Mandriva is like the Woolworth’s of the Linux world, everyone has heard of it, everyone has visited it , a small amount of people use it, but now it’s probably past saving EVERYONE is lamenting it’s demise. ”So why are you blogging about it Pete?” I’ll tell you why, I saw a story from Slashdot on G+ that was just such utter bollocks I felt the need to vent my spleen.

Released in 1998 and based on Red Hat 5.1 (RH being non proprietary at the time) Mandrake (Mandriva) was probably ahead of it’s time in respect of trying to get people to pay for Linux by running the Mandrake Club. Basically the club, which was closed in 2009, was a paid membership, yearly fee, in bronze, silver or gold, and optional corp status. It gave you access to releases before the public. Members also got access to the Powerpack edition for free, ( 2 releases per year). Powerpack have proprietary drivers, a (legal) DVD player and the offical Adobe reader. It also gave access to dedicated update and download mirrors, meaning better performance, It also provided a closed forum and support, help desk etc. Thereby being amongst the first to offer in effect support contracts for their products.

Like most people Mandriva was always my first choice when offering a Linux distro to a new user until Ubuntu became more stable around 2006 having first hit the streets in 2004 this, from a user stand point, Ubuntu may have been one of the first nails in the Mandriva coffin. Other distributions such as Red Hat focused on the Server and enterprise customer offering business support contracts from around 2003 onwards and also have one of the largest, extensive and professionally recognised training programs within the Linux community today. Canonical, which owns Ubuntu (Or as they like to term it “Canonical is the parent company of Ubuntu.”) has only recently within the last few years started to make some headway in the Server and support market. Mandriva never sought that business model, their aim was to support their desktop user base, this was innovative in that currently pretty much all the distributions leave desktop support to the community via forums and wiki’s.

Even a cursory search will reveal some of the main reasons for Mandriva’s problems have been managerial and poor promotional ability, contrary to the post on slashdot which seems to believe the only way for a successful Linux Distribution business model is to follow Red Hat’s path, Mandriva still has the right idea as nobody is offering an affordable desktop support package. True Mandriva tried it and failed but was that their fault? Or was it just that the community, at that time, was not ready to start paying for something that they had downloaded for free? Times are changing and so is the FOSS user base, maybe there’s still hope for them. My spies tell me there are whispers of a possible Russian deal that maybe brokered at FOSDEM, I certainly hope so.

We have a new system in the city centre car park, oh it’s a lot simpler than that silly idea of ‘pay and display’ none of this put your money in get your ticket shove it on the dashboard, oh no, now you must enter your vehicle registration first on a tiny keyboard while a queue waits behind you then lift the little plastic guard and feed your cash in making sure you have the correct money as, sorry it doesn’t give change.

So last week I called into town to meet my daughter I’m a good boy and always get a ticket, now most people would throw it away once they have left the car park and I usually do however (Fortunately) when I ran out to the car in the pitch dark last night in the door pocket was two tickets and even more pleasing there was one for the 28th Nov. Straight away I could see what had happened I had typed the last three digits in the wrong way round!

Now if a human looked at this stuff they would have gone “Doh! I see what that moron did” and before some smart arse says “But hey that wasn’t your registration was it? ParkingEye check with DVLA and get ALL your cars details before sending the fixed penalty so if the camera says it’s a Citroen and the ticket says it’s a Fiesta then there is something wrong in’t there?

“Why are you moaning?” I’ll tell you why, because it’s a PITA and will be a PITA to sort out. I emailed them last night with a scanned copy of my evidence, their phone system is like Ebay designed to stop you speaking to anyone. I’ve learnt with these automated systems to pretend you don’t have a touch phone, after waiting about three (Which is a long time I hasten to add!) minutes it finally said “I will put you through to an operative.” finally a young woman came on the line who clearly spends her days fending off irate parkers.

PITA_1 After five minutes of explaining what had happened she said “I will have to speak with your wife.” but I was the driver? “We will need your wife’s permisson to speak with you.” so I’m wasting my time then? “we will need to speak with your wife however if you emailed in you should hear within a couple of weeks.”

