Late post about last weekend, sorry for the delay.
Saturday 24th October, Linux User Groups of Italy celebrated the ninth Linuxday, an event promoted by the Italian Linux Society, and organized by the Italians LUGs across 123 cities. Ubuntu-it speakers attended some of these events, promoting Ubuntu and how to participate in the community. I did a talk in Siena. You can find my slides on Slideshare and embedded below:
And some photos of the event:
Fixing a computer before the talk.
My talk: Let's Make Ubuntu!
I am what I am because of who we all are
During my talk...
After my talk
During the evening the very talented Luca Mercurio, aucustic guitar in WilloS’ Band demonstrated how to record a song with Ubuntu Studio. Here you can find a short video.
Since the first day I got my G1 I installed the useful WiFi Tether. It’s very useful and it allow to be quickly in the net from any operative system. The bad side is that it drain quickly the battery charge and the phone start to be hot after few minutes.
Today I found a nice program which allow Tethering with USB cable. It don’t need rooted phones, and the phone doesn’t warm up during tethering. It’s called azilink and like WiFi Tether is released under GPL License.
Following few steps to quickly share the Internet connection with your Ubuntu.
Last Friday June 12th, Ubuntu-it took part at the third ConfSL, the annual conference about Free Software held in Bologna. Me and Luca Falavigna had a talk with the title “Facciamo Ubuntu” (Let’s make Ubuntu) where we explained how Ubuntu is made and how to contribute to Ubuntu with Bug Triage. At the end of the talk we showed the triaging process working on a bug reported by a guy in the audience. Here are some photos of the session:
Full photo album is here and you can get my slides in slideshare.
Aldo is well know in Italian Ubuntu Community because his fabulous Ubuntu CD Cover. Now he translated it in English and he published it with sources in Spread Ubuntu Site for the international community. Translating it in your own language and uploading it again in Spread Ubuntu it’s the best way to thanks him.
Last Saturday, I was in Pontedera (Pisa) with Dario talking about Ubuntu and Free Software to the students of the “Instituto Pacinotti“. Members from Pisa and Empoli LUGs joined us and we appreciated it very much. Also, an unexpected member of Ubuntu-it attended the presentation, the funniest Forum moderator of the world: Jeremie Tamburini.
The meeting was good and the students were really involved, asking us a lot of questions. After the event we had lunch with some of the teachers of the school and members of the LUGs, trying to figure out future activities in that school.
We discussed an idea: starting some educational activities where Ubuntu should just be an enabler of those activities, instead of continuing to spread Free Software only by talking about Technology.
This kind of methodology sounded nice to all of us because in this way we can involve students of all ages.
Following are some of the ideas we had:
Organize a TuxMath tournament with some prizes (Ubuntu Netbooks, USB sticks, etc). We will look for some sponsors but the amount of money we need it’s really low (~500 Euros).
Create an Ubuntu Live CD with Tux Math and full Italian localization dedicated to the event, including wallpapers, musics and other stuff created from the students.
Organize some activity with the English teachers where students translate Free Software. The school we met just started helping us with Full Circle Magazine translation, and we would like to extend this kind of activities, also with Upstream projects.
A space in the Italian Weekly Newsletter where Students can write articles about Free Software and their experiences. In that institute already exist a “journalism lab” so we would like to create some kind of synergy with them.
Last weekend I attended PyCon 3, in Florence, with Milo. All talks were really interesting and it has been really nice to hear again Guido Van Rossum live.
I also enjoyed the Talk of the great Alex Martelli who makes me so proud of being Italian.
Sunday I made a Lightning Talk about my recent experiments with Jaunty on Android (1) (2).
But the best pleasure was to meet again old friends after so many years: Christian Surchi, Claudio Cicali and Carlo Miron.
This great weekend i’s over but I’m already looking forward to the next weekend: me and Dario Cavedon will meet the students of Pontedera’s High Schools, introducing them to Free Software and Ubuntu. This will be the first pilot scheme for the Ubuntu @ School project of the Italian LoCo Team. The conference will be held at the prestigious Piaggio Conference Hall inside the Piaggio Museum (anybody out there don’t know what a Vespa is?) and I’m really excited about it.
Today I continued my hacking with Ubuntu chrooted on Android. I followed this guide based on Debian and I installed LXDE over the Ubuntu Minimal installation I prepared yesterday. All it’s pretty easy to do:
edit ./startubuntu script and add “export USER=root”.
Start ubuntu system with ./startubuntu script
Add universe and multiverse repositories to /etc/apt/source.list (if you downloaded my image you have just main)
apt-get install tightvncserver
apt-get install lxde
both packages brings a lot of dependencies that are not really used in this specific case, but I hadn’t time for polishment. My image now, after a package’s cache cleaning, it’s 414MByte.
Now you can start vncserver to have a new display (called :1)
vncserver -geometry 480×320
it will create .vnc directory under /root. It also will ask you a password (insert it twice) and for the viewing password answer NO.
NowIt’s time to stop it for few more configuration
vncserver -kill :1
and move to the config files
cd /root/.vnc
vi xstartup
commenting everythings and insert 2 lines:
icewm &
lxsession
that’s all folks. Now start again vncserver and pressing “home key” come back to Android desktop leaving terminal emulator open in background. Using androidVNC application (it’s on the market) connect to localhost:5901 with the previous selected password. That’s what you will get
Few last improvement, I made 2 alias in /root/.bashrc
alias vncstart=’vncserver -geometry 480×320′
alias vncstop=’vncserver -kill :1′
And i changed the wallpaper with the Jaunty default
About one month ago I bought an HTC Dream aka G1. I started to play with Android and I think it’s pretty cool.
After few hours I had it in my hands I started to look for information about how to hack it, and I found a lot of useful sources. I got Root on it, and then I installed the Jesus Freke’s version of Android. I was also able to install Debian on the Micro SD Card, and it was a lot of fun. Now Jaunty is out, and we have ARM port available, so I was wondering if it’s possible to install Ubuntu under Android like Debian does. With an useful explanation about how to build an ARM image using debootstrap with Debian I started to build mine with Ubuntu repository.
IT WORKS!
Warning: I suggest to try it only if you’re an experienced user with Android Hacking.
What you need:
You need a Rooted G1 with a community build of Android.
I tested it with JesusFreke’s v1.50 but it should works with any Apps_to_SD version
You need an Apps_to_SD version. In other words you need to make an ext2 partition on your Micro SD Card. Further info.
unpack the tar.gz on your ext2 partition. If you have a JF or an Haykuro version it should be mounted on /system/sd
Now you will have a /system/sd/ubuntu folder with a Jaunty ARM image. That Ubuntu image is built with ubuntu-minimal package.
Then copy startubuntu script in/system/sd folder. Umount SDCard from computer and move on the phone keyboard.
With terminal emulator type:
cd /system/sd
su
./startubuntu
Now you will have an Ubuntu Minimal enviroment chrooted under Android’s Linux kernel. You can go ahead installing a full Desktop Enviroment. You can also use abd shell from your computer for a better typing.
Note: probably the image should be polished. Patches are welcome!
