Ubuntu ZA

While browsing Twitter yesterday, I came accros a Swype like keyboard for Android called TouchPal.  It is free in the Android Market and I installed it and started using it.

I was immediately impressed with how it works.  It seems much more accurate and responsive than Swype and I just prefer the overall interaction with it. I like the little switch on the space bar to switch Prediction on and off.  English is not my home language so prediction can be a real pain.  The only drawback at the moment is that I could not find a Afrikaans (my home language) language pack for it. 

It even has Voice input and recognition but I have not really tried this so not sure how good this works.

It is fairly customizable and lots of settings that you can set.  The defaults works just great.

For the time being this will be my preferred and default keyboard.  Here is a screenshot of me using it in Tweetdeck (my other favourite app at the moment)

My handset details:

Handset:  HTC Desire (yes the original from a couple of years back)

Android:  Version 2.2 (Rooted ROM .. just did not had the need to upgrade)

Give it a try, you will not be sorry

 

Giving Unity Another Go

Yesterday I installed Unity5.0 and I was pleasantly surprised by some of its new features:

• I can set the panel background colour. By default, the Unity panel adapts itself to match the wallpaper colour. This doesn’t always work out, and with certain background colours it looks really horrible with the icons on it. I set mine to a none-harsh, dark grey and can now see my icons without any desire to fork out my eyes.
• I can set the launcher panel to be ever present. I have plenty of horizontal screen space and I find it annoying not having a window list present on my display. When I have to hover my mouse to the left edge and wait a few hundred milliseconds before I even see the list of open apps and where they are positioned, it just annoys me. Having them always on-screen is just so much easier.
• It’s fast and more stable. Unity 5.0 is noticeably more snappy than it’s predecessors. It also feels less buggy. What drove me away from Unity on Oneiric was that the window placement snapping got horribly confused now and again and the only way out of it was to kill Compiz or otherwise restart Unity. My session is 24 hours old already and still going strong

Some Areas that could do with Improvement

Update: I thought it’s worth mentioning that removing the Gwibber lens removed close to *500MB* of that extra 1GB RAM that was used. There also seems to be an issue where gdbus and dconf worker are way more busy than they should be (at least on my machine). I’m figuring it out and will file bugs if I can confirm them. When they behave better then memory usage in Unity and Gnome Fallback shouldn’t be that far apart.

• Global menus still get confused about running apps. Sometimes I’d get a Thunderbird title in the menu space and Thunderbird has already been closed. This is kind of weird when you’re not aware of the bug.
• Memory usage is high. I’m currently using around 1GB more memory than I typically would when using the Gnome 3 Fallback session with the same software running. I’m hoping that it stays there and that it won’t continue to rise due to memory leaks and other memory issues. This is a deal breaker on application servers.
• The Dash isn’t very pretty or user friendly. I guess the dash didn’t get much work or research done due to the focus on getting bugs fixed, so it’s probably not all that bad. At least you can right-click on the Ubuntu icon now and get a list of installed Unity lenses. The Dash home should really be customisable, and I’m not sure how users are supposed to do some rudimentary tasks like connect to a network share.

Overall Thoughts

Unity has improved a lot recently. I feel that I can continue using it if it’s memory consumption stays under control. I’m testing it on Ubuntu 12.04 which is currently in an early pre-release state. Unity crashed twice while writing this blog entry so I hope it’s just some underlying bugs that will be solved by the time Ubuntu 12.04 hits release.

As for deploying it at client sites, I don’t think I could recommend that until it’s memory issues are resolved. Losing 1GB of RAM is a lot. Simple day to day tasks should be more intuitive (finding recent docs, accessing menus, accessing what used to be known as ‘Places’, etc), and it would help a lot if the Dash home were customisable (I couldn’t find a way to do it from within Unity or anything about it in the documentation). The Gnome 3 Fallback session is very solid and very familiar and I think I’ll continue to recommend it for the typical user desktop. At the rate that Unity is improving though, that might soon change.

This year I just want to get more stuff done.

Motto for 2012:

 

JFDI

2012 have arrived very quietly in my household, not that I can say the same for the neighbourhood.  

