On Nov 05, 2004 I wrote Guy Fawkes and Ubuntu, on the subject of Uncategorized.

Today is Guy Fawkes Day, also known as Bonfire Night, the day in which we, the citizens of the UK, celebrate the life and death of the only man in history to enter Parliament with completely honest intentions. Guy Fawkes: tried to blow up the House of Commons. Now, that sort of thing is, admittedly, Not Cricket, but you’ve gotta admire the largeness of the bloke’s thoughts.

“This thrice-damnéd Government perpetuates itself at the expense of the people! What say you, Alcazar?”
“Verily, I cannot but agree, Tobias. How shall we, as True Catholic Men of England, put an end to their villany?”
“Mayhaps we should rouse the common Man to our cause? With silvered words might we not educate those beneath us to a more depthful understanding of their lot? How say you, Guy?”
“No.”
“But Guy! What manner of persuasion propose you to use to shew the men of Parliament their errors?”
“Gunpowder. A shitload of it, too; I’ve got 36 barrels lying around here someplace. Incidentally, don’t tell King James that I said that.”

...and the rest, as the man said, is history. I wonder what dear old perfidious Albion would be like if he’d succeeded? The view from Westminster Bridge would be quite a bit crapper, I expect, as would the opening credits of News at Ten. Still, we can’t have everything. Can’t even have anything, some days.
Which is a neat segue away from the topic of politics (of which everyone is bored anyway) and into Ubuntu Linux, which has also been failing me recently (much as did Fawkes 399 years ago: big celebrations next year!). In particular, while I’ve been impressed with Ubuntu’s looks and easy installation and basic stuff, I recently actually tried to do something with it. Two things, in fact: plug in a USB pen drive, and browse to a Windows share. Neither worked. Plugging in teh pen drive did, apparently, nothing. Reading @/var/log/messages@ made it clear that the kernel had recognised it and identified it as @/dev/sda@, but Ubuntu utterly failed to then mount this device. The “Removable Storage” applet (which is actually gnome-volume-manager, as far as I’m aware) has “mount removable media when inserted” and so on, and it didn’t happen. What I’d expect to happen is for a mount point to be created for the drive and the drive to be mounted on that mount point, and then (at base) for a new drive to appear in “Drives“, or (better) that and an icon appear on the desktop, and (best of all) the drive to be called “USB Pen Drive” or the name of the manufacturer or something rather than “sda” or “hal-disk-3-1” or something equally meaningless. In fact, none of these things happened. That’s not very good, and it’s obviously not a fault with the kernel setup because that worked. Yes, it might be a fault with hotplug or something, but Ubuntu and Gnome 2.8 are meant to make this sort of thing Just Work, and they failed dismally. In the end I had to create a mount point and mount it myself from the command line, which is pretty alarmingly arse. Perhaps I didn’t have something installed, but I can’t see why this shouldn’t work as part of the install, especially since I was upgraded to the Warty release.
Secondly, browsing to Windows shares in Nautilus doesn’t work. Not even a little bit. It doesn’t even seem to understand smb:// URLs, let alone show anything under “Windows Network” in “Network“. This is also very pants indeed. PLus it means that I can’t print anything from my laptop, because I can’t find the printer (which is connected to a Windows box). Again, maybe I’ve not installed something (smbfs wasn’t installed, and I wondered if installing that would fix it, but it didn’t) but I shouldn’t have to; isn’t this sort of thing pretty basic functionality?
So, Ubuntu fails on the “actually do something” test rather than the “start it up and browse the web a bit” test, which isn’t good. Plus, there seems to be something wrong with the applet that lets me configure my network cards; half the time it locks up, and it refused to configure the wireless card to come up at boot, so I had to edit @/etc/network/interfaces@. Now, I’m aware that warty is an early release, and I have no major problem with stuff not working; it just means that (and the Ubuntu team might well entirely agree here) that it’s perhaps not as ready for prime-time just yet as I have been thinking it was.

Mark A. Hershberger

I found that I need to turn my iptables rules off for SMB to work.
Obviously, I need to get the rules fixed.