PITA_2 So I have to wait a couple of weeks to find out if they accept my evidence which I suspect if they don’t means they will try and claim £110 instead of £50?

PITA_3 My wife works nights ParkingEye are only open 9am-5.15pm Mon-Fri so that mean the wife has to go without sleep to speak to them.

PITA_4 The wife will have to ring them from home and give her permission for them to talk to me then ring me at work and tell me she’s done it then I will have to ring them.

And people wonder why everyone has a short fuse these days.

I’m a big fan of The Young One’s so pinching a line from the episode “Video Nasty‘ “Yes we have a Video Podcast”
It’s called The Dick Turpin Road Show although I prefer tdtrs for two reasons, firstly it’s a hell of a lot shorter title and secondly I’m always slightly embarrassed that it appears the show is named after me given it’s my IRC nick dick_turpin.

So how did this all come about? Matthew Copperwaite and I are big fans of IRC true some people think it’s an archaic form of communication but we don’t care what other people think. Matt and I met in the Linux Outlaws IRC channel around 2007 and hit it off straight away. I’d been thinking for a long time about doing a podcast but could never decide on who to do one with or even what format it should take, having grown up Linux wise, with LugRadio I knew I wanted to do a rip off of their concept which might make some people say “You bloody copycat!” but then we are only following in the great tradition of Open Source and doing our own fork of a project.

Matt and I are also big fans of Dan Lynch’s Rathole Radio a podcast of mainly free music, having attended RR Live 2010 we decided to make the trek to Liverpool for RR Live 2011 but with the slight twist of recording our journey to and from Liverpool, this was conceived to be a kind of ‘one off’ recording as it was painfully obvious we would be talking complete and utter bollocks. Neither of us had any decent recording equipment Matt had his mobile phone and I had my trusted Nokia N810 but hey we was young (OK Matt was young) and unaware of what we was doing.

I’m not going to go over the recording of our journey to Liverpool suffice to say the sound quality is terrible and we demand that people produce a fitness letter from their doctor prior to listening in fact the audio is so bad I refuse to release EP2 (The journey from Liverpool). Amazingly the recording appealed to a large portion of people most of whom clearly must have some form of mental disorder and so Matt and I discussed creating a podcast, we knew roughly what we wanted to do and already had the show name which is a mixture of my IRC nick and a road near Heathrow (London Airport) Matt sometimes travels along called Dick Turpin Highway the only stuff we didn’t have was proper recording equipment and hosting facilities.

Get your own site: The most obvious first step is to get your domain name .co.uk is pretty cheap and some registers do deals for as little as 00.99 pence even if you do little more than keep the domain parked you can still utilise it. At the time of writing this we are still using tumblr.com in conjunction with our domain name we followed a few friends in setting up a tumblr site as it is supposedly ideal for podcasting however personally I disagree the RSS feed is flakey and does not integrate with FeedBurner (If you use that Google service) you are pretty restricted to the templates but more importantly you’ll need to find somewhere to host your audio files anyway so you might as well set up your own site. Having said that we have managed to work with/around the tumblr site so I suppose I shouldn’t be too unkind, just as a side note we set up a Google apps account to use our domain name for the shows feedback emails: show@tdtrs.co.uk

Here have that: Sending one another stuff is a big time saver, when I say send what I really mean is giving each other access to stuff, we currently use DropBox in fact it’s my account and I just shared a folder with Matt or a guest Co-Host. From a moral standpoint I suppose we should use something like Sparkleshare but I like Dropbox, maybe later on we might change? Matt can drop his audio in our dropbox folder and any files or images we want to use during or after the show. We did try using Evernote and Google Docs for our show notes but Matt hated Evernote and I disliked the aliveness of Google docs so now we use a simple text document, it’s loosely set out with the sections of our show and over the course of the week we put ideas and comments in plus references to any feedback we might have. I know some shows use a wiki maybe we’ll see if Zim is any use but I suspect we would go back to a bog standard text file.

