Remmina is the best Linux application for working with remote computers

As many people know, I have Ubuntu installed on my work laptop. However, this does not mean the bulk of my development and testing is done on this platform. The software that IBM develops runs on many different platforms and so I need to do most of my work on remote servers which are running various different operating systems.

Ubuntu comes with Vinagre pre-installed - it appears as "Remote Desktop Connect" in the system menu. This tool can connect via the RDP protocol to Windows type systems and it also speaks VNC to most other platforms. While it works, it is not exactly a joy to use so I sometimes use Tsclient to connect to Windows servers and TightVNC to connect to VNC servers. Neither of these tools is perfect either so I decided to look to to see what alternatives are available. After a bit of experimentation I hit upon Remmina as the best overall tool that can be used to connect over either VNC or RDP to remote desktops.

The main features that I like about Remmina are

• It has a lot of flexibility about resolution. As well as allowing you type in any arbitrary screen resolution you can also ask Remmina to pick a resolution that is optimized to the screen you are using.
• There are a number of Hot keys that can be used to quickly access common features e.g. change the window size to match the current resolution or visa-versa.
• It integrates the local and remote clipboard so you can easily copy text from a local application to a remote one.
• It is easy to get files to or from a Linux machine, but configuring shared drives on windows can be much more tricky. Therefore Remmina helps you by configuring your local home folder (or any other directory you specify) as a shared folder via Samba and then automatically connects to that shared folder from the remote session it establishes on a windows machine.
• It has a handy applet which integrates with the system tray and allows you to quickly connect to any of your configured servers.

However, Remmina is not perfect. The main problem is the almost total lack of documentation. The project website has the FAQ about where to find documentation "Remmina was designed to be hopefully work for most people without the aid of any documentation". Although this is not really a grammatical sentence it is close to being true, but here are a few things that it would be useful to know before you start using Remmina:

• Most UI elements in Remmina can also be accessed by a combination of keys on the keyboard. When you hover over a control in the UI with the mouse the equivalent key combination will pop-up.
• All of the hot key combinations are accessed by first pressing the ctrl key on the right of your keyboard  For example when you hover over the "Full Screen button" in the UI you are told that the keyboard equivalent is "Control_R+F". I initially thought that this meant that I should press the ctrl R and F keys at the same time, but it actually means that you need to press the right hand ctrl button and the F key at the same time.
• Because the right hand ctrl key is used by Remmina, you will often need to use the left hand ctrl key to use the applications on the remote machine. For example, most editors use the ctrl key combined with the right or left arrows to navigate through the document a word at a time. If you are editing a document in a remote window that you opened via Remmina, you need to use the left ctrl key for this type of navigation because if you use the right crtl key Remmina will interpret your ctrl arrow key presses as instructions to switch to a different active remote connection.

Microphone adjustment on the Thinkpad W510

As I blogged about before, my current work laptop is a Lenovo W510 which is a really great machine once you get it working, but the setup can be a little bit tricky. Because I work on Sametime and most of my collagues are remote from me, I spend most of my days in Sametime Audio/Video meetings. When I got the laptop initially one of the factors that impressed me was the quality of the built in microphone. In fact the quality of the built in microphone was so high that I no longer had to use a dedicated headset.

Unfortunately, after a few months people began to complain that they could not  hear me clearly. Initially I was able to solve this by simply turning up the microphone gain with the "sound preferences" application, but eventually people complained that they could no longer hear me even with the gain turned up to the maximum. I was so desperate to find a solution that I even tried using Windows on my laptop, but this didn't seem to behave any differently so I was convinced that the problem was a hardware one.

I raised a ticket with our local hardware support team to see if they could repair it. They reported that when they tested it the volume coming from the microphone was OK, but there was a lot of background hiss and so they replaced the microphone control board. Initially the microphone worked OK, but then it started to tun itself off again randomly after a reboot or a suspend/resume. Now that I was convinced that it was unlikely to be a hardware problem so I did a little bit more digging on the Internet.

Eventually I found a solution. It seems that although the "sound preferences" application treats the microphone as a single device, there are actually two different devices contained within it. The alsamixer application sees these two devices as "Capture" and "Analog Mic Boost" each with their separate settings (see picture). The sensitivity of the microphone is effectively a combination of both settings, but the "sound preferences" application only adjusts the level of the "capture" device. For some reason the "Analog Mic Boost" had been turned down to 0 and when I adjusted this back up I was then able to make myself heard at team meetings.

Getting Eclipse 3.4 working on Ubuntu

Lots of people might be planning to develop Sametime plug-ins for Hackday. While the Sametime plug-in development environment is really easy to use once you get it set-up it can be tricky to get your environment configured. I always tell people that they must read the instructions in the Sametime SDK very carefully and follow the instructions exactly.

