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Category: Linux

23. December 2009

A little Acer Aspire Revo r3610 update

In my previous post on my beloved r3610 I mentioned that I was unable to make the bundled wireless keyboard work. I assumed wrongly that the dongle was built into the machine, however after cleaning up my things I found the manual and discovered that the required dongle can be found inside the mouse’s battery bay. Once you can dug it out of it’s holding place, unplug your existing keyboard and insert the dongle in an empty USB port on the Revo then hold the connect button on the keyboard for a few seconds and voila your machine now has a working wireless keyboard.

The same approach should work with the mouse but I have used a trackball for years and love it to death so I haven’t tested this.

I hope this is helpful to other people.

3 comments
22. December 2009

Why I will be returning my HTC Hero

Recently I bought an HTC Hero to replace my old broken phone and to bring me into the smartphone era, something I have been looking forward to for a while. For the most part I have been fairly pleased with the phone as such but it is a device with issues.

1) HTC it ifself

Don’t be under the impression that Android phones magically keep themselves updated over the wire, you have to flash the damn thing. However HTC doesn’t support Linux (nor Mac OS X for that matter). They aren’t even shy about it when I asked tech support how to perform such updates under Linux.

Thank you for your enquiry about the HTC Hero.

Unfortunately we do not support Linux and MAC operating systems but we recommend to query local community forums in the internet dedicated to the Linux platform.

If there’s any other enquiries, please let me know by responding using the link provided and I will be happy to check for you.

So they don’t provide the tools to do the job, but I am welcome to ask the community. On one hand their support department is quick to respond, on the other hand their reply is a worthless pregenerated non-answer. The end result is that Linux and Mac users will be left out of important updates which fix issues, including one might suspect security problems. Thank you HTC for entirely missing the point and endangering your customers.

The wonderful bit of irony here is that the phone underneath is running Linux, so they basically deem that it is good enough for their hardware, but not mine.

2) Performance

I’d heard bad things about the Heros performance in reviews but when I played with the store model I didn’t see any lag. However the lag very clearly appears after a night of idleness and it makes the interface nearly unresponsive. Reviews claim that a firmware update fixes this, however do to Linux being unsupported for the flashing this opens up a whole new dimension of hurt. I finally broke down and acquired access to a Windows XP machine and spend a couple of hours hunting down issues with their flashing tool (which turned out to be rooted in a broken driver for the Android phone as a USB device). After performing this gutwrenching update, the performance issues remains present, on the plus side the interface is no available in Danish which was lacking in the device as it was sold.

3) Poor quality slightly hidden

The Hero feels good in your hand, it has the right weight and size to be comfortable to use. The headset that comes with the package is sufficient to enjoy music or conversation. However the insides aren’t beautiful at all, the GPS is off by several kilometers, the camera is slow and produces blurry pictures. The touchscreen keyboard has keys roughly 1/3 the size of any normal fingertip and the spell checking will constantly replace words like “you” with “joo” unless you specifically stop it.  It’s slow to type on, the response of the device is sluggish and overall it just feels cheap in use… for a device that is supposedly the top of the line model, and at a price that would make even Bill Gates blush I definitely didn’t expect this.

4) Strange arbitrary limits on the software

I really need Skype and I need it to be portable. However on an Android phone it seems that the software is both in beta and from on high is prevented from using your 3G/wifi connection to make calls. There is no technical reason for this to be so, in fact my old phone supported Skype directly and it integrated with my contact list. This appears to be a problem rooted in cell phone providers and Google setting up this requirement which is despicable behavior that leaves my expensive phone less capable than it would be for no good reason. Further research shows that iPhone users are in the same boat but with different limitations (I believe they can only use Skype over a wifi connection). This kind of abuse of power makes smartphones far less appealing and limits application developers creativity and user freedom.

