Adventures In Open Source

Wow, we finally made it to Weekly Rewind number 29. A significant edition for me because it’s my age. You could be forgiven for thinking I must be at least 39 looking at me but what can I say, I had a rough paper round. I’ve always looked a lot older than I was actually, even as kid, but I’ve found the older I get the more I seem to look closer to my age. Hopefully at this rate by the time I’m 50 (should I last that long) I’ll look 50. We’ll have to wait 21 years to see just how that theory pans out. Anyway, enough rambling, let’s get into what happened in my little world this week.

On Monday I processed and released a new Rathole Radio, which was followed on the live broadcast by a Professor Kliq gig. You can download that gig as well from his own website. I won’t talk about all that too much because I was so late with last week’s rewind I actually covered it. We recorded and streamed Linux Outlaws 108 on Monday night which was great fun as always. I even attempted a poor Manc accent at one point in the show, though I can’t remember exactly why now. That episode was released on Wednesday thanks to some sterling work from Fab. His laptop has just died in the same way my Dell XPS m1330 apparently, the curse of the faulty Nvidia card. I hope he has as much luck with Dell support as I did. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey folks, you may remember a little while ago I mentioned I’d been interviewed about free culture and online media by Karunya Keshav. It was in one of my Weekly Rewind articles. Karunya has been working on the project for a while and I’m pleased to say it’s all finished now. She sent me some links today, so I thought I’d pass them on. It’s only a short audio interview but it came out really well I think, so thanks to her.

My Interview can be found here: http://karunyakeshav.com/freeculture/create_1diy.html

The whole site is very interesting actually and I particularly enjoyed the other interview with songwriter Ben Walker, an artist I know well myself. His music is well worth checking out, I’ve played it on Rathole Radio many times. The whole project is about free culture and how it’s changed the way people work online. A subject close to my heart as you know.

So go and check out the sites and the videos. They’re very cool. Congrats to Karunya

Dan

I want to make an announcement, admittedly a slightly redundant one now that everyone has already had a go (Popey & Tony), but damn it I’m going to say it anyway. As we mentioned on a recent episode of Linux Outlaws, we’ve been discussing the idea of holding a barcamp event in conjunction with the Ubuntu UK podcast. Since Lugradio Live is only a one day event this year (Saturday 24th of October) it made perfect sense to do something in Wolverhampton on the Sunday. There’ll be all the usual impromptu talks and sessions you’d associate with a Barcamp event, bet there’ll also be a live show and recording from each of the podcasts to get involved with. We’re in the final stages of booking the venue so I can’t quite reveal that yet, but will do very soon. We just have to wait for confirmation that they’ve processed our payment and rubber stamped the booking. Then I can shout it from the rooftops. A lot has happened in the last couple of weeks though.

• We’ve got a name for the event… OggCamp

• We’ve got a shiny new website…. OggCamp.org

…and now we even have some cool banners for you to put on your own site to help us promote the event, woo hoo!!

There are many more updates to come so keep an eye on OggCamp.org or follow us on Identi.ca and Twitter if you prefer. We have ideas for an audio promo which I’ll be putting together very soon, and we should be able to announce the venue in the next few days. It’s VERY close to the LRL location I can assure you of that. So if you’re wondering what to do in Wolverhampton the day after LRL, now you don’t have to. Get along to OggCamp on Sunday the 25th of October at 11am and have some fun with us. We’d love to see you and there might even be a few surprises for attendees, but you ain’t seen me right? Keep it under your hat

Speaking of hats, I’d just like to give a personal hat tip to my friend JonTheNiceGuy for planting the seed of this idea in our heads a couple of months back. I’m not sure if anyone else remembers it now, but I had an email from him suggesting a barcamp event between our respective podcasts. So thanks Jon, you’d better turn up now.

Help us out and spread the word across the land. Go on, we’ll be your best mate, honest.

Dan

It’s that time of the week already, time for the 28th Weekly Rewind article. I never imagined keeping this up that long when I started the series, it was only on a whim but so far I haven’t missed one. A few have been late like this edition… but let’s not dwell on that. I actually started writing this on Sunday afternoon but things got a bit hectic and I never got chance to finish it. Allow me to fill you in on why things were hectic that day.