One thing that is slightly annoying is the fact that the Lotus Expeditor Toolkit which is needed to configure your Sametime launch configuration can only be installed with Eclipse 3.4. This is annoying to users of any platform who may prefer to use a more recent version, but it is especially annoying to users of Ubuntu and other variants of Linux because there is a well known bug in this version which can stop Eclipse from launching.

Fortunately there is a simple work around. You just need to edit the eclipse.ini file (which will be ins the same folder where the eclipse executable is installed) and add this line

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner 

One you have made this change, eclipse will launch properly and there will be nothing to stop you from doing the coolest Hackday project ever :-)

Banshee helps me listen to a more eclectic selection of music.

I normally use the Banshee music player that comes with Ubuntu to play background music while I work. I must say that I find its user interface very slick and easy to use (I would even say it is an improvement on the RhythmBox player that they used before).

I don't look very closely at the user interface and so it was only recently that I spotted that they have an unheard view on your music library which shows the tracks in your library that you have never listened to. I was amazed to see that I had 715 tracks in this category (out of slightly more than 1,000 tracks in total). I know this does not really mean that I never listened to these tracks, it means that I haven't listened to them since I upgraded to Banshee a few months ago.

But it still tells me that my music listening is not as diverse as it should be. As a result I have set the player to play random selections from my unheard list for the last few days and I have really being enjoying discovering old favourites, although it can be a little strange to hear the music switch from Metallica, to Vivaldi and then move on to Horslips.

Does Nelson Mandela support Ubuntu Linux?

I am a great admirer of Nelson Mandela and also fan of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Therefore I was initially very impressed when I saw the following video which seems to show Nelson Mandela endorsing Ubuntu Linux. However, when you listen closer you realize that he never actually mentions the word Linux.  The video shows what seems to be excepts clipped from a longer interview and it has the logo of the Ubuntu Linux community overlaid on some screens to imply that his words are intended as support for the Ubuntu Linux project.



The African word Ubuntu does not have a direct translation in English, but roughly translates as helping other people in your community. As I understand, it may be close to the Irish word meitheal. I can see why Nelson Mandela might want to support the philosophy of Ubuntu but at the same time avoid explicitly endorsing the Ubuntu variant of Linux (it is quite possible that he never even heard of the Linux variant).

I am confused about how to react to this video, because it must represent one of two very different situations:

• If Nelson Mandela knows of and supports the Ubuntu Linux community, then someone should clearly document this support.
• If Nelson Mandela does not wish to publicly support the Ubuntu Linux community then I think this video represents an underhand way of trying to mislead people into thinking that he is a public supporter. In this case the Ubuntu community should publicly disassociate themselves from such trickery.

Is Linux an operating system for computer savvy geeks?

Many people assume that Linux is an operating system which is only really used by computer savvy geeks. However, this reputation is no longer really justified - especially since Ubuntu have started living up to their slogan of "Linux for human beings".

The most interesting talk at last weekend's OSS Bar Camp event in UCD was a talk entitled Mumbuntu where Alan Pope (a.ka. Popey) describes his experiences in teaching his elderly mother to use an Ubuntu based machine. His siblings told her she was crazy to follow Alan's advice since they thought that it would be difficult for someone who has no prior computing experience to learn how to use Linux. But Popey was happy to report that his brother admitted they were wrong and overall her experiences were very happy.

Here is a video recording of Alan's very entertaining talk in which he honestly describes all of the issues he encountered and how he overcame them (mostly they were unrelated to the operating system):


Mumbuntu from Brian O'Donovan on Vimeo.

We have video recordings of quite a few of the OSS Bar Camp sessions and I will be posting them on line gradually over the next few weeks as I get around to doing the various processing steps required.

Is Ubuntu turning Ugly

I do not consider myself much of an expert on colour schemes, but in my opinion the recent versions of Ubuntu Linux are definitely getting more ugly. I know that many style conscious people used to criticise the Ubuntu default scheme saying - brown is boring, but I thought it was calm and reassuring.

In recent releases Ubuntu has been striving for a more lively and with-it theme and so the primary colour is switching from brown to purple. However, to my untrained eye it is definitely getting more ugly. In fact when I first saw the default theme in Maverick I thought my monitor was broken and displaying the colours all wrong.

I know it is not a bug deal because people can and do change their colour scheme, but first impressions make a difference. I wonder if I am alone or if others think the same?