5) There is no easy way to exit applications

As part of the design Android applications never seem to quit, this means that as a user you have to remember to check the browser, close all your additional pages and reset the page that you cannot close to something you are comfortable seeing because the next time you hit the browser icon, this is what will pop up. There is a means of killing applications but you have to dig through multiple hidden menus and enter the castle of slow that is “manage applications”. This is a design decision but given the already sluggish performance, ones impression of the device isn’t exactly enhanced by leaking applications which over time makes the road to recovery a Windows style reboot. You know that you designed a piece of crap when the way to get it back to a useful state for a few hours is to reboot it.

There are good things to say about the device, the Sense UI is beautiful and overall the device is pleasant to the eye with glittery candy being spread for your enjoyment. I’ve had it for a few days now and I have to admit that the calendar application with it’s synchronization to Google Calendar is a wonderful tool that has improved my life leaps and bounds. The screen might be small but it’s clear and very readable, I have found myself enjoying checking Google Reader from my bed and marveling at the power of the mobile webpages as well as the speed of the browser application. In fact I am so impressed by the mobile webpages that for 99% of use I go to these rather than the specially crafted applications for things such as GMail since it’s faster and provides easier access to labels.

You only have about a day and halves worth of battery power so use it wisely, luckily the recharge time is short and since it is done via USB you can be assured access to a source of power pretty much everywhere even without carrying a hefty recharger. The agreement to use USB charging for all modern phones really is one of those no-brainer decisions in retrospect, for years every time you switched phones you got a new brick to carry and nobodies chargers were compatible (often even within different models with the same vendor). The amount of waste and idiocy saved by this is measurable in the real world. It fills my heart with joy to think of, and as a bonus the power brick that is supplied for when a USB port is unavailable has a clever design where you can replace the plug to suit local standards. If only the rest of the device shared this clever engineering and design – verily I submit onto you, the HTC Hero would be a worthwhile investment.

Never the less, today the HTC Hero is going back to the store. I can’t stand the sluggish interface, HTC’s swamy non-support and delivering a frankly broken Skype experience really pushed me over the top. For something I spend this much money on out of pocket not to mention the costs I tied myself to for the “unlimited” data plan I really expected better.

4 comments
16. December 2009

The importance of Open drivers and openness in general

An interesting question was asked on the Ubuntu Forums regarding openness and why some people were reacting the way they are on the issue of proprietary software. The example given was the driver Nvidia provides for their videocards. I wrote this as a response, instead of going into ideologically definitions of freedom I feel that new users might like to see the real world measurable advantages.

Looking at the proprietary closed source nvidia driver which is currently needed for supporting 3D acceleration and many other features supported by this range of hardware. I would like to specifically point to these 4 arguments.

1) Security

It’s several megabytes of code running in your kernel with access to all kinds of things. You can’t see what it’s doing and it has been subject to at least one major security issue. We can’t fix it, if Nvidia doesn’t find the problem worth the effort then we either have to remove the driver or leave users vulnerable to attack as a distribution.

2) Portability

The nvidia driver only runs on the platforms Nvidia deems they can support. This means e.g. that right now PS3 owners who wishes to run Linux on their machines (a fully supported feature from Sony btw. though not on the Slim models) are left without such things as 3D acceleration and video codec acceleration.

3) Stability

Looking over the top kerneloopses a clear trend is that kernels with the nvidia driver (and the ati proprietary driver) are high scoring components of these and related problems. Users can (and have) experience crashes in applications, problems for which the root cause is in code in these modules. Such problems we can’t fix since we aren’t privy to the code, we are depending on the vendor providing such support in a timely fashion. As a Linux distribution you might also encounter problems with users getting a poor experience and thus losing customers – meaning Nvidia in theory could hold distributions at ransom till an open alternative appears with the same functionality or we do as they tell us.

This scenario though due to the public backlash it would cause seems absurd. What isn’t though is that Nvidia has their own development schedule and if we want to develop our software stack we occasionally have to make changes that change APIs and thus breaks the nvidia driver (this has happened). This forces us to either break this piece of the functionality for users when we import the new underlying stack or hold it back till Nvidia decides to release a compatible version. This effectively lets nvidia dictate the development pace and release process of a large part of Linux.

