The Open Sourcerer » Runes and tales

SSH Sessions Timing Out?

Alan Lord — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 22:43:27 +0000

Now this might be common knowledge but it took me while searching and scratching about to find the right solution.

As many others do I’m sure, I use ssh terminal sessions a lot. I’ve often got half a dozen open at once either in separate terminals or in Terminator for example. Sometimes if I don’t update them for a reasonable length of time they simply lock up so that I have no response at all. I’ve not actually timed this issue but I expect it is happening somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes of inactivity.

After getting annoyed for the umpteenth time today I finally did some serious searching… I concluded that this lock-up is probably due to my broadband router. It wasn’t happening across the local LAN or when I was connecting from other locations so I already suspected my broadband service. I suspect that it’s a NAT cache timeout or something but that’s not really important.

Several howtos I found discussing various timeout problems suggested editing the ssh config file on the server. This is fine if you know which server(s) you will be connecting too all the time and of course if there don’t happen to be hundreds of them that you need to re-configure. But if you don’t know or do use many machines then that’s not an ideal solution at all.

I think this is though

If you haven’t already got one, make a file in your home ssh directory (on Ubuntu it is normally found in ~/.ssh):

touch ~/.ssh/config

Open it with your favourite editor and enter a line something like this:

ServerAliveInterval 120

Then save and close it. From my initial tests this seems to do the trick nicely.

According to the manual it:

Sets a timeout interval in seconds after which if no data has been received from the server, ssh(1) will send a message through the encrypted channel to request a response from the server. The default is 0, indicating that these messages will not be sent to the server, or 300 if the BatchMode option is set. This option applies to protocol version 2 only. ProtocolKeepAlives and SetupTimeOut are Debian-specific compatibility aliases for this option.

This is one of those things I should have done ages ago. I hope this help others who find their ssh sessions mysteriously hanging.

A Good Pub Guide: The White Hart, Sherington

Alan Lord — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 22:07:50 +0000

The White Hart, Sherington

If you travel around the country on business it can be a very tiresome and soul-destroying experience. Especially when you end up having to stay in one of the bland, clinical, plastic and totally soulless hotels that the TV adverts would suggest are something altogether different. I’ve never liked these places and so I do try to find interesting, more characterful lodgings to stay that are not expensive. Often the best to look out for are Pubs with accommodation.

Earlier this week, we had a bit of a road trip on our hands… A day discussing OpenERP in Cambridge and the next day vtiger CRM consulting in Milton Keynes which is not too far away, so we needed somewhere to stay to avoid driving a 200+ mile round trip.

We found a real gem of place! A very attractive country pub with extremely pleasant rooms, very friendly service, fantastic food (the Mixed Grill was really, really excellent), good beer and entertaining and congenial locals too.

If you happen to be working around the Bedford, Milton Keynes, Newport Pagnell area and want somewhere to stay, I whole-heartedly recommend you check out The White Hart in Sherington.

How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Alan Lord — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 13:18:26 +0000

sudo apt-get purge libmono* cli-common

The following packages will be REMOVED cli-common* gbrainy* libappindicator0.1-cil* libart2.0-cil* libgconf2.0-cil* libglade2.0-cil* libglib2.0-cil* libgmime2.4-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-i18n-west2.0-cil* libmono-management2.0-cil* libmono-posix2.0-cil* libmono-security2.0-cil* libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil* libmono-system2.0-cil* libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil* libndesk-dbus1.0-cil* mono-2.0-gac* mono-csharp-shell* mono-gac* mono-gmcs* mono-runtime* tomboy* 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 31 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

LibreOffice

Alan Bell — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 11:02:59 +0000

So the news yesterday was that The Document Foundation has been set up by a consortium of interested parties who are unimpressed with Oracle’s stewardship of the OpenOffice.org codebase and project. In short, the project has forked. This isn’t the first time a prominent open source project has decided as a community that the direction of a controlling company is not they way they want to go. In 2005 Mambo was an up and coming web content management system, but there were issues in the community and the strategy of the company. It forked. A foundation was set up, OpenSourceMatters and the codebase was forked into Joomla! So taking a lesson from history, what happened next to the two halves of the fork? Well I find Google Trends illustrates it rather well. Mambo is the blue line, Joomla! is the red line. If the fork had not happened would the blue line continued to a higher point today than the red line? Hard to say, in the bigger picture it looks like forking it was a setback, but it is clear that the fork managed by the foundation quickly gained more popular relevance (and no, this is not very scientific) than the one managed by a single company.

