Fort Wayne LUG Blogs

I just survived my first NECC (National Educational Computing Conference). This year’s edition was in San Diego (you know, I could get used to living there), and was marked by a separate strand dedicated to Open Source, with talks taking place in the Open Source Pavillion and Playground. The area was organized by Steve Hargadon, who also supplied a ton of old IBM laptops that either booted from the net and were terminal server machines or booted from CD and were FireFox kiosks. In either case, they didn’t have hard drives and to the surprise of many, their performance was excellent.

The talks over the 3 days ranged from Edubuntu (Jeff Elkner) to LTSP (Steve Hargadon), Moodle (3 times, full every time), my Python programming in MS and HS, and a bunch of other FOSS in education topics. Most were pretty well attended, so much so that the organizers tracked Steve down to tell him that the Open Source area clearly needed more space next year. Another sign of the success of the project was that BlackBoard, who had spent a lot in sponsorship, raised concerns with NECC’s organizers about the fact that there were so many Moodle talks. Hmmm… is somebody getting worried?

A big hit was the appearance of Indiana’s Mike Huffman, the guy at the DOE who came up with the idea of using Linux in Indiana schools. He claims 40,000 HS students are currently using Linux machines in Indiana and promises it will be more like 170,000 by one year from now. Mike spoke at our Open Source Birds of a Feather meeting and then joined us for our FOSS dinner out, a great bash at Rei Do Gado, a Brazilian barbecue. In case (like me) you have never been to a Brazilian barbecue, it’s an all you can eat grilled meat fest, with waiters coming to your table to offer different cuts of grilled meat until you order them to stop. Let’s just say it was so good that I didn’t need breakfast or lunch the next day.

In any case, everyone had the feeling that the momentum of Open Source in education was building. You couldn’t hang around the Open Source area, listen to the talks, or attend the meetings without being struck by the feeling, as Tom Hoffman of SchoolTool put it, that “the locomotive of Open Source has started to roll.”

Adding to that was the fact that the Thursday keynote was Negroponte on the One Laptop per Child project and that their booth (right next to us) was mobbed by people. Some wanted to play with the working models (prototype boards, but not in the cases), some wanted to talk to the staff, some just wanted to have their picture taken holding the mockups. It was wild. Since Python is a key part of their software I talked to them about what options they will offer for a Python programming environment. They don’t have one yet, but we have a similar wish list, interestingly. Oh yeah, by the way, the hand crank is gone - they are now talking about some sort of pull string generator on the power brick instead.

My Python programming talk was well received, I think. At least people laughed and nodded in the right places which is about all I could ask for.

In the last seven days I’ve spent over 20 hours in cars, planes, or airports in illinois, Indiana, and eventually during a stretch of 5 days in Texas. I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter who you are because Texas doesn’t care. It’s a big state and gets bigger by the day and it will slowly draw out your life force through a straw in your heart.

And while I was down in the big suck, I was wondering if the transplanted residents of New Orleans - where alcohol, blues, and politics are best consumed liberally — would be happy in their new home of cowboys, conservatives, and christian fundamentalism. And then I realized there’s a profound lesson to be learned in all of this.

I needed to go to Fry’s Electronics after I got back.

If you’ve never experienced Fry’s it’s worth going at least once. And if you become a convert you too will begin making regular pilgrimages to the new electronics Mecca off I-69 2 miles north of the I-465 interchange. It’s kind of a cross between a Comp USA, Radio Shack, and a Best Buy rolled into a Wal-Mart superstore.

Seriously though I spent an afternoon there yesterday. In some cases it’s surprising. They stock 50 dvd players, 20 motherboards, most of the major brands and models of hard drives, 30 different cases, and around 30 different kinds of laptops. I was also surprised at the number of external hard drives and hard drive enclosures they had. I bought a lighted USB cable that blinks when data is transferring across.

But what I was most surprised to see was the Nokia 770 linux handheld in stock. Oh it’s thin. And beautiful. But being able to hold it in my hand, I was able to spot one weakness of it on the spot. The RS-MMC slot is covered by a flimsy little piece of plastic that swings open. It looks like the first thing that will break off. But it’s not enough to persuade me to not get one.

But the real lesson that Fry’s teaches is that geeks will inherit the earth.

As I mentioned, I decided to give up the faithful and anorexically thin Sharp MM10 for a Dell Latitude X1 after I got to play with one at PyCon in Dallas. It came last week and I decided to put it to the test by loading Ubuntu Dapper Drake, flight 4 on it. Amazing, it worked with only one stupid annoyance and one minor hassle.

The stupid annoyance was not connected to the X1, but an apparent bug in the system - when I set synaptic to use a proxy server at school it worked just fine. Then I went home, unset the proxy server and… it didn’t work. Kept complaining that it couldn’t find the proxy server. After 20 minutes of swearing I finally just went and looked at the config files. Sure enough, it had inserted a line setting the proxy to nothing, but then had left the original proxy setting line after it. So it was still using the old proxy. A manual edit took care of that, but a bug that stupid is annoying.

