I have installed Ubuntu Studio on ubuntu.eskimo.com.  The section with Audio Production, Graphic Design, and Video Production are all part of Ubuntu Studio.  Each is a separate menu of tools dedicated to those functions.  For instance the tool I used to cut out and reduce a 1.2 MB menu image was gimp.  It is included in the graphics design section although I had previously installed it stand-alone in Graphics.

     Anyway, take a look and explore these new menus and see if they don’t contain some items you find useful.  Because these are all graphical elements you will need x2go installed on your machine.  You can get x2goclient from http://x2go.org.

     The video production facilities will require a high speed connection to the Internet, I would recommend 20mbit/s download speeds or more.  (Lower speeds will result in choppy playback but this will not effect the final video output file).

     Tonights work rebooting machines into a new kernel, 4.15.0-20.21, to fix an issue with the Ethernet controller wedging went cleanly and initial indications suggest that it was a success.  The real test will come later this afternoon and evening with heavier traffic but so far so good.

     Our ticket system is currently broken.  The Administrative interface login will not let me login.  Please do not use the ticket system until further notice.  Instead e-mail support or call 206-812-0051 (leave a message if I am not here).  Thank you.

     The folks at Canonical have kicked out a new kernel for me to try to hopefully fix the E1000 Ethernet hangs.  Since this bug affects our host computers, I will need to reboot pretty much everything tonight to bring up the new kernel on the machines that use the Intel E1000 Ethernet interface chips.

Ubuntu Bionic Ethernet Hangs

     We are experiencing periodic Ethernet hangs on our machines since upgrading to kernel 4.15.0 which is part of Bionic 18.04 LTS.  I have filed a bug report with bugs.launchpad.net, Bug #1766377.

     I’m just writing to let those of you who have an interest in knowing what I’m up to next, know.  For quite some time I’ve wanted to put together some sort of social networking function.  Thus far I have not really found a platform that is workable.  Recently, I found out about a content  management system (CMS) geared towards exactly this sort of thing called “ELGG”.

     I’ve put together a new server with the latest and greatest everything and installed ELGG upon it.  If you would care to take a look, https://social.eskimo.com/.  I am also using this as an experimental server to try new things on so that I’m less inclined to break the main server.

     Right now it is very bare-bones, just have the very basic frame work installed, but you are all welcome to check it out and make suggestions.  If any of you might be interested in working on this with me let me know.

     To give you some idea of what I have in mind, I started Eskimo North as a BBS back in 1982, and we had a good strong community back then.  When we went to a Xenix platform in 1985, it was not nearly as user friendly and we lost a lot of non-technical folks then.  Ever since then I’ve been looking for ways to bring it’s user friendliness back up to that level.

     In my view, a good social networking platform could evolve out of the functionality we had way back then, a very good messaging system with e-mail, upload / download, chat, an games, add to that the ability to have video, pictures, sounds, and a way to relate people with common interest, friending, groups, etc.  Right now I’m still working on very basic infrastructure, being able to upload and view videos for example.  Aesthetics will come later.

     Corebird, a graphical twitter client with filtering capability, has been installed on Debian, Mint, MxLinux, Ubuntu, and Zorin.

     It is a graphical client so in order to take advantage you will need to connect with X2Go.  If you do not have X2Go free X2Go clients are available for Linux, Windows, and MacOS at x2go.org.  If you have Linux, many common flavors already have it in the distribution and you need only type:

     apt install x2goclient (for debian OSs)

     yum install x2goclient (for Redhat derived OSs)

     zypper install x2goclient (for OpenSuse)

     Our web server at https://www.eskimo.com/ has been updated to Apache 2.4.33.  Previously it was 2.4.29 but nothing was 2.4.30 and 2.4.31 were not released.

      The mail spool NFS server is restored.

     The ethernet controller was wedged.  The kernel was stuck in a loop, resetting it and timing out.  Reboot cleared it without a power cycle suggesting it is software rather than hardware related.  There were many patches to the kernel to address meltdown and spectre, and it is a relatively new kernel, 4.15.0.  There was also a kernel patch waiting to be applied.  I have not yet managed to get live kernel patches configured so a reboot was necessary.

    The server holding our mail files is down.  I don’t know what the cause but I’m headed down to co-lo facility to restore.  Data will not be lost as the mail spool is on a RAID partition.