2010's Biggest Linux Thing

2010's Biggest Linux Thing

The Australian Taxation Office finally recognises Linux users!

ATO Brings Linux Users In From The Cold

By Renai LeMay
Friday, 17 December 2010 17:45

Business IT ^[1][1] - Open Source ^[2][2]

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The Australian Taxation Office has taken a critical step towards long-awaited support for Linux users of its online services, revealing today it had released a new version of its AUSkey authentication software that supported the minority operating system.

Although they’re a relatively minor proportion of the overall Australian population, those who use Linux or even other forms of Unix and Unix-like operating systems have long complained about the ATO’s lack of support for their choice of platform.

In a statement issued today, the ATO said the AUSkey registration, download and installation process had been successfully tested with Ubuntu 10.04 — not the latest version of Ubuntu, but one release behind — and Firefox 3.6, adding the system may also work with other versions of the software.

“The latest release will assist software developers to integrate AUSkey into their financial and accounting software packages for Linux users,” the agency wrote.

However, it warned that even if Linux users did have an AUSkey, the new functionality may not automatically guarantee Linux-based access to online government services that did accept the authentication method.

AUSkey is a single key authentication service which allows access to government services and is used by many Australian businesses regularly to, for example, submit their business activity statements and other documents to the ATO at the end of each reporting period.

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There have been a number of ongoing attempts to help the ATO support Linux systems — not just relating to AUSkey, but also in terms of the company’s e-tax package used by millions of Australians each year to file their tax returns.

For example, in July 2010, Linux Australia president John Ferlito revealed he and others were working on a way for Linux users to link in to the government’s Standard Business Reporting system — which attempts to reduce the reporting burden on business by providing a streamlined approach to meeting reporting requirements of different agencies throughout Australia.

However, as recently as May this year, the ATO stipulated that the 2010 version of the e-tax software would not be compatible with either Linux or Mac operating systems when it launched in the middle of this year. The software is maintained by local IT services company DWS.

The ATO does state on its site that e-tax has been tested successfully on Mac OS X, running in a Parallels or VMware virtualised environment or natively in a Windows install through Boot Camp.

Image credit: Larry Ewing

References

1. ^{^} Business IT (www.itwire.com)
2. ^{^} Open Source (www.itwire.com)

References

1. ^{^} Business IT (www.itwire.com)
2. ^{^} Open Source (www.itwire.com)

Linux Gamers Are The Most Generous

I recently bought a set of games from Humble Bundle, the beautiful Indie initiative that allows people to download a collection of top-notch games for the price of their choosing. Guess who has been the most generous?

Linux users.

How To Post to Blogger with GoogleCL and BASH

#!/bin/bash

### Geeky Blogs for The Inquisitive Sheep ###

# Close Gedit so that you won't post an empty blog
# Get name of blog post [TITLE]
# Get labels for blog post
# Gedit a text file in $HOME/Documents/Blog/[TITLE]
# Upload a labeled blog via googlecl with "google blogger post $HOME/Documents/Blog/[TITLE]"

xcowsay "Warning! killall gedit"

killall gedit

clear

echo ""
echo "What is the name of this blog?"
echo ""
read TITLE
echo ""
echo "$TITLE"
echo ""
echo "Any labels besides geeky? (e.g. 'label1, label2,' )"
echo ""
read LABELS
echo "$LABELS"

gedit $HOME/Documents/Blog/"$TITLE"

gnome-terminal -x xcowsay --monitor=0 """Your blog post $TITLE
is being posted via googlecl,
and its labels are
geeky, $LABELS"""

google blogger post --tags "geeky,"$LABELS"" $HOME/Documents/Blog/"$TITLE"

The New And Improved Clockwork PC Webcasting Script

WARNING: THIS IS A VERY GEEKY POST! READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL!!!

#!/bin/bash

### The Clockwork PC Webcasting Script###

# This script is the fruit of many hours of research into FFMPEG.

# You will need ffmpeg with x11grab, and a number of libraries that should be installed automatically.

# You will need a custom directory ~/Videos/Screencasts, otherwise change the output directory in the commands.

# You will also need to download and install the newest xcowsay from its homepage,

# because the older xcowsay from the Ubuntu repositories (2010-08-31 at the time of writing) will not work with the --monitor option.

# The chained command creates THREE separate files:

# x11grab for your desktop,

# video4linux2 for your webcam,

# alsa for your microphone or headset.

# This is very important to me because I use Openshot Video Editor, which cannot split audio and video yet, but can combine them very well.

