Intrepid Ibex testing

Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been using the latest beta of Intrepid Ibex, Canonical’s next release of Ubuntu. Because of reconstruction and redecoration of my living quarters, I’ve been restricted to using my laptop for the mean time. The laptop is a Fujitsu Amilo running as it came some 5-ish years ago with 512mb RAM and a 40gb HDD. The only modifications I have made are the removal of its dead battery which gave up about a year ago, somewhat limiting its mobility, and an awkward Linksys PCMCIA 802.11b/g wifi card.

I previously used the wifi card in an old Dell laptop which runs VectorLinux, so I’ve always encountered driver issues and had to run ndiswrapper at the start of every session. This was even the case when this Fujitsu laptop ran Hardy Heron. Imagine my surprise when it worked out of the box with Intrepid.

It’s not just wifi drivers that have been added to Intrepid: previously none of my machines running Hardy were able to make use of my networked printer as there were only drivers for the models above and below it in the product range and it proved invisible across port 9100. I thought I’d give it a shot and sure enough my printer’s drivers appear to have made it in the Intrepid release. Whatever bad tinkering I’d done to network visibility also seems to be resolved. I’m now working on copying this PPD file over to Hardy so other machines can print.

Brightside is a fantastic program for those running machines unable to handle compiz fusion but who wish to be able to jump workspace by moving their mouse off the edge of their screen. Ever since Gutsy Gibbon I’ve neglected the idea of ever being able to run compiz on any machine with less than 1GB RAM and associated specs. However upon installing Intrepid I was shocked to see that all windows wobbled without touching any settings. I believe Intrepid must handle graphics drivers differently, meaning that compiz can run effectively on lower spec machines. The upshot is that I’m able to operate the desktop cube that has always drawn me back to using my main desktop machine instead of just quickly reaching for a laptop. On this basis, I hope that the next release of Ubuntu-eee makes use of graphics better, because in its current form the refresh rate on my EeePC is visibly slow.

The only downside to running this Intrepid beta is in its title – “beta”. There are still bugs, and I’ve submitted a couple to Launchpad to find they were already well known and documented. On average when I run Synaptic Package Manager I receive around 100 updates and fixes per day. With 8 days to go until launch, I’m sure this will continue and perhaps the number will increase. Provided you keep on top of these updates, I deem Intrepid in its current form to be perfectly usable.

Ubuntu 8.10

Many thanks to Canonical, all the developers and contributors that have made Intrepid possible. I look forward to the release party and all the announcements and discussion about the next release in 6 months time.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu Eee, the Netbook Remix. I’m very impressed! Testament to it’s functionality comes as this post was written entirely on it. What I like the most is that for the first time, things actually fit on the screen without having to use Alt and dragging, and the font size doesn’t give you a giant headache as you squint to read.

Ubuntu Eee

Installation couldn’t have been simpler. The hardest part was using the program that unpacks the iso onto your usb pen drive. The install onto the EeePC was so simple, it loaded the netbook remix as a live distro from the usb pen and then launched the install shortcut on the desktop for me, must have been set as a startup session. A few simple questions about my name, location and password later, I was partitioning the ssd.

I have partitioned the ssd so that there’s no swap at all. I didn’t deem it necessary as I have 2gig ram installed, and there’s not much room to play with on only a 4gig ssd. I’ve read on eeeuser.com about the pros and cons of not having a swap partition. I don’t fully understand what swap does for performance, but I can say that this is working fine, so I have zero regrets about saving on ssd space.

I had tried Netbook remix out once before when it was first announced on launchpad, but it was quite buggy and the icons didn’t fit into the main window space properly, especially the program names. The difference now is staggering, and this version looks promising. I would definitely buy a netbook/notebook with this installed by the maker.

I’d like to say thank you, on that basis, to the community that put together Ubuntu Eee, because it has made Ubuntu have the qualities I most enjoyed about the Easy Mode on the default Xandros installation to the 701 EeePC: big buttons, simple menus and speed.

When the 701 with the custom Xandros build first came out, there was no way to add icons for newly installed programs, so I spent a lot of time in terminal launching apps like Zattoo player. With Ubuntu Eee, you get the full Ubuntu repos and therefore all the software available through Synaptic package manager. Anything you install appears under the correct menu, just as it would in Ubuntu Hardy, but as a giant icon.

