I've been getting this error recently:

W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:                              
9AA38DCD55BE302B                                                                            
W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:                              
9AA38DCD55BE302B                                                                            
W: GPG error: http://ftp.cz.debian.org etch Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 9AA38DCD55BE302B
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

The way to fix it was to run these commands:

gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv-keys 9AA38DCD55BE302B

sudo apt-key add ~/.gnupg/pubring.gpg

sudo apt-get update

Finally, after years of being harangued at how great Linux was compared to the evil Windows, my wife asked me to install Linux on her new laptop a HP Pavilion DV5-1020.

I'm a Debian user and on desktop machines I run 'sid'. For me this is appropriate, because sid gives me the latest technology and any problems that sid causes, I can either cope with or fix. For my wife, however something with a good GUI and preferably and 'just works', would be prefereble. I therefore chose Ubuntu.

I haven't used Ubuntu much, but my previous dabbles confirmed the hype that everything 'just works'. Was my experience this time as positive? And does Ubuntu deliver is it really the distro for non-technical users?

The Ubuntu installer is very good. Mostly, you just keep hitting 'return'. The partition system that it chose - shrinking Vista and installing Ubuntu on one big partition - was the one we went with.

The initial installation was so easy that I thought there was absolutely no point writing one of these how-I-got-Linux-running-on-such-and-such-a-laptop type posts. In fact, would anyone ever have to write one of those posts ever again? Yes, they certainly will.

Everything seemed to work well until I tried suspend/resume.

Firstly, on resume the built-in keyboard and mousepad where unresponsive, but aUSB keyboard and USB mouse both worked.

The fix was to upgrade the BIOS firmware from F.07 to the latest version at the time of writing F.32. This involved booting into Vista, downloading the firmware updater and running it. This is something that a non-technical user just can't do. Ubuntu therefore fails at the first hurdle for a non-technical user.

Important Suspend/Resume Issues

On resume there would be no network connectivity. However, subsequent hibernating/waking up causes the network to come back up.

At first I thought this was something to do with the r8169 driver for the RTL8111/8168B card.

So I tried the official r8168 RealTek module as explained here and here.

Switching the driver did not help. The kernel driver, r8169, therefore appears to work and the bug is probably something to do with ACPI.

Wireless

Wireless doesn't work. The laptop runs the Atheros AR242x chipset. There is a discussion of this issue here.

It is reportedly fixed in Jaunty.

Webcam

Oftentimes, webcams don't work well in Linux. This one appears to work flawlessly.

Other Stability Issues

1. Occasional screen freezes (so far can't be replicated).
2. OpenOffice crashes.

Other Observations

The Ubuntu generic kernels are big, very big. This is because they include absolutely everything. It also take hours to compile one, even on a dual-core AMD64. It make sense, therefore to custom compile. Ubuntu advises against it. This is bad advice, IMHO.

Summary

The HP DV5-1020 is not a good choice candidate for an Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex install. There are too many unresolved issues, may of which may not be solved for several months at the very least.

The experience has been salutary for me, as it shows that Ubuntu is not a panacea for desktop Linux. In fact, claiming that it is a newbie's distribution and then failing to run properly, may harm Linux take-up.

What is needed for Linux, and especially for Ubuntu, is to work with manufacturers who can confirm that their hardware is "Ubuntu ready" in the same way that they confirm hard where to be "Vista ready". This would require a team to work closely with manufacturers.

The Ubuntu GUI really shines however. In my view, it is several orders of magnitude better than either XP or Vista. The widgets are easy to find, easy to use and the setup is intuitive.

Here's how you change your time zone in Debian:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

My previous attempt to fix mplayer sound problems only worked sometimes. I looked up mplayer's configuration log file 'configure.log' and found that mplayer had been compiled with OSS sound but not ALSA sound.

This is the fix. Get the latest mplayer source:

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer 

Install the necessary development libraries, in particular the one that contains the alsa sources:

apt-get install libasound2-dev libxv-dev libxinerama-dev libgtk2.0-dev

then:

cd mplayer
make
make install

It works now.

In a shock move, today April 1st, Microsoft has announced that it will make the source code to Windows freely available under version 3 of the GNU Public License.

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft explains it like this, "I was using my laptop in Starbucks as I usually do; recovering from blue-screens of death, dealing with viruses and so on, when I saw someone else was using a sleek, lean, robust operating system."

That operating system was Crux Linux. Ballmer has now become a devoted user.

"I realised there and then that Windows was just rubbish and that we'd been conning the entire world. Microsoft wants to turn over a new leaf," he says.

All senior management at Microsoft have started using Linux for day-to-day tasks, but converting some of the developers and IT support staff at the software company has been more difficult.

"We're getting there," says Ballmer, "but some software developers are a bit stupid. They think they might lose their jobs."

The most recalcitrant body has, however, been the Business Software Alliance, the tax-farming organisation. It sees its whole existence under threat and there has been dark rumours of a coup d'etat to bring back the old order.

Microsoft has often been regarded as the bully-boy of the IT world using its armies of lawyers and substantial cash pile to sue anyone it didn't like into submission.

