The Blog from Mercian Labels & Security Labels International

dell mini 9 running ubuntu netbook remix

I’ve had problems recently connecting my Dell mini 9 using ubuntu netbook remix to a t-mobile  3G modem over bluetooth as previously blogged, which I think is related to this ubuntu bluetooth bug.  I had some time yesterday and set about finding a fix to this problem to enable me to get web access on the netbook anywhere I have my phone and a 3G cable.

The solution was to connect the phone to the netbook using a normal USB cable and select “PC suite transfer” on the nokia e90.  Then setup a new “mobile broadband” connection under system>network connections>mobile broadband, in my case t-mobile UK.  Then unplug and replug in the usb cable and the new t-mobile connection appears in the network connections icon in the top right of the page.  Click and it just connects.

Ok, we give in. You can now follow our posts on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MercianLabels .

I’ve been to lugradio live a couple of times, and am hoping that the new Oggcamp event will be the replacement FOSS social and networking event.  I’ve got relatives in Liverpool, so have it in my diary to visit Oggcamp 2010 this year.  Hopefully see you there!  If you want to catch up with me and discuss our experiences of open source soft3ware in a UK SME environment then please post a comment and we can try and meet.

15/2/10 NOTE: this post has content that is seen as inaccurate by Miserware and you are advised to read all the text before forming conclusions to give Miserware a fair hearing.

I used a power meter to measure the electric draw of the PC using and not using miserware

Interested by some of Alan’s posts at the Open Sourcerer, I’ve been conducting an experiment in recent weeks with the Miserware power saving software that claims to save energy by better controlling CPU management.  I run a new (late 2009) pc with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 (4x 2.33) CPU with a 450w PowerCool 80+, and have given it a go.  However, I didnt rely on the software’s own claimed power savings, I put an electric meter between the PC’s plug and the socket, and directly measured the power usage over 3 weeks, both with and without the software installed, set at my current domestic electricity rate pkwh.

Here is my data:

What I did was to run the PC without the software installed for 4 days from 19-23 Jan, installed miserware from 23 Jan to 8 Feb, then ran the PC again from 8 Feb until today.  Congratulations to the miserware support though, when I had issues installing they were right on the ball, and FOC.

The results are pretty unimpressive.  Despite a claimed 15% power saving claimed by the software (sudo grep Estimated\ energy /var/log/* )  it actually made very little difference at all.  In fact, if you average out the estimated annual usage for the 2 periods without running miserware ((52.22+54.07)/2) = 53.15 and compare that to the annual cost running miserware of £51.77, you see a 2.7% power saving thats worth about £2.30 a year.  OK, its a saving, but its not worth a lot to me.

The scary observation is that if you leave a PC on 24/7, its going to cost you over fifty quid a year at current online dual fuel electricity tariff rates!

A couple of months ago I started getting into running.  I’ve always found running really boring, even at the gym watching TV, listening to music whilst pounding the pavement, or whatever.  However, I’ve now discovered the secret – podcasts.

Download any podcast on a specialised subject that you enjoy, but dont get time to listen to normally, load it onto your MP3 player, and get out there and enjoy the fresh air whilst losing weight, getting fit and all that good stuff.

To get you started, here are some good podcasts that I regularly download and listen too whilst running:

1. Shot of Jaq -twice weekly 10 minute podcasts on technology from the legendary Jono Bacon + “Aq”
2. Prime Ministers Questions – the UK’ weekly political punchup
3. Small Biz Pod – small business podcast with some very good interviews
4. FLOSS – weekly open source podcast
5. The Naked Scientists – science podcast from some boffins

I’d love to find some more good ones on similar themes – please comment on this post if you can suggest any!

I have been using a cowon iaudio iplayer for playing MP3s for some time now, as its the only small mp3 player I could find that mounted natively in linux without special software that needed to be run under WINE or similar.

Today I had a problem whereby after a power cut where the unit was charging and the unmount had not been done “properly”, it refused to mount in any other way but “read only”, and no amount of CHMOD 777 ing would solve it (see this post also).  In the end I found the solution was simple but brutal.

1. copy the SYSTEM directory to a different device over USB
2. reformat using ubuntu linux system>adminitration>disk utility in FAT32
3. copy the directory back and any files you want to listen to
4. it then works.

