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We got a new Xerox network printer at work a few months back. I haven’t had that much use for it, so I never bothered setting it up on my computer. People around me, using Macs and Windows, were complaining that it was hard getting it to work, and some never managed to get it to work.

Knowing that Macs use the same printing system as Ubuntu, I assumed that this would be complicated as well, so I had postponed it for some time. This week I finally got to setting it up, and it was really simple.

I didn’t have to enter any information at all, it was just a matter of clicking four buttons.

Start the printers control panel from the System menu. This reveals the following window:

1. Click the “new” button (“Ny” in Norwegian).  This revealed the following window:
   
2. You don’t have to enter anything, just click “Forward” (“Framover” in Norwegian). The configuration wizard then asks you to verify some settings, like the name of the printer:
   
3. Still, no need to change anything. Just click “Use” (“Bruk” in norwegian)
   
4. Now click “Yes” if you want to see the glorius and colorful ubuntu test page coming from your printer.

That’s it. Who said Linux where complicated?

I later used the information revealed by the Ubuntu (and Fedora) printer configuration tool to help out my collegues figure out how to set up the printer on a Mac, and in Windows Vista.

When I’m travelling, I often visit the kiosks at the airport, to see what they have of intresting magazines, specially Linux and Digital Photography magazines. I was visiting Trondheim last weekend, and on the way back, while I were waiting for my plane back to Bergen, I was looking on the shelves at Narvesen at Trondheim airport, Værnes. There were actually a quite good choice of Linux magazines, and one specially catched my eye. I had heard about the new Ubuntu User magazine at the Ubuntu UK podcast, which by the way is a pretty good podcast. But I didn’t expect to find it in a news-stand in Norway, I thought I had to order it from the UK.

So I bought it.

The magazine was priced to around £7, which would translate to about 74 norwegian kroner, or €8.20. But at when I got to the counter, I had to pay 210 NOK for it, which is about £19 or €23. In comparison, one years subscription to the magazine is €29.90 if you live in Europe outside the UK, which would include Norway. €29.90 is 269NOK or £25.5

This is a total rip-off. I understand that Narvesen needs a margin for magazines with a narrow group of readers, but this pricing is insane.

Jeg prøver å dra i gang en foredragsserie for BLUG (Bergen Linux User Group), “Linux som kreativ platform“, innenfor rammene av BLUGs foredragsserie Last Thursday, som avholdes siste torsdag hver måned i skole-året (jan-mai, aug-nov) i Auditorium Pi på matematisk institutt.
Jeg er på jakt etter folk som har erfaring med grafikk/lyd/video på linux, og som kunne tenke seg å holde foredrag om det.
Målet med foredragsserien er å vise at Linux kan brukes til videoproduksjon, billedbehandling, 3D-modellering etc.

Følgende temaer har blitt foreslått:

• Linux som platform for musikkproduksjon (Jokosher, Rosegarden, …)
• Linux som platform for billedbehandling (Gimp/F-spot/RAW-bildehåndtering…/…)
• Linux som platform for tegning (Inkscape/Sodipodi/OOo-draw/…)
• Linux som platform for 3d-grafikk (Blender/…)
• Linux som platform for videoredigering (Cinelerra/Kino/…)
• Linux som platform for desktop publishing (Scribus/…)
• Linux som platform for sanntids media (Pure Data/FreeJ/…)

Nylig har det også blitt foreslått et foredrag om lydteknikk, men som jeg føler ikke går inn under hverken “Linux”-paraplyen eller “kreativ platform”-paraplyen. Selv om det unektelig hadde vært interressant.

Det eneste feltet her der vi har et navn på blokken er musikkproduksjon, men forslag der også mottas med takk.

I morgen er det forresten foredrag om Kerberos

Ok. It has been a while since my last post, and quite a few things have happened since then, some of which I will get back to in some later posts.

One of the things that have happened is that I attended the “Skolelinux developer summit” or Debian Edu developer summit here in Bergen, with the goal to do some real contribution to free software. I didn’t end up contributing any code at that event.

Cecilie had asked Knut Yrvin to do a talk about community based projects, which inspired some of the other attendees, Walter Bender, to talk about his organization, Sugarlabs. Sugarlabs organizes the development and promotion of Sugar, the user interface for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

from sugarlabs.org, click the image to show the whole series in context.

