ChichaPlanet

En el Ubuntu Developer Summit

Hace tiempo que no me doy la molestia de postear en este blog. Es interesante, últimamente tengo todo lo que necesito para mi vida social en Internet con Facebook: Comparto ideas, imágenes, vídeos, y todo. Casi hasta he ignorado al Twitter :)

El software que diseñé para este blog (y que empecé a crear desde el muy inicio de mi vida blogística) está un tanto... anticuado. No lo he vuelto a revisar, y ya no tengo tiempo (quizás tampoco ganas) de actualizarlo, para añadirle nuevas cosas. Creo que llegué a ese momento de la vida de todo geek donde uno ya no cocina sus galletas, va al supermercado y las compra ya hechas. Me estoy volviendo viejo.

Igual, por razones prácticas, dejé el LinuxFromScratch que tenia instalado en Dorothy, para instalarle Ubuntu, principalmente por que a) Los builds de Blender 2.5 requerían una versión reciente del glibc, y actualizarlo en el LFS es prácticamente reinstalar todo; y b) quería usar 64 bits para mejorar la velocidad de renderizado. Instalar un LFS 64 bits sería meterme en innumerable cantidad de problemas.

Hablando de Dorothy, les presento mi nueva estación de trabajo, para quienes no me siguen en Facebook :-):

Ya había probado usar dos monitores en un par de oportunidades (el último fue con un monitor prestado, filmé un vídeo), y es realmente otra cosa. Me costó volver a trabajar con uno solo, por que es realmente práctico trabajar con los dos (hasta los chicos de Redmond lo recomiendan). Y me he dado cuenta que no sería lo mismo tener un solo gran monitor con la resolución de 2, la separación física permite organizar mejor tus ventanas para trabajar. Editar vídeos, editar web, trabajar en Blender 2.5, todo es mucho más flexible con dos monitores.

Este último que compré es un LG W2486L, uno de los famosos "LED backlight". Y si, a simple vista se nota el negro más negro que en el otro LCD, un Samsung SyncMaster T220, ahora conectado a la salida D-SUB análoga.

He empezado a pensar en cambiar el software de mi blog a un WordPress, aunque aún me duele, como me dolió dejar el LFS. Cómo duele crecer :)

Hace tiempo que no me doy la molestia de postear en este blog. Es interesante, últimamente tengo todo lo que necesito para mi vida social en Internet con Facebook: Comparto ideas, imágenes, vídeos, y todo. Casi hasta he ignorado al Twitter

El software que diseñé para este blog (y que empecé a crear desde el muy inicio de mi vida blogística) está un tanto… anticuado. No lo he vuelto a revisar, y ya no tengo tiempo (quizás tampoco ganas) de actualizarlo, para añadirle nuevas cosas. Creo que llegué a ese momento de la vida de todo geek donde uno ya no cocina sus galletas, va al supermercado y las compra ya hechas. Me estoy volviendo viejo.

Igual, por razones prácticas, dejé el LinuxFromScratch que tenia instalado en Dorothy, para instalarle Ubuntu, principalmente por que a) Los builds de Blender 2.5 requerían una versión reciente del glibc, y actualizarlo en el LFS es prácticamente reinstalar todo; y b) quería usar 64 bits para mejorar la velocidad de renderizado. Instalar un LFS 64 bits sería meterme en innumerable cantidad de problemas.

Hablando de Dorothy, les presento mi nueva estación de trabajo, para quienes no me siguen en Facebook :

Ya había probado usar dos monitores en un par de oportunidades (el último fue con un monitor prestado, filmé un vídeo), y es realmente otra cosa. Me costó volver a trabajar con uno solo, por que es realmente práctico trabajar con los dos (hasta los chicos de Redmond lo recomiendan). Y me he dado cuenta que no sería lo mismo tener un solo gran monitor con la resolución de 2, la separación física permite organizar mejor tus ventanas para trabajar. Editar vídeos, editar web, trabajar en Blender 2.5, todo es mucho más flexible con dos monitores.

Este último que compré es un LG W2486L, uno de los famosos “LED backlight”. Y si, a simple vista se nota el negro más negro que en el otro LCD, un Samsung SyncMaster T220, ahora conectado a la salida D-SUB análoga.

