Last year I bought Jaime and Kezia one of the first "sub-notebooks" specially designed for young children and only £100.
The philosophy for such computers originated with Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project at the Massachusett's Institute of Technology (MIT) which aims to produce a USD 100 computer for children in the developing world that can be wound-up or solar-powered.
OLPC hasn't quite achieved its aim of USD 100 (exchange rates last year, current economic crisis etc etc) but is getting there. MIT are not the world's greatest commercial operators in comparison with outfits such as Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Dell etc but as OLPC began to take off they began to see the potential off in the educational market of the developing world, huge markets (just imagine Brazil or India for such technology) and have started to promote their own sub-notebooks.
OLPC woke up to the interest of such notebooks to the children and their parents in the "developed world". The developed world also has poverty, although most often not as extreme as that found in the developing world. So, in response the corporate IT giants are responding to the MIT OLPC project by producing sub-notebooks aimed at both adult and child markets in both worlds. IBM, with its corporate might much greater than than that of MITs, has begun trying it "bribe" developing world governments to use their equivalent (with MS? check) as a better product to OLPC.
In the face of such competition OLPC has launched its own counter-marketing compaign - aimed at "socially-aware" developed-world parents "Buy one for your child and we'll finance one for a child in the developing world."
They use a Linux operating system (which immediately got my sympathy).
Then the French-based company Elonex, through its UK subsidiary, launched the child-focussed Elonex One series of sub-notebooks for around £100. I leapt at it!
Again a Linux OS (although proprietary preventing hacking parents from messing around and the machine has no BIOS setup allowing me to boot from a USB drive), it is truely a marvellous machine). But as with all machines designed by adults for children, they are never 100% child-proof. So Jaime, Kezia or Elonex managed to bust it.
My brother tried an OS reload and a hardware reset in accordance wth website instructions but to no avail. The power and disk lights remained red. So he phoned technical support on a national rate (not a premium commercial) phone number ...
... and was put through to Justin in Cape Town, South Africa.
After Justin had gone through his checklist (to which my brother responded "Done that, done that ...") , Justin instructed him to send it back to the factory.
A week later a new machine with a new version of the OS arrives.
I'm impressed!
Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts
Friday, April 17, 2009
Friday, December 5, 2008
Bluetooth
Not a widespread technology in this part of the world.
On Wednesday it decided to piss down as I exited the house to get into the car to go to work. It was raining cats and dogs as I got out of the car upon arrival at work. As I walked down the corridor to sign the timesheet, colleagues remarked I looked like a wet chicken.
As I walked back across the compound (still raining) to my air-conditioned office, I feared "Oh shit! This is a recipe for a chill..." and then I remembered ...
Several months ago we helped out a scientist from the University of Texas by installing a seismic monitoring station on our worksite. Essentially a probe about a metre into the ground into a complex toy connected to a Sony Clie PDA. Each month we would download the data onto a portable drive, plug the drive into a computer and send him the data. I was amazed that an earthquake in the Philippines could be sensed offshore western central Africa!
Anyway, after supervising the installation of the seismic monitoring station, he upped and left. Just before he left, he walked into my office with a plastic supermarket bag saying "Here's a bunch of old clothes which I'm sure you can find a good home for."
The bag laid, knotted closed, ignored, on a chair in my office for months ... until Wednesday when I decided to see if it had a dry shirt in it - and sure enough, although somewhat dirty, it did.
But to my great surprise, under the pile of dirty clothes, there was a weird ellipsoid device with a separate USB widget made by Logitech. Took it over to our computer centre (rain had become a drizzle) where my IT colleague Danny works.
First we worked out it was a laser pointer and then by plugging in the USB widget and toggling the switch on the back it became a mouse. Plug-and-Play under Windows XP. Took it back to my own work computer and it worked a dream.
As it is not work property, I took it home but worried about Bluetooth mice under Linux. Download numerous libraries? Went to the Logitech site - nothing about Linux. Surfed Bluetooth/Linux/Ubuntu 7.10, found a couple of useful links which I printed out.
Got home - plugged the USB widget into a USB port, fired up Ubuntu 7.10 and it was sensed immediately!
Beats the touchpad!
P.S. This is not a new notebook - Compaq Presario 2100.
On Wednesday it decided to piss down as I exited the house to get into the car to go to work. It was raining cats and dogs as I got out of the car upon arrival at work. As I walked down the corridor to sign the timesheet, colleagues remarked I looked like a wet chicken.
As I walked back across the compound (still raining) to my air-conditioned office, I feared "Oh shit! This is a recipe for a chill..." and then I remembered ...
