The Open Sourcerer

How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

As this was such a popular How To for Hardy Heron, I thought I’d document the same exercise for Ubuntu’s latest version Intrepid Ibex (8.10).

With a default install of Ubuntu Desktop 8.10, there are quite a few mono packages installed as standard. In fact there seem to be quite lot really (I counted 28!), especially considering they are only there to support two fairly minor applications: Tomboy and F-Spot. Although the good news is that Intrepid Ibex comes with one less Mono application than did Hardy; which also included Banshee.

If you type the command dpkg -l '*mono*' you will get a list that looks something like this:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Cfg-files/Unpacked/Failed-cfg/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version        Description
+++-==============-==============-=============================
ii  libmono-addins 0.3.1-5        GTK# frontend library for Mono.Addins
ii  libmono-addins 0.3.1-5        addin framework for extensible CLI applicati
ii  libmono-cairo1 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono Cairo library
ii  libmono-cairo2 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono Cairo library
ii  libmono-corlib 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono core library (1.0)
ii  libmono-corlib 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono core library (2.0)
ii  libmono-data-t 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono Data library
ii  libmono-data-t 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono Data Library
un  libmono-dev    <none>         (no description available)
ii  libmono-i18n1. 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono I18N libraries (1.0)
ii  libmono-i18n2. 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono I18N libraries (2.0)
ii  libmono-securi 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono Security library
ii  libmono-securi 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono Security library
ii  libmono-sharpz 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono SharpZipLib library
ii  libmono-sharpz 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono SharpZipLib library
ii  libmono-sqlite 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono Sqlite library
ii  libmono-system 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono System.Data library
ii  libmono-system 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono System.Data Library
ii  libmono-system 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono System.Web library
ii  libmono-system 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono System.Web Library
ii  libmono-system 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono System libraries (1.0)
ii  libmono-system 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono System libraries (2.0)
un  libmono-winfor <none>         (no description available)
un  libmono-winfor <none>         (no description available)
ii  libmono0       1.9.1+dfsg-4ub libraries for the Mono JIT
ii  libmono1.0-cil 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono libraries (1.0)
ii  libmono2.0-cil 1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono libraries (2.0)
un  mono-classlib- <none>         (no description available)
un  mono-classlib- <none>         (no description available)
un  mono-classlib- <none>         (no description available)
un  mono-classlib- <none>         (no description available)
ii  mono-common    1.9.1+dfsg-4ub common files for Mono
ii  mono-gac       1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono GAC tool
ii  mono-jit       1.9.1+dfsg-4ub fast CLI JIT/AOT compiler for Mono
ii  mono-runtime   1.9.1+dfsg-4ub Mono runtime
un  mono-utils     <none>         (no description available)
un  monodoc-gtk2.0 <none>         (no description available)

Fortunately, the dependency management tools mean that we don’t have to remove each one of these files on it’s own. The single package mono-common is a common dependency for everything above apart from libmono0.

So the command to purge yourself of all the Microsoft infected software is as follows:

sudo apt-get remove --purge mono-common libmono0

This command will remove almost 60MB of crap from your hard drive and free you from eternal damnation and suffering. Well, OK. Perhaps it’s not quite that bad, but I personally have no wish to use software that is so tainted. Nor for that matter do I want to use code that is so tightly bound to a company that, amongst other things, manages to screw us all out of significant tax revenues.

There are several alternatives for the two minor applications that we have just removed. For F-Spot, I recommend using the gThumb application which basically does the same thing, and in fact is better in my opinion as I found it easy to set it automatically remove the photos from my camera when it copies them across. Something I never managed to work out how to do when I tried F-Spot.

To install gThumb simply type:

sudo apt-get install gthumb.

If you want gThumb to start automatically when you plug in your camera, or other removable storage media with photos on, open Nautilus (the Gnome file manager), go to the Edit menu and select the Preferences option. On the File Manager Preferences dialogue window, select the Media tab and then change the option next to Photos: so it says “Open gThumb Image Viewer”.

