The Linux Extremist

This week, my office melted in the withering heat. On that basis, I decided not only to take my newly built custom desktop machine home, but to keep it in an air conditoned room with my other custom built desktop at least for the duration of the summer. Once there, it took about 5 minutes flat for me to be annoyed about not having a Keyboard-Video-Mouse switch to easily swap controls between the two.

My setup is fairly modern - I have a DVI monitor, and there is no way I was going to go back to VGA. My keyboard and mouse are both using USB. I also have a scanner and a webcam that I wanted to use on both machines. The problem is that there isn’t exactly a world of choice in terms of DVI / USB KVM switches.

I first took a look at a Belkin Omniview model, and then backed away when I read reviews like this -

Bad points: Doesn’t work with a lot of mondern USB keyboards Cables don’t work with DVI-D only TFT displays Firmware update program only available for Windows

General comments: Updating the firmware stops the annoying beeping if the KVM switch doesn’t recognize the USB keyboard.

Other comments were in this vein. I also looked at a model from Avocent. But the comments on this were not much more encouraging -

Bad points: Occasionally ‘misses’ a PC on boot-up, leaving the USB keyboard and mouse unresponsive - you have to either restart the unit by removing power and USB host cable, or reset the PC. This happens inexplicably, probably about once a week. All the cables you need are not included, and need to be purchased seperately.

Ouch. The only option in this case was to try and broaden my search outside of the standard stockists like Dabs and Misco. Through a company called KVM Choice, I found a little switch by a manufacturer called Aten, and bought their CS 1762 model. It was difficult to find much in the way of reviews on it, so I was taking a risk. The only thing I could say with certainty was that Aten was the Egyptian god of the sun. Was that a positive omen in summer? Who knew, it was roll the dice time.

The switch itself is nothing much to look at, but KVM switches are generally little grey boxes. I was pleased by the fact that it had all the necessary cables with the unit - something neither Belkin nor Avocent had. It also had a small USB hub in the back of the unit. Plugging in the cables was straightforward, I booted up my first computer and found no problem - there was no loss of resolution on the monitor, no change in sound, no loss of performance on the keyboard, no strange beeping, and no problems detecting all my USB devices.

It was when I booted up the second computer that I discovered a little niggle; if you press lightly on the switch for a moment, only video switches over. In order to switch full control over to the second computer, the button has to be pressed for 2 seconds. This is not a big deal, but still, an issue. Generally speaking if I’m switching it’s not for a quick glance as to what’s going on at the other machine; some people might find that useful, but not I.

Another minor niggle occured when I had the focus of the switch on a computer I was shutting down. When the unit shut down, the screen then “partially” switched back over to the other computer - I got a distorted picture from the first PC, even though I hadn’t switched over.

Another little problem which requires more testing is some level of screen flicker after a few hours of operation.

That said, overall, the Aten does the job. Even with the niggles, it is worthy of recommendation. It’s a little grey box, but a valuable and worthwhile one at that.

Being a suspicious sort of fellow, I tend prefer buying things from a local vendor than from someone distant. In particular, I am not a big friend of supermarkets: I much prefer the idea of being able to buy berries from a farmer a few minutes drive away rather than relying on Tesco importing it from somewhere in Central America where the berries are sprayed with pesticides lethal enough to be on Saddam Hussein’s top 10 favourite chemical weapons list, and the pickers are probably spitting on the fruit to spite the pompous gringos.

There’s more to this than just desiring superior taste and freshness (and not wanting to poison myself or get the dreaded lurgy). If I’m spending money locally, then I’m pushing money back into the local economy, rather than sending it to El Diablo, Alcalde of the Berry Farmers. Also, if I have a problem with a product, I’m much more likely to get a good response from the bloke up the road than from El Diablo.