I only have one wish for 2012 and that is that it is better than 2011.  It was a very tough 2011 and I do not want to have a year like that again.  

Wishing everyone a good and prosperous 2012, may all you dreams, goals and wished come true.

What a year, one that I do not want to have over.  This must have been the busiest year in my 31 year working live.  I have never work this hard with the accompanied stress levels that goes with it.

The year started off for me starting a job at Old Mutual for the first 6 months of the year.  It was one of the most interesting projects that I have managed with a great team of developers.  However for some reason Old Mutual decided to treat us contractors not to well and it was time to move on.

I returned to a company that I worked for in the early 2000′s called Fundamo.  Originally I was employed to become the Software Development Manager for one of the Business Units.  For some reason this position was then canned and I was offered the Project Manager position which I accepted.  I still do not agree with the decision that the Dev Manager position was canned. It is leaving a gap in the governance around Software Development and the proper management of the Development processes.

I am Project Manager for 5 countries in the Southern part of Africa.  During Novemeber I spend a couple of days in Uganda to visit and meet the people in Uganda.  I must stay that the past 6 months was very hard and is starting to take it’s toll on me.  I am extremely tired and the frustration levels are very high.  Not sure how long I will be able to keep this up.

On the family side.  My daughter completed her second year at varsity and moves on to 3rd year next year.  My son has one little subject to complete at the beginning of 2012 and if everything goes according to plan, he will obtain his Chemical Engineering degree in March 2012.  Now the struggle starts for him to find a job, so if anybody knows of Chemical Engineering jobs, then please let me know.

To each and everybody, may you have a joyeous holiday season and a great 2012.  For me, 2012 can only be better than 2011.

Two friends of mine recently purchased iPads - Vernon asked me, as a computer fundi, to help him out on the installation. I always think it is useful to document first-time experiences - one adapts and forgets so easily.

Old timer

I have used Linux pretty much exclusively for the last 20 years. I have a pragmatic approach to my friends who use Windows - I have followed Microsoft's offerings from Windows98 through XP - I have an XP user's understanding of the later versions of Windows.

Apple I have pretty much never used. I have never owned one, I taught people how to use the original MacDraw, but pretty much have never used it since. So, when Vernon took advantage of First National Bank's interest-free loan to buy one, and asked my to check it out, I dashed over.

Fresh out of the box at his workplace in Cape Town, battery charged.

Internet

First hurdle - registration. There are a couple of Welcome.. screens, Name, country, etc. Pretty soon, it wants to get online to talk to Apple. Well, we had no wifi in his workplace, and the GSM SIM card was a "micro" variety, so I couldn't pull one out of my Nokia and get past that.

Failure.

Strike #1 - I can't even use this thing without Internet ? Ten years ago, this country only had dialup, and that was expensive. Requiring Internet before doing even the most basic things like taking a picture, writing a note, experiment with the touch screen ?

Vernon knew what to do - buy a SIM card, load with 100Mb data (costs R50, about $8). Weekend comes around - Andy, stop over. Some trouble getting cellular data to work through Vodacom. I had internet from my netbook tethered through my phone - google, ask on forums - ah, I need to enter "Internet" as the APN for the service provider. Would Vernon have figured that out on his own ? I don't think so.

As a side note - Ubuntu Linux knows all the main cellphone carriers in South Africa, and if I choose Vodacom on Ubuntu, it knows to put "Internet" as the APN (thanks, tumbleweed).

We walk through registration, no problems. Vernon had taken advantage of a free 1 hour course at the Apple store, and came away with "iCloud". So, we must hook that up.

An iPad manual

Back up a little - let's RTFM. Where is the iPad manual ? Nothing in the box - no paper, no CD (haha - no CD player on the ultra-thin iPad). A tap on Safari, a quick google - there is the manual, as a PDF on Apple's website. Old-Skool says:- "Save the pdf on the desktop". Safari has no options for that - wtf? Seems I am indeed old-school - the iPad has no desktop. Wait a minute - the out-of-the-box iPad comes with no manual, and there is no way to save a copy locally ?? More googling - oh - I must download the iBook application, and then get the (free !) iPad user manual. Sigh - consider it done.

