9 posts tagged “ubuntu dallas”

Last night was quite the revolution with regards to the management... Brandon stepped up for the management and File13 to be the assistant leader. JJNova has quite a fit that Schpenke not wishing to be the figurehead while he would manage the politics being something that I found as odd. I would like to recognize and congratulate Brandon and File13 for their leadership to take the reins of Ubuntu Dallas.

With regard to those two leading Ubuntu Dallas... The only advice I can say is they need to seek "seats" in the newly formed LoCo Team Council. With the Council being the blade that can kill a team, with them being members, they can at least protect the Dallas team from being debilitated in any way. At the same right, there can not be a greed for power... Something demonstrated by File13 last night with regard to the possible CD distribution to just a state, not to city teams: "[Expletive deleted] the other teams! If they want CD's they come to us! The other teams are not that big."

I am not going to lambast the LoCo Council or trash the LoCo itself. I will clarify one fact. The "Splinter Cell" project that will be headed by Schpenke is NOT to rival the Ubuntu Dallas. If anything I would consider it more of an "alliance" that is to support Ubuntu Dallas. I could easily see myself referring the leery Windows Vista users who want a more complete experience in computing to seek Ubuntu and get into Ubuntu Dallas. The Ubuntu Dallas folks are more than able to welcome us "founders" of the "Splinter Cell" as honorary members and I (personally) feel that we wish the best for Ubuntu Dallas. Let me get one fact straight for myself, Schpenke and whoever else may wish to join us:

We do not believe the philosophy that the LoCo Team Management is pushing with the LoCo Council idea, because we feel it infringes on the philosophy that Canonical has set. Canonical is about humanity to others and the LoCo Team Council idea that is being pitched is in no way following in the steps of that philosophy.

I hope that clears up everything for everyone on how I stand on this matter. Long live open source and free software in Dallas! I will be honored to work with Ubuntu Dallas to help break the DFW Metroplex from the death grip that Microsoft holds on the people!

Today I stepped down as an associate to Canonical and followed Schpenke's lead with regard to the new Local Community team management.

We are working on an unofficial support team project to help aid Ubuntu users in Dallas.

Updates!!!

Well... For those who follow my blog, you will know that I officially resigned as of 12:15am. I do know that inquiring minds ask: "Why?" I will hotlink to the reason why below.

Reasons for disagreement here

Personally, it goes against the philosophy that Canonical has bound with Ubuntu... "Humanity to others" or if you want to put it to the old Christian philosophy "Do unto others as you would unto yourself." But when you form a committee that says which teams can be "approved" or "denied" for things like team webpages, mailing lists, or even free CD's on the release of a new copy of Ubuntu, you encroach on the humanity of another person. Schpenke couldn't agree with it and I followed suit with him. We removed ourselves from our posts with just the Canonical website being the only pending issue as the site is constantly down or being on servers that are requiring repairs.

The next question is probably "What happens to Ubuntu Dallas then?"

As for the Dallas Team, Schpenke and myself have resigned as leaders so that is pretty much done. We are looking for someone in Dallas to step up to the plate and be Canonical's contact for the Dallas folks. JJNova owns the rights to the IRC Channel #ubuntu-dallas so we'll have to see what happens with that. I own the offtopic channel, but I will pass my rights to the new leader once one is found. I will hope that the Dallas Team grows in to a stronger entity, but I am honestly more fearing that the Dallas Team may be choked on development with the idea that a LoCo management committee is the one to be judge jury and executioner to anything team related.

What do I plan to do? I will combine my efforts with Schpenke and dare2dreamer for an effort to advocate free and open source software to the Dallas area. We will sing more of a tune to Linux, but we will not shun those who use a different distro than Ubuntu and even other operating systems such as OS X and Windows. The big difference is that we will opt to be a more social group not afraid of new folks joining our ranks.

To leave with a funny post, I will leave with two things during the hours of separation.

