Ok, this is completely satirical, cynical and NOT serious at all. It’s meant to make you laugh. If you don’t laugh, you may have DVHAD (Digg Visitor Humor Absence Disorder). You may need to seek professional therapy. I can recommend a good psychiatrist if you’d like.
This article is 99.7% joke. (0.3% standard deviation)
1. “First, insert the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 CD into your cup holder.”
This is the 3rd Weekly Linux Nation news report for the week, where I link to and provide some brief commentary with my opinions about the most popular stories for the week in the Linux/Unix section on the Digg.com website. I am committed to doing this every Thursday.
“Why Thursday?” you may be asking – why the hell not! Enough banter. Let’s get down to the nitty gritty.
1. Man is Dugg for donating 16,000 Linux boxes, then gets the regulatory axe
Number one with a bullet, this story is worth reading. Summary: Guy donates computers to those in need, and then the Department of Toxic Substance Control of the California Environmental Protection Agency issues him a citation for hazardous materials.
First get over the fact that the Department of Toxic Substance Control of the California Environmental Protection Agency has of way-too-long-of-a-department-name-and-should-be-shortened-asap-p.s.-add-yellow-dolphins-as-our-logo-thanks.
Second, this guy donates computers to people and organizations that could not otherwise afford to buy them.
These computers he gives away are put to good use, which would otherwise be sitting in a landfill or elsewhere, poisoning the water supply, giving cancer to baby kittens dwelling in sewers, and far, far more evil things. So where’s the problem?
Sounds like this inspector has a hair trigger up his ass.
2. OPEN SOURCE GOD: 480+ Open Source Applications
Cynical Summary: Author browses Sourceforge, Freshmeat and other similar websites, writes about it, and get a ton of diggs. If you’re looking for something new, I can assure that you will find it in this very long list, with screenshots and such – obviously quite a bit of work went into writing this article, especially with the descriptions.
Mr. Sharma, keep up the good work. This article is one in a series of “GOD” articles that have all been very exhaustive and informative. Give it a read.
Have you ever used PeerGuardian for Windows? Well good news my friend, there’s a Linux alternative available.
PeerGuardian is a program that blocks companies such as the RIAA and their affiliates (such as Media Defender) from connecting to your computer when you are running P2P software. This is not foolproof by any means, but certainly a step in the right direction.
When I used Windows, one of the programs I used to protect my online privacy was PeerGuardian. Now that I’m using Ubuntu full-time, I’d like to find an alternative.
A quick google search found that PeerGuardian actually has a Linux client, but the installation is far more difficult than another program I found called MoBlock. Not only does it come pre-setup with most of the Bluetack blocking lists, the same ones that PeerGuardian uses, but it will also utilize the eMule ipfilter.dat file format, if you’re looking for that.
Ok, now I know we’re looking at the rest of this document and saying,
“Sh!t Wayne, this looks complicated.”
It’s actually really easy if you follow it step by step, and if you have any questions, feel free to comment and I’ll do my best to help you out.
Deep breath, here we go.
First, we edit sources.list to add a repository:
gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
Paste these two lines at the end:
deb http://moblock-deb.sourceforge.net/debian feisty main
deb-src http://moblock-deb.sourceforge.net/debian feisty main
Save and Close the gedit program, just a few more commands:
gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv 9072870B
gpg --export --armor 9072870B | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install moblock-nfq
Now it’s installed! Congratulations. Now we need to configure the program so that HTTP (website) traffic is unfiltered. This program likes to be as paranoid as possible to start out with, which can be a good thing for some people.
gksu gedit /etc/moblock/moblock.conf
Look for the following section about half-way down:
WHITE_TCP_IN=""
WHITE_UDP_IN=""
WHITE_TCP_OUT=""
#WHITE_TCP_OUT="http https"
WHITE_UDP_OUT=""
WHITE_TCP_FORWARD=""
WHITE_UDP_FORWARD=""
Remove the hash (#), save and you’re done.
Run this command to test and make sure it’s working properly:
EDIT
Thanks to mbsjoblom on Digg, I missed a step.
sudo moblock-control reload
sudo moblock-control test
You should get a message something like this:
* MoBlock blocked the IP. Test succeded.
EDIT 2
Thanks to “Moblockin” there is a GUI available , which I haven’t tried out, but seems like a more user-friendly than the command line.
Now, you have no more big brother looking after you. MoBlock will automatically do it’s magic behind the scenes with no interaction from you – ever!
SCO and their recent filing for Chapter 11 Bankrupcy has generated quite a bit of buzz on various news websites.
