The Siemens IoT2000 series has been a very interesting development from Siemens and it’s really encouraging to see the use of Open Source in the Automation sector definitely on the increase. And that can only be a good thing for developer productivity. Seeing a different IDE for each manufacturer of a PLC invokes some nasty memories of last century web-application development…

Download existing image

The image can be downloaded from the Siemens support site (if you don’t have an account with Siemens you might have to sign up for a login first. https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/document/109741799/simatic-iot2000-sd-card-example-image

Installing VirtualBox is getting increasingly painful on Ubuntu due to the problems with UEFI Secure Boot and the VirtualBox kernel modules. Another reason for an alternative is that running VirtualBox VM’s completely in the background is not as straightforward as it could be.

From the available alternatives I looked into (VMWare, Xen & KVM) it was KVM that fitted my needs (casual VM usage with mostly headless VM’s for testing purposes). Main reasons:

I recently purchased a GrovePi Zero and expected this to be a reasonable straight forward way to connect Grove sensors to your Raspberry Pi, read sensor values via Python and pushing them upstream via MQTT. However the software side of things turns out anything but straight forward. Most of the suggestions on the Dexter Industries forum suggest to download some custom OS image – WTF? Hopefully this will save some people time to chase down the same rabbit holes…..

If you are using the GUI (Raspian full download) and want to connect your RPi Zero to a keyboard and monitor there are probably easier ways to do this. These notes are for people that want to use a headless (no monitor and GUI) setup ready to connect to your RPi after first boot via SSH from another terminal.

Since Synology (despite requests) still has not added DNS Made Easy as a listed provider (despite listing some really obscure services – go figure!) here is the steps to add a custom provider.

DNS Made Easy Setup

Create a new A-Record

1. Set the name
2. Set the IP (initial – any valid IP)
3. Tick the “Dynamic DNS” tickbox
4. Enter your chosen Dynamic DNS Password
5. Save the new record

When saving the record you will see a “Dynamic DNS ID” – note down this number. This will become the hostname on the Synology setup.

Upgrade or install SANE backends

Since the version of SANE in the Ubuntu 16.04LTS repos is not working for this scanner you either need to install from sources (see this blog) or from this PPA.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rolfbensch/sane-git<br></br>sudo apt update<br></br>sudo apt install sane-backends tesseract-ocr gscan2pdf

Security

Add yourself to the ‘scanner’ group to be able to use the scanner.

sudo usermod -a -G scanner USERNAME

Checking SANE

Check for the libsane version (needs to be at least libsane.so.1.0.26 not libsane.so.1.0.25 which is in the Ubuntu repos)

Unfortunately it is still much harder than necessary to find notebook hardware to use with Ubuntu (or other Linux variants). This blog is full of past experiences (some of them quite time-consuming) on finding notebook hardware that will work without too much fiddling. This short note is to document my recent research on that front to help others who want to do the same (as there doesn’t seem to be a lot of good current info around).

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/leogaggl/16898140083 “ubuntu phone by Leo Gaggl, on Flickr”)

Add SDK repository

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-sdk-team/ppa<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install ubuntu-device-flash

Enable USB Debugging on the device

1. Make sure you have developer mode enabled (see http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html if you are unsure).
2. Navigate to Settings > Developer options
3. Enable USB Debugging. When a device is connected, you will be prompted in Android to authorize it.

Unlock Bootloader

adb reboot bootloader<br></br>fastboot oem unlock<br></br>fastboot reboot

This is a follow-up on an older blog using Ubuntu.

[](https://farm6.static.flickr.com/5290/5328014910_0b3bdd6718.jpg “r by rosmary, on Flickr” https://www.flickr.com/photos/rvoegtli/5328014910/ http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/2.0/80x15.png “Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License” http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License )](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) by

Raspberry Pi Prerequisites

Since this will be a purely headless install designed to sit in a corner behind the scanner I am using a Base Raspian (Debian Wheezy) install (I personally like the clean minimal install via https://github.com/debian-pi/raspbian-ua-netinst the best).

Since I have found some issues with my previous LXQT setup in real-life work I decided to fall back to standard Lubuntu for my cloud desktop. As part of this I also switched to TightVNC which seems a lot easier to configure.

