home » blog
Yes once again I come to complete my tax return, last time (see 11/01/2009: UK Self-Assessment for Linux) I created a page Submit A Uk Self-Assessment Return Under Linux, but it was a far from successful exercise.
Given that that page is now a year old and my next year's return is required, I thought it was an opportune time to update it. Unfortunately nothing much has changed, the list of personal tax applications has shrunk, as TaxCalc's market domination continues. The only Linux-compatible competitor seems to still be ftax and it requires Acrobat Reader, which isn't available for 64-bit Linux.
The problem is that you don't really want to mess about with your personal tax, especially when that includes on-line submission. You need to have faith in the company that offers the product, and you need them to have sufficient numbers of customers that, if there is a problem, it gets fixed quickly.
In short, the only meaninful competition for TaxCalc would seem to be HMRC's own web-based offering. If it weren't for my positive experiences in using TaxCalc, the convenience of being able to import the previous year's return, and the fact that I have a Windows virtual-machine on my laptop, I would probably try out the HMRC system. As it is, sadly, the Windows-only TaxCalc wins again.
Turns out this is as simple as:
$ sudo -i # apt-get install nagios3 # cd /etc/nagios3 # htpasswd -c htpasswd.users nagiosadmin
Then point your browser at http://localhost/nagios3/
Apparently firefox uses sqlite for its databases, maintaining several *.sqlite files in your .mozilla/ profile directory. Over time these become cluttered and it helps if you vacuum it:
$ sudo apt-get install sqlite3
$ cd ~
$ find .mozilla/ -iname '*'.sqlite -exec sqlite3 "{}" VACUUM \;
Wow, can't believe my last post was 4 months ago, well a quick tip to get me back into the blogging frame of mind. If you wish to take a drive image copy over the network, then apparently you do not have to have an nfs share available. Instead you can use ssh as follows:
$ dd if=/dev/sda bs=1M | ssh root@blah "cat > /root/disk.img"
Haven't tried it yet, but it sounds incredible. The bs=1M is essential or the copy will take forever.
From time to time I see the comment advocating a closed source program, with the response "as I'm not a developer it doesn't bother me whether or not I have the source code". I believe that that view is wrong, and that there are many occasions where non-developers will find benefit from having access to the source code.
For example,I've just found that Kmail will not autocomplete email addresses from an LDAP KDE resource. A simple bug; although strictly speaking it's not a bug, as it was a deliberate feature. Fortunately there is a fix, with a modification made to one of the components . Unfortunately this fix has not found its way into Debian Lenny or Squeeze, and Sid is now KDE4.
I could install from the KDE SVN repository, but that version has not been tested with Debian, and I don't really want to have such a significant part of a production server to have come from outside of Debian. Perhaps I am being overly cautious.
Anyway, I changed to /usr/src and ran "apt-get source kdepim" to download the source from Debian. I used "find" to locate the offending component, and used diff to determine what differences there were between the modified KDE version and the standard Debian version. I was pleased to note that only one line had changed. I copied in the new component and ran "apt-get build-dep kdepim" (with help from Dominic in #surrey). Then a quick "./configure", a very slow "make", and a quick "sudo checkinstall make install" and the fix was made.
There are many many more benefits to open source than the ability to modify the source, but I just wanted to point out that, even for non-developers, there is a very real and very direct benefit to having the source.
May the source be with you.
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146247
http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=800071
Our Debian Lenny LTSP5 Install has hit a road block: currently the site are using a Citrix server at another location over a 256k connection to pick up their emails. I really didn't feel that I could ask them all to collect their emails over a 256k connection, so what are the alternatives? Well I could upgrade the bandwidth by creating an inter-site VPN, but that will still only provide perhaps 600k (that being the upload bandwidth of the host site). The solution is to move the mailserver onto the 'net, so that they can benefit from a full 8mb ADSL download.
After seeking advice, I choose Bytemark as a trusted Debian VPS supplier, a day later I had my login to my new virtual server. But what to install? Advice pointed me in the direction of Postfix and Dovecot, which were not much more than an apt-get install:
Great, a working mailserver, but the problem with the installation was that the users were local system accounts, which made it more cumbersome to administer. The best solution seemed to be LDAP, and I duly followed the guide Debuntu to install, and I managed to integrate LDAP with PAM thus giving me the ability to allow users to login with an LDAP account; but in a nutshell that was exactly what was wrong with this solution - the users had to login to the server, before their system account would be created, and if that was the case I might as well have stuck with local system accounts in the first place. What I needed was a true virtual mail host. To that end, I was pointed in the direction of a Ubuntu howto on Howtoforge:
Okay but this was for Ubuntu not Debian and for one reason and another I simply could not get it working. After starting from scratch a couple of times, but ending up in the same place, I found that I had to combine the howto with this one for 8.10:
Even then it took a fair amount of battling to get it working on Debian Lenny. The key to most of my problems was in reading the comments on every page, as these include invaluable corrections and suggestions.
So after a week of pain, I now have a working virtual mail host, now I just need to set-up the domains, users and mailgroups.
