Remarkably true, and an answer if ever there was one as to why I enjoy EvE so much above other games I’ve played. Long may it remain so.

Learning Curve of Various MMORPGs

I took less pictures this year, I was overall less attentive due to recurring hangovers, but I did have every bit as good a time. Anyway, let’s see where we get to…

Transport & Accommodation

After the disaster that was trying to get to Oxford by train a few weeks back, I opted to drive down to Wolves this time round, offering lifts via the LancsLUG list but forgetting to check the LUGRadio Forums – meant I ended up meeting a few others who’d similarly travelled down from Lancaster, which was a mistake. We could have easily car-shared if we’d realized.

Another factor in driving down was that I’d only really decided I was definitely going to go down there the day before – it would have been the same cost to get on the train, with less guarantees.
As it was, the drive down was painless, although I did get there a little late because I went for beer the night before and slept through my alarm – n00b.

With making the decision the day before, I decided to go with what I knew and opted to stay at the Novotel in Wolverhampton – right next to the railway station, 5 minutes walk to the venue, and just off one of the main roads (maybe 15 minutes from the motorway). It was as to be expected – not the cheapest, but conveniently placed, clean and, to be quite honest, easy. Buffet breakfast was included, which I maxed on, and the snack I got there in the evening to wash down my Guinness was pretty good as well.

The Talks

This segment is the reason this is a week late, and it’s an utter failure. I spent most of the last week wanting to really devote time to this part likeI did last year to give the speakers the best possible summation I could. Then I realized I didn’t make enough notes to do that. Instead, I’ll just summarise what I saw, what was interesting, and key things of note.

To begin with, as mentioned, I arrived to the event too late to see the opening segment by the four large gents, and as such also missed the usual rush to get in and see the place fill up. It also meant that I missed a good portion of the first talk I went to see, which was Rufus Pollock talking about the Open Knowledge Foundation. I have to be honest, before LRL, I think I had heard of the Foundation but knew nothing about it. It’s a really cool idea, and I wholeheartedly suggest visiting the webstie to find out more, along with the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network – super stuff. The things that particularly made me sit up and think were a couple of key phrases Rufus mentioned during his talk, the first centralising around the many minds principle, which is a principle I have a lot of faith in, and his phrase of ‘the revolution will be decentralized’. It makes so much sense given the nature of the internet and its accessibility. These big changes, that need to happen to make real progress revolve around the idea of open and shared knowledge and the sharing of ideas struggle if they’re dictated to from a central point. I really can’t do it justice by trying to paraphrase everything he said but, to find out more, check out the aforementioned links.
Another snippet he mentioned that caught my ear was, after explaining how ‘3G’ alone has over 7000 patents applicable to it, and 800 distinct patents (all of which, supposedly, ‘protect’ intellectual property), the question ‘Why should this process be open?’ His answer? ‘Because putting Humpty Dumpty back together is easier‘ when things are open. And it really is. When the shit hits the fan, and things need fixing, it’s so much easier if you can have all the blueprints and tools right there at your fingertips. You shouldn’t need to scrabble around for permission to access certain ‘IP Stuffs’ just to be able to start working on a fix. Another point mentioned that I wasn’t aware of was that, in most cases, works without a license default to being treated as proprietary, not open.

I stayed in the main stage for the next talk by Emma Jane Hogbin, regarding women on open source and various aspects surrounding that. I’m not going to go blow-by-blow with what was said, but it really was extremely interesting, well thought out, and energetic. Would definitely like to go see her speak again when I’m not as hungover / tired so I can pay considerably more attention and make notes.

Lunchtime intervened, allowing me to check into the hotel, grab a lot of coffee, and a sandwich to try and help me make it through the afternoon. It failed.

First up was Jeremy Allison of the SAMBA project, again on the main stage. A very good speaker, I actually found the talk fascinating for an area I didn’t know much about as it provided a good broad picture of where SAMBA came from, what it had done and a glimpse at where it could be going. My only regret, as with most talks over the weekend, is that I was in not mental state to really get the most out of them, as I was constantly battling sleep. n00b.

The Gong-a-Thong Lightbulb Extravaganza was up next, and it all got much more surreal than last year. Funny though. I actually didn’t listen much to most of the Gong-a-Thong though, as I decided to run over and make the msot of the quiet spell on the Bytemark gaming rig. Impressive setup. I found myself coming back more and more in a vain attempt to stroke my epeen and get better at Team Fortress 2. I didn’t quite achieve this.

I also played on for much too long so that I missed at least the first half of Steve Lamb’s talk entitled ‘Green IT’. As such, I feel even less qualified than normal to comment on what it was about – some comments about security not being platform dependent rang true though. And well done again Steve, what I heard was really interesting stuff, but I did spend a long time cursing myself for not getting there to listen to it from the start.

The day concluded with LUGRadio Live and Unleashed. Always amusing. You can go listen and download it here (when it gets uploaded… ).

I was surprisingly spritely at the start of Day 2, my only guess for that is that I was still drunk. I kicked it off by going to see Barbie’s talk, ‘Understanding Malware’.
I’d heard of Barbie many times before going to LRL and he didn’t disappoint. It was informative and interesting, even if it was a little above the level I would be comfortable with.

Next up was the Mass Debate – a popular event last year – this year featuring Jeremy Allison, Mrben, Matthew Garrett and … I forget the last panelist (I arrived after the introductions). Jono hosted it.
As with last year, it was hilarious, with some good points being made along with plenty of sly and not-so-sly piss-taking.

Lunch came, and with it came the afternoon fragging. Back to the Team Fortress 2 server I went, and the time flew by. I missed Matthew Garrett’s talk on ‘Power Management that Works’, but made it to Neuro’s talk on Second Life. I found Neuro’s brief rundown to Second Life last year pretty interesting, even if it is something I’m not massively interested in getting into and, listening to him this year, I came home and downloaded the client. I’ve yet to give it a thorough trial. It’s impressive technology-wise, not convinced it’ll prove to be for me though. We’ll see!

And that was it. Game over for another year. This time with no regular podcasts in between.

