SWAT's blog

Some of you might have noticed and probably a lot of you did not. This morning at 00:31:30 (Netherlands, GMT+1) the Epoch time was: 1234567890. There were a few people on IRC who were still awake at that time, so enjoy the screenshot.

A lot of people do not know any alternatives to the Adobe flash player. Well there is an alternative and it is completely open source: it is Gnash, the GNU flash movie player ( website ). It exists in various flavours for Linux and even for Windows. For example Gnash works on 64 bit Linux (for quite a while now).

Since it is possible that Adobe will ‘update’ their flash software and Gnash will update theirs to keep them in sync, it is likely that you will get stuck with an older version of Gnash and that some flash enabled sites will stop working. The newer Gnash version would ship with the next Ubuntu release or with a backport to the current release. If you can not wait and want the update earlier you could try the gnash firefox plugin . Other downloads can be found at the original Gnash project page or at the getgnash website.

De dongel van KPN, wie kent hem nog niet van die ‘grappige’ reclame spot? Afgelopen week had ik even de gelegenheid om met het apparaatje te spelen en ja hoor, het werkt onder Intrepid, maar net niet helemaal out-of-the-box.

Ik sloot het apparaat aan en Ubuntu herkende het meteen.

Bus 004 Device 015: ID 12d1:1003 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E220 HSDPA Modem / E270 HSDPA/HSUPA Modem

Vervolgens probeer je via NetworkManager de 3G verbinding tot stand te brengen, maar het werkte gewoon niet. De oplossing was erg simpel. Men neme een simlock-vrije telefoon, stopt de UMTS SIM er in, zet de PIN beveiliging uit en het werkt. Blijkbaar heeft de NetworkManager in Intrepid dus last van een kleine bug (die al gefixed is in nieuwere versies van NetworkManager) waar gelukkig een erg makkelijke workaround voor is.

The title of this blog post, pretty much says it all. Since reading “long” documents or manuals is an extremely hard and time-consuming occupation for most people, I just made this ‘how to’ for all the really lazy people .

Note: Only register your nickname and get a cloak if you tend to use IRC on a very regular basis
Why should you care about getting a cloak? A cloak hides your hostname. A hostname can be used to the IP address which belongs to it. So if you do not want everyone to know your IP address, get a cloak. Furthermore, a cloak enables IRC channel operators to give a someone an ‘invite’ based on it, instead of a hostname invite. This is extremely usefull if some users have dynamic IP addresses and the operator does not want to change the invite list on a regular basis.

1. Choose and switch to your (not already registered or occupied) nickname.

   /nick your_nickname

2. Register your nickname.

   /msg nickserv register your_password your@email.address

3. Hide your e-mail.

   /msg nickserv set hidemail on

4. Change to your alternate nickname. I suggest you use, your normal nickname appended with an underscore.

   /nick alternate_nickname

5. Link your alternate nickname to your nickname.

   /msg nickserv group

6. Switch back to your normal nickname.

   /nick original_nickname

7. Check who is currently on-duty.

   /stats p

   If nobody is on duty, you can get a list of the staffers who could help you out.

   /who freenode/staff/*

   If nobody is on duty, go to #freenode, ask politely for an unaffiliated cloak and wait. Do not request such a cloak repetitively if you do not get an answer immediately, but wait at least 3 hours between requests.

8. Ask the staffer politely for an unaffiliated cloak.
9. Set up your IRC client to automatically identify (log in) yourself to nickserv. You can also do this manually:

   /msg nickserv identify

Source: http://freenode.net/faq.shtml

Mental note: do not use ‘sudo’ when you are tired. Yesterday, just before I wanted to go to bed, I made a typo. Luckily it was not the famous ‘sudo rm -Rf /’ typo, but I managed to delete a part of my /usr/ directory. When dpkg, sudo and man did not work anymore, I knew it was time for a fresh install. I copied my /etc/ directory to my home directory, rebooted with a live CD and started the installation process. After less then 20 minutes, my installation was finished. I rebooted yet again, installed the available updates and required applications, enabled the Nvidia driver and replaced my xorg.conf. One more restart and I was back in business. The whole process (including downloading and installing over 250MB of applications), took me less then 60 minutes. Getting a fresh installation never was this pain free!
If you also want the option of a fresh, pain free reinstall, you can follow these guidelines:

1. Create a seperate partition for your /home directory
2. Create a seperate partition for your /etc directory (or back it up, before each reinstall)
3. Don’t forget to backup other important data (like databases etc.)
4. Have a recent LiveCD ready
5. Only use symlinks in directories like /var/www/ to your /home, /mnt or /media directories. If you keep your ‘www’ data in your home directory, it will not get deleted during the reinstall process (since the destination of the symlink does not get deleted)

