Btrfs, a new file system for Linux - from Oracle…

une 14th, 2007 — liquidat

Chris Mason announced the new file system Btrfs at the kernel e-mail list. Btrfs is supposed to become a modern file system delivering all the features you might expect from modern file systems.

The announcement was featured at kerneltrap which also shows the most important features and discussions around Btrfs. There you also find the main features which are currently implemented (marked with a +) or which are supposed to be implemented in the future (marked with a -).

• + Extent based file storage (2^64 max file size)
• + Space efficient packing of small files
• + Space efficient indexed directories
• + Dynamic inode allocation
• + Writable snapshots
• + Subvolumes (separate internal filesystem roots)
• - Object level mirroring and striping
• + Checksums on data and metadata (multiple algorithms available)
• - Strong integration with device mapper for multiple device support
• - Online filesystem check
• +Very fast offline filesystem check
• - Efficient incremental backup and FS mirroring

Obviously, this reminds many people of ZFS - especially the snapshots are quite interesting, I think (think of backup solutions and versioned file systems here). But the file system is still in Alpha and in deep development. It has yet to show if it will be abpe to implement all planned features and if it will be able to become a new standard on Linux.

However, what I found most interesting was the fact that this new file system was developed at Oracle. Although Oracle attacked Red Hat with their unbreakable Linux the most kernel work is done by Red Hat in these days. The only bigger Oracle contribution I’m currently aware of is the Oracle Cluster File System 2, which is more interesting for larger deployments.

I wonder how many resources Oracle will put behind this development - and if their are other aims than providing a good file system. I’m still asking myself what their long term related to Red Hat is…

Anyway, if Btrfs would become stable, fast and usable quickly it could become the new standard for Linux file systems easily. At the moment everyone is looking at ZFS, but there are several problems why it is unlikely that it becomes part of Linux anytime soon. Btw., Dave Jones had a good point about the ZFS discussions: it is not all about the Licence. File systems in Linux are somewhat difficult and there are experienced reviewers missing to deal and properly integrate new file systems into the kernel.

However, since Oracle already brought another file system into the kernel and has lots of experiences in that field I hope that Btrfs matures well and becomes part of the mainline kernel soon. Just imagine the possibilities of a versioned file system in Linux within, say, 12 months. Ha, I like that.

KDE/Linux everywhere?

Today I saw that a drugstore where I bought a CD was using a KDE based system for managing there CDs and DVDs. This lead to the question how many hidden KDE installations - and Linux installations in general - are out there.

There are several big installations of KDE around these days - an examples is the Linux system of the city Munich, called LiMux. Other examples are some 80k school computers in Brazil and the German “Oberfinanzdirektion Hannover” with 12k KDE systems (basyskom was behind this one).

These examples are well known. However, since KDE is Open Source no one can track all installations, and several large installations might not be known yet.

The Müller drugstore chain

Today I discovered such an installation: when I bought a CD in a drugstore I realized that one of the two computers on the desk at the information was running KDE. It was heavily customized - no kmenu and a very simple browser window, for example - but kicker was obvious, and the Plastik window style is unique also. I asked the guy at the desk if that system was store wide or personal and he kindly informed me that that installation was used to look up and manage DVDs and other media.
The other computer btw. was some kind of very, very old DOS interface (you still see these often in commercial computer setups).

The drugstore was Müller, which is a drugstore chain with more than 400 shops in Germany and 60something in the rest of Europe. Every shop is running several computer stations (to get an idea: the shop I am talking about was spread over three floors!), but I’m not sure if they use the KDE system only for the media management or also for other purposes. But I think it it save to estimate that there are at least roughly 500 installations.

Of course, 500 installations alone will not change the world, but it is just one example of possibly many hidden installations - and I discovered it the first time today although I know this drugstore for more than four years. Also, as I mentioned, the other system on that desk was an old DOS system. Imagine they start upgrading these systems as well - it would be stupid upgrade these machines to yet another system so there is a good chance that these machines will be upgraded to KDE as well.

How many are we?

The question is now how many other installations are out there which no one realizes? And if you add all these up, what is the outcome? Of course Microsoft Windows is more spread (well, they do have a monopoly, after all), but Apple says itself has only 22 million installations - I wouldn’t be surprised if KDE+Gnome/Linux installations would have a bigger impact than that.

Unfortunately there are hardly any statistics. But half a year ago Mark Shuttleworth estimated 8 million (!) Ubuntu users. Also, Fedora reported almost 3 million installations of Fedora Core 6 in 26 weeks. Both numbers are impressive, but are old (in the Open Source world 6 month is old) and do not even include the corporate installations like SLED or RHEL, not to mention other Linux distributions like OpenSuse, Debian or Mandriva.

This again shows that the Linux community need to gather more statistical data: smolt and popcon are nice starts, but we need more. The best would be a cross distribution project to collect the data - at least among the community distributions, but that is unlikely anytime soon.

Still, even distribution specific data are very valuable. They show the real power behind the project, and they give the developers and the project leaders a stronger voice when these talk for example to hardware vendors about open drivers. Also, such things - done right - are good for advertising the distribution and Linux (or KDE or Gnome) in general:

Pretty nice, isn’t it? Thanks to the Fedora Statistics and Marketing people. We need more of such things!

Howto: Sun Java Web Start on Fedora 7

une 11th, 2007 — liquidat

I recently faced the problem of using a java web start application on my machine and wasn’t sure how to do this. It is a small fix others might want to know as well.

This howto is an addition to the Sun Java on Fedora 7 howto. Therefore you can only use it when you already followed the Java howto.

The main problem is that with the howto mentioned above (and also with a standard install of Fedora’s free Java implementation) there will be no javaws binary in any $PATH directory. When you have installed Sun’s Java there is such a binary, but it is still not in any $PATH directory.

What you have to do is to link it, the best is to do this by using the alternatives system to make sure you can use several Java installations next to each other. In the following code examples make sure your directory paths are set correctly because I use mine as an example, but you might have another Java version, and the version is hard coded into the directory (which is something I will never ever understand):

alternatives –install /usr/bin/javaws javaws /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.12/jre/bin/javaws 1

In this step we register the real javaws binary from the Java rpm package with the system under the point “javaws” and in the same step link it to the right $PATH directory, here /usr/bin/javaws. Also, we have to give a priority, and of course we set the priority to 1.

