After playing a couple of games, one of the next things I did was to partition the hard-drive and install the PPC version of Ubuntu 8.10 onto it. This is a quick run-down of my experience installing and playing with it.

Well first up I needed to grab the PPC version of Ubuntu. I was under the impression that Canonical had ceased PPC Ubuntu development, but it appears they haven’t. I found the Alternate Install for a dedicated PS3 Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 ISO here for download. This disc is tailor made for the PS3 to get you up and running with the minimum of fuss.

EDIT September 2009: The release of the new “slim” PlayStation3 console has unfortunately seen Sony Computer Entertainment remove the ability to install Linux onto the hard-drive. Only owners of the older, larger PS3′s will be able to install Linux to their systems from now on.

While that downloaded, I prepared the PS3 itself. Thankfully Sony had the foresight to allow alternate operating systems to be installed, thus creating a greater attraction for tinkerers like myself. Unfortunately the ability to install Linux is marred by the fact that access is provided through a Hypervisor which does not give access to the PS3′s graphics hardware, thus preventing the possibility of creating home-brew games. It also limits you to 217MB of the total 256MB system RAM, presumably with some RAM being used for the video framebuffer much like a cheap motherboard with no dedicated video RAM.

Preparing the PS3 for a Linux install is simple enough. First you need to partition the drive. The PS3 OS allows you to allocate 10GB to the “other OS” or 10GB to the PS3 OS. You do not have any ability to set the size manually. Since I don’t really intend to use the PS3 as a workstation for any serious work, I opted to give Linux only 10GB. The system partitioned the drive and rebooted. WARNING: This process will destroy any data already on the drive, including downloaded games and configuration data. Make sure you backup your PS3 data before doing this!

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After that, you need to install the bootloader for the “other OS”. The ISO image I downloaded contained the required PS3 bootloader KBoot and once the ISO finished downloading and I burned it to a CD, I stuck it into the PS3′s optical drive and told the PS3 to go looking for the boot loader there. It found it, installed it and all was good.

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You then need to tell the PS3 to change its “default OS” when turning on the system. By default it’s “PS3″, so I changed this in the system settings to be “Other OS” and the PS3 immediately asked if I wanted to reboot into the “other OS” now. I said “yes”. The machine shutdown and rebooted.

Almost right away I was looking at two penguins and a bit of text centred on my Benq E2200HD screen (connected via HDMI). Like most Linux distros, all I had to do was hit Enter to begin loading the installation program. To do that, however, I needed a keyboard! I grabbed my Microsoft USB keyboard and mouse, connected them to a passive USB four-port hub and then connected that to the PS3, so I could keep the other powered USB port free if I needed it for things like external HDD’s and the like. One USB port can happily power a USB keyboard and mouse together without a problem.

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Ubuntu’s Alternate installer for PPC processors starts and looks exactly like its x86 bretheren, so I won’t go into detail about it here other than point out that when it asked which device I wanted to install on, the hard-drive presented was just the 10GB partition that the PS3 had created – you cannot see the rest of the drive at all (because this is all the Hypervisor presents to you).

The rest of the installation went as normal as any x86 install, however I did notice that the overall installation time was about double that of a typical desktop install. I put this down to two factors – the PS3′s HDD is only 5400rpm and the low available memory probably slowed it down too.

Once installed, the system rebooted. Unlike the desktop flavour of Ubuntu, you don’t get the splash screen, only Linux’s trademarked scrolling of information (most of which has been suppressed by the “quiet” kernel option in the KBoot configuration file). The console was in 1440×900 mode, but the screenshot below shows the console in 1920×1080 mode after I changed the config (see further below).

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Once loaded, the ever-familiar GDM login screen appeared. I logged in and within 10 seconds I was looking at the default Ubuntu Intrepid GNOME desktop. Unfortunately it didn’t fill my screen. In fact, it was only 1440×900 in size on my 1920×1080 monitor, neatly centred in the middle of the screen.

We needed to fix this, so first up was a quick review of the Linux PS3 wiki that had a reference for all the available screenmodes and the required changes to the KBoot configuration file that were required. In my case, I wanted to envoke a 1080p screen mode. I edited the KBoot configuration with:

$ sudo gedit /boot/etc/kboot.conf

…and added the following onto the ends of the two kernel lines in that file:

video=ps3fb:mode:165

This will tell Ubuntu to use 1080p “full screen” on reboot. I saved the configuration, performed a full system restart (you can’t just restart X) and viola! Ubuntu’s console and X displays were now in glorious 1080p.

If you are using an ordinary television, you can try:

video=ps3fb:mode:166

…which will give you full DVD resolution at 720 x 576 (576i mode), but you may need to adjust your TV’s settings to be able to see the entire picture as this will make use of your display’s “overscan” area which is generally beyond the visible area of the screem.

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Logging in and starting a few apps, Ubuntu runs exactly as you’d expect on any desktop PC system. Unfortunately due to the low memory available, performance is a little sluggish, but it’s not bad enough that you couldn’t make serious use of it.

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I did notice that general performance improved once you had used a few applications. For example, OpenOffice.org took a full minute to load up for the first time, but subsequent starts only took about 5-10 seconds. Mozilla took about 30 seconds to start, but once up, it surfed the ‘net quickly and no differently to a normal desktop installation. I was also able to use the optical drive and read the content of CD, DVD and Blu-ray media. I could also happily playback most media without issue after installing the Ubuntu Restricted Extras package as well.

Unfortunately desktop effects such as Compiz are not possible on the PS3 because the Hypervisor does not give you direct access to the PS3′s “RSX” GPU. This was a deliberate move by Sony to prevent homebrew games being developed. Not a great loss, however, as the PS3 is already a little hampered by the fact that it has less than 256MB of RAM to work with.

The PS3 is now “permanently” in Linux mode until you tell it to go back to the normal PS3 OS. If you shutdown and reboot (or indeed turn the console off and back on again), it will boot straight back to Linux every time. To get back to the PS3 OS, all you have to do is issue the following command at the kboot prompt, before Ubuntu starts to boot:

ps3-boot-game-os

…and hit Enter. The PS3 will shutdown, restart and next thing you know you’re looking at the PS3′s normal Xross-Media Bar (XMB) menu again. To get back into Linux again, you simply change the “default OS” back to “other OS” again and reboot when prompted.