Ok, you have to recopy all the files back again, and at 15GB capacity thats a few hours of USB transfer, but its the only way I could find.

USB mounting under linux just isnt as forgiving under linux as windows, as I’ve previously blogged abut, and thats a shame.

opusvl is our new open source support provider

Since Senokian Solutions Ltd ceased trading earlier this year we have been in negotiations for a new supplier of open source software support for our systems.  Today we can signed up with Opus VL in Rugby, who we have met and look very capable of meeting our needs.  We look forward to working with the people there.

It wasnt easy finding quality suppliers of open source support in the UK, in fact there appear to be about a handful or less.  Hopefully with the rise and rise of linux, this will change.

the BBC covers the upcoming Karmic Koala release

With the recent release of Windows 7 getting widespread publicity as a half decent replacement for Vista, widely acknowledged to be a failure, its great to see the BBC covering the new Ubuntu release on their homepage yesterday.  You can read all about it here.  I will be using it, and its free, as in speech as well as beer. Give it a go – just download the CD ISO image and try it from your CD drive without it evening touching your hard drive!

Ginger6.com sell PCs with no operating systesm that work with Ubuntu

My home PC was a 9 year old Dell heavyweight box (1ghtz pentium with 512mb ram running ubuntu 9.04) given to me years ago, and it finally gave up its lust for life recently and started tripping my home electrics.

Looking for a new supplier of a good value linux desktop I initially ordered from Efficient PC, but after some days of no response I cancelled the order by email and bought a custom made box from a local supplier to us, Ginger6 in Wolverhampton.  Of course Dell have now stopped selling ubuntu desktops, and for good value linux preinstalled hardwere there are few options in the uk now.  Looking at the Efficient PC site today they have ceased trading.  Ginger6 duly constructed the machine (entry level intel quad core, 4gb sdramm) in 2 days and shipped it over. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 first time with no hassles (”it just works”) and was up and running in under 30 mins after waiting for the hard drive to format.

I’m really pleased with it, ubuntu runs all 4 processors with no config, and its so much quicker than my old machine, especially when running multiple apps / firefox tabs at the same time.  Thank you again to the community who make such fantastic software available to download for free, and I’m happy to recommend Ginger6 as a good value supplier of PC hardware that works with ubuntu linux straight out of the box.  Now all I have to do is persude them to sell ubuntu preinstalled!

A technical post here… this weekend we had a problem where one of the partitions on our zimbra email server reached 100% capacity, and resulted in us doing a hard restart.  As a consequence of this on restart we could not get zimbra MTA to start, the problem being that postfix thought it was already running.  The solution for anyone who finds this is  as follows, pasted to gether from some notes from “Dave”, who fixed it. “The problem was that whenever postfix is started, it runs postalias. Postalias takes files like /etc/aliases and translates them into machine-readable files.  There was an aliases.db file hanging round in /etc, owned by root. When zimbra tried to start up wuth the zimbra id, it couldn’t touch the stale file.  Unfortunately, this hung it rather than erroring out cleanly. I cleaned up the stale files, and started zimbra using root and /etc/init.d/zimbra start. That reset the necesary permissions and recreated the files.”.  I hope this helps if you are a Zimbra user that finds that same problem.

2009 chilli crop

One of the UK’s leading bloggers on open source software, Alan Lord (aka the Open Sourcerer) got me thinking some time ago about growing chilli plants.  Alan has just posted pictures of his 2009 chilli crop, and so I think its only fair that I post mine.  Not quite as impressive, but then again most of my conservatory was taken over with monster tomato plants this summer!  Next year I shall try harder – it was good fun and easy to grow chillis.  This is what they look like all preserved.

preserved chillis for winter curries

If you are intereted in preserving chillis, I’ve followed this recipie (with some additional water).

When we first started to explore the possibility of moving to open source in 2007, I looked into a number of possible open source support companies and settled on working with Senokian Solutions Ltd, who have been very good for us.  Unfortunately Senokian Solutions Ltd have now ceased trading, and their entrepreneurial MD Jake Stride has moved onto other areas of open source software development with their Tactile CRM product (which I use – its good).  A new company, Senokian Internet Ltd look over our support contract but this business has recently been sold on to a highly capable web hosting company who have agreed to support us as well as they can, but do not specialise in the type of support that we will need long term.

