My only niggle with the Kubuntu installation of the Konqueror file manager/web browser is the way the file manager defaults to Icon View. I'm a geek. I like Detailed List View and find myself forever clicking the change button to set DLV. This week I finally figured out how to fix that permanently. It's actually quite straightforward, if a little unintuitive.

• In Konqueror, click on the Settings menu and choose Configure Konqueror.
• Scroll down and click File Associations.
• Expand inode from the Known Types list, click on directory and choose the Embedding tab.
• Under here you'll find the file modes. Select Detailed List Mode (or whichever you prefer) and click the Move Up to move it to the top of the list.
• Click OK and you're done.

I use Konqueror a lot, so much so that I've set up hotkeys to kick it off. Years of Windows use have accustomed me to hit the <Win> + <E> key combination to start Explorer, so I set the same shortcut to Konqueror's file manager. Here's how...

Different distros (including Kubuntu) shunt KDE Control Centre's settings into different places, but you can always start the "original" by hitting <Alt> + <F2> and entering kcontrol.

• Choose Input Actions under Regional & Accessibility.
• Create a New Group (call it whatever you like) and create a New Action under it.
• Give it whatever Action Name you like, then choose Keyboard Shortcut -> Command/URL (Simple) from the Action Type drop-down.
• Click the Keyboard Shortcut tab, click the button and assign whatever key combination you like. (In this case I used <Win> + <E>.)
• Under Command/URL Settings enter kfmclient openProfile filemanagement.
• Click Apply and test your key combo.

I also set up <Win> + <K> to open Konqueror in browser mode by creating a New Action entering the Command/URL Setting kfmclient openProfile webbrowsing.




Oddly, there's no superuser version of Konqueror in Kubuntu. You can kick it off in superuser mode by entering kdesu konqueror after hitting <Alt> + <F2>. (Or add a hotkey as above, or even add it to Kmenu, by right-clicking the K button and choosing Menu Editor.




If you want to preview the fonts on your system, just type fonts:/ in the Location Bar. Choose either Personal or System fonts, then hover over the each font for a preview.




If you want to get to the Location Bar using the keyboard, hit <Ctrl> + <L>. (The same shortcut works in Firefox.)




Konqueror's great for reading documentation too. Just enter man: or info: in the Location Bar. If you want to look at a specific appication, add the application name as a suffix. Eg; man:md5sum or info:m4.




Got any more Konqueror tips? Drop me a comment!



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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 14 )

Telecom has once again shafted would-be government regulators, competitors and consumers alike. This time they haven't merely changed the rules, they've brought in a whole new rule book. In a deft bit of stage magic, Telecom today revealed a ton of resources no one even knew they had.

For the last 18 months they've been beefing about Local Loop Unbundling and the government's proposed operational separation of the company into three business units. They simply didn't have the resources to unbundle more than 15 exchanges per quarter, they wailed, citing shortages of or difficulties with materials, technical staff and building consents. (The fact that unbundling gives competitors access to the those exchanges was, of course, neither here nor there.)

Yet today those resourcing constraints magically vanished. Telecom announced an aggressive plan to supplement exchanges with more than 2,000 roadside cabinets to be deployed over the next two years. The cabinets -- in a process known as "cabinetisation" -- are placed between the customer and the exchange, effectively stranding competitors with equipment inside the unbundled exchanges.

But wait. Couldn't this be good news for consumers? Well, no. For a start it's going to stop competitors unbundling exchanges. Who in their right mind will go ahead now when roadside cabinets are about to nullify that investment? On top of that, there are plenty of unanswered cabinetisation questions. Will competitors have access to them? Will there be space for their equipment? And just how is Telecom going to mange installing 2,153 cabinets -- a rate of 21 per week -- when, till yesterday, they couldn't manage to unbundle 15 exchanges per quarter? (According to this list, 20 cabinets will be in place by 1 December!)

Orcon Chief Executive Scott Bartlett told Scoop this morning, “The only reason Telecom would cabinetise so aggressively is to prevent competition and continue their monopoly on telecommunications services.  It [will] make the whole regulatory process for LLU redundant.”

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )

The Linux find command is enormously powerful but, like many command-line tools, you need to be a syntactical wizz-kind to work with all its parameters. (I have a sneaking suspicion I could use it to locate Lord Lucan and the wreck of the General Grant if only I could master its syntax!)

There are GUI versions -- check out the gnome-search-tool in Gnome and kfind in KDE -- but most of the time you just want a snappy response to a simple question. Like just now, for instance. I was tinkering with my Konqueror configuration and wanted to find all instances of the konqueror.rc file. Piece of cake. I just went to a console, typed locate konqueror.rc and almost instantly the two locations were listed.

locate is the business end of the updatedb command, which most distros run automatically behind the scenes each day. (Or you can run it yourself as root.) updatedb stores file names in a database which locate then searches -- and that's much quicker than scanning the disk.

Of course, being a command-line tool means you can use wildcards and add other commands to it too. So locate *.png | grep tux will find all .png files then filter the result to only display those containing "tux".

That's pretty simple. But of course with a little practice, you could soon start to build up some really complex syntax...




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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )

In October, Mandriva closed a deal with the Nigerian Government for an affordable hardware plus software platform for the country's schools. The initial batch was for 17,000 machines. According to Mandriva, "We had a good deal... the Classmate PC from Intel, with a customized Mandriva Linux solution. We presented the solution to the local government, they liked the machine, they liked our system, they liked what we offered them, especially the fact that it was open, and that we could customize it for their country." Then Microsoft stepped in.