Get a microphone: You can record with anything, honestly you can. Matt was using his Netbook’s built-in mic and I was using a USB headset when we first started, OK the sound quality was not the best, as some people said Matt sounded like he was talking from inside and empty can of soup but if you have some skills with an audio editing program such as Audacity you can clean up the quality fairly well the point is it’s your shows content people are interested in not the sound quality although this will be something you will want to address as you gain more listeners you kind of feel obligated to reduce the destruction of people’s inner ear as you produce more shows. Matt and I have been extremely fortunate in that a mystery listener purchased the microphone equipment we needed from our Amazon Wishlist and we are forever grateful.

Ring me up: You don’t have to be living in the same street, town or even country this is the age of the Interwebs so you can use loads of web/broadband methods, we currently use Skype it’s basically a VOIP (Voice over IP) service that pretty much everyone knows although we will be changing to an Asterisk service fairly soon more because it’s Open Source than any quality issues. The one important piece of advice do not use Skype/A-another service over WIFI you’ll lose data packets, the sound will lag and it’s just horrible. This awfulness is compounded if you record the phone conversation using something like Skype recorder.

It’s in the can: When recording your podcast you have two methods you can just record the phone conversation making sure you both record just in case someone’s machine fails to take a copy this is how we started using skyperecorder  however as you get better, and as I said earlier, feel the need to improve your audio quality you will want to record your own voice stream locally. So Matt and I both have Audacity installed and record our own voice while still making our Skype call, so for me I still use the headset to call and talk to Matt via Skype but also use my Samson CO1U microphone to record my voice in Audacity, once the episode is recorded Matt drops his Audacity recording into the Dropbox folder and after it has synced I remove it to a local folder this has the benefit of letting Matt know I’ve got it.

Pass the gaffer tape: Editing the show used to be painfully slow it would seriously take me three or four days to complete mainly because of my lack of knowledge of Audacity and the poor audio quality. Most of the time was taken up with applying various filters to try to make voices audible at the very least, one big issue was not a problem and that was voice syncing however if Matt dropped out in the early days the only option was to cut that bad section and try to patch it back together. These days I have two tracks to work with Matt (left) and me (Right) this makes life so much easier you can clean up the sound tracks individually removing coughs and splutter’s and the odd wind breakage. Voice syncing can be a bit more testing, remember the audio is produced on two different machines so you may get some CPU slippage but after a while you can pick that up and time shift accordingly. At the start of our recording Matt places his headphones over his Mic and I emit a loud whistle this gives the sync point for the two audio’s I then listen through cleaning and editing and adding music or sound bites. tdtrs is produced in mono as most people seem to prefer that on portable players such as iPods etc.

And they’re off: Once you’ve produced your master piece obviously you need to upload it unless your hard drive has been hacked that is? Get it registered on as many locations as possible, at the minute we are on iTunes and Miro but I do want to see it on more sites. Every episode release I basically spam as many social media sites as possible as the more listeners the better and you mainly get those by word of mouth.

Why bother?: That’s a good question initially we did it as a giggle Matt and I are not experts we don’t want to teach anything to anyone we just like having a laugh. We try to keep to 90 minutes but it’s really difficult especially now people send us some good stuff, the main idea is to not take the show seriously it’s something to listen to while doing something else, neither of us envisaged allotting a regular recording and release date in fact some of our early shows was all over the place release wise but you kind of get bitten by the bug. I suspect Matt would agree with me we mainly do the show for ourselves and some close Internet friends who seem to have the same warped  sense of humour we do fortunately a wider audience has taken an interest in the show which is really nice, it’s unlikely we will become either rich or famous through the show but as Matt said the other day “I’d still do the show even if it was only us two.” so we will definitely be around for a good while yet.

The help files on 123-Reg I suspect are about 5 years out of date so while Google Apps says “Paste this code in a text file against your DNS entry” we mere mortals just sit looking at our screens with a slight tear streaking down our face. Having spent an hour searching the web I managed to work it out from a hint on a forum that mentioned the @ sign and a site that talked about the verification process with some obscure domain name registration company.

