Welcome to LRL09! (Photo Credit Solexious)

Well here we are again, another year, another LugRadio Live. For anyone who has never heard of it, LUGRadio Live is a community conference for supporters of Free and Open Source software.

Some big changes are taking place this year though, as the date had been altered from July to October, the venue has moved to the Newhampton Arts Centre just outside Wolverhampton, and unfortunately the conference is only for one day. Still, these points aside it remains an excellent event. Here’s a quick summary of what went on, and of the talks I attended:

Brock Craft – tinker.it

Brock is from London-based design-studio tinker.it, he spoke about the open-source hacking platform Arduino. Arduino was designed to be a cheap and easy method for learning about electronics and hardware hacking, and as a quick method for building devices. Brock gave examples of its usage by artists, designers and hobbyists, and it certainly seems like it could have many ingenious uses, including the RFID cat flap which Brock had built for his own feline friend.

Gervase Markham – Mozilla Drumbeat/BBC Basic

Gerv spoke firstly about Mozilla Drumbeat, which is essentially a grass roots campaign to keep the web completely open to all. Gerv mentioned net neutrality, the mobile web, and closed application stores such as the Apple app store as examples of threats to the web. The project’s motto is ‘people, ideas and action for a better internet’ and it’s certainly an admirable aim we should all support! In the spirit of the conference’s ‘back to basics’ theme Gerv then presented his first ever program, written at age 8, a ‘choose your own’ adventure style game written on a BBC Micro. Gerv is a charismatic and engaging speaker, and the presentation raised a few good chuckles from the crowd.

Matthew Somerville – MySociety

Matthew works for MySociety, a registered charity probably best known for their work with the Number 10 petitions website. Matthew spoke about the various projects they have undertaken over the past few years. These include TheyWorkForYou, which can alert users when their MP speaks in Parliament, and holds transcripts of Hansard from 1935 onwards. It has also recently started hosting videos of parliamentary proceedings. Closely related to this is WriteToThem, which allows anyone to contact their MP directly, and HearFromYourMP, which is essentially the opposite.

Matthew also spoke about some projects which are designed to make life easier for people and communities, for example FixMyStreet which allows members of the public to report problems such as potholes and graffiti to their local council quickly and efficiently. MySociety has produced some excellent and easy to use services and hopefully this will continue.

Brock Craft - Tinker.it

Des Burley – A Real Lawyer Speaks

Des works for the independent law firm Martineau, and came to speak about trademarks and licensing in free/open source software. He covered the reasons why people would want to trademark software, what can be covered/protected and the differences between trademarks and copyright. He also spoke about the harm that can be wreaked by patent holders, with the model railway software designed by Jacobsen being a good example.

Andy Robinson – OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is a project designed to provide everyone with a complete, open and free mapping facility. I already had a little background info on OpenStreetMap from a talk given at Manchester Free software last year, but it was really interesting to see how far the project has come since it’s conception, and that we might soon reach a point where the information stored in the OSM database is of better quality than that of any mapping company. Andy also gave the interesting example of the work done in OSM to build the first complete and accurate map of the Gaza Strip, which was then being used in the humanitarian relief effort during the Gaza war in January this year.

Steve Lamb – The Changing Face of Work

Steve Works for Microsoft, but don’t let that put you off, honest! Steve has been at loads of the LRL events and always puts forward an excellent talk to present to us freedom-lovers. Steve spoke about giving employees more freedom and flexibility in their use of technology, whilst somehow creating a balance between work and home technology. He quite rightly suggested that it can be counter-productive if an employer forces specific tools or devices onto employees, and there were many excellent points to agree with.

Summary

The Twitterfall

The event was well organised this year, with the main stage featuring three big screens. One featured the presentation slides as they were delivered. One was used by an excellent portrait artist who sketched each speaker as they were on stage using the Gimp and a drawing tablet. The final screen featured a live twitter feed (or ‘twitterfall’), to which any conference attendee could tweet using the #lrl2009 hashtag, all tagged messages then appeared live on-screen. This produced some hilarious moments during and in-between talks, as ASCII drawings and abuse were consistently twittered by the delegates throughout the day. The conference music was excellent as always, with Rage Against the Machine, Paramore, Bowling for Soup, System of a Down and the Offspring all featuring prominently!

During the recording of the live show, the presenters announced that this really was the last LugRadio event, although it was later discussed that if someone else were to arrange the event next year, then the LugRadio presenters agreed to attend to provide another dose of their unique presenting style. So hopefully this won’t be the last we hear from the LugRadio crowd and I’ll be back in Wolverhampton next year!