Lets have a look at OpenOffice.org vs LibreOffice. Clearly not much on the chart yet for LibreOffice except for a media spike at the end, it will be interesting to look at this chart in a year or so and see when the red line crosses the blue line.

PCs with Compulsorily Bundled Software Should Be Outlawed

Alan Lord — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:59:21 +0000

The Windows Tax

I’ve written about the Microsoft Tax many times before and have even had a minor success with regards to getting it refunded.

Now a fellow Open Source blogger and businessman, Dr Adrian Steel of Mercian Labels, is trying, so far without luck, to get the cost of an unwanted Windows License refunded from a company called Fonestop Ltd. He’s kindly providing an ongoing record of the correspondence between himself and the supplier whilst he seeks a fair refund for the software that he does not want nor require.

This example goes a long way to indicate why the bundling of software and hardware in this way is so wrong. It is incredibly hard to buy a computer in the UK that is not already infected with an inefficient, outdated, expensive, bloated and, still alarmingly, insecure operating system called Microsoft^® Windows^™. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to get even a partial refund due to the updated terms in the EULA that comes with version 7 of the OS (you can read most of the license agreements here):

By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, contact the manufacturer or installer to determine its return policy. You must comply with that policy, which might limit your rights or require you to return the entire system on which the software is installed.

In earlier versions the statement about returning the entire system was not there. Here’s what the Vista EULA said:

By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, contact the manufacturer or installer to determine their return policy for a refund or credit.

Reading Adrian’s struggle to get back the money that is rightfully his makes me quite angry. There are plenty of computer users that do not want or need Windows software when they buy a new computer. Even if they are not aware of the great Free Software operating systems such as Ubuntu or Fedora or many others, they probably already have a perfectly legal and valid CD of Windows in a drawer or cupboard anyway. Even I have a legal and valid Windows XP CD in my office; not that it ever gets used nowadays…

So what’s to be done? I really feel like starting some kind of campaign to get the lawmakers here and across the EU to make this kind of practice illegal. I as a consumer should be able to select and buy any computer I like and decide for myself if I wish to pay for a pre-installed operating system or not. That should be a choice I am free to make. Currently, apart from a few very brave and admirable vendors, I do not have this choice. And now it’s even harder to obtain a refund due to the change in the wording of Microsoft’s EULA.

These Brave and Admirable vendors deserve a mention:

Brave because I’m sure that they will come under pressure from businesses like Microsoft to bundle their software and conform to the way that they want you to sell Computers.
Admirable because they are standing up for something which is good and noble and may not be the most profitable course for their company to take.

As many of you know we started a website some time ago called Naked Computers to track these Brave and Admirable suppliers around the world. It’s been useful to many but it has been quite quiet recently and it could definitely do with a revamp to make it look more appealing (any WordPress Theme designers fancy knocking up a new look and feel for the site?).

In the UK there is one computer supplier that, in my humble opinion, should be applauded for their attitude: Novatech. I think that every machine they sell from their website or retail outlets are offered with or without an Operating System; it’s your choice. It’s quite interesting to look on their site and see just how expensive Windows really is: ~£70 to ~£800 or more!

Recently I noticed Novatech making a few noises on Twitter and I commented positively on their approach to selling naked computers. This was their reply to me:

@opensourcerer Thanks for recommending us, we sell all systems without operating systems as we like to give our customers a choice.

So come on you lot! Let’s try and come up with a plan, ideas and suggestions as to how to go about fixing this problem once and for all… Our company, The Open Learning Centre can host a wiki or something if needed but please use the comments here to start the ball rolling.

