I returned to work yesterday, after a fairly relaxing week off, to find an Eee PC 900 and an OpenStreetMap high‐visibility vest on or under my desk.

I haven’t touched the Eee, yet, except to charge the battery. Rest assured that I will be replacing the operating system, likely with Debian GNU/Linux. I noticed some packages relating to Eee PCs in Sid, which is promising.

I wore the high‐vis vest on my way home. The vest features an OpenStreetMap logo with the host part of the URI (www.openstreetmap.org) above and “SURVEYOR” below. There’s a picture on the OpenStreetMap wiki. Visibility for me on the road, and visibility for OpenStreetMap.

There was an impressive turnout at the #manlug currybeer. A whopping eighteen people turned up. There were a few new faces, including, but probably not limited to Simon Murray, a friend from my university days who now gets to be called “pink”, and some fellows known by their IRC nicks in #manlug as Falken and parag0n. Also there were Daniel and Rob after a bit of a break, Leslie was kind enough to give Eve a lift, and Matt came along too.

Paul took us along to Lal Haweli, a restaurant I’m not sure has ever let me down, and last night it didn’t let us down either. They had no problems, or didn’t show them, seating eighteen of us at no notice. Popadums as usual, lime pickle included. The lime pickle was extra yummy too. It felt like there was some time before the starters came around, but that may have just been my curry cravings, I can’t help it. I had a lovely, gingery “lamb special” for my main course.

Back to Hardy’s Well afterwards. Of course, they rock too.

Richard Moore purchased an Eee PC on Friday. I know because I went with him to Toys R Us. He had been waiting for quite a while for one from Clove Technology, but they kept sending apology emails, and it was getting doubtful whether it would arrive in a reasonable time. It was as much news to me as it was to Rich that Toys R Us had them in stock and you could just walk in and get one.

I was expecting the white version (only white and black are available for now) to look a bit tacky, but it actually looks quite smart. It has a solid feel to it, and the keyboard is usable. I was very close to purchasing one myself, but I put the little leaflet that you had to take to the counter back in its holder, unable to immediately justify the expense, and whether I’d actually use it. I’m still somewhat tempted, so I’ll see how Rich gets on with his.

Update: Rich has written about the Eee now, and Ben Higginbottom also visited Toys R Us and succumbed.

Twice a year ManLUG has an InstallFest, where people bring in their computers and install GNU/Linux on them, and picking the brains of the other attendees. Normally they aren’t that interesting to me, and I’ll just chat to people, or get on with something on my laptop. I was going to go about installing a few GNU/Linux distributions on some virtual machines, which seemed quite suitable for an InstallFest, but instead got distracted by a Netgear router.

The router is a Netgear DG834. The initial difficulty was finding the exact model so we could be sure we were following the right instructions. All we had to go on was the model name of “DG834” but the OpenWRT wiki documents the DG834G and DG834GT. It has a TI AR7 processor, so that ruled out the DG834GT, and was an older model (the case design also gives that away), so we concentrated on the documentation for the DG834G version 1. The firmware version was reported as 3.01.25, which also helped identify it. I saw the note about firmware from this version onwards using LZMA compression, and spent some time attempting to build the patched squashfs. I didn’t manage to build it because I was missing the lzma library. I grabbed the LZMA SDK, but that didn’t help much either.

Simon Hobson came over for a bit of a nosey, and got me back on track. As per the instructions for the DG843G, we backed up the flash devices, and modified the one containing the bootloader. I didn’t have a hex editor, so used vim and xxd to edit the image. Vim mangled it, and the checksum didn’t match the expected checksum after the change. Lesson learnt. Instead of opening binary files in vim, hexifying with ‘:%!xxd’, editing then de‐hexifying with ‘:%!xxd -r’, I first run ‘xxd’, edit the result, then run ‘xxd -r’ on it. After copying the modified bootloader back, and restarting the router, we were pleased to find that it came back up successfully.

Unfortunately that’s all we had time for, and we only managed to change four bytes. The plan is to perform the install at next month’s meeting, after Jim Jackson’s talk on IPv6. It should prove to be another interesting meeting, and not just because of the router: I’ll be paying attention the the IPv6 talk.