OggCamp

UbuntuUK & LinuxOutlaws

With LugRadio Live having been cut down to just one day this year, it was obvious that someone would come along to fill the void. OggCamp is an ‘unconference’ (ie: an unorganised conference) where rooms are set aside and anyone can turn up and offer to speak on any free/open source related subject.

The event was held in the Connaught Hotel, around 10 minutes walk from the centre of Wolverhampton. The schedule of talks for the three rooms quickly filled up, and I attended a few fantastic presentations. I attended Tim Dobson’s presentation on his DFEY group, and Bruno Bord’s talk entitled ‘Explaining programming to my grandmother’. Although my favourite was presented by Andy Stanford-Clark with his talk on his ‘Twittering House‘ (as featured on the BBC) which tweets such events as power consumption, windows/doors opening, light/appliances being turned on/off, phones ringing, as well as other useful information about the house.

Unconference Schedule

His most recent addition being an SMS controlled Rudolph light display on his roof. This tied in with other cool little projects Andy had been working on, such as monitoring his local ferry using the ship’s radio frequencies which were then fed into Twitter, and eventually adopted by the ferry company as their live ferry update service, it was very entertaining to see how much could be achieved on such a small budget.

OggCamp certainly filled the void left behind the second day of LugRadio, and hopefully OggCamp will continue even if a LRL event can’t be arranged for next year. All in all, an excellent weekend, I met some nice new people, put some faces to names, and caught up with old friends. Roll on next year, in whatever form it takes!

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!

On the PHP coding front, MyJDCMS seems to be getting a bit of usage now. While writing this it has been downloaded 69 times from SourceForge, several people are using (or attempting to use) it at the moment, and it also will form the basis of a CMS system for a charity website I am currently developing. Unlike my other projects this one certainly merits some more development time to improve it’s features and code, as it may actually prove useful to people. It’s certainly rewarding to see my GPL’d work in action on real websites!

I’m also now looking forward to the release of Ubuntu 8.04, a countdown timer for which is below! It’s release is scheduled for while I’m on leave from work, so I should have plenty of time to play around with it.

Jonathan

Although before I jump into Ubuntu though I’m going to talk a little about some of the other work I’ve been doing lately. My PHP work is coming along well now, and I’m working on several different projects, all documented on my new code website:

JDCMS - The newest project, started only about a week ago, is a very basic content management system (CMS) designed for an administrator with no technical knowledge to keep a basic website (html/css) up to date through a very easy web interface. I have integrated the TinyMCE editor into the package and it’s almost ready for an alpha release once the code has been cleaned up and the CSS is complete. This will be the CMS used for a charity website I am currently working on.
[Update 22/02: An Alpha has now been released.]

ATS – Airport Taxi System, is being developed as a project to replace an aging Lotus Smartsuite system with a brand new PHP/MySQL database. It will cover all aspects of the business, including bookings, customer/driver management, code tables for airlines/destinations etc, financial and misc reporting, PDF/E-Mail outputs and letters. This will eventually be open-sourced for anyone to use, modify and contribute back.

OrgDirectory – This is a basic organisation/staff database I have been working on. Work on this has stalled slightly at the moment, although an alpha release was completed late last year. It needs an overhaul of the design and graphics, and also needs plenty of new features before it’ll be useful to anyone! This one’s on the back burner, or might just get scrapped!
[Update 27/02: Yeh, I scrapped it!]

Now on to Ubuntu 8.04:

8.10, due for release in April, is the latest incarnation of the Debian-based distro, and only the second Long Term Support (LTS) release from Canonical. This will mean 3 years support on the desktop and 5 years on the server.

Among the usual X-Org and Kernel updates, there are some interesting new features that should make a significant difference to end-users, and might help Ubuntu/Linux/GNU to take the edge over Microsoft, in the wake of Vista’s failure to perform as expected.

Transmission – Gnome’s Bittorrent client is set to be replaced (thankfully!) with Transmission. Although not my favourite Torrent client (which if you’re interested is Bittornado) it is certainly an improvement and novice users might find it easier to use.

Policykit – Policykit is a new security framework that allows security to be applied not just to applications, but to certain aspects of an application. This will allow application authors to tailor access to features/screens to a very specific security level, and should you try to access a part of the application not allowed by your access rights, you will be able to to unlock it with the sudo functionality.

Firefox 3 Beta’s – 8.04 will include the option to test out the latest versions of Firefox from the repositories, with a shedload of new stuff, including tighter integration with GTK, updated download manager, ACID2 support, and better bookmark management.

