Ubuntu 13.04 (Codename Raring Ringtail)

So a wee while ago I decided I wanted to get a decent *nix operating system running at home again, because (let’s face it) running Windows all the time is enough to drive anyone crazy.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ditching Windows all together. I still need to keep it around for some apps, wether I like it or not.

After a bit of googling and with no small part played by reviews from Nixie Pixel (she’s got some great stuff on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube!) I settled on Ubuntu. It is similar to Debian in its terminal commands and it has a pretty good reputation as a nice stable desktop OS. Raring Ringtail (the codename for the latest version 13.04) was hot off the press too, so after a quick download and burning the ISO to disk I made space on one of my drives and booted ready to install.

It wasn’t without hiccups. My computer is self-built and Linux compatibility wasn’t a consideration at the time I got all the parts. The first issue I ran into was installing GRUB to the wrong drive… after several revisions of harddrive config in the machine, I managed to lose track of where the current boot loader was living. That fixed though, I got the install completed and booted Ubuntu!

Or at least tried to. For some unknown reason it just booted to black screens. No small amount of time buried in Google came up with various similar reports and a myriad of proposed fixes. I came to the assumption that it was all due to the graphics cards I was running (dual Nvidia GT250s), but after playing with config options in GRUB I managed to get limited access, and while snooping around I found an entry in fstab for the floppy drive.

Now I have no idea if this was actually related or not but I removed the entry as I have no floppy drive in my machine, and things suddenly started to play ball. This got me a clean boot with one screen working. I have four screens on my machine so this was the obvious next battle.

I thought this one should be simpler, given the Nvidia config app, but several aborted attempts to configure them this way got me two screens at best!

I resorted to writing the config file (xorg.conf) manually. I’ve never really played with any GUI on Linux before so this was new ground for me. Another dive into Google got me a bunch of samples and after more reboots than I can count I managed to get all four screens to show, and actually in the right arrangement as they sat on the desk!

But (there’s always a but) there was no menu bar, no dock or control options to be seen. And that’s where I’m currently at. Experimenting with finer changes to the xorg.conf file, trying Gnome, more Google madness, etc. It’s quite frustrating to have four screens working but unusable, or one (or two) screens working perfectly.

I don’t know if it’s a display manger issue, a config issue, a driver issue, or the little gremlin in the computer having a laugh, but I’m still working on it and determined to figure it out. When I do, I’ll post more…

In the mean time, have any of you had a similar battle? Any hints/tips/pointers for a guy who’s usually ssh’d into 5 different servers but basically a newbie when it comes to using nix as a desktop OS?

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Bits

In the digital world, everything breaks down to binary. Binary is just “base 2”, or 0’s and 1’s.

When it comes to measuring data, a binary 0 or 1 is a “bit” (short for binary digit). So think of bits as the building blocks of what we’re talking about.

You probably see more about bits than you think. Speeds for data transfer (how fast your download is going, or how fast your connection plan is) are typically represented in bits. But just like we deal with grams and kilograms to represent varying scales of weight (where a kilogram is just an easy term for 1000 grams) we do the same for bits.

Now there’s two ways that this can be done. In dealing with weight, we do things in tens, hundreds, thousands etc. (decimal) and we can do that for bit’s too.

So the same way kilo is a prefix for kilogram to represent 1000 grams, we use the kilo prefix to bit’s to represent 1000 bits. There’s another prefix for each increasing power of 1000. In the above table you see mega, giga and tera; it keeps going too with the next few being peta, exa, zetta and yotta tops out as 1000⁸ or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits, or 1000 zettabits! Confused yet?

Well if you haven’t fallen asleep yet, let’s now look at the binary power version. This is the more pure version in my opinion but some people find the maths of 10’s easier.