Strike #2 - I need internet, some savvy, a new app, and a download just to read about how this thing works.

iCitizenship

Back to iCloud - Vernon had been told at the course that he needed a "United States" designation for his iCloud registration. Seems the only iCitizenship worth having is a US one - otherwise no music downloads and app restrictions, or something. I trust the Apple store man - how to do this? More googling - you need to attempt to get a free app from the Apple store, choose "None" as a method of payment, lie about your address, lie about a US phone number.

Strike #3 - to get the full benefits of this new iPad, one has to pretend to be a US citizen. South African simply doesn't cut it. You can buy it here, but there are heavy restrictions on its use.

GSM standards

OK - nearly there with the iCloud registration. Oops - I have no data left. Yep - I have burned through 100Meg of data just to get this far. A trip to the corner store - buy R110 pre-paid airtime, pull the micro-SIM out of the iPad, delicately put it in my phone (which takes a normal size) and walk through the USSD menus to load the airtime, and convert R100 of it to data bundles. R10 left behind as voice - whoopsie. Chalk that up to Vodacom ineptitude.

Strike #4 - the iPad comes with no SMS/USSD interface to the GSM network that would allow you to recharge a pre-paid SIM for data. You must take the SIM out and do it on a phone - that may not take the same size SIM.

Apple is using GSM - iOS (the operating system) is common with the iPhone - yet Apple stripped the GSM bits out of the codebase for the iPad.

OK - now we are sorted. I am unwilling to experiment much with iCloud - I have a feeling it could gobble up all my data again if I accidentally tap "backup" or something.

Games - nope - just a Games portal - go buy one. What, not even tetris or mines ? Oh well, was not really interested anyway.

Browsing is slick and fast, some study of the manual and gestures are easy and intuitive. Some struggle with outdated concepts like stopping running applications - I was pointed to this article by my Linux User Group.

Bluetooth

OK next - will it see my Nokia phone over Bluetooth ? My phone sees the iPad - tries to pair with it - nope. The iPad never sees my phone.

Strike #5 - Apple uses standards like Bluetooth for things like external keyboards, but does not bother to implement the standards properly.

Its like they think they are so big they don't have to bother. Receive a business card from my phone via bluetooth ? Pah - you must talk via Internet please. No matter that others value interoperability, here at Apple we have our own way of doing things.

I have paired my old Nokia phone with my newish netbook via bluetooth. I can easily move photos back and forth, and without even taking my phone out of my pocket the netbook will use it as a gateway onto the net. I can see that this brand new Apple iPad will not allow me to do that - either acting as a gateway, or being able to use my phone as a gateway for the iPad (which would have got over Strike #1 if I could have reached the settings menu, which I could not).

USB

And, last but by no means least - I cannot plug a USB stick into the iPad.

Strike #6 - there is not even a physical interface for a USB stick (or drive).

• Floppy disks were good in their day - but they got too small and unreliable. Snif - floppies are gone.
• CD were fantastic in their day - ubiquitous for two decades, they were the workhorse of transferable media. Now they seem bulky, small, and a tad unreliable. Snif - CDROM drives are fading from the landscape.
• USB disks are small, everywhere, fit on your keyring, and absolutely rule for data transfer. Even virus-writers target them, they are that convenient. The sun has by no means set on the USB thumb drive, but Apple, in their wisdom, choose not to provide an interface.

Now, that is just nasty. That was deliberate. I saw what you did there. And I am calling you on it.

And, just because of Strike #6, I am reviewing your motivations for Strikes 1 thru 5. I could have given you the benefit of the doubt over SMS, Bluetooth and Internet, but I see now this is deliberate.

Summary

The iPad lives up to its reputation as a beautiful piece of hardware. The Multitouch screen is a true Apple innovation, and is a pleasure to use. The few apps I tried seemed nice. Read about that elsewhere - it is all true. But the level of control that Apple assert over the products they sell brings the ugly out in me.

Apple - I will not be buying your products any time soon.

