Friday night, right before heading out to pub with friends, I sat on the couch, armed with a laptop, USB keyboard, RGB cable and a USB memory stick. Trial and error reminded me to

1. use bittorrent to download the image since our flaky Belkin-powered Wifi cuts off the connection every few minutes and thus corrupts direct downloads, and
2. do the boot script magic of pnpbios=off noapic acpi=off like with our earlier Xubuntu installation.

In contrast to the experience of installing Xubuntu on the Viglen MPC-L, the Debian installation was easy from here on. The installer seemed to not only detect the needed kernel and install the correct one (Linux wizzle 2.6.32-5-486 #1 Mon Mar 26 04:36:28 UTC 2012 i586 GNU/Linux) but, judging from the success of the first reboot after the installation had finished and a quick look at /boot/grub/grub.cfg, had also set the right boot options automatically. So the basic setup was a *lot* easier than it was with Xubuntu!

Some things that I’ve gotten used to being automatically installed with Ubuntu weren’t pre-installed with Debian and so I had to install them for my usage. Tasksel installed ssh server, but rsync, lshw and ntfs-3g needed to be installed as well which I had gotten used to having in Ubuntu, but installing them wasn’t too much of a chore. As I use my Viglen MPC-L as my main irssi shell nowadays, I had to install of course irssi, but some other stuff needed by it and my other usage patterns… so… after installing apt-file pastebinit zsh fail2ban for my pet peeves, and tmux irssi irssi-scripts libcrypt-blowfish-perl libcrypt-dh-perl libcrypt-openssl-bignum-perl libdbi-perl sqlite3 libdbd-sqlite3-perl I finally have approximately the system I needed.

All in all, the experience was a lot easier than what I had with Xubuntu in September 2010. It definitely surprised me and I kind of hope that this process wasn’t as easy and automated 18 months ago…

Installation project requires an USB memory stick made into an installation media with the tools shipped with regular Ubuntu. A keyboard is also nice to have to make installation process feasible in the first place, or at least it makes it much less painful experience. After the system is installed, comes the pain of getting the hardware to play nice. Surprisingly I’ve had no other problems than trying to figure out how to make the device and operating system to realise that I want to scroll or right-click with my fingers instead of a mouse. Almost all the previous instructions I’ve come across involve (at best) Ubuntu 11.04 and a 2.6.x kernel – and the rest fail to give a detailed instruction on how to make the scrolling or right-clicking work with evdev. The whole process is very frustrating, and I still haven’t figured everything out.

Anyway. First thing you notice, especially without the fingerscrolling working, is that the new scrollbars are a royal pain in the hiney. The problem isn’t as bad in places where the problem can be bypassed, like in Chromium with the help of an extension called chromeTouch where the fingerscrolling can be set to work, or in Gnome-shell which actually has a decent sized scrollbar, or uninstalling overlay-scrollbar altogether, which isn’t pretty, but it works.

The second immediate thing that slaps a cold wet towel on the face is – after you’ve unplugged the USB keyboard – is the virtual keyboards. Ubuntu and its default environment Unity use OnBoard as the default on-screen keyboard. OnBoard is a complete keyboard with (almost) all the keys a normal keyboard would have, but it lacks a few features that are needed on a tablet computer: it lacks automation of hiding and unhiding itself. In addition to this annoyance OnBoard had the tendency of swapping the keyboard layout to what I assume to be either US or British instead of the Finnish one I had set as default on the installation. One huge problem with OnBoard is at least in my use that it ends up being underneath the Unity interface, where it’s next to useless.

I tried to install other virtual keyboards, like Maliit and Florence, but instructions and packages on Oneiric are lacking and anyway, I still don’t know how to change the virtual keyboard from OnBoard to something else. However, the virtual keyboard in a normal Gnome 3 session with Gnome-Shell seems to work more like the virtual keyboards should, but alas, it doesn’t seem to recognize the keyboard layout settings at all and thus I’m stuck to non-Finnish keyboard layout.