While at the Wolves Lug meeting I relayed my tale of whoa to the guys and how I resolved the task Dave Morely said “I take it you’ve documented the process?” Erm Ooh.

So folks here’s a fast and furious guide;

First step is get the verification code from the set-up within Google apps (Do not close the window/browser as you’ll need to come back to G Apps) from another browser tab or new window access your 123-Reg control panel. Go to ‘Manage DNS’ scroll down to the ‘A, CNAME and TXT records’ section, now you will see two boxes with a drop down menu in the middle. Change the drop down to TXT.

In the left box type the @ sign, in the right box paste the code from Google Apps verification it should look similar to this.

 
 
 
Now scroll down some more and click the button “Update DNS”, you should now see the entry added to the list. Go back to the Google apps tab and click “verify” hey presto you’re done.

Last night as usual she came into the living room armed with her eeepc ready for an evening of netbooking on the sofa as she lifted the screen Monique let out a wail of despair. “My screens broken!” sure enough a lovely star shaped shatter on the screen of her beloved netbook. Fortunately I have years of experience with laptops, star shaped cracks or shatters indicate some idiot has shut the lid forcefully with something on the keyboard usually a pen or a stray peanut from a bag of Bombay mix.

Luckily for her we had Hannah’s 901 with a good screen, this is dead easy to swap, a child could do it. First peel off all the rubber grommets over the screws, get a thin blade and pop out the two screw hole dust covers. Undo all the screws then crack open the screen casing. The screen will not be screwed down at both top corners as you have already removed those screws when you undid the casing. You’ll need to be pretty firm (But not too much) and pull the casing apart near the lid hinges you may need to bend it back a bit so you can get the screwdriver in, undo the bottom corner screws left and right (Or right and left if you prefer) lift out the screen. It will be attached by a long cable, remove the tape over the connector, now with your thumb nail prise apart the connector. I would not advise pulling on the cable, although that probably will work just as good as your nail, if you pull the cables out of the connector you’re stuffed you just need to unplug the screen basically.

Fitting the new screen is simply all the steps above but in reverse (You may need tweesers to put the two screen screws back in the bottom unless you have really tiny fingers.), took me about 12 minutes although I was dead lucky in having a donor unit, some jewellers screw drivers a pair of tweesers  and a fair few years experience of swapping screens out.

I’ve always liked Andy’s posts originally they was very hard hitting although he seems to have mellowed a bit lately maybe the reason for that was the Baskerville incident? Who knows? Dave seems to me to be the classic mediator very calm and great fun to follow, Luke is a lunatic! I think I rememberer asking Andy when Luke first came on the scene “Is he on drugs?” so given these three reprobates track record I expected nothing less than a re-run of The Young Ones.

Getting the podcast is no mean feat, if you type tinap (tinap = this is not a podcast) in Google you’ll get http://notapodcast.podbean.com/ which is totally wrong what you need is http://notapodcast.tumblr.com/ Now the guys as far as I know have no intention of doing this seriously although I ‘m sure Mussolini said he wasn’t all that fussed about Abyssinia? So I honestly wasn’t expecting anything of lets say BBC radio 4 quality and I was not disappointed, the sound presentation takes a little bit of getting used to. I saw @fabsh’s post about it and wondered what he meant, I soon found out for myself.

The guys are using Skype, which I personally have no problem with, they are also (at the moment) record in stereo which silly as it sounds is the root of the problem you get Andy in your right ear and Dave in your left ear, given the silence/pauses this is a little disconcerting at first especially when Luke suddenly drops in on your right ear “Where the hell did he come from?”. The quality of the sound is pretty much what you would expect from a Skype recording like most idiots my initial thought was “This is rubbish its like being on a conference call” but then I realised that was the point as Dave had said “It’s three blokes down the pub” and they just don’t have the kit for the minute to clean the sound up more importantly I have always said “It’s what a person says rather than how they say it that’s important” so with that in mind lets take a look at what the lads have to offer. The first outing was Operation Sandbags At Dawn which I thought was a brilliant title the presenters set out their stall and gave us a run down on what we had in store I really like the running order list on the website I found myself following it and doing a sort of virtual check mark as went along, this is no mean feat to be honest not only in creating it but actually sticking to it.

