Again, I haven't posted in a while, I'm sorry for that. But I have an excuse.

I've been waiting for Fab to put my blog on the outlawpla.net, but I know he's very busy at the moment, and he hasn't gotten around to it yet.

I have about 3 posts waiting in the wings to celebrate my addition, and they're good ones too, but in the mean time you're stuck with this post.

I wanted to alert everyone anyone who reads this blog to OggCamp 10, this year hosted in Liverpool, UK the home of Dan from the Linux Outlaws -- next year I'm hoping it will be in Germany.

It will have been barely 7 months since the last one, at that rate it could almost be biannual. I'll be, of course, going, and with some ingenious planning from Dan, it takes up a bank-holiday weekend.

It starts off late on the Friday with the Rat Hole Radio event on the Friday, which should be amazing. I plan to take that day off work to travel up, either by car or train, and see a friend who is studying in Liverpool University, probably buy him dinner and drinks and see if he wants to see some music.

OggCamp itself takes up the whole weekend, I would be impressed if they can fill a whole two days, I expect the Saturday will be more of an exhibition, like Lug Radio Live 2009 and then an un-conference on the Sunday like OggCamp'09. The Monday, a bank holiday (so no work,) is then to do with as we wish, and I hope that Dan and Fab will record another episode -- although that might be two episodes in two days.

There are possibly plans to take out an entire hotel. It was amazing last year having everyone in one place, but there is nothing concrete yet. It would be nice to at least have a recommended hotel so that we all end up at the same place. If not, I might take the initiative and suggest to people a particular hotel or B&B.

I really intend to help out this year, but I don't want to be crew. I'll help out in getting people interested in the event and offer help and advice where possible -- more esoteric help I guess. It's kind of what I did last year, but I am hoping I'll be less sporadic about it.

I am also anticipating that it will an expensive event, 3 night in a hotel, eating out, drinking beer, donating money, and travel but I know it will be worth it. I am properly earning this year (as opposed to last year where I had only just stopped being a student), but also trying to save, events like this work out as a cheap holiday for me, so it is well worth going, if not just to interact with people who have similar interests to myself.

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again this year, although I can understand if the people who are very far away will find it difficult to go to the UK twice in a 12 month period.

See you guys in May.

Recently my Mum came back from San Francisco after visiting a W3C conference on web usability (I am very envious). Of course she came away with lots of free goodies which I thought I would share with you.

This stylish canvas over the shoulder saddle bag in a fetching #00F (blue), also has a funky W3C stencil on it.

But the really clever part is that after a quick bit of unzipping, and some overly dramatic music:

It turns in to a snazzy sports bag. It also folds up much more easily than it looks by reversing the unzipping process.

Cool huh? I thought you would agree. It's a great piece of engineering, it's just a shame it's so ugly.

Another thing my Mum got was this classy W3C phone ring (not sure what it's exact name is). I think the idea is that you hook it to the corner of your phone and that makes it easier to find in your handbag or pocket.

The underside I think looks nice, but the mobile accessibility logo is an ugly thing. I'm starting to think that maybe the W3C don't really know how to do graphic design -- which is very worrying. It also looks a bit like a sperm.

My Mum also got a cool selection of different accessible business cards from different people in the industry including Microsoft and W3C, some of which had QR codes on them, and some of which had Braille on them, and some of which had both. I'm not too sure how well the QR codes work with Braille all over it, but I couldn't test it at the time. Of course I can't show you these because they have private information on them, but trust me when I say they look cool.

Finally there is this handy guide which of course everyone will want this Christmas.

It's a list of useful things to remember when designing an accessible website.

Not the most exciting list of goodies ever, but I thought the bag was clever. I really have to get myself to one of these conferences sometime.

* All things emphasised were written ironically.

So I was thinking about how you would go about implementing an entirely Linux system in to an organisation like a school or government office where they already heavily rely on Windows software. Lets say the school has some specialist software that will won't run under Wine.

The solution I came up with was a shared environment.