I’ll miss the podcasts, but i certainly won’t miss being at LRL next year. As Westwood may say, “It’s gonna be BIG” – and all that shite. It will be good.

Nutsacks

The fully edited picture will hopefully get linked here Soon ™, but my Nutsack idea this year was, I think, not what I was meant to get, and I apologise if someone left theirs on the side only to return and find I’d swagged it. Having arrived late, I just grabbed the first one that was on the table, saving myself from rummaging through it until I got to the hotel.

Mostly it was of a similar composition to last year (to be expected). The free T-Shirt was from UKUUG, there were one or two pens, some papers and advertising stuff for various upcoming events, the programme, a keyring bottle-opener from Yahoo! (which was considerably more useful than the strangely shaped pen of last year.. ), and a latest Ubuntu CD. Solid stuff.

In addition to the stuff in the bag, I was also able to grab a lovely free T-Shirt from the LinuxEmporium stand, as a return for entering their competition with the chance to win an EeePC. Alas, I didn’t win the EeePC, but getting a T-Shirt for the effort was a nice touch.

I’ll update this, and add info to the pictures, when I get chance (given that this is 7 days late, expect a sturdy delay on that..), but for now I can’t really think of much else to add!

EeePC Desires

EeePCs seemed to be everywhere at LRL this year. Which wasn’t a good thing for me as it dramatically increased my urge to go buy myself one. I did in fact come very close to just getting one right there and then, but with the knowledge that the new models are coming out very very shortly, I figured I should wait.

These things are bloody lovely for the sort of thing I want them for. The keyboard does indeed feel incredibly small at first, but I’m almost certain that, with a little practise, that will become a non-issue. The screen is plenty big enough for general browsing and document-editing. All in a slick little package with wireless capabilities, massive battery life, and solid state disks so I can feel slightly more comfortable when it crashes to the floor.

The other thing that was on show there that looked really slick was the Ubuntu desktop running on one of them. It just looked really, really good. To be fair though, I only had the ‘Advanced Menu’ mode of the native Xandros install to compare it to which, whilst it’s definitely functional and familiar, was a bit of a disappointment – I was quite looking forward to seeing what the Bubbly and Cuddly default appearance looked and handled like. Even so though, I think I’ll end up getting mine pre-installed with Ubuntu, probably from EfficientPC – as the fellow running the stand for them was really quite interesting to talk to about it and seems more than happy to go to extra lengths to help customize it. Go check ‘em out – they’re meant to be getting the new EeePCs in stock in the next few weeks – FUN!

Community, Community, Community

Jono may get a kicking at regular intervals for his overuse of this term but, feck it. The community aspect of LUGRadio may have been clear to see last year but, for whatever reason, this year came across as considerably more sociable right the way through.
Admittedly, as much as anything, that may have been less to do with an increase in sociable atmosphere and more to do with me coming out of my shell a bit more and feeling comfortable striking up conversations and generally imposing myself on other groups. If I ever did become a bind, then I obviously apologise to those people, but I don’t think I did (hopefully).

The addition of Karaoke on the Saturday night was a superb idea, and definitely brought out the best in people, if not always their voices, and generally aided the party atmosphere. Heading down into Wolves afterwards to visit the rock bar (can’t remember it’s name) was just as much a laugh, even if my memory does get considerably sketchier past that point. However, getting lost on my way back to the hotel certainly wasn’t as much fun!

As with last year, both days carried with them plenty of joviality and all round politeness and banter. In many ways similar to what I loved about Glastonbury, everyone at LRL is there because they share similar broad interests – in this case technology in general and FOSS. As such, the atmosphere is brilliant.

I had some great conversations with various folks this year, and learned a whole load, and I thank them for that. I also saw people I first met at last year’s event, and it really did hammer home this community idea, and made me realize how foolish it was to have not taken a bigger part in it during the year. I have no excuses for that, except my own leanings towards being socially inept and not really knowing how to best start to get to know an already established group as a complete outsider. Childish and foolish? Definitely. But it seems to be the way I’m wired.

Pictures and all that Jazz

I didn’t take alf the pictures I’d wanted to take, and most of the ones I did take didn’t come out well.

If you want to look through some of them, then mine are bunched up in the midst of the Flickr collection, tagged lugradiolive. Some fun photos in there!

As you can hopefully tell from this writeup, I had another great weekend at LUGRadio Live this year, and I was extremely pleased to hear that the show will have at least one more outing same time next year. It’s going to be interesting to see how it turns out, seeing as how there won’t be a regular show to promote it, but if anything it provides an impetus to become more actively involved with the community, which can only be a good thing.

So, to the four blokes and their merry band of yellow-shirted helpers – thanks for another great year. For the cool people I met and talked to – thanks for the hospitality and friendliness. To those who provided such solid information – it’s all appreciated, and I apologise I couldn’t do you justice in my write-ups.

I’ll see you all next year, that’s for sure.

1. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox#Create%20A%20Bridge
2. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=830777
3. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=752127

Anyway, let’s begin.

Does it Work…?

First step along this Rocky Road to Near-Fail was to follow the useful advice in Link 1 above, and thus making sure that creating a bridge and activating it and the TUN/TAP actually worked. It did. From that link, I did the following:

~$ sudo aptitude install bridge-utils uml-utilities

This installs the pre-requisite applications to do the fun stuff.
The second point depends on your viewpoint, but it’s probably worth backing up your current /etc/network/interfaces file in case you manage to break something:

~$ sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.good

Obviously, what you call and where you place the backup is up to you. Just make sure it’s something you remember later.

Now for preparing the bridge itself. Fun:

~$ sudo tunctl -t tap1 -u USERNAME
~$ sudo chown root.vboxusers /dev/net/tun
~$ sudo chmod g+rw /dev/net/tun

Next up, we need to edit another file, apparently to help make permissions persist after reboots. The file we need to edit is /etc/udev/rules.d/20-names.rules
Again, we need to edit this as root, so from the terminal:

~$ sudo [$editor_du_jour] /etc/udev/rules.d/20-names.rules

And then at the end of that file, find the following line:
KERNEL=="tun", NAME="net/%k"
And add the following to make it look like this:
KERNEL=="tun", NAME="net/%k", GROUP="vboxusers", MODE="0660"

Take whichever process your editor takes for saving and closing that.

