Getting adb to see my HTC Magic on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 / Jaunty

I wanted to get the Android app development environment up and running so I could learn how to write programs for Android and test them both in the SDK's emulator and on my HTC Magic phone.

I'd installed the Android SDK v1.6 and Eclipse 3.5 and the ADT 0.93 plugin on my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 system and followed all the instructions. I could happily run a program in an emulator, but I couldn't get it to see my HTC Magic Android phone via USB and actually run a program I had written on the real thing.

I gave up on Linux and tried it instead on Windows Vista, but it didn't work there, either. An "apd devices" command returned nothing unless an emulator was running.

So I did some more research and found a couple more things I could try on Linux and finally got it going. No real wizardry on my part. I managed to find a couple of good pages about the USB support in Linux with the Android 1.5 SDK from Titanium Mobile Development and Jason D Clinton. Both are linked to below. There were also some helpful comments adding to these that finally got me up and running. How much I don't know about parts of Linux will probably be obvious to people who do know, but that's just how it is. Any suggestions or refinements anyone would care to offer will be gratefully accepted.

Just to cover it off, I did try the /etc/udev/ instructions mentioned on the SDK web site. Apparently this is the future direction for authorising access to such devices, but it didn't work for me and obviously hasn't worked for at least some others.

Two pages, here and here,talking about Android SDK 1.5, provided the missing links. It appears to have someting to do with permissions and this is how you make it work.

I listed the usb devices on my system with "lsusb".

The HTC Magic is "0bb4:0c02" from High Tech Computer Corp.

This verifies the key details for identifying the phone to the system.

Then, as root (using sudo) I went to /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ *and* /etc/hal/fdi/information and created android.fdi with the following contents (courtesy of Jason Clinton):

<match key="usb_device.vendor_id" int="0x0bb4">
<match key="usb_device.product_id" int_outof="0x0c01;0x0c02">
  <merge key="pda.platform" type="string">android</merge>
  <append key="info.capabilities" type="strlist">access_control</append>

  <merge key="access_control.file" type="copy_property">linux.device_file</merge>
  <merge key="access_control.type" type="string">pda</merge>
</match>
</match>

Note the first two lines contain the first and second parts of the ID seen in the "lsusb" listing. If your phone has a different ID, you'd most likely have to amend these values to match.

Then, I performed the polkit-gnome-authorization changes listed here, and then logged out and re-booted the system. This assumes you are using the GNOME user interface on Ubuntu. Maybe I didn't have to reboot, but I wanted to be sure the contents of the android.fdi would be read and I don't know enough about how that part of the system works.

After rebooting, an "adb devices" command produced output showing I was now able to access my phone.

Even better, when I ran the "Hello Android" app, this time it actually ran on my phone, by default, and not in the emulator. Had the phone not been connected, it would have started an emulator.

Yay! A major hurdle out of the way for both app development and testing AND for getting root access to my phone and - if I choose to - loading a new ROM on it to get additional function.

Apple-verse vs HTC Magic - Android phone

I've been looking at various smart phone options for almost a year. I'd pretty much narrowed the choice down to either an Apple iPhone 3G S or a phone based on Google's version of Linux, known as "Android". I considered the Palm Pre to be a wild card worthy of investigation. Blackberry's are too boringly business-oriented for the lone-wolf mobile phone user like me.

I already have an Apple iPod Touch 8GB. I have used it daily - hourly! - (minutely?) - since I got it in December. The interface is pretty good, though I grew tired of risking hand cramps from pinching and squeezing web pages constantly trying to make links accessible to my large finger tips. That magnifying glass thing when trying to place the cursor when editing text also annoyed me. The predictive text only offered one word (that I could see) and it wasn't clear how to either select it, or make it go away. The requirement to use the wretched iTunes, combined with Apple's chokehold on the platform itself put me off deepening my investment in the Apple-verse beyond the bare entry-level access the wifi-only iPod Touch affords. For example, what do I now do with the music I have bought via iTunes? It's locked up tight in the Apple-verse. I can't listen to it on anything else.

I wanted freedom.

Last Friday I took delivery of my new Android-based HTC Magic mobile phone. I got it for $519 from Vodafone on a new, two-year Smart 80 plan. I'd always been on prepay. I went for Smart 80 because that roughly matched the amount I have been spending each month on my prepay. Well....it's a 'wee bit' more...but in the zone. The Smart 80 gave me access to 250MB / month and additional 3G data at only 10 cents / MB. A lower plan would have seen additional data costing 25 cents / MB. So with this plan, I can do 500MB / month for $105. That's cheaper than the Smart 130 which gives a lot of minutes and txts I don't use anyway, beyond the time provided with the Smart 80 plan.