Add local user account

adduser USERNAME<br></br>adduser USERNAME sudo

Install Lubuntu Desktop

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends lubuntu-desktop tightvncserver

TightVNC Configuration

sudo vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

Since paper and myself have never gotten on well I have always been dreaming of a paperless office. A while ago I purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 scanner for the office. I did this after doing some research on which Automatic Document Feed (ADF) multipage & duplex scanners were both affordable as well as supported on Linux.

1. scan the document
2. perform OCR to convert to text
3. combine the text with PDF to create a searchable PDF
4. OPTIONAL – send the resulting document into Alfresco Document Management Server via FTP

Install dependencies

NOTE: PPA is only required for support of Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:rolfbensch/sane-git<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install sane sane-utils imagemagick tesseract-ocr pdftk libtiff-tools libsane-extras exactimage wput

Now that Twitter has totally killed their V1 API there is no official way to get Twitter feeds via RSS. Which is a real shame as RSS is a well accepted Open Standard for this type of information :-(

SHAME ON YOU TWITTER !

Since I always had trouble with the Eclipse version that is avaialable via the Ubuntu repositories I often need to install Elcipse on new machinery. Hence I am documenting the process for myself and hopefully it might help others as well.

Java dependencies install

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk icedtea-7-plugin

Since I have been really happy with the performance and mobility on the Toshiba Ultrabooks (see previous blog entries) I have now chosen to stay with a tried brand and uprgrade to the Z930 i7 model.

Unfortunately this now comes with added hurdles by our good friends at Microsoft in the form of UEFI and the pre-installed disaster that is Windows 8. Instead of totally wiping the system as I did with the Z830 model I decided to install next to Windows 8 as lots of people have reported problems with the UEFI bootloader and the BIOS if you start messing with the pre-installed partitions (specially the EFI partition).

Having seen more and more articles on the use of micro-blogging tools in educational and corporates settings, I am constantly surprised that one of the most useful options from my point-of-view seems to be constantly overlooked. Micro-blogging is like Twitter, but private to your organisation. It is a great way to capture those more informal internal discussions. It can help distribute useful information (such as links) throughout your organisation or help kick-start conversations.

For roaming mobile clients PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) is still the quickest way to get VPN connections to tunnel traffic over a secure link.

Installation

I always prefer installation via a yum repository as this will ensure patches are applied during regular system updates

sudo rpm --import http://poptop.sourceforge.net/yum/RPM-GPG-KEY-PPTP<br></br>sudo rpm -Uvh http://poptop.sourceforge.net/yum/stable/rhel6/pptp-release-current.noarch.rpm<br></br>sudo yum install ppp pptpd -y

Configuration

Note: replace $USERNAME and $PASSWORD with actual values

IP configuration
echo "localip 192.168.0.1" >> /etc/pptpd.conf<br></br>echo "remoteip 192.168.0.100-199" >> /etc/pptpd.conf

Since I am tired to constantly recite this list whenever one of these designer-type people tells me that they need Adobe’s Whatever Suite to do some basic task here is a summary that I can point them to.

Vector Graphics

Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/)
Xara Extreme (http://www.xaraxtreme.org/)

Raster Graphics

Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/)

Desktop Publishing

Scribus (http://www.scribus.net/)

Photo Editing

Gimp (see above)
Darktable (http://www.darktable.org/)
RawTherapee (http://www.rawtherapee.com/)
Luminance HDR (http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/)
Layout Tools (DTP): Scribus (http://scribus.net/canvas/Scribus)

Debugging things on the Android Emulator (incluced in the SDK) can be a very slow and cumbersome process. Thanks to the Android-x86 Project it’s quite easy to run Android in VirtualBox. This is highly useful when you need to test mobile apps and websites from the Android Browser (as well as Chrome Mobile).

1. Download an Ethernet enabled ISO from Tablets x86wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75945873/android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent<br></br>transmission android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent
2. Create new ViratualBox VM
   
   
   
   Important Settings (see screenshots)
   • OS: Linux, Version: Linux 2.6
   • Enable VTx/AMD-V
   • Use Bridged Network Adapter (if you want to allow direct Internet Access)
3. Mount the ISO file downloaded previosly and start the VM
   
4. Create the Root Filesystem (ext3) on the VBox .vdi created with the new VM, mark as bootable
5. Write the Filesystem changes to disk (VDI) and format the disk
6. Install GRUB Boatloader
7. Copy files from ISO to VDI
8. Unmount the ISO image and reboot Note: You need to disable the mouse pointer integration (if you have installed VirtualBox Client Add-ons) in the menu of Virtualbox (‘Machine’ –> ‘Disable Mouse Integration’) when you start the VM (see screenshot). I have not found a way to disable this by default on Virtualbox on Ubuntu (If anybody has managed this I would love to know how !)

