source http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html

Right May be you don’t live in New Zealand, but remember

First They Came for the Jews
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

Already This evil practise is been allegedly  used by   Starcomms in Nigeria to arbitraryly disconnect the Internet lines of many of their customers for downloading pirated media, without giving the customers a chance to defend themselves.

Well i feel we can do something about it. The Internet is a powerful medium and we can make our displeasure heard by blacking out your avatar you can download a black avatar from here http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html . This is a subtle way to show that we would not start by or support this kind of action. Remember if its succeeds in getting official sanction in New Zealand, Chances are Governments in other countries my decide to follow the same path. But if we stand by our New Zealand brothers(and sisters) we can all nip this evil act in the bud.

On windows i used the windows media center which is a very cool tool for my needs. Unfortuntely when i migrated to Linux i was unable to find a program that does what i wanted. i tried MyTV but it was too TV centric i don’t have a TV Card- beside was a witch to configure. I just wanted something that was easy to install, easy to use, and just works.

I heard about Elisa from the ubuntuforums and decided to give it a try. My first experience (some 8 months ago) with it was a PITA. it was very alpha, very difficult to configure (you have to edit some .xml files in your home dir), and even than it crashed easily was, and was  just too much hassle for my young Linux mind .

Then came the dark ages. For about a year i was without a media center on Linux but got on with my life (some how). Then one day while redditing Elisa popped up again so i said heck and decided to give it another try. This time around it blow me away. I was amazed at  the massive improvement that has been made to it since the last time i tried. The interface has been redesigned, it is now very slick and works very well. installation is dead easy . just go grab their source list from here add it to your sources.list (System/Administration/Software Sources –> Third Party Software tab, –> Add, paste the sourcelist, and add source. Now open synaptic /System/Administration/Synaptic, Reload the search for and install Elisa. If you (like me) prefer the commandline just open Terminal (Applications/Accessories/Terminal) copy and paste the following (modify to the version of ubuntu you are running, am on hardy heron)
echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/elisa-developers/ppa/ubuntu hardy main | sudo tee -a '/etc/apt/sources.list'

then sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install elisa once installed you can run elisa from Applications/Sound and Videos/Elisa

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4Udx2-jVoc]

In all I found Elisa to do just what i wanted from a media center. a one stop shop for my music, pictures and videos. it also has the ability to watch online videos like youtube and connect to flickr (although i wasnt able to test those services) so if you are like me and are looking for a simple easy to your media center that doesn’t try to take over the world .. then give Elisa a try.

But there is also a good side to the boredom (aside the good work conditions and salary that is) i get to learn more about Linux, and as you might know ( or ought to know) its never a dull moment with Linux. there is always something new to try out. so decided that i would need a Linux distro for my flash drive. for the following reasons

1 am bored

2 its sound cool to have a Linux OS on a flash drive one more star to my geek barge.

3 am bored

4 It would be handful especially when i need rescue a system that has crashed (like the few widows systems we have here) its would be faster than using a Live CD.

5 might also be handy when i need fast access to the internet. since the distro i settled for booted in like 15 secs and was internet ready.

