blog.glock.co.za

Thanks to the guys that attended the Global Bug Jam - Johannesburg, South Africa!

Although there were only 4 of us, we had an awesome time and managed to do 71 bugs in the couple of hours we were together. I also think we were the only group to do something officially on the African continent (I hope i'm wrong though).  I hope that the stuff learnt today will continue to be used to improve our great distribution.

Some more pics from the event are located here... http://picasaweb.google.com/stefan.lsd/GBJ2009

With 71 bugs, you will be pleased to know that the ZA team is 5th on the list! (I suspect this may change as the US wakes up!)

Preliminary stats can be found here - http://daniel.holba.ch/five-a-day-stats/

We were watching the bugjam video by Daniel Holbach, and the one thing that I took from it was that fact that it doesn't matter how many bugs you fix, but as long as you get together and have a good time. I think everyone had a good time, all learnt and happily managed to give something back to Ubuntu.

Special props to Robyn (rpenhall) as a first time launchpad user (and even non Linux user!). She registered a LP account this morning and despite not knowing Linux or Ubuntu at all, did amazingly and was able to contribute to Ubuntu. It really just shows that anyone, doesn't matter what kind of experience you have, is able to join in.

I really hope to see more of the same and new guys next time! (We have a package jam in planning that is going to rock!)

I think a highlight for me was joining the streaming video from the 'Brummie Jam' - I have no idea where that was, but they sounded english! It really felt as if it was a global effort watching the English eating chocolate cake and chatting about bugs.

Thanks everyone for all the work (and don't stop now!!)

PS: For the guys that didn't come, you can still contribute! Add your name to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Events and help give some bugs some love! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/HowToTriage may be useful!

PPS: This is actually my first post to Planet Ubuntu, although I have been a member for some time.

This afternoon I upgraded our Asterisk server from Ubuntu Gutsy to Ubuntu Hardy (8.04.1).

Hardy used the 2.6.24 kernel which the mISDN driver has some issues with. I tried the mISDN-1_1_7_2 and mISDN-1_1_8 which both failed to compile against the kernel.

I had to use the mISDN drivers from the git repository. Asterisk 1.4 includes the Chan mISDN drivers and these seemed to conflict and i upgraded Asterisk to 1.4.21.2. FreePBX configuration remained in place but in the new Asterisk version, the structure of /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf has changed.

It wouldn't listen to the astrundir and kept trying to create the files in /var/run which the user 'asterisk' had no permissions to do.

(Old asterisk.conf setup with FreePBX 2.4.0)

[global]
astetcdir => /etc/asterisk
astmoddir => /usr/lib/asterisk/modules
astvarlibdir => /var/lib/asterisk
astagidir => /usr/share/asterisk/agi-bin
astspooldir => /var/spool/asterisk
astrundir => /var/run/asterisk
astlogdir => /var/log/asterisk

(New asterisk.conf)

[directories]
astetcdir => /etc/asterisk
astmoddir => /usr/lib/asterisk/modules
astvarlibdir => /var/lib/asterisk
astagidir => /usr/share/asterisk/agi-bin
astspooldir => /var/spool/asterisk
astrundir => /var/run/asterisk
astlogdir => /var/log/asterisk

That pretty much solved it. Hope this helped someone.

Someone in the office was trying to get an Ipod 3rd gen nano to work under Ubuntu Hardy 8.04. Requirements were it should be easy to use like iTunes.

We tried Amarok and Banshee. I think we could of tried Rythmbox a bit more. gtkpod is a bit too hardcore and ugly.

We ended up settling on Banshee. Needed to do the following to get it to see the ipod. apt-get install ipod podsleuth libipod-cil.

Banshee saves an audio cd by default to FLAC. To be able to transfer this to your ipod. you need the lame encoder for mp3. Right click the ipod and say properties. It must appear here. If it isn't, do apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

That should hopefully sort it out.

I am at a point in my life when I don't care about being a zealot. By that I mean that I don't care that im not one. I really think this war and zealotry between linux distributions needs to end. Specifically package management. Ok. I don't care that .deb is easier than rpm. I dont care that rpm spec file's are hell. I don't care about the ego's and pro / merits of one over the other. I will gladly learn how to work with either of them if we could just please standardise on one of them.

On a Windows system, you get the .exe, double click and install. We really need one unified package management that makes it easy for any linux newcomer to just double click and install.

I recently did some work at a government department and one of the IT people wanted Linux to play with. No problem. Have a look at ubuntu. Great. He got it installed, music and videos playing. ok. Groupwise... ok. Thats released by Novell and its in RPM. Yes, there is a forum post how you can use alien, convert it, make a deb, relink the java. Fine. The fact is that the stupid end user cant do all of this!

Take the .deb developers. Take the .rpm developers. Put them in a room and make them work a new standard out, that everyone agree's to. Failing that, frame them like poor Hans... (hans reiser)

anyways. enough :)

So I recently decided to try out the new 1.0 beta release of the Flock web browser. http://www.flock.com. This blog entry is being written through Flock's blog post interface, and it should post directly to the blog, and hence your reading this, it works!

So far i'm pretty impressed. It has some pretty nifty integration with social sites (such as facebook), and likewise with flickr and of course with blogs. Normal firefox extensions are said to work fine, and the theme is pleasant to work with.

I will continue to use it for the meanwhile and see how it goes, but first impression is really great.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock,

Just an update on some random happenings. Firstly Facebook. If you haven't joined, join and link up to friends. I've found so many friends from school and around its great. Not to mention if you find a hot girl, you can say, hey, you know so and so and she knows him who knows me, so thats why im talking to you and im not really some wierd crazy stalker dude. want your panties back? oh. link

I've been having a massive fight to get my stupid 3G card swopped out on a Dell D820 notebook. Earlier Huwei cards had an issue. I got hold of a Globetrotter Option card which needs the Nozomi drivers to work. Luckily these dont compile under 2.6.20. Anyways, here's the fix that got it to compile

2.2alpha release in nozomi.c

1736c1736
<       INIT_WORK(&dc->tty_flip_wq_struct, tty_flip_queue_function);
---
>       INIT_WORK(&dc->tty_flip_wq_struct, tty_flip_queue_function, dc); 

Tonight Neil and I will be heading out to the suburbs for some night photography. Assuming its not raining, we dont freeze, or get mugged, hopefully i'll post some shots here tomorrow.