8.10 isn’t a massive release by any measure, there are only several noticeable improvements, although it seems that a lot of time and effort has gone into making this release as stable as possible. For me, even though 8.04 was a LTS (Long Term Support) release, it seemed to lack the stability that I had come to love in Ubuntu, applications would crash for no reason, and I had massive conflicts with Flash9, Firefox and Amarok all trying to hog the sound output, with no end of frustration caused.

Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop

8.10 is a fantastic return to form for the Ubuntu team, the addition of Flash10 (despite it’s proprietary evilness) is a welcome upgrade as it solves a lot of the issues that dogged my daily web browsing sessions. Network manager has had some major improvements, now supporting VPN, Wireless, DSL, and mobile 3G broadband services, through a nice (although sometimes confusing) screen.

There’s the usual updates to X.Org, the kernel and Nautilus, the latter now providing a nice tabbed browsing interface, probably not something I’ll use, but I’m sure some people will see great uses for this. Nautilus is also now more tightly integrated with Pidgin, meaning things like status messages can be updated through the Gnome panel, a nice little addition. Another upgrade to File Roller means that it supports many more compressed archive types, which saves wasting time installing different archiving applications.

We also have the addition of an optional encrypted private directory, meaning your sensitive files can now be stored and encrypted very easily, although with the advent of the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which forces citizens to hand over their encryption keys/passwords if requested by the authorities, this facility may have lost a lot of it’s advantage for some users.

Another nice little feature is the built-in guest account, something I have previously had to create myself, which allows you to quickly launch a low privilege password-less account, with absolutely no access to the file-system, in case your mate needs to quickly check his or her email on your laptop.

All in all I have found 8.10 to be rock-solid so far, and really wish that 8.04 LTS had offered this same high level of stability!

Meeting Flyer

“Privacy And Security In The Database State”

Manchester NO2ID and British Computer Society Manchester present:

• Phil Booth, National Co-Ordinator, No2ID
• Becky Hogge, Executive Director, Open Rights Group

ID Cards? Data Losses? NHS Records?
E-Passports? Congestion Cameras?

What does it all mean, and how does it affect you? What are the costs? The benefits? The risks? This is a free public meeting. All welcome.

Tuesday 23rd September, 7pm, in Reynolds Building C2, Sackville Street Campus, University of Manchester.

More information on the talk can be found on the NO2ID website here.

The Crowd (Photo - BrunoBord)

Well, here is it.. my yearly write-up of LUGRadio Live. Unfortunately the LUGRadio team have decided to call it a day after 5 seasons of the podcast, although it was announced at the event that LUGRadio Live will continue, which obviously I am very happy about, as I do really look forward to it each year.

For anyone who has never heard of it, LUGRadio Live is a community conference for supporters of Free and Open Source software. The event was again held in Wolverhampton at the excellent Lighthouse Media Center. I decided to bring my Asus EEE with me this year to note things down as they happen, so you won’t have to rely on my sketchy memory afterwards for details of the talks and goings-on.

Saturday

Saturday was a very early start for me, 6am to be precise, the venue was set up the same as last year, with the main stage being the large cinema screen, the second stage being the atrium, and the smaller cinema screen for lightning talks:

Rufus Pollock

Rufus was first on the main stage, with his talk on open knowledge. Presently much of the data collected by government agencies (especially in the UK) and other organisations is locked away or distributed in awkward formats such as PDF or human-readable TXT. Surprisingly the US government happens to be excellent at releasing its data to the public (and why not, they paid to collect it) and Rufus stressed that this is essential for open data to have the success that open code has enjoyed.

Rufus also pointed out the hazards of data and information being locked away with the example of the 800 patents which currently make up the mobile phone 3G standard, and how this presents a great danger to innovation. It was an excellent talk, and I will certainly look into this matter further.

Jeremy Allison

Jeremy Allison - Google

Jeremy works at Google and is a major contributor to Samba, the free-software implementation of Microsoft’s SMB (network file sharing) protocol. Jeremy gave a fascinating talk, detailing the history of Samba from it’s conception, and giving a brief idea of the future plans for the software. He also talked about Samba’s love/hate relationship with Microsoft, and some of the EU and US court cases around Microsoft’s lack of interoperability with other products, this resulted in MS having to release specifications for their protocols, which Samba has now benefited greatly from.