- dare2dreamer felt we could easily be cool geeks as most of us know how to have a good time, bathe (not to reek of geek funk), and most of our ranks have seen women naked (read: not in pornography).

- During the name generation process, I had suggested "Lyceum of the Technologically Apt"

Met with brandonperry of Ubuntu Dallas and we discussed things with regard to our Software Freedom Day loss of venue site. About late 7pm, Schpenke, ExxonValdeez and Maczimus popped in #ubuntu-dallas and we got the gears moving. For now, here's what we have established.

Papers/Lectures/Workshops
- I will be doing a "workshop" on helping a family get out of close-source software
- brandonperry may do a lecture on Mono/C#

Venues
- The Central Dallas Library location is dead due to loss of location
- Many libraries require a 2 week notice period before booking venues
- Tempest Teas in Dallas was suggested
- Tempest Teas does cater to meetings/venues
- The location on Lovers may be the ticket.

Members of Ubuntu Dallas,

In light of Schpenke's announcement that we have lost our Software Freedom Day site... We need to agree on a new location to hold our event. We have SEVEN DAYS to decide on a new location and I would like to hold a special session meeting to see if we can drum up serious discussion on a meeting site. At this rate, the event may not even be that big... but I would hope we can maybe attract curious on-lookers or even fellow Linux users.

I would like to call a special session meeting at Java and Cha Co. in Plano for a second go-around for a meeting. If you can make it out, please let JJNova or myself know in the channel #ubuntu-dallas on irc.freenode.com ASAP. Time is seriously of the essence.

JJNova: If you find out who all is coming for sure, just toss me an e-mail and let me know.

[Ubuntu Dallas Special Session Meeting Details]
Location: Java and Cha Co. (Plano, Texas)

Date: Sept. 8, 2007

Meeting Start Time: 6:45pm - 7:00pm

Topics: SFD, Venue location

Address:
1820 Coit Rd #138
Plano, TX 75075

Site Details
Serves coffee, tea, boba/pearl teas, cookies and other misc snacks.
Free wifi with an item purchase
Plenty of power strips to plug in

I'll admit, I am a sucker for clean looking desktops. I don't like clutter and prefer a clean look. To the Linux crowd, Avant Window Navigator is an open-source replica of the OS X window-list and launcher. It is the most well known one with regard to the Gnome desktop environment users, but it still is under development. I originally held off on it as the functionality was lacking... until now. ExxonValdeez from #ubuntu-dallas had told me that the functionality has been increased so things have become a little more functional with it. After fighting the install for a good while until this morning... I have it tweaked to my liking. Enclosed in this post are images... I have retired the XP Inverse wallpaper for the press-release images of the Aston Martin DBS, a replica of the latest James Bond car in the most recent movie, "Casino Royale", for those who are curious.

Disclaimer: If you are seeing the "black bars" around Avant Window Navigator, that's a sign you need Beryl or Compiz-Fusion.

Esteemed members of Ubuntu Dallas,

Many of you who've been in the IRC room (#ubuntu-dallas on irc.freenode.net) remember either me (ZeroXR) or schpenke mentioning about what happened to our site with an announcement via an IRC meeting. If you missed out, then allow me to quote from an e-mail from Jono on the official announcement about the site takedown:

On Monday evening (UK time) it was reported that one of the hosted community servers that Canonical sponsors had been compromised.  After investigation, it became apparent that 5 of the 8 machines had been compromised.  Since it was reported that they were actively attacking other machines (and because it's What You Do), the decision was taken to shut the machines down.

On Tuesday morning we started the procedure of bringing these machines up in a safe state so that we could recover data from them. Unfortunately, this took far longer than we would have hoped or liked due to a combination of having to use remote hands, arbitrary limits imposed by those remote hands and (relative) lack of bandwidth to copy data off site.

This process is still ongoing (though only one remain has yet to be fully recovered - tiber).