I’ve now used this for about 18 hours, and my observations so far have led me to find a couple of problems. Firstly, I love having a desktop cube and shiny effects, more commonly known as Compiz. Activating those functions completely messed up the screen display, and I lost the ability to have windows in the top tab bar. I will have to play around with this more, because I’m convinced there’s a way to have this view as a rotating cube. I think it’s just a case of disabling wobbly windows and any other features that conflict with the Netbook remix properties.

Cheese working properly

The second is with Cheese, which works, but can’t display properly on first load. I have to launch the program twice and then close the first instance which displays in a way that I can only describe as portrait over landscape – i.e. the control buttons are off the bottom of the screen, the orientation is the wrong way.

Thirdly, I had trouble with repositories. This Ubuntu Eee uses a custom kernel from Array.org, something that in my hurry to get it all working I didn’t take the time to sit back and read about. When I tried to use Synaptic package manager to update my sources list (having ticked archive.ubuntu.com in Settings, Repositories) and check for software updates, it was reporting errors fetching the lists, and reported the error “Media Mismatch”. I fixed this by opening Accessories, Terminal and then navigating to apt with “cd /etc/apt”.

Once in here, “ls” told me that there were two places to look through to find the list of sources: sources.list and array.list (located inside a sub directory called “sources.list.d”). I opened up each of these two lists with “sudo nano sources.list” or “sudo nano array.list” (having performed “cd sources.list.d”) and first disabled the array.org source in array.list by adding # to the front of that line. I then started a process of elimination: I changed sources.list so that only one source was active and all the rest from archive.ubuntu.com were inactive with #, I allowed Synaptic package manager to reload after every line change. I figured out the clash was with array.org because of the custom kernel, eventually.

I added some software, such as Xchat and all the Gstreamer plugins, and then turned the Array.org sources back on, because I’d like to continue to use this custom kernel. I’m yet to finish reading about it completely, but it seems attractive because I used to have to run RiceeeyTweak every time I performed a kernel upgrade on standard Ubuntu Hardy to re-install MadWifi and the other fixes for the EeePC.

Lastly, the volume control on the system notification panel displays is muted, even if the volume is way up and playing music. I suppose this is better than it being muted and stuck that way, because then I’d have no music, but it’s a little odd. If I turn the volume up, when I next turn the system on it will be back muted. *Edit* Fixed by re-installing the Alsa package, guessing this got slightly messed up during install somehow.

I’ve been listening to the Ubuntu UK podcasts for the last couple of days, and noted that Mark Shuttleworth and Co seem to be very keen on pushing Ubuntu into the mobile and small form factor spaces. LiMo is making big waves on devices and so I’m glad to see that Ubuntu Netbook remix is coming along so well to push the Canonical brand.

I will be keeping this version of my favourite distro installed on this 701, and I’ll be keeping it up to date with any changes available from the Array.org repo. I highly recommend this to anyone with a netbook/notebook looking to try out an OS different to the one it came preloaded with.

Digital Nomad… the conclusion

At the last LUG meet, I presented my findings from the Digital Nomad project I undertook, along with wifi encryption hacking (in theory). This project was started because of hard disk failure, complete paranoia at ever losing anything, and curiosity – can you JUST use a browser and some cunning Web2.0 offerings to run your life? (See Running your life and BACKUP posts) It has now officially concluded and I’m very proud to say the answer is YES! I gave myself bonus points for services that are free or dirt cheap.

Here’s the full list of services that come with the MLED “I like this” seal of approval:

Google Docs: If you have a Gmail account, utilise all the associated features to the fullest. You can put almost all your eggs in this one basket – Google provide blogging, reading, email, calendar, docs & spreads, photos, and they even have had a stab at social networking. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The best news is that Google Gears is being extended to include Google Docs, making this even more suited to serious and/or business needs. Gears lets you continue everything off-line, essentially your work is backed up and collaborated/shared as soon as you go online. Big thumbs up for Google.