Therefore I may be back in the market for a new supplier of open source software support.  Ideally someone UK based (Midlands would be perfect but not necessary) who knows Ubuntu, Zimbra, Postgresql and Trixbox.  I have to say that I dont know of such a company that offers this – can anyone recommend one please?  Lots of individuals I know have specific skills I can call on, but in the long term a company that aspires to offer open source support as a main part of its business would be ideal.

If you are, or know of such a business, please contact me by email or post a comment – Thank you.

This script from Dan at Zomgee is excellent, and allows you to compile your own XPI firefox addon in under 2 minutes (using nothing more than a basic text editor and your mailserver domain name) that makes all mailto: links open up in Zimbra, not evolution of similar.  Its easy and works for me using Zimbra client on an ubuntu 9.04 linux machine with Firefox 3.0.12.  Nice work Dan.

The concept of taking older and redundant windows PCs, triageing them, clean installing linux and passing the machines onto good homes is an excellent one, and cuts out an awful lot of legal problems.  Its being done in the USA and I wonder when it will happen in the uk?

If anyone knows if and when this is going to happen, please let me know and we have a bunch of old machnes we can contribute from our factory in Cannock. Come to think of it, if anyone local to Cannock wants a PC with Linux installed, let me know your circumstances and reasons and I’ll see what we can do.

At Mercian Labels we have benefited hugely from open source software, but unfortunately it is rare that we actually get a chance to help out anyone from the community back.  However, this week it has been a pleasure to host Josh Holland, who has been here hacking us with a new VPN connection on our ubuntu server and the technical stuff needed to integrate Zimbra email into our own CRM. Josh found us online whilst looking for an open source sys admin role for a weeks work experience.

This is Josh’s write up of his experiences this week.

“I am a 16 year old 6th Former taking A levels in Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry, and have been doing work experience on the Mercian Labels computer system for the past week.

I have set up a VPN to allow access to the network when offsite, and written (most of) an extension to the bespoke CMS that extracts all the emails to and from a certain address from the Zimbra groupware server and displays them. I have learnt the syntax of iptables, got to know my way around Zimbra and found out a lot about networking.

Would I have been able to do this without open source and the community around it? I doubt it, because the freedom to download, use and redistribute it allows people like me to try things out without having to spend a fortune on something. For example, I can run my own server on £80 per year with no setup costs because all the software is free. If I didn’t have a server, I would not have got the skills I used this week and would use in a real job, becuase Windows Server (say) costs a fortune and keeps people like me from being able to teach themselves.

Also, the community is a fantastic asset. When I hit a snag in setting up of OpenVPN, I was able to turn to the openvpn-users mailing list and get it working like a charm. Almost every major open source project has support mailing lists populated by volunteers, ready to help anyone who has a problem.

Getting all this for free is fantastic, and something that is very hard to find anywhere else. Open source systems have opened the world of IT for me; they have allowed me to teach myself the skills to work in a whole new sector of employment.”

Thanks to Josh for his hard work this week.  We have really benefited from his expertise, and hope that he does well in whatever career path he takes.  It has been a pleasure Josh!

The blogosphere has been awash today with the news that Google are launching their own operating system.  Of course its easy to say I told you so, but I can confess to putting Chris DeBona, Google’s Open Source Manager on the spot at Lugradio live 2007 Q&As as to when Google would release its own Linux Distro, as strategically it didnt seem sensible for them not to do so.  I didnt believe his reply then that they had no plans to! Anyway, its based on the Linux Kernel, open source, and hopefully using Debian in some way – the Universe is excellent.

I really like my Dell netbook running ubuntu netbook remix, and it will take a lot to get me to move to Chrome OS.  I dont use Google’s Chrome browser as I am suspicious of the data privacy, and qute frankly unless Chrome OS is much, much, better than Ubuntu, then my reply is simply no thank you.  Google is a fantastic business and dare I say it, a free service to the planet’s online community, but if its working towards running my OS, browser, search experience, email and office files, then thats a monopoly I would rather do without.

We are recruiting a new member to our team and they have asked for a blackberry as their email device of choice, something we have never used before in house.  Having looked into this, it seems like a real can of worms.

What I would expect is that there is an easy way of connecting a zimbra server to a blackberry device using a protocol similar to IMAP or the nokia exchange server that I use on my E90 (works with Zimbra fine), but no, you have to have a separate windows box running a piece of blackberry middleware software that only connects to MSSQL type software, to which a special zimbra add on connects to .

