Twitter and Ubuntu blogs everywhere are all aflutter in anticipation of next month’s release of Karmic Koala.  I read tech sites and blogs every day, and I can’t seem to escape all the shouting about the next killer feature coming up in 9.10.

For example, the aptly named OMG! UBUNTU! recently posted about the new boot and login screens coming to Karmic.  Gee, haven’t we seen this before?

OMG! UBUNTU! YAY!

The new boot splash is something special, for sure.  Feast your eyes:

Uh... Wow.

The ever-competent boys over at Phoronix also did another post on the new boot splash.  This time, instead of plastering their logo in the middle of captured video, like Softpedia, they decided to videotape a glare-obscured ugly-ass laptop running the alpha:

Ok, well maybe that’s not so exciting.  But surely there’s some more awesome stuff coming up, right?

Of course!  Karmic is also rumored to include Ubuntu’s new Software Store.  Here, have a screenshot:

Exciting shit

This aims to replace the aging Synaptic and Add/Remove Programs dialogs.  Fortunately, fellow reader, they’re leaving aptitude and apt-get un-fucked-with.

Well, all of this is a little underwhelming, isn’t it?  You would think that after Jaunty Jackalope’s lukewarm reception, they would pack a killer app in there or two.  Unsurprisingly, you would be wrong.  Instead of sticking with Pidgin, for example, Karmic is said to be switching to Empathy for messaging.  Nevermind that Empathy is a buggy, half baked mess.  Nevermind that Pidgin has finally added voice and video support.  I’d lay money down right now that 9 of 10 users will uninstall Empathy and replace it with Pidgin within the first hour of installation.

So what is there to look forward to?

Well, Karmic users will finally get Firefox 3.5 in the base installation and repositories.  They’ll also get GNOME 2.26, some new artwork, and another animal-kingdom idol.

But don’t forget the #1 reason for Ubuntu: its excellent and ever expanding community of Ubuntards, your personal support army.

Here’s what you’ll get with your order!

Exhibit A:

Not quite...

Exhibit B, more wisdom from the tards, after a user asks why he can’t cd to a directory:

Correct!

Then, thankfully, an expert comes along to correct the error:

Oh, so close...

These are just examples from the last two hours of posts on the forums.  I have some real gems tucked away for a later date, but these serve to illustrate the point.  They’re just the blind leading the blind.

After experiencing my own ‘Tard moment, Ubuntard.com is back.

Previously hosted on fsckvps.com (whose name can also be accurately interpreted as “fuckups”) we’re back up and running at nearlyfreespeech.net, whom I endorse mightily.  The previous hosting company suffered catastrophic failure and destruction in early June at the hands of an unnamed hacker exploiting a weakness in the management portal and bad administrative practices.  Most of the VPS systems hosted by VAServ and fsckvps.com were totally obliterated.  Ubuntard.com was one of these.

Always the tard myself, there were no full backups of the Ubuntard.com database or site.  I used Google’s cache and my own local copy of the theme to rebuild the site.

As a result, you’ll notice that:

1. Previous comments are missing.
2. A post or two may be missing.

C’est la vie.  Oh well.  Live and learn.  I hadn’t thought the site important enough to backup at the time, but after a few weeks of idleness, I was bitten again by the rage welling up inside me surrounding Ubuntu and its community.  So with little further delay, on with the posts and welcome back.

There are a lot of reasons people run Linux and other *nix variants.  In my case, I like the pure, unadulterated control it gives me.  It’s the same reason I drive a manual transmission, prefer text files to configuration wizards, and just generally feel more comfortable with the command line instead of GUIs.

I like my machine, whatever it may be, to do what I tell it to.  No more, no less.  Windows and some desktop environments barrage you with a medley of “Are you sure?” dialog boxes whenever you perform the slightest operation.  Files are sent to the politically correct Recycle Bin when you request them to be deleted, as another example.  That’s one of the annoyances people accept about using a computer, and they’ll blindly click any confirmation dialog that comes their way.  It’s one of the things that drives me batty when I have to use a system like that.  Sure, that can be bypassed, but that’s another step in what should be a brisk, easy operation.  Nautilus and other GUIs on Linux do the same, but then again, I don’t use them either.

