That is why it pays to have the following settings in your apt preferences if you want to keep things to a minimum:

APT::Install-Recommends "false";
APT::Install-Suggests "false";

The idea came to me at first when I spotted that MythTV 0.22 has been released and maybe it was time to upgrade to get up to speed, of course I didn’t read through the new features list or check out what was happening in the world of MythTV. As it turns out, nothing changed that affected me or improved the situation . I did a senseless upgrade when I didn’t need to.

So, from now on i’ll follow a simple checklist:

1. Do you need to upgrade? Will it fix a bug or a ongoing issue?
2. Do you REALLY need to upgrade? Will the upgrade fix a world shattering issue?
3. No, DO YOU REALLY NEED TO UPGRADE?

Production systems usually run old software for a reason, I learned that today.

I’m now the lucky owner of two amazing little workhorses, a SPARCStation 20 and a UltraSPARC IV, both true workhorses of the Sun/Solaris era. The SPARCStation is a old world SPARC machine, in its pizza-box format and the interesting MBUS and SBUS connection interfaces with a sprinkle of SCSI, the Ultra on the other hand is more modern PCI and IDE so I was able to get fast network cards and big disks without much issue. due to the old nature of the SPARCStation hardware I’ve not really invested much time into it, I’ll have to poke at it sometime this weekend and get the old thing up and running.

For the moment I was far more interested in getting the Ultra running as a OpenBSD firewall / router, the Ultra is relatively small (but large when compared to the SPARCStation) and allowed me to tuck it under a table to run, much to the disappointment of my other half. The existing DD-WRT based Linksys was starting to show its age and was becoming flaky after a few years of running overclocked without added cooling. The SPARC machine presented an excellent opportunity due to the good support of OpenBSD and the amazing pf packet filtering included.

The next few days were spent faffing with the hardware and re-installing OpenBSD 4.5, I had numerous small issues that were all down to a faulty network card, possibly a faulty PCI slot but i’ve not had the time to push it further. The PCI issue was quite difficult to diagnose for someone whose had no experiences of the platform before hand, I’ve now had a days crash course in OpenBoot. I have to say, that OpenBoot is a fantastic platform and it aided me a lot in diagnosing the strange issues.

Unfortunately, there’s always one problem you can never get to the bottom of. I updated the box with a new PCI network card, a old CDROM and a fresh HDD, A day or so passed and no matter what I tried I couldn’t get the machine to boot from CDROM, it refused to detect media and even some times the drive. Thankfully, the previous owner had left a basic OpenBSD install on the machine that allowed me to download the install image and write to the swap partition, allowing for a quick and simple reinstall using the swap partition as the boot media. The CDROM works perfectly in OpenBSD, I don’t have the energy to chase down this bug any further.

Finally, after what feels like a week of work, I have a small footprint firewall that kicks the arse out of my existing DD-WRT box. While it may not be a amazing icon to show off, like Chris as his SGI coffee table, it gives me warm fuzzies that technology that would generally be disposable by modern standards has its use somewhere. Now the box is up and working, it’ll slowly disappear from my radar and the experiences I had with this individual bit of hardware will slip away, that is, until OpenBSD 4.6 or another hardware failure.

Fingers crossed eh?

LUGRadio Live was a spin-off of the successful LUGRadio podcast, the guys decided that there was no decent open source conferences in the UK so decided to setup their own. The conference is in its fourth year, even though the podcast has finished. LUGRadio Live is described as a “rock conference”, everything is light-hearted and easy going but it attracts some big speakers right across the open source community.

If it sounds interesting, checkout the website, register your interest on Upcoming or Facebook, and follow the Twitter or Identi.ca users.

During the last year or so, I’ve used Webmin and Virtualmin to manage my VPS hosting. For those who don’t know, Webmin is a web based server management console built on Perl, it allows each service to be managed by the use of modules, which you can install/uninstall to create a customised interface for your machine. With the addition of Virtualmin, the Webmin interface becomes a virtual hosting console much the same as Plesk or CPanel.

Webmin has a murky past, several high profile exploits existed for the system and it’s been advised for the last 10 years or so not to install it unless you really need to. Giving world access to Webmin was generally advised as stupid and silly. While Webmin is now up to date with it’s security it still leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of the administrator world and people who use it are usually noted as “newbies”.

