Monthly Archives: December 2007

Ubuntu on 24C3 Congress summary

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24C3, the annual hacker congress at Berlin/Germany, is nearly over and there is not so much to say about Ubuntu. Though there had been a small Debian booth – marketing materials and stuff – there was nothing similar for Ubuntu. We discussed that earlier and actually most people thought, it’d not make that much sense as Ubuntu is not known for being the hacker favorite operating system. I guess, we should think about this next year again, as this conference gives the possibility not only to contact users but also a great bunch of possible developers.

In spite of that, this year you could notice dozens of Ubuntu driven notebooks around the congress. I met some folks interested in Ubuntu contacts and even helped out a Brazilian girl from linuxchix.org.br (greetings!) with an Ubuntu cd. So what you can summarize is the fact that Ubuntu is just a part of common usage around and that is what we like, don’t we?

Using netcat and tar for network file transfer

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Imagine you are on lan party or on the road and quickly want to transfer a file or directory to another computer. Both computer owners are just to lazy to setup something like ftp, smb, nfs. A very simple and even cross platform solution is using netcat and in case of a directory in combination with tar like the following steps. I will just show you how to use it without compression for a directory. Fell free to play around. You can test it locally of course.

1. The sender

The sender has to call netcat in server mode and pipe content into it. The next line tells tar to build a tarball and write it to standard output which is redirected via a pipe to netcat. Netcat is told to start in server mode (-l), listen on port 7878 (-p 7878) and shutdown itself after waiting 10 seconds after having seen an end of file in standard input (-q 10):

$ tar c directory | nc -q 10 -l -p 7878

2. The receiver

The receiver has to call netcat and tell him to Continue reading →

Ubuntu on OLPC XO anonye?

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While waiting for the delivery of my One Laptop per Child OLPC XO, ordered through the great Give one Get One program (you can order until 31. of December and yes, you can do it from outside U.S. e.g. Europe too, as the FAQ shows you), I’s nearly unhappy to see a lot of guys walking around with an OLPC XO at the annualy ccc hacker convention 24C3 while being nearly jealous :) Despite of dozens of OLPCs around here, at this time, nobody could answer my question whether there already had been serious efforts to bring Ubuntu to the little green thingy with the official bunny ears.

As far as Google knows, there exists an Ubuntu launchpad blueprint entitled “Ubuntu for the One Lap Top Per Child Project“, that brings up some hope but to be honest, there are dozens of interesting blueprints. So is anybody of you right now dealing with an installation of Ubuntu on the XO or knows someone around who does so?

(And yes, I know, that the Eeepc is a nice tool, too. But it just has no bunny ears, you know.)

Getting around the Gnome network manager

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Know that problem? You are somewhere around and got special network settings like a wlan essid and static ip ressources. Your Gnome network manager which you really like as it finally brought easy wpa2/wpa/wep detection and setup to you prefers dhcp and skips around the networks like mad.

So this is the time to consider going back to the roots: Switch it off. Just disable the network manager by right clicking on it. Now open /etc/network/interfaces in an editor of your choice with sudo/root rights and add something like this:

iface mynetwork inet static
address 1.2.3.4
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 1.2.3.1
wireless-essid NAME-OF-WLAN

Fill this with your specific details and yes, just choose a name for the interface you like. Don’t edit an existing one, don’t think about connecting it to a real interface right now.

After you have done this, open Continue reading →

Meeting Ubuntu folks at 24C3

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It’s chaos congress time! The annual hacker congress taking place at Berlin(Germany) from 27. to 30. of December has opened its doors for hundreds of hackers, nerds, geeks and people who just like to talk about tech stuff at the of the year. If you are around Berlin, consider taking a ride there and check out the schedule for talks and workshops.

Of course Ubuntu people will hang around there, too. If you like to meet at least a couple of them: We will meet today, 27. of December at 15:15 at the info desk. Don’t expect dozens but definitely more than one. Some of us are native Berlin folks so this is a good situation for retrieving information about local stuff.

Meet you there!

We will probably organize another meeting. Join the Ubuntu Berlin mailing list or the not so up to date wiki for more details. We have an irc channel #ubuntu-berlin on Freenode, too.

Hello to Ubuntu from Berlin

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If everything is up and running this should be my first posting as a new Ubuntu member on Planet Ubuntu.

Some words about me? Just check out my application form for Ubuntu membership which you can find on the official wiki: CasparClemensMierau. So, as you might notice there, my focus in my involvement with Ubuntu lies on Berlin based local activities like organizing our well known release parties (Yes, we nearly hit the one hundred person mark last time – with dj, lectures and all might imagine. Expect more to come. Next time we will show you even more.) but also more technical stuff like bug reporting/triaging.

So that’s for now. Feel free to contact me under “damokles at ubuntu dot com” for questions regarding Ubuntu in Berlin/Germany or check out our current page UbuntuBerlin.