Lets say all the legacy Windows terminals are replaced with Ubuntu or perhaps some Thin clients that run from a virtual machine server. It will have as much of the software that will allow it to run as a replacement version of Windows, so Open Office, e-mail client and as much of the Windows only software running in Wine. But it will also have a shortcut to a virtualised Windows service.

This shortcut opens up a remote desktop session to a Windows machine in the virtual machine server running a finite amount of Windows guests. It would make the user think that the client machine they have just loaded up is a normal Windows session, you just have to go through Linux to do it.

Encourage users to use Linux

You will of course, have to encourage your users not to use Windows. So before you load up this Windows session they will be given a friendly box that suggests the Linux way of doing things. It could perhaps suggest that rather than Microsoft Office they should use Open Office, and direct them in how to use it. Rather than IE they should use Firefox. Both of which are cheaper for the organisation and more easily available to the user.

The other thing getting the users to use Linux is the limited amount of Windows machines and licences. When all the Windows machines are used up, you have to use the Linux interface. This should encourage the users to avoid using the Windows environment in case they hog up the finite Windows resource, or for fear of not being able to use a Windows machine and having to suddenly learn the Linux client at a crucial time. There should also be lessons in using Linux and how to make the switch, and why.

Solution Design

During the solution design phase as many of the Windows applications should be tested to see if they work under Wine.

The amount of Windows licenses could also be calculated to a fraction of the required licenses for an entirely Windows environment (say 30%), this will keep costs down and make up for the extra hardware needed, since the Linux cost is close to free.

Realisation

Essentially you turn XP in to a shared elastic resource like most network licensed software is these days. It's when you think of Windows in this way that you suddenly realise how costly it is to have hundreds of machines not being used for 2/3rds of the day.

Of course you now have to manage two environments, but if the XP machines are reverted to the same snapshot each time the user logs off you only need to consider the addition of new apps as a service. Of course you should shy away from implementing new Windows apps so that there is no requirement for a deployment system. Open Source alternatives should be sought at all times.

We all accept that a lot of people won't change to Linux immediately, and there is a lot of data locked up in proprietary formats. This system gives you the ability to bring Linux to an organisations - keeping costs down - and still keep the legacy Windows component. It also allows users to have their own personal phased switch over, going at the speed they want.

Eventually everyone will be working on Linux.

On the weekend I went to the last ever Lug Radio Live, and the first ever OggCamp in Wolverhampton. I arrived from Woking at 10pm after a 3hr drive at the pub for pre-event drinks on the Friday. But I only stayed for only an hour before going back to the hotel because I had been up since 6.30am. LugRadio kicked off on Saturday morning where I turned up at about 10.30am after a good sleep.

LugRadio

LugRadio was a podcast that stopped broadcasting last year. It featured four guys from the Wolverhampton Lug, who berated each other in the funniest way possible. For the last 5 years they have also run an annual live show full of talks by interesting and fun people in the community. This is a list of who I went to see:

• Gervase Markham: Did a very funny talk about his earliest coding experience using a BBC Micro.
• Matthew Somerville from MySocieties: We weren't intending to stay for this, but Matt from MySocieties needed a Windows laptop to play his presentation. The only one there was my girlfriends one, so we had to stay until the end even though it overlapped Fab's talk. It was still good anyway.
• Fab: talking about kids in schools and touching on centralised systems. This was a great talk, from Fab's experiences, about how to teach kids about Linux and how Linux is perfectly suited to the educational environment. This is an area I have some experience in so I plan to write a post on this soon.
• Tony Whitmore: Did a great talk on how to do podcasts. I'm not really interested in making my own podcast, but he was entertaining anyway.
• Andy "blackadder" Robinson on Open Street Map: Did his usual talk on Open Street Map. I think I had seem most of it online before so I was less enthralled, but it's still entertaining to see how much the community has created.
• Bruno: Did a rambling talk on the nature of computers that was pretty amusing. I think the poor guy was a bit nurvous and so I kind of switched on IRC and didn't hear a whole lot.