What’s this have to do with anything?  I ran across the whining of the user responsible for yet another bastardization of the *nix philosphy in Ubuntu. One day, he found out that rm -rf / actually does what it says on the tin.  Imagine that.  The most infamous command in Unixland might actually be infamous for a reason.

But, his whining wasn’t just confined to his blog.  Being the sensitive and prudent user he is, he posted a bug report to Launchpad, and succeeded in having the coreutils package modified to “fix” this behavior.  Nevermind the countless other methods of hosing a system, like careless use of dd and other such block device utilities.  Nevermind that similar invocations of rm -rf will result in equally disastrous results (see: rm -rf /*, rm -rf ~, etc).  Nevermind the expectation of a system doing what the user tells it to.  Damn the torpedoes.

At least one brother in arms spoke up against the inane change:

Preach on, brotha man!

Life is full of dangerous choices.  Using rm is one of them, or at least it should be.  It’s the price you pay to learn to be careful.  It’s the cost of being in control of your system.  Dammit, that’s the way I like it.

As a footnote, Sun also took this approach with Solaris 10.  Damn.

Tags: control, users

No snark in this post, just a referral to a good, helpful article for beginners. The author assumes the user is on an Ubuntu/Debian variant, but allows and accounts for other options. Nothing is terribly distro-specific, and the information is good, solid, generally useful stuff for the newer user. Cheers!

Making The Linux Command Line A Little Friendlier by Joshua Price.

Tags: kudos

What’s the best part of Open Source?  Participation!  Community!  Now, how’s that old saying go? Ah, yes:

Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.

I think we can modify that adage to better reflect the open source community.  Let me try my hand:

Those who can, develop.
Those who can’t, contribute.

Now of course, some of those contributions are worthwhile.

• Helping folks find their way in IRC
• Responding to questions on forums
• Maintaining packages and user-created software repositories
• Contributing artwork

Ah yes, that’s where I was going with this.  Artwork.  Ladies and gentlemen, behold.  I present to you the be-all, end-all of Ubuntu wallpapers.  I don’t think a soul among us can behold this masterpiece without getting at least a tiny tear in the eye.

This is the work of a true artiste. Go ahead.  Click it.  You can’t possibly appreciate its triumph without experiencing its full resolution.

Sarcasm aside, I think I finally know what this guy was talking about when he created this perfect gem:

Perfect.

Description:

As it seems in the community’s current state; people will slap an ubuntu logo on complete garbage, horrid images, meaningless and totally strange pictures, and the community LOVES it. After viewing the 100 thousandth UBUNTU sunset horizon, or the ‘off in the distance’ mountain with snow GDM (ubuntu snow!-GDM-MOD-clearlooks-MUST!@#) or the unforgettable ubuntu sky, or windows landscape-look alike (needs ubuntu logo -> here) I felt like posting my contribution to the ubuntu community. No need to learn, helping breed the GNU sheep, here it is.

PooBuntu-II. The final release.

I think that nicely sums up the situation.

Tags: artwork, contributions, koolaid, poobuntu, wallpaper

To think, all this time I’ve been running my 64 bit system with only 2GB of RAM. How the hell did I get this far?

What’s actually going on is that whichever package he’s trying to install is not available in 64bit from the repositories he has enabled.  But yeah, he should reinstall… Nevermind the fact that he’d never have been able to boot, let alone install the wrong architecture.

Tags: 64 bit, 64bit, amd64, bad advice, ubuntu 64, ubuntu64

You know what the biggest Ubuntard news is this week?  Apparently, there’s a new boot splash theme to be included in Jaunty Jackalope.  If you’re underwhelmed by this news, apparently you’re in the minority.  This particular article gained more than 500 diggs and almost 200 comments… for some terribly watermarked screenshots (that obscure the portion of the screen that’s actually interesting) and a 20 second video of a machine booting.

Yes!  An action shot of a… progress bar!  I think I just jizzed in my pants.  Now that’s a money shot.