If you wan to judge for yourself. Here is the default desktop background in Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10 which was released in October 2009)


This is a screenshot of the default background in the Beta versions of Maverick (which will be released on 10th of October next or 10/10/10)

Converting .rpm format kits to .deb format

One of the main obstacles to moving smoothly between the Fedora/RedHat and Ubuntu/Debian variants of Linux is the fact that the former use kits in .rpm format and the later use kits in the .deb format. If you are using Ubuntu, but your favourite product (e.g. Sametime) only ships in .rpm format you need some way to convert the .rpm format kits into .deb format before you install them

Luckily there is a tool called alien which can do the conversion for you. Alien is not installed by default, but you can easily install it with the command "sudo apt-get install alien". After installing alien you can easily convert a .rpm format kit into a .deb format kit with a single command (e.g. "fakeroot alien -d -k --scripts kitname.rpm" will produce a file kitname.deb which can be installed on an Ubuntu system).

Unfortunately things are not always that simple, because some kits contain hidden dependencies on the RedHat flavour of Linux. For example the pre-install script in the Sametime kits normally checks for dependencies by issuing a "rpm -qa" command and then parsing the output to see if the necessary pre-requisites products are installed. Naturally this code will not work on a Ubuntu system and so you will need to unpack the kit, fix the installer code and then rebuild the kit.

The steps you need to follow are

1. Unpack the kit to reverse engineer the build environment.
1. The files to build a kit should be placed in a directory with the same name as the name of the kit you are going to build.
   
2. Right click on the .deb file created by alien and you will see the option to open it with archive manager.
3. You will see that the kit .deb archive contains three files:
1. debian-binary is a file which identifies the version of dpkg used to build this kit. Don't worry about this file, it will be automatically generated when you build the new kit
2. data.tar.gz is an archive containing the files which will be installed on the target system. You should extract the contents of this file into your kit build environment directly under the sub-directory with the name of the kit
3. control.tar.gz - This archive contains files used as part of the install script. These files should be extracted to a sub-directory named DEBIAN. One file named control contains information about the kit, its dependencies etc., the rest of the files are shell scripts which get called as part of the install program. The scripts are optional, but if present they will have a name which gives you a good clue about when they are invoked e.g. the file predoinst.sh shell script s called before the kit gets installed.
   
2. Fix the problem - I can't give detailed instructions here. because each case is different.
3. Rebuilding the kit can be done with the command "dpkg -b kitname"
   

If you want (or need) to learn more about building Debian format kits, you should read this tutorial.

Zorin OS Presentation

One of my highlights from helping run the IBM stand at the BT Young Scientist Exhibition is that I met the two young Zorin brothers who have created their own Ubuntu variant Zorin OS. Kyril Zorin, is doing a transition year placement in IBM this week where he is investigating building a variant of the IBM Open Client on top of Zorin OS rather than the one we have at the moment which is based upon Ubuntu itself.

Zorin is an interesting distribution because it aims to help smooth the transition for people moving from Windows to Ubuntu. The menus look very similar to those in Windows XP (which might or might not be advantage based upon your perspective). Zorin OS also comes pre-configured with many things that people typically add to Ubuntu after install (e.g. MP3 support, WINE, etc.).

Here are the slides from a presentation that Kyrill did for us in the lab yesterday. Unfortunately we did not record his demonstration which was very impressive. Especially the "theme switcher" which allows you to switch between a Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Macinitosh look and feel - this will be included in the next version of Zorin OS which will be based upon Lucid Lynx.



If you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to get a Live CD from their web site

Review of the IBM stand at the Young Scientist and using social software for connecting with children #ibm4btyse

Last week I was involved in helping run the IBM stand at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. One of the areas that I focused on was using social software to help publicize what we were doing on this stand. This was a hectic week. Now that I have had time to digest what happened, I decided to write this blog post which  will review how effective the stand itself was and how/if the various social software channels we used helped connect with the young people attending the exhibition.

In common with many other exhibitions there is a tradition that companies running stands at the Young Scientist will attempt to attract visitors by giving gifts to the people who visit their stand.  IBM followed that tradition with 4 diiffernt things we were giving away to our visitors. This was very sucessful - at one stage on Friday it was not physically possible for anymore people to enter our stand. However, I was surprised that the popularity of the different gifts did not relate to what they cost:

1. Anyone who visited the stand and made a token attempt to appear interested in our stand was given a YoYo with the IBM logo. We had a total of 10,000 YoYos were available in a variety of colours and they were all distributed over the 3 days. They were  hugely popular with the students and were probably responsible for a huge percentage of the visitors to the stand. A typical interaction with a student almost always sarted with the question "is it true you are giving out YoYos?". Of course we relied "yes, but not that you are year would you like me to tell you about IBM ..." The students felt morally obliged to feign interest in our messages in return for their valued prize.
2. Each visitor to the stand was asked to enter an idea on our web site for how technology could be used to make the world smarter. Most students were enthused by the competition and put a lot of thought into their entry. This was a good way of ensuring they really understood the Smarter Planet theme we had for our stand. We were giving out a prize fof a laptop for the best idea, but very few of the students showed any interest in the prospect of winning a laptop.
   
