So, Ubuntu has a pretty famous Bug #1:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
The title is “Microsoft has a majority market share”. I think it’s a great part of the Ubuntu culture, because it focuses people on what they want to do with Ubuntu.

Our bug #1, by the way, is “/doc/contact”.
http://laconi.ca/trac/ticket/1
Since this was long-ago fixed, I’d like to wipe this ticket* and replace it with an overall project purpose, like Ubuntu’s. But what would the bug be?

It got me thinking – and not just about Identi.ca and open microblogging as a federated, distributed alternative to centralized approaches like Twitter.

Moose and Squirrel - photo by Paul Lannuier.

Remember Boris and Natasha, and their plans for world domination? They ultimately failed because they always decided "but first, get moose and squirrel" – they chose the wrong bug #1. (See 21 Things I Wish My Broker Had Told Me).

At its core, having a bug #1 is really a geek-centric way of having a mission statement. What’s wrong with the world as it exists without your effort, and what would it look like to solve that problem?

This could even be adapted to personal goals – you could have a shortlist of “bugs” with the world you hope to focus on, and while you may not ever close each of those bugs, you should be able to tell whether your work is headed in the right direction – whether you feel like you are contributing to progress in that direction or not.

One concern might be that phrasing each goal as a bug limits innovation – the old FUD that open source imitates, but doesn’t innovate, for example – but describing a broad problem you hope to solve doesn’t, in reality, limit the innovation you might create.

Side note: it’s really interesting to read the threads associated with Ubuntu’s bug #1 and Evan’s question (view by thread in laconica-dev archives) – both are core cases of a “reflexive public” in the process of defining itself (see Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software for more on that concept).

This means I can turn on internet sharing on the phone and get online from my laptop while on the Acela between NY and Boston, without the tether cable.

I’ve got a Dell Latitude D810, running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn, and a cheap IOGear USB Bluetooth adapter, model #GBU221.

The “bluetooth” package in the Ubuntu universe repository is a metapackage which installs the “bluez” utilities – I have that installed as well.

All I had to do to get online via Bluetooth connection was:

1. Start bluetooth on the blackjack, since I don’t normally leave it running
2. Start internet connection sharing on the blackjack
3. On the laptop, do: hcitool scan (this looks for nearby bluetooth devices – note the address of your phone, which is a hexidecimal string like 12:34:56:78:90:ab)
4. Issue the command: sudo pand -c
   
   , using the address discovered above
5. Issue the command: sudo dhclient bnep0

Of course, once you know your phone’s address you can skip step 3.

I also tried the various instructions for tethering to USB and using the Gnome PPP application, but for me this would connect and automatically disconnect. Bluetooth’s preferrable for me anyway as that way I have one less cable to carry.

Unfortunately, no such luck (cue the “No soup for you!” clip from Seinfeld):

Was the problem that I was running Firefox rather then Netscape (Netscape? Really?), or that I was running Linux?

I clicked through, to find:

My SHC Community currently supports the following operating systems and browsers:
Operating Systems:

• Windows 2000
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista

Browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0 and higher
• Netscape 7.0 and higher
• AOL 5.0 and higher
• Firefox 1.0 and higher

If your browser or operating system is not supported by My SHC Community, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

In this day and age, no Mac support, no Linux support? Why?

Is there some elaborate MS Silverlight functionality in this community? Some kind of Adobe AIR based application to install?

I assume there’s just some overzealous javascript useragent detection at work here, but won’t know until I find time to boot up my Windows virtual machine and check it out on IE on Windows XP. (You can actually click around on the site, but I don’t see anyone to join the community without the right brower user-agent. I suppose it might be faster to just spoof my user-agent, I know I used to have a plugin for firefox which would make it pretend to be on Windows).

Then I’ll likely never go back. Welcome to community!

Hoping to avoid significant “I can’t get to that file now” problems, and not wanting to try out read/write mount of NTFS+ in Linux, I took a multi-partition approach, breaking up the hard drive thusly:

1. ext3 format, onto which Ubuntu is installed
2. ntfs format, onto which Windows XP is installed
3. vfat (aka Fat32) format, as a shared partition accessible from Windows or Linux
4. small linux swap partition, ignored by windows

This was great, as it enabled me to put things like firefox profiles on the shared drive, and then whether I booted Windows or Kubuntu I ended up with the same set of bookmarks, cookies, and the like.

It also meant all my “documents” (client folders, project folders, and so on) went to the shared partition. (In windows I mapped “My Documents” to point to what it sees as the E: drive, and in Linux mapped the mounted drive to /media/shared/).

Since then, however, I’ve decided that rather than dual booting I should move windows into a virtualization container, and run Windows XP inside VMWare Player without having to reboot.

(Experienced virtualization users at this point have likely already anticipated the problem).

