A Man and his Penguin

Funny, funny, funny composer puns posted by Slashdotters to this article:

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/02/20/1853224.shtml

I realised it’s been a while since I posted under the "Ubuntu" category, so here I am.

Ubuntu "Feisty Fawn" Herd 4 has been released. This is an alpha development version; don’t run it unless you like running into breakage.

That said, I’ve heard from a number of people that Feisty is really, really stable. I also love its new features - Migration Assistant, a proper partitioning tool during the install, a feature where it tells you when you don’t have the correct codec and offers to download it, better WPA support out-of-the-box, and that KVM boringness (because having to buy a whole new processor is sooooo 2006!). Thank god sense has prevailed too in that Ubuntu won’t include Beryl out-of-the-box - let’s face it, Beryl is useless and heavy.

Also, Linux Mint "Bianca" was released. I tried to get a copy of it, but I have exceeded my download allocation (through downloading packages for my Copland PowerPC distribution). Speaking of that, it’s going pretty well - if you’re interested, best you scoot along to the main page of my blog (http://bigbolshevik.blogs.friendster.com/a_man_and_his_penguin/).

Yes, I had more problems.

After I setuid’ed "sudo", it told me that it still had the incorrect permissions set. Thankfully, it told me what octal permissions it was set to, and what it should be, so it was very easy to satisfy that.

Just in case that didn’t work, I wrote a tiny program called "Clarus" (named after the Dogcow). It’s just a simple setuid program that launches a root terminal, after warning that this is a bad thing to do. If sudo doesn’t work, then Clarus will.

However, sudo worked the next time.

But then I discovered that Xorg actually wasn’t installed. Apparantly, when I removed the unneeded Xorg drivers from the Copland chroot, it also removed Xorg itself. This took me quite a while to figure out.

FINALLY I got Copland running to a desktop, albeit as root as the GDM login screen kept crashing. I’m hoping that GDM is crashing because of the insane settings I gave it, not because of the modified Zenwalk login theme I chose. Of course, I had forgotten to put my custom XFCE settings into the /root directory, so it looked exactly like Xubuntu. My bad.

On the good side, Pythoncard works; I ran the AIFF Interchange program (I didn’t put an AIFF through it - the computer is REALLY too slow to run Copland from disc let alone do anything that would require putting audio files into RAM). That was the one bit that I was really worried about, and it worked perfectly.

I’ve made the changes that I am going to make for this next Release Candidate (I call all my development masters "release candidates", because if everything works perfectly I’ll release it!). Tomorrow I’ll build another CD image and see what happens.

Good news: I think I found out how to stop the Xubuntu splash screen from appearing on startup, and this only involves a simple edit to the Yaboot.conf file. Kernel arguments.

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Yesterday, I went to Big W and had a look at their Windows games. There was one there for $5, called International Golf Pro. Someone on Ubuntu Forums had lately been talking about how there’s no real golf game for Linux (real golf, not mini golf), and I’d remembered how much I liked PGA Tour Golf 2 for Mac, so I decided to buy it and see if it would run on Wine.

It didn’t run on Wine; well, it crashed before the actual game started. So I tried running it on Windows. Guess what? BSoD. I tried it again; same result. Windows told me to run Chkdsk, so I did. Tried the game again: BSoD.

I tried every variation of installing, uninstalling, and setting options for the game, but nothing worked UNTIL I ran the game under "Windowed Mode". This DIDN’T result in a BSoD, but the graphics went really weird and a box popped up telling me that there was a problem with my video card drivers. Bingo! I updated them and that fixed the problem.

Unfortunately, after all that work, the game wasn’t really very good. Graphically, it’s better than PGA Tour Golf 2. In terms of gameplay, it’s nowhere near. Good for a $5 game though, and it (along with a live Ventures album that I have) kept me occupied during those long Copland bootups.

Yes… I’ve just realised that I forgot to copy over my custom bootmessages and yaboot intro text. Right now, Copland Community Preview is booting on the iMac, with the Xubuntu splash. I thought I’d disabled that thing? Looks like another trip to the chroot for me

Oh, and now the damn thing won’t let me sudo. It says "sudo: must be setuid root". And in the uncompressed filesystem, sure enough, sudo is not setuid root. How on earth did that happen? However it happened, unfortunately, it means I’ve got to boot up the Xubuntu Desktop CD again and recompress the SquashFS filesystem… after I’ve setuid’ed all the appropriate programs.

I’m waiting for the ISO of Copland Community Preview RC 1 (Release Candidate 1) to burn to disc. It feels like it’s taking longer to burn than it did to create the package manifest and compress the filesystem, even including that bit where I had to switch to the Mac to run a command in the chroot

Once the disc is burnt, I’ll chuck it into my Mac and try it out immediately! I’m so excited! Well, it’s just finalising, so I’ll go now :-)  Oh, the ISO is 450 megabytes, how cool is that?

Hey! I got Sabayon Linux to boot on my computer!

Before, it froze up during the loading sequence, but after deleting some kernel arguments and editing one to point to my 1 gig RAM stick, it finally booted.

And I must say I’m impressed. Not with the red theme, which looks ugly IMHO. Not with the fact that (the CD version) comes with SuperKaramba but no actual widgets for it. But I *am* impressed with the performance of Beryl on it. Beryl is freakin’ speedy on this live distro - my desktop cube was spinning so fast, my computer generated a gravitational field! The windows were so ablaze, I had grabbed a fire extinguisher before realising that it was just a desktop effect!