Several months ago we helped out a scientist from the University of Texas by installing a seismic monitoring station on our worksite. Essentially a probe about a metre into the ground into a complex toy connected to a Sony Clie PDA. Each month we would download the data onto a portable drive, plug the drive into a computer and send him the data. I was amazed that an earthquake in the Philippines could be sensed offshore western central Africa!
Anyway, after supervising the installation of the seismic monitoring station, he upped and left. Just before he left, he walked into my office with a plastic supermarket bag saying "Here's a bunch of old clothes which I'm sure you can find a good home for."
The bag laid, knotted closed, ignored, on a chair in my office for months ... until Wednesday when I decided to see if it had a dry shirt in it - and sure enough, although somewhat dirty, it did.
But to my great surprise, under the pile of dirty clothes, there was a weird ellipsoid device with a separate USB widget made by Logitech. Took it over to our computer centre (rain had become a drizzle) where my IT colleague Danny works.
First we worked out it was a laser pointer and then by plugging in the USB widget and toggling the switch on the back it became a mouse. Plug-and-Play under Windows XP. Took it back to my own work computer and it worked a dream.
As it is not work property, I took it home but worried about Bluetooth mice under Linux. Download numerous libraries? Went to the Logitech site - nothing about Linux. Surfed Bluetooth/Linux/Ubuntu 7.10, found a couple of useful links which I printed out.
Got home - plugged the USB widget into a USB port, fired up Ubuntu 7.10 and it was sensed immediately!
Beats the touchpad!
P.S. This is not a new notebook - Compaq Presario 2100.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Three Government Departments
My FOIA request as to the cost of the DoH's contract with Microsoft received a pretty negative response.
I referred in a previous post to the National Audit Office's reports on the National Programme for IT in the NHS i.e. NHS Connecting for Health. In their first report, dated June 2006. the NAO had the following to say about the NHS contract with Microsoft:
"In November 2004 NHS Connecting for Health negotiated renewal of the Department's NHS-wide licence for Microsoft desktop products, which NHS Connecting for Health estimates will save £330 million over nine years with a firm commitment only for the first three years.
Microsoft agreed that the price paid by the NHS would continuously match the lowest charged anywhere in the world. The agreed price for their committed volume was substantially lower than that previously negotiated by the Office of Government Commerce (on a non-commitment basis) on behalf of UK government users. Microsoft also committed to spend £40 million on developing an NHS user interface to help standardise healthcare applications for clinicians, increasing efficiency and reducing the risk of clinical error.
NHS Connecting for Health also considered open source solutions for NHS IT but decided against doing so for two reasons;
The NHS already had an installed base of 500,000 Microsoft environments and users were familiar with Microsoft, and;
Open source solutions are not necessarily cheaper: they may be cheaper to acquire but the total cost of ownership is material when ongoing support, maintenance and training for users are taken into account."
The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) is a department of HM Treasury responsibly for providing advice to all government departments, both national and local, on contracting etc.
In 2002 it produced a report "Open Source Software - Guidance on implementing UK Government Policy". It followed this up with a report "Open Source Software Trials in Government".
It is widely recognised in the IT industry that Unix or "Unix-derivative" operating systems (e.g. Linux) are far more appropriate for servers, particularly webservers. Hence the DoH/NHS will be storing its electronic patient records on Unix (Solaris) servers using Oracle (rather than Microsoft's SQL Server or even the open source MySQL) as its database software.
The desktop environment is more controversial, it being cited that Linux desktops are "insufficiently mature".
The OGC seeked to examine this along with the cost benefits of using open source software (henceforth OSS).
I have some limited experience of deploying Linux desktops to regular users - my employer donated some legacy machines to respectively the national radio station, the national television station, a local primary school and the local municipal council's library.
The machines originally ran Windows NT 4.0. As a government organisation and as Microsoft no longer supports NT 4.0 we had to wipe the hard disks and, after some evaluation, I installed Xubuntu Linux (a light version of Ubuntu Linux suited to machines with small hard disks and little RAM).
The first deployment at the national radio station was a disaster - as soon as I turned my back they had a local technician come in and install a pirated copy of Windows XP.
At the television they took to it immediately - two machines for video editing with firewire ports so they could hook up their DVCAMs and download video clips using the open source KinoDV and edit them using the open source Cinelerra suite. Machines were also provided to the director's secretary and the admin. department - pleased as punch, OpenOffice and Mozilla Firefox no problem at all.
The machine offered to the director of the local primary school couldn't even handle the memory requirements of OpenOffice so I made Abiword the default wordprocessor. Both OpenOffice and Abiword will save documents in a variety of formats including MSWord doc and plain text txt (useful for blogging as Google's Blogger does not like doc embedded headers).
One of the case studies in the OGC report is particularly relevant to this post - that of the Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, Ireland.
