A Man and his Penguin

I meant to keep you posted

To the people who eagerly wanted to see if I could copy the Lovewrecked DVD, well, I apologise because I didn't keep you posted as promised!

I copied it!

It involved using Acidrip on Linux to rip the raw DVD video data, then I copied it onto my big stonking NTFS partition, and used Nero on Windows to create a DVD from the raw data. Works brilliantly, but I lost the surround sound (which from my experience was barely there anyway) and the menus. I also lost the annoying trailer for Happy Feet, which I'm pleased about.

Today I posted UbuntuOS Podcast #44, and recorded #46.  Josh is editing #45.

And one of my other friends (who looks 13 but I found out is actually 18, lol) has definitely seen Hairspray for the fourth time. Some cinemas are running singalong sessions, where the lyrics are put up onto the screen during the songs.  I think Hairspray is going to end off being sorta like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where every year certain cinemas will hold a night where they show the singalong version and encourage patrons to come dressed as their favourite character.

Just put up Podcast #43

We talked about if celebrities started mentioning Ubuntu; Sal asked for the name of a celebrity, and I replied "Amanda Bynes". Sal said that Ubuntu would get a whole heap of new converts if Amanda Bynes showed up at a movie premiere wearing an Ubuntu T-shirt.

Excuse my bad Gimpjob; this was a quick-and-dirty image edit. And bear in mind that Amanda Bynes does not necessarily endorse Ubuntu  ;-)

Why isn't there a podcast #42 yet?!

Reason: Devubuntu is still being a bastard.

Sometimes I can get into www.ubuntuos.com; sometimes I can't. I can never get far into the administration interface; never far enough to actually write the blog posting to release the new episode. The server will simply stop responding while I'm trying to get in.

Things suck with this server downage.

Here's the link to the MP3 podcast: http://ubuntuos.com/podcast/files/ep42-080407-ubuntuos.mp3

Though as at this writing, of course, I myself can't download the podcast, so what chance have you got? Hopefully someone will hear this podcast, it was quite good. EDIT: You may have some luck, it has started to load for me.

In other news, we've got one of our VIP days mixed in with the Cost + 5% fliers - yikes! It's promising to be a very big 5 hours. If you're reading this in time and you live in Perth, come down to the shop between 10am and 3pm Sunday 26 for some bargains. Be patient, we're going to be busy! Mention A Man And His Penguin - I can't give you any extra money off, but seeing a blog reader would make my day!

Also check out our listings for Nobel dishwashers on eBay.com.au - we've sold quite a few! (sold two yesterday alone).  Oh, and we unpacked one of Nobel's 45cm stainless steel dishwashers today and put it on display - it looks wicked, much nicer than the flat look stainless 60cm dishwasher. It's not as cheap - it's $569 - but it is quite eye-catching.

Sorry for the delay

I'd just like to apologise to my listeners and my co-host for the delay in releasing the podcast this time around.

The Devubuntu server which holds ubuntuos.com has been having some trouble lately - security trouble, apparantly (well, I SAID that it didn't look very secure!). So FTP access has been locked out, and I couldn't get a hold of the podcast audio.

It would have been up on Sunday as usual, except that I was waiting for contact from George regarding his addition to the 'cast; and now I've realised that he's recorded an actual podcast himself!

It is now fully edited and due for release today.

Mencoder has been a bit of a bastard lately. It refuses to use the dimensions that I've specified; which is a problem because my DVDs are 16:9, not 4:3! I found that Mencoder had encoded my files with 576 lines rather than 480 lines, which is why my DVD player didn't want to play them. Transcode doesn't have a problem with the aspect ratio or getting the correct size, but it chops some video off the beginning. As in, the first 10 minutes of the movie. That sucks arse.

Unfortunately, in order to get those movies into MPEG-4 in a way that my DVD player can understand, I'll have to boot into Windows.

I'm still thinking more about OpenDisc. We should have never let it be a battle of Bluray vs HD DVD - it should have been Bluray versus OpenDisc. Maybe some day it will be? But only after we get better support for encoding video on Linux.

Are my troubles possibly related to me using an AMD64 chip with a 32-bit Linux and 32-bit Mencoder/FFMPEG/Transcode? I have heard that sometimes there are troubles, but I dunno.