The Principles Meme

This morning I read the following in a blog entry: “I applaud him for sticking to his principles, and not compromising“. The person who wrote it didn’t even agree with the person he was referring too, and yet he was congratulating him for sticking to his principles. I’ve seen a bunch of similar statements recently. There’s also a similar, more self-congratulating meme where people are very proud that they are unwaveringly sticking to their principles no matter what.

I’m not sure where this comes from, perhaps it stems from religious roots? Perhaps from people who are afraid to admit that they are flawed in any way? Perhaps they have some agenda that they want to push?

What if no one ever compromised on their principles? What if, in South Africa during the Apartheid years no white person were willing to consider that anyone with a different skin colour could be considered an equal? What if people could never see women as equals and they could never get voting rights or other equal rights? There are many, many more concepts in the past that were rooted as moral principles and with the hindsight we have now, we can see that they were clearly wrong. Sticking to those principles would have been harmful. The sad thing is that today still, many concepts in society is flawed. So why do we choose to applaud people who are inflexible, unscientific and in my opinion, irrational?

The Scientists

I applaud the scientist types, the ones who are able to look at new information or evidence and are able to take a step back and say “Hey, maybe I should re-think this!”. I respect those who are willing to say “Perhaps I was wrong” and share they’re experiences with others to get wider feedback rather than the person who will relentlessly defend their position, typically using some absolutes to try to prove their point.

If you’re not ever willing to compromise or re-evaluate based on facts or new information, then I don’t care much for anything you have to say.

Who can use these laptop and netbook touchpads, trackpads, whatever you call the thing you-accidentally-tap and lose-focus-and-type-into-the-wrong-spot.

Specialized layout keyboard navigation is the way to go!

Customized Conky to a top horizontal bar, always visible by setting my desktop margins. Installed Pytyle to organize my windows running on top of Openbox, with vi-like keybindings relying on the Super key, And then hacked in a few Openbox global shortcuts for easy volume management and frequently used applications.

 

Crash course in navigation

So far I can manage 99% of tasks using the keyboard layout I set out below.

The Super is also known as the Winkey

Window shortcuts

cycle the focused window, Super-J/K

move the active window between panels on the screen, Super-Ctrl-J/K

move the active windows to another desktop, Super-Shift-J/K

switch desktops, Super-Alt-J/K

Change master tile size, Super-H/L

Add/remove master tiles, Super-./,

Media shortcuts

Ctrl-Ins, up volume

Ctrl-Del, down volume

Ctrl-Backspace, pause/play music

Super-V, alsa volume mixer

Super-M, mocp music player

 

CLI Mode

When it comes to flash in websites that steals your focus, I feel like screaming. Due to bandwidth limits I use the text-mode CLI browser Elinks, and the CLI mail client Alpine.

I rebound many Elinks shortcuts for a vi-like experience to scrolling the page, within the page, browsing history, selecting links and so forth.

 

Last weekend I spent some time with the LTSP folks at the annual LTSP hackfest called “By The Sea” (or BTS for short). This was my second BTS. It was well attended and these were some of the items that were covered:

• Migration to new NBD
• Bootable chroots
• libpam-ssh
• Epoptis
• Local window manager
• Improvements to ltsp-build-client
• Migrate LDM to GTK+3
• LDM login speedup
• Try to do something about the default LDM theme

   

Other than that it was a great time for LTSP enthusiasts to get together and socialize a bit. For the next few months, the focus is on fixing bugs and getting LTSP in a good shape for when Ubuntu 12.04 LTS arrives, since everything that is done now should be supportable for 5 years. After that there will most likely be some push to move from LDM to LightDM, which will allow us to have much nicer (and more useful) login screens for all kinds of remote sessions. It was great seeing everyone there and I hope to be there again next year!

I went to the Whisky Live Festival in Cape Town last Friday evening - the last day of the Festival - definitely a good choice.

International Convention Centre

Emma, a visitor from Scotland, persuaded a group of us to go, and we made our way to the International Convention Centre. We got a group rate, and 12 redeemable coupons for tasting. We decided that we would specialise on the single malts - a whisky made from the product of a single distillery rather than a blend between distilleries.