Glyn Wintle

I spoke to Glyn briefly at last year’s LRL, and joined the Open Rights Group not long afterwards. This particular organisation was formed in 2005, and does an excellent job of “defending our bits” as they put it, protecting our civil liberties when they are threatened by bad or inappropriate digital technology. They do this through a combination of: responding to government consultations, writing to and meeting with MP’s and publishing information for the media (one of their spokeswomen, Becky Hogge, is quoted on the BBC News site almost weekly). I was also impressed that ORG now have a member based part time in Europe, monitoring the EU’s latest rulings and proposals.

Although perhaps not as well attended as it should have been (shame on those who did not attend!) the talk was highly informative, covering topics such as Phorm, E-Voting, RIPA, and copyright extensions on music. I was particularly amused by the story of the recording industry’s full page advertising, listing musicians who would lose out if copyrights on music were not extended, this included several artist’s who were deceased, with one who died more than 40 years ago!

The ORG does a fantastic job, and anyone who can afford it should check out their website and donate as much as you can!

Sunday

Sunday was a little quieter (as usual) but there was still plenty to see and do, Bytemark‘s massive gaming rig was an excellent sight to see, and they should be congratulated for bringing it all that way!

Dotwaffle – Demo Scene

I had been wowed by dotwaffle‘s demo scene talk at LRL in 2006, and so was looking forward to the latest innovations. The demo scene started off as a way for software pirates to ‘show off’ about their latest cracks, although quickly developed into quite an art form. Dotwaffle showed several different types of demo, most of which are below 8MB in size, including music. An excellent example is “The Popular Demo” which is only 3MB (or 5Mb with music).

I can’t really think of a good way to describe demo’s, except to say that they are similar to a computer generated music video, with all sorts of fancy effects, although it is important to note that no video is used, demo’s consist of only code and graphics. These are then entered in competitions to win prizes.

I was particularly impressed by the size-limited demo’s which included 64kb and even 4kb demos. One 4kb demo in particular (Atrium – Loonies) was particularly well done, starting off with a 3D spinning object in outer space, and then building an entire three-dimensional building with walkways and other objects, with a full musical soundtrack, all within 4 kilobytes, which is absolutely phenomenal. Definitely something to check out!

The Mass Debate

Mass Debate

The mass debate this year included Jeremy Allison of Google, Max Spevack of Novell, and Matthew Garrett. Topics included GPLv3, OOXML vs ODF, and Microsoft’s release of its product specifications. The debate was stimulating, and some good questions were raised. There were also plenty of joke’s cracked at Hans Reiser’s expense!

Tango – Designing an Icon

Pascal Klein gave an excellent non-technical overview of the Tango icon project, how things work, the process of creating icons, and an summary of the legal problems that Tango has experienced over the past few years.

Tango provides a standard icon set for use within applications and operating systems, which are all free for usage in any project (as long as credit is given to the Tango team) and are now being used within many Linux distro’s to give a standard look and feel across all the pre-installed applications, which have the added benefit that when the operating system’s icon theme is changed, it changes not only GNOME/KDE, but all the applications and menu’s which utilise the same naming conventions.

I was particularly impressed with how things are beginning to be standardised through the Tango naming conventions, and the Tango style guidelines. Pascal also covered the recent announcement that the Tango icons are being released into the public domain, which will surely increase their usage, and a new project ‘TangoNG’ will be started to create a brand new icon set, hoping to avoid the licencing problems which plagued the Tango project.

Summary

Another great LRL event, attended be around 300+ people (also I stayed in a much nicer hotel this year!) and I’m extremely happy that the guys have decided to return for a 5′th event next year.

Jonathan

Update 21/07/08: Lucy pointed out that I hadn’t covered the news of the Tango icons being released into the public domain, so I have added this into the article.