After upgrading my Toshiba Z830 Ultrabook to 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) I noticed that the ability to control the screen back-light was not working using the Toshiba Fn F6/F7 keys.

Thanks to http://www.linlap.com/wiki/acer+aspire+s3 the solution was found quite quickly.

sudo vim /etc/default/grub

This will open the grub configuration file. (Grub is the initial boot selection software)
To be able to dim the screen brightness, You’ve got to modify the line:

UPDATE: [01-May-2012] It appears that this PPA repo is currently broken (does not allow to get GPG key and has unmet dependencies on x84_64). It appears that the install on i386 systems does work anyway if you ignore the GPG key error, but I wouldn’t install in that case as PPA installs are security risk enough without GPG errors.

UPDATE: [11-May-2012] The reason the PPA does not work is that it has been disabled by Ubuntu due to a licensing issue with (not hard to guess) Oracle. Flexion.org have however created a script (hosted on Github) to allow the automated update of Java 6 for those who still require it as a dependency.

I have recently been looking at different CAD options on Ubuntu and LibreCAD (http://librecad.org/) is looking like the best option for my needs at current (apart from the wish there would be some DWG support).

Since the main Ubuntu repositories are usually a fair bit behind the lastest stable realeases of LibreCAD you need to add the LibreCAD Dev PPA Repository

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:librecad-dev/librecad-stable<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install librecad<br></br>

When you need to convert multiple documents to PDF for distribution (or from one Office format to another) there are a few utilities around. The most workable I found is the UNOCONV utility which is build on top of LibreOffice / OpenOffice. This uses the OpenOffice conversion facilities rather than a simple PDF print driver.

On Ubuntu it can be installed via Software Center or via apt-get from the core repositories.
sudo apt-get install unoconv
Combined with the -exec option of the Unix find command this makes conversion of whole directory structures a breeze.
#find all Word Documents and convert to PDF<br></br>find . -name "*.doc*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \;<br></br>#find all Powerpoint Documents and convert to PDF<br></br>find . -name "*.ppt*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \;
To show all the possible conversion formats you can use:
unoconv --show
The following list of document formats are currently available:

Getting Multifunction Printers to scan under Linux can be a bit of a pain. The Samsung SCX-3400 I had to install recently was no exception.

Here are the necessary steps I had to perform:

1. Ignore all Samsung Provided CD’s and downloads. They do not work under Oneiric Ocelot (11.10)
2. Add Samsung Unified Driver repository http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/smfpv3.html
3. Install Samsung drivers and libsane-extras
4. Edit sane configuration files

vim /etc/apt/sources.list
#add the Samsung Unified Driver Repo
deb http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/ debian extra

wget http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/suldr.gpg
apt-key add suldr.gpg
apt-get update
apt-get install samsungmfp-data samsungmfp-driver samsungmfp-network samsungmfp-scanner samsungmfp-configurator-data samsungmfp-configurator-qt4 libsane-extras

The following sane config files need to be modified (add lines)

One of the most important utilities on any computer is a decent text editing tool. Since there are as literally hundreds of text-editors out there you would think it is an easy task to find a similar one for each platform.

The requirements list in order of priority:

[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/leogaggl/6821823795/ “ultrabook by leogaggl, on Flickr”)

EDIT: Here are some tweaks if you install 12.04 (Precise Pangolin).

Since I will have to do a fair amount of traveling in the next year I was in need of upgrading my trusted workhorse of Toshiba Qosmio F60 to a more portable option that will be easier on the shoulders during long travels. After doing some research into which of the major manufacturers offer the best support for a Linux based Operating System it came down to a final two: the Intel i7 variants of Samsung Series 9 and the Toshiba Z830.

One of the lesser known free Google services in our experience is Google Goggles. Specially in it’s lastest release (Version 1.7) it has received a few enhancements that make it very useful for some mobile learning applications

Scanning of barcodes

Google Googles will scan most standard barcodes and provide information on the product scanned.


Here is an example from the Google Mobile Blog:

This is an interesting report and info-graphic by the folks at VisionMobile on a new way of measuring the openness of some mobile open source projects.

