SWAT's blog

Gisteren ging ik bij een vriendin langs, bij wie ik een tijd geleden Ubuntu geïnstalleerd had. Ze vertelde me dat haar fotoalbumsoftware niet werkte onder Ubuntu. Reden genoeg om  even langs te gaan om te kijken of ik haar uit de brand kon helpen. Zowel Kruidvat als Hema biedt fotoalbumsoftware aan, zodat men offline zijn albums kan samenstellen en deze vervolgens bij hen kan bestellen. Hema biedt software aan die enkel onder Windows werkt en Kruidvat biedt software aan die zowel werkt onder Linux, Windows als Mac. Alle Linux gebruikers kunnen het beste terecht bij het Kruidvat.

De Linux fotoalbumsoftware van het Kruidvat hoeft niet als root geïnstalleerd te worden en bevat een installatie script (Perl) wat vervolgens de juiste software-bestanden download en ‘installeert’. Het is helaas geen proper .deb of .rpm pakket en je moet een EULA accepteren, maar het draait wel native onder Linux en dus Ubuntu.

Every once in a while, you buy a piece of hardware which is officially not “supported” on Linux (according to the vendor). Since I have to do presentations regularly, I finally decided to buy a “presenter” to aid me and make my presentation look even better. After reading several reviews about the Logitech presenter R800 and seeing a couple of comments that it appeared to work on the Mac OS, my mind was made up. I picked it up today, immediately hooked it up to my Ubuntu Karmic (9.10, 2.6.31 kernel) desktop and  it was recognized as:

046d:c52d Logitech, Inc.

I tested a couple of presentations with evince (pdf) and openoffice.org impress (odp) and the buttons work perfectly! The available buttons are: next, previous, start/end presentation and blank presentation screen. Furthermore there is an on/off button, a laserpointer button (a frickin’ laser!) and two buttons to set the timer for the vibrating alarm. I still have to test it in the field, but I already know that this was the an extremely good buy.

This week I am teaching the LPI 101 course again and we covered the shadow file today (amongst other topics). I gave the students the exercise to manually edit the shadowfile and let an account expire on 01-01-2011. The manpage of shadow(5) stipulates that the account expiration date has to be “expressed as the number of days since Jan 1, 1970″. One of my students asked me how to calcuate this. I did not immediately know the answer and I did not want to use rely on any online date/time converter, so I went looking for a satisfactory solution.

1. Find the UNIX time / Epoch of the date in question

date -d ‘2011-01-01′ +%s

Remember that these are seconds since 01-01-1970.

2. Calculate the number of days since 01-01-1970.

echo `date -d ‘2011-01-01′ +%s` / 86400 | bc

A day is 60 * 60 * 24 = 86400 seconds. Notice how ‘bc’ will always be rounding down the number of days.

3. Perform a ‘normal’  round up or down for the number of days

UNIXTIME=`date -d ‘2011-01-01′ +%s` ; printf “%.0f\n” `echo “scale=1; $UNIXTIME / 86400″ | bc`

If you use the Zarafa webaccess (6.40, but apparently also 6.30) on Ubuntu 9.10, apache2 will nicely segfault and you will not be able to access your webmail. Upside: the mobile server will keep functioning. Even Fedora has this problem and it was tracked down to an error in PHP. I do not want to compile my own software to work around this issue, since I am lazy and I use a package manager for a reason! I quickly found the least nasty workaround for this issue in this post on the Zarafa forums.I replace /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so (from karmic’s 5.2.10) with the libphp5.so from the 5.2.6 libapache2-mod-php5 package. At least the file will still be managed by dpkg and thus updated/upgraded if neccessary. As Ubuntu 10.04 is just around the corner, I will suggest the owner to does not update libapache2-mod-php5 until he upgrades to 10.04.

Just when you think you have seen it all,  you experience something new. This happened when SSH’ing to a server which authenticates against an LDAP server:

The source of the problem was a configuration error in libnss-ldap.conf

Onze stickerman, ook wel beter bekend als ArmedKing is MIA (Missing In Action). Blijkbaar worden de enveloppen die opgestuurd worden ook niet meer gevuld teruggestuurd. Je kunt dus geen Ubuntu stickers bestellen bij de stickerman.

We zijn dus op zoek naar een nieuwe stickerman (of vrouw), die dit karwei op wil pakken. Als je denkt dat je aankunt, stuur dan even een mailtje naar swat#ubuntu-nl.org.

P.S. Mocht je dit lezen ArmedKing, stuur mij of iemand van het team even een bericht!

Update (09-02-2010): Hij is terecht en doet nog steeds de stickerdistributie! Hoera!

This little gem of a magazine got my attention during the previous HCC dagen. It contains the basic information a newbie could/would need to get started with Linux. Topics in the magazine are, but are not limited to: drivers, cd/dvd burning, desktop layout, netbook remix, music/video, fspot, firefox, evolution, ekiga/skype, empathy etc.. These are topics which I get a lot of questions about from new converts and this saves me precious time and energy. Another advantage of this ‘publicity’ is exactly that, publicity. There are not that many Linux magazines around, but there are dozens of magazines which focus on other operating systems. This is the kind of magazine I could give to parents to get them hooked on Ubuntu, good stuff!

P.S. Yes, the magazine is focused on Ubuntu (9.10 a.k.a. Karmic Koala)

Yesterday evening the HME awards 2009 event took place at the Jaarbeurshallen in Utrecht, just after closing time of the HCC dagen. A few people from the Ubuntu-NL team went there to pick it up (including me), and I wanted to at least share a picture of the award with everyone. This award goes to everybody who made a contribution to Ubuntu!

Note: “besturingssysteem” means operating system