Seriously, this was simple – and even better, it’s STABLE!

Instructions for this install are basically the same as those for my previous post using Ubuntu 9.04 and VM Svr 2.0.1 – except, now we need new patch files and the good folk at Ubuntu Geek have already written a great HOWTO Guide which steps through everything you need to do – so I’ll just summarise the changes in case you want to follow my guide with the changes

New Patch Files:

Get them

wget  http://www.ubuntugeek.com/images/vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.tgz

Unpack them

tar xvzf vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.tgz

Use them

sh vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh

Remove the old unpatched files

sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary

Run the VMWare installer

sudo vmware-config.pl

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If anything goes wrong and you need to start again:

Delete the vmware modules using the following command

rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/

rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.31-13-server/misc/vm*

Now kill all vmware processes manually

kill -9 $( ps -ef | awk ‘/vm/ { print $2 }’ )

Now run vmware-install.pl file

./vmware-install.pl

at the time of installation where you see the following message type no and press enter

Before running VMware Server for the first time, you need to configure it by
invoking the following command: “/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl”.

 Do you want this
 program to invoke the command for you now? [yes] no

Now you need to run the patch script file using the following command

sh vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh

After completing this you should run vmware-config.pl

sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

Good luck! (and thanks again Ubuntu Geek)

In a previous article, I covered off the installation of Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) onto an aging, but much loved and reliable ASUS 701 EEE Netbook. In this entry, I will detail a few of the additional bits of functionality I’ve added to the already awesome Netbook Remix (NBR) of this latest OS drop.

Topics Covered

• Pairing Bluetooth to a Nokia E71
• Installing EEE Control (EEE PC Tray)
• Installing UbuntuONE
• Installing Skype

As always, if there are things you think I should be including, or better ways of doing stuff, let me know in the comments

Pairing Bluetooth to a Nokia E71

Using an inexpensive bluetooth adapter allows you to get online without having to drag out cables etc when you’re on the bus, in the car – wherever.

The adapter detected fine – but then came the job of setting up the pairing with my Nokia E71:

On the EEE

• From the Home Screen, open the ‘Internet’ group, then open up ‘kbluetooth’
• You should see a bluetooth icon appear on your toolbar
• Right-click the bluetooth icon, and select ‘Settings’ > ‘Bluetooth Adapters’ from the dropdown menu.
• From the ‘Bluetooth Adapter’ dialogue box, set:
  • Adapter Name: ‘[WhateverYouWant]‘
  • Mode: ‘Discoverable’

NOTE: Your Netbook is now being all promiscuous and stuff to the world, long-term, this isn’t good.

• Click OK

On the Nokia E71

• Select ‘Menu’ > ‘Connectivity’ > ‘Bluetooth’ and set:
  • Bluetooth ‘On’
  • Visibility ‘Shown to all’ (the same promiscuous warnings apply)
  • My Phones Name ‘[WhateverYouWant]‘
  • Remote SIM ‘Off’ (not sure what it does, didn’t need it on)
• Now, scroll/tab to the right and you’ll see the ‘Paired Devices’ list.
  • Select ‘Options’ > ‘New Paired Device’

Your phone should now scan for any bluetooth devices in range (if your workplace is anything like mine you’ll see a heap of devices)

• ‘Select’ the device with the name you set in the EEE steps above.

• The phone will now prompt for a passcode – Enter a passcode (numeric) into your phone.

On the EEE

• You should now be prompted to enter a passcode on the EEE, enter the same numeric code

On the E71

• You will be asked to ‘Authorise device [the EEE] to make connections automatically’, select ‘Yes’
• Your connection should now appear in the phone

(Optional)

• Select ‘Options’ > ‘Assign short name’ and change the name of the device to something more friendly if you wish.

On the EEE

• Right-click the bluetooth icon, and select ‘Settings’ > ‘Bluetooth Device Manager’ from the dropdown menu.
• Your E71 should appear in the list, select the device and click ‘Set Trusted’

Congratulations, your devices are now paired… now to do something useful with the connection!

Installing EEE Control (EEE PC Tray)

EEE Control is a utility written to allow easy management of the ASUS EEE embedded devices such as en/disable the Webcam, SDCard, Wifi as well as setting power and performance schemes.

To set it up under Kubuntu NBR, simply open a terminal window and enter the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install eeepc-tray

You should see an icon appear on your taskbar which allows you to access the functionality supported by your model of EEE netbook.

Installing UbuntuONE

“Ubuntu One is your personal cloud. You can use it to back up, store, sync and share your data with other Ubuntu One users.”

…it’s just not in the Kubuntu NBR by default. To fix this, simply open a terminal window and enter the following:

sudo apt-get install ubuntuone-client-gnome

You will then find a UbuntuOne cloud icon in your ‘Internet’ applications group, and from there you are only a simple configuration away from your 2GB of free storage out in the interwebs somewhere.

