Be Jolly with Linux

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I am still eligible to participate in Google Summer of Code, and as I haven’t had the chance to submit a proposal before, I knew now was the time. The idea I’m most excited about is creating an Android application for LoCo teams.

My application is on the wiki, and the initial spec calls for three parts of the application. The first will be to allow users to get in touch with their local LoCo team, and the second tab displays news from Fridge and Planet. Lastly, we’ll have a tab that allows people to post on identi.ca/twitter to help with meetups and getting to know other Ubuntu users nearby.

I’d like to ask the Planet readership for some feedback on this idea. The whole community is the target audience for this, and I want to make sure it’s something that would be useful and fun I’d appreciate constructive criticism and/or feature requests as well.

Here are my initial UI mockups:

The current user's Local Community Team

RSS Feeds for Ubuntu-related News

Locally tagged social media posts

On Saturday, the Ubuntu California LoCo team held a Global Jam event at Chapman University in Orange. It was a great opportunity to get the Southern California group together and spend some time on Ubuntu. I gave a presentation about Bug Triage, and had fun messing up staging.launchpad.net. We went to In n’ Out for dinner, which was a great choice as always. Global Jams are an epic idea, and it’s been a lot of fun reading writeups from around the community.

So for those of you that want to be able to access your home machines from school, work, or the Netherlands:

1)You need a server, which could be your Ubuntu desktop that you’ve installed an ssh server on. You’ll probably want to change the default port that the server is listening on, that’ll decrease the amount of login attempts you get by a lot.

2) Next, you need to set up port forwarding on your router. Hopefully you’re running dd-wrt (like we do at Chapman), OpenWrt, or even Tomato. Google and your peers are your friends at this juncture.

3) Lastly, head over to DynDNS to create an account, and set up a new host. Afterward, either install inadyn on your actual server, or be cool and use dd-wrt.

DD-WRT and DynDNS

So now that you have that rolling, you should be able to ssh into the box on whichever port you have it listening on. If not, definitely do not hesitate to shoot me an email or ask around for help.

If you’re in San Jose this week, you should head out to OSCON. It’s a great conference that brings 2500+ members of the Open Source community together in one convention center. If you’d like to get involved, or just want to figure out what’s going on with this whole “lunix thing”, definitely come out and join the epic-ness.

There are a lot of text editors out there, and there have been several flare ups of the holy war between vim and emacs. As can be seen by this post’s title, I’ve already chosen my side, though lately I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with emacs.

Vi, for me, is awesome because I know that it’ll always be on any unix-y machine that I sit down in front of. I’m a Network guy at school, so I’ll have to ssh into random servers to look up settings or update configuration, and I may not have access to my favorite tools handy. It’s pretty much guaranteed that there’ll at least be a copy of vi on there, so it’s good to at least know the basics. It’s enabled me to increase productivity many fold, and I no longer need to stay tethered to my mouse, which is nice.

If you’d like to learn Vim, I highly recommend opening a terminal (on Debian/Ubuntu) and typing:

sudo apt-get install vim-full

followed by typing:

vimtutor

The included vimtutor program is the most helpful, hands-on reference that I’ve seen, and hopefully it works out for you too. If you’d like to find some other texts/approaches, a search for “vim tutorial” will definitely give you some exceptional resources. Also, it can be very helpful to print out a clear cheat sheet. If you’d like to check out my vimrc file, feel free to download the tarball and take a peek. Add anything that looks cool/helpful to your own .vimrc file, located in your home directory.

Thanks to Josh King for suggesting that I point out The Linux Documentation Project. Fair warning: it isn’t pretty, there aren’t a lot of pictures, but if you have a question, it’s almost assuredly answered here. I’ve really found the Bash Guide for Beginners to be a great intro to using the Bash Shell (the command prompt).

One of the most perilous “it’s-a-feature,-not-a-bug” issues in Open Source Software, is a ridiculous lack of decent documentation. If you’ve ever tried to “man iwconfig” after running into NetworkManager issues, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Most of us don’t particularly care to spend our days writing a few simple paragraphs that will serve to make millions of peoples lives better, because, ya know, we have better things to do.

Yeah…

Anyways, fortunately, this isn’t always the case. I feel like the Gnome docs are pretty solid, and Mozilla does a phenomenal job of curating a helpful wiki of epicness. For Ubuntu, Google’s massive corpus is prime for a search of “your_problem_here ubuntu 9.04″, and you’ll find out that some guy in England realized what was going on and already fixed it for you.

Probably one of my favorite examples, however, is the Python Documentation. Python is a great language, favored by the mighty Nathan Haines and Chapman’s CompSci I class. Python is a scripting language that I use for class projects, quick jobs at work, and is also my prime tool for hacking. There are hundreds of libraries, and a wonderful and supportive community. For those that want to start programming with the least fuss, it’s the way to go.

I recommend downloading the PDFs but you can also read them online. Start with the Python Tutorial, which should only take you an afternoon or so to get through. It’s a really informal and enlightening read, contrary to typically dry textbooks, so you might actually learn something.

So to start things off, we’ll go with one of my favorite, most handy articles ever. Lazy Linux: 10 essential tricks for admins from IBM DeveloperWorks, has several awesome ideas that I hadn’t heard of previously. The first tip is particularly effective, especially when you can’t stop a Backstreet Boys CD (that you assumed would be funny to listen to for a few seconds) from driving you nuts.