Episode #1 was just over an hour long which is long enough in my book having said that most podcasts start out an hour long and end up like Encyclopaedia Britannica. The topics covered as you’d expect included Linux and Open Source stuff but here’s the twist they also talked about Identi.ca to be precise peoples dents (dents are what Twitter calls tweets) Oh all right they talked about @fabsh and his now world famous #fabalanches this is a master stroke in the world of podcasting there are a few podcasts about podcasts but nobody has done one based around microblogging before.  This is very galling to me personally as its obvious the guys have been living in my brain the last six months and stolen part of an Idea I have been working on I have to say for me the funniest part was when the fire alarm went off it was one of those moments you just couldn’t make up.

Not content with making small children cry and kittens to sew themselves into sacks and shuffle into the canal the lads sought more lambs for the slaughter and produced The Awkward Second Episode As they indicated this is like that crucial second album where you either hit the big time or bomb like whale pooh. Given that they talked about Arch Linux this scored them lots of brownie points in my book, I have to say the sound sort of improved for me now that might be that I switched from VLC to Amarok but I’m no sound expert I just listen.

I’m not going to give a blow by blow of what was said and by whom as I’d be here all day what I will say is it is well worth a listen and like all first timers they are getting better not that they stank in the first place. I’ve seen lots of people offering help and advice via identi.ca so the show will only get better.

At the time of writing there was no MP3 format just .ogg this makes the freedom lovers very happy and the “I don’t care about freedom I just wanna listen on my ipod” people like me slightly miffed. Its an interesting point actually should the producers make sure its available in every format or is it the consumer who should convert it?

You can add the feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/tinap to your feeds list or use something like Gpodder

With the release of  openSUSE 11.4 and especially the availability of Tumbleweed I really wanted to give it a spin, I downloaded the iso at home and installed it on a VM which went very well so my next move was to do a proper physical install. I have two Maxtor 160GB IDE hard drives in work and plenty of machines lying around so took the install DVD to the office.

Having selected a P4 3Ghz, 1GB Memory machine I connected one of the 160GB hard drives and started the install procedure every thing goes fine until the installer gets to the partitioning section, cheating a bit because I now know this is where the problem starts, for some reason it wants to set up the drive in a RAID format

(Apologies for the poor quality photo.)

The moment I see this I just know it’s going to fail, but lets move forward anyway. Next up is the usual install stuff and an overview of the package selection and how the hard drive will be partitioned and formatted we say OK, we get the “Warming up” message the progress bar moves a few millimetres and;

(Again sorry for the image quality.)

The install fails, I made numerous posts on identi.ca about the failures along the way and tried the 2nd 160GB hard drive I had but what is even weirder is if I use an 80GB or smaller hard drive the partitioner formats it correctly;

/dev/sda
/dev/sda1 /boot
/dev/sda2 /
/dev/sda3 /home
/dev/sda4 /swap

Both 160 GB drives had been reformatted with Pmagic I even recreated the partition tables on them all to no avail I also tried a manual configuration of a partition scheme with the openSUSE installer but it still bombed out. There is nothing wrong with the drives as I can install FreeNAS and Fedora on them so I’m totally stumped.

I suppose I should really raise a bug but I was only ‘having a look’ to be honest, I was impressed how fast it installed (On a smaller drive and the VM) and the UI as always is crisp and clean. If I had a spare box at home I would start using it again but alas it must remain a VM only for the time being.

Oh one last moan, I don’t like the concertina wallpaper, makes it look like there is something wrong with your screen.

1. Ubuntu will announce their very own Kernel thus establishing it as an Operating System in its own right.
2. 3D desktop something along the lines of what Project Looking glass’s originals goals was given all the hype and excitement about 3D at the minute.
3. The sale of twitter.
4. The sale of Facebook.
5. MS will release or at the very least announce the proposed release Microsoft Linux (Possibly SLED).

I can only think of these five for the minute if I think of any more I’ll cheat and add them.