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Following the green star

The Pasporta Servo (Passport Service) is a hospitality network for Esperanto speakers. Since my friend Andy and I are about to embark on a two-month trip to Europe, and because we’re Esperantists, we thought we should take advantage of this great resource. There’s just one problem: this year’s edition of the address book hasn’t been published yet. Normally it’s published early in the year, but since they’re making an online version of what was previously only a book, things got complicated, apparently.

Andy and I just posted a request for hosts on the lernu.net forums, and we’ve already gotten a response from a young guy near Paris who we can probably stay with for at least a few nights. Also, I decided to buy last year’s edition of the Pasporta Servo, which Esperanto-USA was still offering for sale. I don’t think using it will be a big problem; this year’s version can’t be very different. While I was buying Esperanto-related stuff, I also bought a little Esperanto flag and some buttons so other Esperantists can identify us. Seeing that flag just makes me so happy. I’m looking forward to staying with and befriending a lot of nice people.

To call friends and family at home or future friends in Europe at low, low rates, I set out to install the Internet telephony program Ekiga on our Eee PC. It wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be, though. The EeeUser wiki has a whole big page about adding software repositories, but none of the ones listed on that page had Ekiga, so they were pretty useless. What to do, what to do?

I had read somewhere that the customized version of Xandros that runs on the Eee PC is based on Debian Etch, so I decided to add the Etch repositories to see what would happen. If my system got hosed, I could just reboot and restore everything to the factory configuration. So I added the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib

The EeeUser wiki page wasn’t entirely useless. It taught me about the importance of pinning, which gives different priority levels to different repositories. I edited /etc/apt/preferences to give the standard Eee PC repositories a higher pin priority than the default 500:

Package: *
Pin: origin update.eeepc.asus.com
Pin-Priority: 950

Then I went to Synaptic to install Ekiga, but I kept getting an error message about being unable to parse /var/lib/dpkg/status. I tried some fixes as suggested on the wiki, but the problem persisted. I even restored the original settings, but to no avail. So I just tried using apt-get on the command line, and that worked. Apparently I also could have just scrolled down to Ekiga in Synaptic. The message apparently only comes up if I install a package after entering a search keyword.

Anyway, Ekiga seems to be working fine except for lag problems on my end and sound quality problems on other people’s end. The latter, I hope, can be fixed by adjusting the equalization of the microphone, i.e., giving it more treble and less bass. But I can’t seem to find a utility to do that. More research is needed. In the meantime, I have set Ekiga to start automatically, so friends and family who want to call me should be able to whenever the computer is on.

Self-explanatory: japanesebirdcookingspaghetti.com.

Dork Yearbook is a collection of dorky photos of dorks when they were dorky children. I’m glad I wasn’t that dorky as a little kid. (Via waxy.org)