Now we can create the bridge itself:

~$ sudo brctl addbr br0

Now put the network interface into promiscuous mode, add it to the bridge, and set the Bridge to DHCP (if you are using DHCP, if not, ignore these and see the next statement):

~$ sudo ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 promisc
~$ sudo brctl addif br0 eth0
~$ sudo dhclient br0

If you are NOT using DHCP, and have a STATIC IP, follow this example:
~$ sudo ifconfig br0 192.168.1.105 netmask 255.255.0.0
~$ sudo route add default gw 192.168.1.1 br0
(Obviously, replace the IP, Netmask, and Gateway IPs with your own…)

Now, simply add the tap1 device to the bridge and bring up the interface:

~$ sudo brctl addif br0 tap1
~$ sudo ifconfig tap1 up

Last thing I did was just to run ifconfig to double check everything that should be there is there. You should have the Bridge (br0) with your IP Address, the physical interface (eth0) set promiscuously, and the TAP, tap1.

Opening up VirtualBox and change the appropriate network settings for your VirtualMachine to point to the new tap device (in my case, tap1). First step in that is to change the ‘Attached To’ drop-down to point to ‘Host Interface’.

Starting the VirtualMachine now should be effortless, and when it starts up (and you add them), the same routes you’ve been using should work just fine… so ping, ping away!

Making it Permanent

The initial instructions I was hoping to follow from Link 1 didn’t work out all too well for me, so I was back trying to work out exactly where I could fix it. Thankfully, SpaceTeddy on the Ubuntu forums was able to point me in the right direction of some useful hints he’d written.
In the end, I did the following.
First step is to go back and edit /etc/network/interfaces with your preferred Text Editor. You need to be root to do this. In there, you are replacing your current Physical Interface settings for the bridge, or, in my case, swapping out eth0 for br0. Then you are adding a rule to tell the bridge it using your physical interface (eth0). Finally you are adding the stuff that brings eth0 up as promiscuous. It should look like this:

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
bridge_ports eth1
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet manual
up ifconfig $IFACE 0.0.0.0 up
up ip link set $IFACE promisc on
down ip link set $IFACE promisc off
down ifconfig $IFACE down

It’s probably worthwhile noting that you SHOULD NOT remove the references to the Loopback Interface (lo), but do make sure any other references to your physical interface are commented out, or plain old deleted – you made a backup anyway, right?

After doing that, the only thing left to include is finding a way to bring the TAP interface up on startup. The other guides do mention ways to do it through /etc/network/interfaces but they didn’t work for me – I still don’t know why.

Instead, I just added the commands to /etc/rc.local, along with the routes I need to bring up everytime I startup. This was as simple a case as opening up the file in my preferred text editor (again, sudo is needed) and adding the following:

tunctl -t tap1 -u MyUser
brctl addif br0 tap1
ifconfig tap1 up

exit 0

Make sure to keep the ‘exit 0′ at the end of that file – it seems to work.

And that massively over-lengthy block of text is all that you need to do. I will try and refine this at some point but, this works for me and seems easy enough to follow if I need to remind myself what I did again.

http://www.openmoko.com/product-gallery.html

Seriously, I want this. Badly.

I remember looking at this project every now and then back when I first heard of it, and thought it looked cool. Now it looks even cooler, and is on its second release, edging ever closer to being completely user friendly.

From what I’ve read it is already a huge step up from the first model, and is pretty friendly as long as the user is prepared to get there hands dirty every now and then.

Plus, it is sex-eh:

God yes.

Both Aq’s and Jono’s blogs gave pretty detailed reasons for the sad news.

As, it seems, with the rest of the LUGRadio faithful, I was pretty gutted when I heard the news.

I can understand the reasons, afterall, it isn’t and has never been planned as being a job for any of the presenters, even if they managed to pump out shows with scary regularity over the 5 seasons they’ve done.

Personally, I started listening to the show regularly when I was away in Egypt, so probably around Season 3, as I was experimenting more and more with Linux and Free Software on my laptops as a way of passing the time. The show was good to listen to, gave a good update of some of the things going on in the various Open Source communities and projects around the world and, as much as anything, gave me a good solid dose of British humour whilst I was away, rather than watching various downloaded comedies on repeat. There was always good (not always clean) banter and it did serve to provide great amusement.

To that end, even though I have never really been a very active part of the LUGRadio community – preferring to stay in the shadows both in IRC and on the forums – I decided last year to attend LUGRadio Live 2007, seeing as I was back in the country when it was on and thought it would be a laugh. I think my review from then really sums up what I thought about it- it was a great laugh and really was like being at one huge show. Good information, and general fun.

So, yeh, attend LUGRadio Live 2008 this year. There’s no need to register, just turn up and pay on the door. If you’re heading down from Lancaster, give me a shout – I haven’t decided yet, but I’ll either be driving or getting the train down again (probably the train) – it’s always fun to have people to talk to.

As for the LUGRadio Team – great job over the time I’ve been listening to the show. I think it’s clear from the responses your posts have invoked that your regular banter will be missed, and I’m sure most people, like m, will still follow your various blogs and postings just as avidly before. So have fun, and hopefully you’ll change your minds for a commemorative season at some point…

Seriously, big thanks for all the laughs, and we’ll see you at LRL2008 – I’m sure it’ll be bigger than ever!

This was on my IBM T41 that I picked up second hand last summer, and which has been using the Kubuntu version of the Operating System since being purchased. It seems to handle it well, no major hardware problems (the ones that do have problems are solved using the proprietary drivers – because I hate freedom) and just does what it needs to do.

Last time I decided to stick to what I (think I) know and did the upgrade via the command line – manually changed all the official repositories to Gutsy versions, removed all the 3rd party options and went out on a prayer with sudo aptitude dist-upgrade. It worked. Which was a miracle.

This time, I went a stage further and decided to see if the Kubuntu GUI for these sort of things actually worked as well and looked as acceptable doing it as its GNOME-based older brother. Full marks to the Kubuntu team for getting the update manager up to speed and looking every bit as ‘in place’ as they have on Ubuntu for a version or two. I still think straight Ubuntu looks better, but that’s mainly because of GNOME’s layout – on the flipside I just prefer how KDE works. Having said all that, I may well find myself going back to a GNOME desktop if I continue to fail epically at getting along with using Dolphin as a file manager, at least until I find an easy way to keep it permanently replaced.

Anyway, that’s not the point of the post. The point was to say well done to both Ubuntu and Kubuntu teams for a job well done. The upgrade was painless, kept me informed at every step of the way, looked nice and really was easy. I have yet to double-check that every little thing still works as it should do, but I’m fairly confident any setbacks will be entirely minor and fixable, if present.

As far as this laptop goes, I reckon this will be the last time it gets such an upgrade process, as it doesn’t really need the shininess of KDE 4, and solid Long Term Support that Hardy provides should definitely see it through it’s lifespan as a workhorse.

I still want to get an EeePC though. In black, please.

News Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7258437.stm

I’m genuinely curious to see how they try to implement this. And the inevitable workarounds that will appear the next day.

Also, this comment:

“ISPs are in a unique position to make a difference and in doing so to reverse a culture of creation-without-reward that has proved so damaging to the whole music community over the last few years,” said John Kennedy, head of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

Yeh, because the music industry’s on it’s arse… *sigh*

It really does get tiring hearing the same fat cats argue that the music industry has been damaged by so-called piracy. Apparently though, it’s not obvious enough, so people like the RIAA have to try and make it look like all media ‘pirates’ are up-and-coming terrorists.

Of course, what the various groups are avoiding from admitting in this sort of lobbying is that… wait for it… DRM does not work. But, of course, they can’t say that, because the other hand is still trying to push DRM.
For those not full aware, DRM is that little thing that means if you buy music through the iTunes store, you can’t play it on your Sony Walkman. Or if you buy music from nearly any other store* you can’t play it on your iPod. In some parts of the world, that would be considered an attempt at creating a monopoly, or at the very least, consumer lock-in. Apparently though, it’s not. It’s for national security… Erm, right.

* Full credit to Play.com who ahve recently opened their completely unrestricted digital downloads store, with quiet a healthy selection of music on there. My advice is, if you want to buy music online, buy it through Play. If you can’t find it there, buy the CD f(as long as it doesn’t have that super-smart copyright protection on it that doesn’t play on some CD Players, or under Linux boxes, usually, and only sometimes work with Macs.
Play.com, I salute you. And all that.

I have to be honest, I don’t endorse piracy. But I also like the right to at least have _some_ control over the items I have legally bought, whether it be making a copy so I don’t have to keep a £10 (minimum) CD Album in my car – where it’s at greater risk of being stolen – or putting a copy of a song on my PC or iPod (my PC runs Linux and my iPod runs Rockbox, so DRM is not an issue I can really consider, unless I want to use one of x number of limited CD burns I can make with it, or download it again from another PC after I’ve reached my limit for ‘Registered Computers’ etc etc grumble grumble.

piratebay.org has some interesting views on the subject as well, and some useful links.

What I’m referring to, of course, is the new Desktop system I built for myself when I got back from Egypt, spec as follows:

Coolermaster CM Stacker 830 Case (2 x 120mm Fans)
Gigabyte P35C-DS3R Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU
2 x 2GB Crucial RAM
2 x 160GB Seagate ST3160815AS Hard Drives
2 x 500GB Seagate ST3500630AS Hard Drives
2 x NEC SATA DVD+/-RW Optical Drives
nVidia Geforce 8800GTX 768MB GPU (Dual DVI-out)
2 x Belinea 22″ TFT Widescreen Monitors (one VGA only, one DVI)

Since I read that the board had on-board RAID powered by Intel chips (Intel stuff, from what I’ve heard and read is generally well-supportedunder Linux), I pretty much had my heart set on setting this machine up in the following way:

1. 2 x 160GB Drives setup RAID 0 for striping and to house the Operating Systems
   2 x 500GB Drives in a RAID 1 for storing files and keeping backups
2. Small Windows XP install just big enough for running the one application I need in Windows well (multiple Eve Online clients running at the same time)
3. Rest of the drive dedicated to Linux installs – one 64-Bit version to tryout and probably run virtualizations through, and one 32-bit version mainly for trying to troubleshooting if I couldn’t get the Eve Client running in 64-bit. Once the Eve client stablizes under Linux (to enable, for example, running multiple instances without dramatically affecting the gameplay) then I could see myself finally being able to kick Windows into touch all together.
4. GPU utilizing the binary NVidia drivers and running in Dualview Mode in both Windows and Linux, at 1680×1050 resolution.

Let’s be clear though – as things are right now, I use my Desktop for one main purpose – accessing Eve Online. Sure, whilst I’m on it I use things such as the web browser, check my emails through IMAP accounts and listen to music, but I can do all of those things and more comfortably under Linux, and have been doing so exclusively on my laptop for well over a year (my IBM T41 just runs Kubuntu 7.10). And those things are easy to do. My music is all stored on a separate file server giving me the option of NFS or SMB shares depending on what OS I’m on. My browsing and email tasks are easily handled by Open Source apps on whichever platform I’m running. The only hurdle is Eve. Or so I thought.

When I first got the machine set up, the first thing I knew I’d have to do was install XP. So I went ahead, setup the RAID partitions from the BIOS, and set about installing XP. Got it up and running in rapid time and got Eve running on it. It runs pretty well. Perhaps not as well as I might have hoped, but then it is doing a hell of a lot of work and is stable enough.

After a few days I set about trying to install Ubuntu. The LiveCD started up nicely and everything seemed to just work going through to the installation. Solid.

However, going through the installation, the first major hurdle to my hopes and dreams appeared – Ubuntu detected every single drive independently, rather than as just 2 drives. Bugger.

