It's holiday time and I though I'd revise the Ubuntu bread recipe.

I originally posted the recipe for Ubuntu bread on the Ubuntuforums cookbook thread in 2005. I was pleased when the recipe made its way into the official Ubuntu book.

Since then, I have experimented and learned a few new things about breads. I think the original recipe needs to be a little easier to make.

I have updated the recipe and improved upon the technique. The original recipe calls for a stiff dough that results in a very nice shape, but it is requires a lot of work to make and to shape. It also requires a little experimentation to obtain optimal cooking temperature and time. If you cook it too fast, you end up with a burned crust and an uncooked inside. If you cook it too slowly, you end up with a dry bread.

This dough is wetter and results in a dough that doesn't hold its shape as well, but it results in a dough that is much easier to handle and cook. I prefer the taste, too. It's chewier.

This dough is made without any kneading. So anybody can make it with ease. No special kitchen equipment is needed.

You may also make and shape the dough on one day and put it into the refrigerator. You can keep it there for up to three days before you bake it. Delaying the rising like this will improve the flavor of the bread and prolong the shelf life of the finished product. This may sound more complicated, but it is actually a lot easier to do. You can do most of the work right now and put it in the fridge until about three hours before you want to eat the bread.

Please make some and share it with others!

Ingredients:

1 teaspoon of yeast

1 cup of warm water.

2 eggs

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup vegetable oil

2 teaspoons salt (I use sea salt)

4 cups unbleached flour (I use Canadian all-purpose flour which contains high quality protein. U.S. all-purpose flour has less protein, so perhaps U.S. residents should use a mixture of all-purpose and bread flour)

Optional: 2 teaspoons of honey

Method:

Put the yeast into the warm water. Mix slightly and let it sit while you gather the other ingredients. Crack one egg into a bowl. Whisk it together. Remove about two tablespoons of it to a small bowl. Cover the small bowl and store it in the refrigerator. This will be used to brush the bread after it has risen, before it is baked and creates the shiny crust.

Crack the other egg into the bowl and add all the other ingredients. Mix with a spoon until everything is incorporated. It will resemble a shaggy ball of dough that falls apart. Wet your hands so that the dough doesn't stick and squeeze the dough together as if making a snowball. Press your fingers into the center of the ball and fold the dough over itself. You want to spread the dry dough around the wet dough so that it all becomes uniform. This step should take about one minute. It's fine if you do it for longer, but there is no need to. Any dry spots will disappear during the stretching-and-folding.

Let the rough ball of dough rest in a covered bowl in a warm area for 45 minutes. For example, with the oven heat off, the oven light should provide a little bit of warmth to keep the temperature high enough to stimulate the yeast activity.

After 45 minutes, dust the surface of your counter with a little flour and plop the ball of dough onto it. With lightly floured hands, press your fingers into the center of the dough to flatten it out. Don't roll it out since this will remove the gas bubbles. Just use your fingertips. Look for dry spots. Press down on a dry spot to gently massage it down into the counter top. Don't fuss over it, just break it up a little. It will go away.

Pull the dough into a rectangle. Stretch the bottom third of the rectangle down and then up and over the middle part. Stretch the top part up and then down and over the middle. Rotate the dough and repeat the same maneuver. This stretch-and-fold gently develops the gluten which will give your bread a fluffy, chewy texture.

Tuck the sides of the dough underneath to form a ball and put the dough back in the warm place to rise for another 45 minutes. Do a total of three stretch-and-folds with a 45 minute rising period in between (so do two more after the one you just did) and massage out any dry spots. After the third stretch-and-fold, the dough should be soft and fluffy with no more dry spots. It's ready to shape into the Ubuntu circle. Tuck it into a ball and let it sit for 5 minutes.

Roll the dough out into a long piece and cut it into three equal parts. Rub a small drop of oil on each piece to make the dough a little sticky and easy to roll out. Roll each piece out until it's less than 1 inch thick (about 36 inches or 90 cm long).

