GNU+Linux on the mainstream?

Apple Mac OS was always clear and simple, take a look at any GNU+Linux distribution and you'll see any number of overcomplicated messages for basic functions such the laptop battery indicator. Is decimal place really needed? does know the .2 in 34.2% make much difference?

500 gram GNU+Linux netbook - £70

Disgo Net Browser 3000 is sells in China for £70 with Windows CE 5.0. With its 7 inch display (800 x 480) it would make an excellent GNU+Linux netbook coupled with Firefox. Buying whole sale would be even cheaper. When the average *new* netbook price is £200, this is an absolute bargain.

So why has no one done it already?

• Needs an ARM distro (OpenZaurus, Maemo, openmoko or other embedded disro might make more sense than a regular Ubuntu distro).
• Only 64MB RAM, bloated firefox would consume that immediately, so Fennec is probably the way to go.
• Only 2GB NAND Flash, distro can fit in that, presumably it is also writable so can be partitioned for a HOME partition.

New netbook?

Currently I'm running an HP Compaq Mini-Note 10" 702EA - bought used for £160. Amazing with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the keyboard which is large enough to touch type on.

Mass of only 1.1KG is the best feature though!

What's the competition?

Sony Vaio X505 10" 1024x768. Needs RAM + HD. 0.8KG - used price £800.
Apple Macbook Air 1.86GHz 13", 1.3KG - £1,150.
Lenovo ThinkPad X61 12", 1.6KG - Used price £350
MSI X400 14", 1.5KG - £550
Dell Vostro V13 1.6KG - £400

Ubuntu Netbook Fixes for 2010

I've been runing a recent Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my HP Compaq Mini-Note 10" laptop. A very good user experience.

What I'd like to see improved in 2010 is:

• "Desktop" still exists as a folder, however, it isn't the Desktop! Replace the "Favourites" with the existing "Desktop". Favourite apps can still be copied into the Desktop.
• Fix "Update Manager" display of "Reading package information" which comes up so often; even when it says before and after "Your system is up to date".
• Fix "Update Manager", it often appears in the notification panel, open it up and there are no updates to install. Download and check for updates and there are still no updates to install!
  

That's all for now; will these issues be fixed in 2010?

Laptop power button press again to cancel shutdown?

We've all done it, you come back to your laptop and press the power button.. forgetting it was already on! So then it shutsdown, and there is no way to correct the mistake.

It would be pretty easy for Ubuntu to connect the button as a toggler, so if pressing again while in the shutdown runlevel, it toggles and goes back into multi-user and X login (level 5 as I recall)

Ubuntu gnome memory wastage

While looking into other Ubuntu performance issues and Compiz crash I noticed just how many wasteful processes are running by default. Feels like I'm back on a Windows machine!

gnome-settings
python (system-config-printer/applet.py)
update-notifier
trashapplet
seahorse-agent (can't get rid due to ubuntu-desktop dep)
evolution-alarm (succeeded in removing!)
evolution-exchange
gnome-power-management
evolution-data-
gnome-screensav
gvfsd-smb-browse (can't get rid due to ubuntu-desktop dep)
gvsfd-smb-network
gvsdf-dnssd
gvfsd-computer
gnome-vfs-daemon
bluetooth-applet (succeeded in removing!)
bluetoothd-service-audio
bluetoothd-service-input
compiz-decorator (succeeded in removing!)
gtk-window-decorator
b43 (runs regardless of if the Wireless is enabled, so enable/disable must be a software switch)
bonobo-activation-server (can't get rid due to ubuntu-desktop dep)
samba

I wish I could remove samba, I don't have any Windows machines on my network I need to transfer files to, but ubuntu-desktop has a dep on it.

Even with my internal wireless disabled (Fn+F2) I still see the b43 driver task running and taking up memory.

It's no wonder with all this running it takes 4 secs to load Firefox3 on a 1.6Ghz CPU with 1.5GB ram. It should be up in less than a second. OpenOffice Writer is even worse, around 8 seconds.

