J_K9 @ Linux

The Chance For Linux To Enter The Desktop Arena Has Arrived

There are several Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) which distribute laptop and desktops with Linux pre-installed, but these companies are usually small and localised. I’m talking about companies like System 76, Xtops and the vast majority of the others which can be found on TuxMobil’s list of resellers. The problem with this is that public awareness of Linux is low, and these small companies struggle to compete for large advertisements to let people know that there is something just as good as Windows out there which costs nothing at all, and that there are companies which sell laptops and desktops with this pre-installed instead of Windows (and thus at a cheaper price).

This isn’t good enough. We need a multi-national OEM, such as Dell to offer Linux not only on the worse laptops or specialist computers but as an option for pre-installation on ALL of their computing devices. If you had never heard of Linux and saw something like the following while customising your Dell laptop, don’t you think you would try to find out more about this free alternative?

Now, of course that would be great and could vastly improve Linux’s marketshare on the desktop, but am I not dreaming? Wouldn’t Microsoft browbeat Dell into not offering Linux as an option if they were even planning to, or ostracise them if they did? Perhaps. But, if Dell listens to its customers (which it should), you will soon be seeing an option to install Linux instead of (or alongside) Windows in a way not dissimilar to the image above. The reason I say that is because Dell has recently been reaching out to its customers to attempt to increase its desktop marketshare, in an effort dubbed “IdeaStorm.” Which idea is currently in the lead? ‘Pre-Installed Linux | Ubuntu | Fedora | OpenSUSE | Multi-Boot.’

More and more people are looking for computers with Linux pre-installed because they do not want to be tied in by Microsoft’s ruthless policies and freedom-compromising solutions, and IdeaStorm only proves this. If Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE were offered as possible installation options instead of (or alongside) Windows Vista, not only would Dell profit from the ever-increasing number of mouths for Linux’s desktop pie but its customers would also benefit from a completely free, in all senses of the word, Operating System.

How can you help? It’s simple: go to Dell’s IdeaStorm website and vote for the Linux installation alternatives idea - if the people who will review these ideas have half a brain, they will add support for at least one Linux distribution on all of the computers that Dell sell and add an option for Linux pre-installation. Who knows: in a few years, you may be able to pop down to the local WalMart or PCWorld and buy a Linux-only Dell laptop.

Edit: It looks like I was late to the scene: Dell has already acknowledged the interest in Open Source software such as Linux and OpenOffice.org, and is working with Novell and a few other unspecified distributions to certify their corporate client products for those distributions. Those products include the Dell OptiPlex desktops, Latitude laptops and Precision workstations. Let’s hope more good comes of this!

Mira’s Web Services Are Up

I would like to announce the availability of Mira’s website, wiki, blog and forum which will be temporarily hosted on this website until SourceForge’s shell servers come back up (at which point I shall transfer the software over to Mira’s SourceForge website). Therefore, without further delay, I would like to announce the addition of the following services:

• Mira Homepage

     This page links to Mira’s other services and acts as a front page to introduce Mira to unknowing users who stumble across it.

• Mira Documentation Wiki

     This wiki will act as a repository for our documentation. This is where we instruct users on how to install, update, deploy and use Mira and also put down our decisions on default features, APIs, functionality, and other aspects of Mira’s design (including its user interface) and architecture in detail.

• Mira Blog

     All developers will be able to post on this blog. It will be used to make announcements (in conjunction with the Mira Notification List, mentioned below), to share an opinion or idea or just to capture Mira’s current stage of development.

• Mira Forum

     This is our centre for collaboration: this is where we discuss new features, ideas, development, etc before putting our decisions down in the wiki and it is also where we help users who are in need of it. This forum will, hopefully, bring Mira’s community together (when it gathers one!) and will allow *everyone* to share their opinion on the best route for Mira to take, whether it’s reasonable or not. Please pop over to our forum now to contribute to the discussions and to start your own, if you wish.

• Mira Notification List

     This is a one-way mailing list: subscribe to it and be the first to learn of announcements, news and other aspects of Mira! If you do subscribe, you will receive approximately one email per week to let you know of the current situation and any developments which may have been made during that week.