In an open letter to Steve Ballmer, Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon writes how Microsoft "fought and fought again[st] the deal, but still the customer was happy with the CMPC and Mandriva." In fact Mandriva finalised the deal, took the order and started shipping systems, only to learn that the customer suddenly changed their tune; “We shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed," Bancilhon was told, "but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.” [sic]

So to summarise: a poor African country -- having presumably conducted analyses to find the best solution for its needs -- suddenly changes horses after the competitive bidding is over and the order is being delivered. Could it be anything to do with the fact that Nigeria is one of the most corrupt countries on the planet?

Bancilhon continues: "Wow! I’m impressed, Steve! What have you done to these guys to make them change their mind like this? It’s quite clear to me, and it will be to everyone. How do you call what you just did Steve? There is [sic] various names for it, I’m sure you know them."

He concludes: "Of course, I will keep fighting this one and the next one, and the next one. You have the money, the power, and maybe we have a different sense of ethics you and I, but I still believe that hard work, good technology and ethics can win too."


Footnote: Today (November 12) marks the launch of the OLPC project's "give one, get one" program whereby you buy two laptops for US$399. One goes to you, the other to a child in a developing country.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 4 )

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) isn't something I use much, but it's one of those nice-to-have tools to keep filed away in case you need it. Just such an occasion presented itself this week when someone gave me five pages of printed text which they wanted to edit and update, but for which they no longer had the source file. The options were simple; either sit down and laboriously re-type five dense pages, or OCR it. You can guess what I chose.

There are a number of OCR packages available for Linux. There's the KDE-based Kooka and GOCR for example, but one tester who tried them concluded, "Don't underestimate the value of paying a typist to transcribe your text the old-fashioned way". A few months after that review, Tesseract was released, and he changed his views.

Tesseract was originally developed by HP between 1985 and 1995. In '95 it was one of the top three performers in an OCR accuracy shoot-out, but shortly afterwards HP ditched its OCR business and Tesseract was abandoned. Then, a couple of years ago, they dusted it off again and open sourced it.

You'll find Tesseract an optional add-on for most of the bigger Linux distributions, so it should just be a matter of installing it from your package manager. Note though that it's a dynamic and rapidly advancing project. The version available for Ubuntu is currently 1.02 (from March this year) but the latest version on the Tesseract source site is 2.01 (released on 30 August).

Tessaract requires scanned text to be in the .tif format (although here's a script that'll convert almost any image provided you have ImageMagick installed). From then on it's just a matter of a simple command-line conversion;

tesseract  input-file.tif  output-file

Tesseract generates three output files per input. There's mysterious .RAW and .MAP files -- which you can discard -- and the .TXT file which contains your output.

And it works like a charm! My five pages of admitedly crisp clear text took just a couple of minutes to process. Tesseract doesn't (yet) handle multiple columns, but for basic OCR it sure beats hours of re-typing!



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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 7:31 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )

Computers are now getting humans to do their dirty work -- by offering them smutty pictures!

For years many websites have used the CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") system to prevent the automated creation of things like email accounts that can then be used by spammers. You've almost certainly encountered these things; boxes of wobbly text like the one at the head of this column that you have to correctly interpret in order to authorise the account. Humans have no problem with this sort of thing but computers find it almost impossible.

Now scammers have come up with a clever little workaround. Websites have appeared showing pictures of scantily clad women who strip off more and more layers provided you correctly enter the CAPTCHA string displayed. But what you don't realise is that those CAPTCHA graphics are being relayed from sites like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail where an automated process is setting up bogus accounts and using your brain power to help out!

It's naughty, of course, but also kind of neat. And it shows once again no matter how sophisticated security systems get, there are often simple ways to work around them.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

This month's print magazine has a dangerous tip on page 81. "Is it possible to disable writing to USB devices," a reader asks, "in order to stop users being able to copy sensitive information from a PC?" The answer -- which involves tweaking a Windows Registry key -- gives the impression that it's a complete solution. Which is, but only if an attacker comes from Windows.

What the solution ignores is the world of bootable operating systems. Pop in a Knoppix CD for example, restart the machine and you have full access to not only a superior operating system, but also access to every file in every Windows partition on the machine. You can copy all those sensitive files and not leave any trace of every having been there.

No CD drive? What about Linux on a floppy disk? Tom Dehser's tomsrtbt squeezes a mini text-based distribution onto a 1.44MB floppy. Again, if you know a few Linux commands, the hard drive data's there for the taking.

But most convenient of all is Linux on a USB drive. Mandriva make a commercial version, which includes a 4GB drive and free international shipping for 89 Euros, but putting your own together is a doddle if you follow the instructions at Pendrivelinux.com.

For my test installation, I went for Pendrivelinux's own USB Pen Drive Linux package, which involved downloading a 400MB image file and following a few simple instructions. I also created a second partition on the drive (by following the optional instructions) and viola, a bootable, graphical, full-featured Linux on a stick!

But the fun doesn't end there. By following the directions on the Run Pendrivelinux without rebooting page, I got this...



...Linux running inside Windows -- no USB drive or CD required!

You're not restricted to PDL's own distro either. There's instructions for creating bootable drives from many popular Linuxes, including Ubuntu, Gentoo, Knoppix, SLAX and Damn Small Linux (which only requires a 64MB drive). And most directions allow you to build your bootables from within either Linux or Windows.


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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 4 )