However among all these problems Ubuntu 11.10 manages to show great potential with both Unity and Gnome 3. Ubuntu messaging menu is nice, once gmnotify has been installed (as I use Chromium application Offline Gmail as my email client), empathy set up, music application of choice filled with music and browser settings synchronized.

I’ve found that the webcam works perfectly and the video call quality is much better than it has been earlier on my laptop where I’ve resorted into using GMails video call feature, because it Just Works. It’s nice to see that pulseaudio delivers and bluetooth audio works 100% with both empathy video calls and stereo music/video content.

Having read of the plans for future Ubuntu releases from blogposts of people who were attending UDS-P in Orlando this past week, I openly welcome our future tablet overlords. Ubuntu on tablets needs love and it’s nice to know it’s coming up. This all bodes well for my plan to take over the world with Ubuntu tablet, screen, emacs and chromium :-)

• Assume Good Faith. “Unless there is clear evidence to the contrary, assume that people who work on the project are trying to help it, not hurt it.” Most people aren’t your enemies. Most people will not try to hurt you. If stupidity is abound, it’s (usually) not meant as a personal attack towards you, nor is it intentional.
• When someone does something that doesn’t immediately make sense, which contradicts your assumptions about the skills and common sense of a person you are dealing with, discuss it with them! Don’t make assumptions based on partial information or details, ask for more info so you don’t need to assume the worst! If something is unclear, asking won’t make things worse.

Pessimists are never disappointed, only positively surprised. But while the world seems like a dark a desolate place and the humanity seems to be doomed, I still have to try to believe in the sensibility of people and that we can make something special for the project we are trying to work for. Ubuntu, Wikipedia, Life… or just your day-to-day job.

But why is that? Why is it that something that has filled my free time almost totally for almost fifteen past years is now a source of anxiety and anger?

My use of IRC has evolved from being fun way of passing time and communicating with friends to source of information, connecting with people interested in similar issues and surprisingly, keeping in touch with the professionals, enthusiasts and issues I consider vital to my work and learning new skills. This comes with a downside: I expect a level of professionalism from people I discuss with.

I’m not saying being casual is bad. God knows my jokes are sometimes horrible, punchlines somewhat questionable and sometimes I’m just irrational. But I still expect a certain level of professionalism, not only on IRC, but in conference speeches, blog entries I see in various places, like Planet Ubuntu and Planet Gnome and all the rest I follow, in discussion forums and IRL meets. What I’m looking for is a atmosphere you’d expect to find in a pub on a weekday, after 5pm, but before 8pm. I call it The After Work Beer -atmosphere.

What is it? Lets do a thought experiment. Imagine going to a pub for a drink (be it alcoholic or just your favourite fruit juice) with your colleagues. While you might still talk shop, the atmosphere is notably more casual than at the office or on the shop floor. There’s still most of the social norms of the work place in effect – social faux pas that should be honoured in most cases, right?

This includes how you interact with your colleagues of different gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religion and so on.
A) Think of how you’d behave?

Consider then another group coming in the bar for an AWB just like your group has. They might be all female, all Indians, all Finns, all LGBT, all Somali, all Russians, all Muslim (or Jewish or Bahá’i), all English, all Mexicans.
B) How would you behave towards them?

here’s some hints:
A) You treat them respectfully as you’d treat them at workplace. You don’t hit on them, make racial slurs, tell them they’re going to hell because of their religion or sexual preference, you don’t aggressively pick them out from the group, but you don’t also ignore them.
B) You treat them respectfully as you’d treat them at workplace, being guests, customers or subcontractors. You don’t gang up on them to hit on them, make racial slurs, tell them they’re going to hell because of their religion or sexual preference, you don’t make a scene by calling them out by names from across the pub. If you’re interested in them, you go and ask them all to join your group, but you don’t single out just a few or feel insulted if the request is declined.

And this is what I expect of the FLOSS community, as we are trying to produce a professional level software and services that are on par or better than proprietary ones. We may not be working in the same company, not in the same country or share opinions on political, religious, sexual or whatever levels. But we are interested in reaching the same goal, and we need to work together to achieve it.