On Monday we did Linux Outlaws live as usual in the evening. The show went well and the live audio stream is proving very popular, which I’m pleased about. I also synced up the recordings and did some preliminary editing before sending them back to Fab for editing. On Tuesday I helped a mate install and set up Crunchbang Linux 9.04 for a streaming machine in his studio. He’s never used Linux at all before and he seemed to really enjoy it, he says he’s loving Crunchbang and that’s a major victory I think. I also did research and wrote some of my Pardus article along with various other bits of dev work. Read the rest of this entry »

This week I revisited a distribution I first wrote about back in 2007, Pardus Linux. It’s developed by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptography, it has its own package management system called PISI (Packages Installed Successfully, as Intended), and it’s not based on any other Linux distribution, which makes quite a change these days. I was eager to see how it had developed since our last encounter.

Vital Stats:
Distro Base – Unique (It’s a custom Linux distro)
Packaging – .pisi (Managed by the PISI utility)
Linux Kernel – 2.6.30.4-125
Default Desktop – KDE 4.2.4

Installation:

Partitioning

I downloaded the International installer CD and not the LiveCD, having made a mistake with that last time I tried Pardus. Things may have changed by now but at the time I downloaded the LiveCD only to discover you couldn’t install from it, it really was just a LiveCD. Booting up the CD I was greeted with a funky looking menu, not the most technical description I know but the design is very slick. You’re quickly prompted to accept the GNU GPL first up. Not all distros ask you to do that but I think it’s a good thing. Most new users will just accept without even reading a line, we’ve all become conditioned to do that over the years by 50 page license agreements. But if one person takes the time to read a little bit and actually learn what the GPL is, I think that’s positive. The next step is to check the integrity of the installer CD, something I don’t often bother to do but I probably should. This took about 5mins scanning the disc and checking, after that you can begin the install proper. There’s a series of screens asking you all the usual questions: keyboard layout, time zone, user details, root password and more. Then it’s time to sort out your hard drive partitions which is always a key facet of any install. The GUI looks nice but I must confess I found it a little confusing at first in manual partitioning. You click on a partition and set it up but if you then click onto the next partition without first pressing apply, all your selections are lost. It took me a minute to work this out and it seems a bit counter intuitive from a HCI point of view. Nevertheless I got to grips with it and I like the way it gives you sensible descriptive labels in the options. Instead of saying  / or root for your system drive you choose “Pardus system files”, which might be a bit more obvious to some new users. Plain English is always a winner for me. I chose to make my root… sorry “Pardus system files” partition 12gb as I normally do and formatted it as ext4, the default option. I had to manually choose my swap partition and set it up though, this is often detected by other distributions, even under manual partitioning. I laid out the partitions as I usually do on this machine (Dell XPS m1330n): Read the rest of this entry »

Another Weekly Rewind is upon us, number 27 no less. The weeks are flying by. The number is rapidly approaching my age, almost as rapidly as I approach baldness… but not quite. It’s a been a week filled with writing, audio editing, a Playstation fail and even the impromptu launch of an Internet radio station. So let’s get into the details:

On Monday we didn’t do a live Linux Outlaws as Fab was away on a motorcycle trip, so I edited some interviews I’d recorded at EuroPython 2009 for a special show. It’s been over a month since I recorded them now, so they were well due a release. I also processed and released Rathole Radio earlier in the day. It took about 3 hours just to do the show notes, you wouldn’t know looking at them but it’s true. The show was well received which is always rewarding. On Tuesday I installed Pardus Linux 2009 and set about testing it for a review. The Crunchbang article has had a lot of traffic this week and there’s been a lot of interesting comments too. Thanks to everyone for that. Late on Tuesday night (9pm to be precise) I rang Sony about my broken PS3. It decided to stop working over the previous day or so. It wouldn’t start up at all and despite my attempts to reset it, it seemed to think it was overheating all the time and switch itself off immediately. It was stone cold so there wasn’t an overheating problem. I checked the hard drive hoping that was the problem, since it’s quick and cheap to replace, sadly it wasn’t. After reading up on the problem it seems it’s been dubbed the “yellow light of death”, similar to the “red ring of death” on the Xbox. I’d never heard of it but according to what I’ve read it’s happened to quite a few people. Sony were very good on the phone and it took all of 7 minutes for them to agree to arrange a swap for free. I was a little worried they’d put up a fight because the machine was well over 12 months old but they didn’t. I’d even armed myself with a working knowledge of the Sale Of Goods Act 1979. Under that you can claim a free repair or refund on most items for up to 6 years in some cases, regardless of the warranty offered by the seller. That’s a UK law obviously. I was told someone would ring me back in the next 48 hours to arrange the exchange, I was very happy with that. Read the rest of this entry »

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