OneAndOneIs2

I landed uneventfully after a long movie-watching stint on the plane - first flight I've been on where the entertainment system worked flawlessy for the whole trip.

Being able to watch everything when you want to has its downsides tho. I knew I was running out of things to watch when the Hannah Montana movie started to look appealing...

It was 2am UK time when I touched down, but I managed to stay awake a few more hours so I went to sleep at a fairly respectable 10:30pm local time, so hopefully jet lag won't hit too hard.

Apparently there's some kind of national holiday/celebration of some sort tomorrow, so there may be the odd firework or two to see :o)

It's been an arduous journey so far - I hate London Underground - and I had to repack my bags to get into weight limits. And I haven't had lunch.

On the plus side, at least it's not so fecking HOT and HUMID on the plane!

Takeoff is a little under half an hour away, and then it's a mere 11 hours until I can get off again in sunny California.

Seeya all then!

This is an appeal for information to all my geek readers (both of you ;o)

As you may remember, I was training as a science teacher a couple years ago. One of the schools I trained at, a very large one with nearly 2000 pupils and hundreds of members of staff, I stayed in touch with, and I've been hearing a few interesting things about their computer system lately.

Specifically, they'll be changing from a state school to an academy next academic year (i.e. this September) Without going into too much detail, this is kind of like privatisation of a school, it becomes owned and run by an outside organisation rather than by the state.

Naturally, they have a lot of computers in the place, wifi pickups all around, and all the teachers have their own laptops. Everything runs Windows XP. The thing is, because their Windows licenses are all in the name of the SCHOOL and they're going to stop being a school in August, all their licenses are going to be invalidated. So every laptop has to be returned and every machine in the place needs a new license.

One or two of the teachers have taken this opportunity to sing from our choir book, and are making the argument that instead of paying out for hundreds of new Windows licenses, they should instead switch to Linux. No licensing to worry about, a new lease of life for some of the older hardware, better ability to teach COMPUTING skills rather than "This is how Microsoft does it", and so on.

The main objection being raised against the conversion is that old favourite: Windows-only applications. The school uses a system called SIMS ("Student Information Management services") which holds information about each pupil, their timetable, and the electronic registers that teachers use at the start of each class. It is (I speak from experience) a fairly dreadful application, as it crashes a lot and has a very arcane interface. But it's all they've got, and there's not really any alternatives (on any platform) that they know of.

It seems to me that most of what it does, and more besides, would be easily in the reach of any good CMS, but things like generating timetables and registers is where it starts to get complicated and outside of my experience.

So, the basic situation is, you've got a very few people calling for a conversion to Linux (mainly from Science and Maths because the IT people are all really WINDOWS people rather than COMPUTER people), and now is pretty much their only opportunity because if the new academy pays out for a Windows site license, they're going to be highly resistant to the idea of switching afterwards. They've made the case already that Linux is more reliable (vital in modern schools where most lessons run off interactive whiteboards - essentially a big touchscreen + projector), more secure (even more vital with nearly 2000 children using it daily), and more educational (no brainer), and also can draw upon the fact that the Windows app that they're told they can't live without is decidedly unpopular and unreliable.

If anyone has ANY suggestions for how those few people could overcome the Windows loyalists, I'd like to hear them. Any information of Linux-based alternatives to the SIMS application would be very helpful, as would details of any other schools that have trialled Linux successfully or of people/companies (ideally in the West Sussex area) that would be able to help with a BIG switchover. I know Ubuntu has the Edubuntu branch, but have never used it - how much support is available from Canonical/the community when it comes to large organisations switching to their distro? I've only ever encountered Ubuntu as something to install from CD to PC, not to a huge network..

Apart from anything else, the organisation behind this academy is taking over another school at the same time, and is already running at least one other school I know of, so if it works well in ONE school, they'll possibly branch it out to their others as well. Which means this has the direct potential to get a LOT of kids exposed to Linux in this county, as well as the indirect potential of being a good case study if it works.

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

Quite why this is news when they did the EXACT same thing with Vista, I have no idea, but nonetheless: It's made headlines lately that Microsoft will charge EU double for Win 7 and since there's less software bundled with Windows in the EU, that means we'll be paying a lot more for a lot less.

[cynic]Well, of course Microsoft will be charging more in the EU - they have to recoup the cost of the anti-competitive behaviour that cost them $1.4 billion in fines and all the legal costs that went along with it.[/cynic]

I was scanning through Firefox themes - new desktop, new look kind of thing - and I came across one theme that actually requires you to accept an EULA before installing it.

Expecting the typical "You waive all rights and promise not to blame us for anything that goes wrong even when it's all our fault and we've admitted it" bumph, I was somewhat amused when instead, I was asked to agree to the following:

Look, I don't really care what you do with my theme, just don't do a recolour job or something and re-release it as your own. That's not being fair. I spent the time and effort making this, so at least let me have the credit for it.