Remove Evolution:
# apt-get --purge remove evolution

^ It isn't mentioned, but the tasks are all still running, so another reboot is necessary (another Windows reminder..)

# apt-get --purge remove gnome-screensaver

Why is a screensaver running all the time anyway? The system could run the process from a gnome timer when it needs to start.

Let's see how it goes with this lot removed, I'll be tempted to install Xubuntu (XFCE desktop) if performance is still hogged!

Remove Compiz from Ubuntu

If like me you're running one of the recent Ubuntu releases (8.04 LTS) you'll still be experiencing the unfixed bugs in Compiz Desktop Effects, for me this results in Totem and Xine crashes, taking out the whole machine (power switch restart).

So as no official fixes have been made (even though its LTS!), disable and removing compiz is the workaround:

Right click on the desktop, select "Change Desktop Background".
Click "Visual Effects", click the "none" option.

Then issue these commands to remove the Compiz packages:

# apt-get --purge remove compiz compiz-core

^ It doesn't tell you, but compiz is actually still running, so you will need to reboot to benefit.

Tip: Want to track down that rogue process in the "top" or "ps aux" output? Track it back to the package it came from, so you can unisntall it:

# dpkg -S /usr/bin/compiz-decorator

Laptop is quicker, and no more video playback crashes (yet!) ;).

Remove Bluetooth from Ubuntu

If like me you are running on a laptop or desktop without Bluetooth, you'll notice that Ubuntu is still running around 1.5MB of Bluetooth packages, wasting drive space and memory at run time.

We could could ignore the disk space loss, but the fact that it stays resident after it sees no bluetooth hardware connected is far from ideal. It would have been trivial for them to exit the daemon when it found no hardware connected, so its probably just sloppy QA (or lack of any QA again..) that let this one slip into a release. Should anyone plug in a USB bluetooth adapter, HAL should then swawn the daemon etc.

So simply disable and uninstall/remove bluetooth from Ubuntu.

# apt-get --purge remove bluez-utils bluez-gnome

The --purge removes the installer files from your drive, recovering the space again ;)

Ubuntu USB NTFS filesystem bugs

Seeing as I need to transfer >4GB files between computers running GNU+Linux as well as Mac and Windows I'm stuck with the only option of NTFS filesystem on that USB stick. The problem is how poor Ubuntu support is (well it even has support now, so things have moved on a lot in the last few years).

Windows causes a lot of problems, because it does not unmount filesystems which are not in use, so if a friend pulls out hte USB stick without going through the "Safely Remove" (or the duplicate "Edject" menu item on Vista) Ubuntu will refuse to mount it. With an error as follows:





















How Ubuntu developers expect average users to achieve this I have no idea. Ubuntu should fix the process to be simple and clear as follows:

1. External drive icons are visible on Desktop.
2. If one fails to mount due to this NTFS flag, the user should be prompted to check it and then mount.
3. Context menu on each drive icon should offer "Safely remove" as well as "Scan for errors" and "Format".

So let's get Ubuntu right, and fix the "unfriendlyness" it suffers :)

p.s. Also Ubuntu shouldn't copy files and directories with excluded Windows characters, like ":", because the user will only arrive at their friend's house and find that their friend who is stuck using Windows can't access the files.

p.p.s. Windows no-longer unmounts drives when shutting down, so if you take out your USB stick formatted NTFS from a machine that is off you will find it also won't mount on Ubuntu.

Panasonic TX37LZD81 TV runs GNU+Linux!

Wow, I saw the software license screen on my Panasonic TX37LZD81 TV shows it is built on top of lots of GNU+Linux components, there is even the download link: http://www.am-linux.jp/dl/EUIDTV6/.

Sources are provided for autofs, dhcpcd, findutils, glibc, linux, mount, mtd, netkit, nettools, procps and sash on that link above :)

Mobiles run GNU+Linux too.

Redhat ditch RPM for DEB apt-get in 2009?

