Utah Open Source Planet

Some time ago, being the no good visual designer I am, I decided to put together a mutt color theme. This was no ordinary theme, I’m talking 256 colors! No, don’t worry, the theme doesn’t use all 256 colors.

Aaron’s post prompted me to put up my theme for consumption, enjoyment, and comment. If you want details on how to make the colors work, follow the link above, he did a good job of that already.

Now, the theme and screenshots.

I’m a big advocate of virtual desktops, sometimes referred to as “workspaces”. I’m curious how many workspaces you use, and what, if any, each workspace is assigned to. I use 6 workspaces, and have them organized into two rows of three columns as follows:

1. Email
2. Messaging
3. Web
4. Virtual Machines
5. Miscellaneous
6. Development

I was trying to mirror down a set of zip’s (CD3WD a pretty amazing resource) and I didnt’ want to just mirror, because of other data.  So I was trying to do a simple loop, but was thinking too Perlish and trying to sprintf somehow the numerical formatting (files are cd3wd401 to 444, so needed the 0).  Perlhoser corrected my attempt, by pointing me to the seq command, with the -w flag, which pads the width to the largest amount, with leading zeros, perfect.

Until I tried to run it on my mac, which had the drive I wanted it on, instead of a linux box.  Seq wasn’t installed, and I couldnt’ find it with macports.  However I did find via google that the ‘coreutils’ port has a ‘gseq’ tool. Drop in replacement for my script.

When you make a phone call, say to your grandma, you hear her phone ringing. It's called ringback and its purpose is fairly obvious. But have you ever wondered where it comes from? As a kid I assumed I was hearing grandma's phone ringing which, if you think about long enough, is kinda ludicrous. I haven't read up enough to know where it actually came from but I can tell you where it comes from in a SIP environment. There are basically two options.

First of all, the called party sends a 183 Ringing message to the caller. That's how your phone knows that grandma's is ringing. Your phone also then plays some sort of ring noise to let you know.

There's another possibility though. Instead of just saying 183 and being done, the callee can send back an RTP stream with the ringing noise of its choosing. I'm sure you've heard different types of ringback before (different pitch, different frequency, different volume) and that's because voice switches each have slight variations on the same theme.

Now, take that one step further and consider that an RTP stream is just an RTP stream and doesn't have to conform to some traditional ringing sound. It could be beeping, or honking, or whatever you want. Screeching monkeys, did I hear you say? Oh yeah. But probably more useful is the ability to send music. Here is how to set it up in Asterisk. (BTW, this will work with SIP, IAX2, or PRI. Basically any of the cool signaling methods, but it won't work with analog POTS.)

First we set up a music on hold class which is our ring noise. This can contain any file you want, but since Asterisk will play it from the beginning each time, best to be something that sounds cool immediately. Or pull it up in Audacity and trim out your favorite 60 seconds.

musiconhold.conf:

[ring1]
mode=files
directory=/var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3/ring1
random=yes

Then in our dialplan we use it. First we play a message to the caller that we're trying to find the user, otherwise they might get confused as to why they are hearing music. Then we pass the "m" option to Dial which specifies our music on hold class. It's really as easy as that.

extensions.conf:

[from-pstn]
exten => s,1,Progress
exten => s,n,Playback(followme/pls-hold-while-try)
exten => s,n,Dial(SIP/you||m(ring1))

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The new Ubuntu is out. Download it here if you haven’t already.

For my non-technical readers:

Ubuntu is a flavor of Linux, an operating system that can replace Windows. Linux is open sourced, meaning you can look at the code and see how it works. It’s also free to download and includes a ton of world-class open-source software: Firefox for web browsing, OpenOffice for office software, Gimp for photo editing, and much more.

Ubuntu is easy to use, and it’s a great way to familiarize yourself with Linux. Plus it can save you a lot of money if you’re buying a PC that doesn’t come with Windows. (Or, if you’re currently pirating Windows –you know who you are– switching to Linux can help you get legal.)

There is a ton of help online. There are also lots of local user groups like Ubuntu Utah that can help you get it installed and answer any questions you have along the way.

Anyway, give Linux a try; you’ll probably like it. I for one, am never going back to Windows.

I've had the enjoyable experience of playing around with the Cy7c68013a chip on the Ez-Usb development board for the past few weeks. I thought I'd post a few tips for developing in this type of environment with open source software. Convert to Linux The tools that Cypress provides with the development kit are Windows based. [...]

Thanks to David Evans and Christer Edwards, I’m now a Mutt user. I’ll spare the reasons why I switched, except to mention that I wanted a mail client that did mail standards correctly. Further, as stated on the Mutt site, “All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less”. I am in agreement.

So, seeing as though Mutt has become my preferred default mail client now, I needed a good theme with it. The defaults are just so boring. So, seeing as though I had made adjustments to my Irssi installation, I thought I’d modify my Mutt install to match it. Then I learned later, that unlike Irssi, Mutt support 256 colors. This got me on a whole kick to get 256 colors working in my screen session, of which later, I found that Vim supports as well. So, after a bit of hacking, I got 256 color support in my terminal through screen. Now, I am set to configure a 256 colored theme with Mutt.

First, the necessary additions that you should make to your terminal and .screerc. In my .zshrc, I modified the TERM variable to support 256 colors:

TERM=xterm-256color

Then, I needed to make the necessary adjustment to my .screenrc. Before beginning, GNU Screen must be compiled with 256 color support form your GNU/Linux vendor, otherwise, even adding these configuration options won’t do any good. Further, I don’t fully understand why the options are necessary, or what exactly they are doing, but you need them nonetheless:

attrcolor b ".I" # allow bold colors
termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm' # AB=background, AF=foreground
defbce "on" # erase background with current bg color
term screen-256color

Now we’re ready to roll with 256 colors in Mutt. I did a bit of searching online for Mutt themes with 256 color support, but was disappointed in the lack of such themes. There are a few floating around, but nothing that really grabbed my eye. Also, I was very disappointed in the lack of documentation on the Mutt site about the supported 256 colors. I later learned that this is entirely dependent on your terminal, but their documentation could use some work in this area. Mutt supports color1 through color256, but the question remains: what are these colors? Well, I found a Python script online that can tell you. If your terminal supports it, you’ll get a fantastic rainbow of colors showing what each of these colors is defined as in your terminal. A great aide in getting the right colors for my theme.

