Toss in Ubuntu Linux-based office PCs custom built and serviced by me and we’ll have an attractive, versatile selection of tools many businesses will probably be interested in using.

No more CCNA?

A while back, I got into this habit of writing about wanting to get my CCNA networking certification.  I’ve lost the motivation to continue writing about this for the time being, mostly because I think it’s really boring (no, really!).  There are many aspects about computer networking that I love, but there’s also a good chunk that I don’t have a practical use for right now.  I’m not desperately attempting to secure a desk job somewhere so I can map subnets in Microsoft Visio, configure VLANs on serial interfaces, setup ACLs to filter network traffic and perhaps occasionally arm-wrestle with some absurdly obtuse/self-righteous HR department.  Computer networking is not an intimidating field of study and understanding the basics is about as complicated as understanding how the Post Office works.  But Cisco seems a little full of themselves at times.  You’ll know what I mean by this after you’re waist deep in the plethora of rediculous acronyms Cisco is continually pulling out of its ass.  Cheap excuses to procrastinate aside, I’m now more interested in web design and Linux.  The diploma I’ve already got and passing the tests necessary to get it is certification enough for now.

What’s new with Ubuntu?

I’ve been meaning to create a new video to show off Ubuntu 8.04, but very little about it stands out when compared to 7.10 (with exception to performance improvements, which are very noticeable).  One of the most hyped features, Pulse Audio, has turned out to be something of a disappointment (though this is just my opinion).  The decision to include it with 8.04 by default was likely made so as to help get the kinks ironed out before the next major release of Ubuntu in October, which is rumored to be sporting a sexy new theme that will compliment the impressive collection of special effects rendered by Compiz Fusion.  By then, the soon to be developed “glitch-free” version of Pulse Audio should already be in place.

What’s new with Dave?

Believe it or not, I’m reading Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces“.  The book takes a deep look at the multitude of mythologies that have existed world wide throughout human history and highlights the similarities between them instead of the superficial differences.  I probably shouldn’t comment on it further until I’ve finished reading (which will probably take quite some time).  Ancient human history is something I’ve been interested in for a few years and the topic of mythology adds an informative and sometimes entertaining layer.  After finishing it, I hope to plow through Julian Jaynes’ “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.

Because sharing is caring.

So we’re getting down to the final days of testing before the official release of Ubuntu 8.04.  There are several new features included with it, but we’re only going to take a look at just a couple of them before the official release in just six days!

I have been testing out the Beta version of Ubuntu 8.04 for roughly the past two weeks and put an end to it last night by removing it and replacing it with Ubuntu 8.04 Release Candidate, a preview version of the official release.  A lot of performance improvements have been made to this latest edition of my favorite operating system.  Firefox 3 Beta 5 and Open Office 2.4 are included with Ubuntu 8.04 by default.  Firefox in particular has made major memory usage improvements which translates into faster load times for the user.  And overall, Hardy Heron users report snappier performance.

A new feature called Pulse Audio is being ushered in with Ubuntu 8.04 which stands to bring ease to sound card configuration and make obsolete certain hardware limitations of some cards.  Pulse Audio is a sound server and you can do a lot of cool stuff with it, such as set one computer up to accept sound from another computer over a network.  You could imagine having a Home Theater PC receiving sound from a wireless laptop in the same room.  And it is actually surprisingly easy to configure that scenario I just made up.

There are still a couple of small drawbacks about Pulse Audio that I must mention:

• Pulse Audio has not yet integrated any sort of EQ into its mixer, so you can’t adjust bass or treble on your speakers with it just yet.
• Pulse Audio does not support surround sound channel level adjustment just yet, so only your two front stereo speakers will work for now.

For some people, this isn’t much of a big deal.  Not everybody has a surround sound system connected to their computer, and two speakers is all they could ever ask for.  But for people like me, it’s a bit of a disappointment.  Though… they had to implement it at some point.  So I’ll stop crying about it for now.  I am sure additional mixers will soon be integrated in with Pulse Audio.  In most cases, the technical problems it will solve outweighs its weaknesses.

Wubi – What is it?

Wubi is a new installer that is part of the Ubuntu Live CD.  Wubi allows Windows user to install Ubuntu on their system in a manor similar to installing any other program.

To start Ubuntu after installing, you restart your computer and select “Ubuntu”.  If you want to boot back into Windows, you restart and select Windows.  If you’d like to remove Wubi/Ubuntu from your computer, you can go into Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs, and simply uninstall it.  Now that’s easy!

These are two of the biggest advancements made outside of Ubuntu’s already impressive boost to system wide performance and stability.  All of which are preparation for a dramatic face-lift set to take place when 8.10 is released in October.

Automatix, a third-party program used for installing a select few popular software titles and video drivers in Ubuntu, has passed. The developers of this installer, more or less, have decided to go their own separate ways. If you ask me, I think they stopped because the purpose it served has more or less been replaced by official Ubuntu support.

When I first started using Ubuntu about a year ago, I used Automatix to install my nVidia proprietary drivers, Google Earth, Skype, Flash, DVD playback, even VMware-Server, among other things (come to think of it, I even installed Beryl with it). Today, installing all of these things has gotten much much easier. Most of these items can be installed via the Add/Remove applications applet, or Synaptic and if your comfortable with the terminal good old “sudo apt-get install fill in the blank” works great too for most things. Compiz has replaced Beryl and is included with Ubuntu by default now, video card drivers are handled fairly well by the Restricted Drivers manager… There isn’t much out there these days that Automatix can help people out with.

Sorry to see you go, Automatix! But you’re job here is done. Rest in peace. At least I won’t forget you.

http://share.skype.com/sites/linux/2008/03/skype_20_for_linux_gold_seeing_is_b.html

All the details you need are at the above link!

A new website has launched called Ubuntu Brainstorm and it looks to be the seedling of a site that has a lot of great potential for driving the direction of the Ubuntu Linux operating system. At the moment, it looks like the website is gaining a lot of participants at a very fast rate. This is a good thing in the long run, but for the time being, it can cause the popularity between newer and older topics to appear disproportionate. That’ll iron itself out in the long run as well.

The way Ubuntu Brainstorm works is simple: You can join in by submitting your own ideas about what you think should change or be slightly modified about the current Ubuntu operating system, and then other people can vote for or against your submitted ideas. It works much like Digg does as a social bookmarking website, where users submit multitudes of different things, and the popularity contest begins.

Some good suggestions have already been made, and it is clear that one of the strongest drives held by many of the participants is to find ways to make the OS increasing simpler for new users. One of the most recent suggestions I liked was to get rid of that dreaded GRUB menu and replace it with something more pleasant looking, and less intimidating. There are many other suggestions present on the site. And best of all, you don’t have to be a developer or know a thing about computer programming to make an impressionable suggestion.

So if you’re an Ubuntu user, check this site out and join in helping to make Ubuntu the best OS in the world: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/

Here’s the dumb idea I just submitted: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/338/