Using a number of online guides (see here and here – the latter was more useful for my case), I was able to get WindowsXP booting inside VMWare using the existing WindowsXP installation on the NTFS partition. Very nice. That triggers, unfortunately, a bunch of windows activation hooey, but you can eliminate that as well.

Now, to the problem. When Windows boots inside VMWare, it mounts the E: drive. Problem is that partition is also already mounted in Linux. Now we have two different operating systems, both of which are potentially reading and writing to a single VFAT / FAT32 partition, and neither of which “knows” about the other’s access. Surely a recipe for trouble.

So what are my options?

Here are some I’ve considered – let me know if there are others:

1. Make windows forget that the VFAT partition exists. Not sure how to effectively do this – won’t windows keep trying to “discover” the drive and assign it a drive letter when it boots up?
2. Trigger (via script) unmounting of the VFAT partition in Linux whenever the Windows VMWare player is booted. That way Linux would let go of the partition while I’m using windows, and I could then remount it when I close the VM.
3. Backup the partition and reformat it as ext3. Windows will now ignore it, and I can enable a samba share on the linux side which the Windows OS inside the VM will see as a network share and access appropriately.

This weekend is WordCamp, in San Francisco. Chz and Tofu from ICanHasCheezburger, one of my favorite blogs, will be there. (Yes, I have a doctoral degree in English and ICanHasCheezburger is one of my favorite blogs. Deal with it.)

The full schedule is online, and it many folks will use trackback to add their blogging about sessions they attended to the session’s page in the schedule.

Some sessions which look to me like highlights I will be sorry to miss:

• Getting Involved with WordPress, by Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith
• Kicking Ass Content Connections, with Lorelle VanFossen
• Blogs vs. Journalism, with John Dvorak and Om Malik
• Blogs at the New York Times, with Jeremy Zilar
• Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing, with Dave Winer
• State of the Word, with Matt Mullenweg

Definitely a high powered set of speakers and in a relatively intimate forum. I’ll definitely add WordCamp 2008 to my “hopefully attend list.”

Starting this morning is Ubuntu Live, which runs this morning through Tuesday in Portland. Their schedule is also online and also impressive.

(A Sunday morning keynote trifecta with Mark Shuttleworth, Stephen O’Grady, and Jeff Waugh, as the first session of teh conference? Impressive. In fact, O’Grady’s already posted his slides and script.)

Finally, the rest of the week will be OSCON 2007, which I will be attending.

As usual, OSCON is enormous (check out the schedule – there are literally 15 parallel tracks much of Wed and Thurs), and that’s just the official sessions, not to mention the parties and events.

Drop me a line if you’ll be in Portland next week too.

or, tired of rebooting into windows just to upload photos?

I just discovered kflickr – it’s in the Ubuntu repository for Edgy. (Looks like it is in Dapper and Feisty as well)

(At a terminal, sudo apt-get install kflickr, or use aptitude and look for it by name)

Very nice. Take a look later today or tomorrow for some Zurich photos from today and yesterday.

The first was related to my Dell Lattitude D810′s touchpad – an Alps Glide touchpad. Ever since the upgrade it has been fundamentally unusable, moving the cursor so slowly I’d have to drag across the trackpad itself two dozen times to get the cursor halfway across the screen.

The second was related to using XGL and Beryl – hitting the keyboard combination Shift-Backspace would terminate and restart XGL, making me lose whatever unsaved work I had in that session. (I never knew how many times I hit Shift-Backspace until this).

Fixing the touchpad was ultimately a matter of downgrading the synaptics driver back to the version from the Dapper Drake repository. Based on this forum posting, I was able to locate the .deb file here (i386 version), and install the 0.14.3 version over the 0.14.6 version that is current for Edgy.

Not sure how the problem got introduced, or if it is a bug in the driver itself or elsewhere, but I know that as soon as I got 0.14.3 installed all returned to working order. Your mileage may vary. (It may be that if I futzed with my xorg.conf enough, I could get it working with the 0.14.6 version – but for now I’m happy just to revert to 0.14.3).
Fixing XGL was also relatively simple. Turns out to be a fairly common user complaint, as a google search of “shift backspace crashes XGL” shows you.

Adding this line:

xmodmap /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.us

To my /usr/bin/startxgl.sh (and restarting) was all it took. (The startxgl.sh, as the name suggests, is the script which starts xgl, as specified in /usr/share/xsessions/xgl.desktop, which I created when I installed Beryl and XGL). I put it before the calls to XGL itself. This maps shift-backspace away from terminate app to delete, which is a sensible enough action for that key combo.

Nice to finally have (K)ubuntu back to it’s normal self – hopefully this post will help others who hit these same hiccups.

Configuring your desktop (right click on the desktop and choose “Configure Desktop … ” or go to the K-Menu -> System Settings -> Desktop) gives you the option (in the behavior pane, under the Device Icons tab) to show device icons for various kinds of devices, mounted and unmounted.

