A Man and his Penguin

I recieved my replacement Hi-5 DVD today, and I’ve just eaten a potato pizza and apple pie!

We also had a huge day at work. I honestly can’t guess how much we sold, but was a lot! We finally received the 46 inch Full HD Sony LCD TV today that we had on order… and then at 1pm we got a call from someone who was looking for one and wanted to buy it today. At 1:50pm they came in and bought our display model; possibly the fastest turnaround in the shop’s history. Spiro also sold one of those Palsonic LCDs, thanks in part to the little sign I stuck up on the front window of the shop.

I recieved my replacement Hi-5 DVD today, and I’ve just eaten a potato pizza and apple pie!

We also had a huge day at work. I honestly can’t guess how much we sold, but was a lot! We finally received the 46 inch Full HD Sony LCD TV today that we had on order… and then at 1pm we got a call from someone who was looking for one and wanted to buy it today. At 1:50pm they came in and bought our display model; possibly the fastest turnaround in the shop’s history. Spiro also sold one of those Palsonic LCDs, thanks in part to the little sign I stuck up on the front window of the shop.

Just to whet your whistle:

Notice it says "Gaim Pidgin"? Also notice the Control Strip at the bottom-left of the screen, fulfilling the same sorts of functions as it did in OS 9.

Getting some music done. I mean, getting some work done. Notice the window list / application switcher menu in the top-right corner? Yep, it’s fulfilling the same kinds of tasks that it did in OS 9.

And, of course, no Copland-related screenshot gallery would be complete without HFS Browser. Look at that lovely wallpaper - it’s one from Gnome-look.org that is designed to be distro-branded.

http://www.linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=4146

Please be patient - only 2 seeders as yet, and 1 leecher. I’ll run Bittorrent all night to try and push as much of the file out as possible. 13 hours will see the sending of one complete copy, so I’ll aim to have the computer up for that amount of time or more if possible.

God, work today was hectic. I did sell quite a bit though - two washing machines, a gas heater, a couple of electric heaters, and some smalls. We finally got the 1080p hard disk video player to match our Full HD 42inch Sharp LCD; to see that screen operating at close to its full potential put a smile right on my face. Pity it’s got HDCP in it.

No e-mail back from Roadshow. I’ll have to call them tomorrow, damn it.

I woke up at 8am to the sound of my phone beeping. I had a message from my boss; instead of coming in at 12pm, I should come in at 9am. Yes, I had 40 minutes to have breakfast, get dressed and clean up, and then get in the car.

So I did, and when the boss came in at 12 he was in a bad mood.

After work, I had to go to a guy’s house to set up his Conia 17 inch LCD TV as a computer monitor. It turned out that his computer technician had installed a new graphics card into another slot, and my customer was plugging the monitor into the wrong port. I fixed that problem, and he started telling me about these other problems he was having, so I committed myself to staying there and fixing those too (for an extra fee!).

While waiting for something to happen, I mentioned that I didn’t use Windows much, and that I stay in Linux most of the time. Surprisingly, this guy pulls out an Ubuntu CD - he’d been given it but was too afraid to put it into his computer (he didn’t realise it was a Live CD).

His Windows was completely borked. IE wouldn’t connect to any sites through the address bar, throwing up a completely gobbledegook error message. Outlook would fetch 16 e-mails from the e-mail server, then give up. He had no graphics acceleration, and my attempts to install the ATI driver simply failed with more ridiculous error messages.

While looking through the IE searchbar history, I found that this technician guy had tried using Google to find out what the IE error message meant, but obviously had not done anything about it. I couldn’t fix it - I installed Firefox.

For the e-mail problem, I tried installing Thunderbird, but it had the same problem actually.

As the finale, I booted up Ubuntu Feisty. Admittedly, it wasn’t a new computer, but Ubuntu booted up and worked mostly fine. The internet worked, there was 2D acceleration through the open-source ATI driver, sound was fine, and the Microsoft wireless mouse moved smoothly. The only problem was that the image was half off the edge of the screen; a quick trip to the Screen Resolution program fixed that in a way. Xorg actually knew that it was a widescreen monitor, unlike Windows.