How did this happen
-------------------

Unfortunately:

   a) The servers, especially zambezi were running an incredible amount of web software (over 15 packages[1] that we recognised) and of all the ones where it's trivial to determine a version, they were without exception out-of-date and missing security patches. An attacker could have gotten a shell through almost any of these sites.

   b) FTP (not SFTP, without SSL) was being used to access the machines, so an attacker (in the right place) could also have gotten access by sniffing the clear-text passwords.

   c) The servers have not been upgraded past breezy due to problems with the network card and later kernels.  This probably allowed the attacker to gain root.
[Quoted from Jono Bacon's E-mail, August 10th, 2007]

The site has been under the restoration and possibly a server move, so we're just waiting on Canonical to bring back the servers up so a few members of the Dallas team can assist with the effort to migrate to a different content management system (CMS) as we have had aggressive discussion with regard to how poor PostNuke has been to us. The main proponents of the site migration are: Myself, schpenke, JJNova, goodtimetribe, dare2dreamer, File13, and ExxonValdeez. Just there is one thing that we must know before we may proceed... What are Canonical's terms should we choose to use their hosting? What if we choose to go at it alone and manage our own server? I will post the next part of the very same e-mail with Jono below:

Loco teams/services can choose to either:

 (1) be migrated to the Canonical data centre.  This comes with both restrictions and benefits:

       + Better hardware and bandwidth.
       + Fulltime support from Canonical's sysadmin team including software maintenance and integration into our existing backup infrastructure.

       - root access will not be available.
       - Access by per-user SSH key only, limited number of accounts per loco team / service.
       - Can only support certain software (e.g. drupal, wordpress, planet, moin, ...)
       - No ability to run arbitrary CGIs.

 (2) or stay on the hosted/outsourced servers.

However, assuming anyone chooses option (2), some things will have to change with how we handle these servers.  Specifically, Canonical will continue to sponsor the servers but they will have to become entirely community run, i.e.

   + Community admin team liaise with hosting company for reboots, etc.

   + Community have sole responsibility for all aspects of administration of servers, including but not limited to day to day sysadmin tasks, backups, security, upgrades, recovery if compromised, etc.

   + Use of servers for loco team services only unless previously agreed.

   - Both the Community Council and Canonical have oversight on this
[Quoted from Jono Bacon's E-mail, August 10th, 2007]

With that being said, "what" are our options? From the same e-mail, here is what Jono lists off as approved web app recommendations...

Art-Web
Gallery
Drupal
PHPmyadmin
Wordpress
PostNuke
phpBB
SMF
Moodle
Planet
ASPseek
Moin
TaskFreak
CMS Made Simple
MediaWiki

As far as what transpired today in the meeting with regard to the LoCo team pages, here's the "Cliff's Notes" from Matthew Nuzum's e-mail to the LoCo Contacts mailing list:

Hello everyone, here is a quick summary of the meeting today regarding the canonical sponsored loco team web hosting.

In a nutshell, if you are using one of the "approved" webapps listed in that e-mail, you are welcome to use the hosting provided by the Canonical sysadmin team in the London based Canonical data center (CDC).

If you are not using an approved application and don't feel migration to a supported application is possible, the US based servers will still be maintained, but not allocated the same administrative resources that the CDC hosted sites will receive.

All of the above means, "don't worry, everything is going to be OK."  ;-)

Sites that had PHP, CGI or other executable code need to make arrangements to have that code replaced, since it could be compromised.

Also, each site will need to make arrangements for getting their site set up in the proper place.

To do this, follow these steps:
 * Log into #canonical-sysadmin on freenode and ask for help migrating your existing loco site. The first available sysadmin will contact you to make proper arrangements. As always, be patient. Loco teams far outnumber sysadmins. Change: Instead of logging onto #canonical-sysadmin (which has turned to chaos), file a bug at https://launchpad.net/loco-webhosting. This way you'll be notified if there are questions or when its been completed.

 * Contact us to make sure we can make DNS changes for your site by filing a bug against the loco-webhosting project in launchpad . This process is not instantaneous unfortunately.

