Going Headless

I have one monitor on my desk, quite a nice one, but only one. Right now I want to install Ubuntu Lucid on another desktop I have in the office, but I still want to use my monitor for other stuff (like writing this blog post). No problem, Ubuntu has an accessible installer, I just plug in the speakers and keyboard and go through it with audio, lets see how it goes.

Firstly I remember there is something on the Lucid installer about pressing the keyboard to get to the accessible install, but then what? And when do you press stuff? No cheating and plugging in the monitor, but I am allowed to Google for instructions on my other PC.

Apparently the process is

Press space every 3-4 seconds, several times, then enter, then
F5, then 3, then enter

hmm, ok. That sucks a bit. How about a beep or something at the point when I am supposed to interrupt it? Bonus points for playing a soundfile telling me what to press for an audio install. Anyhow, I seem to have missed the opportunity to press space, it seems to have done some stuff and now stopped. Lets reboot and try again.

Just realised I was looking at the CD activity light, to see what it was doing in the bootup process, that is cheating so I turned it round so I can’t see that (I could hear the heads moving too and feel the vibrations, but clues from lights are not allowed in this experiment.)

OK, booting again, lets hope I hit the magic moment . . .

. . . silence.

Really not sure what is happening here, did I miss it? Have I waited long enough? Is it going to tell me what to do next? Is it sat waiting for me to plug in a monitor. I have no idea.

Can’t feel or hear any activity from the CD any more, left it a few more minutes. Hit return and it started doing stuff. I think I must have missed the accessible install and it was sat at the normal live cd/installer option. Lets give it another go.

Rebooted, now pressing space every few seconds. The CD stopped spinning, maybe it is time now. Enter, F5, 3, Enter . . .

. . . . silence.

Enter again perhaps? Yes, it is doing something now. I wonder what.

CD stopped spinning, no sound at all.

OK, time to cheat a bit and plug in the monitor hopefully when I understand the process I will be able to do it without cheating.

Plugging the monitor in doesn’t power up the monitor and show me the display, presumably it didn’t set up X properly without monitor resolution information.

Right, cheating totally from the start I understand it a bit better, the instructions I googled were wrong, missing an extra enter on the end. Rebooting and lets do it without the monitor.

Power on

Count to 15 from the bios beep (your hardware may vary)

Press space. This goes to the boot menu from previous releases, starting with the language selection.

Press enter to select English (presume you could go up and down to get accessible installs in different languages, but not testing that right now)

Press F5 for Acccessible installation options

Press 3 to highlight the third item in the list which is “screen reader”

Press Enter to choose the highlighted option

Press Enter to start the live CD.

Wait in a silence broken only by the sound of the fan and the CD doing stuff.

. . . nothing

Not really enjoying this any more.

So does it really need a monitor plugged in to do an audio install? Why the heck would I bother with a monitor if I couldn’t see? Why couldn’t it tell me that it has failed because it needs a monitor?

OK, I borrowed the monitor from the kids computer in the playroom and plugged it in, but put it face down on the floor.

Count to 15 and we are off again . . .

Yay, jungle drums. Seems that monitor is essential.

“Welcome to Orca, starting Orca preferences”

“Tab list, general page”

WHAT???

It seems to have dumped me in the Orca preferences page, which goes on forever, with no guidance at all on how to do the install or use Orca? (and anyhow “Welcome to Orca” – didn’t I just start “Ubuntu” did I get the wrong CD?)

up and down seem to let me choose between desktop and laptop – but I think that is an Orca thing, not an install thing.

Tab seems to let me go through a bunch of preference options, but I really have not much idea what preferences I want, I assume the defaults are OK. I wonder if Enter will just select the defaults and let me get on with using the live CD?

“Return Checked” hmm OK

Because I kind of know what I am doing, lets try alt+F2 to run an application

Yup, that works, and I am going to run gedit

After a few spurious audio messages about the orca preferences window, but then gedit was running, I managed to type a little document and save it.

lets browse the applications menu, Alt+F1

yes, that makes sense, I went to the Internet menu, then over to Firefox.

