Continue reading »]]> One of my hobbies is motorcycling. I have travelled extensively by bike in central and southern europe over many years, but oddly, I have never visited scotland before. I intend rectifying that shortly. When travelling in europe I have always made do with the excellent Michelin range of 1/1000000 (1 cm to 10 km) maps. These maps are of sufficient detail to aid serious navigation and they also fold quite neatly to fit in a motorcycle tank bag top. Never before have I felt the need of a GPS satnav device.

My wife, however, has a TomTom in her car and I noted that the device has two distinct advantages over a static map. Firstly it is immensely useful in the “last 5 mile stage” when you are hunting for a B&B in an unfamilar town, and secondly (of most use when in trouble) it has a “where am I” function that pinpoints location so that you can give your co-ordinates to a rescue service. This latter function is reassuring to someone travelling alone (or to someone left behind by someone travelling alone). So, since I shall be travelling alone in Scotland over some wild and windy expanses where the weather is notoriously less predictably friendly than it is in southern europe at this time of year, I saw the sense in getting a satnav. I bought a garmin (small, light and cheap). Mine even came with a free lifetime subscription to map updates. The device itself is a doddle to set up and works very well. But it has a fatal design flaw – all software and map updates assume that you have a microsoft windows or apple OSX desktop at home. Well, guess what. I don’t.

The garmin update mechanism uses a plugin to IE, firefox, safari or chrome. But only if you are using a “compatible” operating system. No matter how hard I tried to fool the site using a user agent switcher I couldn’t get the plugin to work. I even tried using wine (which according to one or two sites on-line) should have worked, but no, garmin refused to play ball. I can happily mount the satnav as a removable drive on my linux desktop so copying maps (or even software) to the device should be easy.

Now this is more than just a little irritating. I have paid for a device with a “lifetime map update licence”. But I can’t update the maps without a PC running a particular OS. I’m pretty sure that garmin satnavs run a version of embedded linux so the company cannot pretend they have no linux expertise. Worse, they can produce a plugin for OSX machines (which is BSD based) but not something which is debian based.

Garmin, I am disappointed. And annoyed as hell.

Continue reading »]]> Some time ago my wife bought me a Sansa Sandisk Clip+ music player. When she asked me “what kind of MP3 player” I would like, I specifically specified the Clip+ because it could handle ogg vorbis encoded audio files. All my audio disks are encoded in this format. Picky I know, but there you go.

The version she bought me was the 8 GB Black which comes with (you guessed it) 8 GB of internal storage – sufficient for a fair number of audio tracks. But this version also has a microSDHC slot which will take a maximum of another 32 GB. That should enable me to carry most of my music collection (which currently runs to around 47 GB) if I cut out some of the obvious duplicates and exclude some of my more embarrassing ’70s choices. The device is small, neat and light and also has a pretty good battery life.

But Sansa have not been entirely honest in their advertising. Sure, the device will accept additional storage, but it is largely unusable. Once you get past around 6 or 7 GB on the internal storage and even as little as 3 or 4 GB on the additional card, the device is not capable of building its database of the collection. The symptom is pretty obvious. As soon as you disconnect the Clip+ from the USB connection used to transfer files (and incidentally to charge the device) the display shows “Refreshing your media” and a progress bar which slowly fills from left to right. If you only use the internal storage, there is no problem, but as soon as you get past the 3 or 4 GB additional store on the external card, the clip+ will sit there, refreshing away, for hour after hour if you let it.

Even after a firmware upgrade, the device wouldn’t do what it was supposed to, so I turned to the FLOSS community yet again. This time in the shape of rockbox.

Rockbox is a free, open source jukebox utility which runs on a wide variety of devices. The website provides detailed instructions on how to install and use rockbox and even comes with an installer for most operating systems so that you don’t have to get your hands dirty installing it manually. Most impressive of all however, is that the rockbox firmware can be installed alongside the original player’s firmware without danger of bricking the device. If you find that you don’t like rockbox (and what’s not to like about a free product that outperforms the paid for original?) you can still boot into the original firmware because rockbox provides a dual boot facility. And if you really don’t like it, then you can simply remove it and go back to using the original.

Thoroughly recommended.

Continue reading »]]> I have recently moved my bank current and short term savings accounts. Partly this is a political statement in support of the move your money campaign, and partly because I feel that my money might actually be a bit safer (if only slightly) in a small UK Mutual than with the UK arm of a large Spanish Bank. However, my reason for mentioning this here is that the move gave me the opportunity to compare the on-line mechanisms of both my old and new providers and it also got me thinking again about the way I actually do my on-line banking.

