Pictures from Open Source Days 2008

As promised here are pictures of some members of the Danish Ubuntu LoCo team, at the Open Source Days 2008 in Copenhagen. All pictures by Niels Kjøller Hansen.

gruppe-lille
From left to right: Niels, Elge Sander, Søren (me), Mads, Mark and Sakse.

The moose is named after Helge Sander, our Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation. (Elg means moose in Danish.)

The Software Exchange was running the booth with the fancy setup. They work under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and help the public sector in Denmark choose relevant software, in particular open source software.

Below are some pictures of LoCo team members lounging in front of the portrait of the sabdfl.

gnomonicshiyeesbc

Working webcam

Finally my webcam is working! Up until recently there was no working Linux driver for my webcam, but that seems to have changed.

Reports indicate that the driver is included in the Linux kernel from version 2.6.28. Until that version hits your system (should ship with Ubuntu Jaunty) installing the driver is still possible. See this guide:

http://m560x-driver.wiki.sourceforge.net/testing_m5602

The webcam (or the chip to be more accurate) is located in a lot of laptops. The Launchpad Bug report mentions Asus, Acer, Lenovo and Zepto. I have a Zepto 6615WD myself.

To find out if your webcam is a m560x model, open up a terminal and type

lsusb

if you see a line like this:

Bus 005 Device 003: ID 0402:5602 ALi Corp. Video Camera Controller

you are in business. You may have to activate your webcam somehow. On my system there is a button with a camera icon on it that I have to press before the camera turns on.

The quality is a bit grainy and far from the best – hopefully this can be solved as the driver matures.
hue-lille

However me being (and looking) tired in the morning is properly beyond the scope of some webcam driver. (Yes I cheated and used a regular camera for the Get to know a LoCo post a few weeks back.)

How to mirror your blog onto Freenet

I received an email a few days ago asking how I manage to mirror this blog onto Freenet.

For those of you out there who don’t know about Freenet, it is a computer program that aims to provide anonymity for consumers and providers of information, in an effort to secure free speech. The network is decentralized and uses strong encryption to secure anonymity and free speech.

I have been using Freenet, and following its development, on and off over the last couple of years, both because I generally like the idea of free speech and also because I find the technical aspects interesting. The Freenet program is still under heavy development, far from a 1.0 release, and always in need of support. Since I’m not much of a coder I can’t really help The Freenet Project that way, so instead I try to provide something else – content. In other words, I mirror this blog onto Freenet (where a blog is often called a flog).

It is actually quite simple (although a bit time consuming) to insert content into Freenet. Assuming my Freenet node is running, here is what I do:

  1. First I fetch the files locally, using HTTrack (apt install) (I guess wget, puf or similar would work just as well…)
  2. Then I use jSite, to insert onto Freenet.

Quite simple really… If you feel like getting your blog (or other content) on Freenet, I say go for it. If you run into any problems, feel free to contact me.

PS. I’m always looking for friends to connect my Freenet node to, so if you feel like you know and trust me, and that I might now and trust you, feel free to get in touch.

PPS. You can find this blog on Freenet at this key:
USK@nwFgddANy8mudsvcXin~XhPLmiiM8tKG0iYdFRcBgM0,edFuHQpV3fY6eeedhSbfSPpQ9gkBFVwvR~uEzTZiB8k,AQACAAE/blog/74/