After all that everyone turned up in the main room for the show at the end. This was the last ever LugRadio show with all of the main presenters from the podcast. It was nostalgic, and incredibly funny, but sad it was the last one. I actually had to leave at one point so that I didn't wet myself it was that funny (I had a few beers). Aq also decided to put a Twitterwall behind the stage. This meant whatever you tweeted with #lrl2009 it appeared in giant letters above their heads. Aome fantastic messages came up that the presenters weren't aware of, and by the time they realised we were laughing at them because of a message, and looked around to see the message, it had gone. Here is some of my selection of messages, my favourite was smells ☟. This appeared as a very drunk/tired Adam Sweet sat with his face in his hands underneath the arrow. I doubt it's on any of the videos because the show hadn't started yet but it got a big laugh.

Once the show had finished we all went back to the hotel for the after event party. This involved making Aq sing karaoke. Apparently the event was sponsored by Microsoft, but there was no open bar and it finished at midnight. We however snuck some last drinks in, and the awesome Philip Newborough of crunchbang fame kept us supplied up with beer until gone 3am. During that time we had a great chat with Fab who was somewhat worse for wear and I got some cool bits of information, like how the Linux Outlaw theme came about.

OggCamp

OggCamp was set up by the Linux Outlaws guys in combination with the UUPC guys, in response to most people having a free day on Sunday after LugRadio Live.

They arranged it like a bar-camp/unconference where at the start of the day, people who wanted to talk wrote their names on a central piece of paper. There was a huge queue for entry, which I would have been stuck in for ages if it wasn't for a bug in the queueing system that meant that the lift to the 3rd floor put you right in the first 3rd of the queue. I made no apologies and decided to make use of the exploit. I'll file a bug in Launchpad at some point.

Once we had made our way to the front of the queue I got my £5 OggCamp mug which you can see at the top of this post. Bargain in my opinion for such a fine mug.

This was the obligatory starting welcome. Dan and Fab from Linux Outlaws as well as the guys from UUPC. They introduced us to the concept of the unconference and then left us to it.

The people that were on at OggCamp that I saw:

• Twitter Enabled House: I decided to stay where I was after the welcome, mostly because I was really tired. But this conference on the Twitter enabled house was brilliant. Really exciting stuff with a surprising practical use. I really hope in the future that I get paid to do what this guy does. It was also during this talk that I saw on irc in #oggcamp on freenode that someone was asking if they could pick up a mug they left behind. So I did.
• Privacy Online: Next I decided to catch the end of JonTheNiceGuys talk on privacy online, but it was also helpful that the girl who had lost her mug was in there too, so I dutifully returned it. The part I caught was on Tor and how to use it. But I disagree with some points, so I'm going to write a blogpost on the area in the near future.
• Pig Analysis: This was a great break from the geeky weekend. Philip Newborough's Wife Becky Newborough did a sort of game where we had to all draw pigs and that she told us how the pig represented parts of our lives, such as sex life and attention to detail.
• After that I took Windigo and NYBill with Mrs MYBill to ASDA to get Marmite. We had discussed the night before in the pub British traditional food and so I had to make sure they experienced our excellent cuisine. We also made lots of comparisons between the United States and Britain. They remarked how like Walmart is to ASDA, there's a good reason to avoid it.
• Some Guy: When we got back from the shops there was a guy giving a talk in the main room who seemed to be getting a right hammering from the audience. I don't know who he was, but I later learned that he was trying to sell recruitment to people, and got quite a kicking.
• Bruno: Back on form again talking about programming for your grandma. I felt this taught my girlfriend more about what I do and why choosing cooking for the metaphor of programming worked really well for her. However the only question my girlfriend had, coming away from that talk was what distro Bruno was using on his netbook. It was easypeasy.

