Mozilla as a social moment of the open web

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Some reflection from recent MozTW offline events and PCHome magazine interview we gave:

The web applications and the browsers will become the so-called “the cloud computing” environment, where everything you wrote, song, and filmed are stored and shared between people. Every piece of information will be interconnected.

That’s what the trend had told me, from big things like Google building a browser, to small everyday things like identities and information being shared and transfered between websites.

Here is what Bob said when he heard that from me (well, not the exact words of course, since I am writing it down here in English):

If this is the trend, then the the role of Mozilla Foundation is to make sure what we believed in will be deeply embedded  into that future. The believes, like the web should be build upon open standards; identities should be decentralized; the information and the wisdom within should be easily preservable and sharable with the consent of the authors; etc.

Mozilla is a foundation that runs a software company, and a social moment of the open web.

Wow. Being a small contributer to the Firefox software, I never pictured so clearly this is what we do stands for. Glad to be one of us.

Mozilla, the social moment of open web. And they have plans… the fraking robots.

兩節課講完宇宙學簡介？

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English, with some background: Education reform is a huge issue in Taiwan, since the current system give too much pressure to the kids and almost everyone has too spend time (and money) on prep school.

“2009 high school curriculum guideline” just published last week, in physics, high school teachers are stocked because they are told by college professors (who made the guideline) to introduce almost everything about physics in ~28 hrs (100 min per week, 20 weeks a semester.) to first year students. In which the guideline recommends cosmology to be taught within 1 week.

新的 98 課綱，高一基礎物理一學期，建議教學時數 32 小時，其中「宇宙論簡介」建議教學時數是兩節課，不多不少 100 分鐘。詳細資料請看阿Samn的物理課本，就不貼過來了。

我的感想跟那位物理老師一樣。我非常難以想像同樣都是在台灣升學，最後變成優秀知識份子的大學老師，為什麼能在他們擁有主導權時還繼續保持，甚至加重這個輪迴。

Install Ubuntu with access to GRUB only

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在 BIOS 被鎖住、沒有光碟機也無法從 USB 開機的情況下安裝 Ubuntu Linux 的方法。

技術筆記，有需要再看。

The following method is what I work out when installing Ubuntu on a computer with following constraint:

  • BIOS is locked, so no booting from CD-ROM nor external USB drives, or
  • the CD-ROM drive itself is absent, and you don’t have a USB drive at hand.

Requirement:

  • Network access.
  • Target computer need to have GRUB already on board with access to it (It’s possible to install it from Windows/DOS but please have the files ready before you reboot.)
  • Access to boot partition (try recovery mode, i.e. append the word “single” after current kernel; if successful you can work directly from there)

In short, we would like to drop two files into the boot partition, and ask GRUB to boot it. After that the partition itself can be safely wipe out since files is used only in booting process.

Steps:

  1. Boot the machine
  2. Grab (wget) Miniual CD and Alternative Installer CD iso images
  3. Mount each of them, i.e. mount -o loop blah.iso /tmp/iso
  4. Copy /tmp/iso/initrd.gz from mini.iso to /boot/mini
  5. Copy /tmp/iso/installer/vmlinuz from alternative.iso to /boot/mini
  6. Reboot the machine, press Esc to enter grub boot menu.
  7. Press e to edit one of the entries
  8. Press e to edit the line begin with the word “kernel”. Change the kernel to /boot/mini/vmlinuz. Remove all kernel options.
  9. Press e to edit the line begin with the word “initrd”. Change the initrd image path to /boot/mini/initrd.gz
  10. Press b to boot.
  11. You should see Minimal Installer shows up. Minimal Installer will ask you what favor of Ubuntu you would like.

Why it works?

  • We need GRUB because BIOS is locked.
  • We need vmlinuz kernel from alternative installer because GRUB cannot access iso directly and minimal iso image doesn’t comes with a kernel.
  • We need initrd.gz from minimal installer because the alternative installer one checks existance of alternative installer CD-ROM (and data integrity of it)

On the security aspect, if you don’t want people tempering with your Linux box, lock BIOS, lock GRUB boot list, remove pre-installed single user boot menu entries, and attach an actual lock on the machine case. But then you are solely responsible to remember all the passwords you have set; no one can save you (without breaking anything) if you forget the password.

That’s all. Have fun with it.