Spurious audio about other windows that are open, then it loads Firefox and tells me there is no internet connection (which there isn’t)

Lets try to actually get to the installer now. I don’t know how to click the icon on the desktop, but I know it is in the menus somewhere, Alt+F1 gets me to the Applications menu, Right to System menu, down twice to the administration menu, right gets me to computer janitor, down to disk utility, down again gparted, again to hardware drivers, once more to Install Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. hmm, that was burried deep. Enter.

“Install frame, Step 1 of 7, Quit Button Forward Button”

hmm, OK. Lets try enter on the forward button. Wonder what else was on that page?

“Install frame, panel”

err, what?

Up and down seems to be a country list, selecting United Kingdom. Enter.

“Window menu”

I seem to be in some other kind of list, might be timezones. I found Europe, then I think I ended up in Belgium, or perhaps the Indian Ocean. Really not sure what is going on there. Tabbed a few times and found the forward button.

ah, now the keyboard

apparently it has suggested one for me, but doesn’t tell me what one it is.

tab gets me into the test box, and shift 3 is # rather than £ so it got the wrong keyboard, shift tab to get back to the selector radio button, I can choose my own, or have it guess. Lets see if it can guess. Tab, “Guess button”, lets press that with space.

Nope that didn’t really work, it didn’t read out the keys it wanted me to press.

Managed to get to the manual selection and find the UK keyboard. and test, shift 3 is now “pound” tabbed to the forward button and lets see what happens next.

OK, this is the partitioning tab, starting to get the hang of the radio buttons now, erasing and using the entire disk. and moving forward.

“What is your name, Text” Tab

passwords are funny, it echos “asterisk” for each keypress

filled out the form without much difficulty

“read only text”

hmm, ok, well read it to me then!

I can’t read the summary, but I can tab to the forward button.

Focus switched back to the Orca preferences window for a second then to the installation progress bar. It should have finished asking me questions now.

While it is doing the install lets think about some conclusions from this experiment.

THIS SUCKS.

And now some more constructive recommendations for improvement.

• Add some help text to the install process, use a really basic command line sound playing application, not a text to speech thing, just something that can play a wav or ogg file with very few dependencies such as aplay. Initally get it to play “press A for an audio install” then just do the boot to the desktop without going through any other menus.
• Get X to start without a monitor and assume something like a 1024×768 desktop, or play a clip when X fails saying “You need to turn the computer on with a monitor plugged in to start the desktop”. Giving no feedback is terrible.

Right, the install has just finished and I am rebooting.

• On booting to the desktop play some text (possibly through the text to speech engine) describing how to operate Orca.
• Tell the user to press Alt+F1 to get to the menu
• Tell the user how to kick off the installer
• Get Orca to read out more of the text on the installer pages.

OK, it has rebooted, and Orca has started, I feared it wouldn’t so this is a good thing.

I have logged in as me. yay.

oh back to the Orca preferences window. boo.

Well the plan for this was to neatly do an install, by using the audio install to save me having to use a monitor, thereby proving that this bit of accessibility technology is a handy tool for everyone to use. In the event I discovered that the accessible install is hard to get to and barely fit for purpose, but I don’t think it is beyond rescue, it just needs to give the user more advice and feedback on what it is doing. If you have a few minutes and a spare computer please have a go at reproducing my little experiment. Put that monitor on the floor or wear a blindfold and install Ubuntu. I can genuinely imagine this being a really useful process on a headless server in a rack with just a set of headphones and a USB keyboard, if only it worked a bit better.

If you want to help make Ubuntu more awesome for everyone who at some point in their life might find an audio install a handy utility then please come and join the Ubuntu Accessibility team .