1) Installing applications to my phone was previously something I really hated. I remember how horrible it was trying to get oggplay installed to my phone, typing the url to the darn things browser. But hey, atleast my N95 already came with the solution (which I didn’t know how to use properly and in an actually useful way before): 2D barcode reader. I used 2D barcodes to my book catalogue (more about this later in this post) entries, but not on much else.

This is where The Most Excellent Mobile Barcoder comes into play… or would, if I’d use Firefox (*DOH*). But despair not, all you users of Epiphany, Konqueror, Safari or even Opera or IE! Since I happen to know the developer of the extension personally *cough*, I asked if he could do a nice little bookmarklet (to be dragged to the bookmark bar of the browser) for me :-) and so he did. It works on Firefox too ;-) I made a smart bookmark of it myself for my personal use; I’ll leave making of it as an excercise to the reader.

2) Fire Eagle and Twitterfeed are a nice way to inform your microblogging friends what is going on. Especially Twitterfeeds add some of the missing features in Twitter and Identi.ca that Jaiku (my absolute favourite microblogging service) already has. Fire Eagle allows me to update my location in multiple ways and to also publish it in many ways. My favourite updating tools are Plazes, dopplr and J2ME updater, and my favourite publishing tool is Eaglefeed.

3) Book/CD/DVD/perfume/shoe/jewelry database is what I’ve been thinking of lately. I’ve already catalogued my books and my CD’s, but I still haven’t entered my perfumes nor my DVD’s or the few games I have to any database. I desperately need a place to database them all, if for nothing else, for letting other people to know what not to buy for me. I was pointed to thinglink.org which might just be what I need. I’m planning to move my music/book collection to there, but what I’m thinking is that since thinglink is open source, it should be expanded and clusterized and clients for it should be made and and and… if only I knew how to code! I’ve not yet studied the whole thing throughly so I don’t know which of my ideas have already been implemented, but damn.

4) Hardware acquisitions are so difficult these days. About two months ago I purchased a hard drive for my laptop in the hope that it would solve my laptops sluggishness (as smartctl suggested my hard drive might be dying). I spent most of my still hangoverish Monday to go to Pirkkala verkkokauppa.com by bus from Hervanta to purchase a hard drive, they didn’t have the model I wanted on the shelf so I paid for a bigger model. I checked the hard drive and the laptop specs before I opened the package, and good thing I did. The laptop uses SATA, the drive I bought was IDE… >____< I just got the new correct hard drive a week ago, I still haven’t installed it, but will soon. BUT.

I need to buy more RAM, and this is where things start to get tricky: I have no idea what kind of RAM this thing eats and how much I should/could purchase. This document (PDF) tells me I could max to 4GB, but I’m still uncertain of the type of RAM.

5) Intrepid Ibex is out and since I’ve been running it on my laptop since August, I didn’t for once feel the odd jittery feeling and anxiety of a new Ubuntu version. I did attend the release day madhouse at #ubuntu and #ubuntu-release-party as a good IRC op should, but that was about it. I guess I’m a bit blind to the new and cool stuff in it, though I do appreciate seeing the fruits of the project I looked over during the summer by one of my Finnish Summercoders who I later recruited to work for Nomovok to be included in Intrepid.

I’ve had my share of problems with Intrepid though – and I’m sad to confess my tight schedule on both work and personal life stuff has prevented me from looking up most of them. My laptop has no wireless in Intrepid with the latest kernel of 2.6.27-7, for reasons I’ve not checked. Might be that I’ve blacklisted a module, though I doubt it as 2.6.27-6 works nice-ish (cuts the signal in a way that, for example, Skype calls hang up from time to time). My laptop has Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01), which works fine with ath5k.

6) Out of professional interest I’ve got a sudden urge to install Gentoo, LFS and/or *BSD on a virtualized system. Odd. Some may speculate I’ve lost my mind. Perhaps I have.