# If this is not important to you, there are many fine commands that combine audio and video streams into a single file, so you don't have to use mine.

# However, this chained command will record everything synchronously, including webcam and audio.

# Enjoy!

# Alexander,

# linux@clockworkpc.com.au

###

# Create a temporary folder called "video bin"

mkdir $HOME/Videos/Screencasts/video_bin/

#!/bin/bash

# Record the desktop at 1440x900 (change to your resolution) using ffmpeg

gnome-terminal -x ffmpeg -f x11grab -r 25 -s 1440x900 -i :0.0 -qscale 1 -vcodec libx264 -vpre lossless_ultrafast $HOME/Videos/X11Grab/X11Grab_on_$(date +%F_%A_at_%H:%M:%S).m4v ;

#!/bin/bash

# Record the microphone audio using ffmpeg && Open a GUVcview recording to the same folder as the other two

gnome-terminal -x ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 2 -i pulse -acodec pcm_s16le $HOME/Videos/Audio/Audio_on_$(date +%F_%A_at_%H:%M:%S).wav ;

#!/bin/bash

# Open a GUVcview recording to the GUVCView and video_bin folders

guvcview --device=/dev/video0 --video=$HOME/Videos/GUVCView/capture.mkv &&

cp $HOME/Videos/GUVCView/capture.mkv $HOME/Videos/GUVCView/webcam_on_$(date +%F_%A_at_%H:%M:%S).mkv && mv $HOME/Videos/GUVCView/capture.mkv $HOME/Videos/Screencasts/video_bin/webcam_on_$(date +%F_%A_at_%H:%M:%S).mkv

#!/bin/bash

# Copy the X11grab into the video_bin

cd $HOME/Videos/X11Grab && cp `ls -x1tr *.m4v | tail -n 1` newest.m4v &&

cp $HOME/Videos/X11Grab/newest.m4v $HOME/Videos/Screencasts/video_bin/x11grab_$(date +%F_%A_at_%H:%M:%S).m4v &&

# Copy the Audio into the video_bin

cd $HOME/Videos/Audio && cp `ls -x1tr *.wav | tail -n 1` newest.wav &&

cp $HOME/Videos/Audio/newest.wav $HOME/Videos/Screencasts/video_bin/audio_$(date +%F_%A_at_%H:%M:%S) &&

# Rename "video bin" to a "bin [date stamp]"

mv $HOME/Videos/Screencasts/video_bin/ $HOME/Videos/Screencasts/bin_$(date +%F_%A_at_%H:%M:%S)

#!/bin/bash

# Call up a cute cow with a message

(gnome-terminal -x xcowsay --cow-size=large --time=3 --monitor=0 "Your video has been recorded :)"&);

# Play an audio track of your choice (Moo!)

(gnome-terminal -x mplayer $HOME/Videos/Sound_effects/moo.wav)

Ubuntu In Business: The Dream of Clockwork PC

Over the coming weeks I will use this blog to explore and express the philosophy from which Clockwork PC's values are derived.

Clockwork PC was founded out of a desire provide a working commercial model for realisation of potential.

Not the phrase for realisation of potential: the ultimate aim of Clockwork PC is higher than maximal utilisation of employees' talents; rather, our dream is to have a commercially successful enterprise whose greatest goal is to help those it employs to be the best they can be.  Achievement of this goal will both entail and result in maximal utilisation of our employees' talents, which will be the bedrock of our success.

In the following articles we will explore how open source software development provides a working model for democratisation of an organisation, be it a government bureaucracy, a corporation, an institution, or an SME:

• Democratisation of an organisation is the key to maximal utilisation of its employees' talents;
• Democratisation of an organisation can only occur if it be the organisation's leaders' primary goal, in and of itself.
• Organisational leaders whose primary goal in and of itself is democratisation of the organisation cannot be products of the traditional, hierarchical power relations to which most organisations default.
• Organisational leaders who do take it upon themselves to create democratic institutions that do not descend into anarchy or management by committee require sophisticated mechanisms for collection of, processing of, and acting upon employees' feedback.
• Moreover, the organisation must establish incentives that reward free, open, honest discussion.

As we will see in the case of Canonical and the GNU/Linux Ubuntu operating system, this instance of open source software development offers a working model for precisely the democratisation described above.

These thoughts, like all software, are a work in progress.  I do not pretend to have all the answers and welcome any thoughtful feedback.

