J_K9 @ Linux

What Would You Like To Read?

I have a few interesting and exciting articles up my sleeve which I now have an entire week to write (you can hold me to this statement, by the way), but there is so much going on in the Linux world these days that it really is difficult to come up with good, enlightening, entertaining articles.

So, why not help me out—which How To or article have you not already seen on the internet which you would like me to write and which is relevant to Linux or Open Source? Go on; surprise me.

P.S. I can’t wait to try Gutsy!

Why Is Achieving Simplicity So Difficult?

Having spent the past five or so hours trying to connect my Ubuntu 7.04 laptop and Windows XP desktop to my Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles so that I can stream media from one to the other with almost no success, perhaps it is a little too easy for me to say this. I can imagine all the effort that went into coding the media centres for both consoles—that I will not dispute. But how on earth can they have made it so complex, so embedded in proprietary ways, that it just refuses to work no matter which media server I use?

I have tried just about every major UPnP media server available on the internet, from Open Source to Free Software to good old proprietary. I have tried Mediatomb, TVersity, TwonkyVision, Nero 7 MediaHome, Windows Media Player 11 and several others on all the Operating Systems they were compiled for (yes, including Mac OS X—I forgot to mention my ageing but powerful iMac G5). The only one I had some success with was Mediatomb; the others were completely useless and incompatible with the consoles.

Not only did I have problems at the server end, but the consoles were also playing up on me. My PS3 has decided that UPnP is “not available” and that my network is a “NAT Type 3″ ever since its last update, which essentially means that there’s no way in hell it’s going to find my server. Then there’s the Xbox, which struggles (and fails) to find even the media server created by its own owner, incorporated into Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 11.

I can’t help but think to myself: how pathetic is this? Are Sony and Microsoft so set in their ways that they cannot agree upon Open Standards to ensure simplicity and compatibility across a range of technologies included in their products? Is it too difficult to agree on some basic requirements for the implementation of these technologies to ensure that they do not differ too much, so that the end-user can truly have a “Plug and Play” experience?

I consider myself an advanced user and I was unsuccessful in my attempts to get this set-up working in my home network. If I was unable to do it, how can Sony and Microsoft possibly expect less experienced users to accomplish this seemingly insurmountable task?

I could go on for quite a bit ranting about how despicable this is, but then I’d just be wasting more time on these “home consoles” which Microsoft and Sony have so lovingly produced. The games and graphics are great, that I will admit—but if you’re going to add media centre functionality, make sure you do it right. Don’t give me some semi-working system which never will quite work as I’m made to believe it can (thank you, marketing departments—ever trustworthy).

Next time I want to stream videos to my TV, I’ll shove a network card into it with some software to output Ogg Theora files to the screen and I’ll transcode and stream videos to it on-the-fly from my PC. No UPnP, no proprietary formats or technologies, no unnecessary crap. Keep it simple and it will work reliably and with as little extra pain as possible.

Hey, that’s not too bad an idea… I better get working on a business plan!

And yes, I do know it’s not that simple to network-enable a TV

Exams Approaching

I’m sorry for the shortage of posts - juggling schoolwork, revision for exams and the other joys of life has been consuming almost all of my time.

The regular, scheduled posting will return soon

Off To Seattle, WA

If you’re wondering why my posts have been few and far between recently, it has been a combination of work, Mira mockups and (until recently) taking part in the development of a presentation which will be displayed to a board of directors at Microsoft.

Believe me, the fact that I, an Open Source/Linux evangelist, am going to Seattle to visit Microsoft sounds as ironic to you as it does to me, but it’s the truth! Visiting Microsoft and several of its departments are in the itinerary of this school trip, as is visiting Boeing’s HQ. Taking a look around the headquarters of these two giants, one of which has slightly sharper fangs than the other, will be interesting to say the least.

We will also be the first school ever to have been granted access to some of the more secretive of Microsoft’s departments, such as the Home and Office of the Future areas. Despite there being pictures of the former on the internet, we have had to sign confidentiality agreements to agree not to disclose anything about either of those two sections, so I’m afraid you’ll be hearing little more than a mention from me (whether that is a good or bad thing is for you to judge).

I leave the UK on Wednesday and shall be returning a week later, and I’ll keep you updated as the days go by - this time, do keep your heads up

Today: In Retrospect

Today has been quite successful and rewarding. I flew back home last night because I’ve got a week of holiday - this is where I first got WPA working on Ubuntu. My old router, a Linksys WAG54G, had been giving me a few problems over Christmas - its ethernet ports had stopped working. However, having returned home after a long period at college, I had completely forgotten about this..

One of my birthday presents was an HP Photosmart C5180 - it’s an excellent printer in its own right, yet it does much more. Not only does it print high-quality photos as well as standard documents, it also acts as a scanner and photocopier. However, I had yet to connect it to the network - I had barely had time after my birthday to set up the printer on my home network. So, I connected it to my router using a crossover ethernet cable and allowed it to configure itself automatically.

I checked its network settings after a few minutes and it had an IP address beginning with ‘169.’ - bad news. That is the IP address several OSs assign themselves when a DHCP server is unavailable and a static IP address has not been configured. As this had failed, I tried to configure a static IP address, but the printer did not show any network statistic once I had configured it. So, I placed the HP drivers installation CD into my CD drive and began to install it.

During the installer, I was forced to locate my printer before I could install the associated drivers - fair enough. However, no matter how many different ports on the router I tried nor which IP assignment settings the installer would not find my networked printer. I spent a total of about an hour - bearing in mind that installing the HP all-in-one software, even up to this point, takes several minutes - before I remembered that the router’s ethernet ports were broken. Plugging the ethernet cable into my laptop allowed me to verify this and, sure enough, the ports were broken!

