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.