Some months ago, I searched for a new music player yet again. A little history: When I started with linux, I was started using XMMS as my default music player. After a while I heard that Beep-media-player was the improved version of XMMS and even had Winamp skins support. This just had to be the player I was searching for… and it was.
After my iPod nano purchase, I made a habit of using Banshee for all my iPod related transfers. Although I do not like .Net and therefore Mono, I give this application the benefit of the doubt, since it gets the work done. I still was not completely satisfied with my regular music player though.
A friend of mine suggested using MPD and Sonata and it is a total bliss. Imagine hearing your music play, even when your X.org is down! MPD is the music daemon, to whom the Sonata client connects. If you do not like Sonata, you can use another MPD client, there are several available in the repository.
You can even easily extend MPD to include Icecast, so you can stream your music. This is quite cool though. If you are on a remote location and connect to your MPD server with an MPD client and connect to your icecast stream, you can control the playlist and listen to your music everywhere. That is, if you have sufficient bandwidth of course.

Note: You will need one MPD client to control the remote playlist and a music player to listen to the stream

1. Install the needed software

   sudo apt-get install mpd icecast2 sonata

2. Setup icecast2

   Edit /etc/default/icecast2 and change this to ‘true’:

   ENABLED=true

   Change at least the <authentification> and <hostname> section of /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml :

   <authentification>
   <source-password>foobar21</source-password>
   <relay-password>foobar54</relay-password>
   <admin-user>admin</admin-user>
   <admin-password>foobar532</admin-password>
   </authentification>
   
   <hostname>foobar5126</hostname>

3. Setup mpd

   Edit your /etc/mpd.conf and edit the ‘audio_output’ section:

   audio_output {
   type            "shout"
   name            "Icecast2 stream"
   host            "foobar5126"
   port            "8000"
   mount           "/mpd_stream.ogg"
   password        "foobar21"
   bitrate         "192"
   format          "44100:16:1"
   # Optional Paramters
   user        "source"
   description "Music"
   genre       "misc"
   }

That is it. Enjoy your music stream either on the server or on any client that listens to your icecast stream!

In the last couple of weeks/months, the Ubuntu-NL community has grown quite a bit and is continuing to grow. Especially the forum statistics (thanks Seveas) show an increasing amount of new users and a constant post-growth. As long as the posts are useful, any growth is a good sign.
To accommodate the community, the Dutch Documentation Team has created a lot of documentation. Some of the “Nl” pages on the Ubuntu wiki will remain there, but there has always been a problem with keeping the pages up-to-date and checking for errors. With the new documentation, which have been created/checked by people with Ubuntu experience, you can be assured of documentation with a higher quality.
The Dutch Forum Team and the Dutch IRC Team have added a couple of guidelines which everybody should read and comply with. It is always a good idea to point new users towards the guidelines. Basically the guidelines sum up a couple of written and unwritten rules (including basic netiquette) which will hopefully make the Ubuntu-NL community an even nicer place to stay.
I want to address something about the forum. Lately some forum users have complained about not getting ‘their way of things’. The Forum Team has been very liberal for a long time. This is easy when there are only a couple of users and few new forum posts each day. There is not much to correct and it is manageable, by manually editing topic names, moving topics to the right sub forum etc. (most people probably will not even realize this). Since the Ubuntu-NL community is booming, there need to be some rules (which everybody has to comply with), like in the real world. These are mostly, common rules which are enforced throughout the internet.
Ubuntu-NL is moving towards a golden future, with all Teams having the best intentions for everyone. A few bumps in the road are to be expected, as long as we do not lose track of our goal: A bigger and better Ubuntu-NL community!

profox and bartek have already posted something about the effects of the Ubuntu-NL SummerMeeting and there has been a short notice on Ubuntu-NL news. Yes, it is a lot of redundant information and I am going to add some more to it. Do not worry, I’ll keep it as short as possible and will only highlight the more important changes.

• The Ubuntu-NL map is back!
• A documentation team (pjotr123, Sander50, Johanvd) and marketing team (w.hellinga) have been set up.
• A new search possibility will be added (check out the Google custom search in the right upper corner of your screen)
• After a lot of fuss (including the ever ongoing “Google is evil” remark) on the forums about the new search, the old one was reinstated
• The Ubuntu-NL magazine was decommissioned
• An Ubuntu-NL security notices RSS feed was launched
• Soon there will be a webpage which contains the common guidelines (like simple netiquette)for the different parts of the Ubuntu-NL community
• A who-is-who page was created (OMG, I’m actually on that page)