Tag Archives: Ubuntu

Ubuntu Edge | Indiegogo

Hi everyone

So ends a crazy month. We’ve broken records, we’ve been written and talked about across the world, we’ve worn out our F5 keys, and we’ve learned a lot of invaluable lessons about crowdfunding. Our bold campaign to build a visionary new device ultimately fell short, but we can take away so many positives.

We raised $12,809,906, making the Edge the world’s biggest ever fixed crowdfunding campaign. Let’s not lose sight of what an achievement that is. Close to 20,000 people believed in our vision enough to contribute hundreds of dollars for a phone months in advance, just to help make it happen. It wasn’t just individuals, either: Bloomberg LP gave $80,000 and several smaller businesses contributed $7,000 each. Thank you all for getting behind us.

Then there’s the Ubuntu community. Many of you gave your time as well as money, organising your own mailing lists, social media strategies and online ads, and successfully reaching out to your local media. We even saw entire sites created to gather information and help promote the Edge. We’ll be contacting our biggest referrers personally.

Most importantly, the big winner from this campaign is Ubuntu. While we passionately wanted to build the Edge to showcase Ubuntu on phones, the support and attention it received will still be a huge boost as other Ubuntu phones start to arrive in 2014. Thousands of you clearly want to own an Ubuntu phone and believe in our vision of convergence, and rest assured you won’t have much longer to wait.

All of the support and publicity has continued to drive our discussions with some major manufacturers, and we have many of the world’s biggest mobile networks already signed up to the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group. They’ll have been watching this global discussion of Ubuntu and the need for innovation very closely indeed. Watch this space!

As for crowdfunding, we believe it’s a great way to give consumers a voice and to push for more innovation and transparency in the mobile industry. And who knows, perhaps one day we’ll take everything we’ve learned from this campaign — achievements and mistakes — and try it all over again.

Thank you all

Mark Shuttleworth, the Ubuntu Edge team and everyone at Canonical

 

P.S. We’ve been assured by Paypal that all refunds will be processed within five working days.

Ubuntu Edge | Indiegogo.

NetbootCD

This is a very useful boot disk – it allows you to download the latest network installer from the relevant site and boot it, without having to burn or create another stick. It supports the major distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, Scientific Linux, CentOS and Slackware.

Be warned, though, Network Installers by nature can be heavily console-based.

NetbootCD.

Security

As a result of the Ubuntu Forums hack recently, I’ve now had to spend several hours going through all my internet logins accounts to see whether or not I have used the same password anywhere else. Not surprising, I have so I have to go through and change them all. Fortunately, LastPass allows me to generate secure passwords which  I can use to replace other passwords. The only real place where I would be concerned if they have access would by emails, but I have 2-factor authentication turned on there, and have had it turned on for many months, and they need my email address, password AND phone to get into my account. Even my backup codes are stored on a TrueCrypt volume stored on a LUKS partition on my laptop so they would need two passwords to get at those.

Mind you, it IS good that these forums were hacked, it’s given me a reason to go through my accounts and see which ones I still use and which ones I can delete.

Related articles

 

Ubuntu Forums

Hello,

You are receiving this message because you have an account registered with this address on ubuntuforums.org.

The Ubuntu forums software was compromised by an external attacker. As a result, the attacker has gained access to read your username, email address and an encrypted copy of your password from the forum database.

If you have used this password and email address to authenticate at any other website, you are urged to reset the password on those accounts immediately as the attacker may be able to use the compromised personal information to access these other accounts. It is important to have a distinct password for different accounts.

The ubuntuforums.org website is currently offline and we are working to restore this service. Please take the time to change your ubuntuforums.org account password when service is restored.

We apologize for any inconvenience to the Ubuntu community, thank you for your understanding.

The Canonical Sysadmins.

Related articles

Grive & Fedora — Working

Grive is an open source command-line-based sync tool to synchronise a directory with your Google Drive. Grive is not in the Fedora repositories, although it is undergoing review for addition into the repositories.

In the meantime, if you want to use it, I’ve written a script that should pick the latest version from the russianfedora website. Bitbucket repository is here.

Direct link to script: here

Once you install the application, create a blank folder (this will be the sync folder), then run
grive -a
to request an authentication URL. Go to that URL, log into Google if you need to, and you’ll get a response string you need to copy back into the console window. If the authentication was successful, Grive will sync your files into the folder. Each subsequent time you run Grive, it will download and/or upload files to/from your Google Drive.

There is only one limitation that I’m aware of. Documents created from within Google Drive won’t sync, but if you convert them to odt or doc files, they will sync.

Cloud Storage

Gah, I really hate corporate firewalls. They block so many sites it’s sometimes impossible to do any work. I have Cloud Storage accounts with various sites, and can’t access:

However, I can access

My main cloud storage is with DropBox because they have a linux-native application for Fedora and Ubuntu. Whilst JustCloud also have a linux application, it’s Ubuntu only, so even though I have an account with JustCloud, I can’t effectively use it yet on my laptop. But, what I do like is that JustCloud tracks your mobile device once you install the app on it. Similar to the Cerberus app. So you can keep tabs on where it is. Although there’s nowhere to hide the app or make it a device administrator, it at least gives you an idea of where to start looking for your device if you can’t find it.

Behind my draconian corporate firewall the only one I can effectively use is Google Drive since they haven’t blocked Google, and I doubt they will since it’s probably the de facto search engine for most of the Internet users (although I prefer a metasearch engine like IXQuick.

Concatenating Videos

I’ve been cracking my head trying to figure out how to concatenate my dashcam videos, which get chopped by my dashcam into 15 minutes chunks. The most obvious one is ffmpeg, where I would use this:

$ ffmpeg -i "concat:`ls -l | egrep -i "apr\ \ 2" | awk 'BEGIN {ORS="|"} { print $9 }'`" -c copy output.AVI

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