Brasero – Replacing the (very basic) Serpentine package is Brasero, a CD/DVD burning application, which can be used as an alternative to the Nautilus burner, and hopefully might reduce my previous reliance on K3B, so another nice change there.

Nautilus – Version 2.21.6 includes various new fixes and a new virtual filesystem (GVFS) which fixes many of Nautilus’s file-handling problems, including not being able to restore from the trash, and being able to handle multiple file transfers much more neatly.

Vinagre - A new default VNC client which supports bookmarks and multiple tabbed connections is a MASSIVE improvement over anything I have seen in the past for VNC on Linux. Although I’m not a massive user of VNC (SSH is where it’s at!) I am really looking forward to this one.

8.04 includes many other changes to the default system, including a new world clock and improvements to the System Monitor and new KVM features.

Hardy Heron (8.04) will eventually replace my Dapper Drake (6.04) web server, so I’m particularly interested in this release as a LAMP server. It certainly looks like they’re preparing for an excellent LTS release, but time will tell.

Jonathan

The Bad Bits

I’m going to start with the bad bits, this section is going to be the longest, not because there is a lot wrong with Ubuntu, but because the points I make need a decent explanation. The two biggest problems Ubuntu has (in my own opinion) are graphical and wireless support. Although this is certainly not the open source community’s fault, as many hardware manufacturer’s refuse to give information to open source developers and release their code. That’s not to say that progress hasn’t been made, the integration of NetworkManager and the addition of Bulletproof-X and the Graphical control panel in 7.10 are huge improvements to areas where newbie user’s could easily become unhinged. Still, there are some aspects that aren’t quite up to scratch.

In graphics, although every card seems to be supported out of the box, ‘3D effects‘, a much-touted feature in 7.04 and 7.10 is still very unstable, and I really have to question the inclusion of the immature Compiz Fusion project as the default 3D environment. In addition to this, on two machines I tested with ATI x300 cards, switching on the enhanced (although non-free) ‘FGLRX‘ graphics driver caused the machine to go into Xorg failsafe mode after a reboot, and even after tampering with the configuration panel I still couldn’t get 3D effects to function at all.

Switching back to the default open-source ‘ATI‘ driver solved this, and although 3D effects did function, one machine experienced system freezes every half-hour, and performance wasn’t great, which eventually led to me purchasing a new card. Saying this though, the default Ubuntu install did set up the best supported desktop it could with no bugs or crashes, so I suppose this wouldn’t affect a normal desktop end-user until they started tweaking the settings and turning Compiz on.

Another gripe of mine is wireless support. Although the list of supported chipsets is growing, and that majority of cards do now work, there seems to be very little help for cards that fail to be recognised. PCMCIA and PCI cards seem quite well supported, and I have yet to experience a problem with these, it’s USB where the issues lie. Both the cards I tested (Safecom SWMULZ-5400 and Belkin F5D7050) although recognised by Ubuntu, failed to connect to any wireless networks in range.

Forum posts on this seem to go unnoticed as there’s probably no known solution, and NDISWrapper also failed to work for me. It should be common sense that having to tweak various config files and blacklist kernel modules is not something a normal desktop end-user should have to do in order to get their hardware working.

I suppose there’s a trade-off to be had here between MS Windows, where everything works eventually, but configuration and driver installation is almost always required, and Linux/Ubuntu where half of the devices work out of the box with no set-up, configuration or installation, and the other half, where some will work after hours of effort, and some just completely fail to function at all.

I think progress is being made fast, and as more and more manufacturers open up their drivers to the community the device support is getting better and better. My advice for now is to test out all new devices with the Live CD before you wipe off your Windows partitions!

The Good Bits

Try not to let my experiences with Wireless USB and ATI cards sour you on Ubuntu, it does have a lot to offer, and 7.10 brings some great improvements to the already brilliant product. Also, my basic £30 Nvidia card worked out of the box and provides blistering speed and excellent graphical performance for 3D effects and the multitude of free FPS games I waste my life on every evening, Nexuiz being my current favourite!

The default desktop environment ‘Gnome‘ is now at version 2.20 and is more than suitable for everyday use by a novice user. The layout of the menu’s and toolbars is excellent and the bundled applications with Ubuntu include a full Office Suite, Firefox web browser, image editing, audio and video players, instant messaging clients, along with all the other bits and bobs you need and thousands of other applications to install through the simple ‘Add/Remove‘ application, all for free, just by ticking a box.

I also want to mention Windows compatibility, over the past few years the Wine project has done excellent things in making as many Windows applications as possible compatible with Linux, leaving user’s with fewer excuses to stick with Microsoft, and thanks to a new and improved ‘Wine’ menu, users can now configure Wine, view their installed Windows applications and uninstall them, all from one place, without having to remember any command line rubbish, and with the ‘Wine Doors‘ project taking shape things are just going to get easier and easier!