I started up Evolution, and set up the guy’s e-mail account (without deleting the messages on the server). Rather than retrieve 16 messages and then give up, it retrieved 50 messages before I stopped it. Amazing open-source program, that.

Ubuntu not ready for the desktop? The live Ubuntu system was more trouble-free than the installed Windows XP! If he comes back to me with any more computer troubles, I’m going to install a dual-boot as he’s the ideal candidate. Doesn’t depend on Windows software, uses ADSL through an Ethernet modem, and has fully supported hardware. Had already heard of Firefox and Ubuntu, and also had a good impression of the people behind open-source (though, until I set him straight, he was suspicious that Canonical must’ve been a Christian organisation for giving away software!).

———–
Oh dear, I’ve spent a lot of time writing about this customer, haven’t I?

The most surreal thing happened when I got home. There was a padded envelope on the table addressed to me, from Roadshow Entertainment. Inside was a letter saying that I’d won a copy of the new Hi-5 Have Some Fun DVD, and I found the signed cover insert inside the folded letter, but there was no DVD in the envelope!

How funny is that! I’ve sent letters to Kids Like Us and Roadshow, so let’s hope they send the real thing soon.

Interestingly enough, although the DVD has Kathleen on it (and the cover has Kathleen too), it was signed by Sun! Another interesting thing to note: The cover photo was composited, it wasn’t taken as a group shot. Maybe the tension within the group is that bad?

On the cover, Charli is wearing a pink top, denim jacket with a pink Hi-5 hand, and a pink wrist-warmer. It’s exactly the same clothing she wears in Channel 9’s promotional wallpaper, except Channel 9 seems to have changed the colour from pink to orange. Interesting trivia!

I found a free file transfer site that lets me send a 500 megabyte file to be hosted forever and ever. So I did it. It took 12 hours, but it has succeeded.

http://www.mooload.com/new/file.php?file=/data/200507/1179674629/copland-cp.iso

Although nobody else has used the distro yet (the invitations to download have only just gone out), I’ve had some good feedback:

1. Cheers! Thanks for the great job. Unfortunately I can’t test it because
i’m very short in bandwidth but hopefully this project can go on

2. Hey thanks! I’ll test it on my Powerbook G4 (Ti). Looks like a great distro

3. Congrats and thanks! Monday is a holiday in Canada so I won’t get to
try this out until Tuesday (left my iBook at work!). I’m excited and
can’t wait to read the first reports on how this distribution works. I
think it has a very bright future.

Another potential user was asking about screenshots. As stupid as it sounds, I actually don’t have any! (I used to, but lost them). If you’ve got screenshots, please send them to me: chris (my name) _*at*_ ubuntu PLEASEDON’TSPAMME os.com.

I’ll get some screenshots tomorrow night, I hope.

In other news, today while my file was uploading, I went into the city. First I went to Harbour Town, where I looked around for a cap to match my nice new clothes; I did find one that sorta matched, but it took a while. The Brooks store came through for me.

And I also went to the city city and found the new Borders bookshop. Man, that place is huge. Not only are there books, but also magazines, DVDs, and CDs. Most bookshops have a rack or two of computer books - this place had 6 full-height racks full of them. Quite a good Linux section, with a book about Ubuntu, but it was child’s play stuff. I did actually buy Revolution In The Valley, which is the book containing stories about the development of the Macintosh computer. You can read those stories at www.folklore.org; some are quite funny, and they provide a lot of insight into the developers.

I’m glad I bought the book. The website is good, but there are a couple of things that the book has (alternate points of view) and lots of photos; as well as it looking like a coffee-table book. It wasn’t cheap - $50 - but it’s given me new perspective on Linux, so much so that I’m now starting to think that Syllable really is the way forward for GPL personal computers.

…that Copland Community Preview has officially been released!

Yes, you can now get all the new hotness for PowerPC-based Macintoshes just by sending a PM to me (3rdalbum) on the Ubuntu Forums, or by leaving a comment on this post, or even by sending an e-mail to me: chris (that’s my name) _*at*_ ubuntuos.com

As I don’t have a download server, nor even a computer I can leave serving a torrent until eternity, it’s through yousendit.com - send me your e-mail address, and I’ll send the file to you through yousendit.com.