He empezado a pensar en cambiar el software de mi blog a un WordPress, aunque aún me duele, como me dolió dejar el LFS. Cómo duele crecer

I’m going to install Ubuntu 9.10 in a couple of machines at home so I needed to create a LiveUSB for that since burning CDs is so old school and mostly wastes the disk. After doing a quick search for a graphic tool for that I ended up resorting to the good old Unix dd command for the task like this:

Click on the image for the full size view.

Steps go like this:

1. Grab the desired ISO file from the Internet. Verifying integrity with MD5 is a good idea.
2. Open a Terminal emulator window.
3. Get the current list of devices by running “diskutil list”.
4. Insert your USB key
5. Determine the device node assigned to your USB drive by running “diskutil list” again (e.g. /dev/disk2)
6. Run “diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN”. In my case the device was /dev/disk2.
7. Use DD like this “dd if=/path/to/ubuntu-9.10-beta-desktop-i386.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m
8. Finally, eject the media by running “diskutil eject /dev/disk2″ and remove your USB drive when the command completes.

And that’s it. If you have been following this steps, you should have a bootable Live USB with Ubuntu by now.

Keep this link with you and help spread the word:

I know i’m late with the news, but i’ve been busy with travels, conferences and catching up with what happened in work while i was away, is amazing how fast open source world can move in a couple of weeks, but as they say better later that never:

Launchpad is now open source, the announcement has been done almost a month ago, and there has been already some community contributions, big congratulations to all the people involved in this! I hope now that it’s not a closed technology more people will feel comfortable using it and contributing!

¿Has intentado colocar en Ubuntu una combinación de teclas tal como Super+R para ejecutar una aplicación (como en Windows)? Bueno, por defecto no funciona, ya que Ubuntu toma la tecla Super como... una tecla, no como un modificador.

Para modificar este conportamiento, te vas al menu Sistema -> Preferencias -> Teclado, seleccionas la pestaña Distribuciones, presionas el boton Opciones de distribución, despliegas la opción Comportamiento de la tecla Alt/Windows, y seleccionas la opcion Hyper is mapped to Win-keys.

Tuve una mala experiencia instalando una versión anterior de Ubuntu en una laptop Gateway W34UI, y hoy tuve la oportunidad de re-vindicar a GNU/Linux. Con la versión 9.04 de Ubuntu no hubo mayor problema: La instalación fue limpia. Reconoció la tarjeta de vídeo (funciona compiz), reconoció el sonido (que antes no funcionó), y casi todo lo demas.

Excepto la tarjeta de red inalámbrica. Ésta tarjeta es reportada como una Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8185 IEEE 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 20) por lspci. La tarjeta es detectada por Ubuntu, pero simplemente no se puede conectar. Detecta la señal de la red inalámbrica con una potencia muy baja (a pesar de estar a dos metros del Access Point), pero nunca logra conectarse.

La solución fue bajar un driver para Linux de la misma página de realtek, de esta dirección, y compilarlo.

Para ello, despues de descargar el driver, abres un Terminal (Aplicaciones -> Accesorios -> Terminal), y asumiendo que lo hayas descargado en el Escritorio (que es donde Firefox guarda los descargados por defecto), ejecutas los siguientes comandos:

cd ~/Escritorio/
unzip rtl8185_linux_26.1030.0625.2009.zip 
cd rtl8185_linux_26.1030.0625.2009.release/
make
sudo make install
sudo rmmod rtl8180

La última línea fue para borrar el driver que viene instalado con Ubuntu. Luego de ejecutar esto, hay que reiniciar la Laptop. Cuando inicie, Ubuntu usará el nuevo driver, y con algo de suerte, funcionará sin problemas.

Anoche, regresando de un compromiso, encontré que mi laptop no respondía, el xscreensaver estaba congelado. Como es un Linux, me sorprendió mucho. Quise entrar por SSH y tampoco respondía el servicio. Al reiniciarla, el disco duro empezó a hacer “click click click” y la laptop devolvió un error.

Esto sería una desgracia de no ser porque tengo la buena costumbre de hacer backups regularmente. El dia de ayer no hice backups, pero todo lo que avancé del trabajo lo subí al servidor y los cambios que hice en mis proyectos están publicados en producción. Mis backups los hago hacia el servicio StrongSpace de Joyent. Les hago el cherry porque su servicio es genial. Las escasas veces que he tenido problemas me los han resuelto fabulosamente. Esta vez me salvan la vida al tener los backups en un lugar seguro.