Ubuntu is of course not the only Linux distribution that can be installed onto the PS3, and there are plenty of videos on YouTube of people using one or more PS3′s running Linux to great effect. Check them out!

Conclusion: It’s awesome that Sony allow people to play with their hardware (with certain restrictions) and makes the PS3 a far more attractive option to buy than the XBox360 or even the Wii. The latter two options really are geared towards playing games only whilst the PS3 can entertain you and help you with serious work, especially tapping into the awesome power of the PPC. For families who are a cash-strapped for a new PC, the speed of Ubuntu on the PS3 won’t blow you away, however it is perfectly viable to use as a cheap home computer that can also keep the kids happy and play high-definition Blu-ray movies, however after trying out Ubuntu on a regular TV display (an old Amiga 1084 monitor) for the hell of it, 576i takes me right back to the days of Amiga Workbench in 15KHz interlace complete with full flicker!! No, you really need to have a proper 720p or preferably a 1080p display to use Ubuntu properly, to not only keep the sanity of your vision but to give you enough desktop real estate to move around as well.

Review score: 8 out of 10

Anyway, the default installation of Ubuntu Intrepid picks up everything except the Fn keys, wireless LAN adapter and the audio. The wireless LAN adapter has proven to be a bit of a challenge, so if I suss it out, I’ll write up about it later. Fn keys I’m not really fussed about (and neither is the laptop’s owner), but we needed the audio.

The SigmaTel STAC 9200 has a dotted history of frustration among Linux users in general, but thankfully it was fixed in Kernel 2.6.27-7 and Alsa 1.0.15. Unfortunately a vanilla installation of Ubuntu it still is unable to autodetect the hardware 100% properly (it will find it and name it, but all you get is silence), so you have to make one tiny manual adjustment before sound will work properly.

1. Open up a terminal and type the following at the $ prompt:

   $ sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

2. This opens up the file in the GEdit text editor. Scroll to the end of the file, hit Enter to make a new line and add the following:

   options snd-hda-intel model=gateway

3. Save your changes and close the editor.
   .
4. Now reboot. When Ubuntu comes back, you will have working audio!

Note: Reader Mouhcine has suggested that if “model=gateway” does not work for you in step 2, try using “model=gateway-m4″ which may give you more success in Ubuntu Jaunty.

OpenOffice.org 3.0.x will be included in Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 in April 2009, but as some people have noticed, there are some useful features in OpenOffice.org 3.0.x (such as much improved Word doc importing) that can make waiting another four months seem like a bloody long time to upgrade. You want 3.0 now, not in four months!

So for the impatient among you, here’s the most painless and easiest way to upgrade your OpenOffice.org to 3.0.1 without having to deal with downloading individual packages or TAR archives from the OpenOffice.org website, or manually having to satisfy the extra dependencies that OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 requires.

1. First up, open a terminal.
   .
2. Now type in:

   $ sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openoffice.list

   …and your text editor will appear with a blank new file to type into.

3. Copy & paste or type in the following line into the editor:

   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main
   

   

4. Save your file and close the text editor.
   .
5. Now type in at the terminal:

   $ sudo apt-get update

6. You should observe that a warning message regarding NO_PUBKEY will appear after the update has completed as follows:

   W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net intrepid Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 60D11217247D1CFF

   This is because you don’t yet have the public key for this OpenOffice.org repository to be able to authenticate anything from it, so we need to add it with the following command at the $ prompt:

   $ gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 60D11217247D1CFF
   gpg: requesting key 247D1CFF from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
   gpg: key 247D1CFF: public key "Launchpad PPA for OpenOffice.org Scribblers" imported
   gpg: Total number processed: 1
   gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)
   $

   Right, that downloaded the key from the Ubuntu keyserver to your PC. Now we need to tell Apt to use that downloaded key to authenticate with. Do do this, type in:

   $ gpg --export --armor 60D11217247D1CFF | sudo apt-key add -
   OK
   $

7. If you now run Step 5′s command again (sudo apt-get update), you will no longer have the NO_PUBKEY warning at the end of it.
   .
8. Anyway, once Apt has finished updating itself with a new list of packages, within a few seconds, your Update Manager will pop up the red arrow in the system tray advising that there are new updates to download.
   .
   .
9. When you open Update Manager, you will find that they are all upgrades to OpenOffice.org 3.0.x including the extra dependencies required! Sweet!
   .
   .
10. Hit the “Install Updates” button. If you are presented with a dialog box warning you that some of the packages cannot be authenticated, then you have not got the Public Key from the Ubuntu Keyserver to authenticate the new OpenOffice.org packages. This is because this OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 repository is not official nor permanent and was only setup to satisfy the impatient ones out there (ie: you!). It is not critical that the packages be authenticated, but that is up to you to decide. If you’d rather not install unauthenticated packages, then just click the Cancel button and stop following these instructions. If you followed Step 6 properly, then you will not get this warning message because the public key you downloaded in Step 6 will authenticate the packages properly and the download of updates will commence immediately as per Step 11.
    .
    .
11. Hit the Apply button and allow the system to download and install as normal.
    .





12. When completed, start up OpenOffice.org as normal and you will see that the splash loader and the Help->About page show that you now have OpenOffice.org 3.0.1!
    .
    .
13. Pat yourself on the back. You’re done.

How is this possible anyway? Well, seems that demand for OpenOffice.org 3.0.x has been so great that the nice guys at OpenOffice.org Scribblers decided to put together a quick little dedicated repository for it on the Launchpad site, so all kudos and credit go to them. The repo only works for Ubuntu Intrepid, so for users of earlier versions of Ubuntu, you will still need to download the .debs and install them manually from the OpenOffice.org website.

Credit goes to stmok from Overclockers Australia for advising of the public key solution used in Step 6 – thanks!

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This article discusses how I used my recently purchased LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray ROM drive to successfully read and watch movies using Ubuntu Intrepid.

DISCLAIMER: This article describes decrypting BD titles using an Intel or AMD based PC with Ubuntu Linux. While you can use a PlayStation3′s BD drive to read and decrypt a title using known decryption keys using the PS3 version of Ubuntu, at this time of writing you cannot use Ubuntu installed on a PlayStation3 console to identify unknown decryption keys of a given BD title because the application used to derive those keys from the disc is not available for the PPC processor used by the PS3. You must use a consumer BD-ROM drive on an Intel or AMD based PC instead.

