nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

Another distro I recently checked out due to its candy floss quality, and I don't meant to say that in a disparaging way, is Bodhi Linux. The system is based on complete simplicity as the name sort of suggests. By using enlightenment, its able to allow for some spectacular screen candy, though as many of us know, e17 isn't exactly completely bug free, and could cause the occasional headache. I certainly wouldn't put it on work machines, a quick test ofj this by installing for some ubuntu knowledgeable buddies proved that. The differences are just too much for most people to overcome, even though I am the first to admit that its and easier OS to use and much easier to tinker the internals.

Unfortunately people want what they know.... something they've used multiple times, though that doesn't mean they care whether that start button has an ubuntu logo, fedora, windows, or even mac... The systems just have to be me moderately similar... at least for kids and young adults...

I suppose thats why Ubuntu's unity system is really catching on, as it makes moderate changes, but still gives the user something new that actually improves the user experience... Usability is everything my friends...

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I'ts certainly been a while since I posted anything, but I figured, if u have nothing worthwhile posting, don't. Well here is something worthwhile I think:

Edu Jam

The idea here is to represent the latest advancements in techology using not the XO laptops, Sugar on a Stick, LTS Sugar, or Sugar , the operating system running on multiple environments and embedded devices. Right now it stands head to head with both Android and iOS, but the big difference is that sugar was never meant to be or designed as a toy to be played with, so that later on kids might migrate to the extremely popular MS Office or even Oracle openoffice.org, becoming another one of the zombies running their lives uncreativealy through the rat race.

In any case, it seems that nature is taking things into its own hands. Both players seem to have come to the market just a little late. Apple slightly got it with its online ability to edit documents of any kind, thoughb with severe restrictions and regulations, and Google went straght for the juggular vein, allowing any user to use its office suite for free, completely compatible with previous incantations of their competitors. They got what the others just didn't appreciate or understand... I'm talking about the cloud baby, Yes... it may seem a stupid misnomer... but its very real in business terms, and Google knows it. It is really just an extension of what already was, web 2.0, web 3.0, and so on.

But lets break it down a bit. We now have smartphones, tablets, iphones, ipods, apples's flopped TV, gmail, youtube, itunes, facebook, twitter, and google's 2 crown jewels, search and Android.

Had you asked me 2 years ago, I would have said we live in boring times, but the blatant backstabing that seems to have become common place on wallstreeet and even Silicon Valley can really only mean one thing. With the lack of a trusting society, having been taught, be it on the streets of major cities, or prep schools where manners and all that crap was spoonfed to the youngsters that now walk down the halls of our ivy leauge colleges, only to be leading hthe country in a couple of years, becoming celebrities that even us skeptics thought impossible.

Yes, those individuals who ran goldman sachs into the ground, Lehmman brothers, bankrupt 2 days before anyone took notice. And hey.... lets not forget whole countries going bankrupt because of our notion that people are inhrently NOT greedy (newsflash, apart from a very very small minority... they absolutelyt are)... I speak of Iceland, who lost 10 times its GDP, Portugal, whose figures I forget but aren't really important. Today, even the EU cannot find ways to REGULATE its economy again. For more information on that, watch the documentary narrated by Matt Damon, "Inside Job", it will certainly make you think carefully about where you next invest your money :-)

So Where do we go from here?

Ok, so I started a little rough right? But if I stood up like all the ex presidents adn even our new golden boy, an simply said.... its business as ususal, that we had a couple of problems in the middle east, but that all in all the economy was geting better., but that due to certain past events he was not able to make any of his promises true. Using the same excuse ever predecessor used before him... that he'd been left with a situation caused by previous presidents.... So... we stand at a breaking point.

Our World leader cannot help to increase educational spending. My answer to that is something that stuck with me for months and haunted me:

Deep in a Spanish village , a kid came to, he knew I was a teacher, implementing a large scale educational project based on Linux. He said.... how come my 2 borthers of 17 are forced to go to military service, when they could be advancing their knoweldge, things they could use for the future, by using these academic systems you are putting in. I felt silent, becuase I had no reasonable explantaion to give the young boy.