You would think that the internet, with its global focus, would actually work in El Diablo’s favour. Theoretically, I can go onto Tesco’s website and others, and get the best price for berries, which usually implies handing over money to the Alcalde. However, the internet also enables me to buy locally as well on a more consistent basis; up until the internet came along, the only way small, local concerns had to get their marketing message out was to go to farmers markets and pass it on through word of mouth. These days a great many producers in my area (West Sussex, England) have websites and provide a means whereby I can get much of my food locally. Here are a few representative samples -

1. Nyetimber Vineyards (www.nyetimber-vineyard.com) - a slick site, selling West Sussex sparkling wine. Don’t laugh, English wine actually has gotten some very good reviews as of late, indeed, Nyetimber’s Classic Cuvée 1998 has been rated the best sparkling wine outside of the Champagne region.

2. Lurgashall Winery (www.lurgashall.co.uk) - this small company makes & sells fruit wines, and the rather peculiar Silver Birch Wine (made from tree sap); not bad.

3. The Chilli Jam Company (www.thechillijamcompany.co.uk) - locally made hot sauce. I swear by their Fireball sauce. My girlfriend, being more sensitive about such things, would swear at it if she got a taste.

4. The Chocolate Alchemist (www.thechocolatealchemist.co.uk) - OK, so the cocoa beans have to come from outside England, but they process it themselves and their organic chocolate is excellent; especially recommended are their white chocolate and raspberry bars.

5. Deer View Products (www.deerviewproducts.co.uk) - jams and chutneys mainly. Their whisky marmalade and goosebery jam are excellent…and organic.

6. Stumpys Brewery (www.stumpysbrewery.com) - not to my taste, but definitely local and not the run of the mill beer.

7. Lurgashall Mill (www.wealddown.co.uk/shop.htm) - part of the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum. I buy my wholemeal flour from them.

Not all of these sites, it should be mentioned, offer online transactions, but at least they offer a means by which these products can be purchased consistently.

The availability of local produce on the ‘Net reminds us of something important; the internet is not just about big, global things. It also can cater to very narrow, niche and local concerns. The modern era and modern technology are not necessarily going to crush small firms, rather, the forces of change may help even the playing field, and ensure that big companies don’t have it all their own way. It also means that this evening, I’m popping open a bottle of Nyetimber with the thought that I’m doing something the French would rather I didn’t. Now that’s worth smiling about.

One advantage of having a Windows PC at work, and believe me, I’ve been struggling to think of something, is that I can constantly remind myself how lucky I am to not be using it at home.

The only other benefit I can think is that I can also use my Windows PC to see what Microsoft is going to try to foist on the public next. Out of morbid curiosity, I’ve just tried out their latest version of Internet Explorer 7, Beta 3. When the project is complete, this is the browser that supposedly will put Microsoft back on the map after a lengthy period of stagnation.

I had problems getting out of the starting gate. Obviously, I went to Microsoft using Firefox in order to download it. However in order to get the file, one has to go through the whole Windows Genuine Advantage nightmare. First, I had to download the “WGAPlugin” tool, which when I double clicked on it to install, it didn’t work. Undeterred, I tried the second download for a “Genuine Check” programme. This worked, and I got a code which I then entered into the Microsoft site, and it finally let me through.

After downloading it, the install procedure of IE 7 then initiated yet another check that I was using a genuine version of Windows. I was wondering how many times the system was going to check that I was using the genuine article - I felt like shouting down the broadband pipe, “Hello, hello, yes, Microsoft, I’m using a valid copy of your junk OS!”

Once the install completed, I had to reboot; one of the things that is most frustrating about Internet Explorer (and as a Linux user this seems insane to me), is the dependency of the entire OS on this one piece of software. As it’s a Beta, I was taking a risk. Still, I rebooted, and fortunately I’ve seen no ill-effects so far.

Launching IE7 was relatively painless but irritating: Microsoft simply refuses to leave you alone. At first, I was redirected to a page where I was told I could modify a variety of settings, including changing my locale from the United Kingdom to the USA. As I am in the United Kingdom, changing this option was not at the forefront of my mind. When I began to browse, IE7 told me about what wonderful anti-phishing tools it was giving me as well. It occured to me that this was the most egotistical browser I’d ever encountered.