Zoho: Google’s offerings have this superb competitor. They seem to be leading the way on some of their innovations, I’ve not found better or an alternative. This is very seriously geared towards businesses, and they do charge for heavy usage. Features that look particularly note worthy are Invoice, Projects, CRM and DB & Reports products. I have stopped using this suite because Google is too convenient and easy for me, but if you’re seriously looking to undertake a shift to the web-centric domain, do NOT ignore Zoho.

Scribd: The YouTube of documents. At the end of this year, I’ll probably upload some of my notes to actually participate in the sharing. This site has a great store of docs, white papers and articles and uses ads to monetise. I have found it immensely helpful as a resource so far, but it’s not quite like Wikipedia in terms of quick access to general knowledge. It’s the opposite angle to document making Web2.0 suites – it wants you to upload all your old notes and documents for sharing in the cloud, rather than providing you with a way to make new ones. They have an API and some interesting ways of embedding documents, presumably aimed more at journalists. I could see some potential uses for this as documents backup and hosting technical manuals.

Seeqpod: If my mp3 player is not pumping beats into my brain, then Seeqpod is how I now get at music. It’s superb. You can build playlists or just randomly search/stumble your way around tunes.

Flickr: Yahoo! did good. I absolutely love Flickr, and it is serves as a backup as well as a way of publicly displaying photos for me. I have forked out for a pro account so that I can freely display and store as much as I dare. A lot of people use Facebook for photos, but I’m not in favour of this as it cuts down images, doesn’t quite have the same freedom as “sets” and “collections”. But lets face it, Flickr is designed specifically for photos, whereas Facebook is now something of a joke where I now get spammed by silly application invitations.

Liquid Planner: Worth a click if you’re a manager. As the title might suggest, it makes planning easy and fluid. I have yet to properly start using this, so I can’t really give too much feedback on how it handles, but the account I have, the interface, and the feature list are all very impressive. A lot of people talk, blog about, and use Basecamp for business, and based on its popularity alone I recommend it in the same breath. I’ve not tried it though, so it’s not properly featuring in this list.

Jungle Disk: Storage and backup pleasure. Uses Amazon S3 at the moment, and should another company like M$ or Google release an alternative then I’m sure the company will explore using those as a back-end. They’re working on version 2.0 of the software which is already cross platform and superb. They’ve just taken on a new worker and announced a bundle of features that they plan on adding.

Meebo: Messaging made easy. I have messaging accounts on Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, Jabber and I’m looking into AIM now that they’ve partnered with Meebo and started to crawl back into the spotlight. Before I used Pidgin to unite all those accounts in one window, but now I use Meebo because it does the same but inside a browser. As a bonus, they have some products that they’re constantly adding to and updating, my favourite so far being the Meebo Me blog plugin —->

Netvibes: Homepage 2.0 and they’re French! This makes the perfect home page as you can literally put anything in a widget, so I no longer have to visit MySpace and wade through ads to check my messages, nor do I have to visit online comic pages. I’m probably missing out on half the features they have because I honestly haven’t found time to explore, but it’s certainly very powerful and worth looking at.

Blist: I got an email from them yesterday saying they’ve added social features – i.e. proper collaboration and sharing with permissions. This is a superb place to work on and collaborate on databases, and more specialised than Zoho’s offering I think.

Remember the Milk!: A reminders plugin for Gmail that sits where relevant text ads would normally be in the right hand column. This is incredibly useful for both simple and comprehensive to do lists. There’s also a plugin for Google Calendar that I haven’t explored because it provides text message reminders just like Google Calendar does, and I was worried that I’d get the two confused or conflicting.

I Want Sandy: My new PA! Remember the Milk! has passed by for me now because I Want Sandy acts fairly human and allows you to add entries to task lists and a calendar via text message, texting you back with reminders. UK residents need to communicate with the service via Twitter at the moment because it doesn’t have phone support for networks other than O2 UK and T-Mobile UK (I think). Twitter is the future, so even if your phone network is supported out of the box, grab a Twitter account anyway.

The concept of Digital Nomad is something I’ve come to both enjoy and rely upon, but with the good comes some disadvantages. Whilst you have a free (£/$/€) set of apps that you can access on literally any internet connected device, it limits you to such devices. Being permanently connected can prove costly in certain areas of the world! Additionally, I think it’ll be a long while yet before professional and specialist tools such as video, music and photo editing suites reach the internet platform. So don’t throw out your computer and bulky software suites yet, there’s still a few years of life needed from them. But what this project has shown is that being on a public terminal or a friend’s laptop shouldn’t slow you down if you’ve got the right service accounts.