La clave para hacer backups constantemente es que el proceso sea lo más sencillo posible. En mi caso es un solo script que hace rsync a StrongSpace de todo: mi home, correo, proyectos, documentos, fotos, dibujos, música, etc. Lo genial de Unix es que todas tus configuraciones se guardan en tu home, así que restablecer todas mis triquiñuelas y scripts de Vim no será gran cosa.
Si no tienen el hábito o proceso automatizo para hacer backups, HAGANLO AHORA. ES UNA ORDEN. Una excelente guía (que, cuando mi presupuesto se regularice, voy a probar) es ésta de Jamie Zawinski.

Muy servicialmente, Antonio me ofreció una mano para comprar un disco duro externo en Lima, pero encontré en Ica un disco duro de 80Gb Seagate para laptop. De todos modos voy a comprar uno externo para hacer el proceso de backup antes mencionado. Uno nunca puede tener demasiados backups. Quién sabe si algún día un Rent-a-zilla destruye el bunker de StrongSpace. :)

Mientras escribo esto estoy instalando la última versión de Ubuntu (9.06). Estuve usando Slackware todo este tiempo y ya habia decidido que mi próxima distribución sería Ubuntu. Finalmente ya no tendré problemas para mantener mis paquetes y sistema actualizado. Antes era educativo (y cool) usar una distro cruda como Slackware, pero ahora mi tiempo vale más y no puedo perderlo compilando. Vamos a ver qué tan bueno es Ubuntu reconociendo mi hardware.

Voy a probar qué tal me va con GNOME. Anteriormente usaba Enlightenment 16, pues soy bien minimalista. Vamos a ver qué tanto ha evolucionado GNOME y qué tanto no va a entrometerse en mi camino. Yo no soy de poner iconos en el desktop o tener menúes de programas. It’s all keyboard keystrokes, baby! La última vez que probé GNOME Metacity no me permitía hacer varios bindings. Ahora ya tengo a Dieguito para gritarle. ;) Soy una criatura que no le gusta cambiar de costumbres, pero he aprendido últimamente que eso es bueno para evitar el stagnation.

P.S.: Hagan backups.

Hace tiempo que no posteo. Andaba bajo de inspiración. Bueno, ahora inspiración me sobra, gracias a JessySol :) <3 <3 <3

Obviamente, ella aceptó que le instalara Ubuntu a su laptop :-) Queria probar Kubuntu, por que el KDE 4 me parece interesante, y queria darle un vistazo. Pero su laptop solo tiene 512mb de RAM, el Kubuntu Live era demasiado lento, y el instalador se colgó en el particionado.

Recordé algo que me habian comentado de Windows Vista (ajj) sobre el "ReadyBoost", que aceleraba a Vista usando una memoria USB para su área de intercambio. Eso, en Linux, es muy sencillo de hacer :-)

(Esto también se aplica para cualquier versión de Ubuntu, e incluso para cualquier otra distribución Live de GNU/Linux, con ligeras modificaciones)

1.- Una vez haya inicializado completamente el Kubuntu (tomará algo de tiempo), presionas las teclas CTRL-ALT-F1. Eso te llevará a una consola en modo texto, para no usar la interfase gráfica que está lenta por falta de RAM (podrias usar también un Terminal gráfico como Konsole, si decides esperar lo que demora).

2.- En la consola, ejecutas sudo bash, para iniciar un shell como root:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo bash
root@ubuntu:-#

- Conectas una unidad USB de un tamaño decente (el mio es de 2GB) a la computadora, te esperas unos segundos, y ejecutas el comando dmesg, para averiguar qué nombre le ha colocado al dispositivo. Una de las lineas finales del comando dmesg dá información sobre el dispositivo, y la partición que tiene:

root@ubuntu:~# dmesg
.
.
.
[506.972590] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[506.972590] sdb: sdb1

Nuestra unidad USB está en sdb1. Si apareciera otro nombre, es el que debes de usar en los siguientes pasos.

3.- Ahora, hay que convertir esta particion en una área de intercambio, con el comando mkswap. OJO, ESTO BORRARÁ EL CONTENIDO DE LA UNIDAD USB. Ten mucho cuidado. También, si te equivocas en el nombre de dispositivo, puedes estar borrando una unidad equivocada (tu disco duro, con todos tus trabajos, por ejemplo):

root@ubuntu:~# mkswap /dev/sdb1
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 1952460 KiB
sin etiqueta, UUID=4d953412-f438-4306-8625-881c2d6e09f8
root@ubuntu:~#

Listo, nuestra nueva área de intercambio (swap) ya está lista.