For the note taking app, there are several alternatives. I have used Zim in the past which is very good, and I have also recently started using Notecase just as a comparison. There are others too. I recommend that you try a few and find one that suits you.

The Sourcerer’s 1st Apprentice?

I received an email the other day from a self-acclaimed apprentice. Rather than trying to comment or analyse Ben’s learnings to date, I’ll leave Ben to speak for himself and you to make up your own minds…

Greetings!  And thank you for a most entertaining and informative site.

I am rambling towards a serious point.  Children’s computing and affordable online security using Linux.  A  grandchild called Gabriel features,  with his ‘new’ sixth birthday ruggedised laptop.  More of this later on.

I cannot claim the title of sourcerer -  one day, maybe.

But even apprentices can get lucky, especially if they persevere.  This apprentice is an old Unix enthusiast from 1981, constrained to use MS in the name of conformity by employers and clients alike.  Retired now!

I even paid good money for the Mark Williams Company’s “Coherent” clone of UNIX, way back when.  Excellent, great fun, but it had to go when the then employer wanted their Compaq  back.  Then time rolled by, and the opportunity passed.  <sigh>

But….
……. for the last couple of years we have been free, yes, free I say!

It started with an AMD desktop  box with SuSE 10 that smoked XP when running X-Plane (we used this as a CAD tool for aircraft design verification).  35% faster on the same box.   Wow!  Meant we could save the money for a new box for another year, maybe two. That was a significant saving.

OK, it was ‘fun’ getting the drivers sorted for OpenGL, but we had help. That was one of the great revelations – the amazing amount of help one can find – often faster and better informed than mainstream OS support.

Then we discovered that far from needing to keep  SuSE 10 offline in order to protect our main earning tool from online nasties, it was more than capable of protecting itself, and updated itself smoothly and effectively when connected. No more Norton! No more AdAware!   It just works!  Wow.

By pure apprentice-style experimentation – we had found out that we could telnet into our cheapo  Actiontec ADSL WiFi router, and that once logged in this way we had a prompt that read:    root#_

Our router/firewall was a Linux engine running Busybox.  About the size of a pack of cigarillos, and not much more costly.  Amazing. The impact this had on me was immediate. Curiosity was ON.

After some careful study the vanilla SuSE 10 installation defences turned out to be even  harder than our firewall box!
This is obvious to many, but it was a big happy surprise for us. If there is one thing I hate it is the drudge of updating and running malware scanners and such.  Too cheap to go for the paid option, and had some nasty surprises from the big name vendors too.

A quick trawl around had me downloading ISOs and burning CDs and trying out live distros and then installing them pretty much at random.  Ubuntu really appealed – and Xubuntu was installed on the old Tosh laptop, still running today.  Fabulous forums.

I have got used to Evolution, and swear by Bogofilter – works better on our industrial quantities of spam than SpamAssassin.

My wife enjoys computer games – but guess what? after raiding the Ubuntu repositories and making sure that OpenGL was good to go, the variety and quality of the sort of games that she prefers was judged hugely superior to that on Windows. By her.

So she won the Toshiba, and we put Ubuntu 7.10 on her desktop too. She says repeatedly that the Linux desktop is far more user friendly because :  “…. it is easier to go back, and not get stuck”

So far, so ordinary.  Family discovers free software. Yawn. But there must be many parents faced with what follows….

More distant family members had a problem – young Gabriel had been increasingly monopolising his family computer for over a year, and he was approaching his sixth birthday.  Not a lot of money around, so choice was limited.  Given the size of his room a laptop was ideal, but the price? Laptops can be delicate, too.

A few keyboards had already been ‘disabled’ on his family desktop, and cheaply replaced, but laptop keyboards can be hard to obtain as well as pricey.  Good hardware was critical to a good result.

A used Itronix GoBook was the answer, found on eBay at around 55 quid depending on spec, fully ruggedised, water resistant keys, solid alloy case, and tough as old boots. We  bought a couple.

They work OK, and run surprisingly long on the ancient batteries, over 3 hours with light use.  Not bad for 2001 hardware.