Last time i tried getting a Linux OS run on a USB i ended up trashing the USB stick and all the data in it. without a bootable Linux. but that was some 10 years ago (actually 6 months but 6 months is 10 years in Linux). so i decided it was time to give it another Go. I choose Puppy Linux because I have tried it before i love it. its annoyingly fast .. and can boot in less than 15 sec.. i grabbed the ISO image from here http://www.PuppyLinux.org/home/ . and i followed this guide http://aronzak.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/usb-Linux-howto-Puppy-universal-installer/
on how to install it on a usb stick . worked like a charm .. so i rebooted my machine a Dell xps m1330. told it to boot from usb (press F12 at boot) Puppy asked me some questions about my keyboard (UK qwerty ) whether i wanted xorg or vesa choose xorg , and my monitor choose the one with 24 option beside it. secs later am booted into a desktop that has everything i need. music player, video player, word processor, browser, a chat clients, an image editor etc i even played some mp3 files from my computer hard drive (yeah it even mounted the computer drives) and it worked… its amazing how such array of applications can be quashed into something not better than 90MB. and did i say everything worked out of the box. i was able to connect to a wireless network and using the ever reliable SeaMonkey browser i was on the net surfing happily. The System was blink of an eye fast. …one click beeeem …one click beeeeeem. i tried it on a lesser system with just 256 mb and there was no different in performance between that and my 4 gb ram laptop. once done i told it to log out and it asked if i wanted to save my session ( if you don’t do this any settings you make doing the usb session wont be saved) so i said yes and called the session bigbrovar. i logged into the “slow” world of gnome fired gparted and labelled the usb drive Garfield ( yeah my partner is always ranting about how much i suck at names after i named a test server …. test server). no sooner have i installed it was Garfield was called to action. a colleague’s vista crashed and wont wake up. her Ethernet port is bad and when we tried the intrepid live cd .. it wont detect the wireless .. so we throw in Puppy 20 sec later we were using the wireless to scp her stuff to the fileserver. (we means me and my partner the network admin). yeah Puppy worked were Ubuntu failed. (although i still use Ubuntu for my everyday computing).

My new Puppy

Please while it might be possible on some other laptops. my laptop came with the PRO/Wireless 3945ABG and its impossible to share my internet over wireless because the current driver for my device doesnt support master mode which is what is needed for this to be possible. But with this guide it would be possible to share intenet via Lan. so if you get your intenet connection over wlan or a 3g modem or anything modem. it would be possible to share that same internet over Lan. Note if you got your wifi to work through ndiswrapper then we are also in the same shoes and sharing via wifi wont work. Infact this post is not about sharing your internet via wifi period.

Ok enough talk. To get started we would need tool packages. Firestarter and dhcp both can be installed with this command

sudo apt-get install firestarter dhcp3-server

Next we need to configure the internal Network Card that other computers get their internet from. In my case since the shaing computer gets internet from Wifi my internal network card (i.e the card other computers would be getting their internet from) would be eth0. we need to configure the card and assign a static IP address in a range that you will use for your internal network card. so rightclick on the Network manager applet and select edit

click the wired tab and select Auto eth0 (or the card of the particular card you want to coonfigure as the sharing interface) and click edit.

now select IPv4 Settings and choose Manual. now Add

and set it up to your preference. for example i set like this IP address to 192.168.0.1, and the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0. Leave the gateway empty.

Now we need to fix a problem where firestarter cannot locate the DHCP daemon script

so we open a terminal and run this command

sudo ln -sf /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server /etc/init.d/dhcpd

Next we configure the interface that DCHP will be listening to.

To do this we need to edit this file /etc/default/dhcp3-server

gksu gedit /etc/default/dhcp3-server

only variable in there by default is “INTERFACES”, which will have a null value. Set it to your internal network interface. For example:

# Defaults for dhcp initscript
# sourced by /etc/init.d/dhcp
# installed at /etc/default/dhcp3-server by the maintainer scripts

#
# This is a POSIX shell fragment
#

# On what interfaces should the DHCP server (dhcpd) serve DHCP requests?
# Separate multiple interfaces with spaces, e.g. “eth0 eth1″.
INTERFACES=”eth0″

save and exit

Now we run Firestarter Applications/Internet/Firestarter

A wizard should appear Select your Detected Device (Internet-connected) if your sharing computer gets its Internet via wifi then your external device would mostly be wlan0. if you are connected via a modem then it would be ppp0 device when it asks, and make sure to specify whether or not the address is obtained via DHCP. Click the “Forward” button, check the “Enable Internet connection sharing” box, select your internal network card,”Start firewall now” box, Then click on Preference and and Network settings.

“Enable DHCP for local network”. Drop down the “DHCP server details” and enter the range of IPs you would like for it to dynamically assign. Make sure they are in the same range as the static IP you set for your internal network card. You can leave the DNS field as “” Click “Forward”, check the “Start firewall now” box, and click “Save”.