The good news for those who insist on using this software is that it does have some features which bring it into the modern era. Tabbed browsing is a feature of IE7. Hold your applause, as it is not entirely straightforward. IE7 tries to make things “simple” by using somewhat anonymous icons to communicate what each function does. Tabbed browing is an excellent example of how this be confusing. On Firefox, one invokes a new tab by simply going to File > New Tab. On IE7, there is this very indistinct motif -

To invoke a new tab, one has to click the grey button on the right of the active tab, in this case, the BBC News page. Yes, there is a message when you roll over it, but it was not particularly intuitive, and neither are any of the other controls on this browser.

As for speed, I did not see any particular performance advantage over Firefox. If anything, IE7 is a shade slower than a tweaked Firefox on Windows, and definitely slower than Firefox on Linux. That said, it is better than IE6, but then again, most things are.

There are some differences in the rendering of fonts. IE7 renders fonts more smoothly than its predecessor, which is somewhat easier on the eyes. Again, this does not indicate any particular advantage over Firefox.

Overall, IE7 is an improvement, not a revelation. It means that Microsoft is still in the browser business, but not leading the pack, and that’s only for Windows, since they don’t make their browser for Linux or Macintosh. It will be interesting to see what vulnerabilities will inevitably spring up in this browser; for the moment however, it’s moved Explorer out of the realms of being a bad joke to merely a questionable choice.

Not every moment in life is meant to be exciting. For every thrill ride, there is a long wait in line at the Post Office. For every gripping episode of “24″, there’s a documentary by Fred Dibnah talking about steam engines. For every Italy, there’s a Switzerland.

I tried to remind myself of this as I began to use the laptop that my company supplied to me yesterday, a HP Compaq nc6220. For every computer that I build and upgrade, and makes me want to crank up Beethoven’s 9th as I surf the internet at warp speed, there are computers like this very bland, safe little laptop.

First impressions of the laptop were very good. At first, I thought it was an IBM Thinkpad in drag: the metal cover, the “nipple” mouse in the middle of the keyboard, all suggested a lineage back to the Thinkpads. I haven’t investigated it, but it would not surprise me if it was a rebranded Lenovo product. It’s very light, particularly compared to my old HP Compaq nx7000.

It’s only when the laptop is fired up the tedium begins. The system boots quickly; it has a 1.73 Ghz Centrino processor and 512 MB of RAM, plus a fairly capable hard drive. Somehow it crunches through the leaden code of Windows XP Professional with relative ease. However, the laptop screen itself is fairly hard on the eyes - compared to the quality of my nx7000, it’s quite poor and fuzzy. Graphics are supplied by Intel’s Integrated Graphics, which is the kiss of death in so far as any presentational quality is concerned. That said all the software loaded onto it, and I made a point of putting on Openoffice and Firefox, boots fairly quickly and performs well.

I did wonder if the system would perform even better with Linux, so I tried it out with an Ubuntu Dapper Drake Live CD. There were a number of booting errors; however, once these passed, it was clear that Ubuntu was designed to handle virtually all of the hardware on the laptop - wireless worked instantly, as did sound. But at the same time, it could not be described as an inspiring computer experience, merely an adequate one.

It was at this point that I had my epiphany; this is the perfect office machine. You wouldn’t want to do anything but work on it. There’s no fun to be had with it; you wouldn’t dare play a game, nor even have an interesting desktop image (believe me, I tried). It functions, it does its job well, and it’s fine. Switch it off at 6 and leave it behind.

I’ll never fully enjoy using it. But that isn’t the point; for the exciting experiences in computing I have using Linux and tinkering with my computers, this is its diametric opposite. I may long for and enjoy using computers that push the boundaries, but the nc6220 is all business. And perhaps business requires computers that are merely born to be mild.

