The Greatest Linux Blog on the Internets.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 is officially out: a “pre-review”

• April 24th, 2008

There’s a good concise summary of Hardy Heron installation and upgrade options over at Tombuntu.

I’ve been running the beta version via upgrade from Feisty, and continually receiving updates, for the last month or so. I guess with this last round of updates I’ll officially be running Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS.

On the surface the changes between Feisty 7.10 and Hardy 8.04 don’t appear dramatic, which is a good thing since Feisty really didn’t need dramatic changes in my opinion, just a little spit’n'polish. Since this is an Long Term Support (LTS), Hardy Desktop users can expect security updates for the next 3 years.

Here’s a few things I have noticed as a user, without digging too much “under the hood”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Serve files via scp or sftp, without giving full shell access to users

• March 1st, 2008

The scp and sftp commands, as part of the OpenSSH suite, are great secure ways to transfer files around … they generally make a great secure alternative to FTP. However, I’d often wondered if there was a way of allowing file transfer with scp or sftp without giving users a full SSH-accessible shell account on my machine. Who knows what they may run

Ubuntu Geek has the answer, with this quick writeup on how to install and configure scponly.

scponly runs in a chrooted environment (under /home/scponly by default), which in theory should stop users fiddling with your machine via ssh, but will still give them read/write access to the incoming directory within the chrooted directory tree.

I probably wouldn’t trust it for unrestricted public access (since I’m just paranoid about things like this, unless it’s a really well known tool on a properly secured server), but it certainly would be useful for friends, family, colleagues and collaborators.

Encrypt your laptop’s /home directory before Christmas

• December 11th, 2007

Command Line Warriors is running a campaign to get Linux users to encrypt at least their /home directory by Christmas 2008. It’s a really good idea, since if your laptop gets stolen, without encryption the thief may gain lots of personal data about you or others … possibly enough to steal your identity. And that would suck more than losing your laptop.

Before you get around to encrypting your /home (and other “data” partitions if you keep sensitive stuff outside /home), here’s a tip that is quick and easy to implement right now. If you use Firefox, turn off saving passwords and forms, or secure your saved passwords with a Master Password. You can do it by going to Edit-Preferences-Advanced-Encryption(tab), click on the “Security Devices” button and select “Software Security Device” from the tree-list and enable it, set a password. This way if your machine gets stolen, the thief won’t be able to simply start Firefox and retrieve the passwords to all your valuable online accounts.

read more | digg story

The Future of Reading (with a Kindle)

• December 5th, 2007

Initially when I saw this new Kindle ebook reader thing from Amazon, it sounded mildly exciting (although currently too expensive for me). But thinking about it a little more, I suspected this could be a nasty case of lock-in like iTunes store/iPod or the Wii Virtual Console service.

Mark Pilgram has written this nice little piece, entitled the “Future of Reading”. It highlights various parts of the of the Kindle Terms of Service alongside some quotes from Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO), as well as some more ominous juxtapositions with some parts of Orwell’s 1984.

The Kindle is DRM infected crap. This is another one of those cases where you can choose convenience or Freedom-with-a-capital-F . . . . I’ll be sticking with dead trees, plain text from Project Gutenburg and maybe the odd unrestricted PDF for the moment.

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 on a Dell Vostro 1500 laptop

• November 29th, 2007

What works, executive summary:

3D graphics (Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT) - yes (minor config required)

Sound output (Intel 82801H HDA controller, ICH8 chipset) - yes (more serious config required)

Sound input (mic, line-in) -untested

Wired network -yes

Wireless network -yes

Firewire (IEEE1394) -yes (more serious config required for MiniDV video camera usage)

SD card slot -yes

Integrated webcam (optional) -yes (but seems unsupported by some older software)

Touchpad pointing device -yes

External CRT video port - only in ‘text’ mode yes, enable with ‘nvidia-settings’ command

PCI Express slot -untested

Here’s the output of lspci so everyone can see exactly what hardware I have, since sometimes Dell changes components within models: Dell Vostro 1500 lspci output

What follows is a review of the hardware features of the laptop that worked out-of-the-box with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10, and what I did to fix the few problems that I encountered. Overall, I’m extremely happy with the performance and hardware support of Ubuntu Linux on this notebook, and apart from a fix required for sound support, there were no show-stoppers that would prevent any computer user capable of installing Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX from installing and using Ubuntu happily on this machine.

Read the rest of this entry »

Fixing the arrow keys in Vim

• October 31st, 2007

Are your Vim / Vi arrow keys making A,C, B etc characters instead of moving around in insert (’i') mode ?

Try typing this … it fixes it for me:

:set nocompatible

Or, add the line:

set nocompatible

to your ~/.vimrc file.

Subscribing to YouTube channels in Miro

• October 23rd, 2007

Here’s a tip for using Miro (formerly Democracy Player), the kick-ass TV-on-your-computer video playing software.

If you want to subscribe to the videos of a particular user on YouTube, you can get an RSS feed of those videos by adding a channel like this to Miro:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/[insert username here]/videos.rss

You can also get RSS feeds for all videos with a particular tag, like:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/linux.rss

Where in this case, the tag you are interested in is ‘linux’.

I discovered this when trying to figure out to subscribe to somecallmejim’s “Edit” video editing tips videos. He’s been offline for a few months now … hope his problems pass over and he comes back.

Official YouTube docs about this feature are here.

Mounting USB key in Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10, the usefree error

• October 22nd, 2007

I recently upgraded from Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 to Gutsy 7.10.

The upgrade went reasonably well with no serious breakage worth mentioning … except my FAT formatted USB key would no longer mount. It kept giving an error about not liking the mount option usefree.

Here is the fix, from the Ubuntu forums:

Go into gconf-editor and navigate to /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options

Your USB key should mount as expected now.

Cheers to Dan Lenski and Dow Franklin Dudley for providing this fix !

Hardware4Linux

• October 7th, 2007

Hey, just found this new hardware compatibility database for Linux. It’s still fairly young, but already has lots of data about hardware compatibility, including distro specific info.

Worth watching & checking before buying new hardware.

Ubuntu Disappoints, Breaks Promises With Rapid Growth

• September 26th, 2007

There is a nice little rant on OSWeekly by Matt Hartley about Ubuntu’s rabid rapid growth and how he thinks the balance has swayed toward too many half-finished and poorly tested new features and not enough polish.

Yes, we all know that with a community produced distro it is OUR job, the role of the USERS, to help test and polish .. yadda yadda … and I’m not denying that … the lack of polish in Feisty is as much MY fault for not helping test and filing bug reports as anyone elses … but the fact remains that there are lots of new features appears before the rough edges in old ones are smoothed over.

As a long-time user of Linux distros, and more recently Ubuntu, I really agree with many of Matt’s points. In most cases, Ubuntu works
great, but there is a real need to fix some of the flaky
utilities that can be real showstoppers for some users (both
experienced and newbies). My personal gripe, to add to the issues with
the Network Manager the author complains about, is that hibernation on
my laptop used to work in Dapper and stopped working for Feisty (searching the Interweb I can see I’m not the only one).
Upgrading shouldn’t *loose* you features or hardware support. Hopefully
there will be a real focus in the next Long Term Support (LTS) release
(Ubuntu 8.04) to not add any flashy new features but just fix and
polish the perfectly usable and snappy OS that we already have. I don’t care if it gets delayed to become Ubuntu 8.10 to do it … just give it polish !!