There are a few reasons. One is that it’s pointless, or it’s too hard, or it’s just a matter of complexity. I want to talk about this last issue around the complexity of our ideas in our community.

I don’t think it’s required to get every single person fully understanding Free Software social justice issues and supporting those views. I don’t think it’s even a matter of getting a single other person to move completely over to new ideas in whole.

I believe in common knowledge; our ideas will spread out slowly being reformed into concepts and ideas that fit into people’s existing world views. Each time you interact with an individual and don’t shy away from sharing your views and passion for the importance of these issues, you move forward the commonly held understanding on the issues.

when you see Free Software being understood by the common person, that’s when you know the Free Software activism has been successful. I don’t believe Free Software can be truly successful and robust without common people’s basic understanding. Otherwise it shall always be abused and re-purposed into proprietary platforms and appliance like products.

Please, everyone, stop. Ubuntu and Debian systems are built to install packages, not compiled code directly from Make files. Many advanced users will actually package their own code up to install it on their own systems, there is no need to make install in Ubuntu.

Now I don’t care so much if you want to play with compiling things, learn debian packaging and pbuilder, that’ll compile things too. But guides for users shouldn’t be written like this, more time could have been spent on getting a stable PPA fixed up and directing users to use that.

In closing: Consider users are smart but eager, they’ll accept any helpful looking guide online that proports to do what they want. Even guides that are obviously not meant for normal users or in this case, Ubuntu users.

• Netbook launcher – no longer supported and doesn’t work any more – solution, program a new one.
• Login Screen – I use the gnome2 gdm as the backend for my logon screen. Ubuntu not uses the rather inflexible lightgm. solution – replace lightgm with GDM for gnome3 and update code.
• User Management – I currently use nfs/rsync method which is why I’ve been banned by the Geneva convention. The ideal option would be to use LDAP, but it’s so excruciatingly hard to setup that my 19 attempts have all failed. Solution – create a set of juju charms and interfaces for openldap, kerberos, the user management setups that EVERYONE uses.
• Printers – I need to continue to use cups, but need quota management. solution – Add PyKota to manage quotas, package it up as it’s unpackaged and make it a charm with ldap interface.
• Lab Sessions – Update lab session manager to use LDAP, improve it’s reconfigurability and add the printer and nfs quota to the information shown

This is by no means the end of the list, but already I have my work cut out to make sure that this stuff works and that it’s available for other people to use. And all this needs to happen before I can touch one computer with the 12.04 CD. If anyone would like to help, I’d be grateful. After all this, I see no reason to beat about the bush and I might as well release labuntu or some such for internet cafes, libraries, and other public access computer systems.

Ideas?

Audacious Video

You can test this out for yourself with Ubuntu 12.04 (Beta) using the following:

sudo apt-get install gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-clutter-1.0 gir1.2-gtkclutter-1.0 gir1.2-gconf-2.0
bzr branch lp:csslavie
cd csslavie
./netbook-launcher.py

Note: default clutter/cogl has a bug which prevents the background’s opacity setting, so you won’t get as cool an effect. But a fixed version of those libraries should be available eventually.

Please comment below what you think.

The frightening proposition is that health in the UK would be privatised. Not just like the system in the USA, but having to possibly pass through a system far worse in order to finally be dragged towards the regulated compromise the Americans have found themselves in.

The point we’re told from conservatives over and over is that capitalism and corporate business practice can bring many efficiency gains to the way health businesses operate. Competition is sighted as a key mechanism to achieving this result. Much needed capital could be found in the private sector and the whole system would be closely monitored to make sure it kept on curing people and setting broken bones.

But, as readers of my blog will know, I’m not really attached to any particular mechanic in achieving what we wish to happen in society. If a privately capitalised, for-profit business which takes it’s organisational strategy from Cadburies really is the best was to set up a hospital, then so be it. But on the other hand if you believe in capitalism in your heart, but not in your head; then one’s politics might be driven towards operational and funding mechanics which might be ill fitting. Politicians who probably aren’t evil or even that naughty, get confused by positive bias and fallacies from popularity and especially group think and persistent ideas.

Really thinking about the simple rules which allow such a mechanic to work well enough to provide all those great examples isn’t simple. Let’s start with a simple rule of markets: ‘Buyer must have the option not to buy’, do we think that health is something we can opt out of? Do we get a choice not to be saved if we’re in an accident and picked up by a private ambulance? That’s the unsettling thing about the USA’s ‘fairer’ health care bill, forcing people to buy products isn’t right there and it wouldn’t be in the UK either.