These go higher too but you get the idea. The really confusing part is that the terms for the decimal versions used to be commonly used (and sometimes still are) when the decimal version is actually meant (even I usually mean 1024³ when I say Gigabit) so it’s often hard to know which is really intended. The units can also often be shortened too, so you’ll see Mb instead of Mbit (or Mibit), and the main thing to note is the lower case “b” which points to bit’s.

If you’re on a lovely 100/50 “UltraFast Broadband” fibre connection, the 100/50 really means you have a rated download speed of 100Mbit’s per second down, and 50Mbit’s per second up. A point that illustrates also that speed measurements represented by bits are also given against a unit of time (usually seconds). The speed you practically see on your connection varies significantly and certainly don’t expect to see every download or speedtest you see to show 100Mbit/s – as I said above there’s a bunch of info for another topic.

Bytes

A byte is a collection of 8 bit’s. Simple as that. The way those 8 bits are arranged defines what the byte represents. There are lots of different standards as to how that byte is interpreted but that’s another topic all together.

We do the grouping stuff here too, so we get Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte etc. We get the abbreviated units too, so KB, MB, GB (note the uppercase “B” here points to Byte’s instead of Bit’s). Technically the binary versions here get the abbreviations KiB, MiB, GiB etc., but again the terms get mixed up regardless of intention.

Bytes are usually not used to represent speed, but more commonly storage. So your harddrive in your computer will usually be measured in GB or more commonly now TB. For example I have several 2TB drives in my computer. If your internet connection has a data cap it too will usually be represented in byte’s instead of bits.

Some math

If you’re still with me, let’s do a little exercise to put what we’ve learnt to use.

Let’s work out if your downloads actually go at 20Mibit/s, how long will it take you to download a 4GiB file (for clarity, I’m going to use the binary version of both here).

First I’ll do some work on the speed to get it to a more useable number.

Times 20 by 60 to go from Mibit/s to Mibit/minute. 20 * 60 = 1200Mbit/minute.
Now, since there’s 8 bit’s in a byte and we measure our file in byte’s we can divide the Mibit’s/minute by 8 to get MiB/minute. 1200 / 8 = 150MiB/minute.

Now let’s get the file size from Gigabytes to Megabytes.
1 GiB = 1024 MiB so we times our 4GiB by 1024. 4 * 1024 = 4096MiB.

So, now we have a 4096MiB file, and we can download at 150MiB per minute.
4096 / 150 = 27.3 (minutes).

So all things going well (which they rarely do) you could download your file in a little under half an hour.

Another application of this sort of maths is working out how much data you will use while streaming video or music from the internet. I won’t put as much explanation around this one, but we’ll work out how much data I’ll use if I steam an hours’ worth of Netflix at high-definition which Netflix rate as about 5Mibit/s.

1 hour * 5Mibit/s = ???
60 minutes * 5Mibit/s = ???
60 minutes * (5 * 60)Mibit/minute = ???
60 minutes * 300Mibit/minute = ???
60 minutes * 300Mibit/minute = 18000Mibit’s
60 minutes * 300Mibit/minute = (18000 / 8)MiB’s
60 minutes * 300Mibit/minute = 2250MiB’s
60 minutes * 300Mibit/minute = (2250 / 1024)GiB’s
60 minutes * 300Mibit/minute = 2.2GiB’s

So for every hour you watched you’d use over 2 gigs of data. If your plan has a 100GB (or GiB depending on what they mean) quota that’s not too bad. If you have a 3GB quota… you’re going to run out of data pretty quick.

More reading? Wikipedia as usual has a tonne (another of those units of measurement) of information. You can start with their article on the Bit and go from there.

That’s enough for now. As usual, feel free to ask any questions below and I’ll try to help where I can. Any corrections are welcome also (Hey, I never claimed to be perfect!).

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But… there’s still a lot of stuff that the states are keeping to themselves. Sites like Netflix, Hulu Plus and HBO GO (among others) that offer movie or TV streaming services in the US and UK for example, are not available in NZ. Netflix is one that’s received a lot of attention lately – for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Netflix allows you to stream a large selection of movies on demand for a simple subscription fee, not a pay-per-movie. There’s streaming TV also, the options are vast.