What a faff, and I’m not doing this.  Blackberry have just lost a sale becasue the dont support Zimbra.  If you agree, consider signing this petition to ask RIM to natively support Zimbra.

In the meantime, I’m going to get a smartphone that does support zimbra like the HTC or nokia E90 we current use.

We have been longstanding customers of Nildram broadband, and recently upgraded one of our lines to the latest generation of high upload speed line offering upto 16mb down / 2.5mb up using annex m. Anyone considering this service may be interested in these results:
EXISTING NETGEAR DG834 v4 ROUTER (allegedly not annex m compatible but still works fine with 5.01.09 firmware):
connection speed 14.64 mb down / 1.17mb up
3 x speedtest.net results:
1) 10.61 / 0.62
2) 10.80 / 0.65
3) 11.24 / 0.73

NEW THOMSON ROUTER FROM NILDRAM:
connection speed 14.34 down / 1.14 up
3 x speedtest.net results:
1) 9.85 / 0.7
2) 8.59 / 0.55
3) 10.45 / 0.72

As you can see the new router Nildram claim that we need is slightly slower, but in any case is nowhere near the 16.00 / 2.5 claimed for the new service. I  wish I did the same test before they “upgraded” the line, but from memory it was about 8mb down / 0.5 up – certainly not a lot different.

Conclusion: – dont buy a new modem if you want this service, as its not worth it.

I am a huge fan of the firefox update scanner as previously blogged, in that it saves me a lot of time (and hurts when its not there!).  Recently I’ve discovered that you can backup and restore or transfer the websites you are monitoring with ease in a remarkably simple way that I coudnt find anywhere on the web.

All your websites being scanned are stored in your bookmarks, so if you backup all your bookmarks using the bookmark manager in firefox, it will save them all.  you can then import them onto the new machine (in my case my new netbook) once you have installed the plugin on the new machine.  And hey presto, you are monitoring the same websites on the new machine.  If you really want mobility, email the exported bookmarks file to your web email account, and you can install it on any machine anywhere at any time that has firefox.

dell mini 9 running ubuntu netbook remix

I have recently taken delivery of a Dell Mini 9 that came preinstalled with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.  I’ve upgraded the operating system to the latest Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook remix to make it boot faster and so its consistent with my laptop.  Pictured above is it with the charger and the bag I also bought from Dell.

Overall I’m really pleased with it, it small, light, the battery lasts for hours (like 4 hours+) and ideal as a netbook.  The downside is the keyboard can be difficult to type on as the keys are just so close together and I must have fat fingers!

It boots in 42 seconds from cold, and come out of suspend by opening the lid in 5 seconds flat (I kid you not). I have connected it as a 3G modem over bluetooth to my Nokia E90 by using the hack previoulsy published for my laptop so I can use it on wifi and 3G anywhere where there is a signal.

And it was only £199 inc vat -  a bargain.  I would recommend this as a really goog value netbook solution, and as always with Ubuntu, it just works.

I was contacted by the publishers of this new book recently and offered a copy for review of a new book written to support users of Trixbox such as us. Well I’ve read through it, and this is my opinion.

I have never really gone looking for a book such as this, as in most circumstances when we need support I look on google or call our IT support company.  In this respect I dont know what the competition is for a Trixbox support book, but I get the impression that this is a ‘first’.

Overall, I really liked the book, as it uses plain language that a non sys admin can understand to explain what Trixbox is, what it isnt , and how to install, configure and trouble shoot it.  There are simple explanation of lots of functions that I have learnt about the hard way in here, and having read the book, I wish that I had done so before configuring it myself, as it would have saved lots of time, probably about 10 hours of iterative learning.  In this respect, for £28 its very good value. When you put this in the context of the cost of a traditional small business phone system at £5K-£20K – its amazing value as trixbox is of course free and open source.

There are some problems that you just wont solve by using this book and non experienced sys admin.  The major IP network range problem we had that nearly destroyed our migration is not even mentioned in the book .

So, my advice is to buy this book to learn if Trixbox is for you, or if you want to learn how to configure a working system.  Its not going to solve all your installation problems like that mentoned above or instaling ISDN cards, but its a start. It will be a very useful reference for us moving forward – I’m now off to try the direct fax to PDF feature I didnt even know existed now that I’ve read the book!