Are there any lawyers out there who fancy a challenge? Want to fight for Freedom and allow consumers to make their own choice rather than be forced to pay for something they frequently neither need nor want?

Finally, for those naive souls who believe that an EULA gives you some protection or guarantees, think again…

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

Alan Lord — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:30:41 +0000

Monogenea

Monogeneans are ectoparasites, meaning they live on the surface of their host’s body (as opposed to inside of it) and feed mainly on mucus and other detritus. To ensure they do not lose grip of their host, Monogeneans have very highly developed attachment appendages such as suction devices, pincers, hooks or spines. Most species require only one host to complete their life cycle and they are mostly hermaphroditic. Monogeneans are a type of Platyhelminthe (flatworm) and as such have only one “opening” where food is ingested and any waste is expelled.

OK, that’s enough of a biology lesson. If you are reading this then you probably know why you are here already.

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

The other applications expunged by removing Mono from the default Desktop installation are the same as last year: F-Spot and Tomboy.

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.

Fun with Gwibber themes

Alan Bell — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:44:02 +0000

In order to be fully buzzword compliant, all conference type gatherings in this web 2.0 social media age now have a compulsory twitter tag and live twitter projected display. Oggcamp (which, I would just like to mention, The Open Learning Centre is sponsoring) is no exception to this rule, but being all about Free culture needs to incorporate identi.ca (or status.net) dents alongside the tweets. The best way to do this is to leverage (I have a buzzword for every situation) the existing technology and make Gwibber fit for the purpose of projecting a continuous stream following a hash tag at a conference. The first thing it needs is a full screen mode. I have hacked one in, but it needs a bit of improvement, some more bits really need to be hidden when in presentation mode. The next thing I wanted to do was give each of the various hashtag pipelines (or “hash pipes” as I like to call them) it’s own theme. This bit was tricky as the search query isn’t currently available to the theme engine. I asked the upstream developers for a bit of guidance at this point and within 15 minutes of me explaining what I wanted to do I was given a new patch by segphault that exposes the search query to the theme.

So now I have a nearly finished Oggcamp theme which adapts when it sees you searching for #oggcamp, #ubuntu, #lo, #shotofjaq or #uupc. If I missed out any interesting hashtags then do let me know. Screenshot below is it running fullscreen on my 2048×1152 monitor. In reality it would be tracking two of them on a 1024×768 projector, but this shows all the hash pipe themes together, click to go large.

I will be pushing up a bzr branch of all this so you can play with it in the comfort of your own home or your own conference. If you have further suggestions, or want to help tweak it a bit more, then give me a shout in the comments.

Ubuntu Rebranding

Alan Bell — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:12:00 +0000

We have known for quite a while that aubergine was likely to be the new brown and this week the new look for Ubuntu has been shown for the first time. Here is the new logo, complete with the white on orange circle of friends image.

So what colour is that exactly? I copied the logo into the Gimp and used the eye dropper tool to pick out the orange from the circle of friends. The top set of three sliders show the hue as a location round the colour wheel in degrees, saturation and value are basically the amount of white and black added to it. So this orange lives at 23 degrees.

Now lets take a look at the aubergine that makes an appearance as a solid colour on the startup screen.

Using the same trick in the Gimp we can see that the aubergine is a dark shade of the hue at 323 degrees, exactly 60 degrees apart from the orange. Relationships between colours on the wheel tell you whether colours will go together or clash. I have to admit to not actually understanding this aesthetically, but I like the numbers behind it all. I expect 60 degrees mean they go together jolly well.

So what does this branding mean for us? Well it is aiming to provide a more professional and enterprise feel to Ubuntu, which is exactly what we want. It also means we have rather a lot of printed leaflets with an Ubuntu solution provider logo that is going out of fashion soon, we will have to get them out in front of customers as soon as possible!