Ubuntards pitch a tent over the slightest changes.  Jesus christ.  I think we need an RSS feed straight from Mark Shuttleworths’ toilet.  I want to know the consistency, color, and texture every time he drops a deuce.

Possibly my favorite part of Softpedia’s excuse for an article is the tacky watermark right over the Ubuntu logo in screenshots of the new splash:

Brillant.

Tags: idiots, jaunty, koolaid, softpedia

One of the problems many veteran users have with the rise of Ubuntu is how message boards and communities get polluted with the clueless new users.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with looking for a little help or offering some of your own knowledge.  But the old adage holds water; one can know just enough to cause trouble.

That’s what happens in a lot of circumstances.  Communities get filled with those who know just enough to lead the new user astray.  At least check your advice before espousing your knowledge!  This post is an excellent example of just that.  It recently hit Digg and Reddit and no doubt ruffled a lot of feathers with its lame tips.  Not only are many of those “50 ways to impress your geeky linux friends” just plain incorrect, they’re asinine.  That post is the rambling of someone who’s just discovered wobbly windows and the command line.  If it’s text-mode, it must be leet!

It’s the blind leading the blind, and it ain’t pretty.

Let’s take this author’s example of ripping a DVD:

What’s wrong with this?

1. Encrypted DVDs will not be ripped with this command.  All you’ll get is a logfile and STDERR filled with errors as your drive gets confused by the CSS studios use to encrypt their content
2. The output file, for as far as it may get, is created in the root of the filesystem.  Classy.
3. No blocksize specified.  Unless you’re willing to wait an eternity for your disc to rip, better crank up the BS option to a sane level.  Lord knows this post has enough BS of its own…

The correct advice would be to make sure you have the De-CSS encryption cracking library installed and to use handbrake, or another such utility to get the content from the disk.  The author mentions none of this.  Likely result?  A frustrated user, banging their head on their keyboard after some terrible advice.

But that’s not all — how bout this gem?

This is when bad advice gets dangerous.  What’s wrong with this?  From shred’s own –help output:

CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption:
that the file system overwrites data in place.  This is the traditional
way to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this
assumption.  The following are examples of file systems on which shred is
not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all file system modes:

* log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied with
AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)

Oh, hey, how about that?  shred is telling you in its own goddamn help output that it’s useless on journaled filesystems.  What’s the default these days?  Oh, yes… a journaled filesystem.  Once again, the author fails to mention a very important caveat.  Now there’s a false sense of security.

Another example of just enough information:

That command will accomplish one thing:  a single html file downloaded to your system.  What the author meant was no doubt something like this:

wget -m -p -np http://example.com/interesting_subsection/

Otherwise, you get none of the interesting content on the page, like… images, stylesheets, linked pages.

Oh, you want to disable root logins via SSH?

Since we’re all running GNOME and X on our servers, I guess gedit is fine… But guess what?  Wrong file!  /etc/ssh/ssh_config exists, but that’s not quite where you want to add that option. Try /etc/ssh/sshd_config.  And don’t forget to restart sshd!

Well, maybe we should give the author some slack.  After all, this is supposed to be impressive stuff.  If I were looking over your shoulder, and I saw you perform this next act of god-like mastery, I don’t know how I’d react:

Yes.  Holy shit.  This is it.  Mecca, you are found.  Should we mention how to query your package manager for installed files from a particular app?  Nah…

The net and social bookmarking sites are all littered with inane crap like this.  20 of the coolest command line utilities!  30 of the best alternative free software packages!  75 ways to jack off with a terminal for fun and profit!  And most of them are utter drivel.

Tags: bad advice, blind

Been there.  Done that.  Got the tee shirt.

Sure you do, buddy. Sure you do.

Sure you do, buddy.  Sure you do.

Tags: innuendo, merchandise, swag

Every sect of religion has a name for those who follow their teachings.  The interesting thing about Ubuntu, as an emerging prophecy, is the unique opportunity it gives for its students to define themselves.

“What do users of Ubuntu call themselves?” they ask each other.

Someone suggests “Ubuntard” among other wishy-washy offerings.

“Sounds French,” one user says.  Not quite…

I quite like the suggestion…

Tags: names, praise