As you would expect, I do all my on-line financial transactions from my linux desktop. Given the prevalence of sophisticated banking trojans (PDF file) such as ZeuS, I really don’t see how anyone could comfortably use a windows based machine, even one fully patched, with up to date virus protection and firewall in place. But I go further than just using my desktop, I actually only log on from a second desktop within a virtualbox VM. Further, the browser I use in that VM is as stripped of functionality as is possible (no addons, no plugins, defaults to block cookies etc.) and only ever connects to my bank(s) and no other sites. Unfortunately, the banks insist on cookies and javascript so I have to enable those selectively.

The thinking here is that my browser is the least secure (and probably most targeted) application on my desktop. So if I use a browser which I know has not connected to anything other than the two or three financial sites I trust, I should be relatively safe. Shouldn’t I? (OK, DNS poisoning could have redirected the browser to fake sites, but you get the drift I’m sure). And the best way to be sure that the browser I use is nailed down, and uncorrupted, is to run that browser from a separate machine. However, separate physical machines are expensive and it is tedious to have to fire up another box just to handle my banking when I could do it all from a VM.

But if my main desktop is already compromised (with say a key logger) how safe am I? One of the nice features of virtualbox is its ability to capture both the keyboard and the mouse automatically whenever the guest OS is in focus. For example, on starting a new guest OS, virtualbox says “You have the auto capture keyboard option turned on. This will cause the VM to automatically capture the keyboard every time the VM window is activated and make it unavailable to other applications running on your host machine.” So theoretically, all keypresses will be intercepted by virtualbox and will be invisible to the underlying host OS and its applications. But does this apply to a keylogger trojan already in the host OS? I guess that depends on the trojan and where within the complex stack of kernel, kernel modules, virtualbox and applications it actually hooks itself. But after revisiting and pondering upon my previous assumptions during the move of my accounts, I can’t help feeling that my (rather elaborate) security mechanisms are actually no more than a nice warm security blanket.

But they do make me feel safer…..

Continue reading »]]> A slightly breathless new post over at omgubuntu proudly boasts that the market share of Linux on the desktop jumped “from 0.96% in January 2011 to 1.41% by the year’s end.” (That could equally be be written as a close to 50% rise in Linux’ popularity). No doubt this will scare the pants off Steve Ballmer.

I can’t help being amused by the comments below this post which run like this:

1. Thanks to Unity!

2. Despite unity.

3. Despite unity & gnome shell.

4. Thanks to gnome & despite unity.

5. Thanks to Ubuntu.

6. Thanks to Linux Mint.

This sort of united, combined front in opposition to proprietary software is exactly what will drive free software to say, oh around 2% of the desktop.

Continue reading »]]> Or “tails” if you prefer, is a live CD/USB distribution based on debian which aims to help you preserve your privacy and anonymity when out and about. As the home website says, tails helps you to:

• use the Internet anonymously almost anywhere you go and on any computer:
  all connections to the Internet are forced to go through the Tor network;
• leave no trace on the computer you’re using unless you ask it explicitly;
• use state-of-the-art cryptographic tools to encrypt your files, email and instant messaging.

This is a good thing (TM).

I already have a system at home which allows me to use the tor network whenever I want to be anonymous, but tails allows me to do the same thing when I’m away from that setup. I like the idea so much that I now provide a mirror for the tails distribution to complement my tor exit node. Every little helps.

Continue reading »]]> OK, yes, I know there are probably already a gazillion web pages on the ‘net explaining exactly how to do this, but I got caught out by a silly gotcha when I tried to do this a couple of days ago, so I thought I’d post a note.

Firstly, X is not exactly a secure protocol, nor is it easy to filter at NAT firewalls, so the ability to tunnel it over ssh is hugely welcome. In fact, ssh can be used to tunnel practically any other protocol you care to name, so it should be your first port of call should you wish to connect to a remote system using an insecure protocol. (I use it to wrap rsync for example).

I don’t run X on my VMs (there is no need, they don’t run desktop software) and I had not previously seen the need to run X based graphical programs on those servers. However, a couple of days ago I thought it would be really useful to run etherape on one particular remote server so that I could watch the traffic patterns. Normally I use iptraf (which is ncurses based) when I want to monitor network traffic in real time, but etherape is pretty cool and gives a nice graphical view of your network connections. But it runs on an X based gui.

So. I changed the remote server’s sshd_config to enable X forwarding (“X11Forwarding no” becomes “X11Forwarding yes”) and restarted sshd. On my desktop I similarly changed my local ssh_config file to allow X forwarding (“ForwardX11 no” becomes “ForwardX11 yes”) to obviate the need to use the -X switch on the command line. I then installed etherape on the remote server and fired it up only to get the message “Error: no display specified”. Sure enough “echo $DISPLAY” showed nothing. But I had thought (and everything I had read confirmed) that ssh should take care of setting the appropriate display when X11 forwarding was set.

