🇺🇦BerkeleyLUG

…is to have a good Samaritan nearby use the Heimlich maneuver on your desperate person. Better yet: don’t swallow it in the first place, so you’ll never *need* to hack it up! Take my nanowife, please!

😛

No, seriously folks, I just purchased my first cell phone. For two dollars and fifty cents…such a deal! I selected the sexiest from the lot of ’em, at a thrift store on Duboce and Church: “Out of the Closet”. Now, all I needed was a phone charger and I’d be in business…which charger BTW, cost far more than the phone itself.

Now, I could finally learn what all this bruhaha is about re. “texting”. Downloaded the user guide, and…Wow, what a ridiculous waste of time, but at least I get the drift: treat your fingers like little slaves, working them to the bone till they’re all wasted from RSI and you’ll need to wear digit splints on your texting hand for the rest of your life…and you’re not even 30 yet! Or maybe even texting while crossing a busy intersection and–in your absorbed T9Word rendering–inadvertantly step on (and squash into its next life) a hapless black cat that had just veered off the sidewalk to avoid scampering under a ladder. Moving on…

Why did I buy a used cell phone? Why didn’t I just go the regular subscription route? Only because–as one who is dead set on never acquiring this new-age albatross to tether me down to a chattering network of inane blathering for a highway robbery sum–I also saw the good in acquiring a diminutive handset, just for the sake of 911…which number by law, every cell phone is required to access, *including* those that are not subscribed.

Mine is the Verizon LG VX4600, which debuted waaay back in 2003. It’s in excellent condition, battery just fine. But now that I own a cell phone, I want to *play* with it, outside and beyond the subscription realm. Or IOW, I want to learn how to *hack* the precious little silver hand robber.

So I’ve just begun the adventure, and would like to share the following cell hacking sites for others who may enjoy:

Cell Phone Hacks – How to hack your cell phone (Samsung, LG, etc)

How to Unlock Your Cell Phone for Free

Mobile Phone Resource & Community

Of course, I am limited from performing any hacks that require my own subscription, but *meh* I can handle that. Just think of all the money I’ll save! (‘Scuse me now while I figure out how to “sext” w/o a camera; maybe I can arrange smileys in some compromising position.)

😐

—
Zeke Krahlin
Free as in dandelion necklaces.

RedHat Enterprise Linux is known for it’s security and stability on servers. Later this year, Redhat will release Enterprise Linux 6.0 and CentOS will release their version shortly after. CentOS is built entirely from RedHat’s sources. They are basically the same thing minus the RedHat artwork and support. What do you think about using it on your home desktop?

I came close to using CentOS 5.5 100% at home. The downfall

was multimedia applications such as k9copy and Kdenlive. CentOS/RedHat 5 is based off Fedora 6, which is very old. However, version 6 will be based off Fedora 12 which was just surpassed by Fedora 13. Fedora 12 was a great release in my opinion because it was stable and had recent versions of all the applications that I needed. After trying the RedHat 6.0 beta, I was able to install all of my modern applications and be 100% productive at home and work.

My question to all of you out there is would you use CentOS/RedHat on your home desktop? What are your thoughts? Do the non-bleeding edge packages matter to you? My opinion now is that release 6 may be good on the desktop for a year or so before the age of the packages starts to show. How long do you think you can use enterprise Linux for?   Would you feel that you are missing out on the new desktop Linux features?

The fourth update to the Mephisto 1.10 series has been released. New features were back-ported from v11 to increase stability because the 1.10 branch is going for stability. This project is also looking for developers for new features and stronger development. If interested, please email phillip.tribble@gmail.com. Documentation engineers are also appreciated.

This program can do simple backups and syncs over a network or locally. Mephisto Backup was made with the Java programming language. The key feature of this program is the ability to backup your system to an image and copy it to a Linux Live DVD for future restoration. The user can then take that cd and move his or her system to any PC.

Location: http://mephistobackup.webhop.org/

Also, test out the v1.11 beta and submit feedback =)

I had an idea on how to make the upgrade process easier for my Fedora installation. I had Fedora 12 installed and wanted to upgrade to Fedora 13 with the same programs installed. The same concept can be applied to most distributions.