4.- Ahora, la activamos con el comando swapon:

root@ubuntu:~# swapon -p 200 /dev/sdb1
root@ubuntu:~#

El parámetro -p 200 es para darle mas prioridad al área de intercambio en la unidad USB.

¡Y listo! Esto debe hacer que el Kubuntu se ejecute un poco menos pesado, y sin colgarse, suficiente para instalarlo.

Ya es conocido por todos, hoy ha sido publicado Ubuntu 8.10, una de las mejores distribuciones de GNU/Linux que hay disponibles.

Ya que demora bastante descargar una imagen ISO (son como como 600 MiB), puedes ponerte en contacto conmigo, para darte una copia de Ubuntu 8.10 por el método "2x1": Me traes 2 CDs en blanco, y te doy 1 CD grabado. Tengo en las versiones de 32 bits (para PCs Intel anteriores a Core2 Duo) y 64 bits (la mayoria de AMDs, e Intel Core2 Duo o superiores), en sus versiones Live-CD, y "Alternate" (no son "live").

Larga vida a Linux!

Siguiendo un artículo publicado por Alex Celi sobre su instalación de Flash 10 en Linux, decidí investigar un poco y es sumamente sencilo tener instalada esta última versión en *ubuntu, así que puse manos a la obra y aquí resumo los pasos:

apt-get remove –purge flashplugin-nonfree

Luego descargar directamente del sitio de descargas de Adobe la versión deb para Ubuntu 8.04+.

dpkg -i install_flash_player_10_linux.deb

y listo, arrancar Firefox e ir a Herramientas -> Agregados -> Plugins y verificar que allí diga Shockwave Flash 10.0 r12, lo cual quiere decir que ha quedado instalado y habilitado debidamente.

Sobre esta versión del Flash Player, se pueden ver algunos videos en el sitio de Adobe, con algunas pruebas de sus características y mejoras principales.

The Chrerokee Web Server is an extremely fast modular opensource HTTP daemon written by my good friend Alvaro Lopez Ortega from Spain. The project has recently been making great progress towards the 1.0 release. The product has been very stable for years and since version 0.6 includes a web-based administration interface so you can avoid tweaking text files manually like you still have to do with Apache, Lighttpd or nginx.

Installing the latest Cherokee package in Ubuntu Hardy can be a little tricky. The version that’s included with the distribution is mantained by the MOTU team and based on the Debian version mantained by another good friend Gunnar Wolf from Mexico.

The packages for the latest version of Cherokee are mantained by Leonel Nuñez, also from Mexico, and are found in his PPA apt repo so in order to install them on Hardy you have to follow these steps:

STEP 1) Add the PPA repo to /etc/apt/sources.list

Simple adding this two lines to the files does the trick:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/leonelnunez/ubuntu/ hardy main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/leonelnunez/ubuntu/ hardy main

STEP 2) Configure the prefered version of the packages at /etc/apt/preferences

This is the most tricky part, simply add these lines in this file. If you don’t have it just create it.

Package: cherokee

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: cget

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-base0

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-base0-dev

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-config0

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-config0-dev

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-server0

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-server0-dev

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999

When a newer package appears in the PPA repo it will be installed or upgraded. Version 0.9.4-1 is there simple because it was the current packaged version at the time of writing this blog post. The important bit is having Cherokee 0.9.x and not Cherokee 0.5.6 installed in your box.

STEP 3) Update your APT sources and install Cherokee

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install cherokee

That’s it. Give it a try! I’ll be using it for serving static content here on my blog.

Keep this link with you and help spread the word:

Just a few minutes ago I realized the locale configuration of my Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 Linode VPS was not using UTF-8 when I was checking out an SVN repo.

So I checked the current available locales:

locale -a

C
POSIX

As you can see en_US.utf8 was not there. So I had to be added manually:

sudo localedef –no-archive -i en_US -c -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8

Now, checking the locales again I got listed:

If you’re an experienced Linux user this is not big deal but in this blogsphere-powered days I figured out this kind of info will be helpful to somebody out there so I’m sharing it here.

locale -a

C
en_US.utf8
POSIX

So the last step is to set this in the environment so it’s configured correctly the next time you log into the server and also if the server gets rebooted.

