Matt Daubneys Blog

OK Ladies and Gents, having been away for a little bit for various reasons, it’s time to get the support ball rolling. First things First, a date for your diaries.

On the 26th of August I’m organising a meeting to formally create the group from those interested parties and to set out some priorities. Initially we need to focus on some given areas where people ask for support. Once we have one or two of these running we can then branch out into other areas and help improve things where necessary.

I’ll stick a formal agenda on the UK Wiki, but if people want to start thinking about the following things it would be appreciated.

• How to report (issues/progress/problems fixed) for statistical purposes
• Initial Targets (UK Section of the Forums/IRC/Stack Exchange/Mailing Lists?)
• Blogging problems and resolutions
• Training
  • How
  • Where
  • What to train on (problem solving techniques/diagnosis howto/?)
  • What materials do the training team have for this
  • Mentoring?
• How to put people in contact with the correct person to solve their issue

This is not a comprehensive list of the issues we’ll need to cover, but gives a good starting point to mull over. If you want to do a mini implimentation of something yourself, have a go and let us know how it goes at the meeting.

If people want to get hold of me individually to go through any issues, you can get me in jabber (daubers at REMOVE THIS jabber dot org) or on irc.freenode.net in #ubuntu-uk (nick of daubers) or by email on (matt at REMOVE THIS TOO daubers dot co dot uk)

Alan Bell of The Open Learning Centre has set up an Ubuntu-UK Community Member Profile Roulette . This stemmed from the Ubuntu Irish Teams Profile of the Day, which is part of a masters project by a Dublin student to get people within the Irish community to get to know each other better. Both of these projects are fantastic ideas, and will hopefully help get more people to create Lanchpad profiles and wiki pages!

Oh, also, todays entry of the profile roulette was me!

If anyone doesn’t already know, I’m on a push to see if community support can be improved. When I gave a talk at Oggcamp on this, someone suggested that the solution might become more apparent if I could understand what drove people to help support others.

I’ve sat and thought about this for a couple of weeks now, and as I sit here with a mug of tea mulling this over a bit more I think this is actually a very hard question to answer. I think it boils down to the following.

I help other people because I dislike feeling useless, and the people I look up to in the community helped me feel less useless by providing that support when I was learning.

I have a terrible habit of projecting my own feelings onto others. If I feel useless about something, then without thinking, I believe that other people would feel the same way. Due to the way I felt in that position, and how I that was solved. It seems fair to me that I do the same for others as others had done for me.

Now, that is my view, what I really need to know is why other people support new users. What is it that drives you and what could be done to help encourage people to improve the way in which they support others.

Please, please let me know. The more data I can collect, the better the solution I hope I can present back to the community to help improve things.

For a little while now I’ve noticed that the community based support for Ubuntu is a little patchy. Admittedly, this is largely in reference to IRC, but I think there are some simple things that could be done to improve this situation. In consultation with the Ubuntu-UK Loco and a few other groups, an etherpad session was started and some discussion has gone on around that. What has come from this exercise is a general set of guidelines for supporting new users. At the last Loco meeting I was actioned to create this into a wiki page to see if some more discussion can be formed, and then a vote will be taken at the next meeting to see if the Loco should adopt them.

Now, to me these seem fairly sensible guidelines, but what would be better is if people took just a few minutes to read over them and comment on whether or not they think they are feasible. The more eyeballs that see this document, the better it can be and the more consistent support we can offer new users. Having something like this would also help set users expectations of community support, which should help us to get users expecting an instant solution from volunteers.

So, please just spend a few minutes looking these over and let me know what you think.

Having had MythTV running on a monitor for a little while, complete with it’s scheduling fantasticness, I finally caved to getting a machine to play it out to the big TV. An obvious candidate for this was the, very affordable, Acer Aspire Revo.

The spec of the machine itself is not that impressive when compared to modern desktops, a 1.6GHz single core Intel Atom, a lonely GB of RAM, a 1Gb LAN connection, an atheros 802.11n wireless chipset and no real expansion capabilities. The saving grace of all this is he Nvidia ION chipset inside the box. Using a media player that can utilise libvdpau this means that using the onboard hdmi port it can play HD video quite happily at 1080p \o/

The machine I purchased supposedly came with Linux pre-installed, but when I first switched it on all it did was through a screen full of “99″‘s . This didn’t bother me overmuch as I’d already intended to stick Mythbuntu on it. Sticking Mythbuntu on a bootable USB stick and then installing it took about an hour in total using the fast connection in my office. Once installed, I plugged it into my TV at home, booted it up and …. nothing. It just didn’t appear on the TV. A little reading around the interwebs and it appears that the HDMI connection is not discovered unless the TV is switched on before the machine is booted. So switch on the telle, stick it on the correct channel, reboot and it just works!

