Joe Terranova

• I’m trying to organize an Ubucon. First step: figure out where the hell it can be hosted. I’m looking at Central Jersey at the end of July, so I’ll try calling TCNJ tomorrow or early next week. If you know a suitable place, let me know!
• I set up beryl on Christina’s laptop, and finally got KVM working correctly — Ubuntu Forums to the rescue! Apparently it’s an issue with acpi in Windows: this post told me how to disable it, and this post tells how to disable it during the install (I added the latter to the kvm wiki page). Now it works, and runs in real time.
• Which is good, because I’ll be at least showing both briefly at PACS next weekend. I’ll be giving a presentation on (GNU) Linux and Ubuntu, and (hopefully) people from the PA LoCo Team will be there to answer questions and give out CDs.
• Spurred by the Ed Lally’s presentation at April’s CHLUG meeting, I’ve decided to set up Asterisk in my house, and been having some trouble. I first set up Trixbox, which comes with Asterisk and FreePBX, but I wasn’t satisfied with it; it runs on CentOS, it didn’t make it clear how to change a lot of the settings, and I was also having stability issues — memory usage slowly went up, ssh died for no reason, etc. Installing FreePBX and Asterisk on Ubuntu didn’t fare much better; apparently FreePBX basically takes over your system, which is what I was trying to avoid. There’s apparently a deb package from Xorcom according to a wiki page Fabian was working on, but if that doesn’t work I’m going plain Asterisk, which should be a learning experience.
• Also, I crave brains, as Dave pointed out. I’m going to try to get Christina to make a better picture of me soon — preferably one that looks like I’m staring right at you, Dave.

In short, TCF went very well. Pictures are available here (Picasa) and here (F-Spot). Some highlights:

In total, we gave out all 150 printed CDs, and a little over 200 burned ones. I’d say it went pretty well.

I seem to have hit a sore spot with regards to my last entry; Dave wrote a fairly scathing entry about my remarks on running Windows in qemu, and running beryl, etc. Let me take a moment to set a few things straight:

As far as running Windows in qemu, what I’m showing is that it can be done. Do I run Windows? No. Do I use any Windows applications? no. But here’s where pragmatism kicks in:

• My girlfriend needs Flash in order to do her school assignments. There is no version of Flash for linux (the editor, not the player).
• My mother needs Turbotax to do her taxes (she’s an accountant; javascript based e-file isn’t going to cut it). She needs Windows.
• etc. Are you in a WoW guild? Windows. Your company requires you use Visual Studio? Windows.

My point is this: I can afford to give up everything that won’t run in linux; most people can’t. While Wine solves some of these issues, it’s constantly one step forward and two steps back; a program might run flawlessly, but an upgrade or patch later it’ll be garbage. What I’m showing by running running Windows in qemu is that, for people that need those apps, they can run them seamlessy, and then be rid of them when they’re done. The need for dual-booting is gone. As it is, it’s a vicious cycle: companies don’t make apps for linux because they don’t think people use it; people don’t use linux because the apps they need only run on Windows. Virtualization bridges that gap, instead of leaving users high and dry.

As for beryl: yes, I’ll be running the proprietary nvidia driver — had I a system with an intel chipset, I’d use that instead. Once again, pragmatism: for many people, it’s all about the eye candy; if Ubuntu, and linux in general, can’t look as good or better than Aero, we’re left in the dust.

The goal of Ubuntu is to build a free operating system that everyone can use. Correct, Ubuntu is about humanity, and free software. It’s also about choice. Neither the proprietary video driver, nor Windows in qemu, nor proprietary wireless drivers are the default in Ubuntu, but the option is there. In fact, Feisty Fawn adds a new panel that informs you that X driver is proprietary, and requires you to enable it to use it.

Choice goes both ways. You can choose to only run open source programs, or you can choose to run proprietary ones as well; I’d argue that denying the ability to choose proprietary software is against the mission of Ubuntu. That’s not all that Ubuntu has to offer, but it is certainly part of what Ubuntu has to offer. As for your offer, you’re more than welcome to have gNewSense running on our table — as you may be aware, Mark has announced that come time for Gutsy Gibbon, they’ll be a new branch of the distro that is 100% free software, just as gNewSense is.

Ubuntu gets a new color: Purple — in summary, that article is a tease. While I’m very happy that there’s more java support in Feisty Fawn, I’d have been happier if the title was literal: if the default background was purple instead of brown. One of the biggest complaints I hear about Ubuntu is “what’s with the brown?”, and a release where it wasn’t brown would at least quiet that sentiment for around 6 months.

As for the update: I’m currently running Feisty on my laptop, so I’m updating to the stable release of it. I’m also downloading the iso for the release, since several people were asking for a copy of it. I’ll be updating my desktop to Feisty sometime next week so that I can set up beryl and QEMU for TCF. I’ve got Seamless Virtualization up and working on my laptop, so IE running as a window on my desktop should turn a few heads (I know a certain Flash user is fairly excited about trying it this weekend).

As for the 500 CDs I’m burning for TCF, I’ll be waiting at least a few days to start on that; new releases have a habit of breaking something or other, and I don’t want to be handing out CDs with broken wireless drivers like Edgy had on launch day. However, I’m not seeing rampant panic in the Ubuntu forums, so it looks like we’re probably alright — or people aren’t downloading it fast enough .

The South Jersey meeting went great! Here’s a link to pics.

The North/Central Jersey Meeting will be in New Brunswick, on March 31st, at 3pm.
West End Coffee Bar
152 Easton Ave, New Brunswick, NJ

Google Map

There was a lot of discussion about whether to have the meeting in New Brunswick or Hoboken, so if there’s anyone from Hoboken that can’t make it, let me know and I’ll see what I can work out.

This should be a good compromise for those in Freehold / Red Bank that wanted to have a separate meeting. Once again, Let me know if it’s not.