The end show was fantastic. It was recorded live to be included in the respective podcasts. However UUPC has a strict no swearing policy, where as Fab from Linux Outlaws has a strict swearing policy. Safe to say Fab didn't last 30 seconds. What was nice was that at the beginning they played their respective theme tunes and Linux Outlaws, despite having their theme played second, got a rapturous applause.

Once the live show had started the conversation topics weren't all that great to be honest. Niche areas of media editing from the Linux Outlaws guys and a controversial single distro topic from the UUPC guys. Even my girlfriend disagreed with popey, which is a very good reason to love her.

After the show ended I went up with all the Linux Outlaws main guys from IRC and the forums, redbrain, NYBill, Windigo and Davey Speedstar to get our photos taken with Dan and Fab. It's a shame none of us were looking in the right direction at the right time.

The Transition

Since the LugRadio guys are adamant that this will be the last LugRadio Live ever, is the new contender on the block OggCamp? It could well be. First there were some problems with last weekend's format. It becomes a much more challenging environment, as 3 groups are there; the LugRadio guys, LinuxOutlaws guys and the Ubuntu UK Podcast guys. This kind of creates boundaries, not necessarily very obvious ones, but enough to divide people in to groups rather than one big community. Without the LugRadio people next year these boundaries should be easier to manage.

What is great about having both though is that OggCamp and LugRadio have a very different style, and an un-conference is less likely to bring in the big names, but more interesting topics. Whilst a fully organised conference like LugRadio Live brings in big names with less interesting topics. The atmosphere from both groups are fantastic, and the new format along with the younger uptake of Linux users since means that the OggCamp style should keep things fresh.

Also, let's not forget the LugRadio guys said they would turn up next year, as long as someone else organised the event.

Favourite Bits

There are far to many bits to list them all here, so I've created a short list of what I can remember.

• Recognising people by beard (Sorry Philip and Alistair but you do have the same beard).
• Chatting to Aq.
• Resucing Jono and MySocities with a windows machine (Saving Jono's bacon).
• Twitterwall.
• Fab told me I looked fit (a bit of miss-translation, but very funny).
• Rescuing a mug.
• Meeting loads of people - putting faces to names.
• Fab talking about the creation of the Linux Outlaws theme.

Worst Bit

It was a great weekend, but there is definitely something that stood out for me as the worst bit. That was after the LugRadio Live after-party, I had stayed up until 3am (including the daylight savings change) I went back to my room, drunk and very tired. I switched the lights off before walking to my bed, and smacked my head really hard in to the eves of the window. It was agony. I woke up the next morning with a headache, not because I had a hang over, but because I had a massive lump on my head.

Trip Home

I left pretty soon after OggCamp finished. I had work the next day and I needed to get home in a reasonable time so I could have a decent night sleep. On the way home I chatted to my girlfriend about what she had learnt from the weekend. My goal was for her to understand why I do what I do. But for her it went further than that. I'm not exactly an expert, but I was a power Windows user before I came to Linux. She is an intermediate Windows user, and now wants to switch to Linux on her EeePC.

Marie also echoed some of the statements that I have said to the community in the past. It boils down to the rough edges are the things that are holding Linux on the desktop for new users back. Something that Ubuntu has started to work on, and also something I had made a push on about a year back. It was nice to hear my own statements echo'd back to me, and reminded me of how I used to feel about Linux. I now intend to work in this area much more strongly and have plans for a more consistent Office environment in Linux, supplementing features for better usability. I shall write on this area soon.

Back At Home

I am currently writing this on a Windows machine, I use one for work. I keep getting reminded about how irritating Windows is because I can't customise stuff. LugRadio Live and OggCamp are a great forum for the sharing of ideas and how to progress Linux. Looking back at the last 5 years I can really see that there has been a lot of progress, and that that progress is accelerating, so the next 5 years are going to be incredible. For now though, I'll settle for next year, and see if we have another un-conference.