After connecting it to the wireless network and letting the mythtv frontend find the already running backend. Turns out the onboard wireless doesn’t play nice with my existing router. While playing back SD stuff was fine, there just wasn’t the bandwidth stable enough to stream HD stuff across the network. A little research and a touch of thought later, I had my hands on 2 Devolo 200Mbps ethernet over powerline adapters. These have allowed me to watch HD content I can get from the BBC iPlayer on the big TV!

How cool is that \o/

Having seen other peoples success of growing chillis from seed (specifically theopensourcerer) I thought this year I’d have a go. So in what could possibly be said to be a familiar style…..

Packets of Chilli Seeds

I’m only attempting three types of chillis this year, cayenne long hot, navaho and scotch bonnet. In the interest of science I’m trying theopensourcers method of germinating the seeds, and tomorrow evening will be attempting some in plain pots with compost in a heated propagator. This may mean I end up with an absolutley enormous glut of chillis, but I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Here are the seeds ready for the airing cupboard.

Seeds Ready for the airing cupboard

I’m also in the process of building an automated watering system for these once they’re in the greenhouse using arduinos, and hopefully connecting to a server in the house using an easy radio link to report the conditions in the greenhouse Many thanks to theopensourcerer for the information he’s posted on his blog.

A couple of weeks ago now I bought myself a new laptop. My poor Dell had been battered too much and was finally giving in to it’s poor treatment. Dead pixels, missing keys, noisy fans, it just had to be put out of it’s misery. So now I have a shiny new Packard Bell.

I’d actually been in the market for a Thinkpad, based on their reputation of being practically indestructible. I soon chaged my mind after being promised deliveries that never arrived by a few online retailers. I ended up going to PC World, pretty much ignoring the sales staff and wandering around with my Pre checking compatibility and pricing on the interwebs. I’ve been a bit skeptical of the build quality of Packard Bell for a little while, but this seems quite a solid machine. Time will tell whether it remains that way or so I must admit, but one can hope!

Spec wise, the machine is a 2.2GHz Core2Duo (T6600), it comes with 4GB of RAM, a 320GB HDD and an nvidia Geforce G210M card with 512MB of dedicated graphics memory. It’s got a broadcom wireless chipset (b/g/n) and a gigabit ethernet port. All of this works out of the box with Ubuntu bar one. The driver for the NVIDIA card has a nasty bug. It doesn’t seem to detect the EDID information correctly for the monitor, so some hackery is required in the xorg.conf to prevent you getting 6 miniscreens instead of 1, or for getting a horribly fuzzy screen. Nvidia has recognised this bug, so hopefully it’ll get fixed soon. The open source nv driver doesn’t have this bug, but you lose a lot of the shiny 3d effects and so on, which is a bit of a downside.

The webcam in he lid also works out of the box.

All in all, it seems quite an able machine, but time will tell if I made the right decision or not!

Friday marks the beggining of a new year under the gregorian calender, so it’s a good time to reflect on various things from the last year, and suggest some changes for the next.

Last year was, for 6 months at least, a rubbish year. With Uni going rapidly down hill, being diagnosed with depression, and everything generally going wrong, I’d rather forget most of it. The last few months have been significantly better. Acquired myself a CCNA, and a job doing things that I enjoy.

So what needs to change next year? Well, in no particular order:

1. One of the downsides of having a job that is largely programming is that I don’t get that much exercise any more which has led to me putting on some weight. Ideally I’d like to turn this around, but would initially be happy for it to be stemmed. Hopefully a bit of Wii fit every other night will help this while it’s dark in the evenings, and as it lightens up I’ll try and start doing some walking or some such.
2. Start putting away more moneys, now my debts have gone (hooray) I can start to put away some pennies for the future.
3. I intend to increase my participation with Ubuntu community in the coming year as well. Hopefully culminating in gaining Ubuntu membership. In order to achieve this, one evening a week will be dedicated to contributing to Ubuntu, be it through support, bug squashing, testing or whatever. This will probably be aimed at Wednesday evenings, but will shift around a little as real life things will undoubtedly get in the way.

I think 3 is enough to be getting on with. Hopefully this year will be better than the last

I finally got one of those mobile broadband dongle thingies in the post this week, and I’m impressed. Admittedly I don’t get any 3 signal at home, so it’s a bit useless there, but once I’m out and about its fantastic. I’m sat in
starucks writing this on my eee and it’s really quite quick. Much quicker than hanging the eee of my mobile, whic
h I used to do previously.

The dongle I’ve got is a ZTE MF627, which was a bit of a fiddle to set up on chruncheee, but I’ll do a screencast
later on showing how to do it. Anyway, my coffee is getting cold!

It’s been etched into my diary now, so I’m going to both Lug Radio Live 2009 and Oggcamp. Both of these will be quite exciting for me as they’ll be the first large scale linux events I’ve been too, however judging from the general community populace, both should be quite friendly and cool!

I’ll be travelling up to wolverhampton from the Newbury/Reading area, so if anyones heading up from that area as well, let me know and see if we can organise some kind of lift share. Hope to see a lot of you there!