Charl van Niekerk » Blog: July 2006

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Windows Live Messenger Beta

I tried out the Windows Live Messenger beta last week. I have to say, I am thoroughly disappointed. The install was slow, and most of my contacts just disappeared. (They reappeared when I downgraded again.)

On the upside, it is quite pretty. Screenshots available as always.

Maybe the issues with the contacts are because they're trying to integrate the contacts with Yahoo? Maybe some other integration that went bad? For now, I'll stick to the old stuff. :)

Ubuntu Dapper on the Desktop

I upgraded a desktop machine running Ubuntu Breezy to Dapper recently. Again, I replaced "breezy" with "dapper" in /etc/apt/sources.list and ran apt-get update and then apt-get dist-upgrade.

I didn't have too many headaches (as far as I can remember) and I have to say the new default theme is stunning. The ugly theme is one of the first things I originally complained about and they finally fixed it! Yay!

We came a long way from 2004...

Oh yes, and naturally there are some screenshots available by me and by others

Hot Weather

Currently, it's supposed to be winter in the southern hemisphere; however, in South Africa we have been having unusually hot weather the past weekend.

In George, the snow retreated all the way up to only the top of the Outeniqua Mountains. The temperature rose to a ridiculous 8°C at some points in time!

It seems like Europe is not the only continent experiencing a horrific heat wave.

(For those that think I'm crazy right now, no, this was a tongue-in-the-cheek post.)

George Toaster Updated

Today I met Russell Cloran. He came through George to update our local Freedom Toaster in his crusade for having updated toasters around South Africa. It is now running the Toaster v3 software. (This version actually includes some software I wrote to set the password of the toaster, it seems.) Many thanks to Russell for the excellent (and very important) work he's doing!

We actually talked a little about RDF and Microformats while he was busy upgrading the toaster. This is actually the first South African I spoke to that seems to be seriously into this kind of stuff. It ends up he's got much more experience with RDF than myself. I can't wait to pick his brains a little more online. ;)

In (somewhat) related news, I listened to Friedel Wolff on RSG (South African national radio channel) today, speaking about Translate.org.za. Great work, Friedel!

Project Hoshimi

Project Hoshimi is a sub-project of the Imagine Cup from Microsoft.

For the first found, the idea boils down to this. You have nanobots that can move inside a model of the human body. You have to program the nanobots to attack bad organisms inside the body. The idea is to destroy the bad organisms as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I think this is a rather cool idea for students with too much time on their hands. Maybe this will help to keep them from watching so much pr0n since this combines strategic gaming with coding. I can't wait to see more. :)

IS Ubuntu Mirror

When doing an apt-get update on Ubuntu from the IS mirror (default mirror for South Africa), I constantly get connectivity errors relating to "bad headers", etc. both when I use HTTP and FTP.

When I use any other mirror, I never have these issues. I used a mirror in the UK for a while but am now using ubuntu.mirror.ac.za at the moment without any problems (except with signatures).

The other day, I was on IRC in the #clug channel on ZANET. Other people seemed to have similar experiences (although some people thought I have just been smoking fynbos again). :)

The weird thing is that, if I run apt-get update two times in a row, the second time I have no issues. We concluded that IS's server is seriously buggered up.

CharlNet Updates

Finally, in the last couple of weeks I managed to give CharlNet HQ some much needed updates. I could start with exactly what I updated, but I really updated everything (except the front page). The only thing that is still seriously shorting is a real front page with some news on it, but I'll get around to that soon enough. :)

Over the Hedge

Over the Hedge is now rolling at Ster-Kinekor in George, so I went to see the movie yesterday.

Although it’s not nearly the best I’ve seen in the past year, it’s not at all bad. I think the idea of digital animal movies is wearing out fast, but this one was unusually good IMHO.

The movie portrays very typical characters and situations. Really funny to see how things came together.

Definitely good for an afternoon of peaceful holiday relaxation. Well done to the creators. :)

Ubuntu Packages

I decided to install Gnome on a “server” installation of Ubuntu Dapper. What a mess. The people that put together those packages need to be slapped with a 60 KG Unix tutorial.

I decided that this was a job for APT. I installed the gnome package. After rebooting, no X. I assumed that if you would install Gnome that it would automatically see X as a dependency. Obviously not.

So, I installed the xserver-xorg package. Ran X -configure and tested X out with the new (totally default) configuration file. No fonts. WTF???

Got fed up and installed xserver* and xfonts*. Got XGL in the process (haven’t set it up yet though). Ran X again, but this time it told me my mouse could not be found. I checked in /dev but indeed could not find my mouse. I commented out the mouse’s config in xorg.conf and tried X. It worked. And the mouse also. (Huh?)

I managed to start up GDM. First thing: an error telling me it can’t find the “human” theme (default Ubuntu theme). Luckily the issue was ignored, and I was presented with another theme. Tried searching for the “human” theme using APT, but no success thus far.

I am honestly not very impressed with Ubuntu's packaging and dependencies. KISS!!!