Please, if you do recieve the file from me, create a torrent of it so as to ease my own bandwidth concerns.

EXTRACT OF RELEASE NOTES:

System Requirements

   
   

Any "New-world" PowerPC-based Macintosh computer (i.e. a "Bondi-Blue" iMac or later).

   

128 megabytes of RAM (192 megabytes recommended)

   

1.5 gigabytes of hard disk space for installation

   

Bootable CD-ROM drive

   

You will need more memory plus a copy of the Mac OS in order to use the Mac-On-Linux virtualisation.

   
   

Quickstart

   
   

Burn
the .iso file to a CD; remember, you must burn it as a disc image, not
just as an ordinary file. Burn at 8x or slower. Users with tray-load
iMacs, I suggest you use a CD-RW or a "music" CD-R. The disc can be
burnt on a PC or another Linux machine if necessary.

   
   

Insert
the CD into your drive, restart the Mac and hold down the C key. Press
Enter at the prompt. Some grey scrolling text will come up your screen
to tell you exactly what is loading. When it has all finished loading,
you will get a grey login screen with the Copland logo.

   
   

Username is ubuntu

   

There is no password.

   
   

———————-

   
   
   

Changes from Xubuntu 6.10 (Copland’s base distribution)

   
   

1. New, classic Mac-like configuration for the XFCE desktop environment

   

2. Aiff Interchange, a program that allows the conversion of AIFF audio files to WAV or FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec).

   

3. Hfs Browser, a program that helps you browse HFS and HFS+ removable disks.

   

4. Higher brightness setting as many iMacs display images too dark on Linux.

   

5.
Removing of nonessential packages and language packs to keep the
download and memory requirements low. Replacement of certain system
software with faster/more functional equivilants.

   

6. Mac-On-Linux virtualisation software

   

7. Free-as-in-beer codecs

   

8. New artwork and theme.

   

9. Airport Extreme driver

   

10. New software added:

   
   

* VLC movie player

   

* Quod Libet music manager

   

* Ex Falso ID3 tag editor

   

* Font Forge (can be used to convert Mac fonts to Linux ones)

   

* Fish - Friendly Interactive SHell.

   

* Gnash 0.9.7

   

* Pidgin 2 beta 6

   

* Essential packages for compiling software and creating Debian packages of them

   

* GTKpod iPod manager

   

* HFS command-line tools

   

* TkChooser - a familiar interface for various network tasks

   
   

11. New options in the XFCE menu for Administrator Terminal and Administrator File Manager

   

12. Whenever your password is needed, an explanation is given.

Contributing

   
   

You
are encouraged to contribute to the Copland project, especially through
documentation, distro hacking and programming GUIs. Any enquiries about
getting involved should be directed to chris (that’s my name) _*at*_ ubuntuos.com
for the moment until a proper website is set up.

   
   

Please
enjoy using Copland. You are free to use it for however long you want
and for whatever purpose, distributing and making changes, as long as
you remember that this software has no warranty, and that it is
licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License). For a full text of
the license, type man gpl into the terminal.

   
   

Copland is finally here!

   
   

Christopher Lees

   

Main developer of Copland

   

http://code.google.com/p/coplandppc/wiki/MainPage

A comment from Joseph regarding the BleedingEdge system I designed:

I’m a Linux newb who switched from Gentoo to Sourcemage, and so far the most annoying thing is realising the program I want isn’t in my distro’s repository, having to download the tarball, make an ebuild-like file for it, and look up the correct name for all the depends relative to my package manager. I’d love to see your idea implemented; it looks simple enough on the face of it, but wouldn’t it be much harder in practice to design code that could flawlessly detect the naming convention of a package for multiple distros? It is a shame that some convention can’t be agreed upon whereby a file is added to the tarball with an official name for the package, then the package manager could scan inside of tar balls for this name, or to save processing time in an ideal world each distro would agree to include the official name in the short or long description of the package.