• Mailing List – ubuntu-accessibility AT lists.ubuntu.com (subscribe) and ubuntu-accessibility-devel AT lists.ubuntu.com (subscribe)
• IRC – #ubuntu-accessibility on freenode
• Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility
• Forum http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=145

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Why Windows still has good sales figures

16:27:12		Alan	Initial Question/Comment: I can’t find your laptops with Ubuntu installed
16:27:23		System	You are now being connected to an agent. Thank you for using Dell Chat
16:27:23		System	Connected with Makrand_Karante
16:27:23		Makrand_Karante	Thank you for contacting Dell sales chat. This is Makrand Karante,your Sales Advisor. In order to Help you better can you provide me with your email address and Telephone number incase we get Disconnected I can either come back to you by phone or email.
16:27:39		Alan	hello
16:27:50		Alan	I am looking for laptops running Ubuntu
16:27:53		Makrand_Karante	Hi Alan
16:28:03		Makrand_Karante	we do not have that option available yet
16:28:15		Alan	oh
16:28:32		Alan	when will they be available, I don’t want Windows at all
16:28:53		Makrand_Karante	we do not have the related information here
16:29:36		Alan	that is a bit of a shame, I will have to go somewhere else to get a laptop then
16:29:53		Makrand_Karante	is there any thing else that I may assist you with today?
16:30:07		Alan	well not really. I just wanted a laptop running Ubuntu.
16:30:19		Alan	Do you have any without an operating system at all?
16:30:28		Makrand_Karante	I am afraid no
16:30:36		Alan	oh
16:31:23		Alan	so if I want a laptop from Dell I have to buy windows
16:31:58		Makrand_Karante	Yes
16:32:12		Alan	ok, thanks for your help
16:32:29		Makrand_Karante	Thank you for contacting Dell Sales Chat and allowing me the opportunity to assist you. Have a wonderful Day ahead.
16:33:25		System	The session has ended!

If you are tempted to go ask similar questions of the Dell online chat thing then go right ahead with the following conditions:
1) You must take a credit card out of your purse/wallet, rest it on your keyboard and be totally prepared to use it, if they find you a suitable laptop.
2) Do it once, don’t repeatedly bother them.
3) Be polite and respectful, the Code of Conduct applies.

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Profile Roulette

One of the great things about the online community is the speed at which an idea can spread. Barry Smyth, a member of the local community team in Ireland who is working on a masters degree in computing is looking at ways to improve community involvement as a part of his course. He came up with the idea of focusing on one member each day in order to help everyone get to know each other better through a profile of the day project. This seems like a fine idea, so we have picked it up in the UK LoCo and added a few extra twists. In order to document stuff you do relating to Ubuntu everyone can create their own personal page on the Ubuntu Wiki, mine is here so you can see the sort of stuff that goes on it. People can edit other people’s pages if they want, it is a wiki after all. If you like something that someone has done, you can leave them a testimonial on their wiki page. These are looked at when people apply to be an Ubuntu Member or go for a position on any of the various governance boards and committees in the community.

We have now launched Profile Roulette!

This is a game that everyone can play, you can subscribe to the Profile Roulette page to get an email each time the wheel spins, every day it will point to the personal wiki page of someone in the UK LoCo. You can see who the person of the day is, maybe you would like to leave them a testimonial or help them fix up their wiki page in some way. If you want to be on the page then what you have to do is create your personal wiki page (just go to wiki.ubuntu.com/YourName and create a new page there) and at the bottom of the page add the text:

 ----

[[CategoryUKTeamProfile]]

Then when the Profile Roulette wheel spins it might be your turn under the spotlight, don’t forget to subscribe to the Profile Roulette page so you get notified when it is your turn.

If any other LoCo teams want to join in then please feel free to give me a shout in the #ubuntu-locoteams IRC channel on Freenode if you want some help setting up the wiki pages. Once you have got it set up, do add a link to it on the Irish team Profile of the Day page, it helps us find them all and will also help Barry with his degree.

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Ubuntu In Business

The Ubuntu UK community and Canonical, the commercial sponsors of Ubuntu, would like to invite you to a very different type of IT event. The Ubuntu operating system for the desktop and server has made significant inroads into UK businesses over the last 5 years. Often it is driven there by the enthusiasm of individuals from the community who use Ubuntu for their personal computing and see the advantages it can bring to the workplace. This event gives those advocates an opportunity to introduce their colleagues to Ubuntu, Canonical, Partners, community experts and their fellow IT professionals. Attendees will learn how Ubuntu is being deployed in the UK and discover how they can introduce or extend this technology safely and effectively within their organisation.

