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-

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.

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!

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!

Here’s the spring barter list! Let’s make a deal!

• A quality bike trailer
• General bike knowledge (I need to learn how to fix this thing myself, it’s costing me a damn fortune)
• Accounting/small business administration and startup knowledge (help me file my DBA and all that rot)
• Shelving and storage of varying sizes for varying parts, from video cards up to minitowers and CRT monitors
• Interior design expertise. If you can come in here and put together an organizational scheme that lasts me more than a month, as far as I’m concerned that’s better than money.
• A flatscreen monitor or two

From now on I’m going to post a barter list in the middle of every month. I think barter is great business. I mean, what’s money other than a middleman? If I have a $THING_0 you need, and you have $THING_1 that I need, why would I instead take money and then go try to find $THING_1 somewhere else? Wasted effort and wasted capital. So drop a line or give a call if you can bring me anything on this hit list and you’re the market for our services, we will work something out. I always take staples; food, bulk whole bean coffee, cigarettes, etc. will pretty much always be accepted as payment.

Okay, this was hard as hell for me to figure out, but once I did, it was appallingly easy, so I want to put this out there in case anyone else stumbles over it in the future. See the logo at the top of my page with the fist and the monitor? The original image of the monitor is a black image that I found in the “openclipart” package (which is chock full of fun stuff, btw, sudo aptitude install openclipart). Yesterday I was fucking with my business card layout, and I wanted to turn that monitor into a white image with a black outline so I can superimpose my text on it. Here’s how to do it.

Using the color select tool, I select the monitor. Ctrl-C Ctrl-V to make a copy of it as another layer. Flood fill that layer with white, then scale it down by a few pixels. Viola, a white monitor with a black outline!

It’s one of those things that if you’re not savvy, it takes you an hour to wrap your head around but once you do, you’re like, “Oh shit I’m an idiot!” So maybe this post can save someone else the embarrassment

-pd-

It’s been quite a while since I posted something that was actually Guerrilla Tech-related, so much so that I’ve gotten a few emails asking me what’s going on. So here’s an update.

The day job’s been absolutely off-the-handle insane, and it’s occupied damn near every conscious moment for the last month and a half. But that’s okay, I planned for that, and the cash influx has been very welcome. Now that the anarchy at the office has begun to abate, I’ve been able to start returning my focus to Guerrilla Tech.

The Bad Vista campaign, of course, continues, and now that the weather’s turning and my bike’s fixed, pamphleteering shall once again proceed. I’m also working on getting a more traditional flier together with the same content, for hanging at bus stops and lampposts.

Also, in addition to the money that the day job’s been bringing in, I received a small-medium sized grant last week, and I’ve been kicking around ideas for how to spend it. There will be some local newspaper ads in the offing, I’m in the market for a cheap bike trailer, perhaps a new demo laptop (maybe a Cloudbook, they look damn nice and I feel that it’s an idea I should support). It’s funny, I’ve become so accustomed to running this show on zero dollars, that now that I’ve got a little cash to throw at it I’m almost at a loss as to how to spend it. If you ever have the opportunity to have this problem, I highly recommend it.

And that’s where we’re at. Waiting on a bolt of inspiration for the next bold stroke. Stay tuned.

-pd-

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-

Dear America,

Have you all forgotten that our current sitting president thinks God told him to fucking invade Iraq?! And now you all decide to get worried about people’s religions? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!

Your pal,
Pete

I broke a thousand hits last week, by the way. It’s actually kind of embarrassing, because the huge majority of them (about 800) are for the KDE4 howto I posted last month which was obsolete three weeks after I wrote (and spent a ridiculous amount of time on) it. But hey, if out of those 800 people (probably way less, the WordPress stats count hits, not visitors) I managed to reel in 25 regular readers, I’m fuckin’ thrilled. So, yeah. That’s neat, huh?

Today 1000 blog hits, tomorrow the world…

-pd-