Now that I know what the colors are, I can start hacking away, getting everything exactly as I want. I wanted something easy on the eyes, suitable for low light conditions. Also, I didn’t want a massive palette of colors. Less is more when dealing with color design. So, I decided to pick on the mascot colors found at ivy league colleges here in the States. The resulting color palette was:

tan, red, green, blue, charcoal and orange

If you’re a designer, you’ll probably call the orange “burnt orange” and the red “brick red” or something similar. At any event, you get the idea that I am going after. The colors don’t have precise functions, as I just spent the night hacking away, getting it to flow and look the way I wanted, so as to not have on overwhelming color on the screen, but a good array. However, I generally tried to leave red for error message (as well as the header), green for good messages (and inline quotes) and orange for warnings (also for inline quotes). Take a spin with the theme, and give me any feedback in the comments.

Of course, what would be a post on a theme without screenshots? You can download the theme here (it’s a work in progress, especially with the regular expressions).

Screenshot 1 showing the index.
Screenshot 2 showing a message.

UPDATE: you will need the ncurses-term package installed to pull this off. It’s an “apt-get install ncurses-term” away, if on Ubuntu or Debian.

This month’s meeting will be on databases. A combined meeting with the Utah Database Users Group. The original announcement follows:

Presentation: This month’s meeting will be a combined meeting with the Utah Database User Group (http://udbug.org) on “why you love your database in 15 minutes”. Several 15 minute short talks about databases that run on Linux will be presented. Hope to see everyone there!

Time and place:

Date: Wednesday Oct 22, 2008
Time: 7:10pm
Place: Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) room 101 (Previously known as EMCB)
Cost: $0.00. Zip. Nada.

Directions/Parking:
Directions - [http://www.map.utah.edu/index.jsp?find=62]
Parking can be found just East of the WEB building and there is a big lot just North of the Merrill Engineering building (MEB).
Parking is free after 6:00 (Based on the signs posted. Always check in case this changes.)

Special thanks go to:
U of U for providing the meeting room.
Various Volunteers

School is quite a bit funner than I remember.

However, I am taking an interesting class dealing with storyboarding for movies. We have to do these things called “animatics.” You all know what a movie storyboard is, right? If not, google “movie storyboards” and read up. The boiled down version is that it is a scene-by-scene (generally using stills) depiction of the sequences of a movie. Could be a short movie. Could be a scene.

Well, an animatic is where you take these storyboarding pictures and make a glorified slide show with them. You are able to put in sound effects, filler music, placeholder dialogue, and other assets to make the storyboard much more like the movie will actually be.

So our professor gave us a few exercises. He gave us a series of drawings, a basic plot, and told us to make an animatic out of them.

What tool did I turn to? When all was said and done, it was Cinelerra, the non-linear video editor for Linux:

Click for larger image

Just to refresh, these are not movies, but more like an indicator of where people will be standing, what kind of shots will be used, what kind of lighting there might be, etc.

With that, if you’d like to take a look at what I finally turned in for these three projects created with Cinelerra, here you are:

2.8 Mb - Ogg Theora format - right-click, save as…

7.2 Mb - Ogg Theora format - right-click, save as…

3.9 Mb - Ogg Theora format - right-click, save as…

Spielberg I am not. Lucas I am not. But at least I got credit for doing the exercises.

My Eee Box (model B202) arrived today. I actually plan on using this machine to run Windows (I have a very short list of things that I *require* the blasted OS to run).

First impressions: Yeah, they really are 'cute'. About the size of a Wii, but thinner. The splashtop mini OS that's built into the BIOS is pretty groovy, but I haven't really been able to think of a good use for it. The VGA mounting bracket for LCD monitors is just plain awesome. Out of sight, out of mind. I plan on using Windows XP via remote desktop from my main Ubuntu machine.

Who cares about all that, though. I obviously had to try and see if I could get Ubuntu running on it, which I did, and that's what this post is all about.

To do this, you'll need a linux machine with internet access and a USB key.

Create a bootable USB key with ubuntu-8.04.1-desktop_i386.iso and the isotostick.sh script mentioned on the Ubuntu FromUSBStick Wiki page. This assumes that you have an already pre formatted (ext2 or fat32) USB key, and that the device is /dev/sde1 (to find out what device your key is using, type 'dmesg' a few seconds after plugging it in).

$ wget http://mirrors.xmission.com/ubuntu-cd/hardy/ubuntu-8.04.1-desktop-i386.iso
$ wget http://www.startx.ro/sugar/isotostick.sh
$ chmod +x isotostick.sh
$ sudo ./isotostick.sh ./ubuntu-8.04.1-desktop-i386.iso /dev/sde1
Not verifying image...(no checkisomd5 in Ubuntu so skipping)!
Copying live image to USB stick
cp: cannot create symbolic link `/media/usbdev.Dn7319/dists/stable': Operation not permitted
cp: cannot create symbolic link `/media/usbdev.Dn7319/dists/unstable': Operation not permitted
Installing boot loader
USB stick set up as live image!

The 'cannot create symbolic link' errors are normal if your key is formatted with fat32. Next, you'll want to get the initial custom eeepc kernel packages from array.org and copy them on to the usb key.

$ mkdir eeepc
$ cd eeepc
$ wget http://www.array.org/ubuntu/dists/hardy/eeepc/binary-i386/linux-image-2.6.24-21-eeepc_2.6.24-21.39eeepc1_i386.deb
$ wget http://www.array.org/ubuntu/dists/hardy/eeepc/binary-i386/linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.24-21-eeepc_2.6.24-21.30eeepc5_i386.deb
$ sudo mkdir /mnt/disk
$ sudo mount /dev/sde1 /mnt/disk
$ sudo cp -rv ../eeepc /mnt/disk
$ sudo umount /mnt/disk

Next, you'll want to configure your Eee Box to boot from your USB key. Unlike the manual (and the interwebs) would like you to believe, pressing F8 at the splashtop boot screen will not allow you to choose your USB key as the boot device. Plug the key in, and enter the BIOS setup screen. Press the right arrow key to "Boot", down arrow to "Hard Disk Drives" (if you don't see this option, make sure you plug your USB key in before you power on the Eee Box), select the "1rst Drive" option and choose your USB device. Press F10 and enter. The Box should now boot the Ubuntu install ISO.