Okay, I’m embellishing a LOT here, but although I wouldn’t use Sabayon as an everyday desktop and I wouldn’t recommend it to newbies, I was very impressed with how quick Beryl was on my little integrated ATI graphics card, with absolutely no configuration at all. If you can get it to run, check it out.

On Opera today, she had given all the audience members digital video cameras and thousands of dollars each, on the condition that they spend the money on the people who really need it, and film the results. One of the women ordered pizzas to her home, and gave the guys hundreds of dollars as a tip! You should’ve seen their faces

I’ve resisted it quite well so far, but now I’m really interested in this Ugly Betty show, completely against my will. I don’t want to watch it, because I’m afraid that I’ll be disappointed at the typical American lame humour involving a character wanting to have a monkey as a pet (I’m sure that happens on all US sitcoms). But it does sound like a show I should watch, well, if merely for the reason that I’m ugly too

Welcome to the newest section of the blog!

This is why I personaly think Linux doesn’t stand a chance in taking over windows…

mount: dev/fd0 is not a valid block device

I feel bad laughing at n00bs, but he was really asking for it. Having an isolated problem mounting floppy disks (floppy disks!) is why Linux won’t take over more desktop marketshare. I’m sure there are millions of Windows users who are looking longingly at Linux, wishing it would support all sorts of ancient technology (not in a Stargate SG-1 sense) so they can finally switch over.

I personally am disgusted at Compaq for not designing my computer with an inbuilt punchcard reader. It’s a basic essential!

EDIT: I found another post on Ubuntu Forums worthy of writing about. The person is asking if his computer is powerful enough to run Ubuntu, and he describes his computer as being "Pentium 2 with 192k of RAM". This guy isn’t dumb though - just got confused, like the man my father worked with back when we changed to the metric system, who got confused between centimeters and kilometers.

Yes, I’m aware that Copland Community Preview has more dropped features than Windows Vista

But I’ve reached beta stage. All the work that I haven’t deferred is done. All I’ve got to do now is reconstruct the chroot environment into an ISO, burn it to CD, and try it out.

I’ll bring in the new guys soon, and I’m also looking for donated webspace and bandwidth.

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I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I’d like to become my own OEM (Own Equipment Manufacturer), buying Linux-compatible PC parts and building computers, then selling them to electrical stores that don’t get competitive pricing for PCs. Of course, all computers would be preloaded with Linux - I’m thinking Linux Mint would be a good option. Also, the Windows Media Codecs bundle from Fluendo would be a great addition.

I’m going to check out some component pricing, work out what my costs would be, and then get one set of components and try my hand at putting the computer together.

I wrote a LOT more about it before, but I accidentally hit Shift-Backspace and so I lost everything. I might rewrite it some day.

The gist of it is: Although you don’t get little specks and lines and things with digital free-to-air broadcasts, the quality is still lower than analogue. With digital, fast-moving objects either cause a reduction in frame rate (causing jerkiness), or leave a trail of blocks behind.

The Australian government is going to "phase out" analogue TV broadcasts so it can sell off the frequencies and make a lot of money. In return, TV stations get a very limited bandwidth (at the bottom end of the frequency spectrum) with which to broadcast in digital. Having such a low bandwidth causes the stations to use a low bitrate, which causes the problems I mentioned.

I would love to lobby the government, preferably with the backing of electrical retailers and consumer groups, to increase the bandwidth available to TV stations and legislate for minimum acceptable bitrates. The minimum acceptable bitrate for Standard Definition would be 50% greater than what the current average level is right now. The minimum acceptable bitrate for HD would be 75% higher than what it is now.

Because it is just greediness by the government, limiting the bandwidth like this. Honestly, this isn’t just a "conspiracy theory" or anything, but it IS doing this just for the greater amounts of money it would get from corporations which want to buy good frequencies.

One of the lesser-known cited benefits of open formats is that you can save into an open format, and forever more be able to access the data.

Before Microsoft Word became the dominant format, there were a number of popular word processing formats. When Word became dominant and the older programs stopped being made, documents made with those older programs became unviewable without the legacy software. If the legacy software stopped running on the newer computers, you effectively lost the documents.

With open formats, the likelihood is that there will always be a program that will be able to work with documents in a particular open format. And if there isn’t, you can program (or employ someone to program) a filter for the format. The specifications, and even the source code, are all there free.

It’s not mentioned as often as the other OSS benefits, mostly because laypeople probably wouldn’t really understand: "Yeah, but MS Word will never go away, It’s the biggest format!".

Tonight when searching my old Mac backups for Spice Girls multimedia (fixing a showstopper bug in Copland HFS Browser in the process!), I came across this exact problem. Remember when RealPlayer was the only streaming audio format worth mentioning? Well, I have some files from that era. The problem is, they’re so old that RealPlayer for Linux refuses to open them - it gives me an error message about the codec being unsupported because of its age.

This is unacceptable! I have legacy audio files that I need to listen to! Fortunately, open-source software came to the rescue. MPlayer plays the files perfectly. And next time I join a world-wide fan network, I’ll encourage everyone to use Ogg Vorbis and Theora :-) 

No, but seriously, this "unsupported legacy codecs" thing is a potential dealbreaker for putting the surviving Spice multimedia onto the web. If peoples’ RealPlayer won’t play the files, what’s the point? Most of the multimedia was wiped out by carelessness, I don’t want the rest to be wiped out through proprietry codec support (or lack thereof). Every piece of multimedia in Real format, I will convert to an open format.