A little bit of investigating revealed the reason – the on-board RAID on the board was, in fact, fancy software RAID, and as such, installing Linux on to it – whilst technically possible – was going to be a royal pain in the arse. Not to mention beyond what I reckon I could feasibly deal with if it ballsed up.

So, I came up with a workaround. It looked like FakeRAID could be used under Linux to at least get shared access to the RAID 1 Array setup for sharing files / backups between the systems. So that could work. I just needed to scrap the RAID 0.
Back into BIOS then, and deleting the RAID0 array, and reinstalling XP into a small partition on one of the now visibly separate 160GB drives. Reinstall all the drivers again. Happy days, it works.
Install Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 64-Bit version) and the LiveCD installer encounters difficulties. Download the Alternate install and stick it on. We’re good. it boots up (no splash screen during boot but that seems to be a resolution problem with the monitors) and after a few seconds black screen (booting) I get the GDM login. Login, everything’s fine.

Restricted Drivers Manager pops up and lets me know about the Nvidia updates that, whilst not free, could help my hardware work properly. Since I hate freedom, I whacked them on.

At this point my memory starts to fail me, as it could have been after this step or the next step, but on reboot I have no screen output, at all. However, if I reboot and unplug one of my monitors, the other monitor does work fine.

Whether it was because the above happened, or whether I was desperately seeking cutting edge, I then downloaded Envy in order to get the very latest Nvidia drivers, and set my desktop on its way to 3D Domination. Epic fail.

Rebooting with 2 monitors plugged in resulted in ZERO output again. ALT+F2 didn’t give me a terminal. It was just no output. But the GPU Fan was audibly spinning like crazy. And would continue to do so even with minimal load. Restarting with one monitor unplugged gave me the same GPU response, except this time I could see that it was hardly doing anything. Trying to plug the extra monitor in once things were warm and working and using autodetect also failed to help. In all senses of the word (well, one), I was buggered.

Nonetheless, with just one working monitor I decided to try to press on and install Eve, using WINE rather than the officially sanctioned ‘Eve Linux Client’ which I’ve heard mixed reports about. It installed fine and seemed to work (chance to test it was limited). The constantly whirring fan was pissing me off, so I uninstalled it and rebooted with the vanilla drivers. Boot up was fine, resolution was proper, and all was good. Restricted Drivers Manager pops up, so I install it again and reboot (still, one monitor). This time on reboot I get config errors detecting the monitor / GPU types and a default resolution 0f 800×600 – I don’t know how many of you have tried looking at a 22″ TFT Widescreen in 800×600 but it is pure ugly. Poking around in the config failed to find a workaround, even when I manually set the card and driver options.  I have since rebooted back into Windows XP, which is where I’m writing this from.

So, I’m at a loss.

Looking at Hardware RAID options, getting a dedicated card right now is simply not financially viable. I’m loathe to wipe everything and experiment with another Linux 64-Bit distro as the sole OS as I already know that in its current state Eve simply won’t run too efficiently with multiple instances open (through no fault of the Wine guys, who seem to be doing a stellar job on getting things working) but jsut because of the ‘Windows only’ style limitations that seem to be in place. Besides that, my so far limtied trials with getting Dual View to work on my 8800GTX under Linux also don’t fill me with confidence – even if I got Eve running satisfactorily on one monitor with multiple instances, I don’t want to have to put up with ALT-TABBING between windows all the bloody time whilst my perfectly good second monitor sits there shaking its head miserably and looking downright glum because it’s being left out of the action.

So what I’m left with is toying with biting the bullet, reassigning the software RAID to having a RAID 0 Array in place and installing XP and XP along on that for the time being, dealing with sticking Linux on there as and when it happens / is affordable.

It pains me to do it though, as I know that barring the Eve Online / Dual Monitor problems I’ve so far encountered with the limited 64-bit trials (probably due to it being a new card and the Linux drivers lagging a bit more than anything else) I can do everything I want my desktop to do under Linux, and would be much happier running things through there (it may sound like a crock of shit, but it’s just easier to actual do things and play with stuff under Linux), but I just can’t see how it’s going to be a realistic option right now. Which sucks.

I haven’t quite decided whether I’m going to go ahead and do it yet, but the way it’s looking, I might have to. It will be a waste of resources (there’s no bloody way I’m sticking Vista 64-bit on here) but hopefully it will only be temporary, at least until I can afford to splash out on a hardware RAID card.

If anyone has any possible suggestions to correct the difficulties I’ve found with the Linux experiments so far then, of course, they’d be greatly appreciated.

19th and 20th July at the Wolverhampton University Student Union.

Have to admit, I’m pretty excited. I was all psyched to try and get to LUGRadio Live USA originally, but when it came to it I wouldn’t really have been able to make it, especially with still being without employment.

So, whilst the dates and location are the only things so far announced, I would recommend anyone with even a moderate interest in such matters keep an eye out for the release of tickets.

Haven’t quite worked how I’m getting down there yet, but I could well just drive, depending on ow tricky it looks to get there, so if anyone Lancaster-bound is heading down as well, let us know.

For those completely lost, I wrote a review of LUGRadio 2007 here.

LUGRadio live is a relatively new event of theirs, first run in 2005 and is held once a year, inviting various speakers to come down and keep the guests informed on a variety of topics… and drink beer.

I quite wanted to go to last year’s event but didn’t get the chance because of work. With being back this year in time for it I decided to go down and see what it was like. Going down on my tod was a bit of an experience, but here’s my summary of it, all from a complete n00b perspective. Any incorrect statements / understandings are entirely my responsibility. All the pictures should be clickable to see a larger version of them, or can be found in the Flickr set here.

For those interested in reading further on, I’ve basically tried to divide this into four areas:

1. Travel
2. Day 1
3. Day 2
4. In Summary

Travel

I decided to get the train down to LUGRadio Live for a few key reasons:

1. The LUGRadio site showed the venue as being right next to the train station
2. I wouldn’t be able to make the Friday night pre-show drinking session and didn’t fancy getting up at some completely ridiculous hour in order to drive there (by the time I allowed myself ‘time-padding’ for getting lost.
3. It turned out cheap.

