20 posts tagged “ubuntu”

So I did the Dist-Upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon today and well things broke. I won't cry about it, but it is a bit annoying until kinks get worked out. I may have to seek a full reinstall because this time around... so many things seemed rushed. I'll see if I get any replies on the forums about my issues, but it'd be a damn shame to have to reconfigure everything again.

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

So... The bleeding edge repos for Compiz-Fusion had committed proverbial suicide on me. I lost a lot of my great functionality that I had come to love from Compiz-Fusion. It crushed me, believe it or not. But I knew what I was getting in to by playing with something that's as deadly as a live razor blade... "If you play with the bleeding edge, prepare get cut!". Boy did I ever get cut... If anything, it smarts. After trying to flirt with the power of Terminal to use it as my sword to duel with the files that bring my user interface (GUI for the geek initiated) to life, otherwise I'd be returning to a VERY cold Terminal screen.

After trying to revive Compiz-Fusion with some prebuilt scripts to take the brain work out of slashing and mucking around in the Aptitude system, I decided to hack to the bone and get Beryl back up while reverting any severe changes from the install scripts for Compiz-Fusion from removing my ubuntu-desktop metapackage. After using a couple of commands to clean out bad Metacity themes and any other things being guilty of borking my configuration... I got the ubuntu-desktop package bolted up then I added the beryl, beryl-manager, heliodor, and emerald packages added to the mix. After all those installed and got all settled... I loaded the final bullet in the clip and pulled the trigger, sending the bullet into the body.

I rebooted the laptop and prepared to witness either one of two things... The death of my GUI or nothing at all. After the machine loaded up, it had my custom log-in screen... and I can't tell you the elation that ran through my mind. I realize that there's a limit to how far I can push the bleeding edge, especially when my laptop is my "production" machine. So some pearls of wisdom for new Linux users who want to play with the "knives" of open source and brand spanking new technology... Keep these in mind:

• Make sure you back-up everything.
• Make sure you fully know what each command does
• Read, read, read all documentation before mucking about
• Google (or any other search engine) is your friend
• Do not use a "daily" or "production" machine if you have any doubts.
• Respect the Terminal/Konsole/xTerm like a weapon, it can save your machine or hurt it.
  

So last night, I poked on to LifeHacker to check out if they had any slick posts about new productivity tips in either life or software, I found this slick little gem of an article there: "Power up your Linux Desktop with Compiz-Fusion" on LifeHacker. After about 20 minutes, I had Beryl replaced in favor of Compiz Fusion. I like it and it really does merge the best of both worlds.

Compiz was a "laboratory stable" project, but never was one to push the boundaries of neat productivity effects. Beryl, a fork of Compiz, did the opposite... It pushed to the bleeding edge. It was not for the weak at heart. After installing Compiz-Fusion, I can see the facets of both projects and it is spectacular...

Avant Window Navigator (from the bleeding edge Compiz-Fusion Repos) with the bouncing icons and window preview

The Cube with a custom background and reflections enabled

The Ring, an alternative to the Flip3D of Vista or your boring Alt-Tab of yesteryear

Expo, see all your desktops and drag apps to the workspace desired, reflections are enabled

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!