Because I like having my mounted drives on the desktop, I went in a checked “Mounted Hard Disk Volume” to get my hard drive partitions (windows, shared, and Linux root) to show up.

That works, but they show up with names like “39 GB Media” and “9 GB Media.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember volumes by their size, and kept having to open and close volumes to know what they were.

But, I found a simple workaround, which works without having to think about disk labels and whether the partitions are ext3, NTFS, or FAT32.

Rather than using the “Configure Desktop” method to show device icons for mounted drives, I just used the “Create New Link to Device” command (right click on desktop again, and choose “Create New … -> Link to Device -> Hard Disk Device”). You can edit, on the “General” tab of the resulting window, the name which will be displayed, and choose the Device in the device tab. You’ll need to know what device you’re after, but you can see both mount point and device when you choose. For example, in my case it shows: /dev/sda6 (/media/shared).

You get basically the same effect, but with the ability to edit the name to something meaningul.

The screen cap shows the mounted volumes in the column on the right, and the device links in the column on the left.

I have to say I’m very impressed. While it has been more than a couple of years since I’ve set up a dual boot system (I used to dual boot Yellow Dog Linux and Mac OS on early PPC Macs, then OpenBSD and Windows on intel), so it isn’t really fair for me to compare my Ubuntu experience with other distros, this was a fairly simple install, once I got past an initial partitioning scare.

My first step was to adjust the partitions on the laptop’s 60GB drive to make room for a linux boot partition, a swap partition, and a shared data partition. My first attempt, using the partition editing portion of the Ubuntu installer (from the Ubuntu Live DVD) resulted in disaster: the installer failed to resize the NTFS partition appropriately, leaving not enough room for the Linux boot (ext3) and swap partitions, and thus dying mid-install.

This lead to a frightening set of “error loading operating system” and “no operating system found” messages, as the installer had set my Windows XP partition to inactive, but had provided no other information to the bootloader. Booting into XP in recovery mode (from CD), fixmbr, fixboot, kneel facing Redmond and chant (“Developers, Developers, Developers”) and it was back.

After waiting a few days, I was ready for try #2. Booted from the Ubutnu Live DVD, ran gparted (had to sudo gparted to give it the necessary permissions – I can see why a Live DVD shouldn’t normally do such things lightly), and resized the NTFS partition. Beautiful – no need for defragmenting, no data loss, 58GB partition down to 30GB.

Side note #1: Started the partitioning while riding the bus to the airport, thinking it would be done in plenty of time, and I could spend the flight, or time waiting for the flight, installing from the DVD. Turns out it took longer than I thought, and I was walking up to the security checkpoint with my laptop still in the process of being partitioned. Luckily right as I got to the point of no return it finally completed and I was able to shut down safely. I had momentary visions of being forced to turn off the machine in the middle of the operation in order to board – but I was safe.

Next step was adding an ext3 partition, bootable, with a mount point of /, and a swap partition at 3GB. (2 GB of RAM in the laptop, I figure 1.5x should be fine, and disk space is at a premium, even with 60GB overall).

I reserved 10GB for a shared data partition – FAT32 so that it can be read and written to from both Linux (where it is mounted as /media/shared) and Windows (where it is now the E: drive). In addition to making it easy to share documents between the two OS’s, as a few helpful blog/forum posts pointed out (thanks matchless and Kevin Farnham) this lets Firefox and Thunderbird access a shared profile.

Now, whether I boot into Kubuntu (I installed kubuntu-desktop after Ubuntu) or Windows XP, I can run Thunderbird and get access to my inbox, address book, and all email folders, or run Firebird and get access to a consistent set of bookmarks, toolbars, saved passwords, and settings. Next step is to tackle calendaring – I understand Mozilla Sunbird can share a profile across platforms as well, but haven’t really settled on a single calendar app yet.

Another helpful tool is Automatix, which can script the install some of the “non-free” pieces of software like codecs for certain formats which the media junkie in me can’t do without. It’s available for the 6.06 release as well as the 5.10 release, for Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

Side Note #2: What’s with the Ubuntu release naming? The alliteration, the cutsey animal names? Time for a revision of the old “Porn Star or My Little Pony” game? Breezy Badger? Dapper Drake? Hoary Hedgehog? Warty Warthog? But, I suppose silly names with some character are better than corporate “codenames” like longhorn or Fiji. Maybe alphabetical order would have made more sense – I see the next Ubuntu will be “Edgy Eft.”

All in all, I’ve been very happy. Feels good to have a choice at startup. Maybe good enough to put off that MacBook Pro I’ve been coveting, at least for a few months . . .

Mike Melanson, the blog’s author, says he “may” ask for input on issues.

I’m hoping that means development of a Flash player for Linux is actually occuring, to the point where it has issues on which input could be required.

So far, there’s only one post (the “origin story”) and 73 comments – I’m assuming that ratio will even out over time.