That’s it. In case of Konqueror (or also Firefox) you might also want to register the mime type “application/x-java-jnlp-file” with the executable given above. In Konqueror you do so by opening Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> File Associations. Find the type “x-java-jnlp-file” under “application” (or create it, the file type must be *.jnlp) and add the application /usr/bin/javaws to the application list (which is most certainly empty). That’s it.

To test the setup I used the (impressive) Qt Jambi web demo. Sun’s Web Start demos don’t work theough since they have the opinion I haven’t installed Java Web Start yet - I have no idea why…
For Firefox go to the Qt demo, click on the link and choose to open such files with /usr/bin/javaws every time.

A Guide to Using PDFs on GNU/Linux

Although GNU/Linux has long supported postscript format, full support for the related PDF file format has been longer in arriving. Today, however, PDF support is finally starting to equal what is available on other operating systems. Whether you are printing, editing, or viewing PDF files, you now have the choice of a variety of applications on both the command line and the desktops.

What follows is not an exhaustive list of choices, but a survey of the main tools available. Taken together, they should be enough to fill most of your PDF needs.

Printing to PDF

GNU/Linux offers several options for producing .PDF files. At the command line, you can use ps2pdf, a script that comes bundled with Ghostscript. As its name suggests, ps2pdf converts postscript files to .PDF format. You can convert a file to postscript within any application by setting up a postscript printer to print to file (you don’t actually need the physical printer). From there, all you need is to enter the command ps2pdf . If you don’t want to change the path or name of the output file, you can omit it altogether to produce a file that has the same name as the postscript input file, but with a .pdf extension.

Complete Article

VirtualBox 1.4 released

nnotek released version 1.4 of its famous Open Source virtual machine VirtualBox. Among the new features are 64 bit Linux host support, synchronized clipboards, a user interface for shared folders and native support for VMWare’s disk images. For the first time there are also prepacked versions for Fedora 7, RHEL 5 and Xandros Desktop 4.1 available.

Several of the features added with this release were often asked by the users: while there were previously already the ability to add shared folders it was quite difficult to set up and required long commands in the shell. Now this is no longer necessary due to the new GUI interface. Also, the clipboard synchronization makes it much easier to work with programs on the host and on the vm at the same time.
The native support for VMWare’s virtual disks brings VirtualBox closer to its competitor, making a transition from VMWare to VirtualBox much easier.
On small new feature I personally like is the new notes feature: with this version you can add simple notes to each virtual machine. This helps keeping an overview over the different vms you’re running.

Besides these changes there are many more changelog: serial ports are now supported which might be interesting in case you only have hardware drivers for legacy operating systems. Also, USB ports can now be dynamically added and removed between the virtual machines or given back to the host. Also, the RDP server now supports session shadowing so that the access from more than one client is possible.

For Fedora and RHEL users there are two new features: first of all there are now prepared rpms available for both Fedora 7 and RHEL 5. But for the first time VirtualBox now also works together with an activated SELinux, making it a possible alternative for data centers with higher security standards.

VirtualBox is available in two licences: most of the software is available under the GPLv2. However, the prepacked versions are only available under the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). The basic differences between these two editions are that you need to pay a licence if you want to use the PUEL versions commercially (personal and academic use is for free) and that the PUEL version has some features the free version doesn’t. Among them: the Remote Display Protocol (RDP) Server, USB support, USB over RDP, Shared Folders and iSCSI initiator.

Xandros Takes Microsoft’s Linux Patent Protection

Xandros has become the latest Linux distro to hop into bed with Microsoft, announcing a five-year deal for joint development.

The oddball duo will collaborate on systems management, office suite, and server interoperability. Xandros will get protection from Redmond’s legal high command, and support for its sales and marketing efforts, Novell-style.

Legal ponderers are still trying to fathom what effect the release of the third iteration of the GPL will have on the relationships with Linux firms which are being fostered by Microsoft.

Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos said: “Cross-platform data centers are a reality. To meet evolving customer needs, vendors need to recognize the value of sharing intellectual property, developing more interoperable solutions, and providing management tools that are familiar and easy to use.”

Microsoft recently renewed legal sabre rattling at the open source community, feeding news outlets with snippets of patent infringment accusations. It says Linux and Open Office trip up 235 Microsoft patents, but doesn’t say what or why.

As part of the deal, Xandros and Microsoft will collaborate on interoperability related to office applications, server interoperability, systems management, sales and marketing support and, of course, intellectual property assurance.

“We believe in and encourage respect for all licensing and development models, and intellectual property is an important component in this environment,” said Bill Hilf, general manager of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, said in a statement. “Our announcement with Xandros is an exciting step to deliver what our mutual customers have been asking for.”

Official Press Release from Xandros

Related: Microsoft Gives Xandros Linux Users Patent Protection

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

The first Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit takes place mid June, featuring the fourth Desktop Architects Meeting, an LSB face to face meeting and various council meetings.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, taking place form June 13-15 at Google’s Mountain View Campus in the Bay Area, is supposed to bring company and enterprise orientated minds around Linux together. The invitation-only event combines several previously singular events together, among them also the Desktop Architects Meeting which took place last time in december 2006 and the LSB face2face meeting which also took place last time in that December.

The schedule and agenda of this combined event give an overview over the main talks which will be given:

• State of Linux Kernel Roundtable Discussion — What’s New with Core Development
• State of Linux Roundtable discussion — Where are We Going? Where Have We Been? An Industry Perspective
• Cross Industry/Cross Distro Software Development: The Ubuntu Perspective
• How Do We Get More Apps on Linux? What are the Issues Facing Linux Application Development and How do we Solve Them? (Ha, I can answer that one )
• The Legal Protection of Linux - Patents and Licensing, GPLv3 and the Future
• End Users and Linux: What Works, What Doesn’t?
• How Do We Work Together as a Collaborative Community?
• LF Collaboration Summit Reception
• Joint Meeting of the Vendor, User and Developer Advisory Councils

Besides these talks the sub-events also feature their own talks, which adds up to quite a lot. Here is a list of the sub-events, called tracks:

• Desktop Architect’s Meeting 4, the only track which goes two days long
• User Advisory Council Meeting: Device Drivers
• Vendor Advisory Council Meeting
• LSB Face-To-Face Meeting
• Printing On Linux
• Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) Breakout Meeting
• Mobile Linux
• Kernel messaging
• IPv6
• Testing on Linux
• Multimedia/Audio

Ha, find a topic which is missing. To me it looks like almost everything is covered - and I wonder how many people will attend? It is more or less a conference on its own.