4) Support for outdated/unavailable for sale hardware and saving the environment

Nvidia regularly moves older devices into a subset of their driver called legacy. This driver isn’t well maintained, on purpose to lessen their support burden and naturally to sell new videocards. We thus can’t support users existing hardware, therefor we (though in reality Nvidia) force them to upgrade their machines or stay on their existing platform. Preventing distributions from gaining users and thus also potential customers. It also lessens the applicability of the age old benefit Linux always was known for, running on an old clunker and give it new life.

E.g. I participate in a project that sends old hardware to Africa to use in schools. When the time comes that the machines that come in through the door contain Nvidia chips that aren’t supported we give poor African children machines that do less than they can, are less fun, will interest them less. Making school a less exciting break in what must otherwise be a pretty bleak day.

Yes, I did just manage to invoke starving African kids while making an argument on software. Please do not see this as an emotional argument but rather a matter of making education as appealing as we can to everyone and thereby encourage more people to get engaged. The positive effects of education are hard to deny and pretty much any effort being made to increase the likelihood that people will enter into such programs should be welcomed.

Every time you are forced to upgrade perfectly working hardware to get to a supported version of Linux (even Ubuntu’s Long Term Support releases are only supported for 3½ years on the desktop) you are left with spare hardware. Often this ends up getting thrown out, replacing it thus forces upon us amongst others the following problems:

- Needlessly depleting our natural resources more

- Needlessly imposing more waste which contains toxic chemicals.

- Wasting production capacity

- Wasting money

With Open Source drivers we have the means to take these problems into our own hands.

I hope this is helpful in providing arguments for open drivers. This is a complicated area where we need to convince vendors to work with us and we need to understand that we are asking them to change their culture. They are used to sharing coming only with the exchange of large sums of money in the form of licensing agreements. We cannot expect them to change overnight but we can inform users of the arguments for openness and then together do our best to work with vendors towards greater cooperation on terms that serve the user.

It’s not just a Linux issue, even Microsoft is faced with downsides of not having access to the driver code and being able to update them at will. A study showed that 30% of Vista crashes where caused by drivers from Nvidia. Vista was notoriously poorly received for many complex reasons, it’s is just one problem area.

This is not to pick on Nvidia specifically, I use them as an example as this is a situation that is fairly well documented and many people use this driver.

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14. November 2009

I love my Acer Aspire Revo r3610

After my desktop died and I had no money to replace it I started using my Lenovo 3000 N100 laptop as my main machine, for the task it was pumped up with another gig of ram but it too started to die. As money is short I had to look around for a quick replacement that would do the trick. I could either build my own or buy something prebuilt, I long ago swore that I wouldn’t waste time building anymore so this left me with the choice of one of these new nettop machines. Having played with with an ATOM powered netbook I was a little skeptical of the performance potential of such a setup for desktop tasks but this was after all a dual core ATOM capable of SMT and 64bit computing, additionally it has the nvidia ION chipset and GPU instead of the under performing Intel parts. Finally the machine comes with S/PDIF sound output and beefy 4 gigs of ram (one of these are taken by the GPU), you also get a set of USB speakers and a wireless keyboard/mouse combo.

The good parts:

The machine is easily mountable using the VESA compliant mount for your monitor, the performance is surprisingly good. The desktop feels snappy and there always seems to be a bit to give from even under load, even video playback without hardware acceleration (I haven’t yet made VDPAU work) is smooth. All your basic hardware is functional out of the box and the machine is very quiet. You get a plentiful 6 USB ports but access when mounted on a monitor they can be unhandy, there is HDMI output but I haven’t had a chance to try this as I lack supporting hardware finally the revo features eSATA. In short a very extendable and capable machine that comes equipped for a multitude of use cases.

The bad parts:

The S/PDIF output is placed on the topside of the machine when mounted in the VESA mount, meaning your fairly inflexible optical cable will hang from a height with no decent way to make it look good without breaking it – a modest suggestion for the next revision would be to put it on the bottom. You need the proprietary nvidia driver to make this run at it’s full potential, something I would rather avoid as I am uncomfortable using it. My Revo came with Windows 7 Home which I now have to fight to get refunded for, for an average user it does mean that you get a machine that will work when you turn it on but I would have liked the option to pick no OS or Linux preinstalled. Finally the wireless keyboard and mouse doesn’t work with Linux for some reason and Google turns up no immediate help as to making them work – mainly here I am interested in the keyboard as I love my trackball. *update* I solved this problem and posted an update here.

