I took some pictures during the unpacking that I thought I would share…

Unfortunately the ruling dictatorship had other ideas. It followed its usual tactics of hiring thugs to scare off the voters. It prevented voters from voting unless they saw that the ballot was marked for the National Democratic Party (which is neither nationalistic nor democratic in case you hadn’t guessed) and arrested anyone who demanded their rights with too loud a voice.

One asks himself; How can change come about while this police state continues to disregard the law and terrorize its populace? And why do western powers (who claim that they promote freedom and democracy) continue to support this corrupt and evil government both financially and politically?

It has been my observation that people rarely are granted freedom. They usually have to wrester it from the hands of their oppressors. They fight and struggle to gain their freedom, not necessarily by coup or war, sometimes just by being willing to die or be beaten or spend years in jail. The price of freedom is great, but freedom is worth it!

When the majority of Egyptians feel and act this way, then we will gain our freedom and Egypt once again will claim the throne of the Arab world. Then shall the world once again be bathed in the light that is Egypt. Then shall the Egyptians once again raise their heads and be proud to be Egyptians.

The data is truly beautiful and I thought It would make a lovely wallpaper. I stitched together various images to create a hi-resolution image which I am now sharing with the world.

After much deliberation and googling, I decided to go with the Optus network as it has reasonable coverage and has many resellers. I found Virgin Mobile offering their Huawei E1762 modem for $89. This is a 7.2MB modem. It has a microSD slot that supports up to 8GB cards and it even has an external antenna connection.

It works fine in ubuntu 9.10 (that’s all I have tested). But I first had to activate my account via a windows machine. I don’t believe that windows based activation is a necessary step except that I needed a working connection to get the correct setting to configure the ubuntu netbook.

I started off with the default setting offered by network-manager. I then edited the connection and changed the APN to: virginbroadband (was VirginInternet) and disabled all the authentication mechanisms except PAP.

And there you go… it works… I am using it to type this

Since grub2 is not a standard ubuntu installation (this was done by Dell) I don’t blame them. In all I find ubuntu 9.10 to be pleasant and in particular I am very happy with 3 things:

#!/bin/bash
# if the filesystem is available under /export/home, then serve that
if [ -d /export/home/$1 ] ; then
    echo "localhost:/export/home/$1
    exit 0
fi  
 
# else create a file system under /export/home
/usr/sbin/zfs create "export/home/$1" || exit 1
# and copy /etc/skel stuff
/bin/find /etc/skel/ -type f -exec cp {} /export/home/$1/ \;
chown -R $1 /export/home/$1/  
 
# now we can serve our newly created file system
echo "localhost:/export/home/$1" exit 0