So I then tried setting a display manually (export DISPLAY=localhost:10.0 on the remote server) and then got the response “Error: cannot open display: localhost:10.0″. So, still no deal. I spent some time scratching my head (and reading man pages) and sent off a query to my local Linux User group in parallel asking for advice. They were gentle with me.

The first, and rapid, response, said:

On the server:

sudo apt-get install xauth

Then disconnect and reconnect the client.

Jobs a good un.

Thank you Brett.

So the moral is, make sure that you have X authorisation working properly on the remote system (check for the existence of $HOME/.Xauthority) if you experience the same symptoms I did.

Continue reading »]]> The reaction to Ubuntu’s move to Unity seems to be getting wider coverage. Over at LWN, Bruce Byfield blogged recently about the rift between the Ubuntu developers and its users. In particular he highlights Tal Liron’s entry to the Ubuntu launchpad bug wiki under bug number 882274. In that entry, entitled “Community engagement is broken” Liron gently rebukes the developers for their apparent lack of enegagement with the community, saying:

“The bug is easy to reproduce: open a Launchpad bug about how Unity breaks a common usage pattern, and you get a “won’t fix” status and then radio silence. The results of this bug are what seems to be a sizable community of disgruntled, dismayed and disappointed users, who go on to spread their discontent and ill will.”

Both Liron’s bug entry (and the subsequent commentary) and Byfield’s analysis of that discussion bear reading. I found myself frustrated by the obvious lack of understanding of (and impatience with) Liron’s position apparent in Mark Shuttleworth’s responses. Byfield concludes that:

“[Suttleworth] sounds impatient, resorting to personal attacks and invoking his personal authority or the necessities of design or standard practice instead of offering explanations. At times, he seems to address issues that at best approximate what others in the discussion are saying. Exactly why this change has happened is uncertain, but it adds a sting to Shuttleworth’s once-humorous title of Benevolent Dictator for Life.”

Meanwhile, over at El Reg, Liam Proven offers his analysis of the Ubuntu upheaval. In that article, Proven describes the differences between GNOME 3, GNOME 2 and Unity and explains how these changes (or more properly, the management of these changes) have led to the difficulties now facing a wide range of users. Proven concludes:

“Ubuntu is gambling that Unity will attract floods of new Linux users in such numbers as to outweigh those abandoning it for its spin-offs and rivals. If it’s correct, then Ubuntu will continue its rise to near-total dominance of the Linux desktop. But if it’s wrong, it will leave the Linux world more fragmented than ever.”

In my view Ubuntu (or more precisely Canonical and Shuttleworth himself) is wrong and will regret this decision not to properly engage with its user base. I don’t blame them for changing the desktop, after all, the GNOME developers have forced that change upon them. But I do agree strongly with Liron’s position. Ubuntu could do well to listen more.

And in a nice summary of Xfce, Scott Gilbertson today explains why previous GNOME users are moving to that desktop in the wake of the GNOME 3 and Unity changes. It seems I’m in the company of a growing number of other users.

Continue reading »]]> After exploring the alternatives to Ubuntu, I finally settled on Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) running Xfce as the desktop. I am now Ubuntu free and have a desktop that looks the way /I/ want it to look rather than the way some design nut wants it to look. I am also hopeful that the desktop will stay that way in future.

My main desktop now looks like this:

and my netbook looks like this:

(click on either image to get full sized views)

I chose LMDE rather than Xubuntu partly out of pique with the way Canonical is taking Ubuntu, and partly out of a genuine desire to move to a distro which is closer to the ideals of the FOSS community which Ubuntu used to espouse and which Debian always has done. For me, LMDE now offers the best compromise between a truly useable modern desktop (with all that implies for proprietary codecs) and the purity and stability of Debian. I know where things are in Debian and I much prefer the Debian package manager to RPM (which immediately rules out Fedora or SUSE). Having now spent some time playing with Xfce I find myself surprised that I didn’t move to it much earlier. It is clean, relatively lightweight, fast and eminently configurable.

On my main desktop machine (which is running the 64 bit version to take full advantage of the 8 Gig of RAM I have installed) everything works as it should – even the dreaded flash (yes, I occasionally watch youtube). On the netbook (32 bit version) everything except the RHS card reader works. Hot plugging works on the left, and the right /will/ work if there is an SD card in place on boot. (But no, I /still/ can’t read Sony memory sticks. I have sort of given up on that now anyway since I no longer use the PSP to watch videos.)

Now to convert my wife.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve used Ubuntu on my desktops/laptops and netbook for some time now. I think my first installation was 6.06 (the version 6.04 which was late by two months) and my desktops currently all run 10.04 LTS. I got over the minor irritation of the move of the window control buttons from the top right to the top left (a la Mac OSX). But I disliked the first version of 10.10 I tried on the netbook (sporting an early version the unity desktop) so much I quickly switched that back to to 10.04.