All in all, the Revo r3610 is an impressive machine. I am very pleased with it and would wholeheartedly recommend it, not just as a second machine or a media center, it actually makes for a fully sufficient desktop machine and it is a great bargain.

9 comments
28. September 2009

When Ubuntu hates upstream

Sometimes Ubuntu pisses me off, like the time they let an aMSN bug that crippled webcam support with a patch linger for several months, sadly now they are at it again.

Banshee 1.4.3 went out of the door with an embarrassing bug in the cover art plugin that made it take up 100% CPU, these things happen. The bug was quickly fixed and a patch was issued, there was however not a follow up .1 release for this problem and development went on for months in the 1.5.x branch instead. This means distributors still carry 1.4.3 as there is no 1.6 stable release yet. Most distributions love upstream and do not want to see their mailing lists flooded with tons of complaining users, they also want to make software look good so they apply the patch when asked politely… but not Ubuntu.

6 months, 4 days and counting, has gotten us what? Instructions on how to use Launchpad better but no patched builds.

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24. September 2009

Congratulations Moblin on the 2.0 release

Let the integration begin

Here are things I hope to see in future Moblin releases:

  • Better integration of instant messaging in the Moblin UI, having to drop an empathy window on an empty zone doesn’t feel very “mobliny”
  • Wordprocessing with collaboration features ala Sugars Write activity
  • ARM support
  • An integrated browser using process separation like Chrome for stability as well as having the UI rethought to maximize the usable work area. Hopefully a rewrite for WebKit could also happen.
  • Stop this Anjal silliness (yes we did debate that before, I remain unconvinced that this is even remotely the right direction)
  • I would love to see some version of Banshee in there, I have not had a good experience with homebrew media library.

A more general problem I see in computing today that Moblin and the type of device it is designed for reveal. I have probably a good TB of data lying around. Music in FLAC, a sufficient number of podcasts to make me look obsessed and naturally video. In fact I hope to add to this collection and have a centralized collection of all my movies. Now I have little desire to carry all that data with me and besides SSD drives should really not need to be more than 64 gigs tops. Yet the flaw in this plan is that we have no good means of transparently letting a nice little machine with some hardcore storage and a suitable Linux appliance act as if it is a seamless overlay on the filesystem when connection can be had be that my wifi or any secure means of calling home when I am away.

All our applications seem designed for local use and expect your full collection to be available on disk at all times and with this amount of storage required that is not possible. The popular solutions such as dropbox or Canonicals Ubuntu One all focus on synchronization which is not possible due to size and even if it was it would be impractical but worse still more certainly undesirable. If I was to lose my netbook and it had 700-800 gigs of my personal data on it, even with encryption I would feel pretty damn scared. I just need access to my data I don’t need it in my pocket as such.

I think we need to tackle this problem soon, I even suspect there is a business here in selling such devices capable of talking the quited protocols. A NAS on crack type device you put in a closet and which then via some nice open standards allow all your devices to have storage and data sharing, at home or out. There is e.g. no reason why my cellphone shouldn’t be able to use it’s 3G connection to stream my music or handle podcasts with storage being done in the safety of my home. Essentially I believe outside the storage taken up for applications and the OS on any device, in this scheme should be thought of as a cache for frequently used data on that device to allow it usefulness in situations without connection.

As a bonus for the redundancy seeking people one might add a paid service involving cloud storage. There are also promising p2p based systems like this which we could easily let the device act as a client for when the network is idle.

This would probably all be some Linux appliance homebrewers could slap on an idle clunker but there would definitely be a business in selling devices with extendable storage for this purpose as well.

The idea sounds vaguely like a cloud concept the average person should be able to follow and trust.. surely it is venture capital friendly.