One of the common problems installing software on GNU-Linux machines is the variety of different packaging systems. Redhat is still persevering with its own RPM packing system, when others have already adopted the standard DEB package format.. how long till they make the switch to DEB and apt-get online repositories?

RPM is notorious for dependency problems, I've suffered with Mandriva and Fedora in the past when trying to get extra software packages working. It's now time for consolidation Redhat! They're losing out to Ubuntu.. so this might even tempt some users back ;)

Dropping RPM would save Redhat development costs, and make it easier for customers to move to Redhat from all the DEB based distributions of GNU-Linux (Ubuntu etc). SuSE should also migrate their YUM front end to DEB!

Ubuntu HP Deskjet 930C printer fix

Ubuntu isn't ready for the lime light yet, it's still detecting my printer and setting up with a broken driver! The dodgy driver is "Foomantic/hpjis".

If you leave it like this, your logs will be full of:

Dec 24 13:56:24 laptop DeskJet_930C?serial=HU0B21G0G9JJ: prnt/backend/hp.c 496: unable to connect hpssd socket 2207: Connection refused
CUPS will display: DESKJET_930C (Default Printer) "/usr/lib/cups/filter/foomatic-rip failed"

The workaround, after Ubuntu detects the printer (after you plugged it in via USB) is to delete the printer and create the working setup:

1. Go into System->Administration->Printing
2. Select "Deskjet_930C" and click Delete.
3. Then click "New Printer", select the "HP Deskjet 930C USB ...".
4. Don't accept the [recommended] "Foomantic/hpijs", click the "Foomantic/cjd550".

I'd happily pay for a company to sort out the QA problems in Ubuntu releases, if 1,000 others would as well :) While Mark Shuttleworth is still sponsoring the Ubuntu project.. I'd hope he would come up with some funds too!

Other system lockups I've had this week are from some Compiz dodgyness:

Dec 20 20:47:12 laptop kernel: [ 1585.909259] compiz.real[6722]: segfault at 00004972 eip 08055a6d esp bfcdabb0 error 4

Xorg.0.log seems to have captured the flaw:
tossed event which came in late
mieqEnequeue: out-of-order valuator event; dropping.

Totem dodgyness is a whole system lock-up when playing a video file in Firefox, (totem-pl)ugin-viewer 2.22.1 or GStreamer 0.10.18 dodgyness?)

It's issues like these that will really put people off switching to Ubuntu, QA definitely needs to improve, and bug reports responded too when filed, not closed after six months (which I had recently on a crash I reported on launchpad -- why should we bother reporting..?).

Firefox 3 fixes needed

Firefox 3 is now released, I've written up a list of the fixes I'd still like to see, to make the browser it deserves to be:

Form buttons that don't "click" properly, and end up just looking like they've been highlighted.

Option to stop sites disabling scroll bars, and block detection of any right clicks.

A decent sized window resize on lower right hand corner (This could just be Ubuntu/KDE/GTK bug).

URL completion doesn't work from the character after http, currently I have to type https:// before it will offer me mail.google.com. At least it offers the SSL site from the history when I just enter mail.google.com.

Some passwords aren't saved always (http/s ones), currently every once in a while I need to log in to my netgear router, but sometimes Firefox doesn't populate the password fields, even though they are stored passwords! AutoAuth is one workaround for a few of the cases :)

Save Page button that I've commented on before. Currently needs a way to save the page as a PDF file!

Quicker (or configurable) time-out on loading iframes, images etc from hosts which are down. let the rest of the page load. The problem is visible on any google cache of a site where the site is presently offline and the iframes/images still try and load!

Native support for common image types like TIFF which is still missing despite many sites using TIFF files in the IMG tag.

When a webmaster embeds an MP3 or Vorbis file into a browser page using the EMBED or OBJECT tag this gives an error if the mimetype isn't supported. The error is at the top of the page "Click here to download plugin.", and there is the green jigsaw icon where the embedded file is. The green jigsaw icon is not ideal, a download link would be much nicer, e.g. "Embedded file not supported, click here to download", or be able to right click on the jigsaw icon and download it is another option. Workaround at present is to delve into the HTML and try and figure out the src URL, or if not generated by JavaScript try and get it from the Page Info (Ctrl+I doesn't work in recent Firefox unfortunately). If there is an EMBED error, my feeling is Firefox should display the mime-type, or a string describing the mime-type so we know it is a "Windows Media Video" file etc, without having to go through the plugin detection wizard to find what format it is.

