Source Guru

With his announcement of the N-imal for Ubuntu 11.04 – I’m being driven slightly insane, as I now now have this song stuck in my head (and probably will do for weeks to come!)

Today, I reinstalled my laptop to use a fresh install of Karmic.

My laptop’s one of those annoying ones that have problems, however, it seems Karmic has fixed a fair chunk of those. My wireless now works (though still only with WPA networks for some reason), I no longer have to boot with “nolapic_timer” (urgh!) and those annoying little niggles have gone. Also, Karmic is looking pretty swish. It’s new notification icons are stylish and minimal, and the xsplash looks good. Also, I’ve noticed that shut down time is drastically reduced! (2 seconds vs my old 10-15 seconds).
Boot time isn’t amazing, but it’s pretty nippy.

I’m lovin it.

The Ubuntu Global Bug Jam is just around the corner, and once again, the kind folks at the Linux Emporium have kindly offered the use of their offices to the Ubuntu UK team.

Last time, we focused on bugs, and this time it’s only slightly different.  Instead of it being a “Bug Jam” – it’s just going to be a “Jam”.  There will be people on hand to talk to about Bug Triaging, packaging, translating (and I hope we’ll get the whole of Ubuntu translated into English by the end of the Jam), and anything else you can think of.

So, if you’re interested in helping make Ubuntu a better distro, and live in (or can travel to) the Birmingham Area in the UK, then you’re welcome to come along.

The Jam is on the 2nd-4th October, and we’ll be around on all three days.  If you need more info, please feel free to email me on <mez AT ubuntu DOT com>.  Last year we had a great time, with refreshments (including beer) provided. Juggling penguins, and one person sleeping underneath the conference room table overnight.  Hopefully we’ll also have the live Video Streams up and running again for anyone who can’t make it (or other Ubuntu Jams) to join in with!

You can also find some blog posts about our last bug jam

After long deliberation (a good few months!), I today came to the decision that I no longer felt that I could be part of the Ubuntu IRC Team.

I have felt for a long time that the Ubuntu IRC team has become an elitist crowd, with a very cliquey inner circle, and those who are not in the inner circle being treated on multiple levels like second class citizens.

There are a lot of things that have pushed me to make this decision, and I’ve not made it lightly. I’ve voiced my concerns to the IRC Council previously, (via individual emails), and had no response.  I don’t see the situation getting any better. In fact, more and more, I see it getting worse.

I know that I’m not the only person who’s thinking this way, though I may be one of the only ones that feels that I need to lay down my cinnamon roll.  I’ve discussed these issues on multiple occassions with various members of the community (both in and out of the team), and with people linked to the Ubuntu IRC community in one way or another (Debian Developers, Freenode Staff, etc etc).

There are also other people who’ve come out of the woodwork after I posted my resignation. Within minutes of doing so, one member forwarded my mail onto the community council, and another replied with his thoughts and feelings regarding the matter.  I’m glad to see that there are other people out there who’ve seen what I’ve seen, and like me, also dislike it.

I will however, retain my @ in #ubuntu-uk.  This is a channel I participate regularly in, and the ops there are chosen by the LoCo Team, rather than the IRC council.

Ok, so at work, pretty much the whole company uses Windows, of some sort. The web team, however, are pretty adamant that they use the best tools available for them, and we use Ubuntu because of this (because it’s the easiest option that we all have the same distro, and as long as it’s Linux, we don’t mind)

Anyway, at the moment we’re working through the process of moving all our internal business applications from Visual Basic.NET (urgh!) to PHP + a web based app. The “Product Owner” for this is one of the bosses, who currently uses Windows Vista.

He has, however, seen us all using Ubuntu and it’s got him interested in using it. He’s said that he wants to try using Ubuntu, and see whether he can get his work done on that, and slowly transition to it, as obviously, he needs to be able to use Windows for the .NET stuff (which sadly, doesn’t work well under WINE).

So, we set him up a Virtual Machine, and he got to grips with what he was doing, great. Except for the fact that he had to allocate memory to it, switching back and forth between windows and Ubuntu was a pain. He eventually gave up on this idea, and got a spare machine, a spare monitor, and set it up next to his machine.

Still, however, it was a bit of a pain, he’d have to switch position on his desk, start using a different keyboard and mouse, and i was all a bit of hassle.