Prior to its adoption of OSS it operated a mixed environment of MS Windows and Unix. The hospital had 3000 directly employed staff, and used 22 Linux servers, 14 Windows servers, a Hewlett-Packard HP3000 mainframe for primary clincal applications and a HP Unix system for financial applications. In 2002 there were 1000 workstations.
The hospital was experiencing severe financial problems and started to look at where it could make cost-savings - including in IT.
The IT department came up with the following results and subsequent implementation, between using OSS and proprietary Closed Source Software:
Email, online forms, laboratory procedures and results, patient care records etc - and even X-ray imaging - could all be dealt with by OSS.
There was some resistance to the Linux desktop GUI - Beaumont purchased an e-learning course to deal with this.
GUIs (there are various) have come a long way in the six years since Beaumont made the change. As I related above, our relatively unsophisticated IT users here in Sao Tome have taken to the Ubuntu-family GUIs as ducks to water.
The OGC strongly recommends that government entities should not tie themselves into closed proprietry systems - the NHS have chosen to do just that!
I referred in a previous post to the National Audit Office's reports on the National Programme for IT in the NHS i.e. NHS Connecting for Health. In their first report, dated June 2006. the NAO had the following to say about the NHS contract with Microsoft:
"In November 2004 NHS Connecting for Health negotiated renewal of the Department's NHS-wide licence for Microsoft desktop products, which NHS Connecting for Health estimates will save £330 million over nine years with a firm commitment only for the first three years.
Microsoft agreed that the price paid by the NHS would continuously match the lowest charged anywhere in the world. The agreed price for their committed volume was substantially lower than that previously negotiated by the Office of Government Commerce (on a non-commitment basis) on behalf of UK government users. Microsoft also committed to spend £40 million on developing an NHS user interface to help standardise healthcare applications for clinicians, increasing efficiency and reducing the risk of clinical error.
NHS Connecting for Health also considered open source solutions for NHS IT but decided against doing so for two reasons;
The NHS already had an installed base of 500,000 Microsoft environments and users were familiar with Microsoft, and;
Open source solutions are not necessarily cheaper: they may be cheaper to acquire but the total cost of ownership is material when ongoing support, maintenance and training for users are taken into account."
The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) is a department of HM Treasury responsibly for providing advice to all government departments, both national and local, on contracting etc.
In 2002 it produced a report "Open Source Software - Guidance on implementing UK Government Policy". It followed this up with a report "Open Source Software Trials in Government".
It is widely recognised in the IT industry that Unix or "Unix-derivative" operating systems (e.g. Linux) are far more appropriate for servers, particularly webservers. Hence the DoH/NHS will be storing its electronic patient records on Unix (Solaris) servers using Oracle (rather than Microsoft's SQL Server or even the open source MySQL) as its database software.
The desktop environment is more controversial, it being cited that Linux desktops are "insufficiently mature".
The OGC seeked to examine this along with the cost benefits of using open source software (henceforth OSS).
I have some limited experience of deploying Linux desktops to regular users - my employer donated some legacy machines to respectively the national radio station, the national television station, a local primary school and the local municipal council's library.
The machines originally ran Windows NT 4.0. As a government organisation and as Microsoft no longer supports NT 4.0 we had to wipe the hard disks and, after some evaluation, I installed Xubuntu Linux (a light version of Ubuntu Linux suited to machines with small hard disks and little RAM).
The first deployment at the national radio station was a disaster - as soon as I turned my back they had a local technician come in and install a pirated copy of Windows XP.
At the television they took to it immediately - two machines for video editing with firewire ports so they could hook up their DVCAMs and download video clips using the open source KinoDV and edit them using the open source Cinelerra suite. Machines were also provided to the director's secretary and the admin. department - pleased as punch, OpenOffice and Mozilla Firefox no problem at all.
The machine offered to the director of the local primary school couldn't even handle the memory requirements of OpenOffice so I made Abiword the default wordprocessor. Both OpenOffice and Abiword will save documents in a variety of formats including MSWord doc and plain text txt (useful for blogging as Google's Blogger does not like doc embedded headers).
One of the case studies in the OGC report is particularly relevant to this post - that of the Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, Ireland.
Prior to its adoption of OSS it operated a mixed environment of MS Windows and Unix. The hospital had 3000 directly employed staff, and used 22 Linux servers, 14 Windows servers, a Hewlett-Packard HP3000 mainframe for primary clincal applications and a HP Unix system for financial applications. In 2002 there were 1000 workstations.
The hospital was experiencing severe financial problems and started to look at where it could make cost-savings - including in IT.
The IT department came up with the following results and subsequent implementation, between using OSS and proprietary Closed Source Software:
Email, online forms, laboratory procedures and results, patient care records etc - and even X-ray imaging - could all be dealt with by OSS.