If you are using an LCD monitor connected via the VGA->DVI converter, once you get past the "Ubuntu" boot logo screen with the progress bar, your monitor might just go into powersaving mode. If this happens to you, press CTRL+ALT+F2 to go to a virtual terminal. Your monitor should come back on. Type 'sudo bash'. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change it so that it looks like the xorg.conf file located here. Once you've saved it, type 'killall -9 X'. If X doesn't start back up automatically in a few seconds, just type 'startx'. If the installation doesn't start automatically after X is running, hit ALT+F2, type 'ubiquity' in the box, and press enter. The familiar Ubuntu installation screen should pop up.

I'm not going to go over the installation process, I assume you already know how to install Ubuntu. The Eee Box 80GB hdd is separated nicely into two partitions already. One for Windows, and one for "data". I chose to dual boot the machine, so I just erased the "data" partition, created a 2GB swap and used the rest as the root ext3 filesystem. Obviously you can partition the system however you want.

Once you get Ubuntu installed, and you've booted into the new installation, you're going to want to install those two custom kernel .deb files you copied onto the USB key. Because you installed Ubuntu from the USB device, your /etc/fstab file will have an entry telling the OS that your USB key is a cdrom drive, and it won't mount correctly when you plug it in. Edit /etc/fstab and remove the last line. Plug your USB key in if you haven't already, and if you have, remove it and plug it back in. It should mount automatically. Open a terminal, see where it mounted using the 'mount' command, and install the .deb files:

$ cd /media/disk/eeepc
$ sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Reboot. Everything should be working at this point. WiFi, the wired network device, sound, compiz, etc. Woot!

Yesterday I decided to upgrade from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron (beta 1). I usually upgrade early, but my main motivation for this was to be able to implement the new multimedia keys interface working in Exaile. Apparently, the Gnome crew decided to change this particular part of the DBus interface making it backwards incompatable. A description of the Exaile bug can be found here.

The upgrade was fairly painless, but here are a few of the gotchas I did experience.

Hardy Issues:

The only problem I had was sound not working once I finally booted into my upgraded system. I found that, by default, the -386 kernel was set as default instead of the -generic kernel. The -386 kernel does not come with snd-* modules for some reason. I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst and changed "default 0" to default 2", which made it so the -generic kernel would load by default. This fixed my sound issues.

Firefox 3 Issues:

Other than missing extensions that are not yet compatable with Firefox 3, I've really only had one really annoying problem. This problem existed in Gutsy when trying to upgrade to FF3, and remained once the upgrade to Hardy was complete (Hardy comes with FF3 by default). The problem is as follows: If you have Firefox on workspace one, and you click on a link in a terminal (or any other application) on a different workspace, the entire firefox window moves to that workspace (even if you have FF set to open links in a new tab).

Googling for answers to this problem revealed nothing, and people in irc.mozilla.org/#firefox couldn't really understand what I meant. Asking in irc.freenode.net/#ubuntu-us-ut, Christer Edwards informed me that he had the same problem and that in a fresh install of Hardy (as opposed to an upgrade) the problem did not exist. After fiddling around for a bit, I found that a simple rm -rf ~/.mozilla fixed the problem.

I will keep posting as other issues may or may not arise with the upgrade.

Here is a nice demo of the new Lancelot menu for KDE 4.1:

more information

screenshots

From a linux.com article on Lancelot:

“KDE 4 is barely eight months old, and already it has three options for a main menu. Until now, users have either used the default Kickoff, which makes for awkward navigation of the menu tree, or reverted to the familiar but unwieldy classic menu. Now, with the first full release of Lancelot, users have another option that overcomes the shortcomings of both other alternatives and gives KDE 4 a thoroughly modern menu.”

“According to comments on the project Web page by main developer Ivan Čukić, Lancelot started life as a SuperKaramba applet for organizing desktop icons. Its name is a homage to Monty Python and the Holy Grail — as evidenced by the default grail icon — as well as a pun on “launch-a-lot.” As Čukić ported it to the new KDE desktop, the project changed in nature, first to keep pace with rumors about it, and then because of his dissatisfaction with Kickoff. Čukić is apparently not alone in his dissatisfaction, because within days of the 1.0 release being announced, Lancelot packages started to appear in many major distributions.”

Read “Lancelot reaches Holy Grail of KDE menu.”

Linux is continuing to grow with much momentum. One of the reasons that this is the case is because non-technical users who don’t want to learn Linux can use it without having to learn it. In other words, Linux has become much more intuitive and user-friendly. Especially distributions like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE. Plus, it’s just better than everything else. *wink*

Excerpt:

“47% of respondents said they would use or evaluate Linux in the coming year, with lower cost as the primary driver. But the largest percentage said they had no further plans to migrate from Unix to Linux, indicating that future Linux growth would be at the expense of other platforms. In response to a different question, 23% said that whenever possible they would migrate from Windows to Linux, and another 16% said that to avoid a Windows upgrade, they would migrate to Linux. Also expanding Linux use in the data center is a sharp projected upswing in use for its built-in virtualization. Although Red Hat and SUSE Xen-based virtualization tally only about 2.5% apiece of deployments currently, respondents’ projections for the technology climb steeply to 10% for Red Hat and 5% for SUSE over the next year.”

Take a look at “Is Linux growing at Windows’ or Unix’s expense?.”

The September Salt Lake Linux Users Group meeting will be on Vyatta, and OpenSource network appliance. The original announcement follows:

Sept. 17, 2008 SLLUG meeting: Using Vyatta to replace Cisco gear

Tristan Rhodes will be presenting this month on using Vyatta to replace Cisco gear:

Presentation:

Vyatta is an open source network appliance that can be used as a router, firewall, and VPN server. Vyatta is based on Debian Linux, but there is no need for Linux knowledge because Vyatta operates just like a network device. Vyatta will allow you to replace your over-priced routers with open source software running on industry standard server hardware. This presentation will demonstrate the capabilities of Vyatta and will include some basic configurations using the command line interface and the web-interface.