People I met

• Redbrain - Philip Herron - GCC hacker: someone has to do it - From Ireland
• Windido - Jacob (Jake) - IRC Lurker - from NY State - doesn't drink
• NYBill - Bill - Forum guy - We don't interact online a whole lot - NY State - Same Lug as Windigo
• dickturpin - Peter 'trouble' Cannon - general trouble maker - From Wolves - really broad accent
• blackcrow - Alistair Munro - evangelist

If there is anyone else I met there I've forgotten to mention you, I apologise profusely, let me know and I'll add you.

Places To Watch

• LugRadio2009 Flikr
• OggCamp Flikr
• OutlawPla.net

By the way, I'm going to make some changes to the design of my blog over the next few weeks. Let me know what you think in identi.ca or the comments below.

It's about bloody time I did another blog post.

I wanted to catch you all up with what's been happening in my life. In short:

• New job
• New house
• Birthday
• Car breakdowns
• No Internet (for a few days)
• No network
• New Playstation 3
• New mobile phone

So, as you can see I've been keeping busy. It has eaten in to virtually everything except tweeting which you can keep track of on the right of my blog. It's a bit weird not being in touch with the Linux community as much as I am used to. My job saps up most of my time, and I am wary of using IRC in work. Yesterday I installed the brilliant OpenSSH for Windows, essentially SSH in DOS, you can use it like normal SSH:

C:\Windows> ssh me@example.com

or even:

C:\Windows> scp notepad.exe me@example.com:~


and once you are in, you are using Linux. I am very excited about it, I can use Linux even in a heavily MS environment like my job. Screen/WeeChat works alright on it, as long as you are only typing. Moving the scrollbars or window size messes things up, might be an OpenSSH issue though.

You can view some example images of it working here:

Another thing that has helped is my new Samsung i7500 Galaxy, an Android based mobile phone, which was finally released to the shops a couple of weeks back. TwiDroid has been brilliant for me, allowing me to keep on Twitter.

I realised I don't really dent enough, TwiDroid has multiple accounts but only in the Pro version. I'm going to have to consider whether paying for it is worth it. I'm not sure if it's quite what I need either because I like to keep my tweets and dents separate. I can't tell if TwiDroid allows you to do that unless I buy it.

Well thats enough of me for now. Plenty of stuff to talk about, but plenty of stuff to do too. Hopefully, now I'm settled I'll be able to keep you more informed.

I thought I would use this space to announce that I will be at Lug Radio Live 2009 and OggCamp. I'll look forward to seeing you there.

To help promote OggCamp I have attached the audio trailer here in wonderful HTML5 standard.

How to keep in touch with OggCamp: Twitter - Identica

You can't disagree that Alexie Sayle looks like Dan Lynch from Linux Outlaws but 10 years in the future. Alexei Sayle, if you don't know is a semi-famous writer/comedian from Liverpool. He is probably most well known for the (very irritating) song "'Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?", which then lead to the much more widely recognised "Hello Tosh, got a Toshiba?".

For reference here is the best photo I could find for Dan:

Yeay! This blog is now picked up on google under the word Localhosy.

Do you recognise this logo? I expect some of you will, but I suspect the majority won't.

You may have noticed since the 30^th of June 2009 that if you are using Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 you are not exactly getting Firefox 3.5 in your standard update schedule. A highly sought after release in geek circles because of the compatibility with draft HTML5 specifications.

You may have attempted to install it yourself, but instead gotten Shiretoko (of which the logo is above). But you, like many other people, went No! I want Firefox! What the crap is Shiretoko?

Well Shiretoko is Firefox 3.5 albeit with different branding. Confused?

So why did you end up with 'Shiretoko' and not Firefox-3.5? Why did Ubuntu make us do it this way? Well the answer sort of lies with the Ubuntu Mozillateam IRC conversation. But this doesn't actually explain a lot.

11:11 < asac> also we explicitly want [Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 3.5] to be installable side by side
11:11 < asac> and same branding would make them indistinguishable on your desktop

Ok, so Ubuntu wanted us to have Firefox3.0 and 3.5 installed at the same time. Again, why?