I originally went with Webmin/Virtualmin as I was still hosting the few remaining customers of Blueshift Media. While I have the technical skills to work without it, the customers didn’t. The system gave a simple interface for the users and allowed them to add in basic stuff like new email addresses and aliases. To work around the security issue I only allowed access via SSH and port tunnelling, that way the user would have to be authenticated with the server before accessing the system. 

Over the next year or two I started using Webmin to do my daily administration tasks, as working outside of Webmin once it’s installed can open you to a world of pain, Webmin keeps track of some configuration in it’s internal database, not in the external configuration files. Over time I become comfortable with the system and my technical skills slowly slip away from me, why do I need to know the in and outs of a program if Webmin can do it all for me?

Today, I learnt the hard way. I had a issue with Postfix content filters and I spent 10 minutes faffing in the Webmin console only for it to be a five second fix in the main.cf file. In a further similar fault I had to read up on Postfix Virtual file format as I’ve totally forgot how it’s supposed to be formatted, somehow the file had got munged and I had to reconstruct what I could.

Then it clicked.

Since I’ve installed Webmin I have been wrapped up in cotton wool, not actually touching the underlying the system and just using this fluffy interface to do my work. This is all well and good in the desktop world but in the server world your risking security and your knowledge of the underlying system.

So, today, I’ve officially removed Webmin, and I’ll never to return again. It’s time to actually learn my trade again and start using the distributions as they’re meant to be.

With the influx of new users come a influx of new trolls, every channel has them, every channel loathes them. Unfortunately #! has not been exempt from this. It came to great shame when within the first few weeks of the channel getting popular we had to ban our first user. Banning is a last resort in my eyes, and in the case of this user he was disrupting the channel and offending numerous other users. Action had to be took, and now that user is serving a one week temporary ban.

So, what can we do to avoid this horrible situation? The times when it’s the trolls vs. the operators, the back and forth can alienate new users and turn other users against the established operators. This provides a very difficult situation for anyone to handle, and something we want to avoid in the channel. So, In response to the rapid growth of the channel we’ve picked a few new operators, people who we trust, and while they’re not seasoned IRC users they show the level head required to take on this role. In addition to that we’ve took on a new rule set to clearly define the boundaries of the channel, Now the users and operators will understand where the buck stops and know clearly between right and wrong on the channel.

So, what next? Well, we’re still in the process of guiding our new operators in the way of IRC moderating, this will take time but hopefully we’ll come out with excellent results. An addition to the logging bot (Scribbler) will allow for “incidents”, that is, kicks and bans from the IRC channel, to be reported to the correct people. We are clarifying our complaints procedure, for people who think they’ve been kick/banned unfairly. I’m sure you’ll get to hear more details as times go on, and I’ll even post some specifics in the near future.

Liverpool LUG Meeting
4th February 2009 @ 7:00pm
Liverpool Social Centre, 96 Bold St, Liverpool, L1

This month is a little different, thanks to the Liverpool Social Centre we have a meeting space available to use for this and future meetings.

This months talk will be given by Vladimir Jakubovskij and is regarding his recent research paper “Open Source perspective: The current situation with online music piracy and the future of free music distribution”. Vladimir will be discussing the topics in his paper at the talk. The paper will be published under the CC license at a later date.

If Vladimir is unable to give the talk for some reason or another, Then Joanne Roberts will (hopefully) have a quick talk devised on Open Street Map.

This will be our first meeting at the Liverpool Social Centre on Bold Street. Access is currently through the door next to the News From Nowhere bookshop entrance. Ring the doorbell (the small white one to the left of the main buzzer) for admittance. If you have any difficulties finding the event, please call 07530 709 263. I’ll be in Liverpool quite early to make arrangements and organise things.

Afterwards, we’ll head to a local drinking hole for a few off topic drinks and banter.

The Liverpool Social Centre is a non-profit volunteer ran operation who usually charge for their space, but they’ve offered this location on a free basis in return of support for their compute cluster. For the first month it would be good to give a small donation of £5-£10 from the group to cover costs, so if you could bring 50p or so to donate they would appreciate it. For more details about the location check the website.

Hope to see you all there

On an additional note, I’ll be there with my Tikitag reader and related software to show off my pyTikitag stack for reading the tags in Python and also to generally fool around with them.