There was some resistance to the Linux desktop GUI - Beaumont purchased an e-learning course to deal with this.
GUIs (there are various) have come a long way in the six years since Beaumont made the change. As I related above, our relatively unsophisticated IT users here in Sao Tome have taken to the Ubuntu-family GUIs as ducks to water.
The OGC strongly recommends that government entities should not tie themselves into closed proprietry systems - the NHS have chosen to do just that!
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Tech Talk - Slax Linux on USB Stick, Qemu and CD/DVD ISO Files
I've been wanting to run an Operating System emulator ever since I bought the May 2008 edition of Linux Magazine accompanied by a Live DVD running Ubuntu 7.10 with the Innotek VirtualBox emulator with five other distro image files (.iso) on the DVD and automatically loaded into the Innotek emulator. But, being IT thick, I've failed to work out how to configure Innotek VirtualBox.
I have a 40 GB hard disk equally divided into a Windows XP partition (used 0.1 %) and an Ubuntu 7.10 partition (installed from aforesaid DVD and previously used 99.9%).
Then my boss asked me to prepare some legacy and redundant machines to donate to various local institutions. It would have been irresponsible of us to donate legacy machines with the no-longer-supported MS Windows NT 4.0 and no current anti-virus software + I was obliged to "zap" the hard-disks so no data remained. So I needed to install something supported on a small machine, both hard-disk and RAM, that would run applications, some specialised, and in our local language. I played around with various "lite" Linux distributions - some thing like Fedora or SuSe would be far too demanding for these machines - and finally, I came across Xubuntu 7.04 - perfect! Local language, wordprocessor (AbiWord) and spreadsheet programs that can open and save to MS formats etc etc. Rather than using Gnome or KDE as memory hungry GUIs it uses the Xfce GUI.
This got me interested interested in even smaller Linux distros with a GUI and applications - and I came across Slax on which I am writing this and will save to MS Word format before copying into the blog. Based on another Linux distro, Knoppix which itself derived from major Linux distro Debian, Slax will run from a USB stick - as small as 256 MB. You can carry the whole bloody thing around with you on a USB stick - applications and all. Change your machine's BIOS settings to boot from the USB stick and you're away.
Default applications - a word-processor, a spreadsheet, web-browser, email, video and music players, pdf viewer, Paint program, photo viewer, an instant messenger etc etc. Non-default applications (given I now have Slax installed on aand boot from a 4 GB USB stick) - Skype, Google Earth etc etc ...
... and an Operating System Emulator!
QEMU
As I am running Qemu from my USB stick, I could find little advice on the Qemu site, support groups etc on how to do this. Everyone running Qemu seems to be running it and the emulated OS from their hard-drive.
Final solutions:
1. You first to have create a .img file somewhere to run the OS .img file. I creaated the .img file on my hard-drive for spaace reasons ... take into consideration the size of the OS you want to emulate.
To do this (logged on as "root") I opened a Terminal window and issued the command: qemu-img create /mnt/hda4/hd.img 5G which created a hard-disk image file of 5 GB on my hard-disk Ubuntu partition. Choose the size of your .img file - I'm sure the larger the better.
2. I then downloaded a GUI Qemu Launcher that allows me to select the OS.iso file.
3. The Qemu Launcher launches the OS from the LiveDVD OS with the command qemu -kernel-kqemu -cdrom + location/OSfilename.iso. kqemu speeds up qemu.
More things to do ... I'd like to run my Windows XP partition emulated under my Linux ... but all the Qemu advice I've seen is that you need to this from a Windows installation disk (.iso).
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
BBC iPlayer revisited
(Note: I've had to revise this post since I wrote it on Monday - as today I've dismally failed to get the BBC iPlayer to work under Ubuntu Linux. Details under Update at the end of the post - I do have to admit and post my failure as well).
I predict this will be less popular than my previous posts on accessing the BBC iPlayer from overseas (they stop you by identifying the country from which your IP address originaates) as I am sure, regrettably, that most of my readers are Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer users.
Anyway, to summarise our previous BBC iPlayer hacks (here and here):
a) One can anonymise your network IP address by using the Tor Onion router that basically sends out your network location through a Tor relay router in another location with a different IP address/location. One can configure Tor to be geographically specific as to where your request exits on to the web. So in this case you need a Tor relay in the UK in the torrc file.
b) One needs to tell your browser not to broadcast your IP address. For this you need to route your web requests through a proxy server. This will set the IP address of your machine as the internal IP address of every machine in the world (127.0.0.1) and send out your web requests through a non-standard http port (8118 as opposed to the standard http port of 8008/8088). Initially I used the extenal proxy server, Privoxy and then discovered a Firefox proxyserver add-on named Foxyproxy.
c) The BBC iPlayer only works with Microsoft's (Windows) Internet Explorer (what is it with this MS and UK public institutions?). An enterprising soul wrote an an add-on for Windows Firefox that allows you to open an IE tab within Mozilla Firefox. And BBC iPlayer (streaming) worked a dream.Unfortunately, the Foxyproxy add-on does not work with Linux Firefox.