I was slightly irritated because I could neither update my new Ubuntu installation on my home desktop nor connect the printer! So, I wrote down a few notes (ie. ‘buy a new router’) and went to bed.

I woke up this morning, showered, got dressed, and did my usual routine of browsing through my RSS feeds on Google Reader and frequenting my usual forums (ok, I’ve been neglecting that recently, which is mostly entirely due to laziness). After lunch, I went out to town and bought a Belkin F5D7633-4A (otherwise known as ‘Belkin Wireless G Plus Router’), another network cable so that I can network both my printer and my desktop, whose wireless driver does not support WPA, at the same time. I bought a mouse too, but that’s fairly irrelevant..

The Belkin router has now replaced my aging Linksys and is doing a perfect job. My printer is now network, and I have my laptop, desktop and family’s laptop all hooked up to it. Despite there only being HP software for Windows and Mac OS X (and those being almost 300MB large and distributed with the printer on CDs), my Ubuntu laptop was the first to successfully print a document over the network with it thanks to the inbuilt hpijs driver - and I didn’t have to install anything or download enormous files. Don’t you just love Open Source software?

*Finally* Connected To A WPA-Encrypted Network On Linux

You cannot possibly imagine how many hours I’ve spent trying to connect both my Linux desktop and laptop to my WPA-encrypted home wireless network. I’ve tried every configuration option in the latest snapshot of wpa_supplicant, tweaked /etc/network/interfaces to no end, and installed the newest releases of the wireless drivers for my cards all to no avail. I had even tried Gnome’s network-manager (KDE has an equivalent called Knetwork-manager), which was meant to have WPA and even WPA2 support for a wide range of drivers, but not even that worked - it wouldn’t recognise my card. At least, not until today.

Today, while I was going through my bookmarks, I came across a thread which I had bookmarked a while back about setting up wpa_supplicant on Ubuntu and configuring it to work with the IPW2200 driver/card (which is what my laptop has). I flicked threw it, knowing that I had tried those instructions before and had not received anything but a bit more junk at the end of it, and I came across a post about network-manager. The poster recommended network-manager over the wpa_supplicant approach, for it was simpler and was far more reliable, but for it to work the configurations for the wireless card in /etc/network/interfaces had to be erased or commented out. Oh.

To cut a long story short, I commented out those lines, restarted the computer and, sure enough, network-manager picked up my card. The reason it hadn’t picked it up in the first place was because the card had already been configured by /etc/network/interfaces! Ah, sweet irony. Network-manager found my wireless network, and all I had to do was select it and enter my password and, lo and behold, here I am posting wirelessly from my Ubuntu laptop with a WPA-encrypted connection between my laptop and router. How about that?

Speaking of irony, my desktop has a wireless card based on a Ralink RT2500 chipset specifically chosen because there is an Open Source driver available for it. The only problem is that the driver still doesn’t have WPA support so, network-manager or not, I can’t connect my desktop to the network wirelessly - the 20m ethernet cable it is

// Edit

By the way, to download and install network-manager on Ubuntu or Debian all you need to do is run the following command from a Terminal window:

sudo apt-get install network-manager

Or, alternatively, if you are using Ubuntu, go to Applications->Add/Remove… and install ‘Network Manager’ in the Internet section.

Back To School

Yes, it’s that time of year again. You’re forced to return to a place you hate to learn subjects that do not interest you but which you must take to secure (hah!) a good future. Bah. Mais c’est la vie, unfortunately.

As if returning to boarding school is not bad enough, I sat two AS (Advanced Subsidiary) level French modules yesterday, which is approximately a year and a half earlier than most other people taking French A level will sit them. I’m not going to comment on how they went (I never do) - I’m just hoping for the best

Despite not posting much over Christmas because the majority of my free time was taken up by Project X, I fear that I may post even less now that I have returned to school. However, I will do my best to get two or three articles out a week just to keep my readers happy!

Happy New Year!

Dear one and all,

I wish you a very happy New Year and may 2007 be an even better year than 2006 for you, your family and Open Source software (especially Linux).

Sweet 16…

and never been kissed!

The past year has been a blast. There are countless other articles discussing what has happened in the Linux and Open Source world this year so I do not intend to regurgitate what they have said. I am only posting to wish you a very Merry Christmas (slightly belated, I know!) and as great a New Year, in case I do not post before then!

Oh, and today was my birthday (it’s worth stating in case the title wasn’t clear enough :P). Burnt offerings are being accepted - please feel free to use the contact form!

On a final note, a quick thanks to all my friends and family who have helped me throughout the year and from whom I have learnt a lot, despite being a year older and - apparently - none the wiser..

En Passant…

Published today, I’ve come across a good article titled “13 Reasons To Celebrate The New Microsoft-Novell Pact” which offers a substantially different viewpoint on the matter compared to articles or opinions of others such as, I don’t know, Bruce Perens’ statement on Novell being “the new SCO.”

On another note, I have been getting Bluehost’s “CPU Quota Exceeded” page quite a lot recently, so I’m considering hacking together my own CMS and writing a script to port the data in Wordpress’ database to my CMS. I think what is causing this error is an excess of database queries, as Wordpress performs about twenty queries per page load (if I remember correctly), so it’s no wonder that the CPU limit is surpassed and my account is suspended for a few minutes whenever there are too many concurrent connections. Bluehost is a great webhost, but since they lowered the CPU limit (or so it appears) I am getting these errors far too frequently, and I am contemplating moving this website to a more powerful server on another webhost such as Media Temple. We’ll see

[edit] Fourteen queries on the front page, in fact.