If you do not yet have Canonical sponsored hosting but would *like* to have hosting, please understand that there will be a slightly longer than usual delay, then follow the existing instructions at

Thanks for your cooperation as we work through this event.
[Quoted by Matthew Nuzum's E-mail, August 14th, 2007 at 11:17am]

As far as which CMS everyone wants to go with for our site, the most popular choices seem to be Wordpress and Drupal. Wordpress has many advantages as there are lots of modules and plug-ins that work great with the CMS. Drupal gets notes for the ability to control management from what schpenke mentioned in the channel. If anyone has more details about Drupal, please comment and I will append this news post for the changes.

I would like to make a "state of the union" to our members at Ubuntu Dallas: Let us know which CMS you would like us to impliment and why. If you have a particular design or site template you would like us to use with a corresponding CMS, please show us and we'll let our users give their input. We also need a logo as well... dare2dreamer, JJNova, and File13 have there logos on display, but I would like to see more "competition". After all the chosen logo will be our emblem for the coming months! If you're artistic, get cracking!

In the IRC room of #ubuntu-dallas on irc.freenode.net/, my leader schpenke told me quite the interesting promotion that Sony's been shooting for with regard to HD-DVD since last month. He recently dropped the money for his own PS3 recently and wanted to answer Maczimus' question in regard to HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray.

When you buy any qualifying Blu-Ray player from June until August 31st, Sony will give you 5 Blu-Ray titles for free. One of the qualifying players is, in fact, the PlayStation 3! For geeks and nerds alike, this is awesome... because with the price drop to $499.99, the free flicks, and the ability to install Linux on it, it's quite a good deal now!
schpenke from #ubuntu-dallas

This should be an interesting few months to see soon... With the Blu-Ray movie promotion and the PlayStation 3's price drop, that should be more than enough to put up an interesting fight with HD-DVD. If Microsoft could fit the HD-DVD drive into the XBOX 360 Elite while pricing it a good price, the battle could get quite dramatic.

For those curious... Yes, schpenke was trying to install Ubuntu Edgy on to his PlayStation 3. ;-) Even something slightly off tangent can relate to Ubuntu!

February was a revolution with me converting my reliable as bolts PC to Linux. Sure there was lots of fear and uncertainty with being in an operating system completely foreign to me... but at the same time, there was another chance for me to relearn how to enjoy computing again. Being a person who owned both a Windows PC and a Mac had shown me realms that are almost polar opposites, but Linux was completely something unique. The previous 2 realms had shown one major point though: IF you want GOOD software, then you need to PAY for it. Every once in a while there's a challenger with a good piece of free software, but the more common place practice is to give a basic edition for free (although hindered) but ask you to front up the money for "enhanced" functionality.

To be "dead in the water" with Linux alone and no Windows XP partition was interesting as there were no commercial applications with prices tagged onto them... Everything was open source. It was in the same mindset of "for the buyers, written by the buyers". Functionality was as robust as a commercial application, yet it was not hindered like a "freeware" application. The irony is that some commercial companies have dived into the foray of open source with regard that programming is like a science. What good is research and science when you don't share your data with your peers? Worse yet... Forcing your "investors" to pay for your research, only to have their returns go towards minuscule changes that have little impact on future developments and lock out end users from assisting with bug reporting or furthering the evolution of the program's life. One of the greatest examples of progress made by open source is Corel/Novell's OpenOffice.org suite. A robust office suite providing a basic frame for a wide range of basic word processing and spreadsheet work for free! Sure, it's not as polished as nicely as Microsoft Office, but at least the licensing cost is not nearly as bad as $139.99 for "Student and Teacher" edition while Open Office is a complete suite and free to boot.

