“Thanks most sincerely, R.B.A., Missouri”

I know that some other people have already blogged this, but it’s important. I originally saw this letter when it got passed from the Ubuntu-Devel mailing list to Kubuntu-Users (the original is here). My friends will tell you that I can be kind of a hardass, and they’re not wrong, but this letter touched me.

The writer is a gentleman named Robert from Missouri. I won’t squander more space on introductions, as he tells his story more eloquently than I could.

Earlier this week I installed Kubuntu on a refurbished AMD computer I purchased for $184 from a discount online vendor, it came with no OS…

We can’t afford much and this was my 14 year old daughter’s birthday present… She is overjoyed. And she is already trying to tackle Adept Manager and exploring Linux, adding bling and her music…

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the work you all have done… If I could thank each and every one of you, I would.

You have given her the world to learn and explore.

So if you get frustrated or tired in your work for Open Source/Free Software, just remember that somewhere in Missouri there is a 14 year old girl named Hope, and A student who runs on the track team, who is now your biggest fan…

Thanks most sincerely,

R.B.A., Missouri

No, thank you. Thanks for reminding me what I’m doing here. To me, this is the core of what makes the Ubuntu community so amazing, and the heart and soul of what I try to do on my own tiny scale with Guerrilla Tech. It’s not just about writing code, it’s not just about building a startup or building a resume or scratching an itch or feeling l33t or “sticking it to the man,” although those are all honorable goals. It’s about making a difference, and helping people. It’s about eventually leaving this world a little better than it was when we showed up. All of us, with whatever modest gifts the gods gave us, we’re making a difference. We’re helping people. At our very best, we’re changing lives.

Let’s keep going, everyone.

-pd-

Why Linux flier, pt.2

Just some miscellaneous thoughts relating to the flier I’m working on, and a (god save me from my own pomposity) development snapshot.

• Thought the first. We will not mention Windows or OS X at a ll. Two reasons.
  • There’s already a flier for Vista, and I think it’s sufficient.
  • More centrally, Linux can stand on its own merits. For one thing, it’s bad marketing to always go on about your competition; if you have the choice between saying something good about you and something bad about them, say something good about you, it’ll bring in more business. For another, It’s about two years past time that we quit using proprietary software as our benchmark for “success,” it’s an idea that holds us back. Free software is better, and has been for some time now. The year of Linux on the whatever was 2005.
• Thought the second. Splitting it into two mini-pamphlets as originally envisioned was dumb, and I’m not going to do it. Also two reasons.
  • I talk too much, there won’t be room.
  • I’m personally uncomfortable putting a direct “this is an ad for my business” type of ad on the same piece of paper as a “this is an ad for Linux” ad. Yes, I sell Linux to people. But I’m always a little touchy about even marginally implying any sort of synonymousness (word? not a word? Firefox says not a word) there. I sell computers, and I show people how to use them. I didn’t make this stuff, and I don’t ever want anybody to think I did.
  • Okay, three reasons. Third being, like I said, I don’t make software. I sell computers, and I help people do stuff they want to do with them, and I write some mostly pretty uninspired and usually disjointed shit about them and hope that it helps folks, but I make no bones about where my skills are and aren’t. So this is a way I can give back, doing stuff like these pamphlets and having an open creative process and releasing the results of that process as free documentation. And in that spirit I should make it a priority to design this stuff so that you, Esteemed Reader, can take it and use it for whatever endeavor you wish. You should be able to pull my logo and contact information off almost anything I post here and replace it with your own info in two minutes.

Anyway, here’s a look at the work in progress. I haven’t settled on layout, images, placement or anything, it’s just a very rough sketch and possible headers. Tear it apart, please. Comments and suggestions gladly accepted.

whylinux-brochure-snapshot2

-p.

“Why Linux?” flier, first concept draft

What, I don’t post for a couple weeks and you think it’s just another flash-in-the-pan Linux blog gone with the wind, eh? Ha.

Matter of fact, I’ve been busting my friggin’ agates over here. Just got a pile of P4 desktop that I’ve been refurbishing for sale (amongst other more devious uses, but that’s a topic for a whole other post), and I’ve been putting a lot of thought into a new run of ads. A more proper, unified campaign this time around, none of that nickel and dime shit. I’m looking at bus ads, if you believe that.

