vSphere - VMWare

I know it's been a while, with Mr O.G being unavailable my geek lessons have been somewhat sparse.

Last weekend however, I was introduced to vmware's vSphere & ESX.  I had never seen, had need of nor used virtual machines so this was all completely new territory, having a bit of a poke around and introduction was pretty ace.

vSphere is pretty spiffy and the UI is really smooth and clean.  This little introduction lead into some rather informative conversation regarding security architecture and methods of ensuring secure environments.

Not really a lot to report on the matter... other than "hey cool I get it now"

Ubuntu 11.10 issues with Wifi.

In July / August this year I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my Thinkpad, I noticed when I logged in that the wireless wasn't working.  After some research I discovered that my Thinkpad is running a Broadcom BCM43224 wireless network card and that there were a number of known issues with the Broadcom drivers.  Luckily for me there was a patch available that would solve all my problems automagically, took a few hours and a ethernet connection but I managed it.

I recently upgraded Ubuntu to 11.10 and haven't had much of a chance to play around on it.  I did notice on Sunday night that the wifi wasn't working, ethernet was working fine which is why I hadn't noticed the issue earlier.

Deja Vu much?  After the hoops I had to jump through to get wireless working on Ubuntu 10.10 I couldn't believe I was having the same issues in Ubuntu 11.10...  

This time there is no patch sitting waiting to be downloaded that will automagically fix the wifi for me.  After some research I found a few "work arounds" (could someone explain to me please why we have to find work arounds for known issues?) 

The work arounds suggested deleting modules and installing other ones, although the work arounds had been well received I don't entirely feel comfortable jumping in and deleting modules and bits left, right and centre unless I know what it is that they do.  I initiated a game of 20 questions with Mr. O.G.

Problem:
Thinkpad running Broadcom BCM43224 wireless addapter, Ubuntu detects the wireless network card but proceeds to install the wrong drivers.

Solution:
Add bcma to the blacklist file created by bcmwl-kernel-source's postinst script.

• Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf to include bcma

This will enable the wl module to run properly.

For full information feel free to have a look at the Ubuntu bug report raised ~8weeks ago & suggested bcmwl-kernel-source patch information.

What bothers me most is that this bug effects a multitude of people and has been reported several times.  I could understand that it could be considered a low priority issue and that valuable resources are being allocated to more pressing matters, but seriously accompanying this bug reported 8weeks ago was a patch to fix it... It would take very little to review, approve and make said patch available... my mind boggles!

Linux Lessons via G+ Hangout!

Introduction to the Command Line

This is hopefully the first in a series of Linux tutorial hangouts, where we introduce you to the basics of the command line, SSH, basic shell scripts, package management, editors.

Questions and suggestions are welcome, the idea is to interact and go with what the audience wants vs a structured lesson.

The lesson will be at Saturday, 26 November 2011 at 7:00:00 p.m. UTC - URL to check what timezone that is for you http://bit.ly/vX9rk2

Please re-share with anyone you may feel interested.

Lessons will be held in English and run by +Liz Quilty

Check out Rimuhosting G+ Page for further information.

I'm not 100% sure I'll make it being 06:00 on a SUNDAY!!!  But for anyone interested in an introduction to Linux I would HIGHLY recommend this!

For those of us unable to attend, fear not I am fairly sure that this lesson will be recorded and easily accessible, just keep an eye on the Rimuhosting or Liz Quilty's G+ Pages.

Blog Stats!

One thing I utterly love about this blogger blog, is the stats for each of the pages.  So much information available and I don't have to log into my analytics account just to see it.  Loverly!

Enjoying yesterday's blog stats specifically.  It doesn't look so good when I look at the entire week and month, but hey baby steps!  (It would also appear Russia has a big windows base! They ruined my stats!)  Oh and no laughing at my piddly numbers, this blog is more for me then for an audience! :-)

Geek Lessons last night!

With an increasingly busy work / life schedule, it's getting more and more difficult for O.G and myself to find the time to catch up and geek out.  Geek lessons didn't really commence until ~23:00 last night.  Which has done nothing for my beauty sleep, I feel like a barely warmed up zombie today!

Discussions last night started of with the pros and cons of white lined paper, demonstrations of the awesomeness that is my LiveScribe pen (I seriously couldn't survive my job without it!) then hitting the proverbial books!

Started with a few demonstrations of additional VIM features/shortcuts then it was time to get serious, conversation then went into discussing strings, variables and arrays, how they interact and pull from each other as well as the importance of formatting in Python.  >_<  I think print will be my bestfriend for a long time and will be very very useful.  I haven't really had much time to read up on Python yet so this rather unexpected lesson caught me off guard.

I understand that I could easily cheat with a debugging program, but I wanna do it myself!

Anyway I'm too tired to write much more now, I have instant coffee *ick* to drink, clients to call and work to do.~!