1 comment
24. September 2009

Why Miguel is my hero

As was recently reported by Martin Owens, at this years Software Freedom Day Richard Stallman took his behaviour to a whole new revolting level by calling Miguel de Icaza a traitor. This wasn’t related to anything except Miguels recent decision to sit on the Codeplex foundation board, a foundation whose stated mission it is to further Open Source in business. It is no secret that Microsoft is the seed of this our newest member in the family of Open Source promotors, even earmarking a million dollars to that aim and dedicating time and personnel to let the foundation reach its lofty aim. In fact in recent years Microsoft has gotten quite involved with Open Source by releasing code of their own, getting licenses approved from the OSI and donating substantial amounts of money to existing projects. In a highly published move they even recently submitted 20.000 lines of code to the Linux kernel. They are no longer the bully of the 90′s, they are changing but their transformation is not complete, and it certainly will not be the instantaneous conversion some people expect of them.

Now Miguel is no stranger to abuse, in a personally shameful moment right after the famed Novell-Microsoft collaboration agreement, fueled by Bruce Perens’, fallacious, claim that the deal was in violation of the GPLv2 even I send the Novell Open Audio podcast an angry mail asking them to dedicate time debating this on the show. Miguel kindly wrote me a lengthy personal mail calming my fears and he never used a harsh word despite what I now realize were words far outside of rational discourse. I have since that moment had a tremendous amount of respect for Miguel as a person, he is probably the person in the community who faces the most opposition and abuse despite the amount of work he has done historically and continue to do to improve the free desktop. You might disagree with his methods of improvement but I have never seen Miguel use a tone of aggression in rebutting his opponents.

If I live to be a thousand years I will never master that level of calmness while under fire, I realise that with some degree of sadness. Had Richard viciously attacked me the way he did Miguel I am sure at tirade would have ensued, I know it to be my style. Miguels reply is nothing short of admirable. It is a constructive polite call for civility in the views on how to improve our community.

I am glad our community has someone like Miguel, I am glad he does the work he does and I believe that it fills a vital piece of the puzzle to get Open Source everywhere and turn former opponents into new friends. Utopia won’t be built in a day but Miguel certain laid his fair share of rocks to let it happen.

3 comments
19. July 2009

A small degression on Moblin

One of the newcomers to the OS scene is the Intel backed Linux Foundation project Moblin. Everyone has seen the videos by now but few people it seems have actually taken it for a spin.

I did that and tried to stick with it for a while on a usb stick and I made some observations.

Firstly Moblin should be commented for being the first to really rethink the whole interface, it feels rather snappy even on low end hardware and it works fairly well for the cases it is designed for. It also looks sexy which is important, your computing experience shouldn’t be dull. There are though some rough edges in the handling which I am sure will be worked out.

My main gripe with Moblin though is it’s porr judgement in what I might want to do on the road. E.g. in a world where more and more people use webmail they ship by default the Anjal frontend for the Evolution mail client. This is in a world where I am supposed to have decentralized data, they force upon me the requirement to have my filters only present on one machine as well as my addressbook. Why in the world can’t they just integrate GMail and other webmails properly and create a Zone for async communication (give it a fancy name people. that’s your job). It could replace that cut and paste traversty you have created. In this same world they also don’t integrate a wordprocessor, instead forcing me to use inferior online offerings (okay maybe not so much when MS Office 2010 web comes out). This on hardware that is already encumbered by tendencies towards slowness, I tell you Google docs runs slower than what is acceptable. Give me something akin to the Abiword based activitiy in the OLPC Sugar interface, telepathy tubes even allows pretty neat collaboration here which makes it a winner for these things. It’s lightweight and works fairly well for most wordprocessing cases. Additionally, it works when I am offline which shockingly still happens, e.g. when I am on a train (no 3G internet for me, to slow and unreliable currently).