Dust each rope with flour as you finish rolling it out so that it doesn't stick to the counter. It's a lot easier to braid dusted dough. Braid the three ropes together.

Cut a few centimeters from each end to provide a perfectly shaped braid on both ends. Rub a drop of water on the three tips of one end. Connect the tips from the other end to the humid tips. Try your best to maintain a nice braid. Place the braid onto an oiled cookie sheet and adjust it's shape to be perfectly circular. Stretch out the center to increase the size of the hole in the middle. Take the two end pieces that you cut off and roll them into one long rope; you can wet your hands and squeeze to get them to stick together.

Cut into three ropes and taper one end on each. Roll up each one like a swirl. Place on top of the circle to complete the Ubuntu pattern - use one of them to cover up the spot where the two ends were joined (heh heh).

Alternatively, make a Kubuntu shape. Create three balls with the cut off dough. Flatten the balls into disks. Flatten the edge of the disks more than the middle. Use a kitchen tool to make a cut in the center of the dough. Rotate the disk and make another cut across the first. Make two more cuts. Flip the disk inside-out and free up the points of the gears. Do the same with the other two balls.

Cover with plastic wrap. If you want to make the bread on the same day, let it rise for an hour. If you want to bake the bread another day put it in the fridge immediately - you can delay it like this for up to three days. It will rise a bit for the first few hours in the fridge. 90 minutes before you will want to bake the bread, take it out of the fridge and put it in a warm place.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Mix a tablespoon of water with the beaten egg you put aside. Just before putting the bread into the oven, use a brush to coat the dough with the egg mixture. Then bake for 35 minutes (30 to 40 minutes). I suggest you cook it on two cookie sheets doubled up (or use a silicone mat) since the oil and sugar will burn fairly quickly.

Let it cool for at least 45 minutes before eating. Resist the temptation to eat it sooner! The bread has not finished baking as a lot of chemical reactions are still happening and the flavor is not at its best until its cooled.

Photos:

Shaggy ball of dough:

Stretch and fold:

The finished dough is very smooth.

Cut the ends off and use them to make the ornaments.

Ubuntu swirls:

Or Kubuntu gears:

Made for sharing!

Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix is a live cd/USB toolkit which includes the best Free/Libre, Open-Source data recovery software available.

I've been working on this for a little over a year with a little input here and there and I have been very happy with the results. The Rescue-Remix suits *my* needs perfectly. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of improvement that can be made.

I have found that I can recover as much if not more data using the free/libre tools than with the proprietary tools. Some of the advantages of using GNU/Linux tools for data recovery is that the command line provides a rich environment for dealing with mountains of raw data. I think a lot of the proprietary tools try too hard to provide a pleasant interface to the user, at the expense of leaving some data behind.

On the other hand, nearly every panicked user who, in searching for their lost/deleted files have stumbled upon Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix, have a hard time grocking the command line. That means that the Rescue-remix is not the best solution for everybody.

What can be done to improve this? Better documentation? A GUI?

If you haven't already guessed it, this is a Help Wanted ad. Apply within. Whether it's improving the live CD/USB, packaging your favorite tool, writing documentation or simply posting some of your experiences, any help is appreciated.

Oh, and if you want to create a GUI for all the Free/Libre data recovery tools available, that would be great too! Thanks!

az

I packaged version 1.8 of gnu ddrescue and uploaded it to my launchpad Personal Package Archive (ppa). This is an unofficial package but it seems to work fine.

If you want to stick with official Ubuntu packages, do not add my ppa to your sources.list. You can still install the ubuntu-rescue-remix metapackages by hand. However, if you add my ppa to your sources.list to install the ubuntu-rescue-remix metapackages, you will be getting (the unofficial) gddrescue-1.8.

