Tag Archives: Dustin Kirkland

Linux

Dustin Kirkland: I Want a PC, that Fits in My Pocket, and Happens to Make Phone Calls Too

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A Slashdot article today poses the question:

“It’s interesting to watch the Ubuntu phone development process, even as those who are satisfied with Android phone or iPhones, ask, ‘Why?’ We could ask the same about the Firefox OS Phone, too. Maybe the most realistic answer in both cases is, ‘Because we could.'”

I’d like to take a crack at answering that question…

  1. Android, iOS, and Blackberry started with a phone, and have spent years adding general computing capabilities
  2. Ubuntu started with a general purpose operating system, and recently added the ability to make phone calls

And frankly, as we’re on the technical cusp of device convergence…

What I really want
is a general purpose PC,
that fits in my pocket,
and makes phone calls too!

I believe that the latter approach will actually succeed in that endeavor.

I want a super speedy user input interface when using the handheld device, but it must also quickly, seamlessly, and ideally, wirelessly, dock into a PC environment with the creature comforts of a huge LCD screen, comfortable keyboard, and mouse.

Is that too much to ask?  Perhaps not…

Cheers,
Dustin …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Dustin Kirkland: Byte My Encrypted Disk

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I had just finished an awesome lunch with my good friend Josh, at a restaurant his brother, Riley, manages in Dallas.  Enjoying the delicious smoked brisket sandwich, Riley walks up to us at the bar and asks if I drive a black Cadillac.  I knew that question couldn’t mean good news of any kind — just how bad would it be, as this has happened to me before.

Josh and I had driven from Austin to Dallas that morning, to attend the Big Texas Beer Festival, which was going on later that afternoon, and had dipped into this really upscale, beautiful barbecue restaurant, Smoke, at 11:45am.  It’s in a bit of a rough neighborhood that is in the process of being cleaned up.  But looks like they’re still in need of a bit more gentrification.
Josh and I each had an overnight bag packed, with a change of clothes.  I also had a small cooler with a growler of my own home brewed Scotch Ale.  Unfortunately, those three bags were in plain sight on the back seat and not in the trunk.  Within 30 minutes, between 11:45am and 12:15pm, in broad daylight, some lowlife reprobate delinquent hoodlum smashed the back window and swiped all three bags.  My Google Plus post, within 5 minutes of learning of the treachery, expressed my feelings at the time.

Besides the growler of home brew, I also lost a change of clothes (of course, my favorite t-shirt, jacket, and flip flops), and my Asus Transformer TF700T and mobile dock.

The latter is, unfortunately, an expensive toy, and the biggest loss here.  Unfortunately, all of this falls within my insurance’s deductible, so it looks like I’m just paying the Shit Happens tax 🙁

So the only silver lining of this whole experience that my Android tablet was, in fact, encrypted.  I used the stock device encryption option available in Android 4.0+, which, if I understand correctly, uses dm-crypt to encrypt the device.
I’m confident that I have a sufficiently long and complicated pass phrase that it won’t be guessed or brute forced easily.  20+ numbers, capital and lower case letters, and special characters.  That has helped me sleep a bit more easily at night, knowing that all I have lost is the physical machinery itself.
While I do know how Ubuntu’s Encrypted Home Directory works, inside and out, I will review Android’s encryption implementation, so that I can get completely …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Serge Hallyn: Qemu updates in raring

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The raring feature freeze took effect last week. What’s been happening with qemu in the meantime?

A lot! I’ll touch on the following main changes in this post: package reorg, spice support, hugepages, uefi, and rbd support.

* package reorg

Perhaps best to begin with a bit of Ubuntu qemu packaging history. In hardy (before my time) Ubuntu shipped with separate qemu and kvm packages. This reflected the separate upstream qemu and kvm source trees. In August of 2009, upstream was already talking about merging the two trees, and Dustin Kirkland started a new qemu-kvm Ubuntu package which provided both qemu and kvm.