The following two lines have to vi added to /etc/environment

LANGUAGE=”en_US.utf8″
LANG=”en_US.utf8″

And that it’s. You might one to reboot the server not it’s not really neccesary.

If you’re Ubuntu server is not configured this way I’d recommend tweaking the configuration.

Keep this link with you and help spread the word:

Since I got a Macbook around six months ago I planned a triple-boot setup but didn’t really do it until recently. One of the first things I did when I got the laptop was using Bootcamp to repartition the hard-drive and install Ubuntu. When I then wanted to add Windows to the mix I found out it wasn’t that easy after struggling a bit with partition schemes and installers that don’t mix so well. The result was I just gave up for some time resorting to run Windows from VMware Fusion.

A few friends that own Macs and do Windows and Linux are happy running the OSes inside virtual machines. I was not. Windows under VMware runs nicely and the Unity integration features are quite cool but since I got the laptop with 1 GB or RAM running heavy enterprisey development tools for Windows among other stuff wasn’t working that well. Besides, OS X is fine and before the triple boot setup I got mostly used to run it all of the time but from time to time I run benchmarks, show demos or give talks and I needed the real Linux running on top of the bare metal. So I went for the real thing

Since I’ve switched to this machine as my primary computer I needed more RAM and disk space so I upgraded it from 120 GB to 250 GB and from 1 gigs of RAM to 2 gigs. Since I was going to have Leopard installed in a brand new disk this was the chance to finally go for the triple boot setup.

So the story starts with Boot Camp, Apple’s utility tool for resizing the Leopard’s HFS+ partion and have Windows Vista or XP installed aside of Mac OS using the drivers included in the Leopard installation media. As you might guess, given the propietary nature of Apple, Boot Camp is not the most flexible tool around and demands the hard drive to be formatted as a unique HFS+ partition using the whole disk. The good news is the process of installing Windows with Boot Camp is pretty smooth and works correctly almost every time. My experience was not the exception.

There are quite a few guides all over the Internet proposing different strategies for having OSX coexists with Windows and Linux on the same hard-drive and almost all of them are very emphatic on following the instructions to the letter. I read most of them but given my previous experiences and the information I had gathered I went for my own approach with I’ll briefly describe in this post.

GUID Partition Table (GPT)

GPT is a modern partition scheme that is part of the Extentensive Firmware Interface standard proposed by Intel. This is the scheme Apple uses for all Intel-based Macintoshes and Leopard’s installer only agrees to install the OSX on a GPT-partitioned hard drive so that’s one of the first things you must be aware of. GPT is an alternative to the old and well-know MBR partition scheme most of us are used coming from a PC world. EFI is a replacement of the old PC BIOS. EFI uses GPT where BIOS uses MBR. Nonetheless, Boot Camp uses a mixed GPT-MBR partition scheme under EFI in order to simulate the PC BIOS and have BIOS/MBR-only OSes like Windows XP installed in the new Macs. That’s why you CAN’T use Windows partitioning tools you might be used to like fdisk. They’ll simply ruin the setup and you’ll have to start all over again by partitioning the hard drive under GPT.

The current versions of Ubuntu Linux, like Feisty or Hardy, support GPT-partitioned hard drives in the installer, so they are not a problem. Windows Vista being a new OS only seems to support this in some 64-bits versions. That’s why you’ll want to rely on Boot Camp for the Windows installation and then try to mess the less you can with the arrangements the software has made

Installing Windows

There are many guides around for this part. I’ll link here to Apple’s official instructions in the 101: Using Windows via Boot Camp with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard article of their support site. When installing XP don’t even think of creating or deleting the partitions. At most you can switch from NTFS to FAT but I went for NTFS since Linux is already supporting it well and my partition was 60 GBs big. You can opt for the quick formatting option for reformatting the drive C: but don’t try reformating, I repeat, since you’re not installing over an MBR-partitioned standard PC hard drive.

After booting XP you’ll find the look is so lame compared to OSX or Linux with Compiz that you’ll want to make the appearance a little bit more decent so I turned on the ClearType option, the Royale theme, XPize and finally Y’z Shadow for adding extra transparency and drop shadows to the windows.