In my youth, I attended a good number of parties, most of which, surprisingly enough, I was actually invited to attend. I knew I wasn’t cool and that was cool, so long as I didn’t pretend to be cool and scoffed down as much free alcohol as I could get my hands on.

Not everyone was as content as I was with living in the ghetto of persistent dorkiness. At these events, there were few things that were more painful to see than other lads who trying to break out of the cul-de-sac of the technically inclined: they were the people who weren’t cool who were trying their damndest to be cool. Seeing that sheer amount of effort wasted on styling with hair gel, splashing on the “right” cologne which was invariably cheap and wrong, and pretending to know something about the latest music was enough to make me want to bleed from the eyes in embarassment. They never realised that being cool is an effortless quality, and it comes, in part, from knowing what is right at the right time, rather than making a lot of wild guesses. Some people don’t know, and it’s OK. Trying to fake this knowledge moves you up a notch from being a dork to a twerp.

I recalled all this yesterday while reading about Sun’s new servers. According to The Register, Sun is dishing out a bunch of new kit based on AMD’s Operton chip in its “latest gamble”. One of the servers, nicknamed “Thumper”, is reported to have capacity for 48 SATA hard drives. Apparently Sun is trying to say - hey YOU ALL, look at our bunch of new processors, and WOW, 12 Terabytes of storage, and its Porsche pricetag of $33,000!

This is like the swagger of a dorky kid at one of the parties I attended, who mistakenly thought that stuffing a rolled up sock in his trousers made him a hot property. It just goes to prove that there is something worse than someone who is not cool who is going through great pains to be cool: it is someone who was cool trying to capture his lost mojo.

I’m old enough to remember when Sun was at the forefront of the internet revolution: their servers and the Solaris operating system were the gold standard for all the great and not-so-great websites. People may want to forget boo.com, particularly the people who gave them the $185 million that they never saw again, but one thing that’s worth remembering is that the owners paid a king’s ransom to Sun for a server that barely fit in a railway boxcar. This was just so they could have sufficient computing power to run their one site. It was the biggest, the best, and the most obvious solution, even to people as oblivious to the obvious as those who ran Boo.

Another example: I worked for a travel company that got online in 1996. At that time there was no question, the servers had to be Sun, the OS had to be Solaris. I suspect Sun’s management at that period were like Leonardo Di Caprio in “Titanic”, leading over the edge and screaming, “We’re the kings of the world!” I can picture them taking a dip in a Scrooge McDuck type vault singing “We’re in the money”. Scott McNealy probably could have had lap dancers gyrating in his office to the sound “Gangsta’s Paradise” while he caused a coup in a 3rd world country, but because at that time, Sun was making so much money, no one would care.

By 2003, however, the once kings of the internet were a dorky, expensive pain in the rump. My travel company was still paying a king’s ransom to Sun, Sun still thought they were cool, but in the background we were moving to Red Hat and saying “So long, you twerps”.

It wasn’t just us. Sun has been losing ground to Linux on Intel (and AMD) for quite a long time. What’s really funny about it is that they were in denial for so long. They were the last major server manufacturer to embrace Open Source; they only did it when they realised that the hair gel and cheap cologne of marketing wasn’t working on anyone anymore. They desperately had to get their cool back.

Unfortunately, it’s working about as well as 2006 version of Henry Winkler trying to put on a leather jacket and saying “Hey!”. The stigma of twerpiness is very hard to shake off once you’ve got it. Sun tried, not only by making Solaris Open Source, but now also by making their SPARC processors open source too. Someone forgot to tell Sun’s management, I think, that while it’s fairly easy to work on source code at home or at a university, it’s not quite the same for making a processor. Speaking for myself, my home isn’t a zero-dust environment, and I’m not about to go mucking about with trying to build my own processor in my study.

