And as I spoke …

… Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft has become available

I wonder how the mirrors will handle the traffic? I wonder if anyone could be seeding?

… 20 mins later, and yes I have 3 seeds to connect to!

And then it was really kicking!

Twiddling my Thumbs

A highly indulgent post to be sure…

So today (well tonight in Aus) is the release date of the newest release of Ubuntu; 6.10 - The Edgy Eft.

I hate getting all twitchy; my computer can survive just a little longer.

I hate being the person who keeps refreshing the Ubuntu page, or constantly checking the forums (you should see some of the people go off, when someone claims to be downloading it) …Yet here I am sitting around waiting for it to come out.

I hate being 10 hours in front of the rest of the world!

Sheesh!

Remote Desktop to a Windows Machine in Xubuntu

To my great surprise, delight and somewhat shame, it was very easy to set up a PPTP connection to my work VPN, should I ever feel the strange need to do some work of a weekend.

Now to setting up a remote desktop connection so I can actually use my work PC.

I’m gonna need two packages to do this; rdesktop (the client application) and grdesktop (a GUI frontend for rdesktop)

grdesktop came at a cost, in terms of GNOME dependencies, which isn’t such a big problem for my system, but just worth nothing. If GNOME dependencies are an issue, just install rdesktop. I’ll try to figure out how to use it next.

sudo aptitude install rdesktop grdesktop

We can almost fire up the VPN connection, which I’ve already gone through here, but before that there is an intermediate step that is required.

As it turns out, I did need to set up a route to get things working. The instructions were thankfully very straightforward. You can take one of two approaches (as always); the command line or the GUI. I’ll show both.

Adding the route through the command line is achieved by using the route command, specifying the starting address for the network, the netmask and connection to use. In my case it was somewhat like this

sudo route -add 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev ppp0

Adding the route via the GUI is done by clicking the Routing tab for the connection. Then select the routing style most applicable. In my case I am a Client connecting to a LAN, so Client to LAN is the easy choice.

 

Click Edit Network Routes, then you will be able to enter in the route IP address and the mask bits (netmask).

I now can start the PPTP connection, which should show that the new route is in use.

So now on to the Remote Desktop GUI. After installation a nice little Tux icon appears in the Network menu.

Once opened, all that is left is to correctly identify the local IP address of the computer you wish to take control of, and the username and password to do so.

Some other important settings, that may require some thought, include the size and colours available to the connection.

If everything works out correctly you’ll finally see the Windows desktop of the remote PC.

eTax 2006 and Wine 0.9.23

It’s almost the end of ‘it’s that time of year’ again… tax time. This was my first year doing a tax return as a full-time employee, and was pretty damn frustrating, more than usual. I think I will need to write to the tax office with an ammendment .

Anyway, this year I decided to do my tax return with Xubuntu. The tax office only supplies their eTax program for Windows, but I figured, if this isn’t a good opportunity to use Wine I don’t know what is.

Wine is dead easy to install …

Just backup and edit the apt-get sources list

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list_backup
sudo mousepad /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add the Ubuntu specific Wine repository (Dapper of course)

deb-src http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt dapper main

Then install Wine with your preference of apt-get interface

sudo apt-get install wine

Then configure Wine and install the program (in this case eTax)

winecfg
wine /downloads/etax2006.exe

As it turned out, eTax installed superbly using Wine, and ran without many of the problems you would expect. I was able to create a new tax data file, and load my previous years data, which was handy. There were no problems filling in the information, from a technical point of view, comprehending tax law aside. The only issues I could determine, were the inability to load the help file, and not being able to see a running estimate of my return.

Printing was another problem, but was sorted by using the CUPS-PDF printer.

I’ll wait to see what comes of my ammendment letter, but it looks like a pretty successful tax reutrn using Wine. If not I don’t have very long to sort it out :$

Indoor Soccer Update

Quick recap of our last two games; in short, not so hot.

We don’t seem to be gelling as a team like we did last season, everyone seems to want to play from the back, I broke my collarbone, so we a minus an experienced keeper too.  I just wanted to boost myself there.

Last week we went down 5-2 in a rather crazy kind of game.  I didn’t pay my game fees for this half of the season, believing I would not be ready to play.  Due to some player shortages and general unfitness, I’ve scraped a few minutes in.   In James’ words, ‘I didn’t help [my] cause’, when I scored a screamer with the outside of my left foot.

That was really all there was to that game, the rest was just fouls, fouls and more fouls.  Apparently, according to our referee, indoor soccer is ‘non-contact’, and despite many attempts to find our just what that meant for the game, we were told to read the rule-book.  OK, fair enough, we can do that after the game, but what about during?  I think it’s the referee’s resposibility to explain to the players, on both sides, his interpretation of the rules.

Both sides were committing fouls, left right and centre, most were in my opinion quite trivial; tackling the ball from front on, but hitting the players leg in the process.  I can understand, and in some cases agree with the referee’s stance on no contact.  For sure some of our games are pretty much ruined by lumbering, unskilled loafs, who are just hacking at you all game.  What I didn’t understand was how tackles that would have been legal in outdoor soccer, were called for fouls, however illegal tackles in outdoor and just general ‘contact’ (ie pushing, and niggling) from behind was ok.

Like I said before, sure after the game we could read the rules, but we need to be told during the game the reason why every challenge is becoming a foul.

Last night was little better in terms of our gameplay; a 3-3 draw.  True we only drop one point, as scored draws are worth 2 points, but it just wasn’t a good game from out perspective.

Everyone was terribly flat.  The passing atrocious, and next to nil in communication.  Some would say we were unlucky, with Paul conceeding two simple goals, but I would counter with the two very easy chances they missed.  I feel for Paul, it’s not easy being the keeper, especially since he’s been overseas for a month.  It took me a while to get in form, so I wouldn’t expect the world from him.

Those guys just ran so damn hard all game, whilst we were left showing our age (bar Andy of course), wheeezing, puffing and just general redness.  I still believe despite our general unfitnesswe should have won, but one point dropped isn’t too bad.