So, I ask you, with utmost humility, could u find it in your heart to help a child obtain a laptop for under 200 dollars. Or at least donate so that vounteers like me and others at Edu Jam can try and give everyone an equal possibility at an equal education? We.... we merry few, we take care of the rest, which includes but is certainly not limited to:

• Working 12-18 hour days to update the XO computers and csutomise the laptops so that what children learn is both culturally and academcally correct.
• Create social Networking portals whereby children can publicise their unique takes on the current state of the planet, either using tools like wordpress, wikipedia, or habari
• Work with more advanced tools (sometimes called content managment systems) like Joomla and Drupal, though to be honest, they really are all the same and do the same things, perhaps slightly diffferently, but the important thing is not to get confused by the mirirad of terms. They basically all can make u a journalist or even a you tube VJ.

I'm sure I've forgotten many things, but I have been priveledged enough to be a teacher for almost 10 years, and quite an efficient science engineer for almost 15.

My main point here is is that there is no one stopping you from learning how to code in Python, Django, Photohsop, Gimp, Inkscape, Scibus, Blender 3D. Its just about picking your poison, or perhaps a couple of them.

The open source community has made it easy for us, now its time to give something BACK!

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Fine, so sharing multiple formats that include reverse engineered file systems that are/were proprietary to creating new ones which are supposed to be just plug and play, is close to rocket science.

Well it would be if it worked in most cases. I'll give you a brief example:

This morning I decided I would take all my pc equipment, my drives, my CD drives, DVD drives, usb sticks, etc etc and on and. I would then try and make an efficient (efficient as can be with multiple Oses and multiple hubs, network cards running at various speeds, and a host of external hotpluggable hard drives, both SATA and IDE to test and see what was on them after the years and years of collecting.

In fact, I'm currently staring at a pile of about 8 SATA drives totaling about 3.5 TBs, and a stack of 12 IDES which god knows might even hit the 1.5 TB mark. NOw... having all of that working together in a more or less redundant method across the network (I figure its the perfect opportunity to brush up on my bash shell coding skills to do a plethora of things from managing all that data, checking how corrupt the disks are and somehow forecasting when its time to get rid of the problem kids, setting up a nifty search system that fits MY naming conventions, not some complex XMBC like system that tries to do everything, moves stuff around and then leaves you more lost than when u started)

Anyway, as always, I digress. This entry was really to complain about the STILL dire problems that the average user will have to share a set of files. First, of course, me being old school, I go to the terminal, set up my smbpasswd -u and set up his password. Perfect...

Then I open the file/s or directory/ies that I'd like to share, but of of course only Root can do that, so here comes problem number one... Do I know the name of the sharing program so I could run it using gksudo from terminal? Nope... bet you don't either.... hint: It's not nautilus.

Ok... Then I think, ah but wait, I can open it from the control panel, so I go to preferences -> Personal File Sharing and repeat the operation... Suddenly I'm bombarded with questions to do with blue tooth sharing, which is really not what I was after... I just wanted regular old samba to allow me to move files to and from my Oses with too many questions. But If go ahead and fill in all the questions, where there is no mention of sharing via samba or nfs or anything.

I right click on the directory I've now been trying to share for 10 minutes and the shre this folder tick box is ticked, and there 2 other options which I choose not to touch in case they influence the final outcome. I then click 'add share' and get the following message:
'net usershare' returned error 255: net usershare add: share name 'myname' is already a valid system user name'

So I think to myself, OK, so there is a conflict because I tried to speed up the process manually of creating a smb user and password which the system seems to be unable to parse (why? heaven knows... Has ubuntu decided to change the way samba details are stored too?"

Fine, I think to myself, let me use a different share name, say share, I then hit create share with a new name aptly named share and get an even more complex explanation on how to get this working. By this time I am starting to get amused (as I tend too, having been involved in the Unix/Linux/OSX worlds far longer than the MS world, you can see me slowly admitting to the n.1 argument that regular folks mention when using a Linux based machine for anything that slides over into a little bit of systems administration work.