3. Each day we held a draw for a Nintendo Wii. All they had to do to enter the draw was write their name on a ticket. There was some interest in the chance of winning a Wii - but the scramble to enter this was much less than the scramble for free YoYos. I think the mood was captured by one young boy (I would guess aged about 8-10) - when asked if he wanted to enter the draw he said "I already have a Wii, but I suppose I could always sell it on eBay" - clearly a youngster with business acumen :-)
   
4. We were also giving out Ubuntu Live CDs and copies of the "IBM Open Client for Smart Work" at the pedestal where we were demonstrating Open Source software. There was very little interest in this from the younger kids, but some of the older students and their parents did show an interest. Some of the visitors to the stand were already using Ubuntu, but were fascinated to learn why IBM was promoting it. In fact a large number of the CDs were given to the IBM volunteers who planned to install it on their own PCs.
   

The communications team were keen to use social software tools to promote the stand to students since they heard that the students would all be keen users of these tools. I was asked to advise them as an expert in social software. I don't consider myself of an expert (expertise is relative), but I found that Laura Cowen and Sacha Chua were only to happy to fill in for the gaps in my knowledge.

The social software tools we chose to use were:

1. We created a Wordpress blog and we planned out a schedule for which of the team members would post each day so that it would not be forgotten. Much to my surprise we kept to the schedule and even posted a few additional blog posts when ideas occured to us during the week. We managed to get IBM employees to comment on the blog by using subtle pressure on them, but I don't think only 2 of our commenters were not IBM employees (of course I could be wrong because am not 100% certain of the identity of all of the commenters).
   
2. We used the existing IBM Twitter account @IBMIrelandEvent and also the hashtag #ibmbtyse - the reaction to this was good, but again I suspect we were more successful in letting adults know about the stand than in attracting youngsters. The young people did use Twitter, but generrally were more intersted in interacting with their own social social circle than in interacting with IBM. A few students who were keen ubuntu fans did send us messages via Twitter so I guess it was high quality interactions even if not high quantity.
   
3. The people manning the stand took lots of pictures and posted them to Flickr (e.g. my photos), Picasa (e.g. Donnacha's photos) and other web sites, but we did not organise them in a way that allowed people view all the content together. The communications team did produce some fairly professional looking videos and posted them to the YouTube channel. Speaking to IBM people they were very impressed, but I am not sure how many others viewed them.
   
5. We created an identica/StatusNet account @IBMIrelandEvent but did not really use it. The communications team were using HootSuite for managing all of the social media channels and since we never connected the identica account with HootSuite nobody remembered to manually cross post. In any case I don't think many students would use identica so our omission was not noticed.
   
6. We created a Facebook event page, since we were advised that most of the students would be very keen users of Facebook. We didn't hook this up with HootSuite either since it seems that HootSuite will only post to a person's Facebook home page and not to an event page (maybe we don't fully understand HootSuite). Nevertheless I manually posted links to most of our content as it appeared and also posted links to articles about the event in the mainstream media. I think that this pages was also used more by IBMers than by the target audience - 15 of the 19 confirmed guests and 9 of the 15 people who said they were "maybe attending" were IBM employees. I think the problem is that Facebook invites can only be sent to your friends and the people at the exhibition were not our friends on Facebook. Indeed the common wisdom is that the students would be advised against interacting with us on Facebook since we are all dangerous adults.
   

In summary it was a great experience and I think people attending got a good impresssion of IBM. This video gives you a quick flavour:

Update 23/Jan: I forgot to mention the Facebook page in the initial post so I added a paragraph about that.

#shotofjaq is destined to become to most popular open source podcast

Jono Bacon is fairly well known in the Open Source community as the Ubuntu community manager, co-presenter of FLOSS Weekly and most recently author of the Art of Community book. So when he teamed up with one of his UK friends Stuart Langridge to create a new podcast called ShotOfJAQ, I decided it was worth checking it out despite the weird off-putting name.

It seems that Jono is following his own advice and is building a really vibrant community around the podcast. They publish a 10 minute episode twice a week about "the goings on in the Open Source, Free Culture and technology world". Each episode is about a single topic which is currently generating a lot of interest in the community. Due to the short length of each episode, they effectively just introduce the topic and wait for their listening community to start discussing the topic by leaving comments on their web site.

So far they are keeping to their twice weekly schedule and each episode so far has generated over 30 listener comments which is pretty amazing for a new podcast. Of course it is to early to be certain if it will be a success (it has only been just over 2 weeks since they launched), but my my prediction is that this podcast will grow a lively fun community of listeners (just like Ubuntu has a lively fun community of users). I recommend you check it out for yourself - it will only take 10 minutes to hear an episode.