7) I want Nokia Internet Tablet n800 really bad. Not n810, I want especially n800. People have asked me *why*, but the answer is actually quite simple. I don’t need GPS, as my phone has GPS. I don’t want moving slided keyboard, as the hardware keyboard doesn’t have *the* Finnish keyboard layout I wish it had. I don’t want moving sliding keyboard, as it would be yet another moving part that would break when dropping the thing, or yet another moving thing collecting guinea pig hair or crisp bread crumbs in between the moving parts. The hardware specs are really better for me in the older model than in the newer one. Anyone care to sell me one cheap? I want to play Numpty Physics, do Ekiga calls, have Flash on my browser for watching youtube and Skype to work on a mobile device. These are the things my trustworthy 770 can’t do.

8) OMG OMG I want zebra to Ubuntu, too! VOTE FOR IT! (and if you can contribute in the development, please add support for QR/DataMatrix, plz?)

9) YES!

10) I’m still an emacs fangirl

even if someone has tried to bribe me in multiple ways ;-)

As an irssi fangirl, I constantly search for solutions to enhance my IRC experience. One of them is logging which I adore. I log all my private conversations (for I’ve lost relevant email addresses, snailmail addresses, phone numbers, promises, threats and beautiful poems too many times before) for future reference to help my memory.

As I’m also using multiple platforms as my communication device (my Ubuntu desktop, my Xubuntu laptop, my IT2007HE2 Nokia Internet Tablet 770, sometimes my sister’s Windows XP, sometimes an odd Windows / whatever), and multiple protocols, I’ve used Pidgin for IM and irssi for IRC. This is quite problematic, since that by default results in

• my logs being on multiple computers
• different settings for each client I use
• inconsistency in my behavioural models

For the problems mentioned above, I’ve used bitlbee IM2IRC gateway before, and few weeks ago compiled a special version for my homeserver to allow Jabber to connect using other ports than allowed by default. This has solved most of my problems.

One still remains though, and this is the part where I yell for help – how can I use OTR with my setup? I’ve tried to look into the forums and apparently there is some steps already taken in the issue, for what I see Debian might be/is packaging a plugin for irssi-otr in the future. However, my home server is Ubuntu Hardy, and I want the OTR *right now*. EEEEEP. What to do?

on related note, I use terminator straight from bzr, and I lovez it.
PS. Hyvää Juhannusta!

Hi, I’m Miia Ranta, one of the recent additions to Ubuntu members but also to Planet Ubuntu. I’ve been using Ubuntu since February 2005, Linux few times before that. I can be spotted at some of Ubuntu related channels in freenode as Myrtti. I’m Finnish geekette, living in Tampere, Finland together with two guinea pigs.

It’s quite surreal to be making my first ever entry to Planet Ubuntu. I wrote about Ubuntu and the spirit of it on my blog oh, so many years ago (was it 2005?). Then, I was still studying in Tampere, doing office cleaning every evening after school, coding my own flat-file based blogging system with PHP, and fiddling with this new thing called Ubuntu. I had used Ubuntu for about 8 months by then. Using Linux and open source fit my mentality and my view on life in general. Since then I was employed by COSS, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions, to help them with Linux and Open source in their own infrastructure, to overview the Finnish Summercode. I’ve met wonderful people, learnt new things, gotten new responsibilities and now working from home for a FLOSS company called Nomovok. Now I get paid for doing what I loved few years ago, but has the basics changed?

No.

Also sprach Myrtti 2005-11-15:
Q:So how does this compute to you being a person promoting open and free source where ever possible?
A:Because I feel that when I help somebody, I get something eventually in return. Because I feel that there is very few types of information that need to be private and classified. Because I think information is the key to every problem. Because I think that *we together* are stronger than *we individually*. Because I think that you don’t have a right to complain about something that sucks unless you’re ready to do something about it. Because I think that if something is wrong and the effort of trying to improve it isn’t uncomprehencively huge, you should. Because I think it’s a sin if you know something and someone would use the information, and you don’t tell it to anyone.

Because I think I love you.