Sugar is an user interface aimed at kids and learning, rather than changing the learning process to use the computer and the web, it changes the user interface, so it is suited for a classroom environment. That being said, using sugar will probably revolutionize the way learning is done in the classroom, to a much more collaborative approach. Everything in sugar is made for sharing between the pupils and/or the teacher.

I had seen some screenshots of Sugar before, but I was totally blown away about the collaboration part of the system, and also how it changes the approach to computers, where we make the computer suitable for the classroom, rather than making the classroom suitable for the computer.

My contribution during the developer summit ended up beeing translating the Turtle Art activity into Norwegian, and helping Mr. Bender finding some bugs.

Since then I’ve translated the download pages on the Sugarlabs wiki into Norwegian. Sadly the current state of Sugar is that it’s quite buggy as “Sugar on a Stick”, completely broken in Ubuntu, and probably somewhat buggy in Fedora.

Also, listen to the Episode 66 of the FLOSS weekly podcast about the implementation of the OLPC in Nepal, which goes more into detail about Sugar.

I just wrote a description on how you can use apache to create an authenticated proxy ahead of your development server, or other http-based servers that doesn’t provide authentication themselves.
You can find it under the docs-section or by clicking here: Using apache to create an authenticated proxy.

Stumbled across this funny clip today:

Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, we take to Sydney’s streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration.

I have a laptop with a rather low resolution screen. It is limited to 1024x768px, so I have had a bit of envy for the Ubuntu eee users that have a nice and practical user interface for smaller screens. I have for a while already removed the taskbar, since I realized that I didn’t use it that much, and it steals a whopping 24px of the vertical screenspace.

I discovered the netbook remix, that is the user interface in Ubuntu eee right after Ubuntu 8.10 was launched. I had already updated to 8.10, and the Netbook remix wasn’t available for 8.10 at the time.

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I installed Ubuntu 8.04 this week. Among the new features are a beta of the coming release of Firefox. It seems like some fine peace of software, but it continues the ever-growing wasting of screen realestate. I bought a new laptop a few weeks ago, and I wanted a small and portable one. In order to get that, I had to go down to a screen resolution of 1024×768. I was a bit afraid that this would be too little, but it has turned out fine. But it irritates me that some developer seems to think that it is no problem at all to use up a large portion of the screen for toolbars.

When I started using phoenix (the name of firefox at that time), one of its selling points was that it left so much of the screen for webpages, and didn’t waste much space at all. With every new (standard) theme it seems like it eats more and more of the screen.

And, since this is a beta none of my beloved “screen realestate cheap”-themes are out for it yet.

F11 and out.

Torsdag 24. april 2008 kl 19,
Auditorium PI, Autogården (Matematisk institutt),
Johannes Bruns gate 12, Bergen

Her er plakat, løp ut og heng opp!

Tilgjengelighet til og i nettbaserte ressurser, ved Sverre A. Holbye, Include AS

Tilgjengelighet til og i nettbaserte ressurser. Hva er tilgjengelighet på nett? De siste årene har interessen for tilgjengelighet økt, og flere land har innført reguleringer med hensyn til tilgjengeligheten til nettbaserte ressurser. Norge holder i disse dager på å få en egen lov (“Anti-diskrimineringsloven”) som etter all sansynlighet vil inneholde bl.a. føringer på hvordan nettbaserte ressurser må legges til rette for alle.

Foredraget vil ta opp bakgrunnen for at dette er blitt så aktuellt som det er. Fokus vil ikke først og fremst dreie seg om konkrete teknikker for å implementere tilgjengelighet, men mer om: Hva er tilgjengelighet? Hva vil det si at noe er tilgjengelig? Hva sier nasjonalt og internasjonalt lovverk samt retningslinjer og standardiseringsorganer? Hvem er målgruppa og hva er behovene? Vi skal se på vanlige hjelpemidler og hvilke begrensninger og muligheter disse gir. Med dette som bakteppe og med synshemmedes behov som utgangspunkt skal vi se på noen konkrete nettsteder og diskutere tilgjengeligeheten på/i/til disse. Avslutningsvis skal vi se nærmere på de “nye web 2.0″ teknologiene og hvilke utfordringer disse fører med seg.
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This is maybe the only april fool I saw yesterday I thought where a bit funny.