Hang on, you say – if there is no support for playback of Blu-ray movies on Linux, then why buy a Blu-ray drive if you can’t watch the movies? Well, I might not be able to watch them directly, but I can certainly rip the little buggers and watch a file version of it instead. But wait again, you say, if there’s no official Blu-ray support, and you can’t watch the discs directly, then how on earth do you rip them?? I’m glad you asked, and even if you didn’t ask, I’m about to tell you anyway.

First up, a little Blu-ray 101.

Blu-ray movies feature Digital Rights Management (DRM). Like DVD’s before it, most Blu-ray movies are encrypted. This is to stop those naughty pirate types from making illegal backups of the movie and giving or selling it to their mates. In the case of DVD’s, however, there was only one decryption key which was eventually discovered and from then on allowed all DVD’s to be easily decrypted using a simple library (called libdvdcss2). The movie industry as a whole were not impressed by this and insisted that the next format be more difficult (preferably impossible) to decrypt, so Blu-rays (and HD-DVD’s, but I’ll concentrate on Blu-ray for this article) each have a different decryption key now. But to complicate this further, this key is kept hidden from you by an authentication mechanism to ensure that there isn’t a repeat of the De-CSS scandal that brought the DVD encryption scheme undone.

Each and every player out there, hardware or software, has a unique player authentication key which is passed to the Blu-ray optical drive, essentially like giving your passport to Customs at the country border, to validate whether or not you are legally authorised to  playback a movie. If the drive has not got a blacklisted record of your authentication key, and the key is accepted as a generally valid key that has been paid for, THEN the drive will give up the movie’s decryption key and movie playback can commence.

Blacklist?? What blacklist? Well, like DVD players, it’s not difficult to pick up a Blu-ray player’s authentication key that is used to prompt the drive for the disc’s decryption key, after all, it has to be held in memory somewhere. Once an industry authority discovers that an authentication key has been compromised, it is added to a blacklist so that it will not work anymore. This is why hardware Blu-ray players need to be firmware-upgradable, and why software players need to be upgraded to the next version periodically with patches, etc, so that new, non-blacklisted authentication keys can be provided.

OK, that sounds all well and good, but if the Blu-ray drive itself is doing the blacklisting, how exactly does it know when a given authentication key is no longer valid? Simple – its blacklist will get updated with the next latest-release movie you buy.

Say what?

Every Blu-ray movie you buy has a little file on the disc under the “AACS” folder called “ContentRevocation.lst”. This file contains a complete list of blacklisted authentication keys for the drive to update itself with, and – get this – you can’t stop the drive loading it. Well, actually to be more accurate this file is simply a copy of the same list that is actually hidden in a non-tamperable, non-user-readable area elsewhere on the disc for the drive to read, but basically the instant you stick that movie disc in, the hidden version of this file is read and the drive automatically updates its blacklist right away with any new blacklist data, even before the disc icon appears on your desktop. Sneaky, huh?

So the next time your legal (or more specifically, pirated) copy of PowerDVD or whatever tries to playback a movie, all of a sudden you’ll see an error message instead saying that your player’s authentication key has been revoked – thus the movie is now unplayable. What’s worse is that you won’t be able to watch any of your older discs that worked previously either! It’s this exact reason that many people have called for the Blu-ray (and HD-DVD) formats to be boycotted.

But not all is lost. Remember, this is an encryption technology created by Man, and therefore can be broken by Man with a bit of help from the Open Source Community at large. With a little help from a few external resources including the Ubuntu Community Documentation and the Doom9 forums, I discovered a plethora of projects by various people, from dumping discs to breaking the encryption and authentication.

On the surface are general applications to dump the movie, decrypted, to a file. One of the best projects is DumpHD which is a Java app that provides a nice easy to use GUI that can rip a movie with a minimum of fuss (see detail about how to use it later in this article), however it requires that you already know what the decryption key for a given movie is which you can only obtain if you have authenticated with the drive. If you have the decryption key already, however, then authentication is not necessary and you can rip the movie right away without a problem, so this project is heavily supported by people posting up various decryption keys for all sorts of movie releases. The problem with this approach, however, is that different countries usually get different releases of the same movie, so for example a release of “Batman Begins” in Australia might have a completely different decryption key to the release of “Batman Begins” in America or Europe. This is not always the case of course, a good example being the Ewan McGregor movie “The Island” – the Australian release is actually the UK release, right down to the age-rating and film-office classification markings on the disc itself – only the box bears any Australian ratings markings!

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So, how do you find out the decryption key of your locally purchased movie then? You don’t want to keep buying a commercial player, especially one that doesn’t run under Ubuntu, just to get a valid authentication key. There’s got to be a better way! Well, there is! How about we just bypass the authentication procedure altogether? How? Again, through another great contribution on the Doom9 forums.

The LG GGC-H20L drive is but one of many Blu-ray/HD-DVD drives which have had their firmware reverse-engineered. Firmware is largely just a computer program that operates the drive. Since the firmware is upgradable to fix bugs and add new features to the drive, it means the program can be altered by a third party. A Doom9 contributor has provided modified firmware for various popular drives, including the GGC-H20L that effectively allow the drive to ignore the authentication procedure no matter what player authentication key is provided, blacklisted or not, thus making the drive give up the decryption key for the Blu-ray movie currently inserted every time!

In the case of the LG GGC-H20L that I use, the firmware is provided as a Windows Executable file. There are three ways to run this, either via a native Windows installation on your PC, a virtualised Windows installation on your PC, or via the Wine compatibility layer. I successfully upgraded my drive using the Wine option as follows:

WARNING: The following information can damage or even brick your LG Blu-ray drive if not followed correctly, or if you have a power failure during firmware update. You proceed at your own risk and I will not be held responsible for any damage incurred by your drive, or for loss of hair being torn out, by following these instructions.

1. You need a normal Wine installation. If you’ve never installed it before, then type in:

   $ sudo apt-get install wine

   …and this will install the Ubuntu-repository version of Wine.

2. Since we’ll be modifying a physical device, only root can do that, so we will need to use sudo to execute the firmware upgrade, however Wine will not work as root until we change permissions of your Wine configuration in your Home directory, so type in the following to make root the owner of your Wine configuration:

   $ sudo chown -R root:root ~/.wine

3. Now execute the downloaded firmware file:

   $ sudo wine GGC-H20L_1.03_VolumeID_Patch.exe

4. The Upgrade GUI will appear. Click on the button to commence update and let it do its thing. After a minute or two, it will tell you that the drive firmware has been successfully updated. At this point, you will need to reboot your PC, but before you do, remember to change the owner of your Wine installation back to yourself. If your login was “jbloggs”, then you’d type in:

   $ sudo chown -R jbloggs:jbloggs ~/.wine

Upon returning from restart, every time you query the drive for the inserted disc’s decryption key, the drive will now happily give it to you without question. Nice.

So how do we query the drive for that decryption key anyway? A simple tool to do this is aacskeys (version 0.4.0c at this time of writing, but check further along the thread for newer releases) written by another Doom9 member, which queries the drive and tells you its Volume Unique Key and its Disc ID, which you can then copy and paste into DumpHD’s keys config file and happily begin dumping your movie.

$ ./aacskeys /media/cdrom
aacskeys 0.3.6 by arnezami, KenD00

Volume Unique Key:              5D9BCD44522B6940F8705400DA612ED9
Unit Key File Hash (Disc ID):   837487B4D6F614D5B4D5F566387B41C2D284F393
$ 

If your drive’s firmware was not patched, instead of seeing the Volume Unique Key and Disc ID, you would get this error message instead: “The given Host Certficate / Private Key has been revoked by your drive.”.

We now need to take the output data and copy it to DumpHD’s “keydb.cfg” file. Each key is placed on its own line in the following format:

DISC ID = Movie Title | D | YYYY-MM-DD | V | VOLUME UNIQUE KEY

Thus in the example above, we would enter:

837487B4D6F614D5B4D5F566387B41C2D284F393 = The Island | D | 2007-03-22 | V | 5D9BCD44522B6940F8705400DA612ED9

Now technically it appears that the date is largly irelevant, and most people just use 0000-00-00 instead of a real date (which is supposed to be the file date of the “Unit_Key_RO.inf” file in the “AACS” folder of the disc). I have tested this and I can’t see any difference in how DumpHD handles the disc.

Once you have finished editing the keydb.cfg file, save it.

NOTE: DumpHD (below) can now use AACSKeys directly, saving you having to edit to the keydb.cfg file manually, because DumpHD now does all the work for you. See this article for more information.

Since DumpHD is a Java application, you will need Java installed to run it. If you haven’t already got it installed, you can install it with the following command:

sudo apt-get install java-common

…or more realistically you should install it as part of the ubuntu-restricted-extras package which also installs a number of other useful packages:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Once that is done, launch DumpHD by simply running the “dumphd.sh” script by either double-clicking on it and select “Run” when prompted, or in a terminal, change to where you extracted the DumpHD program and type in:

$ sh ./dumphd.sh

When loaded, you will be presented with the following interface:

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At the top-right of the window, there is the Source Browse button. Click on it and a new window will appear. In that window, type in or select “/media/cdrom” and then click OK. After a few seconds, the disc should be identified and you will see the window change as follows:

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Now all you need to do is click on the Destination Browse button, specify a place to store the decrypted movie and then click the Dump button to start the whole process! Once finished, you will have every video title found on the disc dumped in its originally encoded (video-wise) format, but without DRM. You can then use MPlayer to play these files directly. Generally the movie itself is the largest file, so in the case of my example, it’s the “00000.m2ts” file. I can play it simply with:

$ mplayer -fs 00000.m2ts

The -fs parameter plays the movie full-screen. I can toggle audio tracks using the hash (#) key (as for some reason, English is generally not the first audio track on the disc).

Remember that Blu-ray movies are very large. In my example, “The Island” is a good 21GB! It’s now up to you to decide whether or not you want to provide storage for your rips of this size, or whether or not you want to compress them down to save space. In my case, I was able to compress the movie down to about 4GB with negligible quality loss at a bitrate of 1200 using the x264 codec. I’ll probably increase this bitrate and allow the filesize to go to 8GB so I can maintain as near-perfect image quality to the original Blu-ray as possible. I personally choose to preserve the audio tracks as-is without down-converting them – they really don’t eat up that much space – a few hundred megabytes only.

Happy ripping!

Woah! After I’ve ripped the movie, it plays but it’s all corrupted! What’s going on?

The movie you have ripped is likely protected using BD+ protection. This is where some or much of the movie is deliberately corrupted to annoy you. I have written a guide on how to deal with this and correct the corruption here.

Unlike when DVD first appeared, and probably thanks to the battle that was waged between the HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats, the provision of high-definition media and associated players has dropped in price rather dramatically to drive acceptance. I have a fairly large original DVD collection, but I am a quality freak and in light of high-definition releases, I loathed the idea of buying a DVD version of a given movie knowing that for about the same price I can buy a high-definition version.

So I decided to buy a Blu-ray drive. One of the cheapest options on the market is LG’s internal drive option called the “Super Multi Blue Blu-ray Disc & HD DVD-ROM Drive”, model GGC-H20L for about AUD$150. This review is my experience using the drive under Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex.

My unit came packaged in a slightly larger-than-usual box with attractive print on it. I normally prefer to buy an OEM drive since this packaging generally always ends up in the bin, so I’d rather save some money. Unfortunately my retailer didn’t have any, so I had to buy the retail box.

In a nutshell, this unit is able to read HD-DVD and Blu-Ray media as well as DVD and CD media, but it can only write to DVD and CD media (all the usual formats you expect, so I won’t detail them here). This suits me fine as these days I rarely write any discs except for giving someone a copy of Ubuntu on disc, and I just needed the ability to read Blu-ray movies that I buy.

Out of the box, the package contains the drive itself, a program disc for Windows only with disc burning software, a backup application, a simple DVD authoring application and PowerDVD for movie playback (this disc was promptly thrown in the bin – I don’t need it). There is also a printed manual, four mounting screws and a serial ATA (SATA) cable and a serial ATA Molex-to-SATA power adapter cable provided.

This is my first optical drive with a SATA interface – everything before this used the usual IDE cable, so it was a pleasure to connect the drive and banish the last of my parallel cables to the cable bucket. General installation was a breeze – as typical as any other optical drive.

Powering up, the system recognised the drive straight away and Ubuntu started booting. Ubuntu saw the drive right away and mounted it as my CDROM drive. It still gets referred to as /media/cdrom which I could change, but honestly, there’s little point to that (and maybe I’m being just a bit lazy because typing “cdrom” is faster and easier than typing “blu-ray”).

The tray of the drive ejects very quietly which is a nice change from my old Sony DVD-RW unit and upon closing makes that satisfying deep “ker-klump” noise akin to the quiet closing of a door on an expensive luxury car. The activity light on the front of the unit is a lone bright-blue LED. Of course, a Blu-ray capable unit with a blue light – brilliant…

To do some basic testing, I stuck in a regular CD. The drive detected the disc within seconds and Ubuntu popped up the icon for it on my desktop. No faster or slower than my Sony drive. I was able to read the CD without any issue.

I repeated the test with a DVD disc. Again, no issues. The disc was identified and opened within seconds.

I don’t have any HD-DVD discs handy, so I was unable to test this feature (not that you can buy any of these discs out there anymore anyway).

I then inserted one of my newly purchased Blu-Ray movie discs. Again, the disc was detected within seconds and an icon appeared for it on my desktop (note that reading Blu-ray discs requires the UDF 2.5 filesystem which Ubuntu Intrepid thankfully has already).

Click for full size (228K)

The Autorun had no idea what to do with the disc:

I was half expecting the laser to spend a few extra seconds determining whether or not the disc was Blu-ray or HD-DVD, but clearly a delay is not needed, despite using a different laser. I was impressed. Again, I was able to read and navigate the Blu-ray disc and I was also able to copy files from it without any issue. The drive transferred data at approximately 8.8MB per second. I was able to read off 500MB worth of data in about 1 minute. In the case of the movie disc I inserted, the actual feature is a 21GB file which would have taken approximately 40 minutes to copy.

Burning discs was completed with usual success. I burnt an Ubuntu ISO to a CD using Brasero without any issue. Burning a DVD was effortless also. Again, burn time seemed to be no different to my old Sony unit.

The drive has Lightscribe ability as well, to burn funky labels onto Lightscribe-compatible discs, but as I did not have any such discs handy, I was unable to test this feature.

In operation, the drive is very quiet. Any noise it does make is certainly being overshadowed by the noise of my PC’s fan and the room air-conditioning I’m using right now.

Predictably I was unable to PLAY any of the Blu-ray movies I purchased due to the fact that the DRM used on these movies is vastly different to that on DVD’s, and that Linux has no official support for Blu-ray – both Totem and MPlayer certainly had no idea what the media was.

Instead, my primary use of this drive will be to make file backups of decrypted Blu-ray movies I purchase and watch them that way instead (because I’m a sucker for high-definition). I have written up a separate post detailing how I did this, the results of which are playable in both Totem and MPlayer – you can read it here.

All up, I think this is a good value for money drive. It’s cheap, cheerful and does the job as advertised. At the moment, it appears the only widespread use of the Blu-ray medium is for movies (and PlayStation3 titles). Outside of that, my drive will ultimately still spend most of its time reading DVD and CD mediums. Who knows, maybe PC games and Linux distros will eventually be released on Blu-ray?

Outside of that, the drive is reasonably future-proof with the ability to be updated via firmware updates, although such updates are Windows-only executables on the LG website, which is a shame. Still, it’s better than having to deal with a DOS boot floppy of old, and it is possible to run the firmware update through a virtual Windows session or via Wine. At the time of writing, my drive was delivered with version 1.03 of the firmware.

Aside from its enforcement of DRM, the Windows-only firmware upgrades and its decidely Volvo-like aesthetics (it’s boxy, but it’s good), there’s nothing really to fault this drive. I give it a hearty thumbs up.

Review score: 8 out of 10

So, to that end, here is an update to my previous HowTo for connecting a Bluetooth mobile phone to Ubuntu Gusty or Ubuntu Hardy.

EDIT August 2009: If you are wanting to connect your phone using Ubuntu Jaunty or later, you should follow these updated instructions instead of this article.

Pre-requisites:

• Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone (I’m using a Nokia N95 in this guide).
• USB Bluetooth adapter or PC with built-in Bluetooth such as a modern-day notebook. Your adapter must be Bluetooth 1.2 compliant or higher.
• A PC with Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Intrepid Ibex installed.

Difficulty level: Mind-bogglingly easy. Point and click, essentially!

1. First, plug in your USB Bluetooth adapter or enable it on your notebook. Ubuntu should recognise it immediately with no need for additional drivers. You can optionally confirm that by jumping into a terminal as issuing the lsusb command to list your USB devices:

   $ lsusb | grep tooth
   Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1310:0001 Roper Class 1 Bluetooth Dongle
   $

2. You’ll be happy to know that Ubuntu comes pre-installed with everything you need to get Bluetooth running, and if the driver is loaded successfully, you will see a Bluetooth icon appear in your system tray, awaiting your bidding.
   .



3. Do a single left-mouse click on the Bluetooth icon and a menu appears showing “Setup new device…”.
   .
   



4. Once you choose the menu option, the Bluetooth Device Wizard will appear.
   .
   
   .
   
5. Click Forward and your system will begin scanning for local Bluetooth devices. Whatever it finds will be shown in the list (note that this may take a few seconds to update). One of them should be your Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone (which will initially appears as its MAC address, but then after a few seconds will change to the name assigned to that device). If you cannot see your phone after a few seconds, make sure that Bluetooth is enabled on your handset and try again from Step 3.
   .
   
   .
   
   
6. Select your phone and his Forward. Ubuntu will then generate a random PIN number and commence a pairing request with your phone. Your phone handset, meantime, should immediately prompt you to enter the randomly-generated PIN number.
   .
   
   .
   
7. Once you have entered the PIN code on your phone, Ubuntu will complete the pairing request and that’s it – pairing done!
   .
   
   .
   
8. Now we can start doing things, such as file transfers. Go back to the Bluetooth icon in your System Tray and this time do a single right-mouse click on it. A new menu appears. Go to “Browse files on device…”.
   .
   