So I've been looking for at a way of getting BBC iPlayer to work under Linux.
There are Linux versions of Tor. There are Linux versions of Privoxy.
And today I discovered IEs 4 Linux.
A (non-Microsoft) version of Internet Explorer for Linux. Installtion was easy, as were Tor and Privoxy. Configuring all of them was easy. Worked first time.
I have one last task to do - Linux Tor GUI (Vidalia) does not show the geographicaal locations of the relays - so I need to discover the UK ones and rewrite my Tor configuration file.
Then I'll see if I can get BBC iPlayer working in Linux.
Updates:
1. I started by copying the currrent Tor UK relay ExitNodes from my Vidalia torrc on my work Windows machine to Vidalia's torrc file on my Linux machine. Seemingly starting Tor through the Vidalia GUI wouldn't force the ExitNodes to be in the UK.. So I had to start edit the torrc file in Tor's native folder and start Tor from a Terminal (/etc/init.d/tor start).
2. The Internet and web appeared to recognise my anonymity through Tor and Privoxy.
3. Although IEs 4 Linux claims to install Adobe Flash Player, necessary to stream video from the BBC iPlayer site, the BBC iPlayer site tells me I need to download Adobe Flash Player which IEs 4 Linux claims to have already installed.
4. IEs 4 Linux requires Wine (that allows Linux to run Windows products - tho' I haven't worked out how to use it yet).
Any help would be appreciated.
I predict this will be less popular than my previous posts on accessing the BBC iPlayer from overseas (they stop you by identifying the country from which your IP address originaates) as I am sure, regrettably, that most of my readers are Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer users.
Anyway, to summarise our previous BBC iPlayer hacks (here and here):
a) One can anonymise your network IP address by using the Tor Onion router that basically sends out your network location through a Tor relay router in another location with a different IP address/location. One can configure Tor to be geographically specific as to where your request exits on to the web. So in this case you need a Tor relay in the UK in the torrc file.
b) One needs to tell your browser not to broadcast your IP address. For this you need to route your web requests through a proxy server. This will set the IP address of your machine as the internal IP address of every machine in the world (127.0.0.1) and send out your web requests through a non-standard http port (8118 as opposed to the standard http port of 8008/8088). Initially I used the extenal proxy server, Privoxy and then discovered a Firefox proxyserver add-on named Foxyproxy.
c) The BBC iPlayer only works with Microsoft's (Windows) Internet Explorer (what is it with this MS and UK public institutions?). An enterprising soul wrote an an add-on for Windows Firefox that allows you to open an IE tab within Mozilla Firefox. And BBC iPlayer (streaming) worked a dream.Unfortunately, the Foxyproxy add-on does not work with Linux Firefox.
So I've been looking for at a way of getting BBC iPlayer to work under Linux.
There are Linux versions of Tor. There are Linux versions of Privoxy.
And today I discovered IEs 4 Linux.
A (non-Microsoft) version of Internet Explorer for Linux. Installtion was easy, as were Tor and Privoxy. Configuring all of them was easy. Worked first time.
I have one last task to do - Linux Tor GUI (Vidalia) does not show the geographicaal locations of the relays - so I need to discover the UK ones and rewrite my Tor configuration file.
Then I'll see if I can get BBC iPlayer working in Linux.
Updates:
1. I started by copying the currrent Tor UK relay ExitNodes from my Vidalia torrc on my work Windows machine to Vidalia's torrc file on my Linux machine. Seemingly starting Tor through the Vidalia GUI wouldn't force the ExitNodes to be in the UK.. So I had to start edit the torrc file in Tor's native folder and start Tor from a Terminal (/etc/init.d/tor start).
2. The Internet and web appeared to recognise my anonymity through Tor and Privoxy.
3. Although IEs 4 Linux claims to install Adobe Flash Player, necessary to stream video from the BBC iPlayer site, the BBC iPlayer site tells me I need to download Adobe Flash Player which IEs 4 Linux claims to have already installed.
4. IEs 4 Linux requires Wine (that allows Linux to run Windows products - tho' I haven't worked out how to use it yet).
Any help would be appreciated.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Linux User Group
The first Linux User Group between Morocco aand South Africa held its inaugural meeting tonight. Six of us met up at a local Internet cafe - Bastien, a French man working with a local environmemtal NGO, Aguinaldo from the local telecomms company (CST), Aguinaldo the owner of the Internet cafe (Club Tropicana), Bernardina from the National Meteorological Institute (NMI), Valentim the director of a local primary school and myself.
