I think it’s because I subscribe to New Scientist, know periodic tables and know what Sir Issac Newton looks like. But I reckon I’m a geek since I don’t read much fiction or non-fiction books, more of an engineer than a library nerd.
Your thoughts on this diagram:
I’m trying to find different debian packaging guides for some work I’m doing for two people. If you know of a good guide that is simple to use and contains both explanations and instructions, then I want to hear from you at the bottom of this page in the comments.
Hopefully this will also help others who read this and have been lookign for a good guide to building their own packages. My own knowledge obout debian packages is very limited in that I can make them, but I don’t quite know why they work.
On newer laptops I’m seeing a sharp increase in sudden grub2 failures, where grub2 is completely failing to load from start. It’s causing all sorts of problems with new converts not even being able to get into windows, let alone Ubuntu. I don’t have any know how with grub2 so I have no way to debug exactly what is going wrong.
So I need to come to you guys. These installs are all Ubuntu 9.10 with recent upgrades, it seems to happen after updates but I can’t confirm since one person I know is on his 4th failure and is asking for me to uninstall ubuntu. Which would be particularly terrible since he’s in my systems admin class and such a deficit would prevent him from completing homework.
I’m going to try two things for the time being for these cases: upgrade to Lucid beta and downgrade to 9.04. Since I can’t pinpoint the exact nature of the problem, I have no idea if either will work.
Extra Info: It’s regular duel boot installs, not Wubi, and the systems are fresh installs, not upgrades.
Update: So the community consensus is that grub2 is larger than grub-legacy and certain windows tools such as backup, anti virus or OEM Recovery tools write data to the end of the MBR because they mistakenly believe that the MBR is only a certain size (i.e. they assume a windows boot system), so this trash data kills the grub2 boot loader resulting in lots of different errors to appear. There are four ways to fix this issue:
Any ideas?
If there is something of a frustration it’s the DRM on Netflix watch instantly which bars legally and technically the ability to play on Free Desktops like Ubuntu. Even if you had moonlight installed, the Mono development community can’t or doesn’t want to reverse engineer the play for sure DRM.
Matt Lee once complained at me that I had a Wii games console, but as it turns out it might be a solution for those who want to watch instantly on Netflix since they’ve just started sending out Wii disks which allow you to watch it on your TV. Even better than watching it on your computer.
OK so it’s not free software, open formats or anything progressive. But at least there is a solution which might relieve some of the Ubuntu converts of the lack of the Netflix feature.
Thoughts?
Today in Boston there was a right wing gathering in the Boston Common which called it’s self “The Boston Tea Party”, it was basically a platform for the anti-everything authoritarians to have a go at the “liberal” everything and a lot of counter protesters who threw vitrol right back.
But, far from us disagreeing with any one’s politics, we took a greater offence at all their uncivilised and rude manner. So as crazy New Englanders are likely to do we organised a counter protest called “The Real Boston Tea Party” where we got together and had a very large picnic on the Boston Common, tea, biscuits, scones and cakes.
It was a fantastic day for a picnic too. Lots of people came either for the whole day or for lunch time (weekday). My lovely wife took the day off work and we all dressed up in costume. The protest was mainly against the uncivilised rowing, the arguments and bickering that are irrational and unproductive. But it was also great way to organise a mass public tea party/picnic on a beautiful day.
Today was a sleep day, I ended up spending about 20 hours of the day unconscious. I suspect some form of a bug. So not much to say, tomorrow I go to the Real Boston Tea Party, a civility protest against the republican’s Tea Party event in Boston.
I will report tomorrow.
I’m looking forward to Google making the On2 V8 codec not only free and open source, but also with patent pledges that can make it a strong open standard.
Although I do disagree with a lot of the people that claim H264 has better quality or size compared to Theora. I’ve seen tests that clearly show it’s easier to get better results with Theora.
I was reading an article about how Ubuntu is a bad standards barer for the “Linux” desktop. I’ll leave aside how paradoxical the brand “Linux” is used to mean desktop when it means nothing of the sort and I assume she means FreeDesktop (FDO).
Now I know that she’s biased and makes a few mistakes, for instance inferring that fedora is made by Red Hat alone, claiming that Red Hat has any sort of desktop strategy at all other than “for geeks”. But don’t let her red hattidness mean that there isn’t a good point about testing.
But I was struck by the problems that she has had and the comments to the entry. When comparing them to my own support roster for the past few months of sudden grub mortality (8 cases) where grub just looses all ability to boot anything with cryptic errors such as “Invalid symbol ‘u’ found” and ‘Error 15′.
Other problems concerning hardware or software failures are popping up more too. It’s actually quite worrying the amount of hand holding I’m having to do for new installs of Ubuntu. Not just the usual restricted drivers, restricted extras, libdvdcss and sun-java installation, but more messing about to get systems stable.
So, what do I think we should do about some of these problems? Testing is one way of getting stuff working, but our testing procedure for releases isn’t organised properly. We simply release a candidate and let users use it until it breaks, very unstructured. As a general testing that’s fine, but I think we should be asking users to sign up specifically to test specific things. Hardware they have, software they use, and that this process could well be made much easier by having more automated testing that executes greater depth of features and mimics facets of use better. If that’s not possible then having better defined instructions of how to test your hardware and having ways of inputting that into reports that are just as easy to fill out.
Lists of hardware and software, who has tested them, what the results are, what isn’t being tested (which requires us to know of every piece of hardware too). We need users who test to feel important in what they test and the reports can help us pick out issues, cut down on the bureaucracy of bug handlers between the users and the developers that simply invalidate bugs because there is a new version without even testing to see if it’s fixed. We can see what is being tested a hundred times and what never gets tested, we need to furnish developers with a way to collect together a list of testers to form an informal community to test new versions of things for patch fixes.
I think we’re on the way to making beta/alpha releases easy to install as secondary systems and packages already allow us to move between versions of a package. More work is probably needed to make it all fluid and easier. It would be nice if packages in ubuntu had live tests that exercised their installed state, something that could be run on any chipset and reported back.
I really do think we need to do far more that what we’re currently doing, and not just more testers, but more structures for QA to grow upon. But of course this requires resources, we have a community willing to do stuff but perhaps we should have some paid QA Community people who can provide the structure and really think in depth about how to exercise the community’s enthusiasm and self interest in testing new releases.
Your thoughts?
Update: People have commented quite rightly that we have a major deficit in programming time. I attribute this to lack of economic viability, others are attributing it to lack of skill in the willing participatory community. But for now I just want to talk about making testing easier and the results more useful and directly targeted at developers.
It’s that time again, when I show case some of the fantastic art submissions made to the deviantArt Ubuntu group. If you’ve not heard about it before, it’s a group where Ubuntu artists and designers can get together, talk about using Ubuntu for making art, the tools available and show case their works in the galleries.
The last post was March 12th, so these entries are strictly from that date to today (April 10th). I may post a more historic set of images since we’ve had additions that were published years ago but only recently added to our galleries. For a full list go here.
If you’ve never seen a animation done in synfig, this one is really great, look at that mechanical heart beat! Click for larger image. 
Next time: April’s Wallpapers, where I show off some of my favourite wallpaper submissions.