Google+ Hangouts.

Well yesterday afternoon and last night was spent experiencing my very first public hangouts.

I must say I do have a preference over the Hangout with extra's to  the standard Hangout.  The ability to share screens is more than just a little bit handy, especially when doing geeky linuxy lesson / guide / brainstorming!

I've met a few individuals definitely worth circling but there is  very low likelyhood of me becoming a "hangout slut", sure it's fun, would definitely be useful for long distance communications, but I'm too much of an in flesh kind of girl.

Google+ Hangouts definitely have massive potential for lessons and group sessions in "How To's", already there are talks of geeky lesson ideas amongst a few people I know which is very exciting.

Although I love my mentor to pieces (BIG LOVE TO THE O.G) it is always a fantastic idea to learn and gain guidance from as many different like minded sources as possible.  Of course at this stage of my linux geeky development I'm concerned about how easily confused I could become, however I hoping with like minded individuals that would be far less likely.

I hope that my mentor Mr. O.G considers collaborating with a few of the G+ers in their informal lessons on G+ Hangouts, he's a most excellent teacher.

Due to some of the conversations had in G+ Hangouts today, I played around with windows video / audio recording abilities for G+.  Will be very handy for a YouTube channel or reposting ability.  YAY!

On a completely unrelated note, this weekend I have the 3D TV to myself (and friends) can I heara "UNCHARTED 3"!!!  BOOOOYAAAAHHH!!!!

Uncharted 3 Yes - No - Maybe

Had the perfect start to a lazy Sunday afternoon.  Awesome breakfast, coffee, catching up on social media and current news. Then it was time to "hit the books" so a relatively small portion of the afternoon was spent reading up on github, since it is going to be necessary to use it to hack my LCA2012 name badge figure I should do some reading on the subject.

Sunday afternoon wasn't spent in Linux/Unix geekery, suffice to say a severe case of lack in motivation caused me to put away the laptop.  Fat with fine food and coffee it was a perfect time to sit back and play some.... UNCHARTED 3!!!  After the previous evenings espcapades in acquiring Uncharted 3, there was no way in hell that I was not going to get some game time in this weekend.

Saturday Night Geek Lessons

Ok, having some minor issues hacking my name badge for LCA2012... AND NO THAT IS NOT A REQUEST FOR HINTS OR THE ANSWER!!!  

I have a few more months to geek up enough to accomplish that right?  I'm well on my way, already found the clues and the bits and pieces, just need to work out all the checksums and salt business.  I'm happy with where I am since I never expecting to get even this far.  I have definitely come to a point where I'm struggling had have various ideas of where to go and what to do next.  I chatted to O.G about some of these ideas and received minute amounts of direction and plenty of confirmation.  I'm sure once I get a few more blocks of free time I'll progress in leaps and bounds :-P

For me, this weekend was supposed to be all about Uncharted 3 (PS3).  I had been looking forward to playing this game for ooooh a good 6 months!  Silly me got the release dates confused, I honestly thought that it came out the same day as Skyrim 11/11/11.  But nooooooooo it was released 01/11/11 talk about massive #girlfail

Of course I was totally unorganised, the sale on Uncharted 3 I'd had my eye on (obviously not closely enough) ended on the 09/11/11, so after scoping the internet for a new deal, rude staff and store hoping I managed to get my grubby little hands on a copy at about 22:30... not such a great start to a new game on a Saturday night!

Arriving at the "classroom" ~23:00, I totally wasn't in gamer mode, instead laptops were turned on and noses were sunk into all manners of geekiness.  The original plan of gaming quickly morphed into "I must install Drupal 7.7 and all associated goodies (MySQL & PHP & fave modules etc) on Ubuntu".  Tangent much?

UBUNTU 11.04 WHY YOU NO HAVE DRUPAL 7???

Recent Geekery Lessons.

My most recent geekery lesson included;

• apt-get - installing and updating software
• apt-cache - help finding software you don't exactly know the name of
• irssi - basic navigation and the /help file
• ssh refresher and screen 
• VI - navigating and how to's.
• ED - navigating and just more of a historical need to know. (I'll stick with vi for the moment, kthx)
• Counting in binary & hex
• The history of Unix - this will have to be revisited again, I can't recall much of those conversations
• C - it's uses and it's creators

I have been downloading programs left, right and center. Chromium browser, pidgin, GIMP (I LOVE this program), htop, deluge, tweetdeck (including apache air), Inkscape (although I haven't used it much) and I've also upgraded Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04.

I've also been playing with adding and removing users, using a variety of methods as well as learning how to give and take permissions.

In June - July this year I created my first website (since 2001 html geocities site) using Drupal for my business.  I've learned a lot since I created that website and already I want to give it a revamp.  This was done on a windows machine, so I'm rather excited to start creating a localhost on the Ubuntu box.