Google Chrome Operating System

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

So not Windows then!

Tech support on the eeePC

Joe (my eldest) has been making great use of the little Asus eeePC linux-based ultra-portable for a while. It has everything he needs day to day and he loves the fact that he's running a different OS to everyone else he knows!
Anyhow - ours developed a fault where it started crashing and eventually it couldn't even complete it's BIOS memory count before freezing - a classic case of a hardware problem (you'd think!).

Anyway - I just wanted to detail the miserable experience using Asus's tech support was;

Firstly you have to submit a web request for support - the online form has a couple of funnies - you can only enter 150 characters in the fault description and no punctuation is allowed! If you've ever tried to write something coherent with only alphabetic characters you'll appreciate what a challenge this is! Also - 150 characters? They need to hire a decent PHP programmer! Another niggle is the fact that the case number is a required field! You've just opened a case and they demand your case-number. They also wanted fax-proof of the age of the machine. Given that they've been out for about six months and they come with a two-year warranty.....
Anyhow - you submit the form (after a dozen attempt because they're server keeps firing it back at you with invalid data due to the full-stop you put at the end of the problem description!) and they tell you that it'll take 48 hours for them to acknowledge your request. They manufacture computers and yet they take two days to process a simple CGI form! They are clearly running their tech support system on counting-beads!
Anyhow - after three days I eventually found a number to call and got through to someone who told me that tech support had bounced back my request on the grounds that I hadn't done a system restore - that was required to eliminate software problems! Now, remember that this machine freezes after a few seconds of power AND it has no CD-drive! So, even if it was a software issue they expect you to have bought an external USB CD drive. After much ranting down the 'phone they persuaded me to re-submit on the web. I did and gave it another four days - no response!
So, back on the 'phone to be told that tech support had issued a collection notice but neglected to email me. Eventually I got the UPS details and the thing was collected and returned a week later with a new motherboard and it's all good.

One thing you can never get away from is that tech support departments are never properly funded and tech support engineers will often say anything to get you off the 'phone because they probably won't get you when you call back after having tried the pointless thing they've suggested - re-installing the OS rather than figuring out the problem, for example.


The 'phone number is 0870 1208340, and if you have to do battle with Asus here are a couple of names that helped me;

Solid state laptops and all that

Watch this episode of Unwired from my mucker Wil Harris;

That caught my eye on Saturday morning while I was sitting around in my dressing gown and catching up on video podcasts. I was so turned onto the idea that I've decided that by hook or by crook I shall get one of these bad boys to play with. It really reminded me of my old Jornada 820 which was excellent as an email/Excel/Word machine.
Anyhow - with that in mind I noticed that Uruguay has ordered 100,000 OLPC machines. The market for small, embedded, task-specific robust devices is getting more interesting.

Funny Linux commands and responses!

% cat "food in cans"
cat: can't open food in cans

% nice man woman
No manual entry for woman.

% ^How did the sex change operation go?^
Modifier failed.

% make love
Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop.

% sleep with me
bad character

% got a light?
No match.

% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.

% !:say, what is saccharine?
Bad substitute.

% \(-
(-: Command not found.

$ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense
no sense in pretending!

$ drink matter
matter: cannot create

Bye bye Windows server, hello Linux!

Just a quick post to say that the Windows server (that has required a lot of maintenance AFAIC) that has sat in the cupboard under my stairs for the last six years has been pensioned off and from now on this blog (as well as several other sites I look after) will be hosted on my little embedded Linux box (running a 2.4 kernal compile of BusyBox).
It was a relatively painless switch-over with only one site falling foul of a path that contained upper-case letters that I didn't notice.
Now I can hold my head up in the company of other geeks!

You now have no excuse!

The aim of this installer is to provide an easier way for a Windows user to install Ubuntu without having to know how to burn a cd iso, set the bios to boot from cd, repartition the disks, set up a multiboot system, etc. It will not replace any of the current Ubuntu installation options, and will not require that windows is installed prior to the installation of Ubuntu.
The installer works by creating a disk image of a pre-installed ubuntu system on the hard disk (downloaded with a bittorrent downloader integrated into the installer, or a standard http download when we find mirrors), and then installing GRUB for windows, which can be chain loaded by the existing boot loader, and which then loads the linux kerner and initrd from the ntfs partition. The initrd is modified to support mounting the image file mentioned above as a root file system, and then continuing the boot process like a normal installation.
This does not use a virtual machine to run linux on, so the performance of the resulting system will be similar to the performance of any other linux installation. The system will use ext3 in the image file, so users will get all the benefits of a linux filesystem.

I used to use BeOS this way - mounting a virtual drive image under Windows and booting into it. It works well and you get good performance. For a while last year I was running Ubuntu under VMWare and you feel the virtualisation performance hit. I'm off to try this on a machine at home (that currently dual-boots). My MacBook is rapidly running out of disk space.....!

Linux on HTC Universal

This looks interesting - I'm about to have a spare Universal - watch this space!

Killed the GUI in Ubuntu?