I currently use IPv6 at home via a tunnel broker (Hexago, formerly Freenet6), but I haven’t updated any of my servers to do so. One of the reasons blocking it was the lack of support for stateful filtering in the Linux kernel. As of version 2.6.20 this changed, and Bytemark (yes, that’s a sneaky referral link, here is a non‐referral link) have some kernels with the relevant options in testing, so I shall be requesting a block of the IPv6‐space from them soon (yes, Bytemark are great, they’ll give you IPv6 connectivity as a free extra).

Via Slashdot, Meet the 5-Watt, Tiny, fit–PC. It’s a neat‐looking and neat‐sounding little device (the sales bumf says it’s about the size of a paperback) claimed to only consume 5 Watts. It’s not packing a great deal of a punch, as you might expect for a small, low‐power device, but it’s enough that it easily beats my desktop of about 8 years ago (now used mainly as a local file and web server). That might be a long time in the computer world, but it was functional. If you’re only doing the occasional browsing and reading mail it should be fine. It lives on the web at http://www.fit-pc.com/

Debian has a lot of packages in its repositories, “it comes with over 18733 packages” according to the Debian web site as I write this, so when you add third party repositories a flexible package management tool that can sort, filter and categorise the packages can be helpful. Thankfully, aptitude does a pretty decent job of it.

Axel Beckert shows how to group packages by origin in aptitude by adding “pattern(~O)” to the default groups. I find this handy, but also got hit by the problem of virtual packages not being displayed. After a bit of a read and a play, I came up with:

Aptitude::UI {
  Default-Grouping "filter(missing),status,section(subdir,passthrough),pattern(~O, !~O => other),section(topdir),priority";
};

Anything that doesn’t have an origin gets put into a hierarchy called “other”. At least that’s what I think, and it looks like it does! Next to find out how to display the suite (stable, testing, etc) for each package version.

Update: Grouping by archive shows, for example, a package in both testing and unstable under both groups, but does not indicate which versions of the package are in each archive. A satisfactory solution is to add “%t” to the package display format as follows:

Package-Display-Format "%c%a%M%S %p %Z %t %15v %15V";

The main package view shows the archives that contain the preferred (I presume) version of the package. Slightly more useful, when versions are expanded, the archive will be shown for each available version of the package:

i A  --\ apt                stable          0.6.46.4-0.1 0.6.46.4-0.1
i A  0.6.46.4-0.1           stable
p A  0.7.6                  testing

People seem to like telling other people about their desktops so I thought I’d join in. A little history first though…

The first comaputer system I owned, all by my self (or near enough), was an Amiga 500+ with Workbench 2.04. It had windows, icons, menus, a pointy thing—okay, I’ve just described WIMP. I later got an A1200, then I thought it was broke, so I bought another. I still have both A1200s, and, while the one I originally thought was broke wasn’t, they are now both broken in different ways. I’ve had someone say they’ll have a look at them though, and I wouldn’t mind having one running if only to play around with. Anyway, broken nostalgia aside, the user interface was really ahead of its time, and I’d say this contributed a lot to my expectations of a desktop environment.

The things I remember are good are:

• Responsiveness: I don’t remember ever having to wait for a GUI to render. There were other things, like I/O, that were pretty slow, but in general the interface felt responsive.
• Clean, not cluttered: There appears to have been some thought put into the design of the interfaces, and things were easy enough to find. I want to do a pun on Intuition so bad.

Not‐so‐good:

• Consistency: Applications could have been consistent, and this improved over time, but they weren’t. This wasn’t helped by the proliferation of alternative UIs, mentioned in the next point. Thankfully AmigaOS 3.5 and newer chose one of them to become the standard for applications.
• Ugliness: Ok, it looked nicer than Workbench 1.3 and any of the competition, but when things are good you still notice the rough edges, possibly more so. Widgets and text didn’t scale well to different sizes. Text looking funny meant you had to use a font similar to the default Topaz if you wanted all of your applications to look nice (there was a nicer replacement font included with MagicWB). There were things like MagicWorkbench, MUI, NewIcons, ClassAct, whatever that thing was that altered window decorations, dock/panel‐type things and various other hacks that helped to make things pretty though.