I will also set up a bug tracker (Trac seems like the best option) when SourceForge’s shell service is back online. I shall also transfer all of the above services over there too.

Please do join in on the discussions in Mira’s forum to help perfect the plans of its architecture and design! If you know a programming language or two and would like to participate in the coding side Mira’s development, please do put yourself forward - we are looking for developers, even though we haven’t decided upon a programming language yet

Announcing Mira Groupware

As I expressed in a previous post, the current Open Source desktop groupware solutions are unsatisfactory - in truth, we don’t have a Groove equivalent which, despite having its faults, is an excellent, albeit proprietary, groupware solution. Thanks to the community’s support and motivation, I subsequently decided to submit this project to SourceForge for hosting under the name “Mira Groupware.”

Great news: Mira has been accepted! However, as SourceForge’s shell service is currently down for “unplanned maintenance,” I cannot upload the wiki, forum and other software to Mira’s new website until the shell service is brought back up.

For the uninitiated, please read my first post about this project and the following presentation which I have put together to introduce you to Mira and its planned features and to demonstrate why such a solution would be helpful in a myriad of situations:

If you are interested in a groupware solution and are looking for features which you have not been able to find in other solutions, or you are particularly impressed by some of their feature implementations, then please do let us know by leaving a comment at the end of this post!

Speaking of comments, I have just written a small PHP application which will act as a sort of ‘one-way mailing list’ to keep you informed of what is happening with Mira and where it is going. Please note that you will be subscribed to the Mira Groupware Notification List if you leave a comment on this page, but you may unsubscribe if you wish at the click of a button (or simply state that you would not like to be subscribed in your comment).

Mira is also looking for developers - it doesn’t matter which languages you know, as the language that Mira will be coded in has not yet been decided! However, if you share the same passion as I do for an easy-to-use, extensible, feature-rich Open Source groupware solution then please do leave a post below and contribute to the wiki when it is set up. And don’t worry about having to check Mira’s website every hour or so waiting for the wiki to be set up - if you allow me to subscribe you to the Notification List, you will be notified as soon as it is ready!

Mira Groupware: Pending Review

Due to the need which has been expressed for a powerful, extensible, easy-to-use Open Source client/server groupware platform (that is certainly a mouthful!), I have submitted the project, designed to compete with existing platforms such as Groove (as explained here), to SourceForge.net for hosting under the name “Mira Groupware.” Here are the details of the submission:

Project submission:

Created:
2007-02-14 18:48

Last modified:
2007-02-14 19:13

Submitter:
J_K9 (j_k9)

Project type:
An Open Source Software Project

UNIX name:
mira

Descriptive name:
Mira Groupware

Public description:
This is an Open Source Groupware platform designed to have powerful project management and collaboration capabilities and yet still be easy-to-use and have an intuitive interface.

Trove categorisation:

• License :: OSI-Approved Open Source :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
• Intended Audience :: by End-User Class :: Advanced End Users
• Intended Audience :: by End-User Class :: Developers
• Development Status :: 1 - Planning
• Topic :: Communications
• Topic :: Office/Business :: Enterprise
• Topic :: Office/Business :: Project Management
• Topic :: Software Development
• Operating System :: Grouping and Descriptive Categories :: OS Independent (Written in an interpreted language)

Registration description:
The Mira Groupware platform is an Open Source collaboration platform which may be used primarily in organisations and enterprises for project management or as a means of organised communication between people from around the world. It will use a client/server model; the client will be an Internet-enabled graphical desktop application, and the server will be a command-line application which may be run as a daemon (and may possibly have a web administration interface so that its settings may be changed remotely).

Mira will be designed from the ground-up to be easy-to-use and administer. It will sport features such as shared and private calendars, filesharing (as a layer on top of a version control system such as CVS or SVN), both chat (instant messaging, possibly built upon Jabber) and email-like messaging, a shared online whiteboard, and have many other collaboration features. It will allow users to work on their local content offline and then resync with the server when they are next online. Any conflicts will either be resolved or made apparent by the server.

It will also be extensible as it will allow third-party plugins to be created and used to improve its collaboration features.