The minor hassle had to do with the fact that X was not using the X1’s native resolution (1280×768). There are wiki pages devoted to the tweaks needed on older versions of Ubuntu to make it work, but with Dapper it’s actually quite easy - install the 915resolution package, manually edit its config file, and restart.

So far, everything else has just worked. The X1 is a slick little machine. It’s a little over 1 inch thick, has a nearly full sized keyboard, and the aforementioned 1280×768 screen. It has 802.11g/b, bluetooth, AC97 modem and ethernet built in. I haven’t tested the modem or bluetooth yet, but everything else seems to work.

The X1 doesn’t have a PCMCIA slot, but it does have CF and SD slots, which both seem to work. The final peripheral port is a special Dell hybrid USB/power port that powers and connects the DVD drive. While I’m not crazy about there being another proprietary connector in the world, this does have 2 advantages: 1) it can be used as a regular USB port, and 2) it removes the need for a power supply for the DVD unit.

So far battery life has been excellent and it seems to perform much better than it’s 1.1 GHz processor speed would indicate.

So the bottom line? I’ve loved the Sharp for the past couple of years - it was invariably the cutest, tiniest, most adorable little machine almost everywhere I went. But the X1 has made me forget about all of that. The cute tiny laptop is dead. Long live the even cuter tiny laptop.

One of the most interesting things about the new MythTV release is the DVD player and a plugin to access your NetFlix selections.

Knoppmyth in an attempt at creating a Debian distro with that installs MythTV to the hard drive. Unfortunately, I see things like this in the Knoppmyth docs:

“Note: You’ll still need to edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to change the refresh rate or you CAN destroy your TV. “

And:

“Currently if you have an SATA drive, you must use Manual Install. “

I have a hard tme promoting how wonderful MythTV can be to non-geeks with issues like these. I suspect that until major issues like these are fixed, MythTV will remain available to the “technical elite” only.

–Rob

I’ve enjoyed the RHL and FC distros quite a bit. They’re popular, they put a lot of effort into the Desktop experience, and they’ve been fairly easy to install and maintain. Now a lot of users have complained about the dreaded “RPM Hell” where one package depends upon another which depends upon a third. That’s not to say I haven’t had problems with RPM, but I’ve been a pretty resourceful guy and have been able to use the resources of the net to figure out and install the dependencies fairly quickly.So to fix it, there were tools created. First Red Hat Network and then APT-RPM. Red Hat didn’t see the need for a depsolver when it could sell you a service to do it for you — Red Hat Network. And APT-RPM was, well, RPM shoe-horned into APT.

Today, in the FC community we have Yum and now Smart. Smart is very apt-like. Yum is not. Yum’s problem is that it doesn’t handle multiple repos well. It did at one point have a “pkgpolicy=last” option to give “priority” to repos in their config file. However, it was removed without a deprecation cycle, and I started noticing non base FC4 packages overwriting FC4 packages (eg…. Dovecot overriding IMAP). Instead, Yum decided to define priorities per package instead of per repo. At that point I stopped being a Yum fan and started searching for alternatives. And that’s when I found Smart which handles multiple repos well.

The second coming of RPM Hell is when new users realize that neither Fedora and Fedora Extras have what they need (like an MP3 player or maybe LiVES), so they find ATRpms, Livna, Dag, FreshRPMS and mistakenly add them to their yum config. On the next yum update, they have a broken system, and can’t figure out how to fix the dependencies in order to get, say, gnome working again.

And it will happen unless packagers (and depsolvers) realize they can’t make arbitrarily broad, sweeping decisions for the user.

Say your prayers.
–Rob

Live from beautiful (and rainy) Addison, Texas, it’s Pycon 2006. Or as we used to say when I lived here, “Sure, it’s cold, plastic, and heartless. But it’s not bad.”

The conference is actually pretty good, with its usual high geek quotient. My talk yesterday on teaching programming to 8th graders was well received. I got laughs in the right places and had several good chats with people afterwards. A relatively huge bunch of us then went to dinner and after that stayed up late trading ideas on how to use Python in education.

This afternoon, Nathan presented on using elements from Zope 3 for desktop applications, which was good and well received.

The highlight of the afternoon for me came at the “Lightning Talks” (5 minute presentations) where one of the developers of subversion, who now works for Google (those guys were all over the place here) explained how he wrote an IRC bot in Python to replace himself on IRC… and no one noticed!

I also decided to trade in my cute, tiny, insanely thin little Sharp notebook for a Dell X1. I got to play with one a guy here had, and I’m convinced. More RAM, more hard drive, more processor, and more screen, with about the same amount of weight. Of course it’s slightly bigger and definitely thicker, but it looks like it’s worth it. I’ll miss the Sharp, but it’s starting to show some signs of age.

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