Some applications I used:

• Shells: AmigaShell, KingCON. KingCON was a replacement for AmigaShell with history, and completion, and other nice things. I also had BASH, but it never became my primary shell.
• Editors: Ed and MicroEMACS, both of which may have similarities to tools on UNIX‐like systems, but I remember them quite differently.
• Word‐processor: Wordworth. A standard WYSIWYG affair. I hadn’t really come across any markup languages, other than AmigaGuide and RTF. I quite liked AmigaGuide as a hypertext markup actually.
• Media player: HippoPlayer, definitely some MOD players, and AlgoMusic which randomly generated house‐ish tunes.
• Desktop Environment: As an alternative to WorkBench, I also used a demo of Directory Opus 5, which I thought was quite good, and had features that I don’t see in modern Linux environments. I never did buy a full version.

I’ve likely missed out many other “serious” applications that I used regularly, and I’ve left out any mention of games because that’s not what this post is about. I’ll definetely have to brush the cobwebs off the boxes some time. In the meantime I can play with UAE (or rather E-UAE for some more features), and AROS.

For those who are interested, Ars Technica are currently running a series of articles on A history of the Amiga. Hyperion Entertainment are still working on AmigaOS 4, Amiga, Inc still seem to be about (and litigating), there may even be new hardware on its way (we shall see).

South Cheshire GNU/Linux Users met in Macclesfield last night, and I went for the first time. Getting there was pretty painless: Macclesfield station is probably the furthest in that direction that I can get a direct train to from Levenshulme, and the venue, The Society Rooms, is easy to find.

The turn out was good, I think I counted twelve, and someone said it was probably a record. Normally they get about three or four people. To accommodate us we had to commandeer some extra furniture, comfy furniture. The Society Rooms is quite nice considering it’s a Wetherspoons pub (I’m used to the ones in Manchester).

We started off by introducing ourselves: There were people from quite varying backgrounds, including step‐ father and son who were just getting into GNU/Linux. I wasn’t the only person wearing a Debian shirt either. Stranger things have happened (no pink elephants involved here).

Topics covered included various UNIX‐like operating systems, virtualisation, the broken MS OOXML specification, network cards that silently corrupt traffic. It was well worth going, and I hope to make it to future meetings.

ManLUG

Yesterday I went to ManLUG’s August meeting. It was supposed to be discussion on the BBC’s iPlayer, DRM and the protests that happened outside the BBC’s offices in London and Manchester on the 14th of August, organised by Defective By Design. If there was such discussion, I wasn’t involved in it. Later, Simon Hobson did a short presentation on fail2ban among other things, which got some interest, especially from some young new ManLUG attendees who I hope aren’t too put off to return.

Preventing SSH brute force attacks

I ended up getting drawn into a discussion #manlug about the “hackiness” of the likes of denyhosts and fail2ban, that continued on to preventing brute force attacks. I gave up trying to get it across to someone who I think is pretty clued up about system administration that simply running SSH service on a high port may help prevent casual brute force attacks, but by itself it is an (very close to) ineffective means of defence. I’d like to think I gave him something to think about, but I think he just ended up not listening on the grounds that he doesn’t see anything in his logs resembling unauthorised connection attempts and assumes it doesn’t and won’t happen. I was getting irritated and losing patience. It felt like everything I said was being put to question. I wanted to tell him to just do some research (I think I did, though can’t remember). The only positive thing I can get out of that is it made me consider my reasoning more carefully. It’s a painful process.

Beerage

After the ManLUG meeting, landstalker and I went to SandBar for a few. We met up a bit later in the English Lounge in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. It’s quite a nicely furbished place, and seemed friendly. Guinness came in at £3/pint. I think I’ve been there before, but I can’t remember. landstalker’s friends were already there, but I didn’t know any of them to say hello. That was resolved on landstalker’s arrival. We went somewhere else, and then on to Bar Fringe where landstalker drank a 9% beer because of a pink elephant. It was fun. I got the bus towards home (Levenshulme) and ended up in Stockport (map), in the rain, with no buses to take me back. The taxi was £16.something. That was not so fun.