Tristan Rhodes recently presented at the UTOSC 2008 conference.

Time and place:

Date: Wednesday September 17, 2008
Time: 7:10pm
Place: Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) room 101 (Previously known as EMCB)
Cost: $0.00. Zip. Nada.

Directions/Parking: Directions - [http://www.map.utah.edu/index.jsp?find=62] Parking can be found just East of the WEB building and there is a big lot just North of the Merrill Engineering building (MEB). Parking is free after 6:00 (Based on the signs posted. Always check in case this changes.)

Special thanks go to:

• Prof. Lepreau and the U of U for providing the meeting room.
  
• Various Volunteers
  

“The most powerful physics project in the history of the known universe - The $10 Billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC)- shot its first light speed beam this morning around its 27 km circuit. Beyond the 20 years it took to build and half of all the world’s astrophysicists, it also takes another key ingredient to make LHC work — Linux.” How much better could you say it?

Not only that, we have a screenshot of their Linux usage. Apparently, they are using KDE, the best desktop environment there is:

Click for larger image

Read “Large Hadron Collider - powered by Linux.”

How fun is school.

Yeah, it’s not. Especially when you’re starting a new job, too.

The fun part is, I got a dark red 2004 Nissan Maxima. Which I am currently enjoying a great deal.

None of which has to do with Linux. But it’s my blog and I get the liberty of going off topic. At least I’m posting.

So I thought I’d take on the challenge of doing a triple-boot setup on my laptop. Yawn, right? Everyone’s done that.

Except not everyone has done it with Windows Vista, MacOS X Leopard, and OpenSUSE 11.0 all on the same non-Mac machine. A machine much like my Dell Inspiron E1705.

I took said challenge, and it only took about 23 tries before I got it.

Here are some pictures of the machine booting, logging into, and the desktop of each OS:

OpenSUSE 11.0

booting

Click for larger image

login

Click for larger image

desktop

Click for larger image

MacOS Leopard

booting

Click for larger image

login

Click for larger image

desktop

Click for larger image

Windows Vista

booting

Click for larger image

login

Click for larger image

desktop

Click for larger image

Most often, I will be hanging out in the OpenSUSE 11.0 installation. For that annoying software that only runs in Windows, I am forced, completely against my will, to have it on the machine, as well. And, I have recently become interested in the iPhone SDK, which of course only runs in MacOS 10.5.2 (Leopard) or newer. Hence, the need for all three OSes. And, I have just never seen it done, so I thought I’d jump in and do it. Instructions mostly came from here.

Fascinating.

So, back to the off-topic. I am selling a white 2004 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor (click for larger image):

For all the information you could ever want about the car, including lots of pictures, take a look at this page.

Red Hat made the announcement today that they have acquired Qumranet, the company behind KVM.

This is awesome news on many fronts. First, KVM is the future for Linux virtualization- not Xen. Second, Red Hat has become the leader in open source contributions, both in the kernel itself, as well as many technologies, such as Spacewalk and oVirt. Because Red Hat stays so close to the fundamental philosophies of Free Software, this is a company worth knowing. They are truly giving back to the community. My allegiance lies not only with Canonical and Ubuntu, but with Free Software in general. So, even if I am an Ubuntu man, this is great news for Linux. Linux, unlike other vendors, can now offer a full in-house virtualization environment integrated into the operating system itself. Because Red Hat is pushing so much Open Source Software on the Linux front, other distributions will be able to take advantage of their efforts, and we’ll all benefit as a whole. Better virtualization, better systems management, better Linux operating systems.

Congrats to both the Red Hat and Qumranet teams. I’m looking forward to seeing KVM in RHEL 6, and even more so, the absence of Xen.

My first day at the Utah Open Source Conference is just about done. I really need to get to bed so I don't fall asleep during my presentation tomorrow. That would be embarrassing. I only made it down at 6:30pm for the dinner and keynotes, which I'm glad I attended. Mac's talk was great and so was Paul's, although it did seem to drag on. Maybe that's because I needed to go to the bathroom. I also had a chance to visit with a few Linux newbies at my table, which is always fun. But the highlight of my day had to be meeting Harleypig. Thankfully, no speedos were involved.

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WARNING: IF YOU FOLLOW THE CODE IN THIS POST, YOU WILL DESTROY THE DATA ON YOUR DISK.

Being a Linux instructor for Guru Labs, I get to travel the United States, and on occasion, other countries. When on the road, usually I’m teaching Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but do sometimes teach Fedora Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server and openSUSE Linux. Soon, I hope, we will be partnering with Canonical (Mark, paying attention? ) to teach Ubuntu Server LTS.

However, for the longest time, I wanted to leave my calling card, so-to-speak, showing I had visited that training center. I thought about changing the MAC address on the instructor machine, but that wouldn’t work out so well. I thought about organizing the dry erase markers in some fashion, or leaving something on the white board, but that’s extremely temporary. I needed something to say “Aaron Toponce was here” without causing any damage to the training center, or any of its equipment, and staying preserved.

I came up with an idea: I’ll echo my name to every bit on the hard dive until the hard drive is wiped. This is an effective means of erasing the contents of your hard dive, and completely destroying the data. As we all know, when you install an operating system, the OS does not flip every single bit on the disk. In fact, it only flips the bits it needs to. As such, even after a reinstallation of your operating system, much of the contents of the previous install could still be visible. After echoing my name to ever bit on the disk, unless every bit on the disk is re-flipped, my name will be present as long as the disk remains operational. As such, digital graffiti on the hard drive. Let’s see how this works.

