After meeting Ubuntu zealots Alan Pope and Jono Bacon at Fosscamp this morning, I made the mistake of leaving my laptop screen unlocked within the range of these two dangerous characters while I went to the bathroom. What’s worse, I left a terminal window with a root prompt open on the desktop. (I don’t remember why– I think I was installing some software earlier.) When I got back, this so-called “Pope” had blown up the font size on my terminal window and added “rm -rf /” at the root prompt.

It was good for a laugh. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the poise to take a screenshot.

Later, it was revealed that the Bacon, not Pope, was the instigator, or so says Pope.

Note for the non-haX0rs in the audience (I guess that’s you, mom): “rm -rf /” is a command that recursively deletes all files in your filesystem. Incidentally, I did once execute that command on an OS X server that I was maintaining a few years ago. I needed to reinstall OS X for some reason, so I tried executing the legendary command. It was pretty sweet– various programs on the desktop crashed, services disappeared, and the machine was eventually rendered unbootable.

Anyway, I won’t make the mistake of leaving my laptop unprotected when Bacon is on this side of the Atlantic.

One other interesting note from Fosscamp– I talked to Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth for a few minutes after one of the morning sessions; he mentioned that the Dell Linux machines that I was so excited about a few months ago were actually Dell’s idea. I had assumed that the whole Dell Ideastorm business was more of a marketing exercise, while Dell and Canonical had actually been planning Dell PCs with Linux for a while. I guess I was wrong.

The Dell XPS 410n that I ordered on May 24th arrived this Saturday. After 10 years of using Linux, I was finally able to order a prebuilt computer from a major OEM without paying anyone for an operating system that I would delete shortly after unboxing. Instead of devoting half of Saturday afternoon to installing Linux, I had a working Linux system 19 minutes after opening the box. I think I probably spent more time picking a desktop background from Flickr than configuring the machine.

I didn’t spend any time installing the DVD drive into the case or washing thermal grease off my hands. I opened the case briefly to take a picture, but I don’t even know how many PCI slots I have. I can feel the freedom of blissful ignorance returning.

I half-expected Dell to screw up Ubuntu somehow– add idiotic icons to the desktop (offers to connect me to the internets, shortcuts to crippled versions of photo editing software, or similar). I’m happy to report that they seem to have gotten it right. The Ubuntu they delivered is difficult for me to distinguish from the Ubuntu I’ve been installing for the past few years. Synaptic is set up to use the ubuntu.com repositories. Compiz is disabled by default. The boot process seems faster, but that may be the new hardware. The 2.6.20-15 kernel was installed; Synaptic installed 2.6.20-16 during the first update.

Ubuntu wasn’t perfect– it did fail to identify my HP f2105 monitor’s maximum resolution of 1680 x 1050, and there was no way that a normal human would have been able to fix it. (I executed sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg and selected the correct resolution to fix it.) Also, the option to enable the restricted Nvidia driver doesn’t work, but I haven’t gone beyond the normal-human level of effort yet.

(Update: after running a Synaptic update, I could enable the restricted Nvidia driver and turn on Compiz– no geek-level intervention necessary.)

Overall, I’m delighted with what Dell and the wealthy gentleman from Canonical have done. For me, 2007 is the year of the Linux on the desktop. I offer my sincere congratulations and thanks to the Ubuntu folks at Canonical and Dell.

I work in a school where we have lots of old iMacs that are barely usable under OS 9.2. The newest browser we can get for OS 9 is Netscape 7.0, which crashes a lot (repeatably on Gmail, for example).

Xubuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu Linux designed for low-end machines. It uses the XFCE desktop. I’ve just finished installing Xubuntu on a 400 Mhz iMac. It went reasonably smoothly, and now that I know the few tricks listed below, doing it again should be quite easy.
The steps:

1. Put the Breezy Badger for PowerPC install disk in the CD drive.

2. Reboot.

3. At the first prompt, type “server” and hit return. This will install everything in normal Ubuntu install except the GNOME desktop.

4. Install the Xubuntu desktop and the GNU display manager using apt-get:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop gdm

5. To get the graphical interface working, I had to tweak /etc/X11/xorg.conf a little. The first change was to alter the HorizSync and VertRefresh settings. I also switched from the fbdev driver to the ati driver. The snippet below shows the original settings commented out and the new settings added. (Link to full xorg.conf.)

6. The last tweak was to add a printer to CUPS manually. To enable the web administration for CUPS, I added a root password:

sudo -s

passwd

In /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, I changed RunAsUser to No, so that CUPS would run as root, and not switch to run as the user cupsys, as I believe this is what disables the web interface:

RunAsUser No

Then restart CUPS:

/etc/init.d/cupsys restart

Here is what ended up in /etc/cups/printers.conf: (Yes, I live in a farmhouse, and I work on Sunday nights)

# Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.1.23
# Written by cupsd on Sun 08 Jan 2006 07:34:40 PM EST

Info Farmhouse
DeviceURI socket://192.168.1.131
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0

Overall, Xubuntu is working really well– much better than OS 9.2. It’s only got 64 MB of RAM, but Firefox runs surprisingly well. I plan on maxing out the memory when I get the chance.

The Xubuntu people have been planning on releasing a CD version of Xubuntu coincident with the release of the Dapper Drake in April. I found the XFCE file manager, xffm, to be a little squirrely, and I couldn’t get it to connect to our file server through Samba; maybe that will work in the next release, or maybe I will have figured out how to configure Samba. The Dapper release of Xubuntu will likely be based on XFCE 4.4, which will allegedly include the first release of Thunar, XFCE’s new file manager.

Hmm. If Thunar is good, I might switch to Xubuntu entirely. So far, XFCE seems like a fast version of GNOME to me, and I spend most of my time in Firefox and a terminal window anyway.

Mark Shuttleworth mentioned a few days ago on the Ubuntu mailing list that the Ubuntu folks were interested in developing a version of Ubuntu that contains only software deemed by the Free Software Foundation to be “free.” Shuttleworth mentions that they might collaborate with Ututo, an Argentinian Linux distribution that includes only free software (English description of project).

I was curious about how much non-free software was included in Ubuntu, so I installed the virtual Richard M. Stallman, or vrms (which sounds like a joke, but is not):

sudo apt-get install vrms

vrms took the liberty of not only installing, but also adding itself as a monthly cron job– reminds me of the real RMS: irritating but right.

It turns out that my Ubuntu server is pure– free software only– but my desktop machine has the Sun JDK, Opera, RAR, and XMame. The first three I don’t actually use, but with regards to XMame, I will confess that I like Zaxxon. In my defense, by the time I was old enough to have quarters, Zaxxon had been replaced by NBA Jams, or some other irritating business.

I suspect that vrms is not as particular as the real RMS, as I have installed the w32 codecs and the gstreamer mp3 decoder on my desktop machine. I *thought* those are both non-free. Maybe the iPodLinux people will get ogg working on generation 4 ipods soon. It’s believed to be possible, as the gen 4 has the faster PortalPlayer 5020 processor.