Starting several years ago, they attempted to extort money from EVERY Fortune 1500 company who used Linux in any form, in an effort to keep their company afloat. They sent letters with veiled threats of legal action, and demanded licenses for “their” code which is inbedded in Linux. Tt was actually proven that Novell owns the code that SCO was claiming was theirs.
They’ve been in headlines ever since they started lawsuit mongering. Even after years of legal battles, they failed to prevail in the courts, and when I recently visited SCOs’ website while looking for a press release from the CEO, I noticed something immediately.
Why are there links for Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) and website design on the footer of www.sco.com? SCO is a business built on selling hardware and software, not SEO or web design.
I was searching around and I’ve compiled a list of *nix errors found on an old newsgroup archive, reformatted for your reading pleasure.
Which one is your favorite?
Most articles I write here are very simple from conception to pressing that publish button.
Usually I get an idea of “Hey, it would be cool if I could do this in Linux” and then I spend a fair chunk of time familiarizing myself with the topic as well as the solution and then I sit down and do it myself. I take notes along the way and finally I write the actual article, usually in a short period of time, since by the time I’m putting the pencil to the proverbial paper, I’ve become reasonably familiar with the topic at hand.
I’ve been working for the last 5 or 6 hours on what appears at the surface to be a very simple article. It’s about how to get your iPhone setup to use the HTTP Remote Control in VLC to control your playlists / etc.
Let’s just say that this article ended up being much more difficult than I first imagined.
I figured that I would simply enable the HTTP server in VLC, connect via Safari on the iPhone and everything would be OK. I was dead wrong. Oh, it works alright, but it doesn’t display properly, and isn’t really usable. I found this page after much searching, which had a re-themed version of the HTTP interface for PDAs and PSPs. I thought my long search was over. Wrong – the link to the Graphite theme is totally useless – it’s been out of date for quite some time now.
So I had to figure out how to do it myself.
First I started trying to download a new svn/cvs version of VLC, as I had read that 8.6c had better mobile support. That had bad news written all over it to begin with, but I persisted onwards, until my notes looked something like this (newlines ommitted to save space:
apt-get build-dep vlc libtool automake1.9 ffmpeg libavcodec-dev libpostproc-dev subversion automake libtool gettext cvs libdvdcss2 This command takes several minutes. svn co svn://svn.videolan.org/vlc/trunk vlc-trunk cd vlc-trunk; ./bootstrap Output should be Successfully bootstrapped. cd extras; cd vlc-trunk/extras svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg cd ffmpeg ./configure --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-pthreads --enable-libmp3lame make cd ~/Desktop/ wget http://downloads.videolan.org/pub/videolan/testing/vlc-0.8.6b-test1/vlc-0.8.6b-test1.tar.bz2 tar xvjf vlc-0.8.6b-test1.tar.bz2 svn co svn://svn.videolan.org/libmpeg2/ Wait.... wait... keep waiting... for that to finish. It takes a damn long time! Open up another terminal. cd ~/Desktop/ wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/mad/libmad-0.15.1b.tar.gz tar xvjf libmad-0.15.1b.tar.gz cd ~/libmad-0.15.1b ./configure make sudo make install cd ~/Desktop tar wxGTK-2.8.5.tar.bz2 cd wxGTK-2.8.5 wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wxwindows/wxGTK-2.8.5.tar.bz2 ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-wxwindows ./compile
Hmm… no good at all – way, way too complicated, even for me. I’m pretty sure I even ran a few commands that borked my VLC config file beyond repair. I don’t want tutorials I write to be so complicated that I’m writing shell scripts to do the work for you, or a person with minimal experience can’t follow my instructions since they are so convoluted and/or take HOURS to complete. In the list above, the “build-dep” package weighs in at over 100MB of packages!
How are we supposed to learn from experience if you don’t/wont/can’t do anything yourself?
In the end, what started as a simple “oh, I’ll just recompile VLC” turned into a complete nightmare. By the way, I did find the best guide on how to recompile VLC after going through most of the above by trial and error.
So now, what I’ll be doing instead, is re-writing a VLC control interface so that things look good on the iPhone. I’ll also see if my GUI can be easily adapted to Windows Mobile, it shouldn’t be difficult at all.
I’m not just doing this for myself, I’m primarily doing all this work for you, to give back to the community.
If you would like to see an improved VLC http interface for pretty much every mobile phone, pda, tablet, etc and are not already subscribed to my RSS feed or updates via email, click here to subscribe now and I’ll have something for you later this week.