Recently, we’ve gotten a “big screen” (which isn’t actually that big!) for the Web Team to monitor the servers, our order download service, etc etc. We were showing our manager some of the stuff we could do with it, and he asked the question “So, how do you control it” – to which my response was to move my mouse off of the edge of my screen, and onto the big screen. “So is that a third monitor?” he asked. “No” I replied, it’s another machine.

Enter Synergy

So this is the point where I explained to our manager exactly what synergy is. Trying to explain it however, is a bit of a hassle, so I’ll try my best here. Synergy is an application that allows you to control another machine’s keyboard and mouse from your own PC. It’s a bit of a mix between a KVM switch, and Remote Desktop, but it doesn’t require extra hardware, and you dont have to relay the video across the network to show it on your screen too.

At this point, our boss got a glint in his eye

“Does it work in Windows?” he asked. At this point, I didn’t realise that he had a seperate machine for Ubuntu. I told him it did anyway, but I wasn’t too sure whether it worked with Vista

“Lets give it a go anyway”

So we went over to his machine, and I installed quicksynergy on his ubuntu box, while he downloaded the Windows installer for Synergy. 5 minutes later, he was grinning like a maniac as he moved his mouse from one machine to another.

Now he’s happily using Ubuntu without any hassle, it’s just a third screen to him – with different stuff on it.

I think the moral here is, there are different ways to get people to be able to use Linux, and Synergy is one of those great tools that enable people to use Linux without having all the hassle that comes with switching over.

I think also, a quote from m manager sums it up.

This is one of the best things I’ve seen all year. I thought it’d take forever to setup, but it was so quick. I can be so much more productive now

I hope that this will be one of the turning points for my manager, and we’ll have another convert by the end of the year

So – after my post about wanting a conference laptop – I went out and bought one today. I got myself a nice, large, Dual Core 17″ Jobby. Ok, I’ve realised afterwards that it might be a bit of a gas guzzler, but, at least, as long as I have power, it should meet all my needs. And it’s the first machine that I’ve had where, out of the box, everything works perfectly, and the first where I’ve been able to properly use the Desktop effects (Darn proprietary Video Cards!)

Anyway, along with this – I’ve now installed Ubuntu on it. Actual Ubuntu – rather than Kubuntu. This means that I now have nearly a full shipment of *buntu that I’m regularly using. Kubuntu @ work and on my desktop at home, Xubuntu on the eeePC, and Ubuntu on this new Laptop.

I also had fun thinking up another name for the laptop. I’ve called it synergy. Which basically means lots of small things working together to make something greater in whole than of it’s component parts (Think of two muscles working together to give you a sort of idea) – The reason? Well – partly because my computer naming scheme revolves around the “I can’t be bothered of thinking of a name” (put politely) – and – synergy, is of course, ultimate laziness, putting small things together to make something bigger (convoluted excuse I know!) and well – it completes my having what my idea of the 3 primary WM’s are (Gnome, KDE, and XFCE), and means that my experience of Linux as a whole, is a more rounded and richer experience (Again, convoluted!) but anyway – here are my machines and what I call them (from the newest acquisition to the oldest)

• Synergy – The new “Conference” Laptop
• Stupor – My VPS for running the important things on
• Lethargy – My eeePC
• Coma – My work PC
• Anorak – Radio Amarok’s primary server (named after a Radio Amarok inside joke)
• Torpor – My “playground” VPS (where I keep all the non-critical stuff)
• Apathy – My Home Desktop

So – those are my machines, but, knowing that I have a similar naming schema to Daniel Silverstone, it begs me to ask.

What do you call your machines and why?

Ok, by popular demand (aka ompaul) I’ve decided to do a mini-howto on setting up networking on an ubuntu server, for those who are new to it.

In Ubuntu itself, when you install the desktop version, you get a nifty little tool called “Network Manager” (you may have noticed the icon, espescially if you have wireless) which pretty much does everything for you. However, if you’re using the server, without a GUI then this isn’t generaly available.

So, where to start?

It really depends on your network setup, you need to know a few things about your network before you start this.

The first and most important question you need to find out is whether there is a DHCP server on your network that will assign you an IP address. If so, your networking setup is very very simple, so I’ll start off with that.