Booking the tickets through QJump was straighforward and, even though it meant I had to leave Lancaster at 07:24, picking up the tickets through the Fast Ticket machines was fairly painless. The train’s were on time and got me into Wolverhampton around 09:45, leaving plenty of time to find the venue. Couldn’t have been smoother to be fair.

Looking online, the easiest place I found to book before being home was at the Novotel, which was only about 5 minutes walk from the venue in the end, which was perfect. Easy to find, and with quite a number of guests staying there. Not wanting to be late though, I didn’t check in there until the lunch break, but only staying a night meant I only had a small bag with me so it wasn’t particularly inconvenient to lug around.

Day 1

Getting to the venue from the train station was easy thanks to the helpful signs attached to the lampposts, and, once the doors opened, getting in was quick and seemed fairly well organized. At this point the bags of corporate tat (or ‘Nutsacks’ as they were wittily titled..!) were handed out on the door containing a plethora of stuff, which you can hopefully see in the below photos.

Included in the pack were: a Red Hat jacket, OpenSolaris Starter Kit DVD, Ubuntu 7.04 Live CD, Google Code notebook, an O’Reilly pencil, an OpenSolaris pen (which glows red when ready to write…) and a weird shaped Yahoo pen, and the LUGRadio Live Programme, along with some paper advertisements for various upcoming events – not too shabby.

The programmes were well laid out and easy to see what was going on, although it seemed the actually signposting of the different rooms could have been a little better, with me hearing quite a few people sounding confused about where exactly things were meant to be, although the introductory segment by the LUGRadio team helped this along. More or less according to schedule, about half an hour after doors opened the LUGRadio team kicked off with their introductory speech and set the ball rolling. The first talk I fancied attending was to be held in the same spot, so I just kept rooted to the same place in preparation

Thomas Vander Stichele

Flumotion: The Only Way to Stream

The Atrium

I don’t know much about Flumotion, and in fact only came to hear of it through looking at the work the Elisa project were doing, but in all honesty this talk was the one that grabbed my attention the most out of the first talks of the day, and I’m glad I went.

As one might expect from the first talk of the day, there were a couple of minor issues with the actual presentation of things – I was sat fairly near the back and felt the speakers were a tad quiet for the occasional sentence or two, but that’s a minor gripe. The only other minor gripe, which more than likely couldn’t be helped, was that, being in the Atrium, the (albeit rare for this summer) sunlight that we had right above us shining through the glass roof meant that the projector was virtually impossible to see until the clouds temporarily came to the rescue. It wasn’t a huge deal, as it happened, but it was frustrating having to squint to try and make out what was on the projector.

The talk itself was pretty interesting, even if it did touch on one or two things that were way above my (somewhat simple) level of comprehension. Thomas himself admitted to a few minor errors of judgement before giving his speech (new distro, hacking the example the night before etc) but I don’t feel they detracted from his speech at all. Overall he came across clearly, and obviously well informed and passed some good information along. Occasionally I felt he stumbled in terms of delivery, but then I’m hardly in a position to criticize!

Sounds like Flumotion and it’s associated projects have some really cool ideas and don’t need too long before they gain a stronger and stronger foothold in their respective areas. Elisa is one project I’m really interested to see how it comes along.

Alan Cox

But I Don’t Code…

Main Stage

I’ll be fair. I went into this talk (not knowing the title) expecting to come away dazed and confused, given what I knew and had read of Alan Cox in the past and his somewhat general uberness in terms of technology.

However, I was pleasantly surprised at his talk which dealt largely with a lot of the other factors that make up a project / company as well as detailing some of the trouble points that Open Source projects in particularly tend to come up against (documentation, anyone?), based largely on his own experiences.

An interesting speaker, I (as a relative layman) found his approach interesting and fairly common-sense, and is someone I would recommend more people hear from. Whilst there were the occasional ‘in-jokes’ (most of which I managed to vaguely understand from listening to LUGRadio and reading LXF) the main bulk of the talk was straightforward and really did a very good job on reiterating the important roles non-coders / developers play within the community. Food for thought, certainly.

Besides all of that – good beard.

Seriously though, a very interesting talk well presented.

Adam Sweet’s Gong-a-Thong Lightbulb Talk Extravaganza

The Atrium

…

Not much to say about this one really, I guess the picture’s speak for themselves!

Fair play to Adam though, he certainly put the ‘thong’ into ‘Gong-a-Thong’…

As far as the talks themselves go, I have to admit to struggling to hear a few of them, although there were some interesting ideas mentioned, and of course some acts of sheer brilliance (the beer comparison… bravo). Glad I witnessed it… if you know what I mean.

The Mass Debate

Panel: Becky Hogge [Open Rights Group], Chris Di Bona [Google], Nat Friedman [Novell], Steve Lamb [Microsoft]

Main Stage

A.K.A. The Nat and Chris Show…

Basically questions from the audience directed to the panel, which meant a good chunk of the portion of the segment appeared to be dedicated to Microsoft-bashing before finally moving onto the more dedicated topics of DRM and specifically the BBC’s recent decision over the ‘iPlayer’. Interesting points were raised all around, with topics digressing temporarily to discuss the Novel / Microsoft thing, Google’s stance on various issues and the role of the desktop in the future given the recent trend towards web-based apps. Some interesting questions and answers from all sides of the equation, although Chris and Nat did tend to dominate the show, largely complimenting each others jokes and comments. Still, very funny to watch, and, as mentioned, some very valid points and arguments raised on all sides.

Chris Di Bona

Google

Main Stage

By far the most entertaining speaker (that I saw) of the first day, Chris gave all of us a quick run through basically of what Google is and associated activities (summer of code, contribution to open source projects and the like). Very funny guy who, by all accounts, kept everybody entertained!

Some interesting pieces of information given in the talk, some of which help to explain why EvE Online is playable using just WINE now, although I never figured the connection could lie from Google giving back to the code from their Picasa work and such. Interesting stuff.

Probably not as information packed as some of the other speakers on the day, but very entertaining and interesting in his own right. If you get the chance to see him speak (and have some remote interest in the subject matter) I would thoroughly recommend seeking him out.