Maybe I should do port scans of other computers online, find out if any have SSH running without a firewall and with root logins permitted, crack into them and use them to encode video? :-)

How I know I'm a Linux user

While looking through the Shift+Backspace blog today, I noticed an entry called "Wine Library TV"; a video podcast. Naturally, since I'm a Linux user, I assumed that it was a show about what DLLs to move from your Windows partition to your home directory in order to get certain Windows programs to run :-)

The podcast with Aaron Seigo is half up. I say "Half" because I've only uploaded the Ogg one so far. I've got a cool idea - the Devubuntu server that hosts the Ogg files is a Linux computer. So it would be great if we could upload the Ogg, then SSH into the server, and run lame on the server so we don't need to upload two files! I don't think Melissa would activate SSH support on the server though - and if she already had, then we might get in trouble for using her processing power :-)

Not much unrelated stuff to talk about. I bought a CD of Hawaiian music, which is nice, and I've now been roped into pirating DVDs for a workmate's mother. Admittedly, one of the DVDs is putting up a fair struggle so I don't blame her for failing to copy it, but it's a testiment to the power of Linux that I can.

EDIT: I installed the Aurora theme engine yesterday. It is absolutely awesome. I'll put up a screenshot some time. The only drawback is that it's hitting the processor fairly hard; there's a tiny bit of slowdown which becomes more apparent when the system is under load.

A new podcast in a day or two

Sal and I recorded another podcast... but this one is with Aaron Seigo, who is a developer for KDE 4. It's a great podcast, when it comes out you REALLY should download it.

I was talking to George (the belter from the boat, not my customer who records porn movies from SBS) the other day on Skype, and he asked me exactly what The Coding Zone is. I told him, and also visited it to give him some examples of topics discussed on it. Anyway, one of the topics looked interesting, so I read the article, and learnt something new. It seems that every time I go there I learn something useful!

The Cost + 5% leaflets thing was a complete fizz-out. NOT ONE person came in about it. NOT ONE person called. The advertising company reckons the leaflets went out. What crap. It was a fairly quiet day too.

I wrote a GUI to make it easier to encode the UbuntuOS Podcast. Not that it's difficult - far from it. I just felt like making something. In the end it's actually a useful program, because George is still finding his feet with encoding the podcast, and he always sets the bitrate too high; so if he uses my program everything will be great.

There's a little inside-joke at the end of the next podcast. Listen out for it.

The Gizmo Project now has the ability to log into MSN and AIM for you, so you can do all your instant messaging and phoning from a single program. Except if you use Jabber or one of the other "To be supported" protocols. In my experience, Gizmo works quite well for MSN, but I'll generally stick to Gaim anyway.

I saw the movie "She's The Man" yesterday. Let me just say that I love Amanda Bynes, and this one has overtaken "Girls On Top" as my favourite movie. I've always loved her, and this just made me remember it :-P

Also, I realised that all the free space on my external hard disk's NTFS partition is going to waste. There's 50 gigs free, and my ext3 partition has about 20 gigs free. So I installed ntfs-3g. There's some big problems though - Gnome Volume Manager doesn't automount it, because it's now (through necessity) in the fstab. So if I turn the hard disk on after the computer starts up, the partition won't be mounted unless I do "sudo mount -a". And if I turn the hard disk on before the computer, then due to a bug in Gnome or HAL, the non-fstabbed partitions won't mount!

That's all I can think of at the moment.

Ubuntuos "Core" and Ubuntuos "Extras"

As tribute to Fedora 6, the Ubuntu Podcast is going to be in two parts this week.

The first part "Ubuntuos Core" is the actual podcast. The second part "Ubuntuos Extras" is our pre-cast discussion, which is actually more interesting than the show (lol).

When I release the "extras" episode, keep listening; I've included the bit at the end of the podcast where I drop out :-)

Today I finally got the latest issue of Linux Format magazine - the only thing is, it's the March issue, so I'm missing the Februrary one. It looks to me like there's a rising demand for the magazine, because this was the last copy left on the racks and it would have only been in the shop for a day or two. This would explain why I couldn't get a copy of Feb's issue (The newsagent in Joondalup will have a copy, so don't worry).

The cover DVD has a great game called Warzone 2100. It was a commercial game, but the development house GPL'ed it. Warzone 2100 is a RTS (real-time strategy) game with nice 3D graphics and futuristic technology. Very good. Plus, it focuses more on the battle than on building bases and managing supplies - always a plus. I'll review it on the podcast next time.

I figured out (I think) why GDM was constantly crashing on Copland. Somehow, the files in the GDM theme folder were all readable [i]by root only[/i]. GDM runs in its own account, "gdm", so it couldn't read the theme's data files, so it kept crashing. I'll build another disc image and test it out. This is likely to be my first real release candidate, as almost everything else either works to specs or is broken upstream as well.

