I videoed the talks at recent Eccentric Eggplant GeekDinner. The videos are available in Ogg format, and should play in VLC. Like the CLUG talks, they are all available in 3 qualities. Don’t expect to be able to read slides in anything but the high quality version.

• South African Mirror - at UCT, slow during office hours
• UK Mirror

This might sound like a silly topic, but it’s infuriating.

It’s only very recently (since July) that I’ve adopted the Ctrl-Alt-Arrow Virtual Desktop bindings. Call me an old todger, but up until now, I’ve always remapped Alt-F1 through Alt-F6 as my Virtual Desktop keys. That’s how I always switched desktop, and I couldn’t bring myself to change to the Ctrl-Alt style.

I try to slowly align myself with the new defaults, so that I have to do less customisation to feel comfortable when I sit down at a box. With the MacBook which infuriatingly requires Fn+ for the F-keys, I thought I’d switch. It took a bit of re-training to switch, and now I’m comfortable. But, every now an then, I accidentally press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and kill X. This combination is supposed to be highly unlikely to be accidental, and used to be. But with the default gnome bindings, it’s quite common. You just finish editing some text, and switch desktop, to find that your right hand hadn’t fully released the backspace key before the Ctrl+Alt went down.

I think either the X kill key needs to be changed, or we have to get rid of this silly gnome desktop-switching binding.

OTOH, I’m almost entirely in line with the modern GNOME defaults. On a foreign machine, I need to set up Dvorak keyboard, change the terminal to grey-on-black, and I’m pretty much ready to go. (My .ssh/config is also nice to have, as are my firefox quick links)

I’ve updated planet geekdinner to pick up *camp posts.

As usual, as long as your post mentions the words *camp or geek-dinner, it should make the planet. We can no longer use tag feeds, as “geekdinner” and “*camp” are generally separate tags.

For regex geeks, the regex is ([gG]eek[ -]?[dD]inner|([sS]tar|\*)[ -]?[cC]amp)

On another note, I don’t know if I’m going to make star-camp - I might well be away that weekend. But hopefully I’ll be there.

Is it just me, or is the Ubuntu development tree more stable than the releases?

I don’t know if I’ve just had bad luck, but the few Ubuntu releases have seen me abandon the stable release, almost straight away in search of some stability in the development tree. I remember Breezy being a stable release. Dapper was quite good, too - well polished. However, edgy was (as people said at the time), a little edgy, and for me it went down from there…

My first foray into Ubuntu development was from edgy to feisty. My laptop (Acer Ferrari 4005) was horribly unstable - a new, young chipset. Also, the tifm SD card reader wasn’t supported. I found feisty development to be quite stable and I pushed The Shuttleworth Lab into running it too, as a work-around for a nasty NFS bug which wasn’t going to ever be fixed.

Feisty development was fun. There was one update when mkinitrd broke, and the systems was completely unbootable (I still have a “rescue” monolithic kernel hanging around from that incident). But otherwise, it was pretty much like life on Debian testing: stable enough.

With the feisty release, prism54 broke, so my Ferrari headed for gutsy, straight away. (My secondary WiFi card is a prism54, the Ferrari wifi is broadcom)

Then I bought a new laptop, a mid-2007 Macbook - a carefully considered machine that should mostly contain well-supported hardware (Intel everywhere and Atheros wifi). Feisty was totally unstable on it, and I had to dive into Gutsy development again. Even gutsy didn’t support my wireless, which is only supported in the bleeding-edge madwifi trunk. No effort has been made to bring this driver into Ubuntu, as far as I know.

Now, I find myself wanting to get away from gutsy as fast as possible, because of a string of bugs. When a distribution is still in development, bugs get fixed, but as soon as it released there is too much red tape involved, and more to the point, the developers aren’t personally impacted by the bugs. Gutsy development has been a treat - pretty stable and reliable, and things worked.

Now almost simultaneously with the release, a pair string of bugs appeared that break my Suspend/Resume:

• a bad kernel
• network manager instability

Am I destined to always run the development version?

People ask me if Ubuntu works. I say yes, it works almost perfectly on most machines. But in the back of my mind, I’m thinking well - it does during the development cycle, but as it approaches releases, bugs creep in.

Of course this rant could be explained away in a couple of ways. I came to Ubuntu from Debian (which I still use), so I’m a CLI user, who started with the expectation that any laptop-ish support is better than nothing. My expectations have since risen to the point where everything should just work out of the box on a 6-month old machine. And a brand-new machine, should at least mostly work.

The Ubuntu release cycle coincides very badly with my academic schedule. Releases occur during term time, during the peak project hand-ins and tests month. So while I’m quite active in launchpad-crawling during development, as releases approach and the updates reach a fever-pitch, I’ve got less and less time to test them. This doesn’t lead to particularly merry releases for me.

Maybe I should follow Adrian Frith’s (rather ephemeral) lead, and switch to running Debian on my laptop. It might make a grumpy geek happier :-)

We’ve read that Telkom is implementing uncapped local access, as mandated by ICASA. The regulation states “local bandwidth shall not be subject to the cap”, but nobody seriously thinks Telkom will follow this to the letter. There is a huge market in inter-office VPNs over ADSL, and Telkom don’t want to lose out on that revenue stream.

Currently the savvy users out there use hacks like mine to least-cost-route local traffic over cheaper IS “Local-Only” accounts (like these). Hell, even ISPs route their clients’ local traffic over the IS Local-Only accounts.

From what I’ve heard from the friendly frogs, Telkom are really just going to keep it simple, and implement the equivalent of IS DSL accounts, where after you get capped, you get another, local-only cap. This can be implemented with Radius only, and will (to some extent) prevent the service from being abused be everybody.

So yes, we all still need our separate IS Local-Only accounts, and do our own LCR.

Anybody who thinks Telkom is doing any good for South Africa, go and sit in a corner now!