My brother just got a £7.50 a month deal with Three, for 3 GB per month of internet access over 3G (HSDPA). I installed Ubuntu onto a PC for him and had a bash at getting the 3G dongle up and running.

Here is the easiest way to get this up and running.

1.) Plug the dongle into a spare USB slot and restart the computer.

2.) Download the Vodafone Mobile Connect Card Driver for Linux. The version I’m using is 1.99.17 (Beta) and comes as a .deb package.

3.) After installing, run the Vodafone application that you’ll now find in Applications > Internet.

4.) If the application doesn’t detect your dongle restart your PC and try again (although it should).

5.) Insert these settings if you’re using the Three (UK) network. Leave the DNS settings empty to allow dynamic configuration of DNS.

Username: three
Password: three

Preferred connection: 3G preferred
Authentication mode: Default
APN host: 3internet

6.) That’s about it. You should be able to see a signal strength bar at the bottom of the app screen, and connecting to the internet is a simple as pressing the big green connect button.

The vodafone application itself is pretty good. Particularly useful is the usage indicator. It allows you to restrict the amount of data transferred to help ensure that you don’t breach your monthly limit. Check out the screenshot below. Cool eh?

Enjoy mobile internet on Linux!

sudo apt-get install asterisk destar python2.4

Hardy ships with Python 2.5 but DeStar throws errors unless it’s running on Python 2.4. Therefore you need to tell destar to use Python 2.4 instead.

edit /usr/share/destar/python/destar.py

so that the top line reads:

#!/usr/bin/python2.4

Asterisk needs to be configured to allow DeStar to manage it. To do this, create a file called destar.conf in /etc/asterisk/manager.d/ Change the secret to a password of your choosing.

[destarman]
secret=123342342
deny=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
permit=127.0.0.1/255.255.255.0
read=,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user
write=,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user

Try DeStar now by going to http://servername:8080 The default username is admin and the password ad26. (don’t forget the dot at the end). You should change it.

In the DeStar web GUI go to Configuration > Options > Management API Access and ensure that the secret there is the same as the secret in your destarman.conf file.

You should now have Asterisk installed and DeStar configured to manage it!

The city of Hull is currently undergoing a period of regeneration unprecedented in it’s long history. Previously a prosperous fishing town, Hull is fighting back against economic decline and trying to etch a place out for itself in a new millenium.

Having a team in the premier league is the icing on the cake and I for one am excited to see what the future holds for both our football team and our city at large.

Hull. Things are looking up!

After campaigning for OOXML so vigorously, MS have now announced that they will be issuing an update to Office 2007 to add support for OASIS ODF 1.1.

This won’t be available as the default format for saving, but even so - making support available for ODF and not supporting OOXML (that won’t come until a future version) must fatally damage OOXML as a standard.

Hopefully the delay in OOXML support and the emergance of ODF support as standard in an MS Office suite will herald new support by the public sector for the ODF format.

Who knows, the next time you visit your favorite government website you might be able to grab a copy of taxreturn.odt

The Source engine powers many of Valve’s top titles including Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2, Day of Defeat: Source, Portal, and Team Fortress 2.

Linux support for Source is likely to increase the take up of Linux based operating systems amongst Joe Public. Lack of support for modern games is often cited as a reason for not moving from Windows.

Lets hope that the rumours are true, and that Valve are the first of many games developers to go down this route.

Quality isn’t great as the script uses the old ‘I’m pretending to be an iPhone’ trick to grab an MP4 file, but it’s still fairly watchable until a better quality stream becomes available.

Because this hack is using an iPhone masquerade trick (oh, and in case you were wondering, the authors overcome the BBC’s first attempts to thwart this kind of hack), the upside is that there is no DRM on the files you download. You can grab the script from Google Code.

I suppose it just goes to prove, there’s life in the old Xbox yet!

Here are a couple of screenies for your enjoyment.