"Those days are over," says Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, "from now on it's Mr Nice Guy."

For a while, I've had a problem with mplayer.

If there was another application using the sound system, e.g. firefox, then mplayer would not produce any sound. If I paused mplayer, watched something, say on youtube.com, and then restarted mplayer, mplayer would crash.

There is a fix. That is to add this line to ~/.mplayer/config:

ao=alsa:device=ch51dup

Hat tip.

Now that I'm starting to use Openbox, and all these people post their cool desktops all over the Internet, I figure that I want a cool desktop too.

This requires certain things: control over the background and window decorations, the ability to have transparent terminals and of course the ability to change text colour in the terminals.

I've used konsole a lot as I like the 'tabbing' feature. However, konsole doesn't seem to do transparency at all in OpenBox. So, I've started to use urxvt.

There's a good rxvt configuration guide here

I found however, that clicking on the 'terminal' button in my taskbar still brought up konsole. The trick is that Debian uses a series of symlinks in /etc/alternatives to set up preferred applications. This command is how to update the default terminal emulator:

sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

and choose rxvt from the options.

There is a lot of discussion on various mailing lists about 'true transparency' which means you can see windows under the current window. This is really useful when you want to read and type at the same time. Anyway, I haven't been able to get it to work.

Kmandla wonders why anyone reads his blog.

But there is a lot of the Internet that escapes me. Blogging is a perfect example. Why anyone would care or want to sift through the dreck I post here is confusing too.

Well, I can tell him. He writes very well on interesting Linux topics. In particular, he writes about getting low power machines doing something useful.

So far, kmandla has encouraged me to do two things:

• start to use rtorrent instead of ktorrent
• play around with open box

Openbox the lite-weight desktop manager that is extremely configurable. It also has some beautiful themes. So open box is great. I have one major problem. How do I get konsole, and for that matter other terminal emulators to have transparent backgrounds?

I was doing some random browsing and came across this; an article called "A Collection of the Best Linux Commands". It lists a few command line commands, such as 'hostname'. I'm a little confused about this - I understand that the hostname command is useful, but is it one of the 'best'?

It also lists 'whoami' which, I often find useful as I am always forgetting who I am. Some others I use all the time include top, du and df as well as cat.

However, there is something really wrong with the list. Take for example these:

du / -bh | more
ps axu | more

I mean who, in this day and age, uses 'more'? Everyone knows that less is more so I really doubt the writer's l33t status.

How to switch the keyboard layout in X from the commandline:

setxkbmap xx

Where xx is the country code.

Glyn Moody has an excellent blog entry on Microsoft's EU lobbying. It shows the way that Microsoft is rewriting EU policy documents to destroy, as far as it can, open source. The complete document can be found at the excellent Wikileaks.

Most telling, to me, are the passages that Microsoft deleted from the original document:

Over the past years it has become clear that specific patent licensing schemes, most importantly the so-called "RAND" 7 terms, discriminate against OSS implementation. This issue complicated the recent antitrust cases in Europe and was subject of a specific workshop on "IPR in ICT standardisation" 8 organised by DG Enterprise.

The workshop revealed a fundamental incompatibility of RAND models with OSS implementations, as well as a very controversial debate around this issue. From the perspective of OSS adoption,9 it could be said that RAND conditions fall short of the Common Patent Policy of ITU-T, ITU-R, ISO and IEC, which states that "a patent embodied fully or partly in a Recommendation | Deliverable must be accessible to everybody without undue constraints."

[...]

A recent development, which deserves the careful attention from the Commission, is the use of unsubstantiated threats of intellectual property rights infringements against those who attempt to develop interoperable software products. As an example, a major software company has publicly stated that it believes Linux and other open source software infringes 235 of its patents, but has never identified any of these patents.

Vague claims by patent holders that open source software may infringe their patent rights should be obliged to identify supposedly infringed patents or cease to make unsubstantiated allegations. This would prevent patents from being invoked to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt ("FUD") against open source software products in the minds of both developers and users. The behaviour of creating FUD against open source software solutions should not be tolerated, as it amounts to an anticompetitive strategy aimed at distorting conditions in the marketplace to the detriment of OSS products.

Here the original EU document clearly references the actions of Microsoft and its minions. Microsoft removed any reference to its actions.

These developments are clearly very serious for FOSS. Making these documents and Microsoft's methodology widely known is the only way to fight back. Please pass these links on.

Here's a way to a line of text to all files in a directory:

 sed '
/text on previous line/ a\
text to be inserted after
' files

So, they finally made me install Tor. They are these people. I don't believe that ISPs do anything other than track their users' browsing habits and sell the data to the highest bidder.

In these days of the presumption of guilt, in these days of an over-bearing and all powerful executive arm of government that will destroy you if they don't like you, there really is no option, but to be paranoid.

You can browse anonymously using Tor.

On a Debian based system, Tor is pretty easy to install:

apt-get install tor

you also need privoxy:

apt-get install privoxy

Debian packages mostly work out of the box these days, but privoxy needs /etc/privoxy/config tweaking. This line needs to be added:

forward-socks4a / 127.0.0.1:9050 .