I did! Actually I was doing a patch-update and the battery on the Dell Latitude died. Subseqently I couldn't get the thing to boot to Gnome. Booting to the command line and doing an init 5 produced only the "brown screen of death"!. However - as with any Debian Linux you can run the patch-manager from the command line;

apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

and all is well!

Skype under Ubuntu

Hmmm - to get Skype working under most Linux distros you have the choice of using the old-skool OSS (Open Sound System) or the newer ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). I've never got anything running properly using the OSS-driver! The problem with the laptop I'm using is that it only has USB1.1 ports and so my US-Robotics handset wouldn't work properly either! Enter Skype 1.3beta which does support the ALSA driver and all is well.

Ext2 Installable File System For Windows

If you currently have Windows running and you realize that you need some files for your work which you have stored on an Ext2 volume of your Linux installation, you no longer have to shut down Windows and boot Linux!
Furthermore, Windows will now be able to handle floppy disks which have been formatted with an Ext2 file system.
Linux Ext3 volumes can also be accessed.

There have been several times in the past when this would have helped me out immensely!
Thanks to Rupert for putting me on to this.

A Closer Look at Damn Small Linux

In this article you will learn how to turn a blank CD and an inexpensive USB keydrive into a powerful, portable, take-along operating system complete with modern applications like Firefox, a Web server, and multimedia tools. All this can be done using free Open Source Linux software.

The article goes on to explain how since the memory footprint is small (typ. <50megs) \home\ directory) on the thumb-drive.
I'm going to give this distro a go and I'll report back.

Linux, Windows & MacOS (2nd week with the Mac!) - Game development

If you have any interest in open source software (who which modern person isn't?!) then FLOSS weekly is a great podcast (part of the mighty Leo Leport's stable). This week's features Ryan Gordon who ports games across platforms (typically from Windows to Linux & MacOS) - he has some really interesting insights into the process of software development, particularly in reference to graphics APIs - Direct3D, OGL & SDL and how Vista will be much for OGL-centric. It reminded me of a video I saw on Channel 9 where they use Doom and then Quake as the test code for virtual machines.
Anyhow - here is a guy who knows each OS more intimately than most developers (he really has to get under he bonnet!) and his view is that each has good points and each has very bad points. I'm starting to realise that being a fan-boy for any OS (even Linux!) ain't useful. Having this little Macbook means I'm using OS-X a lot more (typically at the weekends, but having got VPN and an Exchange client working during the week as well) and perhaps getting good at many OSes can make me a better engineer - particularly where networks and SANs are concerned.

GPX2 handheld game console

Look at this bad boy! It runs Linux and is a third of the price of a PSP!

....it can play games. It can play your Movies. It can play your music. It can view photos. It can read Ebooks. It runs on just 2 AA batteries - And it can do all this in the palm of your hand or on your TV screen.
Yes that's right, this handheld can connect to the TV, console style. Watch your DivX movies on the TV. Play emulated classics on the TV. Try big screen Quake. Or just play them all on the GP2X's large 320*240 backlit screen. You get the best of both worlds.
It runs the free Linux operating system. This means a whole world of Games, Utilities and Emulators are at your disposal. Quake, Doom, SNES, Megadrive, MAME, Media players and Applications to name just a few.
It's powerful - Two 200mhz CPU's with 64meg of RAM, custom graphics hardware and decoding chips. Takes SD cards and has 64M of NAND memory. Plenty to play with. One of the most powerful and advanced handhelds today.

Hmmm - that next day of freelancing......
Wikipedia article.

Thai food & VMWare ESX Server!

I went our for a very nice meal with my friend Kevin Cade last night - he's in town on a training course at IBM on the South Bank covering VMWare's new server product line;

VMware ESX Server is quite different from the other VMware products - which all run on top of either Windows or Linux - as it has its own proprietary kernel and is installed directly on the bare metal. This approach provides better control and granularity on allocating resources to Virtual Machines, and also increases security, thus positioning VMware ESX as an enterprise-grade product.

ESX is VMware's flagship product and has been rapidly adopted by companies who are looking to consolidate their servers. Two other products are used in conjunction with ESX - Virtual Center and VMotion. Virtual Center allows monitoring and management of multiple ESX or GSX servers. VMotion allows moving virtual machines between servers on the fly, with zero downtime.

He's very excited by this - apparently you can migrate a server image between boxes with zero downtime! Which seems incredible! Because they have rolled their own kernal (based on 2.4 Linux) it runs very tight and the typical performance hit for running the emulated environment is in the order of 20% - but this decreases as you host multiple servers on the same hardware due to some very clever transparent memory sharing arrangements. I'm running the baby version of VMWare on my laptop so I can have a mixed Windows/Ubuntu environment and I've been impressed - the virtual NAT router that sits between Linux and the Windows network drivers is a joy to behold!
Kevin also does the First Person Show podcast (link in the RH bar) and he was interviewing my friend Victoria for episode 14. After tea we wandered along the embankment chatting - he has three boys (like me) and it was a splendid evening!