My ppa:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/arzajac/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/arzajac/ubuntu hardy main

After playing around with the 8.04 ALPHA release I created an easy-to-install USB image for general use. Please test out the installation procedure and let me know if you have any problems:

(note: I updated this to point to the final stable release, version 8.04)

Step 1- Download the latest image:
http://rescubuntu.info/files/iso/ubuntu-remix-804.usb.gz

e480c4a72171203e1384c6a3e6990786 ubuntu-remix-804.usb.gz

Step 2- (This will erase the data on your USB device!) Plug in your USB device and unmount it. You can manually
create a partition for the Rescue Remix. You can even put that partition at the end of your device and create another partition at the beginning for storage or swap space. Make sure the rescue-remix partition is 166MB or greater or else the image won't fit.

Make the partition that will hold the image bootable (Use (g)parted or cfdisk); only one partition should be bootable or else that defeats the purpose.

If you put the storage partition after the rescue-remix image partition, you won't be able to access your storage partition from Windows-based operating system; It "just doesn't work."

Step 3- Write the image to the device:

If your device is the second partition on sdc, then you would run:

sudo zcat ubuntu-remix-804.usb.gz >/dev/sdc2

Step 4- Try to boot the device. If it doesn't boot, you need to put an MBR on the device.

sudo apt-get install mbr

sudo mbr-install /dev/sdc

And then reboot.

Again, if you have any problems, please let me know.

I split the ubuntu-rescue-remix metapackage up into two parts. If you are running a desktop version of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Edubuntu, you don't need the live cd components to be installed on your system.

Install the ubuntu-rescue-remix-tools package instead.

Here are the apt lines for Hardy:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/arzajac/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/arzajac/ubuntu hardy main

and for Gutsy:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/arzajac/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/arzajac/ubuntu gutsy main

You will need to enable the universe and multiverse repositories to install the ubuntu-rescue-remix-tools package.

To install the Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix on a regular Ubuntu install (hardy) add this to your sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/arzajac/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/arzajac/ubuntu hardy main

and then run

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-rescue-remix

This is not ready for general use. I plan on separating the package into two smaller metapackages: ubuntu-rescue-remix-live and ubuntu-rescue-remix-tools. There is no need to install the live cd components on a regular Ubuntu install that already boots from a hard drive and uses a volume-manager to mount removable devices.

1- I will be creating a new documentation section for case studies. Each case study will demonstrate a specific problem and the steps taken to recover the data. I am hoping users can contribute their case studies as well.

2- I will be making a meta package for Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix. I will post it to my Launchpad PPA. (https://launchpad.net/~arzajac/+archive)

3- I will be putting together the pre-release for Hardy.

Stay tuned...

0- (As usual, any help is welcome!)

A recurring discussion I have with people is whether something that is free-libre can actually be as good (if not better) than a shrink-wrapped product that is sold.

I elaborated about that in the ABOUT section. The word "free" in free-libre open-source refers to freedom and not necessarily cost. The fact that the software is free in the Software Freedom sense opens the door to it being used in a commercial setting without the overhead involved with proprietary licensing costs. It also allows the software to be improved by anyone with the ability to look at the code and improve it.

So, the Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix can do just about anything the proprietary equivalents can do, except the Rescue-Remix will get even better with time for free.

The business model of free and open source software is services and support, not sales of a software product. That means no one will sell Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix in a shrink-wrapped box in a store.

It doesn't mean you aren't allowed to use it commercially, though. I encourage you to use it in any setting, including in a commercial environment.

Anyone is entitled to obtain it, use it and charge customers a fee for the service of recovering their lost data if they chose to do so.

In this case, I would try Testdisk or Parted to restore your partition table. I hope her note wasn't longer than 512 characters.

Good luck.

I think the OLPC project is great. I agree that computer hardware today is so redundant that it is an exercise in waste. To that end, in just over a month I will be buying an XO through the give one get one program.

Looking through the specs, I am certain the rescue-remix will be able to boot on it. By plugging in your storage hardware through USB2 ports, you should be able to accomplish any data recovery task you need.

I look forward to releasing the next version (8.04) of the Rescue-remix as XO-ready.