“Enable DHCP for local network”. Drop down the “DHCP server details” and enter the range of IPs you would like for it to dynamically assign. Make sure they are in the same range as the static IP you set for your internal network card. You can leave the DNS field as “” Click “Forward”, check the “Start firewall now” box, and click “Save”.

At this stage am able to ping the from the other computer but am unable to access the internet. to fix this we need to add “net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1″ to /etc/sysctl.conf

to /etc/sysctl.conf

so
gksu gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

and add this at the bottom

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1
save and close.

now if all goes well you will be able to share your Internet to another laptop or computer. hope this helps some body

To share your internet using your wireless connection use this guide

for this guide we will be using the commandline. But that should not scare you, i have tried to make the guide as easy as possible. first we open Terminal /Application/Accessories/Terminal
Now since we will be running every command as root(as administrator), we sould need to become an admin. so that we wont need to been adding sudo infront of every command. so first copy and paste this in terminal

sudo bash

hit enter and give your passwd.

you will see your prompts change from
this :~$ to :~#

Then we need to install Libsmbios a linux package in the Ubuntu repositories.

apt-get install libsmbios-bin

once installed we need to get the system ID to get hat run this in terminal
getSystemId

you should get an output that looks like this

System ID: 0x0209
Service Tag: 4MV9HH1
Express Service Code: 10089895861
Product Name: XPS M1330
BIOS Version: A14
Vendor: Dell Inc.
Is Dell: 1

from the above output my system ID is 0×0209. Armed with this information you now need to get the BIOS version want to upgrade / downgrade. you can get it from here. http://linux.dell.com/repo/firmware/bios-hdrs
Scroll down the list to find a directory matching the System ID from the previous step. and look for the bios version that you want to upgrade/downgrade to In my case my directory is named: system_bios_ven_0x1028_dev_0x0209_version_a14/ my system ID IS 0×0209 and the version of bios i wanted was A14.
Go into this directory and download the file, “bios.hdr” and save it in your desktop.

Now we load the load the dell_rbu driver

modprobe dell_rbu

For Updating

now to update the bios we move into the directory were we saved the bios.hdr file. if you saved it in your desktop. just do this

cd $HOME/Desktop

PLEASE MAKE SURE YOUR SYSTEM IS PLUGGED TO A POWER SOURCE AND NOT ON BATTERY.

Then we run the update command.

dellBiosUpdate -u -f ./bios.hdr

if all goes well you would see the following feedback

Supported RBU type for this system: (MONOLITHIC)
Using RBU v2 driver. Initializing Driver.
Setting RBU type in v2 driver to: MONOLITHIC
Prep driver for data load.
Writing RBU data (4096bytes/dot): ............................
..............................................................
.......................
Notify driver data is finished.
Activate CMOS bit to notify BIOS that update is ready on next boot.
Update staged sucessfully. BIOS update will occur on next reboot.


If you are Downgrading

for downgrading to a previous BIOS version.

your downgrade command would be

dellBiosUpdate --override_bios_version -u -f ./bios.hdr

Now that you are done updating /downgrading

we would need to tell the system to do a cold reboot which is what is needed after doing a bios update.

to do this we would need to edit the kernel line in your menu.lst

run this in terminal

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
look for the kernel line

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9-generic
uuid f5e0a891-61ec-434a-b935-78bc25b1542e
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-9-generic root=UUID=f5e0a891-61ec-434a-b935-78bc25b1542e ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-9-generic

and add reboot=bios to the end of the kernel line to look like this

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9-generic
uuid f5e0a891-61ec-434a-b935-78bc25b1542e
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-9-generic root=UUID=f5e0a891-61ec-434a-b935-78bc25b1542e ro quiet reboot=bios splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-9-generic

save and close the text editor

now you can reboot your machine

once the system restart it would display a white screen which some messages displaying what its doing. and your bios boot splash might take a while. but that is fine.

once restarted. be sure to remove the “reboot=bios” from your kernel line.