LUGRadio Live and Unleashed!

The Atrium

Banter-a-plenty from the LUGRadio team as the usual insults got bounced around the room. Prizes were given, what’s ‘fooked’ was discussed, and a couple of interesting newsbites were mentioned: Ade leaving the show being the bad news, his replacement being announced (although I hate to admit forgetting the guy’s name right now…) [edit: Chris Procter], and the good news being that next year will see the very first LUGRadio Live USA around March time, followed by LUGRadio Live UK at a similar time as this year (July-ish). LRL USA should be good event, and it sounds like quite a few of the UK guys will be trying to get there for it – it certainly should be quite a show!

Lots of funny moments, especially the distribution of LUGRadio Seasons 1 – 4 CDs… heads up!

Day 2

Another early start for the crew to make sure everything was back in place after the party the night before apparently carried on until the early hours (I left at 22:30 so I’m basing this on hearsay!) and doors actually opened a few minutes later than planned, although to say that was a big deal would be a bit of an over-reaction! With a similar sort of schedule to the day previously, everyone must have had another hectic day making sure things stayed reasonably on schedule and credit needs to be given to them seeing as it was.

Michael Sparks

BBC / Kamaelia

Main Stage

I’m still undecided on this one to be honest. By the sounds of what he mentioned near the start of his talk he was originally going to talk about the role of Open Source within the BBC a lot more, but apparently ditched that in favour of Kamaelia in order to talk about something he found more interesting. Whilst I’m sure this was sincere on his part, as he certainly seemed very enthusiastic about the project, I still have this nagging voice in the back of my head that says that also smacks of convenience given all the recent (in my opinion, justified) comments on the BBC ‘iPlayer’ that is only available to Windows users. It annoys me that I think that, because the talk he gave was interesting and, from what I understood of it, Kamaelia does sound like a truly interesting application with some very cool possibilities. I can’t help thinking that perhaps the reason I have my suspicions is because I didn’t really understand all the subject matter and because I went in expecting to hear more on the iPlayer situation. Preconceived notions and all that.

So, Michael, my apologies for not writing more constructively on your talk – the technical issues I simply wouldn’t do justice to so I’ll leave it for people better qualified! I did however enjoy what I understood of it and one day when I try and teach myself to programme a little I will try and have a proper look at Kamaelia. So thanks.

Nat Friedman

Novell

Main Stage

Certainly managed to rival Chris di Bona’s talk the previous afternoon for entertainment, funny moments and general enjoyment, as Nat started by talking about the beginnings and growth of the New English Dictionary, through to it becoming the Oxford English Dictionary and the clear comparisons to things in the Open Source world. He also went on to talk, somewhat predictably, a bit about Novell and the Novell-Microsoft deal and a lot about the importance of usability and highlighting some of the contributions Novell and Ximian have made to the community. Differentiating between copyright, trademark, patents and… the other one I can’t remember the name of was also pretty useful and informative and certainly opened my eyes to just how confusing a lot of this stuff must be, and also how scary some of the actions being taken by the so-called ‘Patent-whores’ is.

Being the one talk I had picked out since way before the event that I really wanted to see on the second day, Nat certainly did not disappoint and, judging by the reactions of those around me, that’s not just my sentiments. It was informative, easy to understand, got the points across effectively, and brought a higher level of audience interaction and involvement to his talks than some of the other speakers had done over the weekend, keeping people engaged and actively interested in what was going on.

The talk / questions slightly overran into the lunch hour, but I don’t think anyone minded that too much.

Just don’t mention the red circles…

The Hour of Power

Main Stage

I’ll be honest, the main reason I went to this was because the name intrigued me.

I felt, having listened to the podcast for a while, that I should really know what the name meant and what the section was about, but I’ll have to be honest and say I didn’t. I’m glad I went though.

For those of you who are wondering, the hour of power is a little bit like the lightning talk idea, except without a gong, and without Adam Sweet in a thong… thankfully. It’s a chance for various people to show off (when the projector was playing nicely or the network assigning IP addresses to allow people to show the online demos… ) some of the latest and greatest in various projects that they’re taking part in and provide a little bit of information about them. Basically, this is where the shiny stuff goes.

Despite not knowing what it was going to be about, this soon became one of my favourite segments of the weekend with some really interesting stuff being demo’d. I’ll try and keep it brief as I hit the segments one by one. Apologies for any spelling errors on names.