Since Macs only have one click you’ll find useful the tiny Apple Mouse utility for XP which switches the left and right click options while you’re holding the Ctrl key. Just run it from XP’s start folder adding the /s parameter to the executable path for avoiding the start dialog and you’ll have right-click working the same way as under OSX.

rEFIt

So after Windows install my MacBook was booting straight into Windows. Horrible! Yes, I could still choose from which partition to boot by pressing the right Option (Alt) key or setting my choice using the Startup disk dialog under OSX’s System Preferences but I wanted a cool graphical bootleader that soon would be spotting a cute Linux penguin so I went with rEFIT, a superb opensource bootloader for EFI-based hardware that dynamically detects your partitions and even bootable media.

I grabbed rEFIt as a DMG file and run the graphical installer under OSX. When I booted again it wasn’t working so I had to resort to running the manual installation instructions which are a breeze to follow using the OSX terminal app. Rebooted and the nice rEFIT screen was welcoming me featuring both OSX and Windows icons.

Installing Ubuntu

So at this point my Mac was dual-booting Leopard and XP but I need to add Hardy to the mix. Since the biggest partition was Leopard’s I had to shrink it in order to make space for Linux. There are a few options for doing this: I could have used the opensource gParted tool included in the Ubuntu Live CD or OSX’s own diskutil command under the terminal, or even the Disk Utility GUI under Applications/Utilities but I went with iPartition, a commercial product included in a Coriolis Recovery CD a friend had lend me. The partitioning worked nicely and I had 60 gigs for getting Ubuntu installed to the hard drive.

The problem here was the brand new partition for Ubuntu is physically the third one but Boot Camp will only want to boot Windows from the last partition, in this case the third. So the trick comes here: I booted the laptop with Ubuntu’s LiveCD which at disk point is offered as a boot option represented by rEFIT as a Linux penguin with a tiny CD icon and had the new partition formated as NTFS and Boot Camp’s windows installation copied to the third partition. Of course I had to do all of disk manually so I used mkfs.ntfs over /dev/sda4 to create the new partition, then mouted both /dev/sda4 (Boot Camp’s Windows installation) on /bootcamp and /dev/sda4 (new Windows location) on /windows and had all the files copied by simply issuing a “cp -r /bootcamp/* /windows” command and waiting for it to complete before starting the Ubuntu installer.

Then, when perform the actual Ubuntu installation I switched to manually setting the partition in which Ubuntu was to be installed, /dev/sda3 in this case, created no SWAP partition since many guides replaced it by a swapfile inside the main Linux ext3 partition and had GRUB installed not in the MBR but in /dev/sda3 and everything worked nicely.

Due to Ubuntu’s bug #222126 the Ubuntu’s installer clears the MBR and after rebooting you’ll get a “no bootable device” error when selecting the Linux or the Windows icon from rEFIT. I knew about this problem and the fix from my previous attempts so I didn’t panicked It only takes to run the eEFIT’s built-in partition tool to resync the GPT and MBR partitions and you’re done. At this point my system had a fully operational triple-boot setup.

Configuring Hardy to use the MacBook’s hardware

For this part I mostly followed the instructions at the MacBook Santa Rosa and MacBook Santa Rosa on Hardy pages from the Ubuntu wiki. Sound is working. Wireless is working too. The only thing I’m missing is having the laptop suspend correctly which is currently preventing me from using Ubuntu extensively when relying on the laptop’s battery. I’ll be looking into this issue soon and will be updating the article properly.

Conclusions

Triple-booting Leopard, Hardy and XP wasn’t an easy but a fun journy. Yes, it can take quite a bit of time waiting for the installations to complete and even much more configuring the system so I really helps to know what your’re doing since you risk loosing data or at least a good piece of your precious time. Was the price well worth for my? Definitely, yes. It’s not just all the cool kids who happen to be Linux geeks and own a Mac are doing this but the chance to use all of the system resources running under the proper drivers and being able to forget for the most part what is the hardware platform you’re using what has value to me. Of course, it all depends on your very specific needs. Due to academic reasons I do a lot of team work with other people and at some points we switch laptops or I have mine used by someone else to complete a task. In this situations I’m now booting into Windows and forgetting about any ocassional OSX interferences like switching to a different desktop using OSX’s Expose. It’s also way easier to have Windows run from it’s own partition and not a VM’s disk if you plan to install a ton of software as I’m having to do this days. So for me, it’s working nicely and I can still use Virtual Machines under any of the three OSes to virtualize any of the two others or a different one if that’s what I need. So i’m happy with the end result.

I really hope this post is interesting and useful to some of you out there on the internets For further reference most links are available from my Delicious account under the tripleboot tag.

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I’m looking forward to get a VPS server with root access and ssh login, the requirements i have are not special, i just want to be able to have a mutt, screen and an irssi. It’ll we awesome if i can use it as build server too, so debian based system would be prefered. Did someone of you know/have a VPS that fits my requierements? Please let me know!

August 2008 has been an awesome month for me, there has been a lot of things going on in my life on the past 28 days, a lot of good news, awesome experiences and opportunities, but 4 of them are the most remarkable:

DisneyLand:
I went for second time to disneyland, this time with my girlfriend family. It was just awesome, i had fun like a kid again, i felt like i was 7 again. I even have a photo with Mickey Mouse!

I’m a MOTU
A few weeks ago i’ve been accepted in the MOTU Team, it has been a hard, but wonderful time contributing, learning, fixing bugs, knowing people and having fun and now i get my reward, i’m SO happy with this.

I’m going to latinoware
Some days ago i was invited to LatinoWare, taking place from 30th October until 1th November, to give a talk on the Ubuntu track, and to help in the organization of that track also. It would be my first talk in an international event, i’m so looking forward into it.

I get a new work
Starting on Monday, i will be working as Security Engineer in the OEM Services Group for Canonical. It’s an amazing opportunity to work with the bleeding edge technology, and specially on security, which is what i love!

For those reason specially, 08/2008 will be a month to remember.

I need to thank to all the people who help me to start in this crazyness, all the people who checked, rechecked and point me my error (my lovely sponsors) and all my application supporters, we have something to celebrate now because… It’s official:

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Hello everybody,

the MOTU Council is very happy with the contributions of Nicolas and is
happy to make him a MOTU!

Nicolas Nalcárcel's application:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/motu-council/2008-August/001362.html

Søren Hansen's vote:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/motu-council/2008-August/001373.html
Daniel Holbach's vote:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/motu-council/2008-August/001376.html
Richard A. Johnson's vote:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/motu-council/2008-August/001380.html

Luca Falavigna's feedback:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/motu-council/2008-August/001366.html
Emanuele Gentili's feedback:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/motu-council/2008-August/001367.html

Cesare Tirabassi's feedback:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/motu-council/2008-August/001368.html
Chuck Short's feedback:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/motu-council/2008-August/001371.html

Have a nice day,
 Daniel
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Internet is now proved to be unsecured even if DNS are patched and i reached and unthinkable level of paranoia. Given that launchpad ppa (which are awesome for QA) doesn’t use signed packages, so i can’t actually check the integrity of them i’ve changed all my sources.list from url’s to ip’s so i can’t (at least i hope) be vulnerable to cache poisoning \o/

P.S: Please launchpad team, make ppa use signed packages!

Having one more of our europe’s morning martin pitt love conversations and jokes i was pointed to the pitti fanboys LP team, so i joined and get approved so now i’m an official pitti fanboy! What are you waiting, prove your fanboyism and make it official!

I simply love the Ubuntu community!

P.D: Should we create a ~dholbach-huggers team too?

Ok, there has been a lot of noise (again) about what should be in ubuntu planet, last time i wasn’t a member so i didn’t comment on the topic, but being that now i am here are my thoughts on the topic:

• Planet ubuntu is and should be a window to the community: Some people read planet to be up to date on the technical news, but that’s what changelog stands for, and planet ubuntu (or our blogs) aren’t actually changelogs. So the idea of limiting the what should be posted or not doesn’t seem really fair to me
• Ubuntu member represent the ubuntu community: All of us, being part of this community, an being officially recognized as members of it, gives us the representation of this community and for the people we are not just a lot of single people, we are the ubuntu community as a whole, so everything you said is taken as if it comes from the community especially if it is on one of the community’s communication channel, like mailing lists or planet. So we need to thing 3 times after post something on them since it won’t be treated as our own and personal opinion, but as the community one.
• Respects saved Respects: Before doing something it will be a good idea to think “If someone do this to me, would i like it?” If not, please don’t, everyone of us have different opinions on different topic, but it doesn’t give us the right to challenge people and be unrespectful. And said that you can say whatever you want, just need to find the right way to do it and express your opinion, is better to say “i don’t think so, i think is better like this” than saying “What were you thinking? that’s wrong!”

I don’t want to create more discussion on it, i think planet ubuntu is fine as it is now, and nothing need to be changed but the attitude of ourselves.