Laptop re-pave & Ubuntu

I don't know why I let it go on for so many months! Suffering the pain of a Windows install that is over a year old is unnecessary and easily rectified by a repave. I don't know what detritus the Microsoft OS accumulates but my laptop was taking eight minutes to boot to the desktop - now I run lean and mean and don't have any extra garbage that I don't need. The computer is no slouch - 2Ghz P4 with 2gigs of RAM - but after a complete reinstall I'm down to less than a minute!
I also took the opportunity to try out the new version of VMWare. I put Ubunutu in there (I find running Linux in an emulator, although slower, is less hassle than dual-boot). It's pretty good - I was a bit doubtful about Ubuntu "root-less" operation but it does seem to work with the sodu tool.

Telnet reveals a BusyBox!

I was around a friends house sorting out his wireless aDSL router that had stopped serving up pages on the web-admin side. Although I could ping it nothing else (including it's DHCP server) seemed to be running. Just on the off-chance (and this wasn't mentioned in the badly translated manual!) I tried doing a Telnet to the gadget and discovered a micro-Unix running the the box! BusyBox is a version of Linux for running on embedded systems. It mounts the firmware for the router side of the device as a normal tarball image and it seems that had become corrupted. By forcing it to re-aquire the image and rebooting (holding down the reset button over a power-cycle) I found the gadget was restored to it's factory default.
The router was a Addon GWAR3000 aDSL 802.11g device but it has the same PCB (and hence firmware/version of BusyBox) as several other ones, including at least one Netgear. It's interesting because Adam Curry has been banging on about open-source firmware for routers on the Daily Source Code so people can spin in extra features for sharing their connections. Maybe there is more open source code running on embedded devices than we realize.

VMWare supplying pre-built Ubuntu virtual machine

Virtual Machine

Ubuntu is a free, open source operating system that starts with the breadth of Debian and adds regular releases (every six months), a clear focus on the user and usability (it should "Just Work", TM) and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of support for every release.
Instructions

1. Download your pre-built Ubuntu 5.10 "The Breezy Badger" Linux Virtual Development Environment.

2. To run this pre-built virtual machine, download VMware Player. VMware Player is free software that enables PC users to easily run any virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC.

DVS in Hannover

I've just got back from a training course in Germany with DVS - we sell for them in the UK and they have a great product range for standard and hi-def television as well as film DI workflows. We installed their SAN and two Clipsters at Midnight Transfer earlier this year. They present a very integrated solution if you are in the business of dealing with film dailies or grading and the Clipster is a solid "Swiss army knife" type gadget - it'll deal with every uncompressed image format used in film (typically DPX files) and every variation of video raster. I'd not used the editing and effects features before but really enjoyed three days of getting to grips with it and the v.2 software.

Stephan & Emanuelle from Post Logic, Chia from DVS (our trainer), myself and Ben (Root6) who enjoyed the fact that we got to hire a 5-series BMW!

We also got taken through the hardware of the Clipster from a maintenance point of view and spent the last day doing SAN configuration. Their SAN is based around ADIC's StoreNext file system and as such allows you to have clients using all the common OSes - Windows, Linux, Unix (variants as well as IRIX for SG) as well as OS-X Tiger. They use X24 raidheads to control the array and so the system is not burdened with RAID operations (unlike a Unity).

Hannover is a nice city - we trawled around the Christmas market and saw the statues of the three Nanas by Niki de Saint Phalle - many thanks to Chia from DVS for entertaining us!

Linux on an iPod?! sounds like a pretty crazy idea, but these guys are on the way to doing it, even porting Doom to run on those stylish little boxes.

Axentra Servers are the business - they are a range of embedded Linux fileservers that are aimed at the net appliance end of the market - small companies (less than fifty users) and power home users. We put one in at a client's place and for five hundred quid you get a box that does NAT routing, firewall (based on SmoothWall - the industry leader for Linux firewalls), webserver (Apache) mail (including the best webmail front-end ever!) as well as the more mundane file and print-sharing and PHP/SQL database functionality. Having been using it for a week now I'm convinved that for 90% of users it outperforms Win 2003 server in all respects and is a lot easier to set-up and maintain - and what about the initial outlay, per-user licenses, trained technician, and security concerns you get with Windows?. It has mirrored 200gig internal drives and because (internally) it is based on the ext3 filesystem you can hang external USB/Firewire drives and they immediately become part of the shared storage pool - fantastic! It handles backup (on and off site) and is a joy to use. See these screenshots for an idea - the interface looks lovely.

Microsoft & Linux pt.2 - the piece I blogged recently (see here) was timely - Channel 9 (link in right-hand bar) have just run a feature on the Linux group within Microsoft. The half-hour video is very revealing. They have a very honest accessment of where Red Hat et al. are WRT Windows. I wonder if we're on the brink of Microsoft embrassing open source in the same way they did the Internet ten years ago. At the time that was characterised as a paradign shift rather than a logical progression and is probably why early server-vendors (typ. Novell) just aren't there any more - loosing even a year in adopting TCP/IP meant they lost all credibility very quickly. It's interesting that Microsoft have so far avoided loosing their business model in the face of change - they haven't (yet) "done an IBM/Wang/ICL (insert your favorite mainframe manufacturer of the 20th century here)".
Anyhow - with Ward Cunningham now working there anything could happen!
Oh, the Channel 9 piece is here.