   .
9. You will be asked which of your paired Bluetooth devices you wish to browse. Choose your phone from the list and click the “Connect” button.
   .
   
   .
   
10. After a brief delay, a Nautilus window should pop up showing your phone’s “drives”. In the case of my Nokia N95, the phone’s internal memory is presented a Windows-esque C: drive and the memory card is presented as E: drive. What appears here is ultimately down to how your phone manufacturer has implemented the filesystem.
    .
    
    .
11. At this time, an icon for your phone will also be added to your desktop (I use a custom icon on mine):
    .
    
    .
12. Browse and copy files as normal. When you are done, you should disconnect your phone by unmounting it with the Unmount or Eject right-mouse menu options (or the Eject icon next to your phone’s name in the Bookmark list).
    .
    
    .
13. And that’s it! Pat yourself on the back. Job done.

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Less widely known is that you don’t actually have to use these devices to get Mobile Broadband on the go. You can use your own 3G or HSDPA mobile phone if packet data is enabled on your phone plan. I have previously covered how to do this via Bluetooth and fiddling around with RFComm configuration and PPP chat scripts, but NONE of this is needed any longer under Ubuntu Intrepid.

EDIT August 2009: If you wish to setup your Nokia N95 using Bluetooth instead of a USB cable, then stop reading any further and refer to my updated article for Bluetooth using Ubuntu Jaunty.

Purpose: To setup a Nokia N95 (or similar 3G or HSDPA capable mobile phone) as a Mobile Broadband device to an Ubuntu Intrepid based laptop and connect to the Internet via a mobile network carrier.

Pros:

• Internet available anywhere at anytime (as long as you are in a signal area)
• Reasonably quick – faster than dial-up!
• True mobile Internet – you are not physically connected to a wall socket – you can surf the Internet while you drive your car, or ride a train.
• Convenient

Cons:

• Eats up your mobile’s battery.
• Internet access via mobile phones can be costly.
• You cannot receive voice calls whilst using your mobile phone as a Mobile Broadband device.

Pre-requisites:

• Any 3G or HSDPA capable mobile phone. In this example I will be using my Nokia N95 which is both 3G and HSDPA capable.
• A data plan with your mobile provider. In this example, I will be using Vodafone Australia.
• USB lead to connect your phone directly to your PC (Bluetooth cannot be used in this example, at least not yet, since Network Manager does not yet support connecting through RFComm (to allow connection to a Bluetooth device) – when this support has been added, I’ll update this article. There is a bug reported on Ubuntu Launchpad regarding this already).
• Laptop or desktop PC with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex installed. In this example, I will be using my EeePC 701 legtop.

Difficulty rating: You could do it in the dark. With bells on.

WARNING: Internet access via your mobile phone can be a costly exercise. Make sure you are fully aware of how much your provider charges for packet data access so you don’t get any nasty surprises on your bill. In my case, Vodafone Australia charge $0.90 per 5 minutes of access or part thereof, regardless of whether data was downloaded or not in that 5 minutes. There is no upper data limit.

1. Fire up Ubuntu on your laptop/desktop as normal.
   .
2. In your system tray, look for the Network Connection icon and do a single right-mouse click on it. You will be presented with a menu. From it, choose “Edit Connections…”:
   .



3. You will then be presented with the Network Connections window, of which you should already see at least one wired connection there (your PC’s ethernet port):
   ..
4. We’re not actually interested in this section, however – we want the Mobile Broadband tab, so click on that and you will see the following:
   ..
5. Now click on the “Add” button. You will be presented with a Wizard for setting up a new Mobile Broadband connection. Click Forward until you see the following window:
   .
   .
   
6. Choose the country and provider relevant to you (Australia & Vodafone in my case) and then click Forward.
   .
7. You’ll be asked to confirm your selection. Confirm it by clicking on the Apply button. You should now see Vodafone listed in the Network Connections window.
   .
   .
8. Now click the “Close” button. We’re done for this part.
   .
9. Connect your USB data lead to your mobile phone and then connect it to your PC.
   .
10. Nokia N95′s generally prompt for what mode you would like the phone to be in. Most people would plump for “Data transfer” mode to utilise the phone as a USB flash drive, but we’re not going to do that. Choose “PC Suite” instead.

    
    Click for full size (201K)
    .

11. Confirm that the phone connected to Ubuntu as a USB ACM device by checking the output of dmesg. In a terminal window, type in the following:

    $ tail /var/log/messages

    …which will show the last 10 lines. You should see something similar to this:

    Nov 19 11:16:37 eeepc701 kernel: [ 9987.192045] usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
    Nov 19 11:16:37 eeepc701 kernel: [ 9987.406518] usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
    Nov 19 11:16:39 eeepc701 kernel: [ 9989.149546] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
    Nov 19 11:16:39 eeepc701 kernel: [ 9989.153658] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
    Nov 19 11:16:39 eeepc701 kernel: [ 9989.154256] cdc_acm: v0.26:USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters
    Nov 19 11:16:39 eeepc701 kernel: [ 9989.241789] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_ether
    Nov 19 11:16:39 eeepc701 kernel: [ 9989.272359] usb 1-2: bad CDC descriptors
    Nov 19 11:16:39 eeepc701 kernel: [ 9989.273520] usbcore: registered new interface driver rndis_host
    Nov 19 11:16:39 eeepc701 kernel: [ 9989.292404] usb 1-2: bad CDC descriptors
    Nov 19 11:16:39 eeepc701 kernel: [ 9989.292965] usbcore: registered new interface driver rndis_wlan

    (I’m not entirely sure why I got the “bad CDC descriptors” error, but this didn’t stop the phone from setting itself up, so I ignored it).
    .

12. When Ubuntu detects the ACM device, it recognises that there is a Mobile Broadband device connected and it will enable Vodafone for selection from the Left-Click menu of the Network Connections system tray icon.

    

    .
    Additionally, you will see that the phone itself will show a USB icon confirming that it is talking to the PC via USB.

    
    Click for full size (310K)
    .

13. Upon choosing Vodafone from the menu, a PPP session will immediately be automatically started in the background (you can see it occur in /var/log/messages) and once handshaking with your provider is complete, Ubuntu will confirm that you are connected to the Internet via your mobile provider:
    .
    