Crunchbang is quite an interesting project. A small distribution created by one man, Phillip Newborough, which gained almost overnight fame and is now ranked quite highly on Distrowatch. The speed of the success of CrunchBang is a massive achievement, especially when you take in the “youth” of the project. While i’m not the official biographer of the project I can see a few key stages that helped it gain such a strong following in a short time.

In the recent history of the project, fabsh, also known as Fabian Scherschel of Linux Outlaws fame, decided to give the distribution a go. It seems he instantly fell in love with it and recommended it to everyone via his identi.ca feed. During the next episode of Linux Outlaws, Fabian mentioned the distribution and how he has been trying it out. The result was a large spike in people downloading the install image and signing up to the forums, this was the time where I toddled along and discovered it myself.

Fast forward two weeks or so, and Distrowatch adds CrunchBang to their listing, a minor but important win in the expansion of the distribution, the DistroWatch listing brings in more and more people over time. Just after Christmas the 8.10.02 release was let lose and Distrowatch was one of the first sites to get the news out there. As the release was done over the relative quiet time of Christmas, the release note spent a good few days on the front page of Distrowatch. Over the Christmas period the forums saw a large boost in signups, which are usually a good indicator of how many people have downloaded the distribution.

So, the combination of a major Linux podcaster and reputable distribution news source gave Crunchbang it’s push into the limelight. What the last few weeks prove is that a few key figures could boost the popularity of a good product and take it from small time to the big time in a matter of weeks.

So, how is this applied to other projects?

First of all I think the key success on CrunchBang’s part is the product itself, a lightweight desktop environment, based on Openbox, designed for the power user crowd. A few people had mentioned that this was the type of area that Arch excelled in, but now the user had the convenience of Ubuntu to their Openbox desktop.

Second, the recommendation of trusted peers can only boost the popularity. With the “social media” that exists today a few trusted people could push a project from a bedroom to the stage, so to speak. With tools like identi.ca and Twitter, people have rapid methods of posting their thoughts. The social media can be a double edge sword, as quickly as your software is recommended it could be bashed and ridiculed just as easy. So, in my opinion, this can make or break your project.

Third and final item is the existing “web media”. Blogs and sites like Distrowatch, Slashdot, Engadget and other tech sites allow, again, for trusted people to review and make judgement of the project, a good recommendation will boost your users and a major site such as Slashdot will kill your server if your not careful.

So how does this all relate to the big bang? It doesn’t really; I thought the title would be snappy.

Liverpool LUG Meeting
7th January 2009 @ 7:00pm
The Bar, 1st Floor, FACT, 88 Wood St, Liverpool, L1 4DQ

It’s coming up to that time of the month again, as it’s so damn close to new year I think we’ll keep it as a social night, unless someone wants to step up and give a talk.

As per usual, we’ll start at FACT and move on to another place if we feel the need to. We’ll be located in the Bar on the 1st Floor outside Gallery 2, keep an eye out for UMPCs, beards, and a plushie Tux. If a talk is on we’ll usually move from the bar to the conference room at about 7:15pm, if you arrive late you can get to the conference room via the lift (head to the 3rd floor) or if the lift is disabled ask a security guard.

Hope to see you all there

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1423955
http://identi.ca/livlug
http://twitter.com/livlug
http://jaiku.com/channel/livlug

 If you’re thinking of heading down and not sure of the location then drop me a email, I’ll be getting into Liverpool at about 6:30pm at Liverpool Lime Street.

I’ve now got CrunchBang installed on my main desktop machine and I’ve been using it for a day, Maybe it’s a short length of time to review a distribution but I feel with my past experiences with numerous distros will help me get to grips with a new one quite quickly. Some of you may know, after being a Ubuntu user for well over a year I decided to move back to Debian and became quite critical of Ubuntu for its rash decisions regarding design and key choices. My dislike is not centred purely on Ubuntu, I remember one time where I had a near fit at using a OpenSUSE KDE 4.0 Live CD as I couldn’t switch off the default sound scheme, but that’s for another post. Back to the review…

CrunchBang Linux promotes itself as a lightweight version of Ubuntu, unlike Xubuntu’s XFCE desktop they’ve decided on using OpenBox and a few key programs from other desktop environments, like Thunar and Lxpanel.