First EULA I ever bothered to read all the way through, and one I didn't object to accepting :o)

NEW WALLPAPER!!!

I'm not sure what look I'm going to go for with my new desktop. I'm considering seeing if I can rip off KDE's icon themes to save me some legwork, or making the new theme be what I use to learn Blender & get better with the Gimp.

Whatever. I have no idea what to make my screen look like. So it's tricky putting an appropriate wallpaper onto the background. But I was playing around with some of the screensaver hacks (Xscreensaver, I have missed thee! and one of those gave me an idea...

It's called "webcollage" and it's certainly a NSFW option: It randomly grabs image files and makes a collage of them on your screen. And of course, we all know what that means...

[youtube]T-TA57L0kuc[/youtube]

But you can ALSO set it to run like a wallpaper - like you can any Xscreensaver hack (which prompted Tina to ask if I could find a Windows version of the GLMatrix one) but more importantly, you can set it to generate a screen-sized collage in a JPEG gile, and then set THAT to be your wallpaper.

Which means, to summarise:
Running the command /usr/lib/xscreensaver/webcollage -size 1280x800 -delay 2 -v -imagemap ~/background in Debian will create a file in your home directory called background.jpg which is made up of random image files from the web.

How cool is that??

You actually get a surprisingly low amount of porn at the default settings, and could probably reduce it even more with a little work. But it really is fascinating, seeing what you get as a wallpaper with this...

When I use FVWM, I want my Windows key to bring up the main menu, just like it does in Windows.

(Except that the menu appears under the mouse, not always in the screen corner - much better!)

To do this, you have to configure the key to be recognizable to X and to your window manager. The process I used in Debian Lenny for this was:

Use xev to find the keycode, which was in this case the standard 115:
KeyRelease event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x1000001,
root 0x69, subw 0x0, time 6401648, (171,171), root:(216,273),
state 0x40, keycode 115 (keysym 0xffeb, Super_L), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

Edit /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB so it knows there's a new key for it to deal with on the keyboard:
Start :11000001
added to the end of the file

Create the file /etc/X11/Xmodmap to link the Start key to keycode 115:
keycode 115 = Start

To get xmodmap to actually load the file you just created, near the end of the file /etc/X11/Xsession add:
[ -f /etc/X11/Xmodmap ] && xmodmap /etc/X11/Xmodmap

That should set up the key properly (and for all users, which is why you don't use a ~/.Xmodmap file) Then it's just a matter of a line in FVWM's config:
Key Start A A Popup "MainMenu"

And that's it, all done. The windows key brings up my menu! And if I want to configure any of the other 'hotkeys' that usually don't actually do anything, it's the same process.

This is what I mean about GUIs getting in the way and being able to do more when you know what's really going on under the hood!

My laptop's dual-booted Vista (which it came with) and Ubuntu for a long time.

But I don't like Ubuntu all that much. It uses Gnome, and it's too user-friendly.

Yes, there IS such a thing. I hate software that tries to be helpful, and most people do if they're honest - remember the helpful paperclip is MS Office? :o)

More to the point, though, when it comes to Linux, I hate software that automates everything behind GUIs. It means that you don't know how to do anything WITHOUT the GUI.

So I used debootstrap to install a minimal Debian system tomy spare partition. I followed a couple of helpful guides on setting things up to get the non-free package repositories set up in /etc/apt/sources.list so that I could get the Broadcom wifi hardware working - courtesy of apt-getting b43-fwcutter and then running the shell script it came with. A minor mistake with the /etc/network/interfaces file cost me a reboot, as I configured the wifi as eth1 (As Ubuntu does) rather than wlan0. But that was an easy enough fix.

And now I have a computer that, currently, has no X11 installation and therefore is text-only. No GUIs at all. Command-line or nothing.

I love it :o)

I'm typing this from one of my all-time favourite browsers, links. It's text-only and I always have it installed because it makes life so much easier when you have a broken GUI or can only get to your machine via SSH. Apt is currently pulling down Xorg and FVWM so I'll get graphics sorted out soon. But I have to sort out a few things with the CLI access first. Couple of things people might like to know:

- To have a login prompt that clears the screen instead of appearing at the bottom, as root, type:

# clear >> /etc/issue
Then use a text editor to move the prompt text to BELOW the bottom line of weird characters. This will make the prompt sent the 'clear screen' command each time it appears

- The command line is much easier to use when it's spaced out a little. Go into .bashrc and find where it defines your PS1 variable. Put a \n in front of it. This will add an extra newline in front of the command prompt, giving you a blank line between each command. Much nicer.

Right. That's enough of that for now. Off to configure Xorg! :o)