The EFA has started an awesome new campaign with the aim of raising awareness of this issue within the general population. It appears to be working and has been featured on sites such as ZDNet, Gizmodo, IT Wire, iT News, The Australian & many, many others.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljh-uCH9fvw

This different approach by the EFA aims to raise awareness of this issue to a greater percentage of the population, not just the tech-savvy. The current internet filtering proposal can be best summarised in the following quote by EFA Chairman Colin Jacobs.

“The Government took this policy to the last election as a ‘cyber-safety’ tool to help parents, but it’s since changed into something completely different. Not only will the filter not protect children, it might give parents a false sense of security and actually lessen the supervision kids get online.”

So what are you waiting for? Go have a look at the site, watch the video & then go tell your Mum!

If you find that your numpad has suddenly stopped functioning, it may be worth checking to ensure “Mouse Keys” are not enabled.

It was also announced earlier today that the “Files” section of the Web User Interface received an update. I was testing this new design on the “edge” server before it was put into production & found it to be very well laid out & more responsive than the original design. As well as the server-side “behind the scenes” changes that cannot be seen, there are now “Share folder” & “Publish file” options that integrate the new File Publishing feature into the Web UI. These options are accessed by clicking on the “More” drop down list next to a file/folder in the “Files” section of the Web UI.

After you have published a folder/file, the public url is displayed when you select the “more” drop down list next to the folder/file. To share this file/folder simply give someone the public url & they will have access to this shared content.

There is also a wiki page (put together by duanedesign) showing off some of the great 3rd party community contributed projects utilising the Ubuntu One, CouchDB & Desktopcouch services.

Ubuntu One is really delivering great things for Lucid & there is still much more to come. I am very excited by what I am seeing in the “pipeline” for Ubuntu One.

UPDATE: This issue has now been fixed with the release of the 2.6.32-23.37 kernel. The changelog is available here. As such, this workaround is no longer necessary.

A new patch (undoing a recent change that caused the loss of edge-scrolling) has been provided but will not be included in the final release of Ubuntu 10.04 due to how late it is in the release cycle. This patch will be included in the first kernel to come from lucid-updates. That will be a while though – most likely a few weeks after release. This is what Chase Douglas (the awesome ubuntu-kernel-team member who was working on the issue) said:

Unfortunately, it appears that this touchpad uses a new protocol between the device and the driver. This means that we have to figure out the protocol before we can unlock the full functionality of the touchpad. One way to do this is to watch what the Windows driver does when it talks to the hardware, but this is easier said than done.

In the meantime, the device ID for this touchpad has been backed out of the upstream linux-input tree at my request, and I will shortly ask for it to be backed out of the Ubuntu kernel. Though the touchpad won’t be seen in gsynaptics or other synaptics compatible software, scrolling functionality will be restored. When the proper protocol is determined for this touchpad we can look into pulling it into Ubuntu again.

I’m sorry this can’t be completely fixed at this time.

Thanks for your understanding.

The thought of having to wait that long was not very appealing to me, however I do understand & agree with the reasons behind this decision. As such I have put together this guide on how to enable edge-scrolling functionality on this laptop – mostly just for my own reference. I have decided to share it here in case anyone else has this model laptop & might benefit from these instructions.

This is just a work around that hand patches alps.c and recompiles all the modules in that directory. This work around will only be required until an updated kernel is released in lucid-updates.

Get kernel source & Build Utils

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-2.6.32-22-generic linux-source-2.6.32
cd /usr/src
sudo tar xjvf linux-source-2.6.32.tar.bz2
cd /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.32/drivers/input/mouse

Backup Original Source

sudo cp alps.c alps.c.old

Patch/Edit alps.c (I just did this by hand)

gksu gedit alps.c

1. Goto Line 67 and delete the entire line
2. Save the file

Rebuild the Driver

sudo make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd`

Backup Original Modules

cd /lib/modules/2.6.32-22-generic/kernel/drivers/input/mouse/
sudo mkdir old
sudo mv * old
sudo tar cvvf  old.tar old/
sudo rm -Rf old/

Install New Modules

sudo cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.32/drivers/input/mouse/*.ko /lib/modules/2.6.32-22-generic/kernel/drivers/input/mouse/

sudo depmod -a

Reboot and then you will have edge-scrolling working as expected!

Credit goes to tube013 & this post regarding a similar issue in Feisty on the Ubuntu Forums that I used as a starting point for this guide.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5E0W2oGBPA

UPDATE: As of 5 hours ago, the front-end is back online. Anyone who added the entry to their /etc/hosts file should now remove it (by deleting the ”88.191.101.8    packages.medibuntu.org” line & saving the file).