The list of speakers is also a nice read: almost every bigger company and distribution is represented there. Also other companies like Adobe or Real which provide Linux apps have speakers there. If you miss the more community centered groups there, they do appear as attendees.

Actually, the list of attendees reads like a who-is-who of the Linux ecosystem - especially the more business centered part. Interesting here are the numbers (although they probably don’t mean much): the distributions (Novell, Red Hat/Fedora and Ubuntu) has each a fistful of people in the game. But there are companies which send more: Nokia and HP send each 6 people, Google 7, Ricoh and IBM each 9 and Intel even 11 people!
While I can understand IBM, HP and Google and definitely appreciate Intel I wonder why other companies like Ricoh send so many people. And Adobe only has the Flash player and Adobe Reader for Linux, why do they send 4 people? And what about Cisco’s 4 members? Do they sell devices with Linux on them? And what is DreamWorks doing there with three attendees? And where is Trolltech?

Anyway, as I said at the beginning, the meeting is focusing on the topics which are important for companies working in the Linux ecosystem. The important non-company community parts are also represented, but clearly are a minority.
This is not bad (yes, for me even companies are part of the community), but knowing that avoids wondering.

I’m looking forward to the outcome of the meeting. I haven’t found any information about where results will be posted/reported.

New in Fedora 7: xdg user directories [Update]

One seldom mentioned new features of Fedora 7 are the new directories in the $HOME directory. These are due to the xdg-users-dir program from the Portland xdg project. In other news, Hello Planet Fedora.

When I started my fresh Fedora 7 install I found several directories in my $HOME i never saw before. Among them:

• Applications
• Download
• Videos
• Music
• Templates

I was surprised because I haven’t seen that mentioned anywhere recently. But it was ok since I already knew that this was Portland xdg related. The directories are created by the xdg-user-dirs.

The xdg-user-dirs have the aim to create and also manage directories with pre-defined functions like “Music directory”, “Video directory”, “Documents directory”, and so on. These are also localized and are managed in the $HOME./config file.

If you want to change the pre-defined values simply modify the config file. If you want to delete a directory, point it to your home directory and afterwards trash the directory itself - in other cases the directories might be re-created.

In other news: Hello Planet Fedora! My blog has been added - well, at least the Fedora related posts. Thanks for that, I just hope that I can meet the readers’ expectations. We will see.
As a short introduction to these who are not familiar with me: In the Fedora world I am a small package maintainer who sometimes writes a howto or a bug report or tries to keep an eye on the German FedoraWiki. Outside of Fedora I also write about KDE and Linux in general. And that’s it, I guess.

Semantic Desktop and KDE 4 - State and Plans of Nepomuk-KDE

Nepomuk-KDE is the basis for the semantic technologies we will see in KDE 4. Sebastian Trüg, the main developer behind Nepomuk-KDE, provided me with some up2date information about the current state and future plans.

The Semantic Desktop describes the idea where users will not only be able to search existing information, but also to search for the meaning and relation of these information. The Nepomuk project creates open standards and APIs around this idea.
And Nepomuk-KDE is the implementation of these standards for KDE.

Nepomuk-KDE: Basics

Technically Nepomuk-KDE uses mainly RDF/S for storing the aggregated data. RDF/S is the standard for storing meta data for the Semantic Web and is therefore also used as the standard in the Semantic Desktop.
The current implementation of Nepomuk-KDE contains an implementation of an RDF repository which stores all the data. According to Sebastian the data can be accessed by DBUS which is the default way to communicate in Nepomuk-KDE (of course). But there are also other ways which might be more convenient to KDE developers:

For a KDE developer, however, it is much simpler to use the knepomuk library which provides convenience wrapper classes to access the repository.
Additionally there is the KMetaData library which is yet another wrapper library which provides easy access to the metadata by a resource-centric view. This is what is supposed to be used for implementing stuff like tagging or rating in applications.

The definitions (aka Ontologies) how the data like tags, comments and so on should be stored in the repository can be found in kmetadata/ontologies in KDE’s svn or in the directory $KDEDIR/share/apps/knepomuk/ontologies if you install kmetadata on your hard disk.

Last but not least, if you integrate Nepomuk-KDE with an application KMetaData can help generating code that hides all “nasty meta data type and property named and type conversion”. See the tutorial KmetaData First Steps at techbase. Also, have a look at the KMetaData apidox.

Besides these entry links and the homepage itself the best place to entry the development is, of course, subscribing to the Nepomuk-KDE e-mail list. Btw., one of the current topics is about a possible new, more catchy name for Nepomuk-KDE

Nepomuk-KDE: Current State

So much about the basics and development stuff - now to the sparkling bits:
In the current implementation Nepomuk-KDE enables the user to store additional meta data in form of tags, comments or ratings. See Nepomuk-KDE in action within Dolphin:

The music file is rated, has a comment and also a tag below the comment field. And this cannot only be done with music files but with all kinds of files:

These comments and tags can be searched of course:

In the first image everything is searched for the term “environment” - and a file with a comment containing this string is listed. In the second search example the string “KDE4″ is searched, and the result shows files which are tagged “KDE4″.

So, finally, tagging has also reached KDE 4 - I must admit that I’m very pleased with this result because I’ve waited for tag support in KDE for much too long.

Nepomuk-KDE: Future

At the moment Sebastian works at a backend for strigi. The final goal is to share the data backend so that strigi uses RDF as well. This would create one single data pool for all meta data on your machine.

The next steps are to integrate Nepomuk-KDE further with the applications of the desktop: There is a Google Summer of Code project to replace digikam’s rating and tagging system with the one from Nepomuk-KDE. Amarok already has exactly the features supported by Nepomuk-KDE for all files (rating, tagging, comments) therefore it only makes sense to merge the data as well. And of course all PIM applications contain a huge amount of data which should be analyzed semantic wise: think of displaying not only an e-mail by a contact but also all related e-mails by other contacts and also all related files which were sent and received.
You can extend this list of applications with any program which needs or wants to store any kind of additional information to used or modified files.

