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Which is where Gnome Nanny come in. Gnome Nanny is an Ubuntu/Debian application that makes it pretty straightforward to create rules for each of the users on your machine to limit the time they can use the Internet or the sites that they can view. You can install Gnome Nanny on Ubuntu by adding this PPA to your repository: https://launchpad.net/~guadalinex-members/+archive/ppa

To do this use the following in an open terminal window:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:guadalinex-members/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install nanny

Users of other distributions could download the source code from the Gnome Nanny and give that a try.

Installing Gnome Nanny adds a “Parental Control” option to the Administration menu. Opening that gives the screen below which lists all the users on the system and the various controls that can be added to them. I have user accounts for my children on my Ubuntu machines and I ensure that the screen locks when I am away so they have to use their own account to log on.

In the Gnome Nanny control panel the administrator can set a number of parameters. Among these is which hours of the day they can use the Internet or which sites they are or are not able to view. You can also add a list of blacklisted sites (http://projects.gnome.org/nanny/data/nbl/nanny.nbl) to automatically filter sites for a range of criteria.

Gnome Nanny’s not going to solve absolutely every online threat facing your children but it does make it a little easier to control a good portion of them.

The Special 301 watchlist is a list of countries that don’t “adequately” conform to the USA’s definition of intellectual property protection. It’s a list that is most often used in pressuring countries to conform to US guidelines around pharmaceutical and counterfeiting. Essentially, it is a list of countries considered to be “anti-capitalism”.

According to a report by Andres Guadamuz, a lecturer in law at the University of Edinburgh, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), an umbrella group for organisations such as the MPAA and RIAA, has requested that the US Trade Representative list countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India on its Special 301 watchlist because they use open source software.

Read the full article at MyBroadband

And a good thing too, because they usually don’t.

I also keep it because I own some junk hardware that also doesn’t play nicely with Linux.

I boot into it about once a month – the last time was mid-December. I always enter with trepidation, knowing I’m about to install countless Gigs of security and anti-virus updates.

This evening I booted into Windows at 22h02, and immediately kicked off the Windows, Windows Defender and AVG updates. The updates finished around 00h30, and I’ve probably blown February’s bandwidth.

Shortly after finishing, I was alerted to another update. It seems they arrive faster than I can download them.

About an hour into downloading the patch for the latest gaping hole, a dialer popped up, so a hole was probably exploited in the interim.

I’m now scanning the entire system – who knows how long that will take. Perhaps I was a bit ambitious in hoping to get back to what I was doing by, say, 22h05.

For the average user, who perhaps doesn’t appreciate Freedom, or ever run into the frustrations of not having complete control of their system, there are still two huge advantages to running Linux.

One is having access to tonnes of fantastic software in one place – the default repositories. No need to trawl the internet for dodgy freeware, or head off to Incredibly Expensive software shop to buy something that’s freely available.

The other, of course, is that the obligatory anti-virus software takes up a rather large proportion of the system’s resources, and uses up a nice chunk of your bandwidth too.

And unless you use the machine regularly (and therefore update regularly), the chances of exploitation, even if you immediately install the updates when you do log on, are high.

The scan’s still running. Perhaps I should get this blog post up before my Windows partition is formatted…

First published on Neverness.

With Hardy, there were ongoing annoyances I’d learnt to live with. My screen brightness modifier worked the wrong way around (brighter was dimmer). Flash in the browser caused problems with sound (Flash 9 didn’t work well with PulseAudio), and I’d have to close the browser to get it working again. My webcam image was upside down. Firefox would eventually consume all available memory and need to be restarted. The system was unresponsive for a few seconds after booting up. When wireless was off, it would be on, and I’d need to flip the switch to on and then off again to really switch it off.

I’ve been meaning to try Linux Mint for a while, to see whether I could recommend it to complete beginners. Ubuntu was fine, but for beginners, especially if I just gave them the CD and they installed it themselves, installing all the extra codecs to get music and DVD’s playing properly was often problematic.