Another show done

We did another great show today... Aaron will edit and upload it. I went over my download limit the other day while adding packages to Copland, so although the podcast went well for 99% of the time, I did drop out right at the end while doing the promos.

Still, not too bad.

Copland is going VERY nicely. I have a list of things I've got to do to the environment before I create the next CD image:

1. Turn off hidden file viewing in Thunar (I accidentally left it on when I created the files for the /etc/skel directory)

2. Fix names of Copland programs - Pythoncard programs are actually two files - programname.py and programname.rsrc.py. In my case, I had HfsBrowser.py and HfsBrowser.rsrc.py. To make it easier to launch, I changed the first one to hfsbrowser.py. Unfortunately, it then looked for the resource file at hfsbrowser.rsrc.py, rather than HfsBrowser.rsrc.py. Linux is case-sensitive, so naturally those programs wouldn't actually load.

3. Fix the GDM.conf file - it seems to be crashing the GDM login screen. Either that, or the gdm account does not have proper permissions.

4. Include the Fluendo MP3 playback plugin, all the Quod Libet plugins and extensions, and replace Gxine with VLC.

5. Document how to manually start xfce4-panel and xfdesktop, in the case that they don't start (sometimes, xfce4-panel will start and other times it won't. xfdesktop has the same problem).

6. Have a little program that can set the swap partition - admittedly, this is probably a "next release" kind of program, but I can only get the Copland live CD working properly if I use the command "swapon /dev/hda11", so then it uses my Breezy swap partition. Using this command, Copland becomes so responsive I can even run The Gimp!

7. The Ubiquity menu item doesn't work - XFCE complains that it is "missing command to run". Ubiquity run from the desktop also crashes, but I believe this is due to my use of a swap partition - see above.

8. Automounting in XFCE doesn't work from the desktop, only from within Thunar. I must see if there's a program that needs to be run setuid root, or if the permissions of the /media directory are wrong, or whatever. (I've had SO many struggles against Linux's permissions system while creating this distro - probably part of the problem was shifting the customisation environment over to a Fat32 partition briefly, which probably wiped out a lot of the permissions data).

I *do* have a boring voice

Yes, I do have a boring voice, and I sometimes umm and arr, especially when recording the podcast.

But that's no reason to actually attack me in public on your blog. You must have a lot of built-up angerm, and I thought your last two statements were a bit childish (as were your opinions on the people who had replied to the "Save the PowerPC Port" message).

Putting a trackback on one of our blog posts, so our listeners can see it, just makes the insult worse.

In other news, Josh somehow borked his Ubuntu install after trying to load Virtualbox. Oh, I'm sure he could have fixed it, but apparantly his installation wasn't in good shape anyway, so he did a complete reinstall of the system.

I've never understood how people can break Ubuntu so much unless they're doing something REALLY stupid with [i]sudo[/i] privileges. I've only messed up my user's permissions twice - once when installing Virtualbox, the other when I changed my computer's hostname. Both times I recovered from it without reinstalling. My Xorg.conf broke once, but I didn't cause that. And the first time I installed Ubuntu, I used the wrong mode and caused myself not to have any privileges, so I reinstalled - but I could have saved the install if I had a little more knowlege.

Also, I once filled up my disk on the iMac and couldn't log into Gnome, but uninstalling a couple of programs with Aptitude fixed that.

In total, I've only installed Ubuntu thrice. Twice on my iMac after that "wrong mode" thingy, and once on my x86. And believe me, I've fiddled; I've installed all sorts of tweaks and non-repo programs, quite a number of them from source. And there are little problems with my current install due to my fiddling - for instance, the Theme controls no longer work properly, and some directories within / have the wrong permissions. But it's nothing that would force a reinstall.

I've no idea what happened when Josh tried to install Virtualbox, except that I encouraged him to install it and told him how to put himself inside the correct group. I hope it was more "the straw that broke the camel's back" than a mistake that I'd made.

In complex systems...

...problems quickly emerge.

Readers of the UbuntuOS blog know that I put together a Debian package of the game Bloboats. This is a real Debian package, not just a Checkinstalled one. I was a bit nervous about whether it was going to work, break someone's system, etc; so I installed it on my own machine and it worked fine.

I just bought the latest Linux Format magazine. The first program I tried to install from the coverdisc was available as a .deb. I double-clicked it, and GDebi said that the program would require the removal of two packages. One of those was my Bloboats deb :'-(

So, er... install Bloboats from source. Don't faff around with my stupid amateur packaging attempt, or if you want to AT LEAST check that GDebi is not going to remove some of your existing programs. And then don't complain  if a  package you install later  gets rid of Bloboats.