Besides integrating Nepomuk-KDE into other files there is also work ongoing to bring other meta data to Nepomuk-KDE: while atm tags, rating and comments are supported there will be many more types in the future. As already mentioned above with the PIM example data can be grouped around discussions (which e-mail is a forward or reply to which) but also around origin (where does this file comes from and where have it been before).
Also, think of an image viewer which does not onl display the given image but also all images taken at similar times or with similar people on it (digikam supports this already with person tags) or even taken at similar places (geo tagging or identifying names like barcelona07.jpg).
And if you really dare to have a look at a possible but yet far away future: IBM, a Nepomuk partner, has text analyse tools which could be used to analyze the content of for example mails to get a better understanding of what the e-mail is really about.

And there are other things which have to be done as well: Data export, cooperation with other desktop environments, etc. For example, the Nepomuk project itself plans to create a P2P based solution for sharing files together with their meta data, and at some point in the future Nepomuk-KDE should implement this part of the standard as well.

As you see there are lots of things to do, and there is room for almost every kind of participation. Just send an e-mail to the developers list. You can also simply leave a comment at this post if you are interested, the developers will keepn an eye on the comments.

Forrester Study About Open Source’s Role in Corporate Environment

Three weeks ago Unisys published a Forrester study regarding the use of Open Source in corporate environments. One notable result is that not only costs but also “added value” are reasons for strong adoption of Open Source Software.

Forrester asked around 500 corporate IT people about their experiences with Open Source Software. You can find Unisys’s summary here, the study can be downloaded as a PDF file.

The key results are that Open Source software is often used in mission critical applications and that not only the cost savings are driving the acceptance but also the use of code without restrictions and the open standards. On the other side, most IT people do have stomachache when they think about the support options. To me that is a clear sign that Red Hat, Sun and Novell don’t make their jobs very well, btw.

But the rest of the study is also worth a read. And since it covers only 17 pages with colourful graphics and a big font size you can quickly go through it
Here are some additional points which caught my attention:

• Supporting open standards, using without restriction and no-vendor lock-in are much more important than the price!
• Viewing/Modifying the source code is as unimportant as creating and distributing derivative work. No surprises there, they are not software vendors.
• The companies clearly don’t want to participate with the community. So you shouldn’t mention that possibility as a key point whenever you sell OSS.
• Security concerns are roughly fifty-fifty: 50% think OSS is more likely to be insecure because of the open source code, and 50% don’t think that. Old habits die hard…
• Many other concerns (maturity, complexity, business orientation) are also fifty-fifty. Is that a sign of a turnaround in these days? And if yes, where to?
• Despite all efforts of Microsoft, TCO is not a concern of the most people. Hardly a third do see this as a concern.
• They want support in all ways (maintenance, integration with closed source software, consulting, life cycles, etc.).
• Only half of them want legal support, and they don’t fear problems in that area anyway.
• OSS is used in almost any branch: server, database, network infrastructure, development.
• OSS is hardly used as the Desktop OS.
• The IT people see OSS as a key in consolidating IT infrastructure and improving the IT efficiency.
• Most of the asked people do not see direct business effects since that is more a question of they way how you use software and manage processes than of the licence of the software.
• The most important capability of an OSS vendor are the OSS skills - second is the competitive price.
• A vendor needs to have customer references and integration skills as well.

Nice overview - and it gives a pretty clear impression: there is a strong demand for Open Source service providers which are able to support the used applications and who are able to integrate them with other applications as well.
And the people do not really care about legal stuff (which Microsoft talks about all the time) and they do not care about the community itself (in the way of participating).

As usual: this is a study, therefore you should keep an eye at the numbers, at the details and especially at the details which are missing. In this case the number of asked IT people is relevant:

In order to get the most valid data possible, only companies that indicated that they had at least evaluated open source software were included. […]
In this sample, 59.1% of the respondents were currently using open source (49.6%), currently piloting open source (5.8%), or planning to pilot open source (3.7%). Only 26.8% of the sample had no plans whatsoever to use open source.

Also I wonder if everyone using Open Source Software really know that he/she does. There are several enterprise products around where you might not know that it is OSS.

Five reasons that prevent my ’school’ from adopting Open Source: (from a non-western perspective)

Recently the NZ government aggressively pushed the adoption (some say too early adoption) of open source software (NeoOffice) for their Macs (news-report here I found this a fascinating discussion but in the end unrelated to my situation because while my heart goes out for the permeation of open source for the sanity of the global IT customer/user, my own school (in a non-western country) is ions away from moving towards open source awareness let alone adoption.

A bit about my ’school’: My school (without naming names) is a small set-up for advanced learning; with about 50+ computers for faculty and students. All computers run Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP. All computers use Internet Explorer (except a few faculty who have chosen the adoption of Firefox. The Firefox option does not exist for the students). For office software, all student computers have Star Office 7. While the faculty have either Star Office or MS Word 2003 (education version). Some faculty have their own MS Office solutions, through OEM licensing when they bought with their laptops. The same is true for students with Laptops, though students with desktops (usually assembled of local one-room shops) may have some pirated software, but all MS oriented. In the entire campus, there is only one Mac, and that sits in the Publications Office.

There are at least five reasons why for the next five years my ’school’ will probably still be dependent on Windows-based products and not touch anything from open source.

1. Our institution is not government funded, hence management policies are determined in-house and by the Board. While currently, finances are not preventing positive IT implementation, there are still enough financial constraints to give the impression/feeling that “we can’t take risks” with open source.

2. Since our IT supervisors (we outsource our IT solutions and support) are MS Windows oriented, their recommendations will obviously be Windows-based solutions. In fact, one deterrent for resisting the implementation of Linux in student computer labs is that, according to these IT-guys, the Windows server does not (cannot?) recognise which site a student on a Linux computer is browsing. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but in a school situation where internet monitoring is important, such arguments are clinchers.

3. Our management (raised in the generation of typewriters) is not IT friendly, and any adoption of new technology (even if it is windows-based) is not thought of positively. For example, out of all the faculty, I know only one has a blog. And that too he needs help to manage it. Of course there are exceptions; we have probably two-three IT geeks hidden in the faculty/management. But they are still in the Windows mold and trust Windows enough because it works for them.