Counter Argument: I can think of only one reason why Ubuntu might want both installed together: support. If it is a computer that Ubuntu are offering support of then Ubuntu won't support Firefox 3.5 since it is out of release cycle. By giving Firefox3.5 the name Shiretoko it allows technicians to easily identify whether they can support the installation Firefox or not.

Frankly, not my problem. Except it is, because now I have to find hound-assed ways to get the right branding. Why is this branding important? Let me explain.

By making people install Shiretoko you are losing brand identity. Something that is very important in the FOSS world and one that we are winning very easily with Firefox. If you 'lose' Firefox on Ubuntu, it makes the job of convincing people to switch to Linux just that little bit harder. Windows users, who have Firefox 3.5 and not a clue what Shiretoko is won't be convinced by some petty excuse that Ubuntu wanted Firefox3.0 and 3.5 installed simultaneously. So thank you Ubuntu for making ours, and your own job more difficult.

One other thing the piece from the Ubuntu Mozilla Team seems to be saying, and so does the fabulous Mr Popey is, if you want Firefox3.5 with the right branding, to move to Karmic, Ubuntu 9.10 Beta.

This just sounds like the same arrogant Linux talk that made me distrust Linux for a long time. What that says to me is, move to Karmic if you want the latest stuff, and do our debugging work for us while your at it. Try convincing a Windows user to use an operating system that needs debugging.

A lot of distributions have taken this Shiretoko route. So the only reasonable answer then that it is called Shiretoko because it is was not released with the distribution's release cycle. I guess this makes sense when you realise that the release was not a major update, and only for compatibility with the draft HTML5 specification. The requirement for us mere users then, to want a properly branded Firefox 3.5 is sheer petulance.

But would argue that to the average user, releasing in the right cycle doesn't matter they just want the latest stuff, and they will get it following any of the above (or my version below) techniques. These techniques work, but now users will have to be aware of a number of security considerations as well as software conflicts such as aptitude updates.

Not maintaining at least a par with what a typical Windows user can do easily when we are talking about a major product like Firefox, especially when it's a political thing, makes the open source world seem petty.

I can't see why Ubuntu won't let it's users have the choice, which is especially odd since Ubuntu is about choice. Ubuntu (and others) need a better solution to whatever the problem is, even including switching away from Firefox if there is a darker reason for the Shiretoko branding. You just should not end up with apt-get install firefox-3.5 installing Shiretoko.

Essentially it seems to me like a problem with policy Vs usability, and policy won, wrongly.

Instructions for installing Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu

If you want my (or rather Torikun/Rusher's) way of installing Firefox 3.5. Download Firefox 3.5 from their website, extract it to /opt, symlink it over the Firefox 3.0 location and keep a good eye out for patches.

cd /opt # /opt is where all optional installation files are kept
# the following will most likely need to be sudo'd
wget http://mozilla.mirror.ac.za/firefox/releases/3.5.1/linux-i686/en-GB/fire... # download firefox from example url
tar -jxvf firefox-3.5.1.tar.bz2 # extract firefox from directory
cp /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.bakup # make a backup of any file you plan to symlink so you can recover it
ln -s /usr/bin/firefox firefox/ # places local copy of firefox over global copy
rm firefox-3.5.1.tar.bz2 # remove the installation package


I always try to convince my family to use Linux, and when I found my Mum wanted to get her old Apple PowerBook G4 refurbished, I decided to commandeer it to install Linux.

There are several excellent reasons to get your family in to Linux. But for me one excellent reason was because my Mum researches design for all. A methodology that enables technology to be used by anyone, including the disabled and the elderly. I felt it was important for her to experience Linux.

Tools

PowerBook G4

The PowerBook is a 15" G4 built in late 2004 which means it was one of the range that attempted to set fire to itself. But it's a 5 year old machine with a 2 year old battery, so it is pretty good as far as laptops go, just a bit slow. Perfect Linux material.