Unfortunately links stop working on a page the moment we click one, so even though the new page hasn't loaded, all the page is still readable, and links clickable, but none of the links work! Often we click a link, then see another, but we can't middle-click it to open in an additional tab, as would be handy :)

Firefox3 is great as it is though, a great development from Netscape and Mozilla Suite which went before :)

Ubuntu Mic still broken

Over six months after I had to fix my Mic configuration so it even works in Ubuntu I see the latest Ubuntu release still ships with it broken. Poor QA is the only reason holding Ubuntu back!

Ubuntu ships with the Mic disabled, so you need to manually fix it. The default Mixer configuration has Mic Capture disabled. So you need to go into the Terminal and make these changes to fix it:

$ alsamixer

You will see the [Playback] sliders. Use the arrow key to move right to the column named as "capture", at the top left of the screen it will now say Capture Mux. Set it to "25==25" which should be 1/4 white bar.

Next press Tab key, press arrow key to move to the first "capture" column, at the top it shows "Capture", set it to "7==7". Press Space bar to enable it and show "CAPTUR" in red.

Press right arrow key to move to the next "Capture", at the top left it shows "Capture Mux", set it to "25==25".

Next press right arrow key to move to "input", press up/down arrow key so this shows "Mic" and not "Front Mic" or "Line".

.. and we're done :)

Spaces in filenames

One long-standing difference between Windows Mac and GNU+Linux is that of filenames. Windows long kept DOS 8.3 format filenames, and didn't support unix style filenames which included spaces, now it does. However, as many scripts still need to operate on files which don't handle spaces (e.g. Makefiles) and even people wanting to paste filenames into a terminal window will encounter problems as the filenames contain spaces.

It's a shame the system wasn't standardised on making a character like under-score "_" always converted to a space character in filenames, that way on disc everything would be "_", apps could still display with a space if that made it more meaningful.

Character sets are another area of difference, GNU+Linux distros have at last all switched to UTF-8, but a lot of apps still save filenames with corrupted accented characters (KTorrent), which then need manual fixing. I personally don't use accented characters as there's the risk that I will save it on a pendrive and take it to a clients, and Windows refuses to read files with the "corrupted" filenames (why does it do this when ubuntu and mac dont have a problem accessing them!?).

OpenGL Debugger

Came across this BuGLe OpenGL Debugger, a great tool, allows inspection of states and backtraces, fantastic!

OpenGL has had some what of a resurgence in recent years primarily in the ES variety on mobile, but also on Mac OS X and GNU+Linux distributions thanks to Compiz ;)

GNU+Linux rtsp and mms support

There are a lot of rtsp:// and mms:// served streams online, and GNU+Linux distros like Ubuntu are not yet being released with native support for playing them or saving them to a file. Mplayer, Kaffine and Xine are all unable to play the stream URLs. Mplayer seems to be able to play the audio, but it is all crackly and breaks up.

If we use the workaround of converting the RealPlayer RPM, installing libstdc++5 and then pasting that into RealPlayer we can play rtsp:// streams ;) but we can't save them :(

It's a shame, as there are a lot of sites like youTube Mobile. Which don't rely on Adobe Flash, so we would have otherwise been able to watch the streams. mms:// is common as WMV and WMA files are served that way often. To be a multimedia distribution GNU+Linux needs to support these protocols out of the box from Firefox ideally. The current workaround is to install the DownloadHelper extension in Firefox (unfortunately Firefox still needs a restart.. reminds me of MS-Windows restart issues still!).

Ubuntu FLV video seeking not working

After the problems with Flash in Ubuntu I thought I would try play the Flash Video (FLV) file I downloaded.