Stay tuned, I’ve got lots of new and interesting things coming specifically aimed at Linux iPhone users. Strangely enough, most of them are actually applicable to Windows and Mac also.
Enjoy my rant? Subscribe to the RSS feed.
Ever want to browse your iPhones’ filesystem on your Ubuntu machine? Follow these instructions and you’ll have it working in no time flat.
This article assumes your iPhone is “out of jail” and has Installer.app installed. If you have not already gotten this part taken care of, click here for steps you need to follow first.
Bam! You’re in! Now upload ringtones, compile hello world, slice dice and serve http via apache – whatever floats your dingy.
If you aren’t running Ubuntu, it’s time to upgrade. Just kidding. On any other Linux system this is probably going to be as easy (I hope) or gentoo-style (aka difficult and useless frustration). Two utilities you might need are FUSE and SSHFS if you’re going the frustrating route.
Thanks for reading, I’ll be writing about how to get the iPhone talking with Amarok and how to get ringtones uploaded very soon.
This terrific wiki describes in detail the “tried and true” method of manually performing pretty much every step. Unfortunately, the Wine Application Database shows that iTunes has no maintainer, and is rated as “garbage” by most people.
So right there, my article I had planned about unlocking the iPhone using Linux – simply not possible, as of right now. According to Martin Aumueller, a moderator at the iPhone amarok forums,
“If you manage to get it working it won’t be easy at all:
Other than a regular ipod, the iphone does not work as a ‘usb mass storage device’. This means you can’t just mount it as a hard disk. However, it appears that people have managed to hack their iphone so that they are able to install arbitrary software on it, in particular a ssh server. Then it is possible to expose the iphones file system and mount it via fuse as sshfs. On the gtkpod-devel mailing list you could read that the format of the data on the iphone is very similar to an ipod. So they might be able to handle that shortly. As soon as the gtkpod guys have libgpod working with the iphone, you could try to compile Amarok against the updated libgpod and try to get it working.”
So I checked out the libgpod SVN, and found they had a version that worked once you had SSH running on the iPhone – which means it’s kinda pointless to use a Linux box to try and get things unlocked, because to get SSH running, you need Window or Mac, which is confirmed by Eric Betts (who also has a quick guide how to get gtkpod working), a CS major at OSU – go Beavers!
benanzo has some interesting information over at the ModMyiPhone forum:
“Linux users have been able to sync with the iPhone for awhile now. We just mount the iPhone’s FS wirelessly via sshfs, load GTKPod and sync …wirelessly.
The current SVN version of libgpod (the backend that manipulates iTunesDB) has recently implemented full support for artwork, video, calendar, contacts, podcasts etc. for the iPhone, iPT.
You can also use gnupod. In fact, with that I’ve written a script that runs on my phone that checks what wifi network i’m connected to and if it’s my home network (where my computer is) it automatically initiates syncing.
That means that whenever I get home, I don’t have to sit down at my computer, or even take my phone out of my pocket — everything syncs back and forth automatically. Beautiful.
I’m currently in the process of porting libgpod to the iPhone environment so we can integrate over-the-air downloads into iTunesDB. That basically means we can then write a GUI frontend to bashpodder (podcast client) and automatically download/sync podcasts on-the-go.
My next project will be to get internet radio running…
Shoutcast on-the-go will be sweet.”
That’s it from me, for now. Here are a bunch of links that should get you started unlocking your iPhone. I’m going to detail later on how to get the sshfs and libgpod svn working on Ubuntu.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and lastly, how to remove the iPhone AT&T SIM card. That threw me for a loop.
So far I’m enjoying the iPhone, it’s a beautiful machine – even better when running on T-Mobile.
Three words, one acronym: Midnight Commander via SSH. Damn, I really am a geek!
There’s two solutions that I’ve found. One is a native client, the other is a web based solution that acts as an SSH proxy.
I’m buying an iPhone tomorrow, and I’ll be demonstrating both solutions, plus any others that I find. I’m going to be trying to get it running on T-Mobile’s data network also, so I’ll have plenty of new material coming up within the next few days. SSH to my Smoothie, my Ubuntu box, and probably even a quick how-to use the VLC web-interface to remote control your PC.
That’s a good one – I’ll be using a glorified iPod to control my PC that’s playing music and movies.
Please subscribe to my RSS Feed on the left if you’d like to be notified when I post new articles.
I’ll be posting a new “Linux Nation” every Thursday starting today. Why Thursday? Why not. It’s a not so busy day for me, and I started it last week on Thursday, so I’ll keep doing what works.