I have finally managed to upload the video I made from a presentation at the local Linux User Group. The topic is on the running of a Highlands Wireless ISP.
The quality is not the best. The lighting in the room was messing with the camera a bit and the sound is a bit low so you may want to turn up the volume. I am by no means a video expert, I just dumped the footage, whacked on a title and credits then encoded it twice, once to mpeg and the next to xvid.
Hopefully it will be educational/entertaining. Liscensed under a Creative commons By-Sa 2.5 liscense, you have permission to copy, give to folk and edit it so long as you attribute the source and distribute your versions under the same liscense.
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geek, linux, LUG, video
So I’m sitting in front of my computer and I remembered I was given a guide on how to use the mobile internet functionality of my N95 with an EeePC. I figured I would give it a shot.
I selected PC mode as the usb connection type. Lo’ and behold, NetworkManager picked it right up. Told it I was on the o2 network with a contract, hit apply, disabled the wifi and I was online through my phone.
No terminal, no esoteric config files, just select from a menu and hit a button. Can it really be this easy?! I was looking forward to something more interesting. Oh well.
(This was done with Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex, I doubt it would be this easy with an earlier version)
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cool, geek, internet, linux, mobile, ubuntu n95
A lot of folk these days are using Gmail as their email provider. There are some good (interface is the best I have used) and bad (the whole cloud computing thing) points to this. An entry on Digg popped up in my news feeds with a link to a program called Gmail Backup. It does exactly what it says. You give it your login details, pick a folder and it dumps all your email into that folder so in the event of Google being evil, you have a backup of all your mail. Very handy.
Comes in both Windows and Linux flavours. The Linux one needs a copy of wxpython installed. There is a command line mac version but it is unsupported.
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backup, cool, email, Gmail, linux, Windows
Ubuntu 8.10 codenamed Intrepid Ibex was released yesterday. DIligently, I launched the update manager to begin the update process. As usual, a ton of stuff to download. Mostly happened without a hitch.
Flash player was the hitch. Took over 2 hours to download 3.8mb. That is pretty bad. Once it was finally installed, all was good. Upgrading a running system is always gonna be interesting. Things change before you. Like Firefox. I launched it and found that it looked shinier than it used to. Some of the panels had a glossy effect to them. Not sure if it is a theme but it looks good. A yellow bar appeared suggesting that I find out about my rights by clicking on the button. That launches a new tab with the url of about:rights which basically says you can modify and redistribute the firefox code but not the icons. Another bar appeared a while after asking me to restart firefox due to some other upgrades which is a nice feature.
Gnome, in my chosen theme, looks pretty shiny as well. Nautilus has tabs! That is awesome. No more multiple windows!
Transmission (bittorrent client) has also had a polish. The web interface is no longer a seperate addon but is built in which could be useful for folk wanting to check up on their downloads from elsewhere.
I do have a criticism of Transmission though. There is no tray icon to minimise to. I have to keep the main window up to download which is not a good thing. Not sure if it is a bug or not. Thats about the only bad thing I have found so far.
Pidgin has also been improved a bit. Has support for the Live Messenger personal message things. Still no webcam support.
One of the new features is a usb stick creator which allows you (as the name says) to create a bootable pendrive with ubuntu on it. Aparrently lets you store documents and whatnot on it, might be useful. Wonder if it will let you use non ubuntu isos.
Overall, the upgrade has been good. Not had a proper poke around yet but nothing major has broken.
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8.10, geek, intrepid ibex, linux, release, review, Ubuntu
Yesterday was the first time I went to the local LUG/university linux society. I was meaning to go for some time but never got round to it. My mate Ed mentioned that a presentation on rainbow tables was the topic for the night so I made a point to attend.
One thing I was surprised at was that the head of the society and the speaker was Finux who is a Hacker Public Radio presenter. This meant that the talk he did for free software day was done at my uni and I missed it! Goddam that is annoying. What the hell was I doing that day?
Anyway, the presentation was done very well. I’m gonna try and get a copy of the slides and upload it here.
Edit: Here you go.
The next presentation (in 2 weeks time) is going to be about the internals of an ISP which should be very interesting. For those who are interested, this is a link to the website. The meet is every 2 weeks in the cinema, 3rd floor of the Abertay student union, Bell Street, Dundee.
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geek, linux, LUG, password cracking, rainbow tables
I have been struggling with getting Nginx working on my server at home for the past week or so. Was really confusing me since the configuration files were migrated from my desktop machine unchanged where Nginx works perfectly. The error log said that there was a permissions error, google-fu said to change the ownership of the directory containing th files to www-data:www-data which never helped.
Pig Monkey suggested to check that the directories containing the files to be served had the right permissions. So I chmodded them to 755 and all was good.
I’m such an admin n00b. This is not the first time I’ve had permission errors. Those of you who I gave accounts to to mirror stuff will be all too aware of my screwups.
Mental note: when diagnosing problems, run chmod -R 755 . to see if that fixes things.
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geek, linux, nginx, permissions
Just ordered a new laptop from Dell. Yes, yet another computer will be in my possesion soon.
I’m getting an XPS m1330 with the following specs:
- 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 2Gb RAM
- 160Gb hard disk
- 9 Cell battery
And comes with Ubuntu preinstalled! Win!
I’m getting a new laptop to use as my main deck for a few reasons. My curent mobile deck (an eeepc) is too underpowered and lacks storage space though it will be used as a kicking about laptop and as the main processor in my robot that I plan to build. I do all my work on my desktop and it is a pain in the ass to transfer data between machines when going back and forward to uni. One machine is preferable to house all my stuff on.
Expect a review in the next fortnight or so.
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geek, laptop, linux
Found an application for Linux a while ago but forgot about it until now. Wicd is an alternative to the Network Manager application (which is a piece of crap in my opinion) used by default (I think) in Gnome. Handles connecting to wired and wireless networks and is compatible with the standard Linux networking tools (ifconfig, iwconfig et al) so figuring out what the scripts are doing (coded in python which makes it even better) should be pretty easy.
The really nice thing about it is I can globally set my DNS servers of choice and the dhcp reply doesn’t overwrite them. This means that I can use trusted DNS servers all the time instead of the servers that the network I’m on wants to use.
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geek, linux, network manager, networking, wicd
CRYPTOME reports that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has remote administrative access to several of the most popular Windows PC firewalls, and that it has also taken control of a number of supposedly “secure ” email services within the past few months.
It writes that the personal computer firewall software products from MacAfee, Symantec and Zone Alarm all “…facilitate Microsoft’s NSA-controlled remote admin access via IP/TCP ports 1024 through 1030… without security flag.”
On the Register via Sean Kennedy
And folk wonder why I like Linux so much…
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backdoor, geek, linux, privacy, security, Windows
I really do love the Bash shell, particularly the ability to do scripting. I wanted to make all the files in a directory have lowercase filenames. It gets tedious when doing it by hand and there is no native way to do i in Nautilus (file browser in Gnome). Thunar (Xfce window manager file manager) does have this facility but I’m not gonna install it and all its dependancies. So with a quick google search I found a wee snippet of bash script to do the job for me. Presenting dir2lowercase:
#!/bin/bash
# Script to convert all the files in the current directory to lowercase
# Code taken from http://webxadmin.free.fr/article/shell-rename-all-files-in-subdirectories-to-lowe-135.php
for f in *; do
g=`expr “xxx$f” : ‘xxx\(.*\)’ | tr ‘[A-Z]‘ ‘[a-z]‘`
mv “$f” “$g”
done
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bash, geek, linux, script