Unfortunately, while VLC and Mplayer can play it.. they can't seek.. so we either have to watch the entire clip or not bother at all..

Xine at first appears like it is going to work, seeking at the beginning of the clip works, but go beyond half-way and it locks, and sometimes needs to be killed as it is unresponsive :( Other FLV clips have all the same problems with VLC, Mplayer and Xine.

GNU+Linux is going to find adoption hard going when it can't play "de facto format" Video files out of the box. FLV is only a custom H.263 format after all..

Jobs commented on Flash not being supported by the iPhone, which is a bit odd considering it can play H.264 and MPEG4. Not getting Adobe's Flash may be a blessing in disguise for the platform though! Also.. at least Apple have not made the mistake of adopting Silverlight yet (like Nokia appear to have, after their good decision of purchasing Qt!).

Ubuntu mouse device changing

I highlighted the problem of flaky second mouse support in ubuntu before. My fix works well, but you will find that as xorg does not reference devices by UID, numbering will change and mean that mouse2 becomes the USB mouse!

So really X.org needs a revision to reference by UID, and the Linux kernel needs to expose that to X.org like it does for other devices in /dev

Ubuntu not ready masses?

When I plug in my USB WD "MyBook" it pops up in Kubuntu desktop automatically, and when I want to remove it, it sometimes doesn't have the "Safely Remove" option, so I have to go to root to unmount it (as users are bizarrely not allowed to unmount removable USB drives!?).. anyway, after it's unmounted by root the system locks up when I unplug it.. so much for USB being plug and play with the Linux kernel.

Of cause if it had downloaded the symbols, generated a back-trace from the core-file it could have automatically offered to submit that for further analysis and a fix.. sadly it doesn't support that still. Also it didn't seem to do a recover of the filesystem (i'm using ext3 with all its journalness), when I restarted the computer, so maybe it's just ext3 with its journal recovers automatically? I'd file a bug report, but without the QA staff to follow it up on Launchpad I can't see it being tackled.

I wish there was a pay model so we could contribute to cover QA staff salaries.

The final oldness is that as I don't want to keep my WD drive in Microsoft's FAT32 format I've got to go through quite a manual process to reformat it as Linux's ext3 format. (Why can't I just right click on the FAT32 icon on my desktop and select format and be prompted for the root password etc?)

I need to revert to the command line, repartition with fdisk, format with mke2fs (remembering to set a label with -L and -j for the journal). Then when it mounts I'm left with only a "lost+found" directory, and I can't create files in the root of the drive as a user... so go back to root, create a folder, change the permissions on the folder to 700, change owner and group to user. Rather a faff to use a removable drive in the standard partition format, eh!? I'm not sure how well my non-expert friends would have managed.

vCard Firefox integration missing from Kubuntu

vCard (.vcf, text/x-vcard) has been around for a long time. However, Kubuntu isn't setup with Firefox to load the vCard from web pages. We need to set firefox to use /usr/bin/kaddressbook, or manually save the file and then open it. The browser needs tight integration with the rest of the GNU+Linux distro!

NDISwrapper problem

NDISwrapper is an clever project which implements the NDIS Microsoft API to allow the Linux kernel to run binary NDIS wifi and other drivers and get GNU+Linux laptops and other hardware online. The problem is when this becomes a long-term solution vendor's will start just releasing NDIS binary drivers only, as they know GNU+Linux distros are accommodating that stance.

This is precisely the problem IBM encountered with OS/2. The win16 API support was so good, developers might as well just keep targeting that API and then their software could run on both MS-Windows and OS/2 without them needing to do any additional work.

Also this is problem with the WINE project (for fairness check their Myths page), it's establishing something as permanent which should really be only a migration tool for software over a couple of years. You can't win a game when you're only ambition is to chase and support someone else's partly proprietary changing API !

We're seeing another example of the OS/2, NDISwrapper and general WINE problem with games on GNU+Linux platforms. Thanks to the WINE developers great efforts getting Direct3D working on top of OpenGL many games are now working, but as we all know does this mean companies will develop games for GNU+Linux? or will they just standardise on Win32 as that works well thanks to WINE?

Another problem is that some commercial companies are now contributing to WINE, which cements it further into the software ecosystem, Google just announced it has made improvements.

Support native applications and drivers for the future of the platform! ;) Buy the wifi devices that are compatible! I'm personally using a ZyDAS wireless adapter as Broadcom won't make their products Linux kernel compatible (wasted BCM4318 in my system). My ZyDAS uses the excellent zd1211rw kernel driver.

Update: It is possible to install binary only BCM4318 firmware to get it working with GNU+Linux.

Flakey ubuntu second mouse support

Many of us now use laptop instead of desktops, like us using mobiles instead of land-line phones! So I use the latest Kubuntu on my Dell laptop, the problem is it doesn't' correctly configure my touch-pad and USB mouse that I use... it enables both! The workaround I use is to delve into /etc/X11/xorg.conf and comment out InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad" while I am using the USB mouse... and then when I am on the move I have to go back in and uncomment that line.. ugly but Ubuntu doesn't support detection & configuration like MS-Windows and probably Apple's Mac OS does.

Although, even commenting out the Synaptics doesn't solve it all though, as /dev/input/mice actually is a mixed device node, including the data from all mice! cat /dev/input/mice and see! in my case /dev/input/mouse0 seems to be dead, mouse1 is my USB mouse, and mouse2 is the Synaptics pad. So I also needed to change the /dev/input/mice line to be /dev/input/mouse1 to get it to only respond to the external mouse.

When I'm on the move without an external mouse I'll just have to keep editing xorg.conf for the moment then.. :(

ubuntu should really detect an external mouse and disable the internal touchpad, as it stands I would be left accidentally touching the internal pad and all those touches keep highlighting my text etc while typing! Until it's fixed I'll have to stick to editing files as root then.. Shame the KDE System Settings Mouse section can't control this as a workaround for having to edit the xorg file!

OpenID security issue

I am very pleased that OpenID is finally taking off, I have too many site logons as it is. However, it does raise a security implication, because once my personal data has been concatenated to the point that it's as dangerous as a leak of enriched uranium waste.. someone gaining access to my bank logins subject me to fraud ultimately. I personally am pleased my online banking all has a different login system for security. if banks did ever unify their login systems I'd hold out to have a separate account for each system, as I would never use my bank login from a web-cafe as I can't be sure if it's secure.

Web-apps for Email GPL

I use GMail myself, but does anyone know of a decent Web-app using AJAX I could install on my server and use for email and IM (XMPP etc) while out of my office? Sometihng as good as the current GMail would be needed to get me to switch!

Flakey GNU Flash (Gnash) causes Firefox to hang

I'm running the latest Kubuntu 7.10 which comes with Firefox 2 and through I would see what all the fuss is about with Gnash (aka GNU Flash). Gnash is the GNU/FSF branded project to implement decoding support of Adobe's Proprietary Flash file format that is sadly so common on the net these days (seems contrary to the No MS-Word documents strategy you're probably thinking too?)

Anyway I followed the instructions:

apt-get install mozilla-plugin-gnash

Gnash installed ok, so I headed over to youTube to hear a new track by a band I heard on the radio earlier. I hadn't' thought to save my draft email in another tab.. pretty risky this software stuff.. My laptop started chugging and churning, I ran "top" and could see gtk-gnash was using 1.6% of RAM in its two process threads, and 20% CPU in one process and 79% in the other one! This went on for 5 mins before I managed to close the tab (after several warnings from Firefox about a script which had stopped responding). There were no errors reported, and the clip never worked. I did get a glimpse of the spinning loading icon youTube uses though, before it all went grey.

Bizarrely, there is a context menu item in Gnash (from within the browser) where you can "Quit".. so I did this and it went down to one process taking up 80% of CPU time!

So it looks like.. unfortunately for the Gnash developers.. that the implementation is presently as flaky ass the GNU+FSF strategy to support Adobe is.