At first glance, Helena looked great. Based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10, it’s more polished, booted faster, and was more responsive. Little touches such as the volume control not taking up a huge chunk in the middle of the screen – rather appearing neatly in the corner, the consolidated menu bars freeing up a few extra pixels, or the improved menu, all add up to a noticeable improvement. Most of the little Hardy annoyances seemed to be taken care of (except for the webcam and the off-on-off wireless).

It didn’t last long though. Sound was a complete mess, breaking seemingly at random at some point in the session. Lennart Poettering, a lead developer of PulseAudio has been ranting about Ubuntu’s implementation of PulseAudio since they first implemented it in Hardy. He also blamed application developers, in particular Skype and Flash. He was equally displeased in the buildup to Karmic.

The blame-game goes back and forth, with criticism of PulseAudio equally vociferous, and all sorts of contrary advice floating around (much of it around uninstalling PulseAudio).

Next, the system, although starting off more responsively, degraded very quickly. Whereas beforehand I’d have Firefox open with 30 tabs for most of the day before running into trouble, things fell apart much quicker. Even worse, once the browser hung, I couldn’t just click “X” to close it, and have to manually kill it to close it down. The disease spread to other applications, all needing to be killed manually.

So, in short, lots of little improvements, but two rather large regressions.

Fixing these though proved trivial. For me, two little fixes seem to have helped – installing libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio (over libsdl1.2debian-alsa), and instead o using the buggy version 2.0.x of Skype, which doesn’t work well with PulseAudio, rather installing the beta 2.1.x. Thankfully at least Flash 10 works with PulseAudio (Flash 9 didn’t, causing the sound problems mentioned above). Now, both the sound and the related memory problems have gone away.

So although I seem to have a stable system now, and am personally happy with Helena, it still took a bit of fiddling around, beyond what the average user would be comfortable doing. It’s getting closer though and, hopefully, with Lucid Lynx 10.04 being a LTS release, sound will finally be a painless experience for most people.

First published on Neverness.

Check out the feature list at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList

This is also my first blog so I’m hoping that I don’t do it to badly. WINE is  basically a windows emulator for Linux operating systems. WINE allows you to run some applications on Linux that does not have Linux support or installers ie: Office 2007, World of Warcraft and many others. This is not a how-to but more a idea of what is going around and what its all about. WINE is the underlying technology for all the above applications. But lets face it, this was made so we could run the nice M$ games on our Linux distros. I for one love to game and I really would like to have more games written for M$ and Linux. I can’t figure out what the big deal is as most games are written in C++ and could be compiled for any OS type.

Games is a major stumbling block when it comes to people moving from M$ to Linux and most don’t have the knowledge or time to sit and try figure out how to play there favorite games on Linux. Here comes the solutions. Some are free and others not but lets take a look at them a little more.

WINE

WINE is easy to setup but hard to configure. Most of the time you need to install things like flash, msfonts and direct X to make things work. So far I found that if you don’t want to physically install something from a CD or download it, the best option is to use WINE on its own and check out WINE AppDb for some useful tips on how to run some of the applications. WINE has some add-on tools to make life a little easier like winetricks and others.

Cedega also known as WINEX

Cedega is a commercial application that will cost you around $5 a month if you want to play games on Linux but it does support some really nice games. It’s a frontend that was built on top of WINE which runs basic scripts to install the needed applications to run specific games. Now, as South Africans in a recession this is not a viable option as we already have to pay monthly subs for some games and then also just to run it on our system.

Crossover

Crossover has two versions: Crossover Linux Professional and Crossover games for Linux. And as you can guess it is WINE with some scripts and uses WINEPREFIX to run its applications. I must say if I had to pay for applications this would be  the one. Its a once-off charge of $39.95 and no monthly subs.

PlayOnLinux

This is exactly the same as all of the above its uses WINE with scripts to make installations easy. The big difference here is that its absolutely free and according to their site will remain free. But with all free things there comes a price. Their application support is not as big as WINE and they are still working out what all is needed to run what applications.