For more information, please see the following webpage: click here

Current status:
Pending review

The UNIX and Descriptive names, Public description and Trove categorisation may later be changed, so it’s not too problematic if they don’t quite fit the project at the moment (although I think they’re fairly suitable).The Registration description does not go into a lot of depth but does describe some of the aims of the project, so hopefully it will all be read and taken in. If I had written too little, the reviewer may have thought that there was not enough motivation behind the project, and if I had written an essay he or she may just have skimmed over it, so I’m hoping that the length and content will please the reviewer!

I will announce the reviewer’s comment and whether it is accepted as soon as the project’s registration page is updated. Until then, please continue to share your thoughts on this project in the comments section of the original proposition: whether it will be built on top of Lucane or started afresh in a certain language (which), how you imagine certain aspects of the application, what improvements you would like to see in existing solutions, etc. Thank you!

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Will Not Include Binary Drivers

In a surprising turn of events, the Ubuntu team have decided not to distribute the proprietary ATi and nVidia binary graphics drivers with their upcoming release, Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. I quote Michael Labarel’s post:

Moments ago hitting the ubuntu-announce-list is word that the upcoming 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” release will not include the closed-source ATI and NVIDIA display drivers by default. [..] Like existing releases, the proprietary video drivers will be easily available through their repositories, but they will NOT be activated by default.

These technical board decisions were announced on the ubuntu-announce mailing list almost 7 hours ago by Matt Zimmerman.

Apparently 3D desktop support is not as important as staying on the good side of the Linux Foundation and the community by not (potentially) breaking the GPL, and I respect their decision.

Proposing An Open Source Groove Alternative

Groove is a software initially developed by Groove Networks and now owned and developed by Microsoft as a component of the Office 2007 Enterprise suite. It is a project management application which uses the client-server model and integrates chat, filesharing, calendar, discussion, picture sharing, and is also extensible in that third party tools can be integrated to improve the experience. In Groove, a Workspace may be created and Groove members may be invited to join that Workspace and, if and when they join, they will be set a role in that project by the Workspace’s Manager. It encrypts files in that Workspace on-the-fly so as to maintain the confidentiality of the data and, following the client-server model, each member of the Workspace downloads a synced version of the Workspace’s files and other data for their perusal and modification offline. For more information on how Groove works, see this TechNet article. The only feature that the Groove project management software lacks is a good version control system - and, unfortunately, it is closed-source (proprietary) software.

And good version control systems are exactly what Open Source has: Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Subversion (SVN), Git, etc. However, we don’t have a tool which integrates (or acts as a layer on top of) these excellent systems with collaboration modules to produce an outstanding and free project management system.

Plone (content management)…..would handle most of the online
collaboration…. and dotProject (for project management)

The above quote is taken from a post to a mailing list about Open Source alternatives to Groove, and the situation now is as dire as it was one and a half years ago. Plone and dotProject are excellent projects, but they are not, together, a suitable replacement for an all-in-one project management solution such as Groove. The fact that Plone and dotProject are web-based makes them even less a suitable replacement, especially in our current day, for the interface is slower and is more detached from the desktop. One much also be online to use those solutions, whereas you can alter your Workspace’s files offline and then synchronise them with the server the next time you’re online with Groove.

What we need to do is build an Open Source replacement for Groove. Groove is good, but it is not without its faults. I believe that the Open Source community can build an application which either provides a layer of collaboration over an existing version control system or which integrates one (or multiple) of those systems which will not only rival Groove, but which will be better, faster (Groove’s interface, although minimalistic, is a little slow) and more secure. Here are some of the features or characteristics I envisage:

• User-Friendly and Intuitive Interface

  Take a close look at Groove’s interface. In fact, download a trial copy of Groove on a Windows machine (if you have access to one - if not, please look around or ask me for screenshots) and check it out for yourself. Also scroll down Marc Olson’s Groove 2007 Blog, which will give you a deeper insight into Groove’s functionality.

  Despite Groove’s user-intuitiveness, there are some features which are confusing or unsatisfactory. Resolving name conflicts is a nuisance, because you can’t directly remove one of the names. The version control system employed by Groove is poor at best, although I like the way it notifies you of updates within tools in a Workspace (as explained here). We need to make it even simpler.