The OS supplied was Windows 2000, a variant of Windows NT and the CPU fitted to these was panting under Norton 07;   AVG not a lot better.  So Windows web access was disabled, and
Xubuntu 8.04 installed in another partition.

Xubuntu’s  significantly lighter weight  XFCE desktop was just light enough for the Pentium III running 700 MHz (divided by 2 remember, that’s 350 MHz in real money), but it was still
a bit slow loading – well the HDD is slow, so fair enough. We can live with that.

Once tweaked up, we had Batman wallpaper and sound theme, with the compositor in XFCE giving a good imitation of Aeroglass ™ on less cpu than my Palm.  Amazing.  Gabriel was suitably stunned, and even his computer-savvy older brother was impressed.

More to the point he had a proven OS that is more immune to nasties than the best maintained Windows machine we have seen, and since all the software is from the Ubuntu repositories, no fiddly admin intervention is required to update weekly.

His mother need never worry about updating a raft of nagware; Firefox is as well-blocked against unsuitable sites as anything else available – and all in free software!  The total cost of ownership of this laptop is what we paid for it.  No annual Symantec tax, no long hours (add it up annually) updating things to protect Windows from its own inadequacies.

For a single mum, that time is priceless, not to mention the money.

With Gcompris and stacks of Linux  educational software on board, Gabriel has a machine that is (hopefully) good for the rest of his time at first school. He can learn/use Windows 2K if he wants to, but without the risk of connecting Windows to the internet.  The Win drivers have
been ‘got at’ .

And thanks to the Batman wallpaper/sounds, it has ultimate cred with his school-friends.  No problems there, then.  A rugged OS that has street cred, educational value and is hardened against attack at no ongoing cost in time or money – all at the popular price.

The last word should be Gabriel’s – whilst staring at the BSOD on a Win system he said with the gnomic aplomb of the young:-

“Mine doesn’t do that…. this computer is  bad.”

All the best, Ben Mullett

PS
We are big fans of Knoppix and DSL – they work so well at their intended tasks, and Puppy Linux is remarkable – VestaPup and MacPup are particularly good fun.

PPS
Gabriel will doubtless wish to update his wallpaper/theme eventually, and then we have the fun of showing him how…..

Many thanks for the great email Ben. You don’t sound like much of an apprentice to me; more like an “old hand”. I think you have passed with distinctions and may consider yourself a Sourcerer (there’s no formal exam or certificate – enthusiasm and passion are what really count)! And I’m certain Gabriel will be sure to follow in his Grandad’s footsteps 🙂

Your comment about Firefox,

… Firefox is as well-blocked against unsuitable sites as anything else available – and all in free software!

is amazingly poigniant at the moment as the debate rolls on as to just how “Free” Firefox really is. But the sentiment is sound.

Please point Gabriel to this post – I’m sure he will be delighted to read about his computing activities on-line… If you wish, send me a picture of the laptop (and/or Gabriel or yourself) and I’ll add it to this post so we can all see; a ruggedised and water-resistant PIII lappy running Xubuntu sounds cooler than Iceland!

Building your own PC…

My regular desktop computer, Twoflower*, that I use for work and play is dying… 🙁

Twoflower is pretty old now by PC terms and is becoming quite unreliable. I built it about 4 or 5 years ago I guess, although I can’t remember exactly when, and it has been a good workhorse until quite recently. But the time has finally come to move on.

I like building my own PCs and find it can also be a very cost effective way to get exactly the PC you want and, of course, you don’t have to pay the Microsoft Tax either. So, after planning and reading for a couple of months or so, I have just ordered the new bits which will come together to create Lobsang*.

I’m not a “gamer” so I don’t need a heavy duty graphics card or excessive cooling, but I do tend to run a lot of apps at the same time and some of them are quite “hungry”: Eclipse, VirtualBox Virtual Machines, Inkscape, Gimp, OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird & Lightning with as many email accounts and CalDAV calendars as I have, and Firefox with usually a dozen or so tabs open at one time and perhaps further instances of Firefox running too. I’ve also often got a remote X sessions running to a development server as well.