4. There is also a false (in my view) impression that grammar check and spell check improves grammar and spelling. That is why, there has been a push for the adoption of Microsoft Office on all our student machines; because it has grammar check. (Currently we use Star Office). There is also the false impression that the software with more tools means greater productivity. In actual fact, neither student nor faculty, in my experiences, uses the computer for more than writing academic documents (which require footnotes, table of contents and indexing). Still, the idea of ‘better’ software is always, ‘potential’ to do more.

5. Finally, there is no understanding of open source philosophy. Open Source philosophy, of free (as in money) and free (as in for cooperation/transparency) is unheard of. Linux is probably just a catch-phrase out of context. And right now, people feel they have bigger and more important things to worry about than the operating system and software running on their computers. I say this because this lack of understanding of the ideology of Open Source exposes how despite being an advanced educational institute that focusses on the discussion/critique and development of ideological thinking among students, they fail to understand the ideology (and politics) that control their decision to continue with Microsoft, or the alternatives the lie, waiting for adoption.

In summary: as you can see, we’re far away from implementation. I almost wish that the government was funding our institution and would then force us to adopt something like what the New Zealand government is doing. But alas, I realise that even if our government was funding us, they will still push for Microsoft, because what is here below (the people) must reflect what is there above (our governments that reflect our people).

Short Overview: Current State of Mesa and OpenGL on Linux

Most free X.Org graphic drivers are based on Mesa, which is a free OpenGL specification implementation. However, while OpenGL is already in Version 2.1 the Mesa implementation only supports version 1.5. This is to change soon - but OpenGL will make new releases as well.

Graphics in Linux has several problems and issues: first of all there is only Intel providing real free graphics drivers - but Intel does not build high-end graphics software. Second, Microsoft did its usual monopoly homework, and everyone talks about DirectX 10 - it becomes harder to port graphics apps between Windows and Linux because on Windows you most certainly want to use DirectX. Third there is OpenGL itself: the development stagnated for quite some time and the current OpenGL API does not support all the new cool hardware things out there. Fourth, and that is something I realized just few hours ago, the OpenGL implementation for Linux, Mesa, does only provide an OpenGL implementation for Version 1.5 - although OpenGL 2.0 was introduced almost three years ago.

The first problem might see changes in the future: Nvidia always provided advanced graphics drivers for the Linux community, and AMD at least said it would like to solve issues somehow. The second problem is more difficult: it depends on how well OpenGL evolves in the future. If the API is well implemented with Windows and if there are impressive features and such things available which are appealing to developers on the Windows platform these might prefer OpenGL again instead of DirectX. But to achieve that goal the OpenGL people really have to do their homework.

This is somehow related to the third problem: OpenGL itself. Version 2.0 was released in autumn 2004, version 2.1 was released last year. This year we will see two releases at once: one release in the 2.x branch - and a 3.0 release.

First one that is coming out soon is Longs Peak (OpenGL 2.x), which is a major clean-up of the code after almost a decade and a half of nothing else but stacking numerous extensions together.
This API is supposed to arrive in summer timeframe, most probably July. Approximately three months after that, Mount Evans (OpenGL 3.0) will run specifically on hardware born after November 8th, 2006. You’ve guessed it correctly, we are talking about DirectX 10-class hardware, bringing all the features of unified 3D architecture to the world of OpenGL.

This means that OpenGL will get all cool features as well - eventually. I hope that this move is not too late, and I really hope that this will bring more people to use OpenGL again. This is crucial as soon as it comes to porting applications to Linux or any other operating system.

But to use all these cool features there must be drivers available who actually implement these features. Nvidia and ATI/AMD provide Linux drivers (and Windows drivers of course) implementing OpenGL in version 2.1 (Nvidia) or 2.0 (ATI/AMD). However, the free implementation of OpenGL, Mesa 3D is only at version 1.5 - which was released 4 (!) years ago. This is depressing somehow :/
However, the current development version of Mesa, version 6.5.3 is in a good state and a new version, v7.0 featuring OpenGL 2.0/2.1 support is expected soon:

Mesa 7.0 is expected to follow shortly.

Shortly can be anything, but to me it sounds like we see OpenGL support this summer.

The question is afterwards: how fast will the drivers pick up the implemented support for the new API? I can only hope that they are already targeting at the new Mesa release.

And there is another question: how ling will it take to take on with the next OpenGL releases? 4 years are just too much time for the fast developing graphics market.

But having a look at the Mesa news it looks more like that the main development was done in recent months, meaning that the development sped up, compared to the time before. This would mean that there is now an active development community behind Mesa. And if that is true chances are that we will see OpenGL 2.x and 3.x support soon in Mesa.

In any case, the new Mesa will be released soon. And since it will be the first main release after 3 years we can expect a lot of news overage, maybe even an interview or two and quite some information about the road map of Mesa and even OpenGL.

I just hope Mesa will update their homepage till then, it looks horrible at the moment

New OpenGL driver for ATI cards from AMD this year

Phil Rogers was recently interviewed by extremetech.com about the ATI drivers. While the interview focuses mainly on Windows there are some information about Linux as well.

In the 5-page long interview Rogers mentions Linux while he talks about a totally reworked OpenGL driver: the driver was rewritten from the scratch in the last three years and is developed for Windows XP, Vista and Linux. While (of course…) the Vista driver has the main priority the Xp and the Linux driver will be shipped later this year.

Besides the Linux driver itself Rogers mentions also a new Catalyst Control Center:

On the Linux front we will also be releasing a new version of the Catalyst Control Center quite soon.

Sounds great - however, I wonder when we will see the first results of this new drivers. And I wonder what this new driver has to do with the AMD announcement to fix certain issues of the current driver regarding to Open Source. Remember: the fglrx driver does not support AIGLX or has its own implementation (like Nvidia has), not to mention stuff like RandR 1.2.

Last but not least, I wonder which OpenGL version will be supported by this new driver - it is planned to release a new OpenGL API version 3.0 this year (!) and it would be nice to see ATI being fast to adopt it.

KDE: Plasma&SuperKaramba, Kalzium, Kwin, WebKit, Krita and the general State

The new commit digest is out, and features several important news. Among them are the first real Plasma screenshots, a Kcontrol module for Kwin and Krita and Kalzium improvements.