Installing Skype

Skype is a VoIP client, if you haven’t heard of it in the last 5 years, you’ve probably been living under a rock – it works, the voice quality is acceptable and while the video capability can be variable, it’s got a huge number of subscribers so, give it a crack – you’ll probably find a number of your friends are already on there. My Current Skype Status is:

To get things running on your netbook, see below:

• Visit http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-beta-ubuntu-32 and download the .deb file
• Click the .deb to open in package installer
• Follow the (very) simple instructions

Remember, those of us with low resolution screens may need to invoke the <Alt> + <Mouse Click & Drag> trick to see the bottom of some dialogue boxes.

Hope this helps those of you out there wanting to squeeze a little more life out of your beloved Netbooks

So – Karmic is out, and for those who are looking to upgrade to the new goodness, there’s a few simple tricks to make the process pretty much painless.

If you’re already running (K)Ubuntu 9.04, simply open up a terminal window and type:

update-manager -d

For those installing from scratch (and to be honest – it’s what I tend to still do, hang up from the Windows days?) things are almost as simple.

Getting the Files

1. Grab a 2GB or larger USB stick
2. Hit the web for your ISO files
   • For the Firefox users, I’d recommend using a multi-threaded downloader with MD5 verification like ‘DownThemAll’
   • Ubuntu Netbook Remix
   • Kubuntu Netbook Remix

Once the files are downloading (and they’ll take awhile as everyone hits the servers initially (trying a torrent may help), head on to the next step…
Making your USB bootable

• Grab Unetbootin for your OS for a really easy way to create a bootable USB drive
• Insert your USB stick, double check where it’s loaded then create!

On your EEE 701

• Because of the native resolution of the original EEE, a number of dialogue boxes don’t fit so well on the screen. This is mostly only a hassle during the installation as, afterward, you should be able to hold down the <Alt> key while click-dragging the window you want to see the bottom of.
• If you have an external monitor available, connect it and change the screen settings to display a more reasonable resolution, larger than the crippling 800×400 of the native 701
• If you do not have an external monitor available, don’t panic – we can simply use the keystroke navigation as detailed below
  • Ubuntu Install (First Screen)
    • Press <Alt> + <F> (Forward)
  • Welcome Screen
    • Choose your language then <Alt> + <F>
  • TimeZone / Where are you
    • Select your location
    • <Alt> + <F>
  • Keyboard Layout
    • This should detect fine so…
    • <Alt> + <F>
  • Prepare Disk Space
    • To install to 4GB SSD (This will delete EVERYTHING ON THE DISK and install from a blank partition)
      • <Alt> + <E>
      • <Alt> + <F>
      • Partitions will calculate
    • For a Custom Install (to use SDHC card in a EEE for instance)
      • <Alt> + <S> (to Specify partitions)
      • <Alt> + <F>
      • Setup partitions as you wish
        • I chose to use /dev/sdc (the SDHC card) creating a Primary partition of [Full Size of Storage minus Amount of installed RAM (for swap) ]
        • Set mount point to ‘/’ and use the ext4 file system
        • Create a logical partition using the rest of available disk as swap (which should be size as the amount of RAM in your system)
        • <Alt> + <F>
      • Partitions will calculate
  • Who are you- Obvious really:
  • • Your Name <Tab>
    • Login/Username <Tab>
    • Password <Tab>
    • Password Verify <Tab>
    • Device Name<Tab>
    • Choose your Login type
      • “Require My password” <Alt> + <M> – Default
      • “Login Automatically” <Alt> + <L> or
      • “Require my password to login and Decrypt Home folder” <Alt> + <R>
    • <Alt> + <F>
  • Summary
    • Last chance to check all your selections
    • Alt + I (to Install)
  • And now the installation will start…

At the end of the installation process, you will be prompted to remove the install media (USB drive) and reboot the machine.

You’re done!

Honestly, this is brilliant – while the clip itself has been mashed up to cover everything from Hitlers replacement motorbike to his choice in gaming consoles, this subtitling by Laurel Papworth (original article) has a bunch of agencies across the ditch resorting to ad-hominems – a classic sign of “oh-bollocks-what-do-we-do-now”.

Disclosure: I have met and spent time with Laurel during a workshop a few years back and was well impressed then, as I have continued to be as I’ve followed her commentary on all things social media. For those interested, I’d recommend following her posts, and subscribing to her podcasts.

Oh very very cool… and if you are lucky enough to be able to source an Android 2.0 based phone (like the Motorola Droid) it’s also very very free.

Couple this with the just announced Google Music service and Google Voice and you have a take everywhere, contact, entertain and communicate solution – Not much else to add apart from, what will this do to the dedicated GPS device market?!

Second to the stage was a ‘Reluctant Futurist’ namely Wendy McGuinness from Sustainable Future, an “independent think tank specialising in research and policy analysis.”
Wendy spoke on “The Danger of Now” which, in summary, was about ensuring you take into account whereabouts you (or your project/strategy) fits in the grander scheme of things. Some takeouts from the talk were as follows:
There are three types of futures:

• Probable
• Possible
• Preferred

When testing a scenario or future one should:

• Define: Parameters, Trends, Drivers, Assumptions
• Explore: Uncertainties (and rank them)
• Build: Scenario Worlds / Write Stories / Test
• Use: Consider Implications / Review / Communicate

I found the talk to be somewhat disjointed, yet filled with amazingly wordy slides with paragraphs of text which may have reinforced a point if they had have been on screen long enough to read. It was always going to be tough to follow the first (very engaging) speaker – however, with some practice, feedback and basic presentation learning under the belt, this could have been a lot better received – so I hope I am not seen as being too harsh in my summary.