If you check out the man page on “yes”, you will see that it outputs a string repeatedly until killed. I’ve really have found no useful means for “yes”, until now. Using “yes” can take one argument. That argument could be “Aaron was here”. As you know with communication channels, you can redirect the output using the “>” operator. Of course, because we want to save this to disk, we just redirect the output to our disk:

aaron@kratos:~ 10064 % yes "Aaron was here on ${date +%D}. " | sudo dd of=/dev/sda

When yes reaches the end of the disk, it will stop, at which point, the disk has been wiped, and data destroyed. Now, perform a reinstall. After the installation finishes, examine the contents of the disk with “xxd”: You’ll want to pipe the output to the less pager, as the output of “xxd” will scroll past the screen. What you’re looking at when viewing the output of “xxd” is first a counter in the left column, then the contents of those bits in hexadecimal, then finally, the string representation of the hex. Notice in the ASCII column, the data of the first few bytes of the hard drive:

aaron@kratos:~ 1 % sudo xxd /dev/sda | head
Password:
0000000: eb48 906f 6e20 7761 7320 6865 7265 206f  .H.on was here o
0000010: 6e20 3038 2f31 372f 3038 2e20 0a41 6172  n 08/17/08. .Aar
0000020: 6f6e 2077 6173 2068 6572 6520 6f6e 2030  on was here on 0
0000030: 382f 3137 2f30 382e 200a 4161 726f 0302  8/17/08. .Aaro..
0000040: ff00 0020 0100 0000 0002 fa90 90f6 c280  ... ............
0000050: 7502 b280 ea59 7c00 0031 c08e d88e d0bc  u....Y|..1......
0000060: 0020 fba0 407c 3cff 7402 88c2 52be 7f7d  . ..@|<.t...R..}
0000070: e834 01f6 c280 7454 b441 bbaa 55cd 135a  .4....tT.A..U..Z
0000080: 5272 4981 fb55 aa75 43a0 417c 84c0 7505  RrI..U.uC.A|..u.
0000090: 83e1 0174 3766 8b4c 10be 057c c644 ff01  ...t7f.L...|.D..

If I were to continue through the less pager, I would see that there are sections where that string is repeated and repeated throughout the disk over and over again. Of course, it’s not interfering with the day-to-day operation of the operating system, as the data segments on the disk are unused and unallocated. Those bits will lose their orientation when new data is saved in those spots.

As an instructor, I probably won’t show the students the contents of the instructor machine’s hard drive in this manner. Other instructors probably won’t either. So, this data remains hidden as an easter egg waiting for somebody to stumble on it. However, I’m keeping a list of all the training centers I’ve visited and where I’ve left my calling card. It will be interesting to see if this data does in fact remain in tact when I visit again.

One of the guys that I work with sent me this link.  Its a really good presentation that GKH gave at Google Tech Talks.  For those that don’t know who GKH is, he is a Novell employee that started the Linux Driver Project.  There were some really cool stats about the kernel and its development in there.  For example, on a per day basis there are 4,300 lines added, 1,800 lines removed, and 1,500 lines modified on the stable kernel (2007 - 2008). You have to watch to see the rest.

Open source enthusiasts in the Weber and Davis counties have a local user group they may participate in. The Ogden Area Linux User Group, or OALUG, meets in-person the last Tuesday of every month at 7:00pm in the Weber County Main Library. Directions and a map to the meeting location are located on the OALUG website.

OALUG also has an active mailing list which can be used by members seeking answers to questions, suggestions when trying to solve a problem, or just shooting the bull with like-minded geeks.

Seth House, current president of OALUG, said “The Ogden Area Linux Users Group (OALUG) is a group of professionals who share a love and a passion for Linux, regardless of distribution. The group serves Weber, Davis, and Morgan counties. We welcome absolutely anyone who is interested in Linux, or Free and Open Source Software, to participate and help run the group.” If you are interested in being a part of the OALUG, simply subscribe to the mailing list or show up to a meeting!

Update:  We made a couple of errors in this post.  OALUG meets at the Weber County Main Library (not Weber State Library) and we had the link to their website incorrect.  These errors have been fixed.

Today, I found myself featured on the Linux Haters Blog. I’ve heard of this blog before, but didn’t give it much thought, as most of the posts coming from the author are nothing more than Microsoft fan-boy fanaticism. It’s hard to take any of the posts seriously. After reading his post regarding a couple of mine, I just thought to myself, “Oh, brother. Is this guy for real, or is he all about the press, leading many, many readers on?”. I spent some time on the blog, digging through posts and comments, and I could find nothing intellectual stimulating conversation above “Linux SUX, Windows RULES!”. So, this post is challenge the author to produce something intellectual that will actually show some logic behind his posts (and maybe the commentators behind their comments).

My challenge is a simple question: What does it take to make a stock Microsoft Windows install usable? Let’s take a look, comparing a stock XP Professional install with an Ubuntu 8.04 install, and see who wins out.

First, let’s look at the installer itself. I’m a system administrator, and I want to get XP and Ubuntu installed as quickly as possible on as many machines as possible. What flexibility do I have with the Windows XP Professional CD as far as meeting this need? Well, as far as I can see, I only have the CD to do the install. I have to sit through each screen by hand, clicking through the dialogs one by one until the install finishes. During this install, I am plagued with entering in a different serial number in each computer, unless I was able to purchase a multi-install key, which I still have to enter by hand on each machine. Because I’m limited to only optical media for my installation method, it will take about 45 minutes to complete a single install. Of course, most administrators would use some disk imaging software, like Norton Ghost, but that means I need to purchase a 3rd party utility to make this task successful. With Ubuntu however, I have the ability to install the operating system automatically using a few built-in utilities. Kickstart, Pressed and the hybrid Kickseed give me the ability to completely automate the install hands off. Further, Ubuntu gives me the ability to use repositories where the software for the operating system exists. I can access these repositories via HTTP, FTP or NFS. Just being on a 100baseT full switched network will be incredibly faster than CDROM. I can complete a fully Ubuntu 8.04 desktop install in less than 15 minutes– on ALL machines.

Second, let’s compare security on the operating systems. With Ubuntu, by default, if services are setup, they are only listening on the local interface, localhost. Coupled with AppArmor, I have a Mandatory Access Control system keeping my processes in check with my files. A default firewall is disabled, but can be enabled with the Netfilter kernel module, and built easily with the uncomplicated “ufw” command. Users created on the system are not administrators, so system-wide security vulnerabilities introduced through the user and highly improbable. Antivirus software, as well as software needed to remove malware, spyware, etc. is not needed, as the security design behind the operating system does not let this software grow beyond the user’s home directory. Updates will most likely be waiting on first boot, to patch any security vulnerabilities and bugs with the system. Updates will be ongoing frequently throughout the time using Ubuntu. On the other hand, Windows XP has left me with absolutely nothing. No firewall software. No MAC software, although Vista with UAC addressed this. Newly created users on the system are administrators by default, so creating havoc on the box, and even the network, is as easy as getting online. The latest service pack will be waiting for me, and updates will be continuous throughout my use of XP. Windows has shown a bad track record with viruses and badware, yet on a default install, I’m left with nothing to guard myself. Sure, there are third party utilities to help me address these issues, but I will need to purchase them separately, and get them installed after XP finishes its install. Further, the default services are listening on all interfaces, making me vulnerable to an attack.