It comes as a surprise to many people that ‘deleted’ computer files are not in fact deleted at all by default, the space on the disk that they occupy is merely reallocated as blank space, to be written over as and when it is required, meaning that deleted files stand a relatively good chance of being recovered depending on how much the disk has been used since. Whilst there are many commercial photo recovery packages available, I wanted to avoid having to steer people down this expensive and not necessarily reliable path.

Free Software provides an interesting contrast to this, with the excellent PhotoRec, part of TestDisk. The Ubuntu community wiki lists several other applications for data recovery, but these aren’t all cross-platform, wheras TestDisk/PhotoRec will build and run on just about anything. Whilst it does lack the bells and whistles of the commercial packages (and it really is screaming out for a basic GUI front end to tempt people towards Free Software, and if I could write one I would!) is nevertheless is a simple and very reliable package for Photo, Video, Document and almost any other file type of data recovery.

Available for Linux/OSX/BSD/Solaris and even MS Windows, PhotoRec can recover more than 180 different file types across all of the major file systems (FAT, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3 etc) and on just about every type of camera or removable media device there is.

Despite my complaints about the lack of a basic GUI to assist the less-technical users, the command line interface is almost foolproof, everything is auto-detected, and given the completely read-only interface of the application it’s fairly impossible to cause any damage.

Pre-built packages are available for almost every GNU/Linux distro, and a simple “sudo apt-get install testdisk” within Ubuntu will have you ready to roll in 30 seconds flat.

The screen shots below show an illustration of a data recovery being performed on a 1GB SD card.

Overall I have found PhotoRec to be one of the best-written GNU/Linux tools I have ever used, it does it’s job extremely well, is very easy to use, and is a perfect example of just how good Free Software can be. I’d advise you to bookmark the web address and grab a copy next time you or someone you know accidentally deletes something!

LugRadio Live UK 2008 is an event that has developed a strong reputation for providing a range of topics about free software, Open Source, digital rights, technology and more, a compelling list of speakers, exhibitors and birds of a feather sessions, and wrapping it all in a unique, fun, loose, social and inclusive event, which is often described as combining the atmosphere of a rock concert and a computer conference.

LugRadio Live brings 30 speakers, over 20 exhibitors, an eclectic range of BOF sessions, and plenty of additional sessions such as our debate discussion panel, a showcase of five minute talks, tech demos, and of course a live recording of LugRadio in front of an audience.

I’ll be in Wolverhampton this July for the 3′rd year in a row to attend this excellent event, although I still need to book my train/hotel, and be doing a full post conference write-up as usual! I think MFS are also doing some promotion this year so I’ll be sure to offer some help with that.

If anyone fancies joining me it’s being hosted at the the Lighthouse Media Centre, Fryer Street, Wolverhampton on the 19′th and 20′th July.

UPDATE 23/06/08: My hotel and train are now both booked so i’m all ready!

The talk was by Richard Rothwell of M6-IT, who has worked in education IT for most of his career and now works with council’s and other schools and organisations to deploy free software. Richard covered two projects in detail, the LTSP thin client deployment he worked on while at Handsworth Grammar School, and the Families On-Line project in Nottingham.

The LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) deployment was interesting as it eliminated many of the problems schools have at the moment with daft amounts of money going into maintaining school machines (up to £1200 a year per PC according to Becta) whilst the actual provision of computers is decreasing. Free software allowed Handsworth to reuse all of their old IT equipment (which would have otherwise had to be thrown away) and achieve specialist Maths and Computing Status for the school, for almost no cost. This really highlights the problem that a lot of schools lack a basic understanding of IT, and the fact is that that all the main tasks which schools perform in an IT lesson haven’t changed much over the past decade, yet the specification of the machines and the cost of maintaining them have skyrocketed. It also means that piracy is rife as families cannot afford the expensive Office software at home which is supplied to the schools for a “generous” discount. He also outlined some of the problems that people within a school have with a Free Software deployment, and how these can be avoided.

With Free Software Handsworth Grammar found their PC maintanence costs were now down to <£400 a year per PC and that they could re-distribute all of the software in use within the school to the children at no cost, and at no risk of being accused of piracy. I know that GNU/FSF founder Richard Stallman has some strong views on Free Software use within education, and Richard Rothwell’s work is certainly a brilliant illustration of what can be done with it. (You can read the Full Story of Handsworth here.)