Learning To Program

I played an educational game that teaches a few fundamental details of programming, and I'm interested to know if I could have written the code more succinctly.
To play it in Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install laby
Here is my code from the final level:
***
from robot import *;
forward()
left()
while look() == Void:
forward()
if look() == Wall:
right()
while look() == Web:
left()
left()
forward()
forward()
left()
forward()
forward()
left()
while look() == Void:
forward()
if look() == Wall:
right()
while look() == Void:
forward()
escape()

How to get xcowsay 1.2 working on Ubuntu Lucid

Download the newest package from the website.

Extract it to /usr/local/src

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev

Open a terminal:

cd /usr/local/src

./configure

make

make install

Windows on Linux: Introduction: What's an operating system?

You might ask, 'What does it mean to have an operating system? Doesn't my computer just work?'

Yes and no. Just as a healthy body is in fact a mind-boggling combination of processes and chemical reactions, so a computer that simply does what it needs to do is in fact such a feat of hardware and software engineering that we are mostly innocent of what it takes to make it happen. And your operating system is the brain that orchestrates an amazing body of applications and processes that combine when we go online, send emails, and type documents.

What is an operating system?

An operating system is essentially a program that tells other programs what to do and where to go. If we probe a little deeper, we find that it is actually a conglomeration of programs working together in order to achieve this. It is likened to an eco-system that hosts thousands of programs great and small, most of which live and thrive interdependently.

But however you choose to define it, it is a program, and every computer program has to be loaded and run.

So how does this all happen? How does your computer, a dormant jigsaw puzzle of expensive pieces, become a living, humming entity on your desk?

Let's use the analogy of waking up and going through a morning routine:
Wake up = BIOS
Morning routine = Load the operating system

Waking Up (BIOS)

When you wake up in the morning, you sub-consciously scan your body to make sure that everything is in place. As you lie in bed you open your eyes, stretch your limbs, fingers and toes, and gradually become aware of your body. For the most part, this process occurs below the surface, but if something is different, e.g. an injury, your attention will be drawn to it.

When you switch on a computer, it goes through a similar process of scanning its parts. As the fan begins its familiar hum, your computer will check its memory, hard drive, CD/DVD-Rom, and so on, ticking its items off a checklist and briefly informing you that all is well -- or not, if something is amiss. The checklist it refers to is defined by a tiny program called BIOS, which would still run even if you took out the hard drive because it is built in to the motherboard.

OK, now you're awake, and you need to get ready for work. If you're anything like me, your morning will start by sleepily rolling out of bed and automatically performing routine tasks. We don't give it much thought, but most of us do all these things in the same order every day. It's almost as if we follow a checklist.

toilet
shower
brush teeth
grooming
get dressed
breakfast

Let's come back to the computer. Once it has roused itself and gone through its BIOS checklist of bits and pieces, its morning routine comprises a series of processes that get the operating system dressed and ready for work:

activate the video and audio devices (see the desktop and hear system sounds)
activate the input devices (keyboard and mouse)
load background processes
connect to the internet

As you can see, loading the operating system is the computer's way of getting up, dressed, and ready for its work.

Windows on Linux: Overview

One of the most important considerations when setting up a Linux PC is what to do about Windows.

In the following three blogs I will cover the three main ways of using Windows-only applications on a computer that uses [Ubuntu] Linux as its primary host operating system:

1) Dual booting
2) Emulating
3) Virtualisation

The fact of the matter is that most people, at least initially, are attached to at least one Windows-only application, and despite some really clever thinking from [Mark Shuttleworth], an everyday user still has to commit himself to a host operating system.

Incidentally, a friend of mine gets around the choice of host operating system on his very powerful computer by running all of his applications in three different operating systems, each one in its own virtual machines. However, this is still very much an expert's approach, to which there are still very high barriers to entry -- financial and technical -- and it is not what I will propose.

However, before we go into the three options, we need to understand what it means to have an operating system, and why some programs seem to run perfectly in both Linux and Windows, whereas others don't work at all.

Going On Holiday

Just a quick note to say that I'm going to take a brief, three day holiday on the Mornington Peninsula with my beloved, N.

It's been a crazy first two months at Clockwork PC, but sales are very good, and we already have quite a few delighted customers. Our website still awaits its finishing touches, and there are a few other loose ends, but on the whole it's very satisfying to survey the landscape in Clockwork PC land.

To all those who have helped to make Clockwork PC a reality, thank you very much, and I'll be back on Friday, 25th June.

Alex

PS: This was posted from Linux terminal using GoogleCL.