Its available from here.

Disclosure: I’ve been given a free copy of the book to review and keep, but am under no other pressure or commercial interest in respect of this book.

Gor anyone that didnt know about this new development, there is a great post on the new Microsoft Office SP2 supporting open document formats here.

Netbooks have become increasingly poplar over the past year, and it has become apparent over the past few weeks that having a ‘pool’ one would be very useful for the business for a few reasons:

• Rich (our IT manager) can take it when he is away from home in case he needs remote access ‘in case of emergency’
• I can use it when travelling on business and holiday to work more efficiently than I can do on my Nokia e90, particularly on the train.
• My co-diretor can use it when overseas or on client visits.

My criteria are:

• it must be a small and light netbook type device
• it must have 3g support, as in many places there just isnt wifi
• it must run ubuntu, preferably the ubuntu UNR version designed for netbooks

I’ve really struggled to fit this brief, as there sem to be so few netbooks with 3g.  The Acer Aspire One A110-A 3G seems possible, but it does not ship with ubuntu and seems quote dear.  There is a Asus Eee PC 3.5g modem listed on its website, but I cannt see anywhere to buy it.

The idea of a small, SSD drive netbook device just for mobile use is quite attractive, but it must come with 3g to make it viable for me.  Can anybody recommend such a device?

Last night, whilst I was asleep, I set my laptop to download and upgrade by laptop from 8.10 to 9.04 on my Compaq nx6125 laptop.  It just worked.  You can find out more about the new release here.  After 20 mins of use, I cannt see a lot of big new features as most of the work on this release appears to be at the kernel level with faster load times and more support for wireless / 3G cards.  Its nice to have the latest Open Office 3.0 release and Firefox 3.0.9 though.

It is just quite amazing that the community has provides such good software for “free”, and I an very pleased to use and advocate it.  Thank you to the community for your work in relation to this latest release.

This article on the BBC today got me thinking – what will microsot sell when the world becomes more focussed on browsers than operating systems?  Already I actually already spend 95%+ of my time on my laptop in Firefox (Zimbra, Toodledo, our MIS and other websites), and as long as the operating system supports this, I’m pretty happy.

Maybe Ive missed the point, but is Microsoft’s Midori a downloadable operating environment?  What a world it would be if every client machine just booted up into a browser only, and you downloaded your “desktop” and “user space” over the web, meaning your online world was remotely stored whereever you go.  A sort of remote desktop world for everybody by default, where all the processing was server side and there was an immense “cloud” of “thin terminals”.

Time to up my medication…

A story by Matt Asay prompted me to look up this graph from statcounter.com

and according to this story, Firefox (v3) is now the most widely used browser in Europe, surpassing IE (v7).  Thats a fantastic achievement for the community who built, develop and maintain Firefox.  Its my browser of choice by far, its superb, and I’m really pleased to see it get the adoption it deserves.

For those who enjoy a more satirical outlook on life, today’s Daily Mash article on the launch of Windows 7 should be enjoyable.

As previously posted, Business Link West Midlands, are running the West Midlands IT Expo on March 31 in Birmingham.  Phil from Outserve is using us as a case study in part of his presentation, so please come along if you wish to hear more and learn about open source and IT in the west midlands region. Apparently this event is going to attract in excess of 1,000 people, and its going to be a cracking day.

We have recently recruited Dave, our new website designer, who being from a windows background has not really clicked with our linux platform and so has swapped back to Windows (whilst I was on holiday!).  I thought someone may be interested in his experience and rational, so here goes:

“After being a Windows user for 14 years, the move back from linux was a choice that had to be made based on old habits and autonomy picked up from prolonged use. I don’t feel windows is any better as an operating system, or any better as a tool in aiding web design. What I did feel was I couldn’t work as efficiently without the software and menus that I have grown accustomed to. I needed my ’start button’, dreamweaver, and photoshop on my local PC without any modifications, hacks or virtual machines.

In summary, like someone who uses an Ipod for their music, I use a PC with Windows, because it works for me.”

I’d be interested in peoples views of this, can you only migrate users to an unfamiliar OS if they are told to do it, or how long does it take to be as efficient on a linux desktop as a seasoned windows user?

Thanks for the feedback Dave!

It is good to see the adoption of open source support in government by the HMRC, as observed in this post by The Open Sourcerer.