Linux

Since the G4 is one of the original PowerPC chips, I had to choose the PPC edition of what ever distro I wanted. I am a fan of Ubuntu, so I wanted to choose that, but I was told my Mum may prefer Mandriva since it is more 'Windows' like. However I could not find a Mandriva PPC edition newer than 2005.

Finding an Ubuntu PPC edition wasn't particularly easy either. Google's first link for 'Ubuntu PPC' directs you to a massively out of date link. But it was a good starting point, because after a tiny bit of URL manipulation I got to the Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 PPC edition download page. This is actually a community supported edition, since Ubuntu gave up supporting PPC processors for 7.04.

Test Installation

I burned the Ubuntu PPC CD using the Mac, and dropped it in to a slightly newer 12" G4 I have lying around. Amazingly enough it booted to the Live version no problem. You have to hold down the C key when you power-on to boot to CD -- you can let go when you start to see Linux prompts.

However when I popped it in to this slightly older machine that it was actually going to be installed on, the kernel error'd with:
radeonfb 0000:00:10.0: Invalid ROM contents
it then put up a black screen with light patches at the bottom and wouldn't go any further.

Hitting Google for a few minutes came up with a link that suggested I use the live-nosplash kernel command, and success! I got to a desktop.

The only problem here was that the wireless didn't work. But I plugged an Ethernet cable in and kept going. I figured I would fix the wireless problem once Ubuntu was actually installed.

Backing Up and Shrinking

Now at this point, I need to say my Mum wanted me to not lose any of her data if possible. So I went to the Ubuntu install program but the partitioning part didn't offer me anything about shrinking. I went all over the net trying to find a solution, I ended up at the PPC version of the LinuxOutlaws favourite System Rescue CD. But it's about as old as the computer, and would not allow me to shrink a journalled HFS+ partition.

This is where I went back in to the original OSX installation and decided to backup files via scp to my NAS (man I love Unix, this process was so easy). Whilst doing this I found a forum post that said they shrunk their HFS+ partition using the Ubuntu Live CD. Feeling a bit of an idiot (and after finishing copying everything), I booted back in to the Live CD and started gParted. Bingo. Well... not quite, it was a very long Bingo. About 2 hours of shuffling sectors around. I managed to shrink the HFS+ partition from the near full hard-disk size of 75GB to 60GB and gave myself about 15GB for my full Ubuntu installation (including swap and everything).

Goodbye Live CD

After checking OSX still booted and worked, I went back to the Live CD for a final time and hit install on the desktop. This is a painless process I'm sure many of you are familiar with. The only change I made is to select Keyboard Macintosh. Without it the " key and @ key are in the wrong place.

An hour later the installation was complete.

On rebooting I noticed one small problem. The boot-loader asks you what you want to boot in to. Linux (represented by a keypress of L) or OSX (represented by a keypress of X). Except the L is lowercase L and could easily be a numeric 1, which I would expect more people to need to press.

Anyway, it booted up fine, and since I had my network cable still in, it immediately picked up all the updates I needed, including asking me if I would like to install the drivers for the wireless card. Perfect!

Completing The Setup

After fiddling around with the appearance I made it look all pretty, and even found a way to get Compiz working, although it became extremely unstable and I disabled it.

Of course this PowerBook only has one click button and no multi-touch. There are plenty of solutions on the web to help you, but I found the simplest solution is to go in to the accessibility options and enable a timed secondary click when you hold down the mouse button.

Conclusion

There are a couple of things to note here. Of course the magic SysRq restart command doesn't work because there is no SysRq on the keyboard, I cannot find a solution to this. I expect there is one, but I can't find it.

Compiz is unreliable at best, and generally the system seems a bit more flaky than on my EeePC. For example the GUI Synaptic manager regularly crashes, locking you out of the database.

Hopefully those are issues are ones my Mum will never meet. If I'm going to administer this PowerBook now, I will most likely do it remotely.

Anyway, I love the fact that I have done something so difficult, so easily, and I hope my Mum can get used to all the changes, see if she can recommend anything to improve Ubuntu and Gnome.