Instructions:

1. On my Fedora 12 box:
rpm -qa | cut -d – -f 1 > packages.txt

This command will print all the installed packages and remove the version information and architecture.

2. Install Fedora 13.

3. Copy packages.txt from Fedora 12 to Fedora 13.

4. Copy .repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d from Fedora 12 to Fedora 13.

5. yum install -y –skip-broken `cat packages.txt`

6. Done. =)

My backup web server has a 8GB CF card. I want to reduce the number of writes to it as much as possible to save money and keep my server healthy. I added the following to my /etc/rc.local so that the logs files are created in RAM every time the server boots. The only downfall to this is that you will not have any logs if the system crashes to diagnose the problem, oh well =)

How it works:

1. Create the ram disk directory.
2. Mount the ram file system.
3. Erase old logs.
4. Use touch to create an empty log file in the ram disk directory.
5. Link the log file in the ram disk directory to /var/log

[ /etc/rc.local ]
#Creates a tmpfs RAM disk and mount it
mkdir /ramfs;mount -t tmpfs /dev/ram0 /ramfs;mkdir /ramfs/httpd
LOG[0]=messages
LOG[1]=secure
LOG[2]=maillog
LOG[3]=yum.log
LOG[4]=rpmpkgs
LOG[5]=dmesg
LOG[6]=boot.log
LOG[7]=spooler
LOG[8]=scrollkeeper.log
LOG[9]=cron
LOG[10]=Xorg.0.log
LOG[11]=acpid
LOG[12]=btmp
LOG[13]=wtmp

LOG[14]=httpd/access_log

LOG[15]=httpd/error_log

for ((c=0;c<=15;c++))
do
rm -f /var/log/${LOG[c]};touch /ramfs/${LOG[c]};ln -s /ramfs/${LOG[c]} /var/log/${LOG[c]}
done

http://openhatch.org/ offers members of the community to contribute to open source projects even if your not a programmer.

“OpenHatch was founded in May 2009 by three alumni of the free culture and free software movements. The company was part of startup incubator Shotput Ventures‘ inaugural class.

Our core product is an open source software involvement engine. For developers, we provide tools to demonstrate and broaden their experience and expertise in the open source community. Our vision is to make the open source community better connected, more productive, and ultimately well rewarded for its expertise.” http://openhatch.org/

The Ubuntu-Manual.org is a a great project lead by Benjamin Humphrey. It is another excellent answer to the “where’s the manual?” question similar to what we have been doing with our two pamphlets designed to introduce users to Linux and as an overview of first steps after a first installation.

Documentation for new Linux users is an important element to help users transition from other operating systems.  Since users start with different background, there is difficulty in providing concise yet complete documentation for different types of users.  People need to become feel comfortable and effective using their computers. While there are many past efforts that have tried to provide good documentation for new Linux users no single guide has taken hold and become whidespread yet.

I love Android. It is flexible, feature rich and becoming more polished every day. Development is happening at a breakneck pace. It uses Linux at its core and is mostly* open-source. The asterisk is because certain elements of a typical Android install are closed, like Google’s gmail and market apps (which both have OSS alternatives) as well as some manufacturer radio integration and device drivers. There are some people in the OSS community (the same people that would be angry at me for neglecting the “FL”) that deplore the fact that there are any closed elements in Android at all; to them, I say, “keep fighting the good fight, but I’m going to use and support the best option that is currently available.” Other people (for example the author of this ill-written post that made the front page of digg http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/60849), will claim it is not open-source because Google ultimately chooses which patches from the community get accepted or not. However, as AOSP developer Jean Baptiste Queru has said, this hasn’t prevented significant opensource contributions to Android 2.x. Open-source does not mean open-decision making (just ask Mark Shuttleworth); so, these accusations are just silly, and, concluding that there is little difference between the iPhoneOS and Android is absurd.

Anyway, I think, ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. If you need proof of Android’s open nature, I point you to the fact that it is popping up in all sorts of devices without Google’s name on them: Archos tablets with their own Market, the Barnes-and-Noble Nook and AT&T phones that replace Google’s services everywhere with Yahoo. This is the real value in Android’s openness – the ability of manufacturers to use it for whatever purpose they want. And, the source code being available sure doesn’t hurt Cyanogen’s ability to make amazing ROMs for the Android phones that many of us own and love – anyone with a G1 want 2.1 on their phone?