In 2010, a new ‘qemu-linaro’ source package was created in universe, to provide qemu with more bleeding-edge arm support from linaro. Eventually the qemu-kvm package provided the i386 and amd64 qemu-system binaries, qemu-common, and qemu-utils. All other target architecture system binaries, plus all qemu-user binaries, plus qemu-kvm-spice, came from qemu-linaro. This is clearly non-ideal from many viewpoints, and especially QA testing and bug duplication. But any reorganization would have to make sure that upgrades work seamlessly for raring-raring, quantal-raring, and future LTS-to-LTS upgrades, for the many commonly used packages (qemu-kvm, qemu on various packages, and qemu-user).

In the traditional 6-month-plus-LTS Ubuntu cycle, raring was a good time (not too close to next LTS) to try to straighten that out. It was also a good time in that upstream qemu and kvm were now very close together, and especially in that the wonderfully helpful debian qemu team which was also starting to merge debian’s qemu and qemu-kvm sources into a new qemu source tree in debian experimental.

And so, it’s done! The qemu-linaro and qemu-kvm source packages have been merged into qemu. Most arm patches from linaro are in our package, but you can still run linaro’s qemu from ppa at https://launchpad.net/~linaro-maintainers/+archive/tools/. The Ubuntu and Debian teams are working together, which should mean more stable packages in both, and combined resources in addressing bugs. Thanks especially to Michael Tokarev for helping to review the Ubuntu delta, and to infinity for more than once helping to figure out packaging issues I couldn’t have figured out on my own.

* Spice support. Spice has finally made it into main! The qemu package in main therefore finally supports spice, without having to install a separate qemu-kvm-spice package. As a simple example, if you used to do:

kvm -vga vmware -vnc :1

then you can use spice by doing:

kvm -vga qxl -spice port=5900,disable-ticketing

then connect with spicec or spicy:

spicec -h hostname -p 5900

3. Transparent hugepages. The 1.4.0 qemu release includes support for transparent hugepages. This means that when hugepages are available, qemu instances migrate some memory pages from regular to huge pages. Hugepages offer performance improvements due to (1) requiring fewer TLB entries for the same amount of memory, (2) requiring fewer lookups per page, and (3) requiring fewer page faults for nearby memory references (since each memory page …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Dustin Kirkland: ssh-import-id now supports -r|–remove keys

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As a brief followup to my recent post about ssh-import-id now supporting Github in addition to Launchpad, I should also mention that I’ve also added a new feature for removing keys that were previously imported.

Here’s an example, importing kirkland’s public keys from Launchpad.

kirkland@x220:~$ ssh-import-id lp:kirkland
2013-02-15 14:53:46,092 INFO Authorized key ['4096', 'd3:dd:e4:72:25:18:f3:ea:93:10:1a:5b:9f:bc:ef:5e', 'kirkland@x220', '(RSA)']
2013-02-15 14:53:46,101 INFO Authorized key ['2048', '69:57:f9:b6:11:73:48:ae:11:10:b5:18:26:7c:15:9d', 'kirkland@mac', '(RSA)']
2013-02-15 14:53:46,102 INFO Authorized [2] SSH keys

And now let’s remove those keys… 

kirkland@x220:~$ ssh-import-id -r lp:kirkland
2013-02-15 14:53:49,528 INFO Removed labeled key ['4096', 'd3:dd:e4:72:25:18:f3:ea:93:10:1a:5b:9f:bc:ef:5e', 'kirkland@x220', '(RSA)']
2013-02-15 14:53:49,532 INFO Removed labeled key ['2048', '69:57:f9:b6:11:73:48:ae:11:10:b5:18:26:7c:15:9d', 'kirkland@mac', '(RSA)']
2013-02-15 14:53:49,532 INFO Removed [2] SSH keys

Neat!

So the way this works is that ssh-import-id now adds a comment to the end of each line it adds to your ~/.authorized_keys file, “tagging” the keys that it adds.  When removing keys, it simply looks for keys tagged accordingly.

Enjoy!

:-Dustin …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu