So tonight I was asked what I thought of the Dell XPS 1330 with Ubuntu pre-installed… not having seen one I took a few minutes to search on the vast cyberspace only to come back empty-handed.
So… can anyone of those lucky enough to have ordered one report their experience somewhere public ? Or just point my incompetent searching skills to any existing blog posts or reviews ? I can’t seem to find any! Thanks!
I recently got an HP Pavillion xt1000 series with such hardware and while researching its fingerprint support I came across Fprint.
From the project site:
The fprint project aims to plug a gap in the Linux desktop: support for consumer fingerprint reader devices.
Previously, Linux support for such devices has been scattered amongst different projects (many incomplete) and inconsistent in that application developers would have to implement support for each type of fingerprint reader separately.
The provided packages are:
The packages that enable fprint functionality in Ubuntu are provided by Pavel Rojtberg, I’d like to invite anyone with fingerprint readers to try them. If you find any bugs I think they can be sent to the project’s mailing list, I couldn’t find an obvious link to any open bug trackers. Oh, and don’t miss the FAQ!
There is a lenghty discussion and interesting information on Pavel’s site. I contacted him personally and he setup a Personal Package Archive (PPA) to build the Ubuntu packages very quickly! Thanks for you work, Pavel! All the development work the Fprint project has achieved is made available very easily to us Ubuntu users via the PPA service in Launchpad. This will not make it in any official Ubuntu repositories just yet, but it’s very promising so far. Above all it should not be considered a replacement for other standard authentication and security measures. 🙂
libpam-fprint + libfprint + fprint-demo packages for Ubuntu 7.10 are available as an archive at:
http://madman2k.net/files/fprint-packages.tar
Hardy Packages are available in this PPA:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/madman2k/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
(add that line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and update your repositories: sudo apt-get update from comand line or just use Synaptic.
For other distributions see: http://www.reactivated.net/fprint/wiki/Download
The fprint-demo package provides a graphical application to enroll fingerprints and set different options. After installing that package, fprint-demo can be invoked from command line only (no menu entry yet) by issuing this command (notice the underscore instead of hyphen):
sudo fprint_demo
In order to enable fprint authentication on Ubuntu install the libpam and libfprint packages and then edit your /etc/pam.d/common-auth so it contains
auth sufficient pam_fprint.so
auth required pam_unix.so nullok_secure
At your next login attempt or sudo command from terminal, this will first try to read your fingerprint before asking your password. For testing purposes, you can expire the sudo passowrd caching by issuing « sudo -k ». Do not try to disable password login completely; this is alpha software and you might lock out yourself.
Example of command-line fingerprint enrollment:
sudo pam_fprint_enroll --enroll-finger 7
For more information regarding the current (under consideration) integration of fingerprint readers support in Ubuntu, see:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pam/+bug/187130
This usually happens in other places, not in quiet, boring-without-any-tech-news Quebec province.
Apparently Montreal-based Savoir-faire Linux has had it, and have sent the Quebec Supreme Court a Motion for Declaratory Judgement. The Régie des Rentes du Québec wants to upgrade its desktops to Windows Vista from Windows 2000 without going through any RFPs, because, well, it is an upgrade.
The full documentation of the request (including emails exchanged between the RRQ and SFL), is available online at Cyrille Beraud’s (SFL’s CEO) blog. Cyrille has been blogging about the irregularities of Quebec’s government tech bidding processes for some time now. I’ve known him for some time and I actually almost worked at SFL at the time, but instead ended up at Canonical. If you know Cyrille at any level, you know he’s not joking about this.
This would be the first time (AFAIK) that a North-American company is taking legal action against the government by going to its highest legal instance and asking it to rule as illegal their ignoring of the bidding process of one of its own organizations. So, technically this is not suing our own government, but I hope this will bring some attention to the people and other levels of local government. Although there are some interesting efforts in our province, many government organizations in Quebec are stuck in stone-age procurement systems that leave them out of cash, paying what I call licensing taxes. I wanted to explain a bit how the software business works in Quebec, but quite frankly, I just had some food and it is so disgusting I’ll save it for another rant.
For more information about the Declaratory Judgement Motion legalese, see article #453 of Quebec’s Code of Civil Procedure. Such code is « …intended to render effective the substantive law and to ensure that it is carried out; and failing a provision to the contrary, failure to observe the rules which are not of public order can only affect a proceeding if the defect has not been remedied when it was possible to do so. The provisions of this Code must be interpreted the one by the other, and, so far as possible, in such a way as to facilitate rather than to delay or to end prematurely the normal advancement of cases. » In other words, we have a Code so the actual Code is respected. Pfew!
Update: An English press release is now available.
Apparently Corey was right all along.
I found about this via Ogg’s entry in Wikipedia. So I did the sensible thing. 🙂
Ahhh… that felt good.
Now, can someone with proper access in Launchpad make that « Confirmed, Critical, Hardy Milestone »… or whatever you deem more appropriate 😀
Well, it seems Brother printer drivers will make it into Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04, coming up next month), under GPL and Brother Software Open License Agreement – all driven by the community and with some help from Canonical.
Although I’d rather have 100% free Brother printer drivers, it’s still nice Brother has made their license clear about what can be done with their drivers, effectively opening the door to packaging by anyone:
This Agreement provides terms and conditions for license grant from Brother Industries, Ltd (« Broher »). Brother, who owns all copyrights to the software that is distributed with this Agreement (« Software ») to recipients thereof (« User »), for use of the Software. User shall have the right to use the Software only in accordance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement. Any use by User of the Software shall be deemed as its agreement hereto.
Note:Please click on « I Accept » while holding down « Shift » or right click on « I Accept » and select « Save Target As,,, » from the menu.
Brother retains any and all copyrights to the Software. In no case this Agreement shall be construed to assign or otherwise transfer from Brother to User any copyrights or other intellectual property rights to whole or any part of the Software.
Brother grants User a non-exclusive license: to reproduce and/or distribute (via Internet or in any other manner) the Software. Further, Brother grants User a non-exclusive license to modify, alter, translate or otherwise prepare derivative works of the Software and to reproduce and distribute (via Internet or in any other manner) such modification, alteration, translation or other derivative works for any purpose.
Even nicer is actually seeing the first mention of these drivers a bit over two years ago and the path and work leading to its final packaging and testing just hours ago by many community people and even Canonical through the bug report on Launchpad and a corresponding wiki page.
I hope this raises the importance of supporting Linux properly for Brother and, who knows, perhaps they will be more visible for scanner and PC to Fax support in Ubuntu (and generally, Linux) in the near future. I would bet increasing Ubuntu + Brother customers would already justify this.
I do own an MFC model at home and it makes me think of the same comparisons I hear about the » readiness of the Linux Desktop « . Compare this to all Hewlett-Packard does to support its printers under Linux, there still is a lot to do before both can be compared on equal grounds. Or is it ?