  If there is sufficient interest in this application, I shall create a few mockups of its interface, although Groove’s interface is an excellent starting point.

• Support For The Mainstream Version Control Systems

  Ideally, this application would be able to run on top of CVS, SVN and Git by making each different version control system a separate ‘tool’ (to use Groove’s terminology). Thus, to create an SVN-managed repository, for example, all the Workspace’s Manager would need to do is add a ‘Subversion Tool’ to the Workspace.

  Using the method explained above, supporting multiple version control systems would not be as complex as it might first have seemed.

• Extensible And Flexible Design

  An extensible design would allow third party developers to create their own tools which could then be added on to this application to extend its functionality in new and exciting ways. Want a whiteboard to draw things with your fellow developers in real-time? Download and install the tool. Want to implement support for a VoIP application so that you can have conference calls with your developers? Download and install the tool.

I have many, many more ideas in mind for this software. Please take a moment to look at Groove if you have the time and, if you like what you see and read, let me know about it and express an interest in watching an improved, Open Source version of this highly useful and productivity-increasing utility become a reality.

If there is sufficient demand for this application, I will recruit a group of developers, set up a SourceForge.net site for the software and set up a donations account to speed up the development process and support the developers. However, you will only ever see this software spring out of my mind and onto your desktops and servers if you provide your support, so please do leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Update: This project has been dubbed “Mira Groupware” and is now pending review for hosting on SourceForge.net!

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Today: In Retrospect

Today has been quite successful and rewarding. I flew back home last night because I’ve got a week of holiday - this is where I first got WPA working on Ubuntu. My old router, a Linksys WAG54G, had been giving me a few problems over Christmas - its ethernet ports had stopped working. However, having returned home after a long period at college, I had completely forgotten about this..

One of my birthday presents was an HP Photosmart C5180 - it’s an excellent printer in its own right, yet it does much more. Not only does it print high-quality photos as well as standard documents, it also acts as a scanner and photocopier. However, I had yet to connect it to the network - I had barely had time after my birthday to set up the printer on my home network. So, I connected it to my router using a crossover ethernet cable and allowed it to configure itself automatically.

I checked its network settings after a few minutes and it had an IP address beginning with ‘169.’ - bad news. That is the IP address several OSs assign themselves when a DHCP server is unavailable and a static IP address has not been configured. As this had failed, I tried to configure a static IP address, but the printer did not show any network statistic once I had configured it. So, I placed the HP drivers installation CD into my CD drive and began to install it.

During the installer, I was forced to locate my printer before I could install the associated drivers - fair enough. However, no matter how many different ports on the router I tried nor which IP assignment settings the installer would not find my networked printer. I spent a total of about an hour - bearing in mind that installing the HP all-in-one software, even up to this point, takes several minutes - before I remembered that the router’s ethernet ports were broken. Plugging the ethernet cable into my laptop allowed me to verify this and, sure enough, the ports were broken!

I was slightly irritated because I could neither update my new Ubuntu installation on my home desktop nor connect the printer! So, I wrote down a few notes (ie. ‘buy a new router’) and went to bed.

I woke up this morning, showered, got dressed, and did my usual routine of browsing through my RSS feeds on Google Reader and frequenting my usual forums (ok, I’ve been neglecting that recently, which is mostly entirely due to laziness). After lunch, I went out to town and bought a Belkin F5D7633-4A (otherwise known as ‘Belkin Wireless G Plus Router’), another network cable so that I can network both my printer and my desktop, whose wireless driver does not support WPA, at the same time. I bought a mouse too, but that’s fairly irrelevant..

The Belkin router has now replaced my aging Linksys and is doing a perfect job. My printer is now network, and I have my laptop, desktop and family’s laptop all hooked up to it. Despite there only being HP software for Windows and Mac OS X (and those being almost 300MB large and distributed with the printer on CDs), my Ubuntu laptop was the first to successfully print a document over the network with it thanks to the inbuilt hpijs driver - and I didn’t have to install anything or download enormous files. Don’t you just love Open Source software?