Now for my 2 cents worth on the entire subject is that if you have all the install CDs and your looking for less fuss and more play time then get either Crossover or PlayOnLinux as they are reasonable and less hard to work with. If you have all your games on a external hdd like me from Windows past then WINE with winetricks is about the best option. This is a work around for playing games on Linux and until supplies start recognizing that the Linux gaming community is growing rapidly and start selling games for all OS’s this will have to be the workaround.

Oh, the one thing that all the others do is use WINEPREFIX with different names. Crossover calls it bottles and PlayOnLinux something else. But what it basically does is install your game on its own little windows framework so that if you install something that might help one application but break another then they don’t affect each other. CodeWeavers Crossover also gives you a 30-day trial on CrossOver Games Linux if you want to check it out before you buy it.

Some useful links

http://www.winehq.org/
http://www.codeweavers.com/
http://www.playonlinux.com/en
http://www.cedega.com/

If we have a Linux release party and “Two techies from the area teamed up to highlight ******* *’* key features and answer questions”, people will most likely say or at least think that is because nobody else understands Linux. Insert Linux distro of choice in the appropriate space.

To promote Linux and in this writers case, UBUNTU, we have to give it a cool factor so that general users WANT to belong to the group of Linux users. Make it a cool, fun, easy “club”  to belong to.

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Apologies to all here and at Ubuntu-ZA for not being active the last 3 weeks.

In a blog posting, Microsoft group manager Paul Lorimer said the company was working to publish the specifications behind Outlook’s .pst files.

The move, he said, would “allow developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files in server and client scenarios using the programming language and platform of their choice.”

Lorimer said the documentation effort was still in its early stages. “We are engaging directly with industry experts and interested customers to gather feedback on the quality of the technical documentation to ensure that it is clear and useful.”

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Desktop features

GNOME 2.28 featuring Empathy: with this latest beta release, Ubuntu now uses the Empathy instant messaging service by default, introducing the Telepathy framework.

Ubuntu Software Center: the first step in a replacement for Add/Remove Software has landed for testing and feedback.

New boot experience: multiple changes to look, feel and speed of the boot experience have been included in the Ubuntu 9.10 beta.

Server features

Cloud computing: Ubuntu 9.10 builds on cloud support in Ubuntu 9.04, with support for Eucalyptus configuration at install time and publishing of standard VM images for UEC.

AppArmor: Ubuntu 9.10 continues to raise the bar for server security, with AppArmor profiles enabled by default for ntpd and libvirt providing another layer of protection from attacks on the network or via guest virtual machines.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix features

Ubuntu Netbook Remix is optimised to run on Intel atom based netbooks. It includes a new consumer-friendly interface that allows users to quickly and easily get on-line and use their favourite applications. This interface is optimised for a retail sales environment.

It includes the same faster boot times and improved boot experience as Ubuntu desktop.

Kubuntu features

Kubuntu 9.10, built on KDE 4.3, brings users a complete, full-featured KDE4 desktop with many new applications and innovations. This is also the first release for a new Kubuntu variant, Kubuntu Netbook Edition.

Xubuntu features

Xubuntu 9.10 comes with the light-weight Xfce 4.6 desktop environment
to provide a desktop designed for productivity while conserving system resources.

Xubuntu 9.10 includes an improved multimedia experience with the Exaile media player, a more integrated power management solution with the Xfce4 power manager, and more convenience built right in with improved multimedia volume key support and more consistent desktop notifications.

Edubuntu features

Edubuntu 9.10 transitions from an add-on educational CD that depended on an existing Ubuntu installation to a full Ubuntu derivative delivered on as a DVD image. This allows prospective users and decision makers to try the educational offerings prior to installation and the flexibility to make Edubuntu a first class educational operating system.

Mythbuntu features

Mythbuntu 9.10 introduces MythTV 0.22. The entire stack has been ported to QT4 and now allows for very neat UI effects. Also 0.22 adds support for VDPAU hardware acceleration, and HD-PVR hardware support.