Now on to productivity software. After installing these machines, I need them ready for the corporate environment. I’ll need email clients to synchronize with my backend servers, regardless of what they’re running. I’ll need office productivity software in the way of word processing and spreadsheets. I’ll need PDF creators and viewers. I’ll need a compressing utility, as well as encryption, due to the nature of sensitive emails. Instant messaging is a must for internal communication. With Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org is shipped and installed by default providing the employees the necessary tools to begin working. Evolution is provided for email communication, which gives me the ability to connect to POP3(s), IMAP(s) and Exchange servers. Ubuntu ships with Evince as the default PDF viewer, and a PDF “printer” is installed by default, giving me easy access to create PDFs. Three compression utilities, zip, gzip and bzip2, coupled with GNU tar, give me the ability to archive and compress anything on disk. GnuPG is installed by default for encrypting those sensitive emails. Lastly, Pidgin is my mult-protocol application for using instant messaging, giving me the ability to connect to Jabber, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Novell groupwise, and many, many others simultaneously. As for Windows, I have Notepad and Wordpad installed for my “word processing”. There is no spreadsheet application installed. Outlook express is available as a minimal email client. There is no PDF creator or viewer. Zip is provided for compression, but no encryption application is installed. A Windows Messenger application is installed for instant messaging. Of course, many third party utilities can meet many of these needs, but none of them are provided by default

Lastly, the need for remote administration. Being a system administrator, I’ll need the ability to connect remotely to each machine, and administer it as needed, whether stuff breaks, I need to install/remove software, or other administration tasks. XP Professional has given me the ability to utilize the RDP protocol through remote desktop. RDP uses encryption by default, however, due to the nature of XP, I can only login via RDP when the user on the other end has logged off. XP only allows a single user logged in at any given time. Unfortunately, however, there is no scripting language provided by the operating system, so writing simple scripts to automate tasks for me is not possible. Again, I can install plenty of third party utilities to meet these needs. On the other hand, Ubuntu has given me OpenSSH, which also does encryption by default. Further, because Ubuntu is a mult-user operating system, I can administer the machine while the user is still using it. Installed are several different scripting languages and compiled languages to make automating tasks a breeze. Perl, Python, BASH, C and C++ are all installed by default.

Looking at these comparisons, Ubuntu 8.04 comes well ahead as a usable desktop on a default install where Windows horribly fails. This recalls to mind the Mac and PC commercials. Remember the first commercial, where Mac and PC were “born” by being unboxed? Mac was ready for primetime, while PC had service pack updates to process, third party utilities to install, and security software to configure. It was going to be a while before PC could be on the same usable level as Mac out of the box. I’m seeing the same thing here.

After a default install, I could see several scenarios where a default install just wont meet my needs, but third party utilities will. Norton Ghost, Microsoft Office, McAfee Antivirus, Windows Defender, Lavasoft Adaware, Spybot Search and Destroy, PGP, PDF utilities, better IM client, scripting language, and so forth. The third party list for getting a usable Windows desktop gets long fairly quickly.

So, I guess Linux must be laughable. It sure isn’t an operating system defective administrators would want to use. It just makes life too easy, both for the user and the administrator.

Since losing Windows XP Pro to a slew of viruses, malware, trojans and any other form of badware, our family has been getting along fine with Ubuntu and Mac OS X. I mentioned that my wife would have some growing pains associated with the learning curve that is Linux. However, I’ve noticed that while she misses her beloved Microsoft Office, she’s actually not missing much. What she is really missing, is being a school teacher, and integrating technology into her classroom (since having a child, she opted for being a full-time mom). She’s been patient learning OpenOffice.org, of which I think she’s actually enjoying. Further, to increase her skill set for her resume, she has asked me to train her in depth with Linux, so she can teach others should she ever go back into education. That’s my girl!

Now that our family has made that switch, it’s sparked some key interest from other family members and friends about how we can live “Microsoft-free”. It’s interesting to see people think that Windows is all there is in the world. I’m asked how I cope with the lack of apparent software, my reasons for the switch, and how my daughter will grow up in a Microsoft-free environment. They’re even critical that when our daughter grows up in school, she’ll have to “face the music”, and learn Windows anyway, so I might as well teach her now. Well, of course I’m hopeful that in the future, we won’t have just one operating system controlling the market, but that choices will abound a plenty– Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD, Haiku, etc. I guess time will tell.

So, as it sits, my wife is ever-so-patient with me, and learning quickly. Our family is moving forward, and our computing infrastructure has remained intact.

I’m sitting in the airport waiting to head out to San Francisco.  Starting tomorrow as many know is Linux World Expo.  I’m really excited and can’t wait.  I’m going so that I can help with the opensuse booth.  This year there is an openSUSE community day.  If you go to that link there is a list of the events.  They have some really good presenters that will cover some really cool topics.  So, if you are passing though make sure that you stop by the openSUSE community day.  I can’t wait!

From what I understand there are some really good booths to stop by as well,  One of them is Linux Journal.  I’ve been working with them to get our conference in their magazine and the person that I was talking to said there will be some sort of really cool secret swag this year.

If you are going to be there, I’ll see you then.

There’s been something that’s been on my mind as of late, and it’s been bothering me enough that I’m finally blogging about it, and that’s the hypocrisy that is the Linux community. If I’m way out of line, let me know. If I’m off base, let me know.

To start, I’ll begin with the phrase that we’ve all heard: “Linux users use Linux because they hate Windows. BSD users use BSD because they love Unix.” I can’t emphasize how true that statement is. I’m subscribe to several mailing lists, I subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds, I visit forums semi-regularly, I’m on IRC 24/7 in plenty of channels. You want to know what I see?

M$, Microshaft, Micro$oft, Win-blows, Windoze, and so on and so forth.