14. You should now be able to open your browser and get to the Internet without a problem! As you surf, depending on your model of phone, it may indicate data packets transferring with an icon on the phone’s display. In my case, the 3G icon lights up.
    .
15. When you are done with the Internet, don’t forget to shutdown the connection by going back to the single-left-click menu of the Network Connections icon in the System Tray and select “Disconnect” from the menu.
    .
16. That’s it! Happy mobile Internetting!

Luckily, this one is easily fixed.

1. Go to Edit->Preferences, and the Preferences window appears.
2. Now click on the Composer Preferences icon on the left and then click on the Spell Checking tab at the top. You will now see the available languages to do spell checking with. At least one of them will already be checked.
3. The issue is that despite the option being checked, it’s not actually checked internally within Evolution. All you have to do is un-check your language and re-check it, then click Close which will re-write the preferences.

You might need to restart Evolution again (I needed to after re-installing SpamAssassin), but you will now find that Evolution is now correctly doing its spell checking again.

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For this comparison, I have pitted the following versions of Ubuntu and Vista against each other:

• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1 and all system updates to 29th October 2008
• Ubuntu Linux 8.04.1 Hardy Heron with all system updates to 29th October 2008
• Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Release Candidate with all system updates to 29th October 2008 (just for kicks)

The tests would be simple. A fresh vanilla install of Ubuntu and Vista doing four of the most common things a typical user might do everyday:

1. Nothing
2. View a web page
3. Listen to an MP3 music track
4. Play Solitaire

To keep things as fair as possible, I used Virtualbox 2.0.4 and created three VM’s each sporting 1GB RAM, 32MB video RAM and an 8GB HDD file each, except for Vista which needed more HDD estate, so it got a 20GB HDD file instead (this is not boding well for Vista already!).

The Ubuntu installs each had a 512MB swap partition created while Vista went ahead and stormed in with an automatically-created 2GB swap file. Shouldn’t be an issue as the tests are not going to tax the OS’ anyway.

All installed OS’ are the 32-bit versions. All had the Virtualbox Guest Additions drivers added, but since these drivers do not support acceleration, OpenGL and DirectX eye-candy (such as Compiz in Ubuntu and Aero in Vista) were automatically disabled by the system.

The host hardware for the VM’s is an Intel Quad-core Q9450 based machine with 8GB RAM running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy Heron.

Installed Disk Usage

So let’s start with the simple stuff  – how much disk space does a vanilla install of each OS chew up? The following table shows a completely stock installation of each OS, including subsequently downloaded update files:

Ubuntu has been dubbed by some to be the “Windows” of Linux distros in terms of its overall weight, but it’s anorexic compared to Vista. Why does any OS need over 10GB of disk space just for itself? Consider also that Ubuntu’s installed space also includes a full office suite – not even Vista has that, yet it’s so much bigger.

It was interesting to note that Ubuntu Intrepid consumed a whole 400MB less disk space than Ubuntu Hardy, however part of this could be attributed to possibly less extra update files downloaded compared to Hardy. In any case, both are well under 5GB, let alone 10GB!

So far one point to Linux and a big fat zero to Vista.

Idle RAM Usage

With disk usage now established, how does the RAM stack up? Each desktop was at its standard setup with standard wallpaper, panels, widgets, etc and only the resource manager window on-screen:

Vista SP1	411MB
Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy	122MB
Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid RC	142MB

Another win for Ubuntu by a good 250MB. Also, again a surprise showing by Intrepid that despite the smaller HDD footprint, its resource usage was 20MB greater than Hardy, but what was alarming was that Vista was already using 387MB of its 2GB swap file while both Ubuntu installations had not touched theirs…!

Two points for Ubuntu, none for Vista.

Browsing a Common Web Site

Now to up the ante – all three installations now used their default web browser (Firefox 3.0.3 for Ubuntu, Internet Exploiter, uh, Explorer 7.0.6 for Vista) to view a common website containing Flash, animated GIFs, lots of frames, blocks of formatted text and graphics – the Sydney Morning Herald homepage.

All three OS’ do not have Flash installed as standard and thus did not play any of the Flash content, however the rest of the page did load and render successfully.

The memory usage now stands at:

Vista SP1	490MB
Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy	179MB
Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid RC	198MB

A notable jump by all three candidates in this case, as one might expect, though while Ubuntu jumped up some 55MB, Vista jumped up an extra 80MB.

Curiously, Vista’s CPU usage jumped up and down a lot while the site sat idle and the spike of usage you see at the end of the graph is when the site automatically refreshed itself. No such major jumps from Ubuntu.

Another point for Ubuntu for a total of three. Vista is yet to score.

Listening to an MP3 Music Track

Browsing any website would just not be fun without some background music. Using the default music player (Totem 2.22.1 and 2.24.2 for Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid respectively, Windows Media Player 11 for Vista), I perused the SMH website (without clicking on any new links) and listened to the same 3.3MB MP3 music track for 1 minute to allow memory usage to level out.

Vista SP1	560MB
Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy	211MB
Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid RC	237MB

Memory usage has increased by nearly 40MB on Ubuntu but by 70MB on Vista. This is not really too surprising given the heavyweight that is Media Player versus the simpler Totem, though Totem did prompt me to download and install the GStreamer Extras MP3 codec, so there’s extra memory usage there too.

The observant among you might say that it would be a fairer comparison to compare Windows Media Player with Rhythmbox, however I decided to go with whatever launched as the default MP3 player and at the end of the day, all that matters is that I can hear my music and Ubuntu has delivered 30MB ahead here.

Four points for Ubuntu, still none for Vista.

Playing Solitaire

Surfing the ‘net is hard work and what better way to unwind than with a relaxing game of Solitaire. In this test, I played Solitaire for two minutes whilst listening to my MP3 track and leaving the web browser open with our self-refreshing homepage.

Vista SP1	605MB
Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy	224MB
Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid RC	244MB

Really, Solitaire isn’t a terribly complex application and Ubuntu’s Solitaire bears a remarkable resemblance to all the Windows versions… except Vista which was drastically revamped with extra visual effects, new card textures, etc. No wonder the memory footprint is so much bigger, but a 45MB difference??

Ubuntu Hardy went up 13MB and Intrepid didn’t even break double-figures with only a 7MB increase.