For Kluggers: here is the link to the wifi hacking tutorial I discussed at the meet.

BACKUP! BACKUP! EVERYBODY BACKUP!

Why is it that no one seems to think about doing this? What if there was a flood or a fire, and your server/desktop got destroyed? How screwed would you be, personally and/or professionally? Tekzilla did a great episode not too long ago that gave a really simplified consumers guide on backing up your files, both in Windows and on Mac.

For me: my photos, personal details like banking records, documents and presentations past and present, chat logs, saved histories, preferences and bookmarks. These are what matter to me the most in terms of my digital life. We’re all really lucky at this stage in digital evolution as we’ve already been blessed with reliable online services that can reduce not only the need for high storage capacity on our computers but also the worry that we face answering that question – what if a hard disk just stopped working?

For example, Google handle my email, and I’m safe in the knowledge that I can access that on any internet-connected machine and it have the exact same user interface to it and thanks to its insane storage, I’m not limited on attachment sizes or concerned about deleting items. Looking at the two accounts I have with Google, personal and public, they are both now over the 6gig size, which I find impressive. Even more incredible is that I’ve managed to fill up 4%. I use Google over other mainstream email accounts like Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail just because I prefer the simple interface that seems to me to load a lot faster on slower connections. I have also been impressed by the ease with which you can use Google’s Partnerpages – they take over the running of email on your domain and also give you the full suite of Google Apps.

But we’ve progressed beyond mere email now with web services. Online storage looks to allow us simple uploading of photos, video, and music and a lot of those services also provide a social network dimension that allows the sharing of all this data. Having ads served to me is a price I happily pay for using the services of Facebook, Flickr, Youtube etc. But what if you want something that I’m going to define as “more hardcore” – no ads, bomb-proof reliability, and the sky being the limit on capacity?

A lot of companies have launched themselves on Amazon’s S3 service, using it as their storage back end. I believe this to be genius, as it means that these companies can be paying their fees to Amazon, outsourcing the cost of setting up and maintaining the servers to them, leaving ‘Mr. Web 2.0 Entrepreneur’ free to focus on an innovative front end. There are two examples of such companies that I am going to explore: Jungle Disk and Scribd.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I have just recently made the total switch over to Ubuntu Linux. Whilst Canonical and the open community that contribute to Ubuntu are doing a phenomenal job of increasing compatibility and function, it’s still a nuisance that so many programs and services are locked in on providing solely for Windows and/or Mac users. An example of this is Carbonite, who provide a highly recommended online backup service to Windows users. So some folks at my LUG did some research and came up with a short list of linux compatible online storage services, of which my favourite stands as Jungle Disk.

Jungle Disk is not only available for Windows, Mac and Linux but also lets you install a program to a usb pen that’s compatible with all three OS’s and will backup in just the same way as on your own machine. Their Why it’s better page accurately outlines their best features, but what wowed me the most was the section on “Pay only for what you use, with no minimums”. This feature is something that’s part and parcel of S3, which is why I really like what Amazon are offering to other companies that can be passed on as a sensible option for all end consumers.

Scribd takes on a much more user-friendly community approach to its use of S3. It markets itself as the ‘Youtube of documents’. Users can upload documents, with unlimited storage, and they share these documents. This free consumer community side will prove to be a very useful tool for education and I look forward to watching this grow. It’s had excellent press so far, and they’ve done the most sensible thing in creating a platform including API so that it can take on a much more commercial business market. I’ve already signed myself and a couple of friends up to the API, who each have very specialised knowledge in certain fields and have been looking for a straightforward way to publish their work while being able to monetise in a controlled fashion. Scribd will embed ads into your documents and then the ad revenue is split between them and you. Obviously with this business model, they can quickly jump to the absolute front of the race, provide a collection of widget options, and with this embedded ads system pioneer the use of widget ads.