I've been spending a lot of time in XFCE recently. I often do this - use Gnome for a couple of months, then get tired of it and use XFCE for a little while. Let's see how this goes.

Also recently, I've been alarmed at the attitude of Ubuntu's developers - "PowerPC makes up only a couple of percent of downloads, so we're going to stop supporting it". WHAT? Linux is only a couple of percent of the computer market, yet you're so quick to critisise companies that don't support it.

Macintosh Linux use is set to grow substantially, and everyone but Ubuntu (and Fedora, they're saying the same thing) realise it. PPC Ubuntu is how I got into Linux. If it weren't for PPC Ubuntu, I'd probably be surfing the web on Windows. And now I'm making a contribution to the community by being on the Ubuntu Podcast, and showing people how NOT to make Debian packages :-)

Now there's talk of forking PPC Xubuntu (well, actually, I'm the only one who's talked about it!). It makes sense to me - the Ubuntu repos have a lot of utilities that are must-haves for Mac users; these include hfsutils, mol and netatalk. A distribution by PowerPC users, for PowerPC users, could fix a lot of problems with PPC distros AND be a good avenue for Mac users to migrate to.

I hate the speed of electricity

Podcast 20 sounds so terrible. Our content was good, it's just that the limited speed of light and electricity, my podcast inexperience and our geographic locations, meant that I kept cutting off Sal and Josh accidentally. Sorry guys :-)

Also, my mike was probably too close to my face - I sounded awfully loud.

On the plus side, Aaron did a good job of editing the podcast. There was a bit where it sounded like I'd been disconnected from the others, and I had a lot of interference on my line. Aaron noticed the few seconds where I thought I'd been disconnected and cut them from the final file.

Now I'm trying to seed the podcast with Bittornado, and I don't know if I'm doing it right. I downloaded the file from the mirrors, downloaded the .torrent file, and told Bittornado to download the torrent to the same location as the actual Ogg file. The progress bar quickly went to 100% (within a few seconds) but now it's sitting on "0.0% (0.00MiB)", so I don't know if that means that it's ready to serve the file or not.

Didn't get the job

I didn't get the job. And I haven't heard back from Kym for a while.

On the plus side, I did another podcast with Josh and Sal. Aaron (biggest KDE fan I know!) is editing it right now, and he asked me to give him credit for that ;-)

Josh came up with the idea of having a torrent for the podcast. It's a good idea, but it means I have to stick around in Ubuntu to seed the torrent :-)  Not a problem.

I suppose I don't really have any other news. I completely forgot that I was going to take my friend Joe to the movies because he fixed my car... oh well, I'll take him and his girlfriend when they're both free, as she was working on her folio last week.

My first podcast

You'll be able to catch my first Ubuntu Podcast with Josh soon. (sorry mate... I put you on the spot with those unscripted questions!)

For once, Skype actually worked perfectly for me. I downloaded the release version, it felt a little different, but the best thing was: It works!

Now I've got a sore throat :-)

In other news, I've got an interview for a job at Westpac tomorrow. Wish me luck (although, to be honest, I'm not sure I really want to be working for a bank as a call-centre operator).

Eye Candy coming soon

I've recently become the administrator of the Ubuntu Podcast's blog, at www.ubuntuos.com, until Josh is ready to take back the reins. Don't worry, it doesn't mean I'll stop posting here! (I know a lot of my Friendster friends check out this blog a fair bit, because reminders keep popping up on their home pages, lol!)

I've posted a message already, about my favourite command-line shell. (Fish). Check it out; it might actually encourage you to use the command-line more. I have a launcher to it on my top Gnome panel. Unfortunately it can't completely replace Bash. It's not compatible with Bash scripts and it sometimes chokes on wildcards (you know, when you do "copy *.jpg /home/chris/ or something like that). But it's very very useful.

On the podcast, Mike said he would appreciate some info about getting eye-candy on his Ubuntu, so watch out for some links and HOWTOs I'll be posting on the ubuntuos.com website.

In other news, Songbird 0.2 Beta is out for Windows, Linux and OS X. I haven't downloaded it yet, but I expect good things. Songbird 0.1 for Windows is quite good, plays all my music almost flawlessly, even runs in WINE. Oh, yes I should definately download the new version, because its dark colour scheme will fit into my desktop, and I'm looking for a definitive iTunes replacement.

And even if you don't like the music player, just keep checking out the website or the RSS feed. Somebody at the project is a great artist, and most of its blog posts contain an original drawing of the Songbird. No, I don't know why there's a puff of air coming out of its rear end :-)

Songbird Nest
Ubuntu Podcast