Here I’d like to slide into a wider concern. Health is something of an important system, without this service the economy would be very quickly loosing people to illness and injury. The pain felt in the USA is not just by individuals, but keenly by companies big and small. They often pay for some or all of the health coverage for all their employees because having employees without health care would be detrimental to their own operation. So clearly some functions are so important, that organising them collectively has great benefits.

Then there’s competition. Is it a good thing? Well the first thing to ask is what competition hopes to achieve. In market terms, competition is a group selection process which hopes to push forward the fitness of each organisation as it strives to out bid other organisations for available resources, other organisations that can not claim enough resources are deemed unfit and are allowed to fail. This system of evolution does require (system-wide) a larger amount of resources to invest. In organisations which will fail and organisations which will perform activities outside of their core function to innovate. It’s a bet on the future which requires a trade off between cost today and expected organisational innovation tomorrow.

But with a system like the NHS, which will always be tightly controlled. Will there be added resources to cope with this new evolutionary requirement? Will there even be the flexibility to change the organisation in such a way as to find new and brilliantly innovative organisational methods?

Then I see we have a combining. If I like the idea of competition, does it follow I have to swallow private capital funding too? So often we fail to be able to articulate well when we’re talking about funding source and the organisation’s market forces. The lack of distinction and separation of the two probably doesn’t allow us to come up with more interesting rules or more innovative funding ideas. Although it’s amazing to think that the Government of a G8 country, can’t seem to put the money together for anything any more.

In conclusion: When the government says they want to privatise a working public service, what they probably mean is: “We don’t have the money to make it better and we don’t trust the current public sector operators to know their job well enough to improve it’s operation.” and not “We have some added cash to turn this inappropriately publicly operated function into a number of well functioning business concerns.”

The Free Software debate is a long one. There is a principle amongst both developers who want to serve users honestly and users who have been treated badly in the past, that we needed a way of identifying the rights and privileges that any user of software ort to have as a matter of the normal set of freedoms we each have in any other area of life.

Because of computers and software are new to humanity, it’s taken us forty years to go from anarchistic freedom to over-controlled monopolies to a more open market with legal frameworks. Free Software (and the FSF) were critical is finding out what was needed and filling in all the legal and philosophical foundations which would move us, not backwards towards anarchism, but forwards towards freedom with fairness.

Linux and many other software projects owe the FSF, and the philosophies, a great deal. These projects require the structures and foundations laid down by the ideas and principles of people who didn’t think it was good enough to be just practical for ones own benefit.

We’ve been doing a delicate dance for many years trying to move the established order over to this new system; trying to make exceptions, bend the rules and fitting the pieces of the puzzle together by hook and crook. Trying to make sure that Free Software is Free, useful and economical. This we hope, will bring more interest, more developers and more stability.

New users misunderstand why we would put non-free pieces into our systems. Some think that practicality is the only function and that social responsibility is simply not needed. I think differently. We keep track of all the non-free pieces that we need for functionality, but work hard to replace them all the time. This is not fundamentalism, it’s simply that this software is disrespectful. It isn’t a civil member of the software world and despite having to use it to make computers work, we don’t invite it round for tea and support it’s campaign to be elected as the normal method of software production.

But once in, it’s hard to remember why we should spend any time replacing it or even if any work needs doing at all. Projects like Trisquel honour the Ubuntu community by showing us directly what work we need to still do in order to civilize the last few savage packages and drivers. They are our brother who’s uncompromising ideology and courageous functional sacrifice is helpful to our own progression. Even if we, ourselves need to balance both the need for Freedom and functionality.

And surprisingly to some, conversely it’s important to note how important a practical Ubuntu is to the FSF and projects like Trisquel. It’s just too easy to exclude users with difficult hardware or complex needs reducing the size of the user community as it is to thoughtlessly add proprietary components into the system. We offer the FSF a perspective on overcoming user centric problems and a push towards inviting ever more practical people into becoming just a little more concerned with Free Software without having to throw their computer away first.

The very difficult path is not between two hard choices, but between two easy ones.