Is this really becoming of the Linux community? Have we really stooped so low? Yet, as Ubuntucat mentions in his blog, at first sign of a Linux user struggling with his/her Linux install, the first thing we shout as a community, is “Go back to Windows then!”, or “Don’t let the door hit you on the *** on the way out.”

Wait, what?

I find this rather unfortunate. Aren’t most of us computer users, because of the science that is computing? Don’t all operating systems have something to bring to the table? I would think that we use Linux, not because we hate Windows, but because we want to learn about Linux. We want to learn the Unix way. Computing should be fun, not filled with animosity.

As I’m not entrenched in the BSD community, I can’t speak for their behavior, if such mentality exists or not. However, the BSD users that I have come in contact with definitely love their operating system. In fact, I’ve learned more about Linux from BSD and Unix users than I have from Linux users. And yet, I never hear a bad word about Windows or Microsoft. If brought up, it seems to be logical concerns, and clearly states as subjective. Doesn’t the Linux community make blanket statements about Windows, concerning its security or stability?

Now, with that said, I recently ditched Windows in our home, as we got hit with a virus, and got hit hard. Rather than spend hours cleaning it up, not even sure if I rid myself of everything, I opted for wiping the computer clean, and moving strictly to Ubuntu or Mac OS X. It was a personal choice due to the fact I didn’t want to administer an operating system I knew little about. Plus, I’m excited to use Ubuntu. It’s a fun operating system.

Now, I know I’ve been guilty of calling names in regards to Microsoft and Windows. I’m not saying I have a clean slate, and I’m certainly not on a pedestal higher than anyone else. However, I do think we need improvement in this area. Windows may not be my favorite operating system, but belittling it, and the users who use it, does nothing for us as a community. It’s time to move past this, and embrace Linux for what it is, not for what it’s not. We aren’t any better than anyone else, because we use Linux. Windows users aren’t beneath us because of their choice to use proprietary software. Each has a different philosophy and reason for their actions.

So, let us get past this ridiculousness. Let’s start learning and advocating Linux, because we love Unix. Let’s bring excitement to the table with Linux. As a system administrator and trainer myself, I love learning everything I can about Linux, and it’s fun to see the exciting new advancements on the Linux and Unix arena. Windows is a good operating system. Give credit where credit is due. Make criticisms based on logic and understanding. Understand, that Linux and Unix isn’t perfect either. Flaws aplenty abound in our world. Learn those flaws. Learn the strengths. For the love of Unix.

My Guru Labs coworker mentioned something to me today, that our boss mentioned to him (or a class, who knows), and that is that every operating system turns to Unix eventually. Thinking about this for a second, he’s right.

First, there are the obvious Unix-like operating systems such as GNU, Linux, Minix, and others. Their intention is to be as Unix-like as possible, while maintaining different goals. Of course, these started out as Unix clones, and will stay that route, so not much to say here.

Then, there was the Apple Macintosh. Developed completely on its own, apart from any code base. It had a loyal fan base, and good features. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the first thing to do, was refresh the operating system. Based on Nextstep along came OS X. Built on a hybrid Unix kernel and pulling many implementations from FreeBSD, it’s as Unix as Unix gets, with a pretty GUI. Apple even prides itself in advertising that OS X is Unix under the hood. Not to mention, as a company, Apple had its hands in a Unix derivative, specifically A/UX.

Some of you may remember BeOS. It was the little operating system that could. Technically, it was not a Unix-derivative, and worked hard to stand on its own. Yet, it had many features that to the lay user, would make him think he’s on a Unix machine. The BASH shell was ported to BeOS and it remained POSIX compliant. It also used a single-rooted Unix-like directory structure, with a 64-bit filesystem and preemptive multitasking, uncompromising characteristics on any standard Unix-clone.

Finally, Microsoft Windows. Just as with Apple Computer, Microsoft had its very own Unix called Xenix. I’ll spare you the history lesson. Suffice it to say, Microsoft put a lot of money and research into Xenix, until they sold it to SCO, and decided on OS/2 with IBM. After abandoning OS/2, they placed their focus with Windows NT. First and foremost? Take the TCP/IP networking stack from BSD Unix, and incorporate it internally. The next major move towards Unix was PowerShell, a Unix-like, POSIX compatible .NET framework shell for Windows “power users”. Of course, those on Vista are becoming familiar with User Account Control, a mandatory access control system, seen on Unix-like systems for a bit now.

A great new Firefox plugin has been created that allows you to create new Tomboy notes from selected text in Firefox, check it out here.

This is the first of many articles to come introducing our readers to the organizations associated with Utah Open Source. Today, we bring you one of the oldest Linux user groups in existence, let alone in Utah: the Provo Linux User Group (PLUG).

PLUG was first formed in 1994 by two then-students at BYU, Thayne Harbaugh and Mike Handy. Thayne and Mike had wanted to form an on-campus student organization for enthusiasts of Linux, but were unable to find a faculty member willing to sponsor its creation. Undaunted, they created PLUG as an off-campus organization.

This was during the early days of Linux and the Internet. The fact the plug.org domain name was available is one example of how early this was; The Intel Pentium CPU was brand new and most geeks were running 386 and 486 CPUs with less than 1GB of hard drive space; Internet service was still a novelty and most connections were made over serial modems at 9600 bps to 14.4Kbps.

The Linux community was young, still driven mostly by volunteers coordinating through online groups. However, 1994 would be the year Red Hat, SuSE, and Caldera would all release the first versions of their respective distributions, thus kicking off the fast-paced commercial Linux distribution race.

PLUG began holding its meetings the second Wednesday of every month — a tradition that has stood the test of time — at various venues around Utah Valley including the Canyon Park campus, The Palace, and at CEDO.

After the first five years of PLUG, the original founders were either moving out of the area, getting busy with work-related (Linux, of course) tasks, or just feeling it was time to pass the torch. Jason “Jayce^” Hall suddenly found himself holding said torch and carried PLUG through the next several exciting years until 2007 when Jason stepped aside to become more involved with UTOS and Ryan Simpkins took the helm.