But the fliers. I’ve got plans. In the past, the whole operation was kinda clever but half-assed, lots of different 8.5×11 ads for different purposes in different spots. Which has done pretty well outdoors, but has absolutely bombed inside (coffee shops et cetera), so I’ve been kicking around how to improve my eye-catching ability in such places. The Bad Vista pamphlet was the beginning of that thought process, and it’s been doing… okay. But I’ve got a slightly bigger plan than that in terms of coffee shop visibility, and I think it’s a good one.

So here’s the thought (or at least the prerelease draft thereof). A mobile propaganda station, with copies of several different pamphlets. Something that I could tack up on a board and instead of having to come replace it every week, come refill it every couple weeks.

Remember the 8.5×11 folders you used in school, with the pockets? Think half of one of those, tacked to the wall, with pamphlets and business cards and maybe even some magnets and shit inside. This is a winner, I think, for a couple of reasons. First, I’m better at writing pamphlets, they give me more room to talk and I don’t have to worry so much about making the layout all symmetrical and color-balanced. Second, if you’re in a coffee shop, you’re not going to stand there for five minutes and read my damn flier. But if you’re sitting down and hanging out for a minute anyway, you might grab a couple pamphlets and skim them while you’re waiting for your soup.

So all that was just a really long introduction to the first pamphlet that I’m working on for this (not counting the Bad Vista one), a general “Why Linux?” piece. (Another nice thing about this idea, I can work on them one at a time, edit and revise as needed, pull pieces, add pieces, whatever I want to do.) Attached is a pdf of the concept draft. Initially, I’m thinking a Z-folded pamphlet (as opposed to the letter fold I used on the Bad Vista piece). One side will be Why Linux, three pages. Flip it over, it’s Why Guerrilla Tech, three pages. Clever, eh?

Drop me a reply if you want to see the sourcefile, I’m doing it in Scribus. As always, I invite your comments, but please keep in mind that this is a concept sketch, literally twenty minutes of thought and five minutes of typing. Okay, have at.

whylinux-brochure-concept

-p.

PS: Yes, I’m also working on part 2 of the cmus howto! Thanks for the interest in it, it’s nice to know you’re getting read!

MiniHOWTO: Save and recover full list of installed packages with dpkg

Oh, the things you catch flying by on the mailing lists! This tip comes from Ulrich Grün:

To make installation of your favoured packages more easy, you could save your list of installed packages from your old system, and then use this list for your new one:

dpkg –get-selections > list-of-installed-packages

dpkg –set-selections < list-of-installed-packages

then with aptitude with option ‘g’ or with synaptic or other packaging programme: installation of this list of packages. Maybe, an apt-get upgrade will do this as well (not tested)

One very important thing to note, as another poster in that thread brought up, is to always check the list and make sure you know what you’re doing before you use it as basis for an upgrade, especially if the list is from a different version (Gutsy to Hardy, for instance), or you could really hose yourself. But god damn, I can’t count how often I’ve looked for something like this! Thanks, Ulrich!

HOWTO: Compiling 101

Quite often, on scanning some of the more n00b-oriented forums (fora?), I will come across the perennial “I have to actually compile something?! WTFOMFG! Linux is sooo not ready for the desktop! How the hell am I supposed to perform such brain surgery?” posts. Not that I’m picking on anyone. In fact, for the bash virgins, compiling source can oft be a source of fear and frustration, and I think one of the unintended side-effects of n00b-ready distros like Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS is that the “you should never have to compile anything” mentality, while good by itself (I use aptitude for installation of new software whenever possible), ultimately is a disservice to first-time users, because a month or five down the trail they’re going to run into something that’s not in the repositories that they want, and because no one’s ever explained to them what the compiling process is and how it works, they’re going to go apeshit like the (completely fabricated) fictional n00b poster above. The following is a ten-step recipe for compling code, and found on the Kubuntu mailing list, originally posted by Luís Silva, and reprinted here with his gracious permission. May it find the eyes that need to see it most.

A tar.gz is a set of files that was first archived with tar and then
compressed with gzip. You will also often find tar.bz2. The difference being
the compression utility used, in this case bzip2. tar itself can handle them
both.