So, it was important to me that I built a PC that is pretty quick, can be expanded easily and will – again – hopefully last me for a good few years.

Here is my shopping list:

The notable items on here I would say are:

• Power Supply – It is a really important part of your system. A cheap “no-name” PSU gives you unstable voltages that will lead to operational and reliability problems, crap cabling which restricts airflow, inefficiency so you just waste money making heat and they can be surprisingly noisy. The reviews I read lead me to choose either this Corsair model or a 450W unit from “Be Quiet”.
• The Asrock Motherboard – This was probably the hardest component to choose. I don’t need a top-end mobo that will overclock like a wild thing, but I did want one that would provide me with a decent platform and will allow some level of growth. This board looked to be just about right and very well priced for an Intel LGA775 board. It supports DDR3 (up to 4GB) as well as DDR2 (up to 8GB) memory and will run any of the latest generation Core2 dual and quad core processors including the most recent 45nm designs.
• The Processor – I was, until quite recently, going to go for the outstanding Q6600 65nm Quad core chip but having read some more recent reviews it seems as though the newer 45nm designs are much more efficient and yet more powerful. In most review tests, this dual core E8400 outperforms the Q6600 device and has about half the power consumption. There are certain times when 4 cores are better, but seeing as I’ve happily lived with just one up until now I think two will be just fine!
• No Operating System – I will, of course, be installing a Free and Open Source OS and that will almost certainly be Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.1. In fact I am planning to have a spare partition or two so I can install other OS’s too.

The rest of the items are nothing too special. I am very fond of Samsung drives and have used them for many years now. They are usually very quiet, fast, reliable and are excellent value. The graphics card is a passively cooled device that will be very fine for Compiz and the minimal other 3D requirements I have. I wanted a new case as my current PC’s case is terrible. It was cheap, looked it too and is really noisy with quite a few 80mm fans churning away constantly. This new Antec Three Hundred case looks much better, has bigger 120mm and 140mm fans (that turn slower and thus make less noise) and has better cable management so air should flow well and is quite capacious so I have room to expand too.

My main source of knowledge for this lot comes from the excellent Custom PC Magazine. Although it is heavily geared toward gamers and high end systems, their no-nonsense reviews and technical features are the best I have come across, and I’ve been reading computer magazines virtually since they first appeared. When Custom PC review a product, if it is crap they really say so. There never seems to be any of the “polite excuses” or bias toward particular suppliers or vendors – unless they make really good gear that is. My only gripes with it are I’d like it to cover more Media and power efficiency topics and feature more Open Source software. Perhaps I should suggest some articles…

For the supplier of the bits, I have gone to Scan Computers. I have used them several times before and have no complaints at all. They have a great reputation for service and they do tend to have the best prices too. Hopefully the bits will be here by the weekend, just in time for my 10th Wedding Anniversary, so how much actually ends up getting assembled before next week remains to be seen…

For this blog, I’ll take some pictures of the bits before, during and after assembly and run through the way I put together a new PC. It isn’t terribly hard and is very satisfying when it’s finished.

Update: I’ve written two articles covering the build process. Part 1 is here.

* All the computers in our house are named after characters from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. So far I have used: Rincewind, Mort, Binky, Moist, Angua, Twoflower, Gladys and Vimes.

And you want ID Cards??? (More on Number 10)

This is quite amazing stuff really. You just couldn’t make up a better story.

The Number 10 website fiasco just keeps going.

New Media Maze, that “Full Service New Media Agency”, look to have really screwed up. Not only have they nicked a free WordPress template and removed the attribution and removed the license, but it seems the site itself is actually full of bugs and errors too.

Dizzy Thinks has found some lovely errors and a strange chap called “Adam Test”… ROTFL.

And when you’ve finished rolling around on the floor laughing take a look at this research on The Rouseabout to see what a little more digging throws up: (I’ll give you a clue: 404s).

Honestly, if this is what we get for £100,000 of taxpayer’s money from New Media Maze then, quite frankly, I’m glad I hadn’t heard of them before.

