Librarian, violist, and dad discusses technology, music and life.

Here is a video of my mom’s group doing a singing valentine.

I have finally posted some flickr pics (they are all from some time ago) and I finally put up a video of from the day Julia and I stayed home from school because it was -15 ,it had been -19 earlier in the morning.

Flickr Pics are here:

Video is here:

SuperTux

This is the commercial that Julia, Ashley and I made for Julia’s first grade advertising project.  She made the poster that is at the beggining and end of the video.  She is also going to give a presentation tomorrow.  I asked Julia why she liked SuperTux, and she told me “It’s just like Super Mario Bros, but it is free.”  So, SuperTux is Fun and it’s free. What more needs to be said?

 

 YouTube: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Julia

Originally uploaded by ashkev

We all had a good time at the beach this July 4th. Julia in particular seems to be a real water child. She and I had a grand time playing in the surf and jumping over the waves.

Mom, Dad, Avery, Ashley and Julia

Originally uploaded by ashkev

Last night we all went to the pops concert at St. Patrick’s Park just down the road from my house. We all had a good time. We learned that if Avery can’t find us, he will go seek “official looking” people, who will make an announcement in front of several thousand people that “a little boy named Avery is looking for his mom.” Avery was fine… he was in fact playing with a firefly he had caught. He had been (like hundreds of other kids there) playing in the field next to the seating area, but when it started getting dark, he had trouble finding our seats.

See the rest of the photos here.

The first thing I did was download and burn Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Herron to a disk.  This was eventually done on a “gasp” Windows machine, since the gOS burning software was somehow not able to burn a readable .iso.  So…

1. I installed Ubuntu
2. I installed the Firefox Flash Plugin
3. Installed mplayer, mplayer plugin, xine and codecs (see Medibuntu)
4. Created a user “guest”
5. Downloaded sabayon and created a profile “guest” then configured account and assigned the profile to user “guest”  See this article for more.
6. Changed Default file formats in Open Office.
7. Edited Menus, removed some items from the Panel, added Desktop Launchers for Firefox, Open Office Word Processor, Open Office Spreadsheet and Xine Movie Player.
8. Once everything was set up the way I wanted in “guest”, I logged out of guest, and back in a different account.
9. Set up a printer. I went to System>Administration>Printing.  Clicked add printer.  It automatically found our HP 4050tn and I followed the instructions to add it.
10. Using this as a guide I did the following:

I bacame root

sudo su

Created backup and restore scripts for guest account

cd /root
touch backup restore
chmod 700 backup restore

Opened Backup in editor

cd /root
sudo gedit backup

Pasted the following into backup

#!/bin/bash

IMAGES=/root/images
USER=guest

mkdir -p $IMAGES
rm -f "$IMAGES/$USER.tar"
tar -cpPf "$IMAGES/$USER.tar" "/home/$USER"

edited restore:

cd /root
sudo gedit restore

Pasted the following into restore:

#!/bin/bash

IMAGES=/root/images
USER=guest

mkdir -p $IMAGES
rm -fR "/home/$USER"
tar -xpPf "$IMAGES/$USER.tar"

Setup the restore script to execute on system startup. This allows a system reboot to reset any changes made to guest’s desktop.

cd /etc/init.d
ln -s /root/restore restore
update-rc.d restore start 99 2 .

It is also a good idea to put in a cron job to do automatic updates. As root I did this:

crontab -e

Add this line:

* */4 * * * (PATH=/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin && apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y) > /dev/null 2>&1

I then ran the backup script

cd /root
sudo ./backup

11. I then went to System>Administration>Login Window.  On the security tab I checked Enable Timed Login, set the user to guest and set the time to 10 seconds.  This means that when the machine is turned on it will allow you ten seconds to login as someone other then guest, otherwise guest will be logged in automatically without entering a password.
12. I put it out for patrons to use.  So far one patron has been on for about an hour and she has had no problems.  She says it is working fine.  It will be very interesting to see how this works as we go forward.

The everex pc arrived today and the reviews of gos being a total piece of crap os are true.  I am sure that anyone with tech skills would put on a Distro like Ubuntu, and those without tech skills (like probably most of the customers who might buy it from walmart.com)  Would be throughly confused.  I will be installing ubuntu on it tomorrow.  In the mean time, I have found some good posts on how to “deep freeze” the desktop in Ubuntu.  I will let you know exactly what I do and, how it works.

The machine itself seems ok, but as many reviewers have said, the keyboard and speakers are very junky.

The friends group at the Howard Branch of the Cass District Library have generously donated a six station computer table for patron access computers. This means that we need to come up with six new computers… Since we have a very limited budget for computers, we want to make this as cost effective as possible, while still meeting the needs of our patrons. I just ordered an Everex Pc2 for $189.00. It comes with the gOS Rocket operating system (an ubuntu derivative) installed. I plan to replace gOS with Ubuntu or Groovix.

It will be interesting to see how patrons react to the new machine. At the main library many patrons prefer the Windows XP machines, but I wonder if part of this is the quirkiness of trying to watch flash video over LTSP. In this case, since it is a standalone machine, and is brand new, the performance should be equal to, or better than the windows machines.

Julia with Sculpture @ Cass District Library, originally uploaded by ashkev.

Avery with Sculpture @ Cass District Library, originally uploaded by ashkev.