I know, that, had a client been with me at this point it would be extremely difficult to convince them that Linux is in fact a better, more efficient and easier solution to set up than a multiple windows based system.

But 'not being one to give up easily, I continue the journey. This time I have the following sprawled across the screen:

'net usershare' returned error 255: net usershare add: cannot share path /home/nubae as we are restricted to only sharing directories we own.
Ask the administrator to add the line "usershare owner only = false"
to the [global] section of the smb.conf to allow this.

Sooo.... away we go again, to command line and try adding that, hoping this will finally allow me to share the ONE directory. I restart the smbd service from the command line with service smbd restart (though admittedly, I'm still more used to doing a /etc/init.d/command restart.)

Trying to change any of the other tick boxes (allow others to create and delete files, or allow guest access) fails on the premise that permissions could not be changed for the directory nubae.

I decide to start from the very beginning, deleting the nubae directory, removing samba completely with --purge and giving a go from scratch in case I've missed something, but so far, you can imagine I'm grinning out of frustration more than out of anything else. I delete the whole user account from within the user setting visual GUI, to make sure there are no lingering side effects. And start again by creating the user through the GUI.

Vy recreating the account through the user settings control panel, I suddenly have no problems, even when it comes to sharing the account. It simply asks me if I want to install Samba and away it goes.

Now... if it had been obvious from the start that one can no longer touch the terminal without causing serious damage I wouldn't be so annoyed by this. But it seems like more and more, anyone with a terminal based systems administration background is being left in the dark, while Ubuntu developers and Canonical decide upon their own best practices.

This is not very different from what windows forces its users to go through, and it is yet another reason I am become more and more alienated by those who promise to stick to standards while secretly doing whatever they want without letting people know what is really going on.

I state this not as a newbie, but as someone that's been involved in development through countless areas of Linux, and never have I seen so much secrecy surrounding the introduction of new ways of doing absolutely fundamental things (adding users) without being told that if you use the terminal, you can screw up everything.

This is unacceptable. Either make things backwards compatible, or give an explanation somewhere on the new/right way of doing things. Making users jump through hoops is no way to get a larger user base, in fact, in my case, its made me actually start running XP along side Ubuntu... something I thought I'd never do....

sigh.... There is of course always OS X, which if I really have to be honest about... its the system of choice, if one has the money. Everything just works, it has a unix core so you dont have to feel like you are in unfamiliar territory, and it looks damn cool.

So the moral of this story is... Developers... please... work united to give people a unified experience that they can manipulate either in a format that has been charted out for them (we L(i)(u)nix people don't like that at all) or let us once more be free, and make the gui stuff work along side the true tried and tested command line environment configuration files. Its not that hard...

Any developer worth their salt will tell you that editing existing config files and making a gui that does the same is JUST as easy as doing some proprietary...

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To limit my exposure for getting sued, I've obviously used acronyms for various parts of the telecom names in question. This article really started forming itself in the back of my mind over the last 6 months to a year. But like all politically motivated pieces (the ones I tend to shy away from because they seem to have litte to no effect on the status quo of the telecommunications industry. This old boy's club seems quite impenetrable by an ordinary citizen like myself.

But I digress. My current beef is really with just one provider, although that is not to say I haven't had problems with all of them. (To date, that would be Jazzzzztel, Vodaphlone, movlisun,and even I-and-go (yo-i.....)

One would think that with competition comes innovation, better customer service, and an overall more respective attitude to the clients that are lining their pockets with ever increasing funds, while they (quite successfully I might add) sell us a whole new set of plans and gadgets that have a life expectancy of about 3-5 months.

The recent smartphone craze hasn't helped much, with people prefering to go hungry and beg in the streens in order to get a piece of technology that has been touted by technophiles and futurists as the only way to stay plugged into the sprawl.

For me, the sprawl is an extension to web 2.0, where apps no longer need to live on web browsers of sorts or proprietary systems like AOL, or Prodigy (the now seemingly daft ideas about how a small group of people could control something as big as the Net itself), but could be a lateral amalgamation of different commuication methods via different hardware designs (usually closed and not open source) but driven by the market forces of pure capitalism itself.