The Open Governance Index measures the true openness of eight open source projects – Android, Qt, Symbian, MeeGo, Mozilla, WebKit, Linux and Eclipse – and analyses how governance, and not licenses, tell the full story of a project’s openness, across transparency, influence and control.

Thanks to Olivier Berten for providing this package via his PPA Repo !
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:olivier-berten/misc<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install mysql-workbench-gpl

EDIT: this has been confirmed to work on Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) as well).

Finally I made the effort to completely get rid of my Facebook Account. After initially getting a Facebook Account in the very early days (as an ‘occupational hazard’ to investigate the potential of Facebook Applications) I have always been suspicious of the companies motives and decided not to use such a closed system as a base for application development.

Recent developments have only confirmed this suspision:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2011/08/08/facebooks-privacy-issues-are-even-deeper-than-we-knew/
• http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ln2e0/facebook_patent_to_track_users_even_when_they_are/

Instead I will concentrate all of my content inside this blog (including as a backup for other social services I create). I believe the control over my own content is important enough for me to warrant the extra effort.

I am not generally one for writing blog entries about customer support failures. Thanks to my technical work I have had my fair share of dealing with call queues and help-desk systems over the last 20 years. But compared with my experience with Google AdSense over the last weeks all of these just pale into funny memories. I have never experienced the outright refusal to acknowledge an issue and blanket denial of communications.

Like it or not (personally I am in the second category) Blackboard Collaborate or Elluminate (as it is still more commonly referred to) is something you have a hard time avoiding if you work in online education.

I discovered that I have audio issues on some Ubuntu Linux machines and found the following to fix the issues.

1) Install alsa-aoss

apt-get install alsa-oss

2) Save the Elluminate Java Webstard (.JNLP) file to a local folder – DO NOT OPEN IN BROWSER
3) Launch Elluminate using this command (in the folder you saved the JNLP)

With every new release of Ubuntu I am becoming more resigned to the fact that the effort to revert back to the Ubuntu Classic (Gnome 2) interface is getting harder and sooner or later I will have to bite the bullet and learn to live with the ugly and more cumbersome Unity interface (specially since Gnome 3 seems to be even worse). One of the first issues I found is that there seems to be no easy way to manually add programs to the “Launcher” (as well as to the applications list).

UPDATE: To install on 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) you need a different PPA.

Since sun-java6-jdk has been removed from the default Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) repositories you need to add a PPA repository (unless you want to install by hand)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin

After the recent takeover of Delicious from Yahoo Inc by Avos and the subsequent total screw-up of what was a workable system I have been struggling to export bookmarks from Delicious in XML format (since the API is badly broken). The API export of all bookmarks limits the export to 1000 bookmark entries. Which is fine if you have less than 1000 bookmarks stored. But it makes it impossible (since there is no paging functionality exposed by the API) to export the rest should you have more (and many people would have much more than that).

Just a quick note on how to configure backups of Google Apps email to a local machine.

Install getmail

apt-get install getmail4

create config directory

Create a subdirectory in users home folder (and change permissions)

mkdir .getmail
touch .getmail

create config file

Create a file such as .getmail/username.gmail

[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = username@domain.tld
password = password
mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/All Mail",)

[destination]
type = Maildir
path = /path/to/storage/directory/

[options]
# print messages about each action (verbose = 2)
# Other options:
# 0 prints only warnings and errors
# 1 prints messages about retrieving and deleting messages only
verbose = 1
message_log = ~/.getmail/gmail.log

create data directories for storage

Create 3 sub-directories in your designated data directory

After recently researching the available software for e-book creation for some of our clients (in the education sector) I came across quite a number of options. However after some further look into the option and trying some I was able narrowed the field down to 2 options that seem to be reasonably user-friendly and matured. The two are using a very different approach and will suit different types of users. One is a native e-book writer which will give better low-level control for the more technical types. The other is a plugin to the popular OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) Office Suites.

The release of the latest Ubuntu Version has been seen by a number of commentators as the most end-user friendly yet and signals another milestone in the readiness of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for more widespread (and business) use.

As a long-term user of a number of different Operating Systems and as SME Owner for the last 15 years I have overseen the gradual replacement of a number of proprietary software solutions with FOSS Alternatives. With the beginning of the new financial year however, we are planning to go another step further and are starting to change our default Operating System to Ubuntu (from MS Windows).

