The Canonical presentations were aimed mostly at businesses, and sysadmins in particular, delving into the Ubuntu Server distribution. IBM on the other hand went deep into Ubuntu Desktop model – this speaker was really entertaining. Mark Shuttleworth was there too of course – smart guy.

There was an open bar, and some really fancy nibbles – I can’t remember what one of them were called. Quite a few fish selections, sushi-ish. Nice though.

The swag was cool too. There was an Ubuntu notepad and pen on each seat, for us to take notes. Then on our way out we were handed a goody bag. This had the usual stickers and Ubuntu CDs, Ubuntu Mousemat, but what I liked the most was an IBM Lotus stamped gadget – a USB charger for all popular mobile/cell phones! This thing has an adapter for Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung and mini-USB. So cool!

I must say, IBM really impressed me with their Lotus suite. Not just because of the swag, but their presentation was actually really good. I can really see a place for it in the Enterprise environment. True, it’s just based on Open Office, Eclipse and other Open Source software, but the way it’s put together as a nice full-package is great.

Basically, Flash 9 had great webcam support – but lousy sound support. And in Flash 10 they fixed sound support, but broke older webcam support (by adding V4L2, I believe they removed V4L1 support. Or vise versa).

Well I tried compiling my own kernal, with pcw support. Tried using EasyCam to install my webcam drivers. I mean, I’m using a Logitech QuickCam, one of the most popular brands in the world – you’d think it would be supported.

I eventually fixed it, and this is how;
Downloaded and make installed V4L1 libraries.
Now before I have to use the command export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so and then run firefox or flock from this terminal window.
This is basically telling flock not to use the newer V4L2, but V4L1 instead.

The webcam works fine in all other applications, it’s just Flock/Firefox that are affected. So all I’ve had to do is make a startup script for them, so they export everytime. I know it’s only a workaround. But it works for me.

It seems this next version may come with a new name, to avoid Copyright conflicts. No biggie.
I think Ubuntu Eee will continue to be successful, no matter what name it goes under. The Netbook Remix style is just so user-oriented. But not in a newbie way, like the original Xandros OS that comes preinstalled on Asus Eee PCs.

I’m really looking forward to the new version – I’ve been enjoying Intrepix Ibex on my desktop for a few weeks now. There’s only one bug on my Eee, that I hope gets fixed.
I installed a new wifi card, as posted earlier. It works fine with BackTrack3, but to get it working in Ubuntu I had to disable ACPI. Which is obviously not ideal, because I then lose all power management, including the battery icon/status.

I wonder if we’ll be seeing a new theme ^_^

I went with the GIGABYTE WI07HT from Oxfordtec, because the WI01GT was sold out.
Installing the card was as simple as unscrewing a couple of little phillips screws, and popping out the antenas, placing the new card in and popping the antenas and screws back into place.

After installing the hardware, I booted up my eee, whihc is running Ubuntu-eee, only to be greeted with kernal errors:

CPU#0 stuck for 11s

OHNOES!

I tested my BT3 usb thumbdrive, the wifi works fine in here (which is a positive, because BT3 didn’t like the RaLink card at all!), so I knew it wasn’t a hardware issue.
Of course I had wifi drivers coming out of my ears after I’d installed madiwifi, madwifi-ng, and a karma-patched madwifi. None of which did me any good.

Disabling Wifi in the BIOS menus is the only way I could boot back into Ubuntu eee. This lead me to the idea of checking for BIOS updates.
It turns out Flashing the BIOS to the latest version ended up fixing the problem.

Create a FAT32 bootable USB disc (using HP’s Disc Util), and Windows ME DOS files (98 DOS files do not work).

Then just copy AFUDOS and the latest firmware ROM onto the disc, and boot from it (Hold ESC during eee’s startup for the option to boot USB).
The command is;

afudos /i1111.rom /obackup.rom

Where 1111 is the number of your new firmware. This will also backup your old firmware to a rom called backup.rom.

You can download all the tools (AFUDOS, HP Disc Util, DOS files). And your latest BIOS firmwares here.

I took a copy, to play around with, as it seemed to have a lot of cool tools on there, some of which I had seen before, lots of which I hadn’t. This looked like a hacker’s distro.

The name is BackTrack. I didn’t look much into it, until I was watching Hak5 on Revision3 this morning, and saw a review on Maltego, which just so happens  to come with BackTrack.

So I started playing around with BT3 (after an easy upgrade), and I love it. It’s so useful.
This is a Network Security / Sysadmin must-have distro. Every tool you could possibly need, is already there, on the disc.

Maltego is pro. It’s basically an Identity lookup tool. You input a person’s details, whatever you happen to know about them, name/email/location/phone etc. and then it will look up all the information it can find on said person.

I found some very old email accounts of mine, linked to forum posts and profiles, just as old. I think I may have also discovered Kevin Rose’s personal e-mail account. No luck with Bill Gates though. ^^

Now just to try and remember what I did, for this journal…

Install novelclient (one L) from SourceForge. Forget the official Novell Client.
Setup the ‘Default’ local profile NDS Server, and tick the rest of the boxes to DHCP, they will pickup all the info they need.

Login using the Server IPs as the tree, one at a time (use the correct full Context). This will mount all the directories needed.

To isntall the official Linux versions of GroupWise and ConsoleOne, I had to convert the .rpm files into .debs:
sudo alien -v -d novell-blahblah.rpm
sudo dpkg -i novell-blahblah.deb

To get GW snapins in ConsoleOne, download the full gw701lnx_eval.iso mount it, and extract novell-groupwise-admin-7.0.1-20060627.i386.rpm from the admin dir.
Install this the same way as before. Sorted

When you open ConsoleOne, it will now ask for the location of your mount with the wpdomain.db file.

Instead of NW Admin, I’m using the iManager website. Although this stuff can be done in ConsoleOne, sometimes it’s just a nicer interface.

I believe that’s everything.

Tweeks:
GroupWare had to be connected using the Server DNS, which I got from launching the Windows version and going to Help > About; Cw_admin_gpo_server.domain.ac.uk instead of the actual post office (CW_EMAIL).

I had to connect the GW snapins to the domain file: /home/calvin/SC_ADMIN/192.168.50.21/GPO/GW5/wpdomain.db

http://www.speech.kth.se/snack

Sudo copy the dir to /usr/lib
Run the aMSN voice setup.

Sorted =]

(remember to install xmms-devel first).

http://www.snika.uklinux.net/?p=xmms-alarm

This fades in music to wake you up. Much better than an annoying sound effect, or playing an mp3 via cron schedule.

This guide is amaizing. Don’t look anywhere else for info on installing Logitech MX1000 drivers;

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MX1000Mouse

lordc@umbongo:~$ sudo chown -R lordc:lordc /media/hda1
lordc@umbongo:~$ sudo chmod 744 /media/hda1
lordc@umbongo:~$ sudo chown -R lordc:lordc /media/hdd1
lordc@umbongo:~$ sudo chmod 744 /media/hdd1

Take ownership with chown, then the chmod will stick