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For another summary of the talk, click here to see what Missing Link said.

As I alluded in my initial TEDx Redux, the inaugural Auckland event was awesome. In the next three posts I will briefly cover my perspectives on the presentations delivered at this, the first TEDx event in Auckland, New Zealand.

The first speaker was a fascinating guy called Michael Henderson [UPDATE: Looks like something 'weird' is happening with his domain,try here for his cached page in the interim] , a Corporate Anthropologist. As well as being unemployable (who want’s an Anthropologist anyway?), he is never bored – because people are so interesting to study. Some observations:

• Organisations are the modern tribes
• CEO – Interesting title
  • Chief – Head of the tribe
  • Executive – Head of Structure
  • Officer – Very Militaristic – Head of Strategy
• The difference between a cult and a culture is:
  • In a cult, the leader sees greatness in themselves
  • In a culture, the leader sees greatness in people
  • Silo mentality never occurs in a tribe
• Engagement Studies
  • Organisations:
    • Engagement = email sort
    • Worldwide ~20% of employees are engaged and 80% sit on the fence
  • Tribes
    • Engagement = contact sport
    • No tribes run engagement surveys, all members are engaged 100% as you are either learning, doing or teaching

“Why is no one teaching GenY to respect those who came before them as sources of learning?”

Executives go on a ‘retreat’ (never an advance?) then return to proclaim new company values to their employees.

• Employees don’t hear values, they hear violations;

“Integrity, really?? Aren’t you the CxO trying to set up XYZ to fail so you can get more headcount/budget?”

“Language is the bloodline of a tribe”

His parting observation was on the two dynamic forces of organisations: Relationship versus Results

“Measure yourself on Relationship versus Result – is the win [on this point] worth more than the long term relationship?”

The interesting observation I made about his talk was that, not only was I noting the same points as one of my colleagues, these same points were also being noted by a number of other ‘corporate types’ around where we were seated.

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For another summary of the talk, click here to see what Missing Link said.

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Update: A TED talk on this theme of Anthropology and Tribes was posted recently “David Logan on Tribal Leadership”

Update: Domain seems to be back – have adjusted links & text

TED. Three letters, a veritable treasure trove of new ideas, challenging thinking and incredible people with finely honed presentation skills.

I first stumbled across the TED initiative in 2006 when I was shown a presentation by Hans Rosling using Gapminder to do some incredible data visualisations. From that day onward, they have been a regular both in my RSS feed readers and in my browser as I immersed myself in the site from which I have gained so much.

It was with huge excitement then that I saw that TED was not only allowing independently organised events (under it’s banner of TEDx), but one of these events was going to be in Auckland, New Zealand – my home town.

I must admit I was initially reluctant to fill out the registration form, as chest puffery and self promotion doesn’t sit well with New Zealanders. Encouraged by some colleagues, and with the knowledge that the official event attendee spots are so coveted I did sit myself down and force my fingers to the keyboard to tap out an introspective view of what I have achieved to date, and why I should be amongst those fortunate enough to sit in attendance. The exercise in itself was worthwhile as it gave me an opportunity to cast back over many years in the technology industry, and to re-celebrate a number of the awesome innovations that I had been involved in over that time. The submit button was clicked, the “Thank you for registering” page loaded – and then all there was to do was wait.

In the fullness of time, I received an acceptance email and, excitedly, I checked in with my other colleagues to find they too had secured their place – timing-wise, the TEDx Auckland event was scheduled for the day before a weekend away at TelecomONE, a FOO style “Innovation Unconference”, so I knew that we would be in for one heck of a lot of brain stretching. We made our plans to meet up and attend together, and then again we waited for the beginning of the first ever TEDx Auckland, October 01, 2009.

What. an. event.

There is simply too much to type to do justice to what I got out of last nights event, so I’ll post this entry as it is, unfinished, but linking to some of the cool stuff which was discussed…

Keep up with the tweets surrounding the event here – and I’ll be summarising my notes over the weekend.

For now, check out this vid which was shown as a segway between speakers…

Awesome

As I gear up for this weekends unconference, I’ve been looking through my Delicious bookmarks, specifically on things around Education, which is one of the sessions I’d like to run, if nothing else – to get a different perspective from that discussed at this years BaaCamp where I was part of a similar session.

I came across this video, speaking to the one way approach many educators are taking to using the Internet as a resource. The presenter has written a supporting article (PDF) where he explains the different roles students can take to build engagement, and to collaborate with their global peers

Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom by Alan November from Brian Mull on Vimeo.

Food for thought – and a definite starter for our discussions at TelecomONE this weekend – how can we as an industry help support our educators and their students to become part of the global voice of learning?