I was also very interested on Richard’s observations on the curriculum software in use within Schools, particularly the story of BBC Jam, a site which provided national curriculum learning content online for students to use, which was shut down last year after the software suppliers complained to the government and the EU that it was damaging their interests. I see no reason why Jam should have been effectively forced to close down, except that it was stopping these suppliers selling their re-hashed software packages through the e-learning credits system. This is a situation I wasn’t aware of before, and will certainly do some further research on.

Many people at the talk raised the issue of programming within schools. Now, even when I was at school we had a BBC Micro and were encouraged to write some code, but nowadays this does not appear to be the case. I was reminded of an article I read by Bill Thompson not long ago where he raised these same issues. Pupils in our schools are now being raised to be consumers and office workers, rather than programmers, and are being taught ‘Microsoft Word’ rather than Word Processing itself. Due to the majority of schools running proprietary software, students wanting to learn more about how the applications on their PC function will be unable to do so, and the UK software industry will certainly suffer over the next few decades because of the lack of skilled programmers. Free Software is a mirror image of this system and encourages kids that want to code to learn this (increasingly) useful skill.

Richard then went on to talk about his work with M6-IT.

Families On-Line is a project that M6-IT have been working on with schools and community organisations to deploy PC’s and internet connections to socially excluded families. The PC’s are recycled, come with Ubuntu installed and are free to families as long as they attend the training on how to use them. The families must attend the training together, and in an area with only an 8% university attendance rate Richard thought this one of the few times the family had actually worked together. They also have a voluntary £5 a month donation scheme should families wish to take part, and this appears to have had a very good take-up.

The topic of central government contracts was raised with the example of the £80 million pound contract announced only this Monday (19′th) for licensing school software. OCGBuying.solutions and Becta are running the procurement and it essentially covers off the shelf software for school use, for example, word processing, spreadsheets, databases and image handling. Importantly it does NOT cover software created to deliver the national curriculum. Now I think we can all agree that £80 million is a lot of money to spend on software which could be delivered using free alternatives (such as OpenOffice.Org and GIMP) at a fraction of the £80 million offered in this tender. This contract also needs to be looked into in more detail by the Free Software community to understand it’s full ramifications.

I spoke with Richard briefly in the pub afterwards about his work with Becta and several other topics, all in all a very interesting evening and I’ll be sure to follow up some points with Richard at a later date.

My disclaimer (on my about page) applies on all my posts, but especially this one.

Jonathan

Update, July 2009 – Richard sadly took his own life on Friday 17th July 2009. Tributes (including my own) are listed here.

Richard gave a history of the GNU Project, the four freedoms and Free Software’s benefits and advantages over proprietary software. He also spoke about DRM and the other dangers of non-free software, such as hidden back doors and other spying and monitoring activities.

Richard also covered some of the important reasons why businesses, government and educational establishments should use Free Software, preventing the support and development monopolies which are now becoming commonplace, along with the problem of proprietary vendors offering gratis or near-gratis copies of their software to schools in order to keep students reliant on their package and then carry this reliance forward into their future academic and business careers.

We had only been expecting around 100 people to attend but the 300-seat lecture theatre filled up completely, with latecomers sitting in the aisles, it certainly shows how many people interested in Free Software we have in and around Manchester. The talk was very informative and I hope Richard returns to the UK at some point in the not too distant future.

Jonathan

My own brainstorm idea is a simple one, but I feel is could be very effective. Whilst watching a documentary on BBC3 it occurred to me how much free advertising Microsoft gets based on their default Windows logo screen saver. During a 1 hour documentary I’d say Microsoft got around 3 to 4 minutes of free advertising during interviews with people sat at their desk’s by their computer screens and I suggested that perhaps a default Ubuntu screen saver might provide some additional advertising.

I suggested the idea on the 31′st of March and it is currently at 135 positive votes. Making it the 3′rd most popular idea in the Marketing category.

If you feel obliged, click above and give it a vote!

Update: I have been notified that a Ubuntu screen saver has been present in the past, but had been missing from the last few releases. I am assured that it will be back in the operating system soon. Job Done!