Looking at Ubuntu 7.10 and comparing it to Vista, it seems like moving away from Windows was one of the smartest things I ever did, and with the incredible progress being made I can’t wait to get my hands on the next LTS release in April 08.

Jonathan

I have had experience of many languages in the past few years, including ASP, HTML, CSS, VB, VB Script, JSP, Batch, Python, Shell Scripts and many others, but apart from HTML and CSS, I have never really taken to a programming language well. The only language I have had a lot of experience with is PHP. It seems that PHP has become the standard language for web applications these days, especially the open source ones, and all of the applications I run on my sites (PHPBB, WordPress, Mediawiki) use it, so it’s inevitable that I have picked up some skills in that area by poking around, adding new features, fixing bugs etc…

Only recently I have started looking into learning PHP to code professionally. I have started small by building some simple applications, scripts to access MySQL and MS Access databases and am really enjoying it so far, and it’s a great rush of excitement when you finally get a script doing what you want it to do.

After all the recent publicity around Facebook’s API and the associated applications I started looking into the technical side of things and how the Apps were built, as well as how they were linked into the user’s Facebook account. Remarkably 90% of the work is done by the developers own web server, which stores the code and manages adding and configuring the App, with the results appearing integrated into the Facebook site.

It’s quite a nifty system, based on PHP, with Facebook’s own mark-up language (FBML) similar to HTML. It also allows you to extract any information from the user’s Facebook profile and add it into your application. Facebook’s own documentation on this is sparse, although they do provide a sample application and the PHP5 library which you need to install (and configure with API keys and so on) to link your site to Facebook. Fortunately I managed to find a great page which gives newbie developers a much more useful guide to developing Facebook Apps.

My first application is small, but it seems to work well. It’s basically a ClassicKidsTV box which provides the site’s logo, with a link to the site and some additional text, I have also played around with the confirmation page so that it drags through the user’s name, and I plan to add in some functionality that will grab the user’s favourite Television shows and then ask them to add some Classic Kids shows to it!

It’s only an initial release, buggy and fairly useless to most people, but I really enjoyed coding it, and given that there are currently only around 6,000 applications on Facebook (compared to it’s 47 million members) I feel it’s quite an achievement!

• ClassicKidsTV Facebook App
• ClassicKidsTV Facebook App Info
• Tucows Facebook Developer Guide
• Facebook Platform

Jonathan

Here’s some of the things I am most looking forward to in this upcoming release:

• Gnome 2.20 – For us KDE haters. The new release of Gnome with updates to Searching, Image Viewing, Power Management (A must-have on the laptop) and an overall nicer appearance it should certainly improve the whole user experience.

• Desktop Effects – This is currently one of the most impressive features of Linux, beating anything Mac OS-X and (dare I say) Vista can produce. The effects are now provided by the recently created Compiz Fusion project, a merger between the competing Compiz and Beryl projects. Despite some controversy in the open-source community, these effects are now enabled by default in every Ubuntu installation.

• Firefox – Ubuntu’s version of the world-conquering browser Firefox now has an incredible new feature in the ‘Plug-in Finder Service’. Now some might say ‘Wait a minute, hasn’t Firefox always had a Plug-in Update Service?’. Whilst this is technically true, as anyone who has ever tried to use it with Ubuntu will testify, it was about as much use as a chocolate teapot. Necessary plug-ins such as Flash were identified, but never installed due to them being non-free additions, leaving the end-user to plough through the Ubuntu support forums trying to find out how to install it. Well it appears this issue is now resolved and Firefox can automatically detect and install the most popular plug-ins, even giving the option to install the open source flash player ‘Gnash‘.

• Graphical XOrg Configuration – One of the greatest problems with Linux from a configuration standpoint is that the display system used (X.Org) is very hard to configure. Screen resolution, refresh rate and multiple monitors all had to be configured using a text config file, or alternatively a very confusing text based setup utility. This has now all changed with the addition of a graphical interface for configuring all aspects of the display.

These new additions, along with improvements to Wireless Networking, Restricted Drivers, Additional Server Set-up Profiles, Printing and NTFS read/write access, it’s really shaping up to be a great release.