Here is how it goes:
1- Create a folder named BUILD in your /home/YourUserName (This is just to
keep your home tidy!)
2- move/copy the tar.gz into this folder
3- I suppose you have already used the command line before. If you did the
above in the command line just cd to the BUILD folder. If not, open a
terminal, type “cd” (without the “) (this is to make sure you are in your
home folder), type “cd BUILD”.
4- Now you are in the BUILD folder, you are going to unzip and untar the file:
tar vxzf yourfile.tar.gz
The “v” is for verbose, the “x” is for extract, “z” is because you have a
gziped file (you should use “j” instead if you had a tar.bz2), and the “f” is
to say that the next word is going to be your file name.
5- now you should have a new folder there. Check it with “ls -hl”
6- “cd” to the new folder.
7- Each program in source code comes with one or several scripts that perform
the actual compilation and installation for you. Typically you have
a “configure” script there. Again, check it with “ls -hl”. Run it
with “./configure”
8- If you get any errors just post them here so we can help you going through
them. If don’t just type “make”. This should compile your program.
9- If everything went as expected, and you want to install the program in your
system type “sudo make install” and enter your password when asked for it.
10- That’s it. There are surely a lot of things I omitted. If you want to know
more about each command you used (and you should be learning about these)
type ‘man command’ on the command line (replacing command by what you want to
know about.

A nice thing about kde (I assume you are using kde) is that you have man, info
and help available in konqueror. So typing man:command, info:command or
help:command in the location bar gives you help on the desired command. For a
newbie I would recommend its EXTENSIVE use.

Ok! Have fun and keep trying. Don’t stop just because something didn’t work
the first time.

That’s great advice at the end. Don’t quit on it just because you can’t figure it out right away. Maybe you’re missing a library somewhere, or the configure script is looking for something that you do have, but in an unexpected place. Keep poking, put up forum posts, trawl IRC channels. Email the author if you have to. Everything worth doing is hard and scary the first time. There’s a whole big raft of people waiting to help you. Good luck!

-pd-

Emacs tip o’ the day!

This Emacs tip brought to you by Steve Yegge!

Make Emacs prefer backward-kill-word over Backspace

Emacs Wizards try to avoid hitting the backspace key, because it’s just remote enough from home-row to be annoying. We make typing mistakes all the time, but if you type faster than about 50 wpm, it’s more economical to kill the entire word and re-type it than to painstakingly backspace to your error.

Here’s what you add to your .emacs file:

(global-set-key "\C-w" 'backward-kill-word)
(global-set-key "\C-x\C-k" 'kill-region)
(global-set-key "\C-c\C-k" 'kill-region)

Note that because Ctrl-w was already bound to kill-region, a very important command, you need to re-bind something else to kill-region. I chose Ctrl-x Ctrl-k (and its sloppiness-forgiving companion, Ctrl-c Ctrl-k), primarily because that’s the way they did it at my old company, which was filled with wise Emacs Wizards who taught me a lot of what I know. Rebinding Ctrl-x Ctrl-k means it’s no longer available for edit-kbd-macro, but you’ll use that infrequently enough that it’s not something you’ll miss having a shortcut for…

For a more in-depth look at this tip and how to use it effectively, and nine count ‘em nine more great Emacs tips, check out Stevey’s “Effective Emacs” post!

Spotlight Application: HOWTO rock better, faster, harder with cmus (Part 1 of ?)

I promised some more serious in-depth reporting now that my life has calmed down a little bit, so here we go with a walkthrough for a wonderful and underappreciated application, cmus. This post started as just a brief introduction, but as I dug into it, I realized this sucker was gonna get long. Also, although the documentation for cmus is really good, there’s a total lack of howtos for this application on the interwebs, and as Greg will tell you, we here at Guerrilla Tech are committed to caulking all the holes! (There’s a good story that goes along with that, but you know, never mind.)

So I’ve been idly looking at text-based audio players for a while, but yesterday I was sitting here playing Civ 4 on my Windows partition (I have a dual boot machine, Kubuntu/Civ 4) and was suddenly and irresistibly seized with the need to listen to some Nightwatchman right now. So I fired up the laptop and looked at some of my notes from last time I had this thought, and did a little google fishing for a non-graphical music manager. My criteria:

1. Not a player, a manager. I’m demanding when it comes to my music management software. I run Amarok on my Kubuntu desktop and gmusicbrowser on my Gnome laptop. After experimenting with just about every free software music management/jukebox application that I could find in the repositories at least once, I am convinced that these two are absolutely the best of their breed (yes, that was two plugs for the price of one, slick, eh?). Music is a large part of what I do with my computer every day, I need a program that can keep up with my listening.
2. Something with a relatively easy initial learning curve, and solid documentation. I don’t expect to master the program in half an hour (in fact, if I can master it in half an hour, it’s probably not what I’m looking for), but I should at least be playing music within half an hour.
3. .mp3, .ogg, and .flac support.
4. It must exist in the Ubuntu repositories.