Networking with an available DHCP server

When you have a DHCP server available on your network, things are made a lot simpler. Cut short, a DHCP server sits on your network and hands out configurations to the different computers that ask for them. I won’t go into detail, but, generally you’ll find these on small home networks (your router will generally work as a DHCP server, which is why you (usually) magically find your way onto the internet when you plug yourself into a network with a router on it)

First of all, find out whether you actually already have an internet connection. I’ll assume for now that you have a keyboard and monitor hooked up to the computer you’re setting up as a server, and have logged in as a user with sudo rights.

Type in the command “ifconfig” (without the quotes) and you should hopefully see something like this:-

mez@stupor:~$ ifconfig

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:3E:7F:AC:B2
inet addr:212.13.30.94  Bcast:212.13.30.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
RX packets:3576458 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1886783 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
RX bytes:836607596 (797.8 MB)  TX bytes:291514569 (278.0 MB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
RX packets:73611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:73611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:15252378 (14.5 MB)  TX bytes:15252378 (14.5 MB)

The important bit we see here is the block of text starting with “eth0″ and espescially the line

inet addr:212.13.30.94  Bcast:212.13.30.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

This generally means that the computer already has an IP address! yay!

Next, try the command

ping google.com

Hopefully, you’ll get back a response saying something along the lines of

PING google.com (64.233.187.99) 56(84) bytes of data
64 bytes from jc-in-f99.google.com (64.233.187.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=245 time=100 ms

If so, you have a working internet connection! Go you! you can now start using your computer on the internet (though the IP address given above might only be accessible from an internal network, depending on your setup – going into howto get this IP available on the internet proper is beyond the scope of this blog post)

If not, you’ll get one of two errors, either a “no route to host” or a “cannot resolve google.com”.

The first issue is a complex one, which again, is beyond the scope of this article (though feel free to email me to ask questions – or catch me on IRC – I will *try* to answer them)

The second one generally means that you do not have a nameserver setup.

Open DNS is a project that provides Accessible DNS resolvers for the whole world to use. More information can be found out about OpenDNS here

For now however, lets open up your DNS resolver settings

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

This file should be edited to contain the following lines only

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Hit Ctrl + O then enter, then Ctrl + X to get back to your command prompt.

Try pinging google again, and hopefully it should work. If not, something went wrong somewhere, again, try emailing me or poking me on IRC.

So, what if you don’t have an IP address?

Well, assuming that you DO have a DHCP server running on your network, lets first of all check that we have a working interface on our system

ifconfig -a

You should hopefully see a couple of lines here, one starting with “lo” and another starting with “eth0″ (or similar) – remember this name

Now, open up your /etc/network/interfaces file (sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces) and make sure it contains the following

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Assuming that it does, we should be able to do the following

sudo ifup eth0

Which will (hopefully) bring the interface up. Go back a step if you cannot resolve google.com when trying to ping it. You might have to setup a resolver (though your DHCP server should provide these details for you!)

Voila! hopefully you now have a working network interface

Networking without an available DHCP server

Now, here is where things get more interesting. To be able to setup a network without having a DHCP server readily available, you need to know the following

• The IP address that will be assigned to your host
• The netmask for the IP addresses being used
• The default gateway’s IP address (usually the IP address of your router)

It may differ how you get this information, however, I cannot tell you how to do so, I’d ask your network administrator if I were you (or your hosting provider)

So, I’m assuming here that you have the above details, are logged in at your machine and ready to go

I’ll only be brief about this setup, as a lot of the details are covered above.

First of all, make sure that your interface is down

sudo ifdown eth0

next, edit your /etc/network interfaces, replacing the information between < and > with
the information from above

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
	address <IP Address>
	netmask <Network Mask>
	gateway <Default Gateway>

So, you should have something like this

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
	address 212.13.30.94
	netmask 255.255.252.0
	gateway 212.13.30.1

Now head back to your console, and try

sudo ifup eth0

To bring your interface up. Hopefully, now, everything should be working (if not, go have a look at the DNS stuff above)

If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment here, or email me (martin AT sourceguru DOT net) and I will try and answer, though I make no guarantees!

Thus concludes Mez’s basic guide to server networking on ubuntu – I’ll try and add some more interesting stuff in a later blog post (IPv6, IP Aliases, etc etc)