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Open Source is good for the environment!I’m sure it is really - less travel by big executives, less massive conferences, fewer gadgets given away at trade fairs, just less environmental waste basically. But here is a brilliant idea to help make your linux powered computer use less power: www.lesswatts.org I’ll be following this site closely - I’m sure it will be useful for my home server project :-). Tell Someone Else!
       OpenOffice.org Market Share Numbers (What’s up in the UK?)I found this link via a post on the OO.o marketing mailing list this morning. The figures that follow are probably nowhere near complete either. We know that in Holland they are moving the whole of the Amsterdam administration over to Open Source and I’m certain that there will be many more companies and public bodies that either: haven’t seen this list and know that they can contribute, or are simply not allowed to. If you know of any one using OO.o in their business, public agency or wherever else, encourage them to get it on this list! There are some pretty amazing numbers on there, showing some very large installations of OpenOffce.org. But what really grabbed my attention was some of the European statistics:
Now something is surely very wrong here… France and Spain are using, close to, a million (878,750) copies of Open Office. That’s got to be several hundred million pounds worth of license fees they aren’t paying to M$. And not just once, either. That’ll be every three years or so I guess. If our government wasn’t so in bed with M$ we could probably have built a couple of new hospitals, or a dozen or so new schools with that kind of money… Jeeez, this makes me really angry. What a WOFM. (Waste Of [insert famous anglo-saxon adjective here] Money) Tell Someone Else!
Untangle, Asterisk PBX and File Server; All-in-One. Part 5If you’ve been following the story so far you’ll now where I am. If you haven’t, please go back to Part 1 and read from there. I’ve been a bit busy recently so haven’t had as much time as I’d like to crack on with this. However, I’ve actually come to a bit of a halt regarding Untangle due to the kernel… I managed to get the initial Rake (Ruby’s Make) build scripts to run to completion on my LFS-6.3 system :-). For those who are interested, after editing some of the Rake files for hard-coded environment variables, I had to drop down to the last version 5 release of the JDK. Version 6 is not supported due to the issues mentioned in part 4 of this series. After the build completed, trying to run Untangle caused it to barf badly. But I wasn’t surprised by this. I hadn’t installed Postgresql, and I discovered I was missing a setting in my kernel config ( After some dialogue on their mailing lists, it became clear that the build process was not going to be as simple as I’d first thought. The current version of Untangle (5.0.2) uses a very heavily patched Debian kernel (2.6.16-ck11). The method they use for patching relies on some debian tools which, seeing as I am building on LFS, I don’t have - nor do I really want.
When I have some more time to concentrate, I’ll try and work out what is really needed and see if I can patch my recent 2.6.22.5 kernel. They are developing a new release of Untangle (5.1) which may well give me what I need anyway; the ability to run other apps on the same platform and a more modern kernel version. Watch this space… In the meantime, I have managed to get Asterisk installed. It’s a fairly straightforward CMMI (configure, make, make install) install for the needed packages (in build order): zaptel-1.4.5.1 drivers for the x100p card, asterisk-1.4.11 and asterisk-addons-1.4.2. Configuring asterisk however is another ball game entirely. It is fairly complicated and involves a steep learning curve. Although thankfully, there are plenty of resources available on-line. I strongly recommend to get the Creative Commons Licensed O’Reilly book from 2005: Asterisk - The Future of Telephony which is widely available on-line and is an excellent resource. Also, there are lots of good blogs In addition, you will almost certainly need a SIP phone of some description. I’m currently using the Ekiga softphone as it is open source and happily runs on Ubuntu (it’s gnome based). It was originally called GnomeMeeting. I can now make and receive calls locally between the Asterisk server and my PSTN line. Next is to try and get it work over a NAT’ed firewall to Alan Bell’s (my business partner) Asterisk server. Using IAX2 (Inter-Asterisk Exchange protocol) seems the way to ge here as it was specifically designed to use a single IP port, as opposed to SIP that uses independent ports (and potentially many of them) for connection management (UDP) and actual call data (RDP). Using SIP requires you to open up hundreds, if not thousands, of ports on your firewall. More reading and learning to follow. Laterz… Tell Someone Else!
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