Android also happens to have the most open software-store in the mobile world (not to mention the fact that you can install software on your Android phone from any source outside the Market whatsoever). Which leads me to the other point of this post: I have written a couple Android apps and released the source. As a developer, I didn’t have to pay an large amount of cash for the SDK or sign the ludicrous developer agreement that Apple requires for their devices (including restricting the tools you can use to write your app and limiting who you can give it to and by what means). For Android, all I had to do was download the free SDK, try out a few example apps, and off I was (granted, the second app ended up being pretty involved). So, without further ado, here are the two apps I made:

1.SquirrelCam (Available now in the Market). The ledge off my office is home to a squirrel nest every spring. We set up a webcam that utilizes the Linux OSS project web-cam server to set up a live webcam stream. The only problem? It doesn’t work in any mobile browsers (and it wouldn’t be a very nice experience even if it did). So, I wrote a android app to connect to the stream, show live video and allow the user to save frames to his/her sdcard.

HomePage: http://www.jdeslippe.com/SquirrelCam/
Source/APK: https://launchpad.net/squirrelcam

2.EMusicDownloader (Coming to the market soon.  For now, grab the apk file from launchpad). eMusic.com is an awesome DRM free music and audiobook store (I think they are the only DRM free audiobook store actually). To downloads albums and audiobooks from the site, however, you need a download manager – there are a couple open-source options for a Linux desktop. EmusicDownloader for android serves this purpose on Android phones. Allowing users to browse eMusic.com on the Android browser and then download their purchases directly to their phone using the app.  And, because the files are DRM free, you can copy them to your PC at your convenience.

HomePage: http://www.jdeslippe.com/EMusicDownloader
Source/APK: http://launchpad.net/emusicdownloader

To conclude this Android lovefest, here is a list of some of my other favorite Android apps (not developed by me) for you to try out:

Shoot U! – A super fun game by Camel Games, my favorite Android game developers.

Dropbox – If you use it on your Ubuntu machine, you’ll love the Android app.

Astrid – Open-source todo list that syncs with remember the milk = awesome

AmblingBookplayer – Awesome audiobook player/downloader for Android.

GoogleVoice – If you don’t know what GoogleVoice is… go check it out now!

Google SkyMap – Best augmented reality app ever.

WordPress – Manage wordpress sites on the go.

WordUp! – Fun word finding game.

Listen – Awesome podcast fetching app.

Boxee Remote – Control your Boxee box with your phone.

OI-Filemanager – open-source file manager

Qik/Ustream – Stream live video from your phone

Picsay – Edit photos and add amazing effects right on your phone.

Fring – Make Skype calls over 3G.

Locale – Control your phone’s behavior based on all sorts of criteria.

Shazam – Everyone knows what this one is right?

ShopSavvy – Scan barcodes to get web/local prices and reviews.

+Many more.  Come to this weeks BerkeleyLUG meeting on Sunday to see the full list.

In my opinion, Google’s web-services and Linux go together like pie and ice-cream.  Though, there are some people in this very LUG that would disagree with me about Google’s benevolence, there is no denying the quality and convenience of gmail etc…  Moreover, even though Google’s web services themselves are not open-source, they are built on top of an open framework and toolset, and Google itself sponsors some great open-source projects (chromium, android, Kernel development etc).

If you are of a like mind, you probably already use google’s services like gmail, google-voice (the best thing since sliced bread) and google reader.  Like me, you might have been in a constant search for a notifier applet for your taskbar for these services.  I have used CheckGMail for a long time, and then docky’s builtin gmail applet, but I have now found a real winner after reading a post at OMG!Ubuntu.  It’s called googsystray; it’s one program that looks great and notifies you of new messages in gmail, wave, gvoice and google reader in your taskbar.  It comes with a lot of nice features.  For example, you can send SMS messages with google-voice right from the applet.

Here are a couple screenshots:

And here is one screen cap from the original OMG!Ubuntu Article where more details can be found:

Go ahead, follow the link above, grab the .deb and give it a whirl.