James Galvin

Like so many new Linux users before him, Grandad has asked the question that sets you on the road to beard, sandals, and hats with built-in propellors.

The Linux I installed is called Ubuntu and it uses a thing called Grub.

Where the f*ck do they get these names? Are the people who write Linux high on acid or something? They have the most obscure names for everything. You don’t ’search’ or ‘find’ - you ‘grep’. And the desktop is called ‘Gnome’ or ‘KDE’.

Before you even download Linux, you’re faced with an assortment of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Gobuntu, nUbuntu, and that’s just a few of the Ubuntu variants. There are countless other releases from Gentoo/Pentu to Debian/Xebian, and I won’t even mention Yellow Dog, Puppy Linux, or my favourite: Tinfoil Hat Linux (for the extra-paranoid).

Most of us have got so used to this over the years that we don’t even notice the unusual choice of names given to most open source software. Making phone calls through Asterisk, receiving mail thanks to Dovecot, chatting on Pidgin, and daily exposure to the likes of Bash and Apache for so long makes you forget what it was like as a first-timer having to google search Yahoo to find out what everything did.

One of the great thing about open source software is, if you don’t expect to be lining up in front of a bunch of corporate fatcats selling it, you can name it whatever you like. The guys responsible tend to have a particularly nerdy sense of humour, which is why Guido van Rossum opted to name his programming language “Python”, in honour of Monty Python, and why we see web frameworks springing up named after anything from Gypsy jazz guitarists to… cake.

Here are a few of the more common programs with questionable names:

• Gimp: Image manipulation program, similar to Photoshop
• Snort: Intrusion detection system (lets you detect hackers and unusual activity on your network)
• Oinkmaster: Used for updating snort rules
• Barnyard: Event processing for snort
• Clam: antivirus software
• Squid: proxy server and web cache
• Putty: a telnet/ssh client
• Seahorse: a front end for GnuPG encryption/decryption program
• Nautilus: file manager, similar to Finder or Windows Explorer

In honour of Head Rambles, I’ll have to mention Gramps, the open source genealogy platform. By the way, can anyone explain the recurrence of the maritime theme? Actually never noticed it before…

Attention any Linux users having trouble with Totem: be careful of what information you submit in your bug reports!. (Well spotted, Killian)

Ubuntu have named their 8.04 release. This one will have Long Term Support, so you can expect to hear a lot about it, as it will be Ubuntu’s next big push and will be around for a long time. With that in mind, you might think they would put a bit of thought into the code name.

They could have chosen:

• Hearty Hamster
• Humble Horse
• Hefty Hippo (battling the temptation to opt for ‘Hungry’)
• Hostile Hyena
• Homnivorous Hummingbird

How great would it be tell people that you’re trying out a new home theater platform on Hefty? Everyone loves hippos and they tie nicely into the African theme. Hippos have great personality. Herons? They just stand there all day doing nothing! Who ever heard of a hardy heron? And as for HARDY??? What kind of signal are you sending to potential users who are contemplating a switch to Linux but worried about the steep learning curve. Next we’ll be seeing Impossible Iguana, Justforgetaboutit Jack-rabbit. Myself, I would have skipped the H entry altogether, given that we’ve already had a Hoary Hedgehog.

Faustov has written up a nice Mencoder tutorial to help QuakeWorld players make movies in Linux. I don’t think I’ll be making any QW movies in the near future, but I’ll bookmark this anyway, since I always struggle even with the basics of Mencoder.

Congrats to Colm and Joost in becoming immortalised in /etc/services - they now have an official IANA assigned port. Incidentally - if you haven’t got a Joost account yet and feel like checking it out, let me know because I have a few invitations available.

I just installed Ubuntu 6.10 - “Edgy Eft” today. First impressions are good - it looks nice, and it’s very fast, particularly the boot-up process. I haven’t had a chance to check out any of the new features yet, like IceWeasel 2.0. There were a few issues with the installation - most critically the wireless card support. I’ve been using a Belkin USB wireless adapter via ndiswrapper with no problems since Breezy. Edgy detected it, for the first time, and loaded the rt73usb driver… which didn’t work properly. I blacklisted the module and opted for my trusty ndiswrapper instead - but Edgy packaged a very outdated version 1.1, which didn’t work either. This was nearly a show-stopper, since I depend on a wireless network as my only internet gateway, but luckily I had my ndiswrapper 1.8 source backed up on my /home partition and was able to get online with that.