This weekends Commit Digest, Issue 60, was already mentioned last week to become a big one: the first real Plasma screenshots were announced. But even without the Plasma news there are enough interesting news and changes - and it also feature two videos, something I never saw before in a Commit Digest. Here is an overview about the most important and notable news.
Plasma&SuperKaramba

First of all, here is a Video showing Plasma in action (a mpeg version is linked at the Commit Digest):

Pretty neat. Of course similar things have already been possible with SuperKaramba, but Plasma will provide much more functions than SuperKaramba did - this clock is just a first example and proves that the basics are indeed working.

Speaking about SuperKaramba, the Digest also explained the realtion between SuperKaramba and Plasma:

SuperKaramba themes can now live within the Plasma space and will help fill the initial void till real Plasmoids appear.

Sounds to me like the merge will take more time than expected, but that is ok: Plasma is not complete at the moment and we will even see huge improvements in the step from KDE 4.0 to KDE 4.1 In the meantime SuperKaramba might deliver everything which is still missing until both finally merge.
Kalzium

One of Kalzium’s main new features will be the molecular viewer:

Kwin

The new composite extension of Kwin develops quite well- but had to be enabled by command line in the past. This changed now: kwin gets a kcontrol modul. Atm it does not really do anything and kwin doesn’t care about the module, but that will change soon. I’m really looking forward to the next KDE Four Live release where I can test this feature and have a look at the new kwin composite features.

Speaking about the composite extension several application developers were faced with the problem that they wanted to support such features in their applications, but needed to know if the composite extension was activated. Therefore the applications developers started to implement their own solutions for each application, which of course is unnecessary duplicated work. Therefore, a common function to check if the composite extension is enabled was introduced:
bool KWindowSystem::compositingActive();
Nothing revolutionary, but as said necessary. Now the applications developers need to get aware of that function.

WebKit

Work started to have the option to integrate WebKit as a kpart in the future. This means that users can choose if they want to have KHTML or WebKit displaying their web pages. If this work is finished it might also inspirate other people to start a stand alone browser for KDE based on WebKit.
Of course this does not mean that konqueror or even KHTML are replaced or anything like that - it simply adds another possibility.

From my point of view this is great since I have great hopes in WebKit and the fact that several parties are involved with the development: Apple, Nokia, Adobe, many KDE developers, and so on. Still, I would prefer to see that all KDE/KHMTL developers would be fine with WebKit, atm there are still some strong emotions among some developers.

Krita

The Krita development is pretty strong - as usual. And I have to admit that I’m really looking forward to the new Krita 2: I was used to Gimp in the past but started to play around with Krita in the last days and weeks whenever I had to modify images - and I was impressed! It works reliable, fast and just smooth.
And this will hopefully be better: with the last week Krita got an OpenGL interface for display of HDR image exposures. The print support was implemented, new layers and transparency features were added, etc.

But the Krita developers are also faced with a current problem: they want to improve the usage of tablets (think of Wacom here), but to achieve this goal they need money to buy them. Therefore they asked the community to donate money. All over all they need several hundred Euros, which is quite a lot, but you know the math: if each user donates 1 Euro…

Stae of KDE 4 in general

There are many more changes and improvements making this Commit Digest worth a read. It also shows pretty well how active and alive the current development and the community around KDE 4 is.
Also, with Plasma now getting into shape there are hardly any base technologies left which you have to worry about if they will make it into KDE 4. The only things I’m missing are news about kicker and kmenu replacements.

However, the current state of KDE 4 itself is best described by hints found in to other posts: in recent posts both Annma and Troy mentioned that they currently use KDE 4 to accomplish their daily work! Annma mentioned that she was pretty impressed seeing KDE 4 in such a good state already, while Troy pointed out that the state of KDE 4 is enough to write his famous articles inside of KDE 4.

Or course it does not mean that it is ready for normal users yet - base desktop applications like the menu and the taskbar will be replaced before the final release - but it is on a good track! And there is still a month left till the first Beta release…

LinuxOS 2007 vs openSUSE 10.2 vs Windows XP: Comparing Boot-up/Shut-down timings

I recently installed PCLinuxOS as the third distro on my system (incidentally overwriting Ubuntu). And since I’m an openSUSE (fan) user, I’ve been jumping distributions a lot recently to get things done… just to give each distro a fare usage. Anyway, the moment you regularly jump distributions, the boot-up (and subsequently shut-down) timings become an issue. And I thought it would be interesting to compare the three operating systems from a ‘timing’ perspective.

Testing Method: There’s nothing too technical in my experiment. I used the stop-watch on my wrist-watch. I gave each operating system about three times to load and look the last reading. If the last reading was way off the other two, I took the middle reading. For boot-up, I timed from the moment I clicked the distro in GRUB till the Login screen. For shut-down, I timed from the Logged-in stage (hence the distro would have to logout and shutdown in one go). My desktop is one of those AMD 64bt, 1800+ machines, with 512MB RAM (and a normal hard disk, ie not SATA) So on faster machines the boot-up/shut-down times will definitely be faster.

nb: Please note that while I’m a openSUSE fan, I’m not trying to skew the numbers in it’s favour. Which is why it comes out the ‘worst’ of the three.

BOOT-UP TIMING: from GRUB to LOGIN Screen

PCLinuxOS 2007: 37.33 seconds
Interestingly, all three times I booted up to PCLOS, I always got 37 seconds, it was the most consistent.

openSUSE 10.2: 1 minute 5.43 seconds (65.43 seconds)
I like openSUSE, but this is atrocious. All I can say is that I’ve heard a rumour that openSUSE is trying to speed things up. More power to that!

Windows XP: 25.64 seconds
Windows has always been the faster booting system I’ve seen. These seconds actually matter because you (I) tend to choose Windows when you need to quickly check something.

SHUT-DOWN TIMING: (From LOGGED in position to computer TURNOFF)

PCLinuxOS 2007: 22.81 seconds

openSUSE 10.2: 28.93 seconds
A much improved performance!

Windows XP: 35.44 seconds
This was surprising, and I feel I must qualify by saying that possibly Windows was trying to close all the background programmes running in Windows logged in mode (there were no open programmes), which is why it took so long. But I guess that is a Windows problem, so why give excuses, right? :)

SUMMARY:

My personal favourite openSUSE failed big-time, though the shut-down was not so bad. PCLinuxOS is slowly winning me over by it’s high standard. And Windows? Well, it’s always easy to enter Windows but (in the words of the Eagles) “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave…”

Fedora 7 Moonshine - first impressions

I tested a release candidate of the new Fedora 7, code name Moonshine. As already pointed out, most big changes were under the hood and are not really visible to the user.