You don't have to look far to understand what might seem jiberish to some. We have Facebook to keep us in contact with our immedate, and more and more distant surroundings. For parents it gives them a sometimes false sense of security knowing what is going on with their sons and daughters, their friends, the friends of their friends. Indeed Social Networking is quickly becoming the number one pass time in America, with the rest of the planet following suite. Then for those who cringe at these new terminologies like web 2.0 (yes, I am one of them) we have our own underworld of controlled bits and bytes, encrypted, anonymised, and usually located in places where 'piracy/borrowing' are generally accepted. The only rule being, if one mentions even the name of such a location you'll be banned from the entire "scene"

So what is this "scene." Well believe it or not there are approximately 500-1000 scene groups all focusing on archiving what to them seem the most interesting topic for them. It more ore less evens itself out, with film, video, tv, documentaries, self help, music, and even magic all being carefully extraced from whatever medium, be it a satellite feed, scanning of a book, ripping of a CD, or recording straight to .avi

This is by no means an easy task, and the organistation isn't far from the efficiency and work ethic found by people wokring in a nuclear power station. Most of these people range between the ages of 15-40. Of course there are still some old school folks, you know, the one who coud create animation sequences in assembler that fit in less than a couple of KB.

I grew up just as computers were beginning to be conidered items of necessity. But by items of necessity I mean, spreadsheets for formatting and storing paychecks, letters written in a wordprocesser threatening others of pneding legal suits, and large sets of tools that fit under a corporate brand that promised to alleviate the stresses of yesteryear. No more secretaries requires (the computer was supposed to do that. No more invenory checks and salary handouts. No no.... the computer did that all magically for you.

Of course it didn't take long for that famous phrase FUBAR to hit the computer jargon (Fracked up beyond all recognition.) But like so many things that seemed to be here to stay, the entire Informtation Technology infrastructure changed, with monopolies taking over, which in turn dropped prices and increased quality of service.

But once more, here we are again in soething akin to the wildwest of telephony, the netbook and smartphone era. And make no mistake, if you thought the "web" was what everyone thought was the informtion super highway, I'm afraid that was just a taste of th real super highway.

The best way to think about it is that pretty much every new gadget that haseven the slightest piece of hardare in it, has or will have, the capability of communcating with another pieve of hardware. The common language isn't even important anymore. There are abstraction layers (translation devices that translate from one component to another) and this then brings us a step closer to total internationalisation, meaning, a child in Bangladesh can perfectly communicate with an American boy.

What this means for entertainment and education is a total marriage, that can really only be seen as something positive. Of course, resitance for such technology is only natural, but I really do believe, that with time, it wiill be embraced like all techonological adances.

I have really digressed about my inital complaint though, Eves though it seems we are light years from really serious tehcnolical breakthroughs, we advance both quickly and enthusiasyically. Why then... is is that customer service from the 5 telecom oligopolies really hasn't advanved at all, Perhaps this is different in other counties...

If you are still reading now, at least you get to read the juicy part. I bought a HTC Tattoo (A smartphone with the google Android OS on it) which for the most part, I was reallly quite amazed at what that little phone can do. Really, we should be calling it a mini computer, because it can do more than your average 4-5 year old desktop or laptop. The othe great thing was that almost 70% of the apps were free... showing that the open source solution lives on viably and healthily on these little computers.

Of course, there are still teething problems, but at least I can make a skype call without having to be in a wifi cafe (take that I phone) or run more than one app conccurently (again, take that iphone.) So... away I go using it in such a way without imagining what would happen if something happend to it. Of ocurse. 2 months in, my worst fears came true, when the touch screen stopped working. I went straight to the shop, where they told me theyd have to send it to the central to get it replace. After much screaming and shouting over the phone, I still don't have my telephone, and I really don't know what to think anymore. Vodaphone has always had relatively good rates and customer service. But this is just unnaceptable. I'm going to paste my order so its obvious how long I have now been waiting for a phone. They did of course give me a replacement phone, but it was a 2 euro alcatel phone that can do about as much as a calculator.

Well... here's hoping
David Van Assche
IT Specialist

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