It depicts Ubuntu with Unity using multi-monitors. Hopefully a feature that will be polished and ready to go by April. Keep up the good work community!

http://paste.ubuntu.com/872138/

This is mainly a problem because the documentation for Gtk with gi.repository is so poor and not clearly described that it makes it impossible to use without great force of will.

Hopefully this script can make the job easier for others, feel free to adapt it and post your remixes.

See Video Here

If you’re using a similar setup, I’d love to know how you manage your content library and do remote access. If you’re interested in my fall-over easy python modules for accessing the XBMC library database you can find the code on launchpad and the librarian code too.

Over the years in the Ubuntu community I’ve grown to dislike this particular metaphor. Not just because we cant seem to learn anything useful from it to enable our community to succeed, but also because its a very weird way to look at the problem. The problem is not number of users or products sold per year, but how your ideas are spread through the population by other people.

For example if we were to think of the chasm as just about getting the majority of people to use your product, then we can consider Apple to have failed to cross the chasm in their desktop computer market. But if you change the concept of success to “people think and talk about” my product then apple is wildly successful. Even the legions of windows users aspire to and understand ownership of an Apple computer. Many of these people will have never used a Apple computer in their lives but will actually change
their way of thinking about desktop computers in order to incorporate Macs into that world view.

So what is the role of advertising? Well that depends on how good the advertising is by how much of an effect advertising has on the population. So if you produce a perfect advert, it can only have a certain effect on the people who see it and then you have to run it a lot or hope those that saw the advert will pass on the ideas your trying to communicate. Since adverts are known for being fairly weak forms of idea transmission you would have to run a lot of adverts for a long period of time to basically force the population to adopt a new set of ideas. This is also known as “throwing money at the problem” since you don’t have to do much leg work with your message in order to get it out there.

What is a strong form of idea transmission is word of mouth. This is easy you might think, anyone who uses your product would be naturally inclined to tell their friends about it! Ah, just because a set of ideas find a home doesn’t mean they’ll find a good way of spreading. You will get a set of customers who enjoy using your product, but no one outside of that group will really know about it. This forms them chasm in the metaphor mentioned above. Its created by a reluctance of your users to communicate your ideas
to the people they know.

As an example i present to you RedHat. Way back before Ubuntu, it was very uncool to run a server with linux, only really technical people did so and usually not with the knowledge of their bosses. Then a company comes along and spreads the idea that Linux can be brilliant on the server, they’ve done something to it or cast a spell of invincibility or something. But even if Linux was exactly the same technically, it was now completely different and new in the eyes of many more people.

The technical users started telling their bosses, other professionals, the word got out not because the technology changed, but because the message was sent with a renewed vitality and conviction that it was new, improved, important and could save you a bag of money to boot.

And that particular war drum has been beating ever since.

Then comes Ubuntu many years later. The same thing happens in fact, Ubuntu creates hope and a renewed vitality for spreading the message. “hey did you know you could run Ubuntu on your desktop computer?” it became cool to tell your friends you used Ubuntu, that maybe they should give it a try or let you
give them a try with a helping hand. Ubuntu wasn’t massively better that Mandrake, Mandriva or SuSE, it was just getting out a clearer and more easily spread message.

Spreading the meme over the chasm

What we’ve done is incredible. Many more people run a Free Desktop now than in 2004. But the message got old over the years, the faith and the vitality has waned and public relations issues have made the message of spreading Ubuntu to everyone you know less appealing and seem more risky.

Nothings really changed. Ubuntu is really getting better and better as a technology, but its message, its “meme spreading” capabilities aren’t what they used to be. New products like Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu phones are interesting and renew some of the flagging faith and in a bring back the old religion in seeing a Free and Open Source platform flourish somewhere.

We secularists tend to think of religion and faith as nasty, dirty emotionally charged system and we should focus instead on proving with data that we are the best and only supporting Ubuntu if it really is the best. But that’s not how humans work, we’re far more emotional and biased and working with that is what produces this chasm effect in the market; if you’re before the chasm then the bias is working against you, if you’re over the chasm then the bias is working for you.

We want to take on the world, and it can be done. Ubuntu can be installed on every computer within a mile of
where you live, that there is nothing it cant do without a bit of persistence and faith that Ubuntu can work. Each and every member of the community is a mass of human interaction; chance after chance to spread our ideas and get the message out there that “you may not use Ubuntu, but think of Ubuntu when you think of computer desktops”.