The comes the plain buggy, such as the chat functionality which isn’t properly integrated with the new interface… making chat windows from Empathy pop up.. underneath the new Moblin interface and as there is no way to see a list of open windows in this zone.. you assume it crashed. However if you go to the open zones tab you can bring it forth and have a regular awesome Empathy experience. The standard Empathy complains still stand though, such as no webcam or custom smiley support for msn, there is no crypto or OTR support at all to be found either. Aside that the contact integration is very cool and helps with making the rethinking of instant messaging happen.

You have Twitter integration, but none for Identi.ca despite supporting the same API and being 100% open source. Something I find a bit strange especially since Indenti.ca seems so heavily favored with hackers and these betas might reflect that a tad some places.

Moblin tends to ignore that Google exists, their default search engine is Yahoo! and there seems to be no way of changing this. This is unforgivable and makes the webbrowser which is already a strangely unstable and visually inconsistent experience just that tad worse. At least ignoring Google is consistent, none of the popular Google apps are integrated into this new mobile internet experience OS – yes that does sound strange but it’s true. It’s also exactly the thing Microsoft has gotten sued over a number of times and been forced to offer choice to alliviate. Moblin please follow suit here. Also in a world where we are seeing more and more products use Webkit for it’s performance and low footprint Moblin elected to go with Mozilla which might prove to be an interesting choice. I suspect suspect some vendors will replace this at least.

Moblin also reinvented Network Manager which is a bit of a shame, especially since there seems to be no apparent need for this to happen. Their replacement doesn’t really seems to work very well but the interface for working with it is topnotch, very easy and foolproof.

There is a new core for managing music, videos and pictures, this seems though to be so early in development I have yet to figure out how to import music and video, nor play any of the demo clips, in addition it seems to crash rather often. I personally wish they had worked with the Banshee people on this one and gotten a stable platform to build something exciting on, like Aaron Bockovers new Cubano frontend for Banshee.

On the subject of crashing, everytime something crashes Moblin automatically offers to send a crash report to thei corewatcher service. What Apport did for Ubuntu this does without the requirement of an account, it all just happens with a single click like Windows offers.

I do wish though that Moblin would offer some options for safety and security. It automatically logs in with access to everything. I might have information I do not want people to just see and there isn’t really any mechanism to let that happen. The same thing with chatting, there are no options to encrypt this and if I am on a public access point I may not want everything I send especially to certain people to be readable in clear text floating around the room. Now the whole netbook platform is a compromise on this point but still once wishes they would at least acknowledge that somehow and give you the option to be a touh safer.

The conclusion can only be that Moblin is very young and where the polishing of it needs to happen it will in time by Moblin itself or by vendors. I suspect we will see good things but on the whole for an ambitious project that aims to reinvent the way we use computers it is shaping up very nicely. I look forward especially to what vendors will do with this, I know both Novell and Canonical are looking at Moblin for their netbook offerings, Novell having already started replacing Connman with Network Manager and I suspect we will see integration of the Cubano frontend for Banshee instead of the existing multimedia platform. I don’t know what Canonical are planning, they are currently keeping their hands firmly to themselves. So far I have to say the Goblin (Novell) incarnation of Moblin seems the most promising and the one I would be likely to recommend to people.

All in all I am very impressed with Moblin despite it’s flaws, I am hoping the interface will be able to scale to nettops and regular lap/desktop machines as it is a very pleasant way to interact with ones computer and I think it would be bold to let this replace the desktops we see today (and we see in development today).

2 comments
19. July 2009

I’m not dead

Some friends have started wondering why I stopped blogging. It’s not that I ran out of things to talk about, in fact recently outside starting a blog to talk about one of my other great passions pen and paper roleplaying (check out Pawn your wand), I have also been spending a bit of effort looking at gnome-shell. So far impressions of both the design reasoning and the application itself are utterly poor. But every time I sit down to write, the anger swells up inside me over the whole anti-mono crusade which is going on and I am tempted to add my say to the debate, yet I know that no matter how often the lies and slander of the anti-mono crowd is pointed out the very same points will return days later. It is like debating creationists, something long years experience has told me I do not have the stomach to do.