Next I’d like to see more competition in the S3 market to drive innovation, as always. Someone should develop another S3 style service because I feel front end operations are already suitably saturated with some great companies like Jungle Disk and Scribd. Let’s see some more of the tech giants offering web 2.0 startups the backbone systems to launch their ideas from, and ultimately it should also do something for internet infrastructure in the process which can only be seen as a good thing.

Karma – what goes around comes around

After my previous outlook of ‘everything’s great’ and my theory that there was a genie sat behind me, it seems that karma has come back to get me. It is true that good luck must be followed by bad luck, and my bad luck has come in the form of an Asus eeePC.

The Asus eeePC IS a revolution. Screw all the media and rave reviews about this device, just go out and buy one right now. It is so simplistic that my nan could operate it without being told what to do, and yet it really packs a punch with the power and streamlined Linux distro combination. I love it. There’s just one problem though – Asus didn’t deem it important enough to make the little Xandros distro compatible with WPA PEAP encryption.

Asus’s target audience with this device is simply anyone that wants a great little machine for on-the-go work, play, and most importantly quick internet access. They won’t tell you this (and for some reason neither will 3) but the 3g usb dongle that you can get for just £10 per month works out of the box, which surely makes this device the best completely mobile device out there at the moment, especially as you can do all that for under £300. I spent £250 on my black 4g 701 eee at PC World because I was impatient, but online retailers are dispensing them at an alarming rate for just £220. The 2g version is going at £190, but I’m struggling to see why anyone would get one as you lose out – no space for any documents and no inbuilt webcam.

To me, the natural audience fit for this device is students of literally any age. It’s cheap, the solid state disk makes it more robust, it does everything that a windows laptop does and it is TINY. The massive downside for this demographic is that most of them frequent educational establishments during office hours, most of which have some kind of wifi (good thing) with WPA PEAP encryption (bad thing if you’re an eee user). The UK rolled out a fantastic project called JANET eduroam, which means that any student from any university can go to any (not just their own) university and use their login and password to access the wifi. To protect this, eduroam employs the use of WPA PEAP, which is admirable as universities have always been a real sore spot in terms of infrastructure security.

So WHY then does the eee not have the ability out of the box to connect to WPA PEAP? That’s just nuts. I’ve done much trawling of the awesome forums and wiki run at eeeuser.com and no one seems to have hit a solution for Xandros. The only answer is to install Windows or Ubuntu.

Kudos to Ubuntu BIG TIME, as I’ve now entirely switched from Windows XP to Gutsy on my main desktop; and I’m astounded at its customisation tools, general out of the box compatibility and speed. The only two things I’ll say is that no one should try this at home without a nVidia graphics card, and if you invest in a printer have a good check on the Ubuntu site for which printers work out of the box. I now have dual screening working all lovely and I’m really impressed.

But I shouldn’t have to install XP or Ubuntu onto my eee. WPA PEAP wifi should just work. So wake up Asus, start shipping with this feature out of the box, and release a patch for those already purchased! It’s frustrating to the extent that the iPhone is. I watched the latest episode of Diggnation last night, and Alex Albrecht pointed out that the iPhone is SO close to being the perfect mobile handset, but there’s really silly details missing like MMS. The same goes here with the eee, it is amazing, and I love my new eee and find it hard to put down, but it’s still a couple of features short of being the dream ultra mobile SSD laptop.

Someone up there loves me right now…

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve encountered a situation where I’ve thought to myself, wow, I wish this type of tool existed because that would be extremely useful right now. Then, as though some invisible genie was sat behind me granting my every wish, I would log on and find just that tool had been launched and hit the media.

The latest example of this that I’m super excited about is Scribd. Man, Web 2.0 sure loves to leave out its final vowel when naming. Anyway, this startup has followed in YouTube’s footsteps, but looks to create a community around sharing papers.

I’m excited by this because there’s a lot of white papers that float around, those from TechRepublic have had the most interesting titles to me recently, and this service will greatly encourage the circulation of these whilst still allowing them to be monetised. Some of the charges for white papers out there are quite insane, and I hope that by adopting Scribd’s platform, the people that produce such white papers will feel much better about opening up their distribution to a wider audience (and for free). This is certainly the perfect way for freelancers who are specialists in certain fields to publish and promote their work while earning from ad revenue.

More findings later…