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• Small print in big fat letters

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

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As the topic on #ubuntu-offtopic says, CHRISTMAS is a recursive acronym for Christmas Has Really Innovated Society to Make All Spend. I hope it went well. Here’s a post-christmas installation of tales from the offtopic, featuring Madpilot and Spec:

tales from the offtopic was almost forced on a break because my primary expressive tool the StripGenerator is temporarily offline, awaiting upgrade. Luckily, Lynoure was able to find a top secret mirror.

I will try to get beta tester status for the new beta version of the Generator ASAP. Hopefully it can even improve my artwork!

I’ve always wondered why people like the OSX look so much, even to the point of modifying their GNOME desktops to look somewhat similar. So I decided I’d see for myself, following Artificial Intelligence’s instructions. I stumbled on his desktop screenshot on the Ubuntu Forums and liked it.

Clean desktop:

As it says on the wallpaper :)

With a few widgets:

Thanks for the inspiration and the instructions, AI!

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on a very sad and interesting court ruling in Australia. In effect, linking to copyrighted material is infringement. Read again: not hosting, or distributing it, just linking to it.

So I reckon here’s what will happen next:

• Google will close shop in Australia. Sorry mates, from now on you’ll learn to find the information you need on your own. Remember not to help each other.
• Record companies and other branches of the Mafia will push even harder in other parts of the world, in order to destroy the Internet. Never mind that their own businesses will be ruined in the process, the next couple of quarters should still make a nice profit without the ‘Net.

I’ll evaluate the risk to myself and my host Gandi, and consider taking this site down soon as well. After all, it’s full of links to copyrighted material, so the stakes are high! Gandi operates from France and I myself from Finland, so effectively it should be enough to monitor the situation in the EU.

(via BoingBoing)

When it’s Multiple Personalities Day on #ubuntu-offtopic, it’s difficult to catch the spirit and still fit the artwork in the space provided by my chosen medium. Well, here’s a brainfart at that general direction, featuring a few nickspoons, tonyyserver (a side-personality of tonyyarusso), and mc44:

Being sick, I can’t write about replacing a Nokia Communicator with an E-series smartphone and surviving. I’ll do it one of these days. Meanwhile, here’s another installation of my new comic series, tales from the offtopic, this time featuring wastrel (again), strabes and sonicGB:

This begins a series of comic strips generated from random snippets of conversation on Freenode’s #ubuntu-offtopic channel. My technique for achieving such a high level of artistic quality is using Copy and Paste from my IRC client into the StripGenerator *cough*Flash*cough* tool.

(Click to view larger image)

This first installation features gdb, mc44 and wastrel. They don’t really look like this, wastrel for example has much smaller ears and pointier teeth in Real Life.

The witty name for the series was suggested by mc44.

I’ts fun enough to let machines translate a piece of text to another language and then back again, to see what happens to the meaning.

I hope not too many english speakers die laughing when they get their hands on this Revenge of the Sith DVD.

There are great community support options for many Linux distributions, and people do use them. Here’s the official Ubuntu support channel right now:

989 people.

Now, even 100 newbies can have a lot of problems and questions, and most of the time new users are not very good at describing the problem they are having. They don’t know how the system works, they don’t know about log files, let alone their locations.

A large part of the traffic on the #ubuntu channel consists of discussions similar to this:

nubi: help! my linux is broken! none of my cool games work, only minesweeper and same game

master_foo: so you're saying tetris works but doom3 doesn't?

nubi: yeah

master_foo: sounds like your graphics acceleration doesn't work. which graphics card do you have?

nubi: huh? how do i know?

master_foo: could you paste your dmesg, xorg.conf, the x error log, and the output of lspci and lsmod to the pastebin?

nubi: of course not. what are those things and where do i find them? i just want to fix enemy territory!

Then begins the endless hunt for log files and trying to upload them to a public pastebin for debugging, while trying to ignore the 200 other discussions going on at the same time on the channel. None of this is very much fun.

That will change once we get Upstream integrated into our distributions. Upstream is a nice python utility that changes the part of finding and uploading relevant log files into this:

Now the discussion can be more like this:

nubi: help! my linux is broken! none of my cool games work, only minesweeper and same game

master_foo: you're having video problems: fear not, nubi! run the Upstream Log Uploader from the System menu

nubi: ok found it

master_foo: tick the "video" and "kernel" options, then follow the instructions. when you're done, paste here the url you get

nubi: http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/123456

master_foo: i'll take a look at that and your problems are solved in no time at all

nubi: wow this is so cool. upstream changed my life

master_foo: yes, the upstream team really is a valiant and talented group of people

nubi: i agree. debugging was never so easy before.

Of course, master_foo himself rocks just as much, for volunteering to be there for nubi on his own valuable time!

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