I used this method to update the BIOS of my dell xps m1330 ( and downgraded it once) and it worked fine without any ( as we Nigerians will say) Whahala or problem.
Hope this helps some one.

They say if u want something done you’d better do it your self. Since there was no deb package for the latest scilab 5.0.3. I had no choice than to build one from source. it wasn’t easy hunting down the needed dependency many of which are not available in the hardy repository. I had to download online from the intrepid repo . here are the things  i did to get it to compile.

first download the latest scilab 5.0.3

wget http://www.scilab.org/download/5.0.3/scilab-5.0.3-src.tar.gz

mv it to your home directory

mv scilab-5.0.3-src.tar.gz $HOME

then we install the scilab dependencies that are available in that hardy repository

sudo apt-get build-dep scilab
sudo apt-get install liblaf-plugin-java libjgoodies-looks-java scilab-doc ant sun-java5-jdk

once that is done
time to download and install the external dependencies that are not available in hardy repo to make things easy we create a directory called dependencies

mkdir dependencies

now we enter into the dependencies directory we just created

cd dependencies

then we download the required dependencies

libflexdock-jni
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libf/libflexdock-java/libflexdock-jni_0.5.1-dfsg1-4_i386.deb

libflexdock-java-doc
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libf/libflexdock-java/libflexdock-java-doc_0.5.1-dfsg1-4_all.deb

libflexdock-java-demo
wget [url]http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libf/libflexdock-java/libflexdock-java-demo_0.5.1-dfsg1-4_all.deb[/url]

libjogl-jni
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/libj/libjogl-java/libjogl-jni_1.1.1-2ubuntu1_i386.deb

libjogl-java
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/libj/libjogl-java/libjogl-java_1.1.1-2ubuntu1_all.deb

libjrosetta-java
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libj/libjrosetta-java/libjrosetta-java_1.0.1+gpl-1_all.deb

libmatio0
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libm/libmatio/libmatio0_1.3.3-2_i386.deb

libmatio-dev
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libm/libmatio/libmatio-dev_1.3.3-2_i386.deb

libflexdock-java
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libf/libflexdock-java/libflexdock-java_0.5.1-dfsg1-4_all.deb

libskinlf-java
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libs/libskinlf-java/libskinlf-java_6.7-3_all.deb

once every last one of the dependency as been downloaded
we then install all of them with one command

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

once done . we have installed all the dependencies needed by the application.

NOTE: I didnt build this on a fresh ubuntu so they maybe some needed which didnt show up because there were already installed on my computer. so to be save make sure you install build-essential
sudo apt-get install build-essential

now we start the build.

cd ..

extract the scilab

tar -xzvf scilab-5.0.3-src.tar.gz

enter the directory

cd scilab-5.0.3

then run configure

./configure

it would take a while. and if all went well it would return no errors meaning all the dependencies needed for compiling the package is installed. now we run make

make

this would take a very very long time.. if you have anything else to do .. this is the right time.
i ran this on a pentium dual core 1.8ghz 2gb ram and it took almost 1 hour.

but once its done

sudo make install

it would also take some time to complete .. but once its done without errors that means that scilab 5.0.3 has been installed and can be found in /Application/Education/Scilab

hope some one finds this useful.

PS.. if u run ibex. you dont just

sudo apt-get build-dep scilab
sudo apt-get install liblaf-plugin-java libjgoodies-looks-java scilab-doc ant sun-java5-jdk

and

sudo apt-get install libflexdock-jni libskinlf-java libflexdock-java libmatio-dev libmatio0 libjrosetta-java jogl-java libjogl-jni libflexdock-java-demo libflexdock-java-doc

before starting the compiling

For those using Intrepid good news is that u dont have to go thru all the process i went thru just
In /etc/apt/sources, add the line:

deb http://www.scilab.org/team/sylvestre.ledru/repository/ubuntu/ intrepid main

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude install scilab

Reference http://www.scilab.org/team/sylvestre.ledru/