Then applications like firefox need to be setup to use the tor-privoxy proxy.

But now browsing is anonymous, if somewhat slow.

The code this site works on is a work-in-progress. It is based on the old Everydevel code which powers sites like Perlmonks and Everything2. But that code is very old - very Web 1.0 - and needs updating.

Normally, the updates go smoothly and the site is only down for seconds or minutes at most.

This update was a SNAFU. It was more complicated than most as it involved changing the basis of the class system used for objects, by moving over the the cutting edge of Perl technology: Moose .

But this showed up some design problems in the code which I had to resolve before I could get it back up again.

Anyway, back now!

Sorry for the instability of the site over the last few days. This is because the site software is undergoing some rather serious changes, some of which will mean that the site runs a bit funnily. After a while the site should be getting faster, though.

One of the great advantages of running a site that isn't at all commercial and is little more than a hobby is that you can play around with the live site without getting into trouble :)

I've been caught by git this a number of times:

The problem here is that git push seems like a natural thing to do but screws up your working directory on the remote side. Mercurial doesn't change the working directory, but neither does it silently rebase it and set you up to undo your changes if you're not careful. The problem here is a lack of safety and a lack of warning.

I like both the solutions presented there. That is, either having a separate branch on the 'server' for incoming or having a bare repository on the 'server'.

How much time and effort does Windows waste?

Some years ago studies were produced to show that the introduction of IT did not increase productivity in organisations. "Why not?" wondered all and sundry.

Well, here's an idea for an answer: Windows.

Microsoft's monopoly "operating" system is so sub-standard and users spend so much time maintaining their systems that any productivity gains simply evaporate away.

I've just spent hours trying to get a spambot off my wife's Window's laptop. The stupid beast has all the hallmarks of a drive-by infection. The fact it takes several attempts to stop re-infection is testament to Window's dodgy architecture. The infection even turned off the Window's firewall.

The root of most these problems is Microsoft's refusal to separate system and application code. This makes it easy for viruses to corrupt the system itself often requiring a complete re-installation. This would be laughable, and indeed I laugh about it a lot when it happens to other people. When it happens to me, though, Bill Gates's name is always close to an expletive.

To turn a Window's toy into anything like a usable computer you need to load it up with security software. What I decided to install was AVG. Allegedly one of the better products. AVG seems to do everything. One thing it does is take so long to scan incoming email that Outlook thinks the remote POP server hasn't responded. AVG also has a firewall. This firewall is managed by a series of "profiles". The profile we selected was 'Home & Small Office Network', only to find that this profile blocks connections out to port 110. That is, connections to check mail on a POP3 mail box. How friggin stupid. Even more stupid is that there is no way to tweak the profile to allow outbound connections to port 110.

The stupidity of this is staggering.

AVG is hardly unique in its amazingly Neanderthal user-interface and settings. This is a disease that has spread through all Windows software.

Compare this to Linux, where setting up a robust and simple firewall and tuning it to suit your needs is as easy as falling over.

Windows is simply not fit for the task.

One is being reported by the BBC. In Britain there's a government post with the Orwellian title of "Culture Secretary". The title is of course a misnomer as a Culture Secretary does not so much promote culture, as restrict it. At the moment the post is occupied by one Andrew Burnham.

Mr Burnham, a father of three young children, believes internet-service providers should offer child-friendly web access.

In other words, anodyne and safe for the likes of Mr Burnham. But how can ISPs only offer child friendly access?

This isn't about turning back the clock. The internet has been empowering and democratising in many ways, but we haven't yet got the stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around it [...] This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it, it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people.

A wider public interest than free speech. There is no public interest wider than free speech. Free speech is a human right. Burnham and his ilk find that human right inconvenient so he wants to curtail it in favour of a greater good - his own convenience.

How the government will do this is a mystery, but no doubt high on the list is giving ISPs a list of approved web sites. That's one way Mr Burnham can have "stakes" to help the sheeple navigate.

It is no wonder that Guido, who has been identified as a threat by ministers, is moving his website somewhere else.

Guido is being threatened again, because some minor politician, Zac Goldsmith, who can't keep his dick in his trousers, doesn't want the truth to get out about his bedroom exploits.

And that's the truth of it. Politicians want to censor the internet so they can do what the want with impunity.

This is beautiful in its simplicity:

convert file1.jpg file2.jpg files.pdf

Turns jpeg files file1.jpg and file2.jpg into a multipage pdf document.

'convert' is part of the imagemagick suite of tools. On Debian based systems (e.g. Ubuntu) it can be installed as:

apt-get install imageimagick

Note to self.

First get the source:

apt-get install linux-source-2.2.26

Unpack the source archive and create the symlink:

cd /usr/src/
tar jxf linux-source-2.2.26.tar.bz2
ln -s linux-source-2.2.26 linux
cd linux

Don't reconfigure manually, get your old config:

zcat /proc/config.gz > .config

Compile your version with the wonderful fakeroot command:

fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --revision=anumber kernel_image

Install it:

sudo dkpg -i ../linux-image-2.6.26_anumber_i386.deb 

And reboot.