*Finally* Connected To A WPA-Encrypted Network On Linux

You cannot possibly imagine how many hours I’ve spent trying to connect both my Linux desktop and laptop to my WPA-encrypted home wireless network. I’ve tried every configuration option in the latest snapshot of wpa_supplicant, tweaked /etc/network/interfaces to no end, and installed the newest releases of the wireless drivers for my cards all to no avail. I had even tried Gnome’s network-manager (KDE has an equivalent called Knetwork-manager), which was meant to have WPA and even WPA2 support for a wide range of drivers, but not even that worked - it wouldn’t recognise my card. At least, not until today.

Today, while I was going through my bookmarks, I came across a thread which I had bookmarked a while back about setting up wpa_supplicant on Ubuntu and configuring it to work with the IPW2200 driver/card (which is what my laptop has). I flicked threw it, knowing that I had tried those instructions before and had not received anything but a bit more junk at the end of it, and I came across a post about network-manager. The poster recommended network-manager over the wpa_supplicant approach, for it was simpler and was far more reliable, but for it to work the configurations for the wireless card in /etc/network/interfaces had to be erased or commented out. Oh.

To cut a long story short, I commented out those lines, restarted the computer and, sure enough, network-manager picked up my card. The reason it hadn’t picked it up in the first place was because the card had already been configured by /etc/network/interfaces! Ah, sweet irony. Network-manager found my wireless network, and all I had to do was select it and enter my password and, lo and behold, here I am posting wirelessly from my Ubuntu laptop with a WPA-encrypted connection between my laptop and router. How about that?

Speaking of irony, my desktop has a wireless card based on a Ralink RT2500 chipset specifically chosen because there is an Open Source driver available for it. The only problem is that the driver still doesn’t have WPA support so, network-manager or not, I can’t connect my desktop to the network wirelessly - the 20m ethernet cable it is

// Edit

By the way, to download and install network-manager on Ubuntu or Debian all you need to do is run the following command from a Terminal window:

sudo apt-get install network-manager

Or, alternatively, if you are using Ubuntu, go to Applications->Add/Remove… and install ‘Network Manager’ in the Internet section.

Taking Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Herd 3 For A Spin

I’ve decided to try out the latest alpha release of the upcoming version of Ubuntu, 7.04 Feisty Fawn, which scheduled for a final release in April (hence the .04, for April is the fourth month of the year). I don’t usually test pre-releases, not because I don’t want to help the developers - I do - but because I’d rather wait to be welcomely surprised by the final release than watch as the latest version eases its way to that release, polishing up and removing bugs along the way.

Why the change? Well, I’ve got a few reasons, which are (in no particular order):

• Jono Bacon, a prominent member of the Open Source community, recently called for testers for the latest version of the easiest-to-use audio production tool in the Linux world — Jokosher 2.0. I love the look of Jokosher and I expect it to become an excellent application, particularly for audio producers who are looking for an Open Source alternative to proprietary tools such as Apple’s Garage Band. I don’t know if Jokosher’s developers plan on making Jokosher as advanced and as feature-rich as tools such as Sony Acid Pro or Apple Logic Pro, but I know that, if they do, they will make those features as easily accessible and as simple to use as the current ones. I have been inspired to test Jokosher, and what better system to test it on than the latest version of Ubuntu? If you also wish to test out Jokosher and help make this latest milestone release as bug-free as possible, please read the Testing Development page on Jokosher’s wiki for more information.
• Not only that, but I shall also get to test Herd 3, the third alpha release of Ubuntu 7.04, for bugs. I’m almost killing two birds with one stone. Wait, no - I am

With two bullet points, there wasn’t really much point in making that a list.. But they are valid points, and I hope that you will assist me and the rest of the community in testing these (and other) excellent software projects to aid their development and final stability.

Expect updates on the testing process!

Whoever Said That Beryl Is Useless?

It’s not.

Don’t believe me? Check out this series of articles from Liquid Weather’s Linux HowTos which explains and displays several usability and productivity enhancements allowed by Beryl:

• Beryl: Usability (i)
• Beryl: Usability (ii)
• Beryl: Usability (iii)

Or perhaps they’re just excuses to enjoy the eye-candy