Rob

Eek. This is Bad News. Mounting stuff, WiFi and connecting to Windows machines is exactly the sort of thing I need it to do effortlessly. I’ve got it installed on a machine but haven’t actually tackled it yet. I shall approach it with some trepidation now.

Jason

I hate to be pedantic[1], but the view probably wouldn’t be much different since most of Westminster Palace was built a couple of centuries after Guy Fawkes.

[1] This is a lie, obviously :-)

sil

Oh, bugger off :)

mrben

When was your last apt-get upgrade? There were certainly some problems previously with mounting drives, but as far as I can tell they have been fixed.

When I plug in my USB drive (a Creative Labs Nomad Muvo) Nautilus automagically appears with the drive contents displayed. It was broken a while back, but has been fine after the last couple of upgrades.

sil

The laptop is up-to-date with warty, so it’s not because it needs updating…

henry

as root the usb pen pop up, as guest it sucks.

mike

gotta upgrade to hoary.. everything works… wifi, windows shares in nautilus, usb drives all show up. I even installed fluxbox with apt-get and load that instead of gnome at gdm. My Ipod shuffle even loads up in nautilus and with gtkpod I can load music to it without itunes. This is by far the easiest and most user friendly lunix distro around

as days pass by » Bonfires

[...] Guy Fawkes night is one of my favourite days of the year, as I’ve written about before. It’s the 400th anniversary, too. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot, indeed. This year we decided to not go to Himley Hall again, despite it being excellent, because the queues are too long and the event’s too expensive. We still went to a public display, though, because home fireworks are rubbish; again, it was great, although next year we’re going an hour late so we don’t have to sit for 40 minutes in the cold and wait for the display to start. The stall that sold bread pudding and tea was a welcome diversion, though. In other news, things have been pretty busy. We’re looking for a developer at work; if you’ve worked with classic ASP, SQL Server, XML stuff, some JavaScript, that sort of thing, and you want to build some nice advanced internal web apps and aren’t going to whittle on about how it’s impossible to be advanced without .NET, then drop me a mail at stuart.langridge@mills-reeve.com to tell me about yourself. [...]

jim bob

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jim kana

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as days pass by » More on fireworks

[...] Two years ago, in response to another Guy Fawkes night and its associated pathetic firework display in my back garden, I spoke of how annoying home fireworks were. Since then I have learned my lesson: go to a public fireworks display. Last night I visited Spooktactular at Himley Hall (warning: crap conversion of a PDF), which cost us a stupendous fifteen quid to get in (£6/adult and £3 for parking; Niamh was free), after queueing for half an hour in the car. And it was bloody excellent. The fair was rather packed. The bonfire was large, but had no Guy on top of it. And the firework display was superb. Long and strong and definitely worth it. They had music playing all through it, taking shameless advantage of how Hallowe‘en was a week ago; there were songs from The Lost Boys and The Addams Family and Ghostbusters. And there was Bring Me To Life by Evanescence, and a few others. Went well with the music: a touch of the dramatic, some big beats, that sort of thing. None of them, however, could hold a candle to the music that played over the huge sky-lighting rainbow-shaded crashing explosive finale of coloured lights in the sky, because that music was Orff’s Carmina Burana (well, O Fortuna from same, for pedants). It’s such a good bit of music for dramatic things. It is, in fact, one of the three best bits of classical music ever written, along with Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Bach (and even then only the beginning bit, and only if played on a really massive church organ) and the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem, and that’s not only equally dramatic but also terrifying. Rodrigo’s Concierto d‘Aranjuéz gets an honourable mention at number four, but it is for guitar which is silly. Plus, Gladys once corrected me on the pronunciation of “Aranjuéz” in such a patronising way that I had to shoot him. How did I get on to music? I was talking about fireworks. If you even remotely like fireworks then you should go to a public display. If your gsrden ones disappoint you because they say “Global Thermonuclear War” on the wrapper and look more like “Light Green Ejaculation” once lit then go to a public fireworks display. Half the time they’re run by the local council anyway, so you’re helping them to get money to do useful things like fix roads and so on, which can’t be a bad thing. [...]

ers453rt5d5t

i want to no about him in prison

sil

I imagine you do want to know, for homework or similar. Read an encyclopaedia.