Fedora 7 comes along with a pretty impressiveset of changes - however, the average user will not see most of them. Especially if he upgrades a highly personalized system like mine and additional runs KDE which traditionally does not get so many improvements in Fedora.

However, some things were notable: First of all several packages are update. The kernel is now tickless and you can start using PowerTop to check for evil processes. Also, my knetworkmanager features a new overview actually displaying the IP and other current information. However, support for additional network types like the new version of NetworkManager provides is not yet included. KDE 3.5.7 is not (yet) included, but k3b is provided in version 1.0. Also, Firefox finally is shipped in version 2.0, as is Thunderbird.
Another notable thing was the fact that I didn’t had to install the ipw2200 firmware: it comes with the distribution now. Very neat.

Also, as promised the device nodes of the IDE drives changed - now all my partitions have /dev/sdX nodes. I had to alter one or two scripts to deal with that, but it also showed me how useful labels are.

Of course, one of the largest changes, the merge of Extras and Core is invisible (despite the missing “core” in the name). First of all because the repository directories are still not opened yet and second because this has no direct effect to the average user. Strange, somehow, because quite a lot of effort went into this change.

And, another big change, the integration of the newest GNOME version, is something I can’t say much about since I hardly use GNOME ever. But you might want to read more about the new version here.

All over all, from the user point of view an evolutionary but very useful step to a new version of Fedora.

How this “poor chap” fixed his GRUB

Recently I ooh-ed and aah-ed about PCLinuxOS 2007. But one gripe I did have was that it messed up my GRUB (ie. it recognised my Windows but it did not recognise my openSUSE partition). While writing that point, I confessed that I have some GRUB problems with many distros and only Ubuntu in my experience recognises and boots everything correctly. I then confessed that I have actually installed an entire Ubuntu distribution (in the past, but on more than one occasion *blush blush*) to fix my GRUB!

Later, I saw a GRUB fixing how-to post that was intended to help ME fix my GRUB, and it referenced me as “the poor chap”. Which I admittedly am! :) The helpful techinical post is found here: http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/16701

Anyway, I was inspired to fix my GRUB, but the post was a little complicated for a noob like me. And so I did what I usually do, go for shortcuts and hope for the best. The following text is extrapolated from the comment I wrote in that post. Hope that helps some people, though I would urge as many people as possible better read the helpful techinical post to get a better idea of how to REALLY fix the thing.

*****

Hey thanks for your effort, but what you wrote, for a person like me, was tooo scary. Really, I’m one of these people who find it difficult to read too much technical stuff… and so I found it difficult (and scary) to read your help. But you did inspire me to fix my GRUB immediately, and so, I did. And this is how I did it.

Firstly, taking on from your pointer, I realised that GRUB is just code. Thanks for that pointer.

Secondly, I realised that I actually needed to “cut and paste” only. Thanks for this pointer too.

However what I did, was I went to my openSUSE GRUB menu.lst and opened the file (using su) and then I copied openSUSE’s boot code, which in my case was

title openSUSE 10.2
root (hd0,3)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc4 vga=0×317 resume=/dev/hdc3 splash=silent
initrd /boot/initrd

I pasted this to the end (replacing my previous openSUSE detailed attempt). And then tested.

Viola, it worked!

Now I know that people like me are the bane of linux. Meaning, if I knew the code, I’d understand it… but instead, more and more, a generation of windows-based users (like me) are infiltrating linux and filling the space with a desire for ‘easy’ solutions. I try not to be one of them, but sometimes I am. However, I guess I have to go with my strengths. I don’t think I will ever be friendly about understanding code (cut and paste solutions are just about all that I can do), and so I guess I want to thank you again for taking the time to address this issue… and hopefully there will be more people who will read your entry and actually UNDERSTAND what they’re doing.

Cheers!

NetworkManager: more support for corporate environments

The NetworkManager tries to ease the usage of wireless networks from a users point of view. The next version 0.6.5 will incorporate support for a range of authentication methods which are often used in large WLAN deployments.

The NetworkManager is an irreplaceable tool when you work with changing networks on a Linux computer: it can manage different wireless LANs as well as wired LANs and even VPN connections. And of course, you can switch easily between the networks without any problems.
NM’s release by Red Hat was the breakthrough which made networking on Linux user machines really easy. Today almost every bigger distribution includes NetworkManager.

However, there are shortcomings: although NM uses the wpa_supplicant to authenticate against secured networks NM doesn’t support all authentication methods supported by wpa_supplicat.
Especially the EAP methods have limited support. This limits the usage of NetworkManager in corporate environments somewhat because these techniques are often used by big WLAN deployments.

Now it was revealed in a bug report that the next version of NM, version 0.6.5 will have support for several of these methods:

Using the 0.6.5-pre version of nm-applet downloaded from
http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/NetworkManager/0.6.5, I can see options for
EAP-TTLS/{PAP,MSCHAP,MSCHAPV2,GTC}. So, it should work for you.

This is great news for everyone working at a bigger company or using WLAN for example in universities (I know of several universities which use one of these methods to authenticate).
From my point of view it would be additionally nice to see when Linux would have native support for these techniques because howtos I read about TTLS/PAP configuration on Windows stated that you need extra software because Windows does not support it native.

One thing though: this is still a development version - nothing is written in stone, it is not marked as usable in production environment and I haven’t tested that. But as soon as a new version is marked stable enough I’m out testing it!

A last word about new versions of NetworkManager:
0.6.5 is a minor release: big changes will come with version 0.7:

• Multiple Active Devices (think of connection sharing here)
• System-wide Configuration (the current one is userbased only)
• wpa_supplicant dbus Control Interface (socket based atm; a dbus interface could bring more flexibility)
• More Wireless/Wired Authentication Methods (even with the mentioned support there are some missing)

However, there is no targeted release date I know of atm.

PCLinuxOS 2007 installation review and first impressions

Never have I had such an incident free installation procedure before. Really! I’m not joking. There’s literally nothing much (in terms of problems) to report. My installation of PCLinuxOS 2007 was simple and error free. What I will say now (about installation) will be comments on certain preferences and perhaps some confusion on (my) part. However, I would say that while PCLinuxOS 2007 installation was one of the most simple and straight-forward linux installations I have ever done, it wasn’t perfect!