Now, there’s been a lot of people posting details on ways to get around this geographic restriction, and even more speculating why it exits in the first place, but be it political, commercial or whatever other reason, get around it we shall. I decided it’s time to help piece together some of the bits around the net and hopefully give enough info for novice and advanced user alike.

I’m going to show you a few different scenarios to get yourself connected to all that content, but before we start there’s a few things to be aware of:

• Legality: The general consensus is that there’s no laws being broken here. Various Internet providers in NZ and further afield have even setup a service to do this for you. BUT I’m no lawyer. If it’s something you’re REALLY worried about, you should have a look around make your own mind up.
• The content is coming from the US. That’s a fair way away even in internet terms, which imposes some limitations. The main one you’ll notice with Netflix is that you might not get their full HD movies (See here for more info on connection requirements and remember it’s not your plan speed but your speed to their server in the states!). You can still stream those movies, they will just be delivered to you at standard definition which is still usually plenty for most people.
• Streaming movies uses your bandwidth. This is the same no matter where it comes from (as a general rule) but keep an eye on your data usage and take note of your internet plan!
• This works now, and has done so for quite some time. But as it’s not standard usage, providers like Netflix may make changes in the future that stop this from working. They haven’t made any noises about it, but it’s a possibility either directly or indirectly.
• Some will tell you this is what you do to replace Sky. If you’re a Sky subscriber (as I am) you need to have a look and see if just one or the other is the best option, or if you want to keep both for the things you want to watch. You might for example keep the basic Sky package for the channels it offers but biff your Sky Movies in favour of putting those funds towards Netflix. Basically, make your own mind up based on content and budget.

Lets start with probably the easiest scenario. Do you have an Apple TV? Yes? Excellent, you can get up and running pretty fast.

Netflix on Apple TV

Netflix on Apple TV

Difficulty: Low
Time required: 10 to 30 minutes for most users
Costs (at the moment anyway): $4.99/month (USD) for remote DNS, and $7.99/month (USD) for Netflix itself

This setup on the Apple TV will allow you to watch Netflix through it using what’s called a remote DNS, without messing with any of your other devices (e.g. Your desktop computer still won’t be able to access Netflix). This is good for someone who’s not that tech-savvy as there are sometimes unintended consequences of having all your devices use the remote DNS service.

What you should know before you start: Part of this setup requires you to basically tell your Apple TV that you live in the US. This works fine for our purpose but does have a side effect that you can’t use your NZ iTunes account from the Apple TV. Not a big issue for most, but if you watch movies purchased through Apple iTunes you need to decide if Netflix is a suitable replacement.

Still keen? Sweet! First head on over to Unblock us. It’s a service that helps you get access to the right information (it’s the remote DNS service I just mentioned). If you want to know more there’s info on the site, but in my opinion it’s one of the best ways to do it, so just do it. You can register for a free week trial, or $4.99/month (USD). They have instructions for lots of devices, but the version of it for Apple TV is here.

Note that you have to change both DNS and location settings to make it act like it’s in the US. Once that’s setup, you should see and be able to use the Netflix application on your Apple TV to connect.

Assuming you don’t have a Netflix account already (from time overseas or by registering an account at someone else’s place that has this going already), the Apple TV Netflix account should let you set one up. Just follow your nose, it should be self explanatory (I did mine over a computer but I’ll review the app method more if people are getting stuck). If you have to enter a postcode for your *cough* US Address *cough*, just use the good old 90210.

For those who aren’t just satisfied with getting it up and running but want to find out what else might be possible, Apple have a little marketing blurb that gives you an idea of what else might be out there which you can read here!

That’s it for now. Next on the list… well we’ll see. If there’s a particular device you’d like to get up and running or if you’re still having trouble, leave a comment down below and I’ll see what I can do to help.

Ciao!

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