There has been a major change in the Ubuntu landscape since the last time I put finger to keyboard. Hardy Heron has arrived, Ubuntu’s new long term supported release! I’ve been running the pre-release version on my laptop for a while (until I accidently smashed the machine the other night) so it hardly surprises me that people installing it for the first time are finding it to be the best Ubuntu Linux yet! Of course, a few bugs remain, but if you find one, join me and hundreds of other users in reporting it and helping the developers to make Ubuntu better! It’s fun, and you might even get your name up in lights!

One thing I have noticed is that the validated hardware list has grown even larger with this release. It’s now easier than ever to grab yourself a laptop, desktop or server certified to work with Ubuntu. Seeing a good range of HP servers in the list is great for me as they’re the most commonly used ones at work - Hoorah!

So, that’s about it for now. Catch you soon…

The competition sees hackers compete to discover a 0 day code execution vulnerability, on one of three laptops running Mac OSX, Windows Vista or Ubuntu. The winners take the pwned laptop plus a generous cash award.

Mac OSX (10.5.2) fell on day two, after the discovery of a vulnerability in the Safari web browser allowed a team from Independent Security Evaluators to remotely exploit an Apple MacBook Air. Day three saw Shane Macauly of Security Objectives defeat the Windows Vista (SP1) laptop using an exploit against the latest version of Adobe Flash.

Well done Ubuntu.

You can find the ‘likewise-open’ and ‘likewise-open-gui’ packages in the Ubuntu Hardy universe repository. Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager, ensure the universe repository is enabled, and search for ‘likewise’.

After installation, you can find the Likewise Open GUI in Applications > Internet > Likewise. Joining the domain is simple enough. Specify the FQDN of your domain and click on ‘join domain’. After giving details of an account with permission to add computers to the domain, you should be connected.

Restart the PC, and at the GDM login screen try an Active Directory login. For instance:

DOMAIN\username

Hopefully all should be well, if not try the following.

—-

Login as a normal (non-AD) user and run the following command.

lwiinfo -n “DOMAIN\username”

You might get an error complaining ‘could not obtain winbind separator!’

It looks like the likewise-open script is not set to start with the system. To see if this is the case, try running ‘sudo likewise-winbindd -start‘ and try the command again. If it works this time (you should see a string of numbers and letters) you need to set likewise-open to start with the system.

To do this run ‘sudo sysv-rc-conf‘ from the command line, and turn the likewise-open service on for runlevels 2,3,4,5. Hopefully this should be sorted soon, I’ve filed a bug report.’

—-

At this moment in time you are likely to come across other issues. Sound, USB, sudoers etc will not work under the AD user. I’m sure that there are workarounds for this which involve mapping AD user groups to local groups. Hopefully in time for release we’ll see some firm instructions for this appear.

If you’re interested, watch this space.

A good place to start is here, at a Slashdot article entitled ‘Why Linux Doesn’t Spread - the Curse of Being Free’.

You see people just don’t trust things that are free. They have been conditioned to believe that ‘you get what you pay for’ and hence find it hard to see the value of free software. As the article rightly points out, as far as Joe Newbie is concerned both Windows and Linux are free to him, so he will have the one worth $300 thank you very much…

If you read through the comments of the article you come to another observation. Lets assume that Joe Newbie has got Ubuntu installed on his laptop. He opens up his favourite .mp3 album on the PC and gets a prompt for a codec. Now although Joe is a newbie, he knows that .mp3’s work fine out of the box on Windows so why not on Ubuntu? Uh-oh! His mistrust of Ubuntu increases.

OK, so what can we do about it?

Well, if you’re observant, you will have noticed that we now have an all free software version of Ubuntu. Every single piece and parcel of it is comprised of free software. Great eh?

Why not also create an Ubuntu variant which includes (out of the box) support for things like .mp3, dvd, wmv et al and charge for it? Canonical could license the technologies needed to legally create such a piece of software and sell it to the customer.

As long as the price was kept reasonable, Canonical could sell a ready to rock, fully spec’d up operating system to OEMs. It could also sell a boxed retail version to the public (although of course these sales wouldn’t be as large) through distribution channels such as PC World or Amazon. Chuck in six months technical support helpline access for a few quid and you provide a support channel for the punters too!

I think that if Canonical could do this, Ubuntu would become more credible in the eyes of the ignorant computer user and we just may be able to entice him across…