The beardiest of Linux snobs sometimes sneer at Ubuntu, because it is not hardcore enough. It is pretty and graphical and far too easy to use, with tutorials on how to spell your name. As a Ubuntu user since Warty, I have always hated this kind of attitude… but for the first time I am starting to see where it comes from. The greatest strength of Linux in general is the ability to see exactly whats going on - and if you dont like it you can change it. Tragically, this refreshing verbosity is what keeps the average computer user at barge-pole distance. In an admirable effort to make Linux more accessible, Ubuntu made a compromise. Thanks to Dapper (with Long Term Support, an easy Live CD install, and programs like Automatix and EasyLinux which magically do all the work for you), for the first time, Linux was a genuine option as a desktop OS - I’m surprised that there wasn’t a bigger take-up among art students and the like, or enterprising refurbished-computer dealers who wanted to save on the cost of an operating system. But there’s a thin line between making the system more user-friendly, and unnecessarily dumbing-down the distro. The first thing I noticed upon booting up my Edgy system was the fact that there is no feedback, no step-by-step progress that we’re so used to seeing. I’m sure its easy to enable this again, but thats beside the point. I really don’t see any advantage to removing the diagnostics, but there are a number of obvious disadvantages, and this does not bode well.

When Dapper came out four months ago, I spent days (literally) on dial-up downloading the standard installation CD. What a sickener it was when it woudln’t work on my system. I was gutted to see that there was no means to fail over to a text-based intallation without downloading another 700mb alternate install. I got stung again this time around, but lucky I’m no longer a narrowbander. I had to download Edgy Eft three times - the first one failed its checksum, and the second time I accidentally got the standard live CD again. In my opinion, the Live CD should be the alternative version. I fear for Fiddly Ferret, or Gawky Gazelle or whatever is coming next.

A minor annoyance - the bog version of vi is back again, but “apt-get install vim-full” puts it back in its cage quickly enough.

I just forked out €15 for a three month subscription to Transgaming’s Cedega - the portability product that allows you to run Windows games seamlessly on Linux. As much as I hate to say it, it was money well spent. After hours of recompiling several different versions of Wine, and troubleshooting minor bits and pieces that made some of the newer games just barely unplayable, I decided that it is just too much effort and the time that Cedega would save me is worth more than €5 per month. In other words, spurred on by a blast of nostalgia, I needed a fix of World of Warcraft immediately. Cedega did exactly what it said on the tin, and it surpassed my expectations by running Civilization 4 flawlessly. I’m told that there is even support for Oblivion and Age of Empires III… if only I had the inclination to find the CDs.

Unfortunately, WoW is just as boring as when I quit playing it over a year ago… only this time around my few buddies in-game are all gone (except for Spaceman). My once-buzzing guild was empty bar one other member… and he was 8 months idle. I’ll try to give it a few hours here and there but I don’t think I’ll ever reach level 60.

For any Ubuntu Dapper users who didn’t see this… there was a dodgy version of xserver-xorg-core released yesterday which breaks your X server. The thread on Ubuntu forums is here. There will be a fixed version on synaptic soon, so you’ll save yourself some hassle by not apt-get-upgrading today.

A couple of interesting Linux-related tidbits from the mailing list today. Conor on ILUG linked to a very valuable wireless card database. I have been forced to use ndiswrapper on all four of my linux boxes that have wireless cards, since none of my randomly chosen wireless cards were natively supported.

Elsewhere, on the Freevo Users list, there is discussion about the ivtv_xine_tv plugin, which allows you to record live TV on your Linux box. You’d need a few hundred megs of disk space, but it looks like a very nice feature.

All the fiddling with Freevo has made me think about compact PC’s, which has unfortunatley given me a crazy desire to build an in-car computer for myself. I spent some time on the MP3 Car forums today, and the idea is very firmly rooted in my mind now and I am struggling to shake it.

What a fright I got when I came back from lunch to find a naked woman floating across my screen at work. This is part of a default Ubuntu screensaver (Flipscreen3d) which I suppose ties in with the whole Ubuntu “human” theme. I know there is nothing wrong with the image, but my boss might not feel the same way. If its borderline NSFW, then leave it out of the default setup, please!