• Zaheer kicked things off with his quick demo of the desktop recording application Istanbul designed for the Gnome desktop (simple and clean, minimal config). He demo’d it by recording some of the latest features included into the Elisa project – a media center-type project based on Fluendo – effectively making this two demos in one. Elisa is a project I’ve heard quite a lot about and so it was really nice to see it in action ‘first-hand’ so to speak, and Istanbul / Desktop recorders in general were something I was curious to see how clean they were under Linux. Besides the apparently known bugs that Elisa displayed (the last viewed picture / video shot hangs around when you go back to the main menu) it looks genuinely very interesting and seems to be getting smoother and smoother. As far as the Istanbul demo goes, again this looks pretty stable and appeared to work fine with a few cool options (window recording, selection recording and the like) although with it only recording into OGG Theora, I presume this means you then need run it through a converter to get your screencasts into a ‘format for the masses’. Still, OGG would do for me.
• Neuro moved onstage next to talk to us and demo a bit of Second Life to us. This was quite interesting as, like most people, I’ve heard a lot about Second Life, but (perhaps unlike most) it really don’t hold any particular interest to me. One really key piece of info Neuro mentioned though, that I’d never really thought of before, was his emphasis on the fact the Second Life is not a game – it is exactly what it’s title suggests and is a second life – real life companies are in there and people are making and investing real money in game. So whilst it comes across as being similar to another MMOG, it is in fact, not a game. A difficult concept for me to get my head around, to be honest, but also seems to make sense. He then went on to try and demo it, which had to wait until the end of the other talks, as the ethernet didn’t want to assign him an IP address too quickly! The demo when it came appeared a bit dark due to the extra lights shining near the projection screen, but looked alright. Again, it’s hard for me to actually be impressed by it because it’s just not my cup of tea. Although his comments on the amount of data they deal with at Linden Labs was kind of scary…
• Next up was Juski to talk to us a little bit about MythTV and some of the latest improvements going on in it. This was of particular interest to me as MythTV is something I’ve looked at quite a lot over the past year or so, although I still haven’t really given myself the time to try and set it up (having heard a lot of things about the joys of setting it up…). To be fair, Juski didn’t disappoint. Whilst a lot of the features were things I knew and had heard about already, there were a couple of really cool things he mentioned and demo’d, namely the TimeStretch feature, which allows you to speed up the video and audio playback of your recordings to up to twice their original speed (depending on your computer specs, presumably) whilst keeping them legible and avoiding the usual ’squeaky-voice-syndrome’ assoicated with speeding up the audio. This effectively means you can take a half hour recording, watch it in 15 minutes, and still understand almost everything (although I presume thinks that are originally spoken quickly would be lost) and with it all at the pitch it was intended to be at – pretty cool. He demo’d it to us at 1.2 times the original speed, and it worked smoothly, although I don’t know the specs of the desktop tower he was demo’ing on (it didn’t look new…). Another cool feature mentioned was the recent addition of the ZoneMinder CCTV plugin, allowing all you Big Brother enthusiasts to keep track of your own ZoneMinder CCTV cameras through the MythTV frontend. I don’t know how exactly the additional functionalities work out (recording and timing for example) or if those options are even available for it yet, although I would imagine it would work like the normal TV recording, in which case MythTV shouldn’t have a problem with it. As usual, MythTV simply looked good, although my guess is that Juski maybe knew how to configure his box pretty well… Still, a very interesting talk and some cool features.
• Next was the only person not to physically demo something, due to a laptop problem apparently, which was Alan Pope, talking about screencasts and the project he is running over at http://screencasts.ubuntu.com, which is something he started in order to try and bring a certain amount of quality and usefulness to a counter a lot of the crappier screencasts he was seeing all over YouTube and the like. This actually sounds like a really ambitious project, currently only creating for Ubuntu under the Gnome desktop (because that’s what he uses and knows well) but this was effectively a public call to get other people onboard from other distros / desktop environments to try and increase this database of useful screencasts as well as for seeking out any new ideas or wishlists that people would like to see and know how-to-do. As part of this he also briefly touched on some of the different Screen Recorders available under Linux and which ones he’d recommend and why, and put real emphasis on why applying certain limits and criteria are important in maintaining the quality. Definitely a worthwhile project and one I’ll look into more. Keep up the good work Popey!
• Last up (excepting Neuro’s Second Life demo) was Joe Shaw talking about his result from Novell Hack Week, the currently titled Banshee Media Server which effectively and simply streams your Banshee Music collection across the web. Although clearly still in it’s early days, this actually looks pretty cool and quite easily configurable, although quite how legal publically streaming your music across the net is I don’t know. I’m sure I heard somewhere there’s some problem with it, although I could well be wrong. Still, this could easily be solved by coming up with a login system for it, meaning effectively only you can access it. Pretty funky. And seeing as he mentioned it as the intro to his talk, Joe, I just finished watching the season finale of The Sopranos… brilliant. I know it got a slating by a lot of people, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Joe Born

The Path to the $100 Embedded Linux Media Center

The Atrium

Another talk I’d been pretty interested to see what it was about after receiving the programme, this talk by Joe Born from Neuros narrowly beat the LUGRadio Live Quiz in gaining my attention. Unfortunately I missed the start of it due to the Hour of Power marginally overrunning it’s slot time, but believe I still got in before the first slide was passed over.

The talk itself seemed pretty interesting, as Joe got to talking largely about the importance of the embedded market and media center devices specifically in the next few years, given as how it’s the one key are in which no one company or system as really taken a key share of the market (although admittedly Apple seems to be pretty set on sealing that as fast as they can). And the more he mentioned this the more I sort of felt that yes, he’s pretty much correct.

Obviously, part of his talk was his demonstration of one of the Neuros machines which was interesting to see, especially as this is a Media Device that’s built and packaged by them, using a lot of Open Source software although obviously incorporating some proprietary aspects (MP3 codecs, for example – at least that’s how I understood it). The demo was pretty interesting and seemed to be nicely packaged, although it struck me that the interface side of things, along with some of the extensions could and no doubt will gain a lot of useful ideas from similar software options currently out there. XBox Media Center for example was exhibitioning both days and shows some really great interface work, and of course there’s MythTV that’s been around for a while, also exhibitioning there, but then, considering they’re manufacturing as well, I guess they have plenty of areas to think about, along with plenty of time to improve it.

In Summary

I’ll be fair, when I first decided I wanted to go to this, I really didn’t know quite what to expect. I sort of expected to come out of it having not understood a hell of a lot and was pleasantly surprised to find almost everything a lot more accessible than I had expected – which I guess is reasonable considering the podcast itself never really goes into explicit details about complicated things and is more an overview of certain issues. The only talk that really bordered on completely losing me (as mentioned) was Michael Sparks, through no fault of his own, it should be added, just that the material covered was different to what I expected and, whilst sounding like a pretty interesting project, touched on a lot of coding things that I simply don’t know enough about to fully grasp.

The whole event seemed to run pretty smoothly. Of course there are always going to be hiccups and technology issues to deal with as part and parcel of it – that’s the nature of the beast – but the crew seemed to do a brilliant job of making sure things were ready and in some sort of order and truly deserved all the applause they received.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I’m still amazed at the entrance cost of only a fiver considering all the information that was on offer and the amount of time and hardwork that must go into organizing such an event. Besides which, the real sense of community that seemed to exist was very refreshing and a nice thing to be a part of.

All in all it was a great experience and I can well imagine I’ll be at the next one, although right now I’m quite seriously considering seeing if the USA one will be feasible.. everyone needs a holiday after all…!

If I haven’t typed it already, thanks again to the LUGRadio team and all the crew and speakers for a cracking weekend!