So I have spend time focusing on things I do like, I have been playing with Moblin (more on this later I promise), I have finally settled on a distribution – Ubuntu though part of me really wants to use openSUSE I just can’t get over their horrible  yast thingy and all this multiple repos which always seem to be poorly managed and in constant conflict. I also looked at Foresight, and was invited to join the team but Foresight just doesn’t deliver the integrated computing experience I have come to enjoy. E.g. why should I need to manually unlock the keyring upon login (btw. openSUSE you are guilty here as well). Aside that Foresight is very nice, just bear with Conary for being slow and instead spend your, lenghty, upgrade lounging in their IRC channel and you will discover the side that really sells Foresight. They have the nicest developers of any distro out there, always ready to help and to randomly shoot the breeze. I suspect superior tools gives you that calm edge and really I do want me some of that.

The one thing I dislike about Ubuntu is that they above all suffer from extreme cases of not invented here. They have their own bugtracker implementation (which makes me want to pull my hair out), they reject existing technologies such as plymouth and then go ahead and announcement their own basic reinvention of rhgb. They reject PackageKit and again write their own aptdaemon. It feels very much like they are positioning themselves intentionally to be as incompatible with other distros thus creating a lockin which is put mildly extremely uncool. I do love pkg-mono though, they know their stuff and are very helpful. In the end the presentation Ubuntu gives users is probably also the best we have to offer on a general desktop, there are still gapping holes to be filled but it’s a solid offering for which they should get praise.

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25. April 2009

A little more time with Ubuntu

In the quest for the perfect Linux for me, I decided to give Ubuntu a longer bit of time on my setup. This lead up largely to the weeks till the release of 9.04 meaning it is the latest Ubuntu has to offer.

Ubuntu has a very solidly frozen release which kinda bothers me since I either have to apply an unsupported PPA external repo to get the version of software upstream supports. This is the case for things like Banshee e.g.. In addition Ubuntu does not seem very willing to adopt software early which means that 9.04 ships with the older 0.9.14 version of Pulseaudio, which is a shame since 0.9.15 definitely is an improvement and finally lets me set up 5.1 (though still only analog). Again I can enable a PPA but that leads to a support nightmare (and breaks the awesomeness that is Apport) which I am not really prepared to bestove on anyone having worked with supporting users myself I know that I always like them to be in the most vanilla state I can get them to lessen my burden. This is a larger problem though of what to do with regards to the balance between a static release with updates and a rolling release. I do not believe this to be an easy problem ti solve but making people rely on PPAs to get important updates to X drivers and leaf applications like Banshee is not a good way to solve it from a QA point of view. What is, seems a huge problem space which would be interesting to explore.

There are also some really annoying moments, mostly when dealing with the package manager. I really miss an up to date PackageKit 0.4.x and interacting with apt-get or dpkg from the commandline just doesn’t feel as natural as using yum or rpm. The output of yum e.g. is very clean and easy to follow as is the out of rpm. In contrast dpkg has multiple lines of jibberish which one has to dig into to find simple information like version numbers for filing a bug report. I really think the time is approaching rapidly to have dpkg put down and radically redesigned, things like debhelper are especially poor designs for the target audience Ubuntu has. If you default to a situation where asking questions during the installation of updates you have failed. My metric for this is normally how quickly my mother would call upon me screaming “IT’S SAYING SOMETHING AGAIN!!! HELP”. Aside that dpkg is extremely frail for some reason, it falls over and gets it database corrupted quite quickly and unlike with rpm the recovery has not be easily discoverable (rm -rf /var/lib/rpm/__db.00* && rpmdb –rebuilddb normally takes care of it). It lacks some nice modern functionality like rollbacks and delta downloads, sadly it does’t look like it will gain them anytime soon either. I am concerned that I have yet to see a clear sign of commitment to PackageKit from Ubuntu, they don’t have the latest version and despite being marked as “in process for Jaunty” we still do not have it by default in any capacity.

I hate the fact that I can’t delete everything relating to gimp and openoffice without also losing my danish translations for everything else. Yes I know OpenOffice has features like a presentor that GNOME office does not have but AbiWord does just fine for me, it’s pretty, quick and very stable. I should be able to remove all those useless help files from OpenOffice as well. Minor nitpick I know but it seems that Ubuntu isn’t very flexible when it comes to changing these applications.