Yes, it would be difficult, but hopefully the standardisation you speak of will occur at some later date, and until then BleedingEdge’s guesswork will be a last resort in case the packages listed in the "require" statements are not found.

Thanks for your comment! I do enjoy reading comments on this blog, it makes me feel like I’m not just talking to myself

———-
It’s the strangest thing. I opened the Logout window and noted that there were no options for Suspend or Hibernate. For an unknown reason, I started looking at the man pages for reboot and the init programs, and I played around with the "runlevel" program, and when I went back to the logout window the options were there!

So I tried them. Actually, I closed the logout window and pushed the special key on my keyboard that I always had set to "logout", that hadn’t worked on Feisty. It promptly suspended the computer. Waking it up worked fine.

So then I tried hibernating. Hibernation never worked on Dapper - it would hibernate, but waking up would just freeze the system. This time, it looked like Ubuntu was going to load from scratch, but then the logo disappeared and I was left with a Gnome prompt for my password ("unlock screen"). I’m currently running on this dehibernated computer, writing this entry. I have noticed that the network card seems to be down; still, hiberanation is a dumb idea that never works properly for anyone anyway.

EDIT: I’ve since restarted, and the Hybernate and Suspend options have disappeared again. The whole thing looks like a bug in Gnome or Ubuntu, but at least I know that Hybernate and Suspend work on this computer (mostly).

Wednesday; supposed to be my day off. Bloody Mare (her name is pronounced "Mary", lol now you get the joke) called in sick; I had to step into the breech.

I mean, she is supposed to be supporting 2 children. She works one day a week, but always calls in sick every 3rd week. She ain’t sick. I know by the number of Wednesdays in a row that I’ve had off, whether she’s going to call in sick the next Wednesday. There’s no illness that could do that.

So, yeah. I worked. It was a very quiet morning, then a rush in the afternoon. Sold one heater, an LG plasma TV off display (yay! We’ve got room for a 46 inch LCD now!), a dishwasher and an MP3 player. I was 95% toward selling a digital camera as well, but then the woman realised that her old memory cards wouldn’t work in it, and I lost her. Damn, that took a LOT of work to get her to the 95% stage.

After work I went to George’s house (George is an elderly man who is a serial wrong-button-pusher on his TV remote) to install a new VCR for him. When I went to test the video-playing part of it, I grabbed one of his tapes at random and pushed it in there. When it started playing, I found that it was the first episode of Big Brother Uncut; yep, this guy tapes all sorts of nudey shows. I found it funny. I’ve no idea if his wife knows about it, but I suspect she probably does.

Now I’m just tired. I might drink some choc-milk and then go to bed.

Myf Warhurst looked good tonight. lol, there are two reasons why I watch Spicks ‘n’ Specks, and comedy is only one of those reasons

Judging by the number of people who have been talking excitedly about Copland, and those who have been advertising my project and imploring people to get involved, I’ve had remarkably little involvement from the community.

Not only have I not received a single line of code, it seems that nobody has even tried the technology that I’ve developed for the distribution and placed on the website. Today when testing HfsBrowser, I found one of those simple "one missing character" errors. Blind Freddie with an HFS+ hard disk and a root terminal could have noticed it (my main development machine is x86 and I didn’t have an HFS+ partition available to test it on).

No, it’s not an excuse that I didn’t actually test the HFS+ functionality on my target machine. I should have. But on the same token, it’s ridiculous for some of those people to ask about creating artwork for the distro and then not help in other more useful ways. I mean, why didn’t anyone else test this program? It’s very useful on PPC-based systems, and actually even more useful on x86 systems where HFS formatted CDs and stuff are going to be used.

I’m fixing this bug (and one other that I found; more permissions stuff), and then releasing the thing. If I don’t get anyone contributing utilities or helping bugfix after Community Preview, then I simply won’t bother creating a proper release. I’m serious. From the beginning, I said that I wouldn’t be able to single-handedly develop the distribution that PowerPC users deserve, and single-handedly I haven’t yet managed to create a starting point.

I’m sorry if I sound angry; I’m mostly angry at myself and I had a bad day at work, but I am also puzzled about why nobody is even thinking of running my code until it’s packaged neatly on a CD.