Perhaps having realised how out of it they are, now Sun is swaggering into the party saying they’ve got the biggest, most powerful servers of all. Hear them roar, I presume. It looks more like bad chat up lines being tried in rapid fire succession on all the girls at a teenage party, the lasses rolling their over-eyeshadowed eyes in disgust and turning on over high-heels to storm off and get another shot of bad rum and fruit punch.

So what does Sun need to do? One, is to forget the idea they are ever going to climb back to the position they once were in. To even think that they are is about as realistic as expecting the Byzantine Empire to come back; watching Sun’s management is like witnessing some Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians in Istanbul saying, “This time, next year, the Emperor of the Romans will have returned to us.” Um, not.

Secondly, if you really believe that Open Source is your friend, Sun, then do something which you haven’t dared to do yet. It’s easy to make Solaris and SPARC Open Source when they’re losing market share. How about really showing the commitment and making the most successful Sun contribution in modern times (namely Java) Open Source too. Well? We’re waiting.

Companies like Red Hat have shown that you can be committed to Open Source and still make money; you may not be the Kings of the World like Sun once was, but Red Hat doesn’t need to be. They’d rather just be profitable. Perhaps when Sun realises the wisdom of that particular stance, maybe, just maybe, they’ll not be the twerps of the industry any longer.

It’s extremely hot here in England. Yesterday the temperature busted the 30 degrees Celcius mark (around 90 degrees Fahrenheit) and I’ve confined myself in a room with a powerful air conditioner, trying to convince myself the heat and the pollen are irrelevant.

While I had the time, I decided to re-install Ubuntu on my HP Compaq nx7000 and my custom built desktop; in the case of the desktop, I wanted to try using Easyubuntu (http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/), a tool which will set up everything from Microsoft fonts to a Flash player without requiring any extra intervention.

EasyUbuntu is a good tool, to a point - as a Linux user, I am not thrilled by the idea of having all sorts of things working in the background to install items of which I’m not aware. I tried it once letting it run fully - then again, after once more having wiped the PC, letting it run partially. I was happier when it ran partially. Fully, I had let it set up everything from Macromedia Flash to the Java run-time plugin to my Nvidia drivers. It did not get everything right - for example, the need for a Flash plugin on Opera failed, and I was better off setting up the Nvidia drivers myself. However, where it shines is setting up the computer to play MPEG, WMV and DVDs. All these formats work perfectly now.

Additionally, EasyUbuntu provided an answer to a relatively minor question that I had - where do I find a tool that uncompresses RAR files. All in all, kudos to the developers behind it.

I reinstalled Ubuntu on my laptop because it had become a dumping ground for various xorg.conf files. Ever since the release of Dapper, I have been truly struggling with the ATI drivers for the nx7000, which has an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 (64 MB RAM) card. The drivers that come with Ubuntu are adequate, but don’t have 3D acceleration. So that has led me to try to install the dreaded fglrx driver.

I say dreaded, because ATI has made a huge mistake from which many users simply have not recovered - at a certain point, their drivers simply do not work with older graphics chipsets like mine. This came as a shock after I got it working with Breezy: I had 3D acceleration, no problem. With Dapper and the new fglrx driver, no matter what I tried, I kept getting a blank screen. At best, I’d hear the familiar Ubuntu drum beat, but there would be nothing on the screen.

I have tried installing older drivers, but Ubuntu’s update manager kept on insisting that I update it - even then, the old driver didn’t work perfectly. I followed suggestions on the Unofficial ATI Linux Driver Wiki (http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Dapper_Installation_Guide) - again, totally useless. It truly does feel like ATI has joined with Microsoft and Intel in trying to kick users into upgrading their systems. I can deduce this from the fact that I have had no such problems with the ATI driver on my Savrow Katana K90 laptop, which is also using the latest driver.

So the nx7000 is wiped clean and using Ubuntu’s reliable old ati driver. To be honest, I had used that with Breezy for a very long time and hadn’t noticed a problem until I was told on Ubuntu Forums that it lacked 3D acceleration.