How much are the Gov. going to spend on our ID card database? The one that nobody wants. Do you trust them to get it right? Nahhh.

And Glyn Moody discovered a little known government project to build a “massive central silo for all UK communications data…”.

It’s at times like these that I fall on my virtual knees and bless the cyber-gods that ensure every single major UK government project is a complete and utter failure, so this doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever working properly. Phew.

PLEASE!!!! Someone take these huge IT projects out of the Government’s hands! They are so crap at it our whole lives will end up on Facebook if we aren’t careful… Oh, most already are.

All we need now is for Microshaft to come rolling along spouting off about how much better the site would have been if they’d spent the money on Blog Server 2008 running on Windoors 2010 with Sequal Server 2012… or whatever crap it is they are pushing this week.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Linux can save us

Here is a most excellent article in which Steven explains, in simple terms, why it makes really good business sense to dump Microsoft and use Linux and OpenOffice.org. It is so obvious, even the M$ Fanboy should be able understand it…

It’s time to give up our Microsoft habit. We used to be able to afford to pay the Microsoft tax. Those days are done.

The hard days ahead are the days when we need to make the most of what we have and that means Linux. If we, and our businesses, are to make it through the great depression of the 21st century, we must start moving to Linux today.

I recommend you read it through, there’s some really simple and compelling arguments in there. And then read the comments.

Freedom of Information Act: Microsoft Rules O.K.

One of my favourite commentators on the Open Source phenomenon is Glyn Moody. And today he has clarified something I had been struggling with for a couple of days now.

The story in question, from The Inquirer, is basically this:

Becta refused to satisfy a Freedom of Information request made by the INQUIRER for details of the latest Microsoft schools megadeal, “after consultation with Microsoft.”

Which is pretty bad really. We are talking about Taxpayers’ (that’s you and me friend) money here. Why should we not be allowed to know what our beloved Government is spending with a US Software company on our children’s behalf? And don’t forget that it’s a company that has been convicted of monopolistic and anti-competitive practices, so it should be even more important we know what we are giving them. Shouldn’t it?

Well, on the face of it I bought the argument from Becta that goes:

If Becta, a UK government quango, published details of schools’ Microsoft spending, it “could give rise to an actionable breach of confidence by Microsoft against us,” it said. This was a “considerable risk”, it added.

And further, plausibly stated:

Becta said there could also be repercussions in disclosure for itself: “We have concluded that disclosure of any part of the MOU would prejudice the commercial interests of Becta and of schools throughout the UK because the significant savings achieved under the MOU would be put at risk,” it said. “We believe that our future negotiating position with Microsoft would be weakened and we would not be confident of our continuing ability to obtain the best deal possible for those UK schools that choose to purchase Microsoft products,” it added.

If we ignore the fact that the Microsoft products are pretty crap, and they aren’t really the right thing for education to be using in the first place, I can sort of understand the bit about their negotiating position – if they know no better.

But I wasn’t totally convinced… Something was niggling at the back of my mind as to why this is really bad…

Enter Glyn:

I do realise that it’s too much to hope that Becta will take open source seriously, but I wonder if it has ever crossed Becta’s chosen minds that putting themselves in this position of snivelling dependence on Microsoft isn’t actually the optimum way to get the best deal for UK schools – even for those benighted enough to want to bathe their charges in the delicate glow of BSODs. Has it ever occurred to them that if they started negotiating from a position of dignity and strength, rather than abject, supine servitude, they might just possibly do their job a teensy-weensy bit better?

Microsoft is scared witless by the prospect of open source getting a foothold in schools, and would agree to any deal rather than let the UK education system discover the power and value of free software. Becta is actually in an incredibly strong position, and yet somehow manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The idea that “our future negotiating position with Microsoft would be weakened” if it dared to cross Masher Microsoft, as it has claimed to The Inquirer, is simply risible, and shows how desperately out of touch it is with the realities of the marketplace. The sooner this particular quango is abolished, and decisions are made locally, the better.

Ouch!

Thanks for clearing that up Glyn 😉