We could keep testing common applications until the cows come home, but I think it’s pretty clear that the established pattern is that Microsoft Vista uses up much more memory and disk space on average than Ubuntu Linux.

Probably what was the most worrying here was that Vista’s swap usage had increased to 692MB and there was an unusually high amount of CPU usage, while both Ubuntu’s had left their swap on the plate, uneaten.

So the final score is five points for the trim and healthy Ubuntu and still nothing, nada, zip for the obese whale that is Vista.

Conclusion

I think some people might say all I’ve done is confirm what everyone already knew, and perhaps that is the case, but it still made for an interesting comparison and certainly highlights that Microsoft need to do some serious fat trimming.

For those that are interested, the host machine used up a total of 4GB RAM to run all three VM’s simultaneously plus a bunch of other apps that I had running at the time of testing, and it only nibbled at 44MB of swap.

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Why not setup your own personal local Ubuntu Repository? Here’s how to make one to use either on a personal web server or carry with you on a portable USB (or similar) hard-drive.

In this example, we’re going to make a repository using a great little tool called apt-mirror and use it to mirror the 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (AMD64) versions of Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy Heron and 8.10 Intrepid Ibex ONLY from an existing source mirror (thus ignoring any other architectures we’re not interested in). Our source mirror will be the Australian Ubuntu Mirror at Internode, but you can use any mirror you like.

1. On your Ubuntu desktop or server, get into a terminal and type in the following:
   

   $ sudo apt-get install apt-mirror

2. Once installed, edit the config file with:

   $ sudo nano /etc/apt/mirror.list
   

   ...here’s my config file that I use on my own file server:

   ############# config ###################
   # set base_path    /var/spool/apt-mirror
   #
   # if you change the base path you must create the directories below with write privlages
   #
   # set mirror_path  $base_path/mirror
   # set skel_path    $base_path/skel
   # set var_path     $base_path/var
   # set cleanscript $var_path/clean.sh
   # set defaultarch  <running host architecture>
   set nthreads     3
   set _tilde 0
   ############## end config ##############
   
   # Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy Heron 32-bit
   deb-i386 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-i386 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-i386 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-i386 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-security main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-i386 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
   
   # Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy Heron 64-bit
   deb-amd64 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-amd64 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-amd64 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-amd64 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-security main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-amd64 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
   
   # Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex 32-bit
   deb-i386 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu intrepid main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-i386 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu intrepid-updates main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-i386 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu intrepid-backports main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-i386 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu intrepid-security main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-i386 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu intrepid-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
   
   # Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex 64-bit
   deb-amd64 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu intrepid main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-amd64 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu intrepid-updates main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-amd64 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu intrepid-backports main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-amd64 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu intrepid-security main restricted universe multiverse
   deb-amd64 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu intrepid-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
   
   # Ubuntu source
   #deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
   #deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
   #deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
   #deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main restricted universe multiverse
   #deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
   
   clean http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu

3. The above config sets you up to download both the 32-bit and 64-bit repos for both Hardy and Intrepid only – nothing else. If you like, you can also add other repos such as Medibuntu, Virtualbox, etc – anyone who has a standard Apt repository.Note the commented out deb-src lines. I don’t use source, but if you want it, just uncomment them and point them to Internode.

   If you wish to use a different source mirror, simply substitute the URL as appropriate.

4. Save and exit. You then kick it off with:

   $ sudo /usr/bin/apt-mirror

   …and go and order several pizzas, because this will take a good while to finish. To update your repo with anything new since last run, just re-run the apt-mirror command. Alternatively, configure cron to execute the command for you. I have mine set to run at 2am every night.

   Here’s my log from this morning’s run:

   Downloading 222 index files using 3 threads...
   Begin time: Thu Oct 23 02:00:01 2008
   [3]... [2]... [1]... [0]...
   End time: Thu Oct 23 02:01:27 2008
   
   Proceed indexes: [PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP]
   
   276.4 MiB will be downloaded into archive.
   Downloading 111 archive files using 3 threads...
   Begin time: Thu Oct 23 02:01:51 2008
   [3]... [2]... [1]... [0]...
   End time: Thu Oct 23 02:07:16 2008
   
   318.5 MiB in 108 files and 0 directories can be freed.
   Run /var/spool/apt-mirror/var/clean.sh for this purpose.

   …which tells me 276.4MB of new files were downloaded and 318.5MB of old files are now redundant and should be deleted. Again, I have a cron job setup to run that advised cleanup script for me.

5. To view the downloaded files. just go to /var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror and you will see a new directory there called mirror.internode.on.net and within that will be your parent mirror’s directory structure, in this case, exactly how Internode have their structure setup.
   .
6. Once that’s all done, just setup a virtual website with Apache to allow you to see the downloaded data via a browser and then on your desktop go:

   $ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mylocalrepo.list

   …and enter the appropriate URL’s to your local website (note you can call the custom sources file whatever you want as long as it ends in “.list”). If you setup a virtual server called http://localhost and point its root to /var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/mirror.internode.on.net/ then you would enter the following into your sources.list:

   # My personal Ubuntu mirror
   deb http://localhost/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy main multiverse restricted universe
   deb http://localhost/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-backports main multiverse restricted universe
   deb http://localhost/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-security main multiverse restricted universe
   deb http://localhost/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-updates main multiverse restricted universe

   …OR if you’re not using a web server, then set it up to use local files instead, eg:

   # My personal Ubuntu mirror
   deb file:/var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy main multiverse restricted universe
   deb file:/var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-backports main multiverse restricted universe
   deb file:/var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-security main multiverse restricted universe
   deb file:/var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu hardy-updates main multiverse restricted universe

   If you’re using Intrepid, then change all above references to “hardy” with “intrepid”.

7. Don’t forget to then edit /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out all the standard deb lines out. Additionally, if you don’t want to use a particular section of the repository, such as Backports or Proposed, comment out that line in your custom mylocalrepo.list too by placing a hash at the start of the line.
   .
8. Save and exit and then update your system with your new repo list with:

   $ sudo apt-get update

   …and all subsequent updates to your system will now come from your local repository. If you’re using a 32-bit system, it will automatically use the 32-bit data you downloaded, ditto 64-bit.

9. Pat yourself on the back. Job well done!

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