Sunday, November 28, 2010

Getting around Network Manager problems with WPA2

I ran into a problem with some certs some time ago and wanted to write about it for future reference. It was due to some certificate issues and it's formatting or something of the likes.

While the openssl command line utility had no problems with them, network manager refused them to be valid certs.

What was needed to be done was to remake them with openssl
$ openssl pkcs12 -in original.p12 -out temp.pem
$ openssl pkcs12 -in temp.pem -export -name "Repackaged PKCS#12 file" -out new.p12

All this was taken out from a bug report on launchpad.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Presenting Meego in Salta

This year I had the pleasure to attend the V Jornadas de Software Libre in Salta (http://5jsl.saltalug.org.ar). My participation involved the presentation of Meego to the local community.

As the events of the day to day life transcended due to the timing of my involvement and the pile of work I had coming along, I was unable to attend day 1 of the event, making myself available to travel and arrive for day 2 that Saturday morning.

The event was organised in such a way to have all the talks go one after the other in a single auditorium and have an outside area with some activities such as quizzes and first person shooters.

My talk about Meego was one of the last ones to go on stand, the attendance was rather good and people seemed keen to listen to what I had to say.

The talk was a run through of how Meego came to be, how it will evolve, the importance of a common base ground to work from, how the common base ensures applications will be able to cross over through the Meego verticals and most importantly, how to activate the local community in order for it to be involved. Many things could be done with Meego in its current state, ranging from creating local customisations from it adapting it to work best with the tools local to us, all the way to application development or translations.

As an addendum I gave a really quick introduction in how AppUp Center could facilitate distributing a developer's applications if they came to be with the added benefit of having them being validated by a team dedicated to do so.

My talk was preceded by one talk regarding Tuquito, named after how they call fireflies in Tucuman. The presenter was the current project leader. He also gave a walk through of the history and what Tuquito aims to be. Commenting the Tuquito Urbano movement which basically enables the local community with technology needed for today.

Tuquito is a distribution, spinned off from Ubuntu with many customisations made for universities, low powered machines and our local culture. They have enabled the ExoMate's in all their iterations to work well with Tuquito and have come in contact with many educational institutions for its distribution.

My comment regarding Tuquito comes with a stance, the leader, Mario, was rather interested in Moblin at the moment and some talks came later to be about making a Tuquito distribution using the Meego base (core). We came to agreement to get some talks going closer to the end of the year.

The community in the region (SaltaLug) was mostly interested in Meego, and wanted to start seeing some talks or workshops to develop for Meego, I commented on the possibility of doing that during next years event.

Afterwards, during the after event, which was basically a barbecue with all the organizers and presenters, we had a fair share on how to enable Meego in the local community.

The full list of talks can be found here.