My previous experience of the *box window managers have been with Blackbox during the very early days, when Enlightenment was all the rage and most distros used FVWM95, so checking out Openbox will hopefully be a refreshing blast to the past. My main concern was compatability, a lot of applications out there depend on certain features of the desktop environment. I left all my expectations at the door and decided to grab the Live CD and have a 10-15 minute play to see if everything works as expected and that it actually works on my slightly quirky setup.

The Live CD / Installation media is mirrored on a few sites, as it’s only a “baby” distro it’s not been picked up by the mainstream mirrors, thankfully, a few people in the community had offered some space up to the project and finding a local, fast mirror isn’t that difficult. As with all Ubuntu style Live CDs, it was a simple case of burning the ISO to a disc and rebooting the machine. I’m not sure if this is a feature of all new Ubuntu discs now, but the ISOLINUX menu had a option to check the installation media for errors, this would save you quite a bit of time if you suspect dodgy media.

The boot was quick, quicker than I expected. Usually with Ubuntu CDs I pop the disc into the drive the slip off to make a cup of tea and head back in time to get the last second or so of the desktop booting. This wasn’t the case with CrunchBang, after returning from a delightful brew making trip I noticed that the desktop was loaded and the default conky panel on the right side informed me that it’s been booted for about 5 minutes. So, boot speed, even from the CD it’s nice and quick.

To a user who has been brought up on the GNOME or KDE environments the initial desktop may take a second to sink in, by default it comes with a minimal panel and system information pane on the right side of the screen and nothing more, no desktop icons or fluffy applications menu, just a basic desktop. Right clicking anywhere on the desktop brings up the system menu and the list of applications. The default install gives you a nice range of applications, some you’ll never use, others are dire essentials.The default includes a few keynote applications:

• Firefox 3.0.4
• Pidgin 2.5.2
• Rhythmbox 0.11.3
• Skype 2.0
• Gwibber 0.7.2
• GIMP 2.6

A few more are available, and a full list can be found on the CrunchBang wiki. Needless to say I was impressed, not only had they selected reasonable defaults but as the distribution is based off Intrepid it had the latest and greatest versions available. Skype is a interesting nugget in my opinion, possibly being the only QT application in the default installation. I do understand that lots of people use Skype for VOIP, but maybe they should consider including another application like Ekiga.

So, I have my desktop running as a Live CD, time to see how it fayred in real world usage. I can happly say, after a good hour or so usage I didn’t feel restricted by the choice of desktop environment, Openbox is low key but quick and powerful. I decided after just a few hours usage to commit to this distro, ditching my current Debian Lenny install.

The installation of CrunchBang was nothing really spectacular, It’s a standard Ubiquity installer which does it’s job very quickly. A few quick selections and the dreaded disc paritioner screens and you on your way. Installation took about 10 minutes on my machine and felt a little quicker than previous Ubuntu installs, but I put this down to a little bias on my part. Rebooting the machine brought up a standard GRUB menu and I happly noticed that it detected my existing Windows installation and put the relative entry in. Again, the boot was quick and my machine boots to the desktop in under a minute.

So, here comes the negatives. A few minor issues have bugged me since i’ve started using CrunchBang, but nothing show stopping. So to save time I’ll just put them down as bullet points:

• xcompmgr seems to have a “dicky-fit” after a few hours use, making all window focus go out of the window. Disable/enable of Compositing fixes that.
• Tray Icons are hit and miss to what actual colour they use for their background. In my case with the “Fawn” gtk theme you get either a brown or beige background, which looks a little messy. Not really a distribution problem but still annoying.
• Restarting Conky seems to paint over the entire desktop for no reason, causing the Windows-esq issue when you have to use an existing window to get the desktop to repaint.
• By default, the xserver won’t detect 1280×1024. Simple fix of modifying the Xorg configuration but initial boot of the Live CD can be annoying with a mishmash resolution.

As I said, the negatives are MINOR. Really, really minor. CrunchBang was designed as a “2nd – 3rd” distribution for users, so it targets the section that are more than happy to have a twiddle with the system configuration and the thought of text only configuration doesn’t phase them. If you fall into this category and you’re looking for a lightweight desktop distribution then i’d suggest you grab a copy of CrunchBang and give it a whirl.