The first surprise we got was that many of the stands asked for two coupons per taste, rather than the one we had been expecting. However, this did not turn out to be a problem - by the end of the evening nobody bothered asking for coupons as it was the last day.

The booth babes were gorgeous, and most seemed knowledgeable on their products.

A good early stop was made at the stand for the Whisky magazine, who issued awards for the whiskys. The gentleman on the stand said that the overall winner that year had been a Japanese whisky - but it appeared that there were no Japanese whiskys available for tasting in Cape Town, either on his stand (stocked with also-rans from the competition) or on other stands. He recommended the Independent bottlers stand as worth a visit.

I had an early taste of a Dalwhinnie - from a very impressive stand giving tastings. I learned from Emma about Speyside - one of the centres of the Scottish single malt industry.

Glen Grant

Another stand that stood out for me was the Glen Grant stand, where the very knowledgeable South African Marketing manager gave us a rundown of their products. They also had a whisky workshop, where they had three sessions explaining the process of making whisky.

I managed to get a seat in the workshop, where the white-haired gentleman explained the process - which starts very similar to beer. Malted barley is cooked and rinsed to extract the sugar - maltose, created by enzymes from the starch in the barley grain when it germinates.

The yeasts they use are different, however - the distiller's yeast can stand much higher concentrations of alcohol. The yeast is allowed to do its work, and the first distillation step produces Low wine - with alcohol concentrations up to 60%. Another distillation step is performed - being careful to skip the initial distillation products and the end distillation products, and keeping the 'heart' of the whisky.

The end result of this is a clear liquor - of quite high alcohol concentration, ready to be aged. Second hand barrels from the sherry industry are very popular, as well as Madiera wine barrels. It is this step that gives the whisky its colour and much of its taste. Scottish whiskys must be aged a minimum of three years, but can be kept as long as 21 years.

We got to taste in the workshop the Low wine (rough, strong), the 3 year, 10 year, and 12 year Glen Grant products.

Jack Daniels

I bumped into friends Ashley and Barbs there, and also made my way to the Jack Daniels stand, where I learned the differences between Bourbon Whiskey and scotch. American whiskeys all contain at least 51% of another grain, either corn, Rye, or wheat, though they also have a 51% barley product, Malt whiskey. The Glen Grant man had no nice things to say about any grain other than barley.

We tasted some nice Welsh whisky, and Ireland were also well represented. The coupon system was out of the window by the end, so most of the stands were offering free tastings.

A very pleasant evening.

I am a few days away from my practical exhibition for my Masters in Digital Art. The show is titled nullPointerException. Why am I posting this on my ubuntu blog? Because it was made in ubuntu using opensource software such as openframeworks and boodler. Because each work runs from a custom live USB disk running ubuntu. Because the concept is software related. The sensing devices are XBox Kinect and I am using the OpenNI and PrimeSense drivers to do the tracking I need.
 

Doing an technical installation in a gallery space poses some reliability problems. The pieces need to autoboot. If there is a power outage they need to startup again without intervention as the PCs are often hidden and out of reach. They need to run continuously for 3 weeks without intervention incase there isn't a power outage. In my case my budget didn't allow for 4 new pcs so I had to borrow what I could. This means boot from USB and don't touch the hard-drive. Initially I made lubuntu install disks but for the final set I customised a ubuntu oneiric desktop install image with UCK. Stripped out what I didn't need and installed kinect drivers and the artworks. It has the added advantage that I can give someone a flash disk and say "plug it into a pc, plug in the kinect, reboot and press F12, choose to boot from flash disk" and it works mostly depending on the pc the person chooses.

Great UDS

 

This week I attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.04 in Orlando, Florida in the USA. I have so much to say about it that I don’t know where to begi n.

This was only the 5th UDS I’ve attended so far, it’s also hands down the best. UDS has become a well-oiled machine. Things just worked and everything was in place to ensure highly productive sessions. Kudos to the organisers, you rock!

Thanks to the sponsors: Cloud Foundry,  Rackspace and Google. VMware sponsored the food for this UDS, it was awesome, I hope I haven’t gained too much weight. Also thanks to Canonical for providing me and a whole bunch of other community members full sponsorship.

Ubuntu 12.04 – A high precision release

 

This UDS I spent most of my time on technical sessions rather than on the community side. I find the community sessions emotionally draining, probably because I’m such a strong introvert. The technical sessions on the other hand I find engaging, exciting and inspiring. Most sessions I attended were calm, highly focussed and very productive.

Ubuntu 12.04 is going to be a very special release. So much effort has been put in from the very start to ensure an exceptional high quality release. Some have said that ‘precise’ sounds like a bit of a silly name to type in your sources.list file, but there’s never been an Ubuntu release where precision has been more relevant. There were plenty of sessions covering really important issues like LTS upgrades, the state of MOTU, keeping daily builds usable, the role of the ARB, the relationship with Debian and many more discussions that will lead to having higher quality packages in Ubuntu. I can’t even start to cover it in this blog entry but over the next release I’m going to write a *lot* about it. There’s such amazing focus going into quality and people should know about it!

Venue

 

The Caribe Royale is a great venue for UDS. I think if Nintendo would have ever released a game called “UDS Resort” it would look pretty much like this place. I hope it’s host to a UDS again in the future! It was great seeing so many Ubuntu contributors, especially all the people who attended UDS for the first time. I hope to do so again in 6 months!

Yes, I know that Oneiric (11.10) is also released but I am only getting around to upgrading my Ubuntu boxes now.  I have 2 Ubuntu desktops and decided to ugrade one of them yesterday from Maverick to Natty.  And I was pleasantly surprised how smooth the upgrade went.  It is not a new machine, in fact it is a couple of years old and run Intel graphics.

I did run in a couple of small issues:

• After re-enabling 3rd party repositories and PPA’s, there was no Natty repository for XBMC.  After some Googling I found a solution to just use the Maverick repository.  A while ago I also bought a Samsung 32″ Full HD TV which I use as my monitor and the TV is also connected to my LAN.  I run a DLNA server (minidlna) on my Ubuntu Box and stream my media through minidlna to the Samsung TV so I do not really need XBMC anymore and decided to uninstall it.
• For NZB dowmloads I used Klibido as my download client but that is not in the Natty repositories anymore and not supported at all anymore.  I did some research and went for LottaNzb which uses SABnzbd as a backend.  After some configuration and testing, I now have a working solution for all my NZB downloads.

For the time being, I have stuck to Unity but the jury is still out on whether I like it.  It is starting to grow on me but it has only been a day.  However I have seen that my old box seem to be performing a bit better than when I ran Maverick so I might just stick around with Unity.

I will be running Narry for a couple of months before upgrading to Oneiric.

My other desktop is even older and run a very old nVidia graphics card so I think that upgrade to Natty will be a bit more challenging.  But that is a task for another day.

See larger image Samsung UN32D6000 32-Inch 1080p 120 Hz LED HDTV (Black) (Electronics) List Price: $899.99 USD Used from: $593.80 In Stock

Some updates form the world of Jonathan…

• LTSP BTS2011: Yesterday Marc, Stéphane and myself drove down to Southwest Harbour in Maine for the LTSP By The Sea 2011 hackfest. It wasn’t a long road trip, but it’s been fun, we picked up 4 other people at Bangor airport and the minivan we’re hiring was like a party bus from the airport to the harbour. The hackfest itself has also been really fun so far and productive, I’ll blog about that some time.
• UDS Precice: On Sunday I’m off to Orlando, Florida for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.04. It will be my first time in Orlando, and the first time I get to attend a UDS in the US. Previously my visa got approved too late so I couldn’t attend, this time I received a 10 year visa so I should be fine for a long time, I’m really happy and relieved about that.
• Holidays and stuff: The week after UDS I’m back in Canada for a week to organise some things and report back at the office about what happened at BTS/UDS and then I’m off to South Africa for 3 months. I’ll be working from there for the period and also taking most of my year’s holidays during the end of December and early January. I’m the best man for a wedding and will be organising a road trip for the bachelors party, my friend in South Africa also got my motorbike fixed so we might end up going there by bike, the weather should be really good around then.
• Back in Sherbs: On 15 February, just after my 30th birthday, I’ll be back in Sherbrooke. I’ll probably end up having some form of birthday party in both countries. After that… the adventure continues!

We are at Panzerotti's in Canal Walk.

Hmm, due to time constraints, multi-tasking and even a bit of attention thrashing, our organisational skills for this round were a bit oneiric but I am happy to say we have a release party for this cycle in the Western Cape.

The long and the short, we meet at Panarotti's in Canal Walk on Saturday 15 October at 15:30. More detail on the LoCo directory. Thanks to the guys at UCT who sorted this out for us.

May our next release party be precise.

Everyone loves a Live OS on a bootable USB disk, it's useful and very geeky. Let's up our geek by making a  multi-boot live USB disk!

I had the inspiration while using the Debian based distro Tails, I wanted to be able to save data onto the USB for later use. Tails is mastered with the iso9660 filesystem,  more commonly used for CD's,  it is a read-only file system. It's worth saying this was by design, as a security centered distro it leaves no room for accidentally leaving traces behind.

Some digging found that grub can load a kernel from a ISO directly via a properly configured grub.cfg line, which differs for each distro mind you. This is when I found multibootusb, a shell script that does the heavy lifting, including generating your grub.cfg, and it works on partitioned USB disks to boot - that means we can have a storage partition on the same USB disk too. Perfect!

Prep

Use your partitioner of choice and setup 2 partitions on the USB disk. Partition 1 will carry our grub boot loader and each distro's files. Partition 2 will be storage. I named my partitions "multipass" and "store" respectively.

Warning: this will destroy all the data on the USB stick. Make doubly sure you use the correct /dev/sdX assignment for your USB disk. You can see it's device name with 'fdisk -l' or 'df'.

I have success using up to a 6GB partition, I formatted both partitions as FAT 32 for compatibility reasons, using this command:

 sudo mkfs.msdos -F32 -n "multipass" /dev/sdXY

Of course you will replace sdXY with your own device name. Change 'multipass' to whatever names you want for your 1st and second partitions.

Setup

Download, extract and run MultiBootUSB as sudo within a terminal so we can  see any output messages:

sudo sh MultiBootUSB.sh

It prompts you to choose your USB device:

 

Choose to add distros Manually:

 

Add your first distro:

 

Choose 'Yes' to add more distros, as many as your space allows, and choose 'No' when you are done choosing your distros:

 

Next the script asks us to check which distros to install and add to our grub boot menu:

 

Now you may go make some tea while the script extracts the ISO's onto your USB disk, and builds your custom grub.cfg.

Behold the grub boot menu for your multi-boot USB disk:

 

 

Geek On

There you have it, a very geeky multi-boot USB disk!

It's a great way to carry a couple utility operating systems like Tails or Clonezilla, and as you can see I included Crunchbang and Kubuntu too.

I keep the truecrypt setup on my store partition in case I need to access any encrypted containers.

Happy bootin'!

The people in Midrand have been busy, they made this poster and there is a Software Freedom day coming up. More news on the other Software Freedom day activities else where in the country to follow shortly.

Our small yet persistent group of bug fixers who sacrificed a Saturday to make Oneiric Ocelot better for everybody. Thanks to everybody who pitched in and helped.

Revisiting(mpd) I have this problem when using alsa (default) output: it blocks other audio sources.

Playing a video in vlc while listening to music, gives us this flak:

Potential ALSA version problem:
VLC failed to initialize your sound output device (if any).
Please update alsa-lib to version 1.0.23-2-g8d80d5f or higher to try to fix this issue.

The solution to my surprise is very simple, yet very obscure. edit /etc/mpd.conf and comment out the "device" line in the audio_output section:

audio_output {
	type		"alsa"
	name		"My ALSA Device"
#	device		"hw:0,0"	# optional
	format		"44100:16:2"	# optional
	mixer_device	"default"	# optional
}

I have no idea why. My guess: specifying a device locks the hardware to send audio to the device directly, while no specified device sends audio via the software mixer. The default probably assumes the hardware does mixing automatically. Audio is still a strange beast in dark realm for me.