As one of those who grabbed a HP Touchpad at the recent firesale (after announcing the killing of the product line) I did it as in full knowledge that this device in it’s current form is of limited use and (highly) unlikely to have lots of additional applications created for it.

After casually using it for a few nights of use I am personally not surprised that HP decided to ditch this product. Compared to the current Tablet leaders the Touchpad is miles behind both Android and iOS and HP would have had to spend serious money to even get close to the current functionality of the competition. And you can take a bet that both of these will not remain static. I was actually hoping that WebOS can be a serious competitor to the current duopoly, but after using this thing I have to say that it is not even close.

This is an interesting info-graphic comparing the 3 most popular OpenSource Content Management Systems.

While I don’t really agree with some of the metrics (such as the web-service stats) it is never the less a very good visual overview. As a long-term user of WordPress and Drupal there are some good points to give a quick overview.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 11 (Natty) I did some further research on VoIP clients (SIP) for Ubuntu Linux as XLite seems horribly out of date now.

I came across QuteCom (formerly WengoPhone) and from first testing it seems to work quite well. The install is easy as it’s part of the Ubuntu Community Software (Universe) and that means it can be installed via apt-get, Software Center or Synaptic.

Taking part in MobiMOOC has given me the opportunity to take stock of my own MobilePLE – the top 5 tools I find most useful as part of my ongoing learning.

• Catch Notes (previously 3Bananas) – mobile note taking the most critical component. Whenever I get a new device – this is what has to be installed as one of the first actions. For those not familiar with this software – it’s like Evernote without the bloat.
• TwiDroyd – mobile Twitter / Status.Net client. This could be replaced by similar Twitter clients
• GoogleReader – RSS reader client
• Flickr – image upload and sharing
• FourSquare – location based sharing

These are the main applications I use pretty much constantly, however here are some other useful services I use regularily:

If you upgrade you Ubuntu Netbook release to 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) you will notice a change to the new ¨Unity¨ user interface.

Personally I think the new interface is absolutely horrible (from a usability perspective) and I wanted to revert to the previous Netbook-Launcher.

HOWTO

Install the required components via terminal:

sudo apt-get install netbook-launcher-efl

After install just change the “Login Settings”

Log out and after the next login: voila – the laucher interface:

Having used IP Telephony for a number of years I need a workable SIP client for all of the devices I use. I have found a very capable client for my Android phones (SipDroid) and on Windows/MacOSX I generally use X-Lite (as well as it’s paid version EyePhone) from Counterpath.

Having tried several different Linux SIP clients (Ekiga, Twinkle, …) but all discarded them because of weird UI’s and/or problems with stability I noticed that there is a Linux version of XLite available. Unfortunately on current versions of Ubuntu (10.04) it needs a deprecated version of a library.

Due to the hype generated by the recent launch and my reservations on using the Apple Inc. iTunes I was doing some research into alternatives to the proprietary and completely locked iPad device (and the associated lock-down to Apple’s iTunes Store). Hopefully this list can be of use for other people as well.

I can see the form factor and the tablet style with a cut down (mainly web-browser based) Operating System as useful in a number of settings not least in educational institutions and libraries.

Getting excited about a new text editor of all things is not something I like to admit to easily, but in my line of work (although less and less is actually doing hands on coding) text editing is an important part.

That’s why I checked out the BESPIN project as soon as I heard of it. The prospect of being able to edit your files from anywhere is very appealing to me since I spend a lot of time away from the desk and on devices that not always have good text editor (let alone all the files necessary). The thought of being able to edit files from a netbook while on the run is coming to mind straight away.

One of the nicest ways to get photos straight from your mobile to Flickr (without having to use e-mails) on Nokia devices is the Flickr Plugin for the Nokia Share Online application. Since a lot of my clients in the educational sector are starting to use Flickr as part of their online teaching I decided to create a short HOWTO.

The application itself comes with the phone on most recent Nokia S60 devices (with recent Firmware – check Nokia Software Updater for new firmware). To check if your particular phone is capable you can check the Nokia Share Online Support site.

In running my businesses over the years I have been an unhappy user of MYOB for years. But due to time constraints I have always put off a change in accounting software as it is very disruptive and the alternatives were not too convincing (better the devil you know …). However due to the fact that our business is growing and we were at the end of a financial year the pain of using MYOB became greater than the pain of switching.