Phone Shops and Ubuntu

I had a bit of a look around to see if some USB GSM modems would work with my Ubuntu laptop and I was also curious as to what the people in the shops would think of me asking to try it out.

None of them had heard of Ubuntu, although all of them had heard of Linux (mis-pronounced every single time in every conceivable way) The Carphone warehouse sold a computer with Ubuntu, I know it’s ubuntu because it uses the ubuntu and debian ntp servers and I find it unlikely that a manufacturer would go out of their way to use those specific ntp servers (networked time syncing) the t-mobile shop on the other hand didn’t have any machines, but the staff were friendly.

So what’s the problems?

Well education was a big problem, these guys had such a loose grip on the ideas and concepts. For all of what they’ve been told you’d think that Linux was a company and that ‘they’ would serve you drivers for anything and give you all the professional support you need.

I don’t know if this is just a general misconception and it probably goes along with the idea of calling everything ‘Linux’ even when it’s Ubuntu.

although you don’t see them calling the Google phone Linux, no they call that Android, for them it’s ‘Based’ on Linux and that’s a technical detail not even useful in general conversation. But they know it anyway which is better than not knowing it at all.

What’s sad is how badly we’re being treated as a community, how ill served our brands and ideas are being communicated. Perhaps if the GPL had some provisions to maintain the brand or communicate that it was free software, we’d now have a much better situation with these companies.

Thoughts? How can we get people using Ubuntu and calling it Ubuntu (not Linux, because that brand is burnt/toxic) or if your dealing with some other distro how can we communicate that distro without marketing deals and educational packs for each of these companies?

Ubuntu’s Internet Connection Sharing

I was doing a bit of a search for internet connection sharing this evening, you know like you do. And what I found was a bit of a mish-mash.

Plenty of people on the forums are currently or have in the past advised a method which is highly complex and involves a great deal of custom configuration. Take this thread: Howto Share internet connection in the Tutorials and Tips section of the forum. You get to this when you do a search for “Internet connection sharing ubuntu” and this forum post is from 2005.

To correct some of this misinformation, I’m posting here this evening a quick video guide for how you deal with sharing from one ethernet port to another. I’ve asked my good friend David Edwards to record his first video, he uses WindowsXP for all of his own work and doesn’t use Ubuntu normally.

So to share any internet connection method to your ethernet:

1. Connect to your internet connection via WiFi, Ethernet or GSM as you usually do.
2. Right click on the network manager icon
3. Select “Edit Connections…”
4. Go to your “Wired” connection tab.
5. Click the “Add” button
6. Enter the connection name “Shared Internet”
7. Select the IPv4 tab
8. Under Method, select “Shared with other computers”
9. Click “Apply”
10. Click on the network manager again, this time with the left button
11. For the target ethernet port, select the new “Shared Internet”.
12. Now plug in your computer via ethernet.

If you want to share your internet connection via wifi, then you need to use the “Create new wireless network…” to make a wireless network that other computers will be able to connect to. This automatically shares your internet connection.

What do you mean ‘Silence’

Found this comic and I’m sick so being cheap today on my blog:

More Respectable Risa

I’ve been plodding through the graphics for the “How to Ask Smart Questions” guide, which coincidentally will help people ask questions with the same quality that Akane does in chapter 03 of Ubunchu. Some of the graphics I’ve been playing with are for illustrating various parts of the guide and so I asked my good acquaintance C-Quel to draw me up a quick SVG image of Risa to help us through.

The problem was I feel, was that the style of the guide I wanted to make was more conservative than C-Quel’s style, I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t suggesting that only women in dresses have problems. So I set about modifying the SVG to produce some more professional, slightly more western eyes and clothes.

Your thoughts, dear reader?

Fighting a USB Install

I wanted to make a USB install of ubuntu, one I could carry around and show off in people’s computers.

But a whole set of problems with grub2 and ubiquity installer in ubuntu make the process very painful.

Firstly, because your installing on /dev/sdb (second hard drive) you’d think that the system would automatically try and detect if it was a usb hard drive and decide to put the grub boot on the drive it’s self. But no, it decided that sda was a much better drive for the grub boot loader and decided to kill my installed grub entry.

Mind you, this is changeable if you use the advanced button… a button I didn’t even see when setting it up. So I ended up toasting my laptop’s grub installation and I had a lovely (nasty) time trying to figure out how to use grub2’s tools. They are horrid, everything about their UI design stinks, the help files are useless and in some cases simply wrong (grub-install points to some other grub tool’s man page) and the descriptions contain no examples or in depth explanations. The errors are cryptic, the use is obtuse and the manifestation non-obvious. What’s the difference between grub-setup and grub-install? who knows.

These tools are most certainly not polished up to the standard of release that I would expect and this is exactly why UI designers should be just as concerned with command line tools as they are with GUI design.

After eventually getting my computer back from grub failure and fixing the grub boot of the usb hard drive, I decided to try it out on another computer… failed, wouldn’t load an OS from after 100GB or there abouts. poot. So I’m resizing my partitions, shuffling them about, trying to get it to work.

Have you had a better time of it? have you broke your computer because of ubiquity? comment.

Update: My computer crashed half way through the resize operation, my backup drive and videos are all toast. Thanks system76 your unstable computer has once again inconvenienced my life.

Ubunchu Chapter 03 is here!

Great news, we’ve finished work on translating the excellent Chapter 03 of the Ubunchu Manga.

This chapter tells the story of our system admin club members negotiating their way through the Ubuntu Forums, will they find geeks replaying with RTFM posts or will they find a kinder and more helpful community. And why has Akane, our skilled hacker, never posted to a forum before?

You’ll have to download it to find out!

BBC Radio Interview

I gave a wonderful interview for the BBC Radio Live’s Pods and Blogs show, I talked about Ubuntu, Ubunchu the manga and the up and coming Anime Boston event.

I thought it went well and I got to describe a couple of things in a nice way, invite people to join in the community and not be scared of us geeks.

Visit BBC Website
Download MP3 Here

Let me know what you think.

In Flight

There will be no blog entry today as I’m in flight to England.

Self Study vs Teacher Lead

We’ve been having some very interesting conversations in the Ubuntu Learning project, part of what we’re still working out is some of the structures we’ll be writing our courses to.

The problem is that the Ubuntu Learning project has an ambitious goal of being a well grounded and at the same time serving a couple of different output forums for different kinds of lessons.

Part of the material will be used to codify and help the IRC teaching sessions that go on in #ubuntu-classroom, both during special events like ubuntu open weeks or during the normal course of the year (people do set up classes ad-hoc). With this target we need materials which are perhaps separated enough to give guidance on each section to the teacher, maybe some sections and images which can be shown via Jono Bacon’s new classroom app.

On the other hand, we’ll also be serving physical classroom needs in real schools or community centers, as well as people who just want to download a course through moodle and be self driven, not requiring any sort of teacher.

There are best practices for how you present information for student self study programs and how you present it for teacher lead classrooms, the kind of language used, the kinds of compression you can use on the language. Is the result going to be a reference for the student or is it going to need to be more substantial?

We might end up needing to have a couple of pieces to each class paragraph, pieces that perhaps build upon each other to produce the different outputs with different verbosities. But in order to model some technical structure around which all our volunteers can write course material, we need more input from real teachers and course writers.

We have the good fortune of having Belinda from Canonical be able to lend us her wisdom, and we also have a couple of other people who have experience in the field. If you think you can add some interesting discussion, we’d love to hear from you either on the mailing list or the IRC channel (#ubuntu-learning).

Flying Today

I’ll be a little quiet on my blog, since I’ll be flying to England to get back to my own culture for the first time in three years.

With all the packing, sorting things out, getting things washed and tidied (you don’t want to come back to a mess do you), it’s been a bit busy.

Plus I wanted to experience a couple more American cultural items before I leave, after all I’m be gone for a month and a half (over Christmas and New Years).

See you on the other side!