Installation Ease? 10/10

Speed of installation? I think I had a whole installation completed in under 30 minutes. That’s excellent, though not as fast as Freespire which I think has a record (on my machine) of about 10-12 minutes!

Configuration capability? Now there’s the problem. I guess every Linux distro has to choose between how “easy” to make an installation and how “configurable”. Well, PCLinuxOS’s installation configuration ability is not thaaaat great. It’s sufficient, but somehow, it is a little scary because when you’re messing with the partition editor, everything looks “fun” even “childlike” and the gravity of the situation just seems to be lacking. The advanced options are limited and often unhelpful. Perhaps to compare, one of the BEST installations in term of configuration was openSUSE 10.2. Now in that installation you can almost change everything (including which windows drives to mount or not)! But I guess, PCLinuxOS just saves the user the trouble and does the thinking for you. Nice, but a little frustrating to non-so-new Linux users.

Bootloader? Well the final bootloader looks pretty, and it even automatically recognises my Windows XP partition, but it failed to recognise my openSUSE 10.2. This was made all the more frustrating because while installing there was no way I could add (or figure out how to add) the full details for openSUSE which was really frustrating. (it’s still not working and I know I have to edit grub somehow, though I don’t know how). Anyway, all this should not be a problem for those who work only with Windows and PCLinuxOS. I must say though, that the BEST bootloader installation is by Ubuntu, which doesn’t look pretty, but recognises EVERY single distribution that I’ve had on my machine. In fact in times of greatest frustration, I’ve actually loaded an entire Ubuntu just to fix my GRUB. OK… that suggests I’m still a noob, but it also shows how reliable I think Ubuntu’s grubloader is.

Internet connectivity? No hassles at all. My DSL modem worked fine as soon as I entered my IP address etc details.

Graphics display? I must add that PCLinuxOS has been one of the BEST (alongside Mandriva) out of the box experiences in terms of my monitor graphics display. Usually, in openSUSE, Ubuntu and any other distro I’ve tried, I’ve usually had to re-configure my Graphics display settings, and even download a VIA driver when available. And even with a VIA drivers, my Ubuntu display blinks! No such problem in PCLinuxOS. It’s working. No configuration needed. And that’s excellent. Really excellent!

Multimedia Codecs? Well, I’ve not tried everything, but so far, everything has worked; EVEN DIVX movies. Can you believe that? (Yes it plays DVDs and mp3s too) No need to install anything. I’m yet to try a Quicktime .mov file, so I’m not sure about that, but any distro that can read my .divx (which even Windows needs a software package for!) out of the box is excellent!

Look and feel? I must say that PCLinuxOS is visually a standout distro! The icons and the desktop look unified, as if they had one designer thinking it all through. We don’t get the modular design look (where many designers work on different programmes to give their own ‘personal’ and contradictory touch). In terms of other distro’s, openSUSE is pretty good, but you still have to work to make it look really good. Ubuntu is just terrible! But PCLinuxOS is just simply beautiful. It did remind me of Dreamlinux, but a better version of Dreamlinux! It even makes the blue look good (and I hate blue distros)! There is one minor drawback. I think because of the lack of ‘proprietary’ fonts, the font-display of my webpages is not as ‘good’ as on openSUSE or on Windows. Well, that can be changed, or gotten used to, but that’s just an additional comment.

Software Packages? I’ve given the packages in PCLinuxOS a quick look-in and I’m surprised that all the major programmes are there… OpenOffice 2.2, GIMP etc. But I’m surprised that the games are missing. That’s sad. Because for such a distro, the games would only help strengthen it. I know where to get the games, but I wish, especially if/when I were to give this distro to a newcomer, the games were already there because it would just be that much more attractive (because the Linux collection of games are actually quite fun… some of them at least).

Summary? Basically, PCLinuxOS 2007 lives up to the hype. And as a single-CD distribution, it looks and feels much better than Ubuntu, at least in its first impression. I find myself missing the power of openSUSE, but then, openSUSE being a multi-CD distro with big-buck-support, is a tough act to beat. I liked PCLinuxOS for all the reasons people are saying that it is a great distro: looks, ease of use, out of the box multimedia functionality etc. And I can’t wait to try and test it out more. Cheers to the PCLinuxOS team. This is really a Linux Plus!

(final screenshot after installation and slight modification below)

HelixPlayer news

After almost two years the HelixCommunity updated their pages and gives information about the current development state. The next release can be expected after June this year, but it will not feature AMD64 builds. Still, WMA and WMV seems to work…

Half a year ago I wondered if the HelixCommunity is still alive - the homepage was in large parts outdated and the development seemed to concentrate on other parts than on the players itself.I
I joined the lists and figured out that there was development in place, but without a release schedule at that moment.
Today I checked again the home page and was pleasantly surprised to see a reworked design and new information.

The first impressive information is also a sign that the HelixCommunity does has other priorities than someone might expect: the base technology is more important than the PC players because the base technology is used in more than 125 million devices - mobile phones. Pretty impressive, I think. But: the player for the Symbian OS already features the third generation of the Helix DNA client while even the second generation based HelixPlayer/RealPlayer for the PC is still in development.

But the player development was also straightened and now has a detailed roadmap. The roadmap shows that the work is currently at stage M11. Stage M13 will be reached in June, afterwards we will see the first Beta/RC1 releases which means that we might see a new RealPlayer/HelixPlayer combo this summer.
The roadmap also points out which features have been implemented/tested yet and which not. Among the tested and working features you find WMA and WMV support - I wonder how this works with the Free Software licence the HelixPlayer is released under…

But there are bad news as well: there will be no AMD64 version of the player. These users have to wait for the next generation of the player.
This is sad somehow because I had great hopes with HelixPlayer. I once hoped that it could become *the* multimedia backend for Linux. It would have been nice to have a multimedia backend supported by such a large community and with such a corporate backup. However, this chance has gone by: gstreamer conquered the gnome desktop (and has some corporate backup as well), and as it looks like xine won the hearts of the KDE people silently (amarok, kaffeine, phonon-xine).
And without functional AMD64 builds there will be no way to gain more market share again.