Generation 8

Many South Africans probably saw this ridiculous ad about a little paper man jumping out of its string and going for the door on the TV recently.

So yeah, after that crazy "lonely finger" stunt pulled by 5FM, our latest crazy media stunt in South Africa is Generation 8. So, what is it about? It's about cars (the Civic, to be precise). Seems to be the latest advertising craze: Confuse the crap out of your viewers and let their curiosity get the better of them. Might be incredibly effective right now, but once people start to get used to it nobody will fall for this shit anymore anyway.

Oh yes, and you got to love the scam to get your e-mail address so that they can (probably) spam you. Act like it's exclusive and get you to enter your e-mail address before you can enter the site. Prying on the naivety of the stupid. I see two horns and a tail growing...

Anonymous Comments

Blogger allows you to easily post anonymous comments on this blog. I hate it though, because if you want to say something, be a real man (or girl) and stick your name to it. :)

Sadly, I only have two options:

Allow anonymous comments.
Only allow registered Blogger users to comment.

Since, in my mind, the latter is unacceptable, I will have to settle with the first option. Funny enough, it doesn't seem like Blogger allows me to require my readers to fill out their names in the comment form.

However, as I'm still moderating all comments (thanks to ridiculous amounts of spam), I will from this day onward immediately delete anonymous comments as I receive them. Sorry but thanks.

OpenBSD Package Management

The only reason I still preferred Debian (GNU/Linux) as my primary server operating system is because I liked the ability to do system-wide upgrades with a single command (using APT, naturally). Now this ability finally seems to have come to OpenBSD!

sudo pkg_add -u

You can find more information in the OpenBSD FAQ.

OpenBSD 3.9

I finally got around to installing OpenBSD 3.9. Impressed, as always. :)

Although I probably won't recommend OpenBSD as a desktop any time soon, it does rock as a server, bigtime. Yes, it's one of the most secure operating systems in the world. Yes, it's BSD, so it's super-stable and efficient.

The only thing I will say is this: if you're not a hacker (or otherwise an über-geek), stay away from OpenBSD completely. This distro is made for hackers by hackers. Period.

But if you're willing to spend some time, you can get a really cool installation going. This is what I've done so far.

First of all, please make sure you RTFM before you install. You'll need it; believe me! Expecting nice user-friendly prompts to guide you through the setup process? Bwahahaha! You're obviously new to OpenBSD! :)

After you got it installed (or should I rather say "if if you got it installed"), you can start playing. Firstly, get pkg working. pkg is the (very primitive) default package management tool for OpenBSD (also for FreeBSD, last I used it). All you need to do is set the PKG_PATH environment variable correctly:

export PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.9/packages/i386/

This is assuming you're using the i386 platform. Just change that to whatever looks right. You can also use machine -a to get the right value when in doubt. Also change the host to your closest OpenBSD mirror. Otherwise you're really a noob. :P

Next, get yourself some decent editors like nano and vim (I hate vi personally):

pkg_add nano-1.2.5.tgz
pkg_add vim-6.4.6p1-no_x11.tgz

Now get yourself a decent shell like bash. Yes, I don't like sh/csh/ksh very much either. :)

pkg_add bash-3.1.1p0.tgz

Start bash by just typing, you guessed it, bash. Yes, the default prompt sucks, doesn't it? Luckily not that difficult to correct:

PS1="\u@\h:\w# "

Put both that line as well as setting PKG_PATH as shown earlier into your ~/.bash_profile file.

Now just make bash your default shell. Remember that if you screw this up you can't log in as root anymore, so unless you have another sudo-enabled user you can log in as you're totally screwed. A safer option might be to do this later after the other user has been set up, logically.

user mod -s /usr/local/bin/bash root

It would be wise to first make sure /usr/local/bin/bash is actually in /etc/shells. Otherwise replace that with the applicable path in the command above.

Finally, get yourself a normal user account. Just run adduser and follow the instructions. Remember to invite yourself into the group wheel (else you can't su). You also probably want to remember to set your default shell to bash. Don't forget to also add yourself to the /etc/sudoers file. Particularly, look at the following:

# User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL) ALL

Now just add your user to the line beneath that. For example, let's say my username is charlvn (which it happens to be, can you believe it):

charlvn ALL=(ALL) ALL

You can probably just copy over root's ~/.bash_profile to your new user's home directory now. Just make the prompt a little different:

PS1="\u@\h:\w$ "

Note the hash (#) has been replaced with a dollar sign ($). That's just one of the more standard ways to have things configured.

If you can log in as your new user now, and everything works, you beat the odds. Congrats and welcome, fellow OpenBSD user. :)

There is a lot more stuff I'm planning on doing with OpenBSD. The first thing will be to get Quake III Arena to work. I will probably write more posts about hacking OpenBSD later as I get time.

Please comment if you have any questions, would like any clarifications or if things don't work as I explained them here. Flames are also welcome, especially if they are of the kind "you unix nazi" and "you suck - bill rulez", etc.

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