#!/usr/bin/env bash
limit_ms=150
sleep_duration=1
while [ true ]; do
pong_res=$(ping -c 1 10.0.0.30 | sed -n 's/.*time=\([0-9]*\).*/\1/p')
echo "$(date +%s): pong response is $pong_res"
if [ "$pong_res" -gt "$limit_ms" ]; then
/usr/bin/notify-send -u critical -t 30000 "Ping Alert" "Above Threshhold: $pong_res";
fi
sleep "$sleep_duration"
done

• Find us today at 9:00CDT (02:00 GMT)
• #ubuntu-us-wi on Freenode or the web client

Ubuntu Friendly is the new hardware validation and database client.  The application tests your system hardware, and sends a hardware report
back to a database that you can see at http://friendly.ubuntu.com.

If you have ever wished for a compatibility list when shopping for hardware, here’s how the Ubuntu community is building that list.

Requirements: (See the video at http://friendly.ubuntu.com/participate/ )

• Ubuntu 11.10 on a laptop (installed to HDD, not in VM)
• The ‘checkbox-cli’ or ‘checkbox-gtk’ package
• Headphones and Mic (optional)
• USB stick, USB HDD, Firewire HDD (optional) – CD-R, Audio CD (optional)

Tonight we’ll run through the tests (20 minutes or so). The goal is to help build that compatibility list AND file bugs to improve the beta. This is an easy activity to fit into your evening plan. It’s fast, easy, and you can do it while watching TV.

I am looking forward to working with Rick on future presentations in the area, whether I’m able to attend or not.  If anyone else in the LoCo is interested in presenting or has any questions, please let us know on the mailing list.

Here are a few pictures of the venue, and Rick’s setup.

Rick Schwai from our own Ubuntu Wisconsin Local Community had an interview with WXPR regarding his upcoming presentation, “Introduction To Ubuntu.”  Above is the sound clip from WXPR, where Rick got a little more than a minute of airtime giving a brief introduction to Ubuntu, giving listeners taste of what they can see on October 3rd.  If you’re in the area and find this interesting, we hope to see you there.  I’ll be there, with a nice stack of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS CDs to hand out to anyone who attends.

Stop on by:

When: Mon, 03 Oct. 2011 18:30 – 19:30 CDT

Where: Rhinelander District Library

Why: Introduction to Ubuntu

Let me know if you have any questions, and we hope to see you there!

IRC event in #ubuntu-brainstorm and #ubuntu-us-wi conducted by the Ubuntu Wisconsin LoCo Team.

Sept 3, 2011 1700-2000 UTC (that’s 1200-1500 CDT)

Lean how the various teams and upstream projects interact by triaging Brainstorm ideas.

Meet new people who want to improve Ubuntu, too!

No experience necessary, no coding skills necessary – all training provided. Mentoring provided.

Details

When: Sat, 03 Sept. 2011 17:00 – 20:00 UTC

IRC Channel: #ubuntu-brainstorm, #ubuntu-us-wi

Event Contact: Ian Weisser

Organizing Team(s): Ubuntu Wisconsin LoCo Team

Global Event: Ubuntu Global Jam

Yes, Virginia, there is a way to boot your physical Ubuntu (or whatever) partition as a VirtualBox machine from within Windows. With port forwarding, no less.

Background

Last week I took receipt of a Dell XPS 15z. Intel Core i7-2620M, NVIDIA GeForce GT525M with Optimus (for switching between integrated and dedicated graphics), 8GB of DDR3 memory. Which is fantastic. The chassis does resemble that of a Macbook Pro, and its keyboard is straight out of The Jetsons, but on the whole it’s a nice machine.

The issue is that Ubuntu 11.04 still doesn’t have solid support for the i7, let alone Optimus. Not to mention the Cypress Semiconductor trackpad, which I got working once after restarting to test an NVIDIA driver. As it stands, I’m now able to boot Ubuntu by using the acpi=off flag, if I’m willing to sacrifice three of my four cores, power management, dedicated graphics, and my trackpad. I have every confidence that eventually I’ll have everything working, but for now, I need a little more than this.