All are welcome, but if you already count yourself as an Ubuntu user, please drag along a colleague who has yet to see the light!

1pm – Welcome

An introduction to Ubuntu and our community.

1.20 – Ubuntu in action

A selection of case studies of companies using Ubuntu to enhance their business.
Oxford Archaeology

Chris Puttick, Chief Information Officer, will explain how one of the largest independent archaeology and heritage practices in Europe, with over 400 specialist staff, took the strategic decision to adopt an open source infrastructure with Ubuntu at the heart of it.

Emphony Technologies

A start-up software company producing engineering project management and workflow tools decided to deploy Ubuntu as its infrastructure, find out how they got on and their plans for the future.

1.40 – Open Mic

Ubuntu partners and community members (perhaps including you!) tell us how they use Ubuntu in a business context. There will be 5 minute slots with strict timekeeping!

2.15 – Demonstrations, food and networking

Grab some nibbles and see a selection of demonstrations and hands on workshops featuring:

• Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (Amazon EC2 compatible cloud computing wherever you want it)
• Landscape Systems Management for Ubuntu
• Ubuntu Server Edition
• Social Media for the workplace with WordPress and Ubuntu
• Quick, cheap, easy, low-risk and fun ways to get started with Ubuntu
• Ingres, an enterprise class open source database
• Alfresco document and content management

4.00 – Ubuntu Advantage

The new services from Canonical designed to give your business an edge in its open source strategy.

4.15 – Panel Discussion

A panel with members drawn from Canonical, partners and the community chaired by author and journalist Glyn Moody and loosely following the theme of “The Benefits and Pitfalls of an Open Source Strategy”.

5.00 – Late

Attendees are encouraged to stay on, sample an Ubuntini at the bar, have a chat and enjoy the comedy night hosted by the venue itself.

Your nearest Tube is Aldgate East

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I Wanna Eurovision on my Lucid

You Rock ‘N Roll kids may think Eurovision has been lost and forgotten, but actually it is unstoppable. Maybe it is a habit you are trying to quit, to which I say: what’s another year? You may be making your mind up about how you want to watch it and I would like to help in everyway that I can to get you watching on Ubuntu.
You can visit my number one Eurovision website where you can watch the show live, it requires a special plugin which takes you on a bit of a wild dance across the internet to the Octoshape site where you can download what they call a plugin. The instructions tell you to chmod +x the downloaded file and run it in a terminal, this works fine and you have to accept the EULA (just shut your eyes, say la la la and type “yes”). As far as I can make out the plugin is a peer to peer streamer, a bit like skype or bittorrent, it is downloading stuff from the central site and streaming it out again to other Divas in your vicinity. It then re-serves the stream locally to all kinds of everything, to the flash applet on the website or to mplayer or vlc. To stream to the flash applet, just run ./OctoshapeClient with no parameters and hit play on the applet. To run it in mplayer first make sure you have mplayer installed and run ./OctoshapeClient -url:octoshape:EBU.esc2010.semi2 (the URL will change for the final, that one should get you all the boom bang-a-bang of the second semi-final) and mplayer will pop up (it executed mplayer -nocache http://127.0.0.1:6498/ms2/1274825307308/0MediaPlayer+0+/octoshape+h+EBU.esc2010.semi1/EBUesc2010semi1 on my machine so you can see it pointing mplayer at the locally served stream). If you want to use VLC there is a FAQ about editing the settings.xml file to get it to execute VLC instead. I assume you could point any other media player or transcoder/recorder at that stream and control it like a puppet on a string.

Lets all get together on the 29th on Freenode IRC channel #eurovision for an evening of europop, yes that sounds good to me.

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How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx [Updated]

Monogenea

To remove Mono from your shiny new desktop installation of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx enter the following command (after taking the usual precautions like backups of your data etc):

sudo apt-get purge libmono* libgdiplus cli-common libglitz-glx1 libglitz1

[UPDATE: Many thanks to Directhex who pointed out my error regarding the need to remove libsqlite0. I've removed it from the command above. He also requested (you can see in his comment below), that I mention that the mononono package is no longer particularly effective at preventing Mono from being installed. Thanks for the prompt Jo, I was going to but I just forgot.]

This is almost the same one as used for the Karmic Koala release (9.10), and for me the result of the above command was as follows:

The following packages will be REMOVED
cli-common* f-spot* gbrainy* libart2.0-cil* libflickrnet2.2-cil* libgconf2.0-cil* libgdiplus* libglade2.0-cil* libglib2.0-cil* libglitz-glx1* libglitz1* libgmime2.4-cil* libgnome-keyring1.0-cil* libgnome-vfs2.0-cil*
libgnome2.24-cil* libgnomepanel2.24-cil* libgtk2.0-cil* liblaunchpad-integration1.0-cil* libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil* libmono-addins0.2-cil* libmono-cairo2.0-cil* libmono-corlib2.0-cil* libmono-data-tds2.0-cil* libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil* libmono-posix2.0-cil* libmono-security2.0-cil* libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil* libmono-sqlite2.0-cil* libmono-system-data2.0-cil* libmono-system-runtime2.0-cil* libmono-system-web2.0-cil* libmono-system2.0-cil* libmono2.0-cil* libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil* libndesk-dbus1.0-cil* libnunit2.4-cil* mono-2.0-gac* mono-gac* mono-runtime* tomboy*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 40 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 49.8MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

I chose to accept this and proceeded. Of course YMMV so please check carefully before hitting that enter key. The purge switch of this command removes any configuration files as well as the packages themselves.

Compared to Ubuntu 9.10, in 10.04 there appears to be just one new Mono dependant application called gbrainy (in the Games menu) which is described thus: “a platform to train memory, arithmetical and logical capabilities with many sorts of different exercises of different difficulty levels”.

Unfortunately it appears as though the “training” objective of gbrainy might not be realised…

Over the last year or so, the BBC have carried out an experiment which examined “brain trainer” games. Subsequent analysis of the data found that these brain trainers are an empty promise as reported here in The Guardian:

Practising brain-training games will improve your performance on brain-training games, but that effect will not transfer to other aspects of brain function. They will not make you brainier, so you may as well just pootle around on the internet.

It seems that not much grey matter will be lost by removing the gbrainy package then

Gnote and Getting Things Gnome

For a very similar alternative to Tomboy try Gnote, and as I like task-related management too I also recommend the excellent GTG [Getting Things Gnome] application. To install these two simply type: sudo apt-get install gnote gtg.

The alternative for F-Spot I usually use is a combination of gthumb and Gimp, the latter of which has been removed from the default Lucid desktop install to make space for other things. Both of these applications can be easily installed by a simple sudo apt-get install gthumb gimp command. However there is now a new kid on the block which looks quite exciting called shotwell. Shotwell will be the default camera/image app in the forthcoming Fedora 13 distribution replacing gthumb (as it has no dependencies on Mono in the default desktop installation). It is also, I was pleased to discover, available in the main Lucid repository so can be installed using either the command line: sudo apt-get install shotwell or you can use the very easy and graphically attractive Ubuntu Software Centre (as you can for the other applications listed above also). This is how Fedora describe Shotwell in the preliminary release notes:

Shotwell is an open source photo organizer designed for the GNOME desktop environment and has replaced Gthumb by default in Fedora 13. It supports the following features:

• import photos from any digital camera supported by gPhoto
• automatically organize events containing photos taken at the same time
• use tags to organize your photo collection
• edit non-destructively when altering photos, without ruining originals or using disk space for each copy
• publish photos to Facebook, Flickr or Picasa
• one-click auto-enhancement
• rotate, mirror, and crop photos
• reduce red-eye and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of your photos
• edit any photo, even if it’s not imported to the Shotwell library

I haven’t used Shotwell yet but it sounds like a good one to try out.

There you have it and hopefully that will be it for another 6 months on this subject.

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