Over the years PLUG has hosted several special engagements with impressive speakers such as John Terpstra and Steve French of the Samba project, Perl guru and O’Reilly author Damian Conway, and Miguel de Icaza of the Gnome project. Over the course of several Summers, PLUG has held annual barbecues for members and their families which also included surplus swap meets where members could trade or sell old hardware.

PLUG has a member mailing list which varies in the amount of traffic it gets. Most of the time, the list sees fairly low to moderate traffic, but occasionally will fill its members’ mailboxes with spurts of off-topic discussions. PLUG hosts archives of these highly intellectual discussions at http://plug.org/pipermail/plug.

The PLUG website is firmly located at http://www.plug.org/ and, as mentioned above, meets (with some very, very rare exceptions) the second Wednesday of each month at the Omniture building in the Canyon Park campus.

It has been some time since I’ve done a Vim Tip of the Week, but I came across something today that I thought I would share.  This tip will allow you to use Vim, with all its syntax highlighting glory, as a pager (similar to less or more).

If you use cat or less or more regularly to quickly view files, but you’d like to keep the same syntax highlighting that you’d get in Vim you can use an included config that makes Vim act as a pager.  Setup the following within your .bashrc file, or wherever you keep your shell aliases:

alias vless='vim -u /usr/share/vim/vim71/macros/less.vim'

You’ll then need to re-read that file, which can be done using:

. .bashrc

At this point you can use vless to view a file, which will use the beloved syntax highlighting.  Normal pager shortcuts should work.  q to quit, / to search, pg-up, pg-dn, etc.

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After reading all the details about the “new” DNS exploit I feel quite annoyed. These types of attacks have always been possible. This isn’t new. Cache Poisoning has always been on every DNS server administrator’s check list of things to carefully plan to prevent. I compare it to Firewalls: Every firewall administrator knows that best practice is to block everything by default and only make exceptions for what should be allowed.

This idea has been around for well over a decade. Maintaining a discrete list of what is allowed which can be completely enumerated with a great level of confidence and block the rest. Badness cannot be enumerated completely. Blacklists will always be missing important aspects. Expecting that all people are good and don’t do bad things will always turn bad.

Patches released for DNS services that are vulnerable do not fix the root cause. It can’t be fixed because it is part of the original specification and migrating away from it will be equally as painful as the migration to IPv6 is. These patches only implement other kinds of mitigation for the exploit. The best form of mitigation comes in the form of implementing standard best practices that have been around for many years.

DNS servers should carefully control who is allowed to ask questions about non-authoritative zones (recursion). DNS servers at ISPs should limit recursion to customers only. Corporations should run internal recursive DNS servers with access restricted to internal users only. This will severely isolate any damage caused by cache poisoning.

I am not saying nobody needs to patch their servers. In fact the patches should be applied quickly because it does help quite a bit. I am just saying that if you have already implemented best practices you shouldn’t have to worry very badly. And if you haven’t implemented them, do it now!

Well I’d talk about the article, but well you are just going to have to read it.  Just a quick gem though from the article:

The big question is: Given that Red Hat bases its Fedora distribution on OpenSUSE, and that Fedora and OpenSUSE are both distributions with advanced features intended for power users, why would you pick one over the other?

openSUSE Examined

Stuart Jansen from Guru Labs will be presenting on KVM kernel based virtual machine at SLLUG this month. Here’s the announcement for next week’s Salt Lake Linux Users Group meeting:

This month’s Salt Lake Linux Users Group meeting will be on KVM, the Kernel Virtual Machine, presented by Stuart Jansen.

Presentation:

KVM, the Kernel Virtual Machine, is a Linux kernel module that turns a normal Linux kernel into a hypervisor. Many kernel developers feel this is a superior design to Xen. Stuart Jansen, from Guru Labs, will discuss virtualization with an emphasis on KVM, its advantages and disadvantages.

More information and links at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-basedVirtualMachine

Time and place:

    Date:  Wednesday July 16, 2008
    Time:  7:10pm
    Place: Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) room 101
           (Previously known as EMCB)
    Cost: $0.00. Zip. Nada.

Directions/Parking:

Directions - [http://www.map.utah.edu/index.jsp?find=62] Parking can be found just East of the WEB building and there is a big lot just North of the Merrill Engineering building (MEB). Parking is free after 6:00 (Based on the signs posted. Always check in case this changes.)

Special thanks go to:

• Prof. Lepreau and the U of U for providing the meeting room.
• Various Volunteers

From the OpenSUSE Newsroom:

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the 1.0 release of the openSUSE Build Service. The 1.0 release provides all the features necessary to support building openSUSE in the public build systems and allowing direct contributions to openSUSE from all contributors. Developers can now submit contributions to openSUSE directly at build.opensuse.org.

The openSUSE Build Service allows developers to create and maintain packages for openSUSE and many other Linux distributions, including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. With the 1.0 release, the openSUSE Build Service expands its scope to building the entire openSUSE release, and provides everyone with the same access and transparent interface to work on the openSUSE distribution.

The openSUSE Build Service has offered a simple collaboration system since its inception for groups to work closely together on packages or solutions stacks. The 1.0 release improves on existing functionality to allow the Build Service to scale to larger projects like openSUSE’s Factory distribution, and to allow building openSUSE’s stable releases in the open.

What the changes mean for contributors:

• Anyone can find a package’s working copy as maintained by the official packager or packaging team. Contributors can submit changes against the working copy.
• The submission handling and notification system has been put in place, allowing any contributor to request a merge of their changes to a project.
• Quality assurance happens before contributions are merged. Test builds of a suggested change are accessible to anyone.
• Improved branch handling. It is easy to set up a branch of a package. The branch will build in the same way as the original package, but can be modified.
• Source handling is improved in 1.0. It’s now possible to easily maintain a branch, and modifications are stored without creating a full copy. This makes it easier to maintain features based on the latest copy of package. The Build Service builds the latest packages, including modifications, automatically.

The majority of this functionality is implemented on the server side. The rest can be implemented by the various Build Service clients, so that contributors can take advantage of the new features.

The Build Service team has also introduced a number of smaller improvements and bugfixes to make the system more scalable and usable.

The openSUSE Build Service is now considered “feature complete” for collaboration. The Build Service team is looking for additional feedback on improving the openSUSE Build Service as it will now be the standard tool for working on the distribution.