The Mono stack works beautifully, documentation is generated for everything and the coverage is near spotless (all I lack is Monsoon). You are given a full MonoDevelop stack. It’s truly a thing to behold how well kept it is and how much work has gone into making it the best Mono stack around. Additionally the excellent debian/ubuntu Mono team has done some impressive work cutting down the size of applications by removing Mono 1.x functionality meaning that now Banshee and all it’s dependencies take up less space on the CD than rhythmbox. I find this especially interesting as one of the, fallacious, accusations I got when proposing Banshee as the default media player in Fedora was that I disregarded the space contraints and I suggested just this solution to meet the requirement along with splitting out debug information. I am happy to see that it paid off for them and I hope that the patches will be broken out and pushed upstream where possible, also so other distros might benefit that they become available in something other than dpkgs default horrid one mega pseudo patch per package format. Truly masterful, and I get moonlight in the repos as well which rocks my rationale mind.

The desktop itself has some nice tweaks, I like the idea of using the fast user switching applet to do presence and to handle the logout/halt/suspend/hibernate scenerios. I just wish they did that work upstream so that everyone would benefit from looking at the design and applying. It is though a very nice idea and it works really well with Empathy. I do lack the option to set some predefined custom states such as “Having dinner” and such. There is the risk of growing this list very long if one was to do this though.

I hate Launchpad marginally less now, I still think that it is confusing and dead hard to use but somehow work gets done. It needs to be orders of magnitude easier to use before I beats bugzilla though. In the same sense I really miss an easy overview on a per package basis of all the bugs, like bugz.fedoraproject.org/<packagename>. It makes it much easier to do what I love, namely breaking software and triaging bugs, in an effective manner.

Suspend just works… most of the time, I have gotten the system into a state where the network driver never regained life and other little wringles but overall it is the first time I have seen suspend work consistently on this laptop. I hope the same is the case for other people so that one day we might rely universally on this technology to suspend machines when they are idle. If wake up could be made really quick perhaps a system as envisioned by OLPC that would suspend the machine while reading a website might be a viable future for us all.

I am still not sold on the per home directory encryption and it does worry me that I have yet to see any evaluation of this technology by a 3rd party security expert for flaws. It is appealing to have security that does not require every user of a machine to know the master password to boot it yet still have the advantage of knowing that while you are not logged in your data remains safe. It also does not encumber boot nor imparts the performance overhead to system binaries that full disk encryption would do, which is another appealing idea. I would like to have a more informed opinion on the design before I judging one way or the other. It worries me that I have not been able to find a wiki page listing the known weaknesses in this approach, it is not enabled by default but it would still be nice to be able to look up more information. Personally since my laptop is used only by me, I used the alternative CD to install and used dm-crypt, then added this on top, mostly “because I could”, surprisingly the performance overhead of doing this was very low. I think what worries me is that it seems like such a finely pick solution that does the best from a user point of view that it really has to have problems from a security point of view – experience tells most people that when sounds to good to be true, it very likely is.

A problem that seems to plague all Linux desktop right now on this laptop is that it takes very little to make it lock up for seconds or minutes. Audio stutters when the slightest load comes along. It didn’t used to do this but looking at the cpu scaling the slightest load seems to cause a problem where it instantly lowest the cpu speed to the lowest setting. I am currently unaware of what is going on and I don’t have another machine to confirm that it isn’t just this machine going tits up. Ubuntu sadly is affected as well, I won’t deduct them any points but it does make Linux as a desktop very painful on the whole.

Jaunty is an excellent desktop I would not hesitate to recommend it to people, out of the box you get a lot of very nice functionality and a very polished look and feel. It does somehow feel like it is the end of the line for the current Ubuntu desktop and that their experiments with new UI elements will have to lead to some major changes. Hopefully they will be able to pipe this into the GNOME 3 process in a standardized manner so to avoid basically forking the desktop.

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