In contrast to ATI’s idiocy, Nvidia shines. The old system I built at work, using a very old AGP card, responds just as well to the drivers Nvidia provides as the 6600 I have in my custom desktop. So thanks to Nvidia, and truly, ATI, go to hell.

One of the items that has hindered Linux adoption has been the lack of desktop systems that come pre-loaded with it. It’s not always fun, nor easy, to set up Linux - the uninitiated really don’t want to know about ndiswrapper, or troll around message boards to find out about drivers and hardware compatibility.

This is really a pity, because this state of affairs means there are many users who still remain in the dark about Linux’s performance, reliability and stability. If Linux is to conquer the desktop, it is likely that it will need to make some appearance as “just another OS choice” like Windows or Mac OS X. Worse, it means all but the most custom built systems are going to require paying a fee to Microsoft (or Apple) before one can build their Windows system. Still worse, those custom builders seem to be outrageously expensive.

This state of affairs, however, may be about to change. I recently saw a website which gives me hope - System 76 (www.system76.com). They specialise in building laptops and desktops which are bundled with Ubuntu Linux…and nothing else. They have systems which rival both Mac and PC platforms and even ape their appearance; for example, the resemblance of the System 76 Koala system to the Mac Mini is uncanny.

While System 76 is unlikely to be a rival to Dell anytime soon, it is progress. One can only hope that the arrival of Ubuntu - a powerful, reliable desktop OS - will make the likes of Dell sit up and take notice, and perhaps offer greater choice to their customers - namely, let them get out of the Windows rut. But certainly the arrival of Ubuntu Dapper Drake and System 76 is not likely the beginning of the end of Windows dominance - but to quote Winston Churchill, it may be the end of the beginning.

I had been aware of Damn Small Linux for some time, but I never really gave it much thought until yesterday. I am an Ubuntu devotee, and for me, that had been that.

However, I saw the following in the Damn Small Linux store yesterday -

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/Mini_ITX_Systems/Damn_Small_Machine

It’s a Linux equivalent to the Mac Mini. It runs off a USB drive, so there’s no concern about disk speeds. For all intents and purposes, it’s a Linux equivalent to the Mac Mini - except it’s lighter, faster and made of metal rather than plastic. OK, it doesn’t appear to have wireless built in, but it is definitely an achievement for the DSL folks.

It also is a poke in the eye to Microsoft. It’s a hot topic of conversation about how much more power one is going to need to run Vista. This elegant little machine is a riposte - one can have an elegantly functioning computer with less.

If they had a version available in Britain, I’d be definitely considering it.

I remember back in 2004 that I had procured a new PC for one of my staff, and he insisted on putting Linux on his machine. He also insisted that he had to put Opera on as well. For him it was the gold standard of browsers, particularly on Linux.

I have long been acquainted with Opera; in my business, it’s good for auditing any websites you build as it’s the most unforgiving browser. Code errors which IE passes over are picked up in Opera. Thus if you have a site that functions perfectly in Opera, it can be truly said to be a sturdy solution.

That said, Opera’s claim to be the fastest and best appears to have been eclipsed by the coming of Firefox. Opera 9, perhaps, is an effort to reclaim the title. Does it succeed?

I spent a day using it to find out. The answer is simply - it’s great, but not an improvement enough on Firefox to provoke a switch.

This is not to denigrate it - the browser is fast, clean and unlike Firefox, it has an e-mail client built in. Again, it is still the most unforgiving browser and this is helpful for those in the development arena. There are a number of skins (I prefer Freestyle) to make it very attractive. The new widgets feature shows promise; though I must say that the FTP Widget is a dud - it merely prepopulates values for a web based FTP tool.

So in the end, it’s a case of 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. Both Firefox and Opera are excellent, outstanding browsers. Firefox may just have the edge on speed, particularly with the tweaks I’ve described in an earlier post. In my case this means I use Firefox as my primary browser but Opera is always on my PC as well.