Bristol Wireless News

Ben Green reports that there is a metapackage available for the forthcoming Bristol Wireless Linux distribution, which is based on Debian’s latest ‘etch‘ version.

The version available for testing, codenamed 0.1.0, can currently only be obtained by people connected to Bristol Wireless network, since it resides on the magico server, which is not accessible to the public. However, those inside the network will be able to try it out by adding the server to their sources.list file and executing the following command:

$apt-get update
$apt-get install bristolwireless

Furthermore, Ben adds that potential testers will need Debian current testing distribution, codenamed ‘etch’ and debian-multimedia.org sources in your sources.list too and that, at the moment, it should just work from a basic etch install with the X11 graphical desktop on it.

As part of the project, Ben has also written a dedicated wiki page on creating a metapackage and Debian repository.

Returning to Ben’s announcement email, it’s obvious he’s put a lot of hard work into this project and now needs the help of others to take the project forward, or as he states: “Please test, test!”

Ultimately, Bristol Wireless hopes to install this, its own Linux distribution, on the refurbished machines it supplies to potential network users and others.

Following the recent exceptionally stormy weather of the last couple of weeks, Bristol Wireless’ Lloyd Cohen and Rich Higgs have paid a visit to Holroyd House on Windmill Hill – our most exposed location – and Armada House in Kingsdown to check the condition of the bolts holding our antennae to the buildings.

While they were there, Lloyd writes, they set up a new 5.8GHz connection to St. Werburghs Community Centre (affectionately known as WCC), our operations base. On Monday Lloyd also spent some time up a ladder in the freezing wind swapping out the client end of this link at WCC and, after the resolving of some software problems, the link went live on Tuesday.

This means that servers hosted in St Werburghs are now ‘on the backbone’ as it were, improving both VoIP services and website hosting.

As of 23rd January, Bristol City Council is changing its website address to make it easier for visitors to remember and use.

From that date the new web address for the council will be http://www.bristol.gov.uk. The hyphen and ‘city’ previously used in the old address, http://www.bristol-city.gov.uk, are being dropped to shorten the address and to bring it more into line with the format used by the majority of other local authorities.

The new address will be used for all of the council’s specific departments, e.g. libraries, which will now take the new, shorter address, e.g. www.bristol.gov.uk/libraries.

The move will doubtless also please followers of at least one of the city’s two football teams, i.e. those playing in blue and white, who no longer have to type the name of their longstanding rivals into their browsers when visiting the virtual Counts Louse!

After lengthy installation, testing and all the bureaucratic hoop-jumping with Ofcom and other bodies with the kind assistance of Westcom, Bristol Wireless’ 5.8 GHz backbone infrastructure has completed all its testing and legal procedures and is now live.

Bristol Wireless’ network coverage

As you can see from the above map, we have wide coverage of the central Bristol area with our 5.8 & 2.4 GHz infrastructure in Easton, Kingsdown and Windmill Hill. The Knowle West Web network (shown by the small red area near the foot of the map) is also linked into the Bristol Wireless network, which in turn connects to the BMEX network at the University of Bristol’s Merchant Venturers Building.

A quick bit of calculation with an OS map reveals that our rooftop level access gives Bristol Wireless network coverage of approx. 15 sq. km. To the best of our knowledge, this gives us the largest community wireless network in the country… unless, of course, you know differently, in which case, please contact us.

Today we bid a fond farewell and wish bon voyage to May, otherwise known as Yu Wei Li, who is returning home to Canton province in China.

May studied global computing and multimedia at the University of Bristol before she started volunteering for Bristol Wireless at the end of 2005. Although she’d never used Linux before, she went through the usual Bristol Wireless volunteer induction programme, involving doing operating system installations on donated and refurbished hardware, and quickly came to realise its power. When it came to making use of her particular skills, May led the development work on the video jukebox currently being tested before being let loose on the Bristol Wireless network.

Last Friday night we had a farewell gathering at the Windmill pub for May, at which she was presented with a new Bristol Wireless T-shirt as a momento of her time with us (we now hope to see it being proudly worn in various parts of China – Ed.).

May, we’ll miss you and wish you all the best for the future. Please stay in touch.

After extensive testing behind the scenes, Bristol Wireless’ website has undergone a makeover and is now wearing its new clothes in public. In addition, the more observant will note that the Bristol Wireless logo in the top right of each page has also changed to the design we commissioned from Beef. We have nevertheless retained the ‘in your aerial’ strapline which roots us firmly as a Bristol organisation.

Your correspondent would like to thank our web wizard Chris Wach for all his work on the update. When are we upgrading Wordpress Chris?

Bristol Wireless’ networking guru Lloyd Cohen has posted to our daily list covering what he did before the Christmas holidays with Debian Linux, a pile of recycled computers and two accommodating locations in Windmill Hill and St Werburghs.

He starts by saying that before Christmas we installed two new LTSP suites.

The first was at Holroyd House on Windmill Hill, in the community room at the base of the building. This entailed BW volunteers Jim Farrand and Lloyd dropping a run of weatherproof ethernet cable down the side of the building from our equipment in the liftroom on the rooftop 18 floors above. The suite comprises a server (configured by Ben Green) in the lift room and 3 diskless thin clients booting on the ground floor. Holroyd House is just one hop away from our interconnect at BMEX in Bristol University, giving it one of the best internet connections in the city.

The second suite was installed at Mina Park Hostel. Lloyd spent a day running cable through the building to the rooftop where Lloyd installed an all-in-one wifi box client which seems to be working well. Although Lloyd has had to revisit the hostel to correct a loose cable – the occupants seem happy and are using the system. The server is a recycled Dell PowerEdge server, the two clients are redundant machines recycled as thin clients. Several of the permanent residents are considering running extra cable through the building at their own cost so they can extend the access to their rooms.