I'm not one to say that I have fervent zeal in spreading the joy of Ubuntu Linux to others. I do, however, end up introducing Ubuntu (or any other packages) to friends or family who have been utterly frustrated with Windows and could use an alternative to love their PC's again. Computers are nothing to fear really, well until the common place plagues of viruses, malware, and even root-kit trojan keyloggers land in full force. I have shown some people the joy I get from my computer and they are impressed. No more needless maintenance that has to be run overnight... More time enjoying computer time. Recently, my ex-girlfriend had asked about conversion, as she is starting to feel the burn of Windows related frustrations. I enlightened her today and even let her try out all the flavors of Canonical Linux: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu. She definitely liked Ubuntu the most as it seemed foreign to her, but yet so natural. Kubuntu was not her thing, due to the fact that the layout by default is similar to Windows XP (being that she wants to get away from the offending memories of Windows XP). Xubuntu was a bit much on her as the learning curve is a bit higher due to its minimalistic nature. She too had the same view that Ubuntu Studio should have been packed as a Live DVD as the Alternate CD format only takes up 836mb and a single layer DVD is about 4.7GB! For now, she awaits conversion, as she's not sure about making the dive just yet.

Giving people a choice of absolute freedom for computing is a gift of knowledge. You're giving frustrated users a chance to stand-up against the "locked-in" to software companies trying to exploit problem fixes as new frontiers for profit. Ever since becoming an assistant leader to Ubuntu Dallas, I have felt like the gift of choice and the promise of open source are wonderful. I know from stumbling on my own into a world of freedom, it was overwhelming. To be a guide in my city and give others the hand to break free is a joy on its own.

Many wonder what got me into Linux and Open Software and boy, do I have a story to tell.

Windows has frustrated me for a very long time. Viruses, worms, trojan horse root-kits, and anything of the like have pissed me off to no end for years... Anyone remember the good old Blaster worm? I happened to have Windows XP and on dial-up of all things. That was my first horrid encounter with computer security problems... I had to crash the RPC procedure call with Alt - Ctrl - Del and have the update slowly pull onto my machine, where I would locally load it into a floppy for my cousin and fix his machine. The download was an unbearable 3 - 4 hours... Then there was sharing my tower with my sister... It tracted so many viruses and malware that a low level wipe was the only saving grace that could pull the machine out of its misery. That low-level wipe ran me a good 5 - 8 hours. It would happen to me again and again with my machine. Then the event would finally break me open...

Here's an excerpt from my blog posted at Ubuntu Dallas, this documents the final battle I had with Windows being on my machine:

What began as a simple Friday night of post-work relaxation on my Windows XP machine, BEAST v5, became one of anger and madness. The date was February 9th at about 9:30pm, I logged on just to check forums, read the news, use Outlook for personal e-mails and just relax to some music to ease away a very stressful week. Unfortunately, the common plagues of the Windows world came knocking on my door this unfortunate night. My copies of ZoneAlarm and Spybot Search & Destroy threw all the warning bells saying malicious code was infecting my system but couldn't be removed. The annoying issue that arose from this was the constant pop-ups screaming that the virus' attempts to access the outside world were blocked. But it seems that the virus only got more infuriated at me and became more persistent, so persistent that it crashed my anti-viral and spyware protection and began eating my resources. This would ultimately turn my machine into a proverbial zombie...

To think, that mess came about when I planned to just play some Guild Wars! From that, I began soul searching for another operating system... I ran into Ubuntu Linux by Canonical and the rest is history.

I wanted to give back to the promise of open source as it has been good to me. I began to go join up the Ubuntu Dallas Local Team to help out users in the Dallas area. I was invited by the administrator Shawn to be a forum moderator. Eventually, I would be asked to help moderate the mailing list and eventually, being promoted to assistant administrator! I have been proud of my promotion and even more proud to be of service of to Canonical in the Dallas area.

I have converted 3 machines. Two being my own, a desktop called BEAST v5 and a laptop known as Suzaku. They have served me well since the conversion and they have been reliable as a rock. I assisted in salvaging a friend's HP Media Center PC which proved to be a great task. I have shown friends my hard work and it is great!

Enclosed with this post are images and video of my machine. The pictures are more recent work of Suzaku, as I have been trying to perfect the "Burn" effect to run smoothly and rendered damn well.