Enter VirtualBox. A friend (who shalt remain nameless) has started running his various unix-like instances as VMs under a Windows host, which he loves – full, tuned hardware support for the host, and everything that Ubuntu and OSX need to operate virtually. Still, the idea of creating a virtual machine and virtual disk drive for Ubuntu, while keeping my actual Ubuntu partition separate, was unpleasant (ignoring for a moment my intense dislike for Windows as a whole). And while a couple people have written up tutorials for booting a physical partition in a VM, they were all dated <=2008. And so, good reader, I give you this:

Solution

Note: This assumes that you’ve already got Ubuntu (or similar) dualbooted with Windows, with your bootloader sitting on the Ubuntu partition. If you have a separate /home and/or swap partition, fear not.

1. Boot Windows. Install VirtualBox.
2. Run VirtualBox as an administrator (right-click the shortcut, click “Run as administrator”).
3. Create a new VM (click the blue “New” button). Customize your heart out. Don’t worry about adding any media to it just yet.
4. Open up the command prompt, again as an administrator (click Start, type cmd, right-click the shortcut that appears, click “Run as administrator”).
5. Change directories to the VirtualBox program directory – probably just cd "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\".
6. Run VBoxManage internalcommands listpartitions -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive0, where 0 is in the index of the physical drive you have Ubuntu on. This will give you a list of partitions for that drive. In my case, my boot, /home and swap partitions were 4, 5 and 6, respectively.
7. Run VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "C:\Users\user\VirtualBox VMs\ubuntu.vmdk" -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive0 -partitions 4,5,6, where 4,5,6 are all of the partitions used by Ubuntu, and "C:\Users\user\VirtualBox VMs\ubuntu.vmdk" is the full path of the file you want to create to represent the Ubuntu partitions. Doesn’t really matter where you put it, as long as you know where it is.
8. Open up the settings for the VirtualBox VM you created earlier. In the Storage section, add the vmdk file you just created as a Hard Disk. Make sure that you also add an empty CD/DVD device – this will be used for the VirtualBox guest additions later.
9. Go back to your command prompt. For every port you need forwarded from Windows to the VM, run this: VBoxManage modifyvm tank --natpf1 "guestssh,tcp,,22,,22", where tank is the name of your VM (yeah, yeah), guestssh is the name of your forwarding rule (be logical, but this one’s up to you), and tcp,,22,,22 are respectively the protocol and host/guest ports (e.g. use tcp,,8080,,80 to forward TCP port 8080 on Windows to port 80 on your VM).
10. If all goes well, you’ll be able to start your shiny VM, load GRUB, and boot into Ubuntu. Don’t forget to install the guest additions (Devices -> Install Guest Additions…).

Main caveat: whenever you run something that accesses another partition, you must run it with administrator rights. I ended up creating a shortcut directly to my VM (Machine -> Create Shortcut on Desktop) and modifying it to always start this way (right-click, Properties, Compatibility, Privilege Level, Run this program as administrator).

Credit to Jexel over at Neowin for figuring the bulk of this out before I did.

In being an Intel fan, I ordered a nice quad-core Intel Core i5 Sandybridge from Newegg for a pretty decent price.  It can do nice graphics, if paired with the right motherboard, right? Right! As long as your OS supports it.

I received the parts, pieced the box together (more details to be posted later), and installed Ubuntu 10.10.  I did notice, however, that I didn’t have the nice visual effects, and was unable to enable them.  Everything just works on linux, right?  It turns out, I was wrong.

It turns out I didn’t do all of the research that I should have, and realized that Ubuntu 10.10 didn’t ship with 2.6.37 kernel, Mesa 7.10, and the xf86-video-intel 2.14 DDX driver that is apparently required to run nice Sandybridge graphics.  Phoronix has a few nice posts and a quick Google search can turn up information you may need.

To make a long story short, I saw in the release notes for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty 2:

X.org Server 1.10

Alpha 2 includes a new X stack, comprised of XServer 1.10 and mesa 7.10, along with updates to all the major drivers. New features include support for Sandy Bridge graphics, improved 3D support for newer radeon hardware, support for more OpenGL extensions, improved multi-head functionality, and of course many bug fixes.

Excellent.  To upgrade to 11.04 (currently in beta, see the release schedule) I simply performed (in a terminal):

$ sudo update-manger -d

and followed along.  Note: 11.04 Natty still isn’t finished, so expect issues.  I run it on a few different machines to report bugs and test my hardware, and I don’t mind doing it with this hardware.

I have only had approximately an hour to play around with it, and I haven’t tried to play any high-definition 720p/1080p videos yet, but Unity appeared to be screaming fast, and it just appeared better overall.  I’ll give an update as I dig deeper into what it can do, and probably some benchmarks that I will run.