We didn't actually do very much except have a few drinks and chew the rag. It turns out that we are mostly Ubuntu (in its various versions) and Debian users. As well as its inevitable Windows machines, the NMI has a Debian machine and Bernardina has had some experience of Ubuntu whilst on training courses in Brazil. She got me to download OpenOffice a couple of weeks ago via the Synaptic Package Manager – given our slow Internet connection I left it running and walked away ... the next day she told me it was working perfectly. Valentim has a legacy machine (donated by my employer) running Xubuntu. Aguinaldo from CST says his company is planning to transition to Unix/Linux servers, Aguinaldo, owner of Club Tropicana and partner with the owner of our national domain (one of Sweden's largest ISPs), is a great fan of Ubuntu but has been limited by non-Linux support for the thin-client boxes he has been using to set up thin-client networks around the country. I discovered last week that the company making his thin-client boxes has just produced beta Linux software to support these. Bastien has managed to procure a laptop for the NGO he is working with and it is now loaded up with Ubuntu and he says the users are having no problems at all using OpenOffice. I descrbed how I had just got my US Robotics “Windows” Skype phone working on Linux. Valentim asked me to look into a Portuguese spell-checker/dictionary for AbiWord. I showed Bastien Slax running off a USB pendrive.
All-in-all it was a great success.
We didn't actually do very much except have a few drinks and chew the rag. It turns out that we are mostly Ubuntu (in its various versions) and Debian users. As well as its inevitable Windows machines, the NMI has a Debian machine and Bernardina has had some experience of Ubuntu whilst on training courses in Brazil. She got me to download OpenOffice a couple of weeks ago via the Synaptic Package Manager – given our slow Internet connection I left it running and walked away ... the next day she told me it was working perfectly. Valentim has a legacy machine (donated by my employer) running Xubuntu. Aguinaldo from CST says his company is planning to transition to Unix/Linux servers, Aguinaldo, owner of Club Tropicana and partner with the owner of our national domain (one of Sweden's largest ISPs), is a great fan of Ubuntu but has been limited by non-Linux support for the thin-client boxes he has been using to set up thin-client networks around the country. I discovered last week that the company making his thin-client boxes has just produced beta Linux software to support these. Bastien has managed to procure a laptop for the NGO he is working with and it is now loaded up with Ubuntu and he says the users are having no problems at all using OpenOffice. I descrbed how I had just got my US Robotics “Windows” Skype phone working on Linux. Valentim asked me to look into a Portuguese spell-checker/dictionary for AbiWord. I showed Bastien Slax running off a USB pendrive.
All-in-all it was a great success.
Friday, June 20, 2008
VoIP Phones
I use a US Robotics USR9601 USB VoIP phone to call Nanda on Skype. US Robotics only provide a Windows driver for it - but thanks to finding this post today I discover I can use it on Ubuntu 7.10 and Slax 6.0.7 on a USB key. In Skype Options/Sound Devices choose VoIP USB Phone (plughw: default,0) and it works a dream!
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Microsoft bribes the NHS
Thanks to Dr Penna I learn that every NHS employee can purchase Microsoft Office 2007 for £ 17.00 for use in their own home ...
Dr Penna thinks he is onto a good thing. And Microsoft's NHS website has discounts on other MS products for NHS employees. All you have to have is an NHS email address (oh shurely I can hack that ,,,).
Let us look at this in more detail on the Microsoft-NHS website ...
Microsoft has a Software Licensing Enterprise Agreement with NHS England (with similar but separate agreements with NHS Scotland and NHS Wales). The current agreement runs until 2010 and covers a range of Windows software including the Vista operating system (both Business and Enterprise editions) and a range of Microsoft products including Office. It also includes Client Access Licenses (CAL) to Windows Server and SQL database software but not the server and database software itself.
What does a CAL mean? Well, no desktop workstation will have server or database software installed on it. However, a desktop workstation within the NHS will probably need to access a server for networking and an SQL database server (for Summary Care Records?). To access a server, the desktop workstation needs a CAL. Ok, so Microsoft's licensing model screws you twice ...
But the intimation here is that the NHS is using Windows servers (Microsoft server and database software licenses are sold under a separate agreement entitled the Select Licensing programme - whatever the fuck that is). For the storage of confidential patient data, the Summary Care Record, for NHS Choices “Choose and Book” etc etc.
Why didn't Connecting for Health opt for far more secure Unix servers and Linux desktops? Or even Unix servers with Windows desktops?
Given the government's recent record on the loss of confidential data on Joe and Jane's data, given what I have learned today of Microsoft's involvement, and what I already knew of its appalling security record, my confidence in the development of the NHS Connecting for Health project has lessened x-fold.
Afterwords:
1. FAQ: “What is the NHS paying for this agreement?”
Answer: “The NHS is paying a fixed amount per year. The number of devices each year increases to cover an expected growth in the number of users. Microsoft has provided a substantial discount to the NHS based on the volume of devices covered and length of the agreement.”
Does anyone know? Can anyone tell me how to access government contracts or do I have to write a Freedom of Information Act request?
2. Certain Department of Health, but not part of the NHS, institutions are included in the Enterprise Agreement.
3. fyi Dr Penna the software does not belong to you. At 65 years old you will be without a word-processor and email client. “... so should they leave the NHS then they are required as per the terms and conditions on the web site to uninstall and return it to their Trust.”Thursday, January 17, 2008
BBC iPlayer Overseas
There has been alot of justified criticism of the BBC iPlayer which since earlier in 2007 has allowed you to download BBC domestic programming over the Internet for later viewing on your own computer without the need for an Internet connection. Just before Christmas they introduced a streaming version whereby you can view programmes over the Internet.
The criticisms are manifold and I list some below:
1. The iPlayer has, so far, only been provided for the Windows XP and Vista platforms. Linux and Macintosh forget it.
2. The programmes for download on the website are only available for 7 days (for either streaming or download).
3. Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been applied to downloaded files - after 30 days they become unplayable.
4. The iPlayer uses Microsoft´s ActiveX coding so in theory, and the BBC tells you so, you are limited to using Microsoft´s Internet Explorer browser. No Opera, Mozilla Firefox etc.
5. Users overseas are prohibited from either streaming or downloading content. The BBC´s reasoning is that UK TV (obligatory) licence payers finance BBC programming. They forget that I am paying a UK TV Licence now, that the huge UK expat community live six months abroad (missing Eastenders)and six months in the UK, or that you want to catch up with EastEnders whilst on holiday..
I have heard that criticism no. 1 can be overcome for Linux and iPlayer streaming using Wine and associated lbraries (but not for downloads). I have also heard that criticism no. 3 has been hacked.
But here I will address nos. 4 and 5 (in reverse order).
When you access a website server, your computer sends your IP address so that the website server can look up where to send its data. The BBC looks up your IP address, and as IP addresses are allocated on a geographical basis, can decide if you are a UK resident or not and make a decision whether to allow you to access their programming.
So we have to fool the BBC into thinking you are connecting from the UK.
Issue #5
The following tools and explanation are in debt to the Electronic Freedom Foundation who have done pioneering work on Internet censorship and how to get round it. And apply to Windows XP and FireFox only.
1. Download the Tor programme from http://www.torproject.org. The core programme, Tor, is an anonymiser, i.e. it hides your IP address, sending your web requests through a series of servers with their own IP addresses. The Tor programme comes with a GUI frontend called Vitalia and a locally installed firewall called Privoxy.
2. Windows installation is easy - just accept the defaults.
3. But Tor, by default randomises its default servers and exit points to the the web through its network of servers so we need to specify where the Tor network exits to the web i.e. somewhere in the UK.
4. To do this, you need to edit the Tor configuration file, named torrc, in Notepad. Find and open it. By default it is empty. Add the following lines:
StrictExitNodes 1
exitnodes figue,tor2uk4iravedahs,cbadhjkssdhjbc,ephemer,miller,onnium,Doormouse,yeti,Abby,tck90874dhfoyt304,colinwillsdorkyyahoo,clayman,gigatux
Both Vitalia (Tor) and Privoxy icons should be in your toolbar but you might have to reboot. If they are not, manually start them from the Windows Programs menu.
6. Then you need to change some settings in your browser and I will dscribe these for Mozilla FireFox. Go to Tools/Options/Advanced/Network/Connection/Settings. Tick Manual Proxy Configuration, for http enter ¨localhost¨ and port ¨8118¨. Tick the Socks v5 box.
7. In the bottom right corner of your FireFox screen you will see a button. If it says Tor Disabled, click on it to enable Tor.
7. Go to the site http://torcheck.xenobite.eu/eindex.php? and it will tell you if your Tor exit node server IP address is in the UK.
Issue #4
I hate to be tied to the Internet Explorer browser and much prefer the open-source Mozilla family of browser/email applications - SeaMonkey, FireFox, Thunderbird etc. BBC iPlayer states it will only work with Internet Explorer because it only works with Microsoft´s ActiveX controls. Bullshit!
If you are using Mozilla Firefox for Windows, download and install the plug-in from http://ietab.mozdev.org. This plug-in allows you to open IE pages in Firefox tabs. And with a right-click you can change from FF to IE renditions within FF.
My experiments showed you didn´t need to open an ¨IE Tab¨ for the streaming view but did for the Download.
Enjoy EastEnders!
Update: I downloaded the iPlayer Download Manger today and find it is also based on Kontiki - but it works in a somewhat different way in that when you hit the download button, it opens up the iPlayer download page in Internet Explorer - I haven't got enough bandwidth to download a file so I can't test whether you can download through port 8118.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Linux
Kezia got into Linux over the festive season ...
Ok, she didn't really ... but she got into Pingu. And that's a good start ...
Friday, December 14, 2007
Microsoft
... is the name of mobile discotheque here ! (I wonder if Bill will sue for trademark abuse). There are various mobile discotheques playing on the weekends and holidays, usually in the open-air. I await (and probably will for a long time) one called Linux!
Friday, September 28, 2007
Linux
As I have explained previously, my boss wants to give away a bunch of old NT 4 workstations to the local state-run media (radio, television and press agency). NT4, no longer supported by Microsoft (i.e. no security updates), the fact that we cannot buy anything (we are not an aid agency), as a government agency cannot provide pirated copies and cannot protect them from Windows viruses.
After some experimenting with different Linux versions for older machines and in our own language, I came up with the Brazilian Kurumin Lite. Flew … except CUPS and HPLINUX printer support don’t work. It is based on Debian which has a reputation as being very stable and conservative.
So I took the Kurumin machine down to the national radio last week and, guess what, it wouldn’t connect. Put in the DNS IP server addresses in the /etc/resolv.conf file etc.
Finally, after four hours of work on a Saturday morning with A. from the local ISP who knows much more about Linux than I, we discovered the switch downstairs (where we were working with the Linux box) was not connected to the switch upstairs and thus not connected to the broadband modem. Duh!
A. recommended Ubuntu. I’ve downloaded a “lite” version, Xubuntu that has multiple language options including our own and like it – the bundled word-processor (Abiword) is far superior to Kedit.
However, there seems to be a big video driver problem in that Xubuntu does not like NVidea video cards and after the initial boot from the Live CD the screen goesblack.
Later ..I’ve managed to get to a command prompt … so we will see tomorrow.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Linux in Brazil
Well, I went through DeLiLinux and Damn Small Linux … learning experiences. Then it was pointed out to me that I would need an operating system interface and applications in our home language, Portuguese.
I couldn´t find Portuguese language and keyboard support for for these flavours so googled on “Portuguese Linux” and came up with … a whole bunch of stuff!
I had forgotten that
One of the, what could be termed “middle-range”, commercial Linux flavours, Conectiva was actually developed in
Another Debian derivative is Kurumin Linux, apparently being used in the above trial, which comes with a “lite” version for older machines. It is far easier to install programs and devices through a “control panel” designed for computer users with little IT knowledge and the user interface is much more friendly. With some caveats it can use “pure” Debian program packages (suffixed deb instead of the ubiquitous .rpm packages used by Red Hat, Fedora, SuSe etc, which, seemingly, have come under some criticism).
It also uses the graphical HPLIS system for Hewlett-Packard printer installation.
As you can gather I`ve installed it on our test machine. Unfortunately, it is not available in English.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Linux
Given up on DeLiLinux (url). Liked it but not enough built-in printer support. I am now trying Damn Small Linux (DSL) () – the GUI is very nice. A larger support community than DeLiLinux
It supports HPLIS (a shell script for printer installation) but I am currently trying to get HPLIP (an X HP printer driver installer supporting far more HP printers) working, which apparently is possible, Needs Python – which doesn´t come with DSL – so currently on Python installation.
And yesterday trying to install Python it wants one of three C compilers, none of which come with come with DSL. The compiler that comes with DSL is apparently tcc Tiny C Compiler. There appear to be two possible ways around this – one to edit the installation script to look for tcc rather than the other three, the other to use the Debian command apt). So today will try again.
I am no way an expert in Linux so if any of our readers are, please feel free to add a comment with some advice.
Such problems are both an advantage and a disadvantage with Linux.
On the one hand such problems force me to look for solutions and learn. On the other, they are a pain in the neck and do demand a fairly sophisticated degree of computer literacy – your average user will certainly not have it.
The well-known large flavours of Linux, such as RedHat, SuSe, Ubuntu, do provide purchased commercial support and have large free online support communities. But small distros such as DSL and DeLiLinux have very small user bases – they are designed to be small, to run on old computers with small hard disks and little RAM.
Hands up all those still with a computer with an 801486 processor and 32 Mb of RAM?
Geeks do and we do (hey, we still have a Wang 386 running MS-DOS from 1992!).
So if we’re going to give away some Pentium machines (‘cos I’m not giving away that Wang!) with a 2 Gb hard disk and 128 Mb RAM, I need a small Linux …
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