The comings and goings of the partner repo

Alan Bell — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:52:15 +0000

The comments in the previous post raised an interesting question about the Ubuntu/Canonical partner repository. What exactly is in it for the various releases? Did Zimbra ever get in? Well the repos are all publicly available so we can go see. Here are the contents of the partner repo from Dapper to Lucid. Caveats are that there could have been stuff in at a point in time that have subsequently been removed and Lucid is not released yet so the list there is rather more suspect than the others. I also don’t know when things were added to each distro, it could be that packages have been incrementally added to Hardy as it is the current Long Term Support release, maybe the Lucid list will grow over time, maybe a bunch of those Hardy packages will go in to Lucid as it is the next LTS release. What does it all mean? I don’t know. What do you think?

The Zimbra story is interesting. It isn’t in the list below, but as Jef Spaleta points out, the Zimbra desktop package for Hardy is in the pool. I, for one, am puzzled by this.

Dapper 6.06
db2exc
desktopsecure
realplay
sugarcrm
Edgy 6.10
nothing at all
Feisty 7.04
nothing at all
Gutsy 7.10
nothing at all
Hardy 8.04
wasce-server
parallels-modules-2.6.24-19-server
parallels-modules-2.6.24-19-generic
parallels-modules-2.6.24-18-server
parallels-modules-2.6.24-18-generic
adobe-flashplugin
informix-csdk
gstreamer0.10-fluendo-plugins-wmv-doc
gstreamer0.10-fluendo-plugins-doc
pdvd-doc
parallels-modules-2.6.24-25-server
parallels-modules-2.6.24-25-generic
parallels-modules
parallels
symphony
skype-mid
parallels-modules-2.6.24-24-server
parallels-modules-2.6.24-24-generic
informix-oat
informix-ids
informix-license
informix-pdo
ibm-gsk7bas
db2exc
informix-ids-demo
arkwui
arkppostgres
arkpmysql
arkpldap
arkobk
acroread
zarafa-webaccess-muc
zarafa-webaccess-mobile
zarafa-webaccess
zarafa-licensed
zarafa-libs
zarafa-dev
zarafa-dbg
zarafa
Intrepid 8.10
adobe-flashplugin
gstreamer0.10-fluendo-plugins-wmv-doc
gstreamer0.10-fluendo-plugins-doc
pdvd-doc
symphony
skype-mid
acroread
Jaunty 9.04
accountz-baz
adobe-flashplugin
symphony
alfresco-pdf2swf
alfresco-community
openbravo-erp
skype-mid
acroread
Karmic 9.10
adobe-flashplugin
uex
symphony
accountz-baz
acroread
Lucid 10.04
adobe-flashplugin
acroread

Using Facebook XMPP chat on Ubuntu

Alan Bell — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:47:41 +0000

The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. Hi everyone, my name is Alan and I do have a Facebook account. There, done it. Feels better already.
I don’t use it that much, and frankly I find it a little disturbing the way it mixes up all your friends, family and work contacts so they all talk to each other. But this isn’t a post about my insecurities and paranoid delusions. No, it is a post about Ubuntu and XMPP. Facebook now does XMPP, which is an instant messaging protocol also known as Jabber. It is the same thing Google talk uses and the same thing that the most awesome OLPC XO uses for communication.

First up you need to set a facebook username up. Log on to facebook and go to your account settings page. Set your username if you haven’t already. I chose alanbelltolc, to match my twitter and identi.ca names. Now I think you have to log out of facebook and back in – this ~~might not be~~ appears to be a necessary step.
Now run Empathy, Applications-Internet-Empathy Instant Messenger.
Press F4 or go to Edit-Accounts in the Empathy menu.
Press the Add button and choose Jabber from the dropdown list of account types.
Press the Create button.
Your login ID is username@chat.facebook.com – we think it prefers all lower case
Your password is your facebook password
Now make sure the account is enabled (checkbox next to the account name on the left)
It may ask you if you want to let it save your password in the gnome keyring at this point.
Make yourself available and the names and pictures of both of your friends should appear!

The account setting dialog as you go through the setup:

You can chat with your friends

You even get lovely libnotify popups like this one >>

Update
If you want to try it out on someone please feel free to find me on Facebook and . . . um what is the verb? XMPP me? Jab me? Next up I will have to take Debian off my OLPC, put Sugar back on and try and get Sugar to use Facebook as a back end.