Jonathan

Saturday

I arrived feeling quite refreshed on Saturday morning, surprising given the frighteningly early wake up of 6AM, like last year I spent a lot of time in the main stage, which this year turned out to be a cinema screen! The Linux-loving crowds were out in force, I’d say there were about 500 people in attendance. Anyway, here’s my Saturday summarised:

Ted Haeger – Bungee Labs
Ted is a former Novell employee who now works for a VC-funded start up called Bungee Labs in the US. Their product is called “Bungee Connect” and is basically a web-based IDE for developing web applications. It is quite similar to the EBase tool I have used in work in the past, but is geared more towards developing sites with AJAX, and getting them shipped fast. Ted was entertaining as always.

Alan Cox – Red Hat
Alan is a Kernel hacker for Linux who currently works for Red Hat, Alan spoke about the Linux community, how things work, how changes are made and development takes place, and marketing of Linux. Overall a very informative talk.

Gong-a-Thong Light Bulb Talks
These were a series of short 3 minute talks compared by one of the presenter’s ‘Adam Sweet‘ who arrived on stage in a dressing gown to the rocky theme tune, who promptly stripped off to reveal a bright yellow thong (thankfully with a pair of pants below). The talks themselves were interesting, the ones I can remember included an American man who had travelled from Indonesia who wanted to start using free software in this area to help the recovery after the Asian tsunami. The winner was a young man who had a speech on how ordering food at a bar was akin to computer networking, he revealed how it was open to ‘spoofing’ and ‘denial of service attacks’ and was a hilariously funny skit.

Mass Debate
This debate included Chris DiBona from Google, Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Group, Nat Friedman of Novell and Steven Lamb of Microsoft. Steven took the brunt of the crowd’s heckling as he did last year, mainly over Microsoft’s creation of the OpenXML file format, with the crowd wanting to know why MS created OpenXML, when a free version, created with consultation with the free software community, which is also ISO accredited, already existed! He also took some stick over the BBC’s usage of Microsoft DRM in their iPlayer software, which will exclude any non-Windows machine from accessing BBC content over the web

Chris DiBona
Chris is Google’s open source program manager. He gave a talk on the area’s where google uses open source, where they contribute back to the community, and a lot of information on the Summer of Code program. Amazingly Google has released over a million lines of code into the community and has also contributed to projects such as Apache, MySQL, Wine, Samba and Gaim. He also talked about the history of Google and showed some amusing slides of the original google set-up, which consisted of several assorted machines and a monitor on a desk! Chris seemed like a great guy and stayed around for the whole conference which is rare for international visitors, I even managed to grab a quick chat with him which was nice.

Unfortunately I missed Kat Goodwin’s talk on Open Source advocacy in Schools, which I was a little gutted about as it’s something I am really interested in, but hopefully I can get a summary on it from someone!

Sunday

Sunday was a little quieter, not quite as many attendees, but still plenty to see and some additional exhibition stands. I spent a good amount of time on Sunday chatting to a man called Glyn from the Open Rights Group, he talked about the projects they have been involved with, such as efforts to eliminate DRM which will should soon result in legislation to force products that use DRM to be labelled as such. He also talked about the work they have been doing with monitoring and discouraging the Electronic Voting trials in the UK, which is certainly a good idea given some of the awful errors that have been made already, and the amateurish way that the system is being run, one example Glyn pointed out was one where a miscalculation in an Excel spreadsheet (yes, I know how stupid that sounds!) almost cost the SNP control of Scotland. I will certainly be signing up to support the Open Rights Group.

Michael Sparks – BBC
Michael is from the BBC’s research department and showed off some of the applications that they have worked on, including several from Google Summer of Code students. Some interesting ones including a BitTorrent Swarming application, and a secure network transport method which arose from certain high profile shows such as Doctor Who needing to be protected from theft during their transport.

Nat Friedman – Novell

Nat gave a very interesting talk where he compared the writing of the Dictionary, it’s many versions, revisions and authors as being one of the first examples of Open Source collaboration, he also discussed usability on the Linux desktop, and spent a large amount of time discussing patents, including the formation of the Open Invention Network, which is a collaboration of several high profile organisations with a large patent pool, to protect open source projects falling foul of intellectual property laws, and helping them out by counter-suing if necessary.

Wolverhampton itself is a fairly nice city, the usual shops you’d find anywhere nowadays, but it does have a nice air to it, and the venue reminded me very much of the Cornerhouse in Manchester, coffee shops, art, and independent and international cinema, a lovely place to hold a free software conference.

I spent most of the afternoon wandering around the exhibition, talking to people and drinking beer in the sunshine! All in all I had a truly excellent time, the people were great, the exhibitions gave me some great idea’s and I bought tonnes of merchandise, along with the HUGE goodie bag I got on entrance! I have posted a few pictures I took above, but more can be found here! Roll on LRL 2008!