As Dapper is out tomorrow I thought I would beat the rush and upgrade my desktop to this new whizzy release of Ubuntu. Thanks to the apt-proxy this wasn’t very painful as most of the packages were already cached locally. Everything seems to work well, and I’ve already noticed a few nice usability improvements. (.dv files are now thumbnailed - woo!)
I’m looking forward to torrenting the ISOs. I’m going to get both the live CD (recommended method of installation for new users) and the standard CD (for servers, geeks and fans of the CLI). I need the latter for when I reinstall my media box. 
In a bit less than a month’s time, I’m leaving Regents Park Community College to become IT Manager at Taunton’s College. I’ve been Technical Administrator for ICT at Regents Park for three and a half years and have enjoyed most aspects immensely. It has been great working with network managers and technicians from across Southampton, as well as responding to the changing needs of a large and busy secondary school. I’ve certainly learnt a lot, getting to grips with new technologies and providing complex network services. If anyone is interested, the job advert for my role at Regents Park is here.
Taunton’s are facing their own IT challenges and I’m really looking forward to getting to grips with their network and settling into a new work environment. I know it will mean a lot more learning too!
Next weekend is a HantsLUG Bring-a-box meeting:
When: 3rd June 2006, 10:30am - 4:30pm
Where: Seminar Room 1, ECS Building, Southampton University.
What: Bring-a-box with talks. All the regular B-a-B notes apply.
The usual requests for snacks and Greeting People apply. The talk schedule is:
- 12:30pm - Introduction to the Semantic Web - Hugo Mills
- 1:30pm - Introduction to Perl: The friendly programming language - Adam Trickett
- 2:30pm - Wireless Networking on Linux - Tony Whitmore
Please spread the word to anyone you think might be interested in coming along. If you want to use the wireless network, e-mail Hugo Mills your MAC address by 4:30pm on Friday 2nd June.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu Dapper. I run apt-proxy on the LAN file server to improve the speed of distributing updates to computers. I set up Ubuntu repositories on it for the first time a couple of nights ago, in readiness for Dapper’s release in a week’s time.
One of the reasons I’d not set up Ubuntu repositories on apt-proxy before is that I’d basically stopped using it back when I was running Debian on the desktop and laptop. When I took my laptop off the LAN, it was a pain to have to reconfigure /etc/apt/sources.list to tell it to use proper Debian repositories. I then had to reconfigure it to use the apt-proxy when I brought it back on the network. Or, more likely, I couldn’t be bothered and would end up continuing to use the repositories direct, and not benefitting from having an apt-proxy at all.
As we have currently three machines (and several virtual machines) running Ubuntu, I thought I should start using apt-proxy again. But I still wanted a way to get round the laptop problem. Could apt be configured to use the apt-proxy if it was available but failover to the proper repositories otherwise? Apparently it can’t. “yum”, the apt-like tool on Fedora systems, can do exactly this. If a file isn’t available on one mirror (or the checksum fails) it can fail over to an alternative mirror. But ol’ apt can’t.
However, apt-proxy itself does support this behaviour. Multiple backends can be defined for each virtual repository that it offers to clients. So, I installed apt-proxy on my laptop too. Configured it to listen on localhost only, and to use the apt-proxy on the LAN as the first port of call and the main Ubuntu repositories as a fallback. So this should provide transparent failover, which is exactly what I wanted.
I also looked at approx as an alternative to apt-proxy because it has fewer dependencies, but it doesn’t support multiple backends at the moment.
There’s a new version of the acpi-support package in Ubuntu Dapper today. At our recent special LUG meeting, Paul Sladen took a look at suspend on my ThinkPad R40 and we discovered that it had an unusual BIOS which wasn’t reporting the correct make. Hence suspend wasn’t being activated by default. Paul asked me to send him the output of some BIOS probing commands, and the changes are in this latest version of the package:
* Save the ‘dmidecode’ bios-version as we can identify ThinkPads with blank product-names.
* Add entry for ThinkPad R40 with BIOS version “1PET62WW” (Tony Whitmore)
How cool is that?! It’s odd how a chance event like last week’s meeting has led to a bug being fixed for a really popular brand of laptop. I’ve never been mentioned in an Ubuntu changelog before either.
Dapper has now got the final artwork and other touches in it, as it’s going into final lockdown before release. It’s looking good though!
In preparation for the talk from Paul Sladen tomorrow, I have upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu Dapper. Dapper is still two weeks from release and Paul is interested in seeing laptops that have problems with suspend and hibernate. I had problems with hibernating on Breezy, but everything seems to work great under Dapper. So it doesn’t look like I’ll have to take my laptop along tomorrow after all!
One of the things I noticed after the upgrade was that wpa_supplicant wasn’t running and its init script had disappeared. A quick check of the updated README and it transpires that wpa_supplicant is now controlled by /etc/network/interfaces and doesn’t need to run as a daemon any more. The alternative method is to use GNOME’s Network Manager, which is designed to provide simple and intelligent wired and wireless network management. Network Manager runs as a background process, with a userspace GUI to control it.
I run WPA-PSK on my home network and configuring it was dead easy. I selected the appropriate WLAN from the drop-down list that appears when you click on the Notification Area icon. It worked out that it was a WPA-PSK network and asked for the passkey. I provided that and after a few seconds for the handshake to take place, I was connected. Very easy really!
The documentation for Network Manager is a bit thin on the ground though. The README discusses the concept of Trusted and Prefered wireless networks, although I’ve yet to work out where to configure networks as Trusted. Trusted networks are connected to whenever one is present, it seems. So your corporate or home network would be Trusted. Preferred networks are ones you configure Network Manager to connect to but don’t properly trust. Examples given are conference or hotel WLANs. Network Manager won’t connect to unknown WLANs. However, I can’t find anything in the documentation that covers how to designate a given WLAN as trusted or preferred. I’ve tried searching the project mailing list archives, but the archives have a very limited search feature and haven’t turned up anything useful. Can anyone enlighten me?
I’m pleased to be able to confirm the details for our impromptu LUG meeting on Thursday evening.
Venue: Jamie’s Computer Club, Southampton
Date: Thursday 18th May 2006
Time: 7pm for 7:30pm. Approx finish at 9:30pm.
Paul Sladen, a lead Ubuntu developer will start off with a talk on the Ubuntu project and what’s coming in Dapper. He’s also interested in laptops that have problems with suspend to disk / RAM (especially on Dapper).
Please spread the word to other LUGs or anyone in the area who’d be interested in coming along!
OpenDocument Format, the native format of OpenOffice.org and used by an increasingly large number of other applications is now an ISO standard. It is ISO/IEC 26300. This is really important for people who care about open standards, interchange of information and the longevity of data.
So, have a drink to ODF tonight!