I have used the LTS versions of Ubuntu because, in my view, it provides the best trade off between bleeding edge and stability. I’m a huge fan of Debian and use it on my servers and slugs, but Debian is too conservative (and too purist about non-free software such as multimedia codecs) to make it a truly attractive OS for the modern desktop without a lot of additional work. So, the fact that Ubuntu was based on Debian, but with a rather faster release schedule and added usability has made it an obvious choice for some time. And it has become hugely popular. It still ranks number one at distrowatch and there are many other distributions which are based upon it. But Canonical have been taking some controversial decisions of late, many of which have split the user base.

After trialling the unity desktop on the netbook edition in Ubutu 10.10, Canonical merged the netbook and desktop versions into one with 11.04. This meant that users upgrading from an earlier (GNOME based) version were suddenly faced with a radically different looking desktop. The GNOME desktop (called Ubuntu classic) was still available as a fallback from unity in 11.04, but from the latest release (11.10) this is no longer the case, instead you get a 2D version of unity. So, you have unity or you have a worse version of unity.

Ubuntu may be using the GNOME libraries (and it is now using the GNOME 3 libraries rather than those for GNOME 2 as it did when unity was first launched) but many people, myself included, cannot understand why Canonical did not simply work with the GNOME project on version 3. But Canonical have form here. As a company they have been criticised many times in the past for taking rather too much from the FOSS community and not putting enough back. Without Debian, Ubuntu would never have existed. Ian Murdock (the “ian” in Debian) himself expressed concern some time ago that the Ubuntu codebase could diverge too much from Debian unless Canonical developers pushed changes back into the upstream projects. Furthermore, unlike companies such as Intel and Redhat, Canonical developers seem to be almost entirely absent from the linux kernel development community. An interesting, indeed almost comical, statistic emerged recently showing that Microsoft was the fifth most productive contributor to the Linux 3.0 kernel behind only Redhat, Intel, Novell and IBM respectively. As admin magazine notes however, this position owes much to the fact that Microsoft employee K. Y. Srinivasan made 343 changes. Most of those changes were to clean up the code implementing a driver for Hyper-V virtualization. But this is just a statistical blip – I fully expect Microsoft to drop out of the top five, or even top twenty five, shortly.

Canonical also got into a spot of bother when they ditched the GNOME audio player Rhythmbox in favour of Banshee. Rythmbox is decidedly “free software” and links users to free music downloads from Jamendo and paid for music from Magnatune, whilst Banshee looks far more commercially oriented (it linked to Amazon’s MP3 store for downloads in mid 2010 and Canonical used it to link to its own Ubuntu One music store in the 11.04 release. Such decisions can upset people (and make Canonical begin to look like Apple). If they introduce any form of DRM then there will be hell to pay.

With the release of 11.04, Ubuntu Studio, the Ubuntu based distro aimed at multimedia creators, defaulted to retaining GNOME in preference to unity, saying in its release notes “Ubuntu Studio does not currently use Unity. As the user logs in it will default to Gnome Classic Desktop (i.e. Gnome2)”. Shortly thereafter, in May of this year, Scott Lavender, the project lead for Ubuntu Studio announced that they would move away from unity (and GNOME) and use the lightweight Xfce desktop as the default environment in future.

Criticism of Ubuntu (and of Canonical the company) has become so loud and frequent of late that Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community “spokesman” reacted by founding openrespect.org apparently as a means of deflecting some of that criticism. The openrespect website says:

“OpenRespect was founded out of a concern that discussion and discourse in the Open Source, Free Software, and Free Culture community has become a little too fiery and flamey in recent years. The goal of OpenRespect is simple: to provide a simple declaration that distills some of the core elements of showing respect to other participants in discussions.”

But as itwire points out, the timing here is rather odd since it is only now “when Canonical has its feet held to the fire, we have a new website called OpenRespect.org registered and volumes of spiel being generated by Bacon.” Quite so.

Jono Bacon has also popped up in a variety of fora getting all defensive about Canonical’s design decisions. He even fronted an article in the July 2011 issue of LinuxFormat magazine where he “interviewed” four key players at Canonical (including Mark Shuttleworth). That interview included such unbiased questions as “Unity is an exciting new vision. What are your goals and inspirations?” Worse, the article did not bother to mention that Bacon was a key Canonical employee.

I have no doubt that Canonical will make unity work. The installed base of Ubuntu users is so large that developers will be forced to make it work, but I don’t have to like it. My problem is that GNOME itself has also changed radically in the move from 2.30 to 3.0. And I don’t like that either. I find myself in good company though, back in July of this year, Linus Torvalds called GNOME 3.0 an “unholy mess” and announced that he was ditching it in favour of Xfce. Although unlike Linus, I never liked KDE, even before the KDE 4 debacle