One thing you need to know about me is that I am rarely satisfied. For example, my laptop boots up in a very acceptable 25 seconds, but still I am looking for better. So far I have not managed to improve matters, but I did find a great tool for graphing your boot performance, and a very neat way of adding it as a grub boot option, read the following article for how to set this up:
I've just returned from my first Bring-a-Box meeting at Nokia in Farnborough. I found it hugely enjoyable to have people who actually want to talk about Linux.
I was introduced to Firestarter, which is a GUI to configure a firewall and share your Internet connection, if you so wish, I'm looking forward to having a play with this.
I apologise in advance for this shameless piece of self-congratulation; but a while ago I wrote about how to Recover Data from a Hard Disk, and I published it also on my local LUG's knowledgebase. I have received an email to say that my instructions have enabled someone to recover two years' worth of lesson plans for a special-needs teacher. So I must admit to feeling rather pleased with myself!
If, like me, you have your laptop permanently on whilst you watch TV, then MythWeb is going to be a shock, a delightful shock. Imagine, from the comfort of your sofa, with your laptop on your lap:
And there's more: weather, ripped video, music, and more. If you're anything like me, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it, and quite simply it has now spoiled me for ANY other PVR system.
After a week spent trying to install our Debian Lenny LTSP server, with the clients failing to boot with an error "rpc failed: 2", and everyone I spoke to baffled as to how this could occur, I decided that enough was enough, and deleted the partitions and started again. Within 2 hours the server was back up and running without any of the same problems.
And a lesson learned: don't invest too much time in an install, without testing that the fundamentals are in place!
Initial impressions weren't that great, but I have to say mythtv is winning us over. The turning point was when we switched on mythweb. Mythweb does several things, but most notably it provides the program listings in a much more usable format than via mythtv This makes it must easier to browse and search the listings and record programs. And with a little extra work, it should be possible to make this accessible over the web. This feature gained huge spouse approval.
The other win is the commercial skipping, enabling a one button press to skip adverts.
I finally obliterated Microsoft Windows XP Mediocre Centre from our living room. I know one shouldn't indulge in Microsoft bashing, but I have earned the right after suffering with that atrocious system for the past five years. I would go so far as to say that my experience with that machine over the past five years is the number one reason I use Linux on the desktop today.
Anyway, decided to replace it with Mythbuntu, because (1) it's Debian based, (2) it should provide a quicker install than Debian.
My first impressions are that, if Ubuntu is Linux for human beings, Mythbuntu is Linux for human beings who have evolved into a higher form of intelligence.
The problem is that it's trying to do so much, that the essential options are obscured by the trivial; they really should triage the options into essential (need this to get a working television), important (you need this, but not necessarily immediately), and the rest.
Also, it simply isn't intuitive enough, for example I now understand that you have to install the capture cards, then the video sources (bizarrely this is the channel/guide information - or at least I think so) and then, after four hours of hair tearing I finally realised that you also have to configure the next option on the list "Input connections" which effectively links the tuners to the channel/guide information. If they must call the channel/guide information "Video sources", then they could at least have the decency to call the "Input connections" option something like "Connect Capture Cards to Video Sources", which I would have immediately understood (at least once I had worked out what the heck Video Sources were).
All very frustrating, and I really have been made to feel like an innocent newbie all over again. Horrible.
But I can see that, once I'm over this hump, it will do just about everything I could possibly ever want, and a great deal more besides. And it looks good, which is important in a living room computer.
And most importantly, we are a Microsoft-free house - hurrah!
I have today started a clean install on a new server, and I am documenting the entire process; not just the LTSP install, but everything, from the installation of a virtualised Windows server, to the installation of KDE and end-user apps. You can follow the process on the following page:
This morning I have been trying to find a way to complete my UK Self-Assessment Tax Return under Linux. Unfortunately only one application appears to exist for Linux, called FTax, and this application requires Adobe Reader, which is not available for 64-bit Linux. If you're comfortable on how to run 32-bit applications under Linux, then this might not be an obstacle for you. After going all round the houses, I ended up back on Windows XP.
See Submit a UK Self-Assessment Return under Linux to read more.
Fantastic, Amazon have opened their MP3 download site for the UK. Better still they support Linux, offering clients for Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. Once again we see companies choosing to support Linux from day one. Unfortunately there is no 64-bit version, as I found out last night. This really is the problem for companies producing proprietary software for an open platform. Which distros do they support? Which architectures? Which desktop environment?
The solution is obviously that they should just open source their client applications so that the distros can package them; or just publish their APIs and leave the open source community to develop the client apps. Naive I know, and yes I should just be grateful that Amazon are even offering a client for Linux. But then again the existence of the Amazon packaged client is going to be a powerful disincentive for any developer to produce an open source client. Maybe that wouldn't be possible anyway.
I guess I can manage without the client app, but I'll have to make sure that none of my friends and family move to 64-bit. That would have been the case anyway, as they all use Skype. So what am I actually complaining about? God knows. Oh yes, proprietary software; always worthy of a rant.
See Blog 2008 for my older postings.
This site was designed by Bootpolish.net
© Bootpolish.net, All rights reserved