I can confirm that the packages.medibuntu.org is down & will probably remain that way until at least Wednesday or Thursday. Only the front-end is down, so you can add a temporary entry in your /etc/hosts pointing to the medibuntu back-end until the front-end (packages.medibuntu.org) is back online in a few days. I will outline this process step-by-step for any who may be experiencing this issue & are not familiar with the process.

1. Open a terminal window (Applications –> Accessories –> Terminal)

2. Type “sudo gedit /etc/hosts” (without the quotes) & press enter. This will display your hosts file.

3. Add “88.191.101.8    packages.medibuntu.org” (without the quotes) to a new line in your hosts file.

4. Save & close your hosts file.

5. Reload/ refresh your package list by typing “sudo apt-get update” (without the quotes) from a terminal window or by opening Update Manager & clicking on the “check” button.

My VMware Workstation testing was going very well. I would use zsync to update my lucid daily iso’s & create a new virtual machine to install this image. The whole process works extremely well. Unfortunately a little over 2 weeks ago I began having problems – my keyboard was not recognised at the gdm login screen in Lucid virtual machines. This was more than a little frustrating, however it was overcome by using the on-screen keyboard. The keyboard was fully functional after logging in to the virtual machine. Unfortunately the on-screen keyboard also has a bug which causes it to crash when first enabled. This caused me to have to reboot after enabling the on-screen keyboard to be able to use it to log in.

Today I finally had some spare time to investigate this issue. I noticed a few forum posts & a couple of bug reports on the issue, however I could not seem to find anything that would give me a hint as to what was causing this problem. Finally, after much searching I came across this bug report. It appears that this is actually a bug related to console-setup (the console font and keymap setup program).

Fortunately, the very awesome Martin Pitt has already identified the cause of this issue & has given an easy work-around. The root cause of this issue can be seen by running: sudo DISPLAY=:0 xprop -root |grep NAMES.S

The output for my machine was: _XKB_RULES_NAMES(STRING) = "evdev", "SKIP", "us", "U.S. English", ""

The important part of that output is “SKIP” – it is not a valid keyboard layout.

To resolve the problem, all that was required was to run: sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup to reset the keyboard model (in the virtual machine) back to default. I am now able to login to my Lucid virtual machines without needing to use the on-screen keyboard.

Netbook bootchart with standard 2.5″ hdd installed

I decided to install this SSD into my netbook & install the latest Lucid daily image. I noticed that the install seemed fairly quick which made me optimistic about seeing good boot times. After the initial install was finished I rebooted & then I was absolutely amazed at how quick the boot time is on this netbook!

1st Netbook bootchart with SSD installed

To ensure that this wasn’t some weird anomaly, I decided to reboot to produce another bootchart. The boot time appeared to be extremely fast again. Upon checking the bootchart it seems that this definitely isn’t a once off super fast boot.

2nd Netbook bootchart with SSD installed

I am very impressed! The SSD knocked a massive 9.5 to 10 seconds off the boot time on this netbook, boot time has literally been halved! I am now happily & consistently booting in under 9 seconds! This is using the stock-standard 32bit lucid daily image with no tweaking done at all. I can safely say that this SSD was a very wise investment & I am very impressed with the performance increase it has made.

The Ubuntu One Dashboard

The Ubuntu One dashboard presents you with an overview of your Ubuntu One account. It displays information related to the amount of storage space being used in your account, the number of contacts & notes you have stored, & also any recent activity you have performed on your contacts & notes.

Another excellent feature of the Ubuntu One dashboard is the “Service status and updates” information along the right hand side. This is a summary of the latest posts to the Ubuntu One identi.ca feed & will show any service outages or Ubuntu One related news.

I would like to publicly thank Martin Albisetti, John Lenton & the rest of Ubuntu One hackers for their excellent work. This new feature is extremely useful & has been implemented very well. Keep up the absolutely awesome work you guys are doing! This dashboard is awesome on so many different levels & it is exactly what was needed to put all of the relevant account information in one place.

I am continually amazed by the amount of truly astounding features that are being deployed for the Ubuntu One service. Considering the fact that Ubuntu One has been deployed for less than 18 months, it really is amazing how many features this service has. I believe that the Ubuntu One service is yet another great reason why people will choose to deploy Ubuntu instead of any other linux distribution.

Unfortunately, this tab has been removed in Lucid. This was a controversial upstream gnome decision that seems to have come about due to some people believing that this kind of functionality belongs in a 3rd party “tweaks” program (such as Ubuntu Tweak). Thankfully, the gconf setting has not been removed and can still be adjusted.

This is the default configuration                                                                                                       This is the modified configuration

To customise this setting, you need to do the following:

1. Open a terminal window (Applications –> Accessories –> Terminal)

2. Enter the following commnad: gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/interface/toolbar_style --type string "both"

3. If you find that you prefer the default setting, you can revert this change by running the following command in a terminal window: gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/interface/toolbar_style --type string "both-horiz"