Enter cmus, the c* music player. Install with sudo aptitude install cmus, fire it up with cmus, and we’re on our way. Let’s do a walkthrough, huh? (Remember, kids, for best results with any howto, always follow along in The Fabulous Manual! It’s quite comprehensive, and much of the material here was been lifted verbatim. I hope no one minds.)

Ubuntu Brainstorm

If you haven’t heard the word, there’s a new site up where you can submit your brilliant ideas for the future of Ubuntu, and vote on others’! It’s called Ubuntu Brainstorm, and I think it’s the best idea since… well, since user-friendly desktop Linux! Go check it out! Now! Quit wasting your time reading my nonsense and make your voice heard!

(Image shamelessly swiped from here.)

Dear lazyweb…

This is one of those that I’m sure I could figure out if I wasn’t so fucking busy trying to put together this presentation for Sunday.

I’m looking for a calendar synchronization solution. Here’s my setup. I have a desktop (KDE) on which I run Kontact. I have a laptop (Gnome) on which I run Thunderbird with the Lightning extension. They both pull from my nfs server (except when I’m away from home with the laptop). So my question is this: How can I get them to sync at home, and how can I automate making a local copy of the calendar on the laptop, say, every day, so that when I’m out I’m still using the same calendar, and how can I re-sync my calendars when I get home?

-pd-

HOWTO: Install _only_ KDE4 on Ubuntu 7.10

UPDATE: Please stop using this howto, it is obsolete and only being kept up for archiving purposes. The Kubuntu-KDE4 8.10 beta is out! Use it instead!

…

Yes, I know I can install KDE4 on top of KDE3.5 in Kubuntu. I know that the final release of 8.04 will have separate install discs for KDE3.5 and KDE4. But I want what I want and I want it right fuckin’ now. Here’s how I did it.

1. Install the server edition of Ubuntu 7.10. I will not detail this process here; if you don’t already know how to work with the debian-installer, don’t take it personally, but this howto is probably a little beyond you. Go forth, read the fabled manual, and come back when you’ve built your first lightsaber, young Jedi. Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.
2. Reboot, log in. Install the generic kernel. This step is not strictly necessary, but the generic kernel is optimized for low latency desktop use. What this means to you, Joe User, is that applications can pre-empt the kernel, resulting in slightly lower overall processing power, but increased desktop responsiveness. Oh, the things you learn hanging out here!-> sudo aptitude install linux-generic. _Reboot_ into the generic kernel (you’ll have to select it from the GRUB menu just this once) before moving on to step 3.
3. Remove the server kernel. -> sudo aptitude remove linux-image-2.6.22-14-generic linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.22-14-generic linux-server linux-image-server. GRUB will update itself. (Note: By the time you read this, the kernel version may have changed, in which case you’ll have to change the version number above. You can find out what kernel you’re running with -> uname -r.
4. sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list and add the line “deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main universe multiverse restricted” (no quotes)
5. sudo aptitude
6. In aptitude, press “u” to update the package list. Press “/” to bring up a search bar, and search for kde4-core. Press “+” to install. This should automatically install the x server with it, but check to make sure by searching for xserver-xorg and making sure there’s an “i” next to it. Also search for and mark kdm for installation.
7. MUY IMPORTANTE! Search for kdm-kde4 and press “-” to cancel the installation. I have a showstopper bug with kdm-kde4, wherein when kdm starts, it kills all my other ttys*, which I cannot live without. I have seen no known fix for this, and I haven’t even seen anyone else with the problem, so your mileage may vary, but you’ve been warned. After all this is said and done, press “g” to install. It’ll pull down about five million package, so if you need to go to the corner store for a pack of smokes, now’s a good time. EDIT: Okay,my ttys vanished again.kdm-kde4 is not installed, it happened after an update to xserver-xorg-video-intel. I think it may be related to this bug, but I’m not sure. I have a seperate bug report filed here. EDIT TO THE EDIT: This seems to be fixed in Feisty.
8. Reboot into KDE4! Right now, only the base KDE4 desktop is installed, but wait there’s more! First, install Adept (there isn’t a KDE4 version yet) with -> sudo aptitude install adept. Then check out extragear-plasma, kdepim-kde4, koffice-kde4, kde4-amusements, kdeadmin-kde4, kdeartwork-kde4, kdeaccessibility-kde4, kdeedu-kde4, kdegames-kde4, kdemultimedia-kde4, kdenetwork-kde4, kdegraphicskde4, and kdeutils-kde4. Etc, etc. You may just want to search for KDE4 in Adept and go down the list.
9. Enjoy!

-pd-