Since then, I've been playing with it fairly intensely, working out what it does, what it does well, what it could do better. I have to say, I'm happier than I expected to be. The Magic has some great features that struck me right up front.

I can connect to a PC, mount the phone and copy MP3 files or video files onto the phone and just play them. No iTunes. It also plays happily downloads and plays *.ogg (Ogg-Vorbis) sound files.

When editing text, I can place the cursor where I want it with a simple touch. The predictive text offers me a list of words and I can pick one before I've even finished typing my current word.

When web browsing, the trackball on the Magic allows me to scroll through page links and select the one I want without pinching or spreading my fingers again and again. Easy. The web browser also has a magnifying "square" I can scroll around the page using the trackball and then select the area to be magnified. Good.

The 3.2 megapixel (woohoo!) camera integrates nicely with any new app that can accept a photo or video as input.

The Magic is a nice, handy shape. It's thin and slips easily into any pocket I use. It's light. The 3.2 inch screen is big enough.

The phone is stable. No crashes so far. (My old Vodafone 715 used to crash frequently, especially handling image data.)

Android multitasks. You can have several diverse, 3rd-party apps open in the background doing their basic functions. Twidroid notifies me of new tweets. Earthquake tells me of the latest earthquake anywhere. BuddyMob tells me about new posts. Or I can shut any or all of them them up and check manually. I can move away from Skype for a few minutes and when I come back, I'm stilled logged in. It does time out though. Not sure how much time I have, but it seems to be at least 3 minutes.

The wifi on the Magic is more sensitive than my iPod Touch. Yesterday morning I found myself connected to the wifi at work while on the next street over from the office. By comparison, the iPod Touch would lose the connection if I crossed the street. Similarly, parked at the local shops near the offcie I was on the office wifi, whereas this just isn't possible with the iTouch.

I'm not saying no other device does these things. I'm saying the HTC Magic, running Android, does do them.

The apps for Android aren't as many or diverse as for the Apple-verse, but most of the core apps I want are there and good enough and judging from the Android Market's list of apps, there are new apps every day.

But I still have my iPod Touch. It's not going anywhere. After I turn my HTC Magic into a wireless AP (because I can!), my iTouch will be even more useful than it is now...and I'll have simultaneous access to both the Apple-verse and the growing Android community of applications.

Freedom. Loving it.

[2009-11-24 - Update: I rooted my phone and got wifi tethering running. The tethering part was as easy as installing an app (either "tetherWiFi" or "Tethered wifi for root users"). No tricks or fiddles. I'm now using my Apple iPod Touch anywhere, tethered via wifi to my HTC Magic and sharing its 3G data connection. That happily works in the background thanks to android's multi-tasking ability. I'm currently running Cyanogen Mod 4.2.5 as the android version on my phone. Yay! ]

Chromium Alpha for Linux

Chromium has been steadily improving. The latest (May 29-30) warning / disclaimer page in 3.0.183.0 (0) looks better than ever! :-)

Chromium Alpha

This is an alpha build of Chromium on Linux. The following, significant chunks of functionality are known to be missing:

• Plugins, inc Flash (so no YouTube, Hulu etc)
• Printing
• Complex text
• Complex tab dragging
• Gears support

Other parts of the browser are notably incomplete, poorly tuned and broken. User beware!

‘Chromium’ vs ‘Google Chrome’

Chromium is an open source browser project. Google Chrome is a browser from Google, based on the Chromium project.
This is a build of Chromium. No versions of Google Chrome for Linux will exist until Google makes an official release.

Don't file bugs without doing the work

Every minute spent triaging and de-duplicating bugs is a minute spent not fixing them. If you have a good bug report (e.g. includes a stack trace or a reduced test case), first verify it exists in the latest build, thenverify it hasn't been filed already, then file your bug using the Linux-specific template.

How to help

Chromium is an open source project, and you are welcome to help out. We have documentation for developers as well as mailing lists and an IRC channel.

Chromium for Linux advancing rapidly

I'm writing this blog post using today's build of the Chromium web browser for Linux. For those who don't know, it's the Linux version of the Google Chrome browsers.

The progress over the last few weeks have been good. On my 64-bit AMD Opteron-based system running Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit desktop, the first build I got running could do little more than display the developer pages at the Chromium web site. Any other site I tried caused it to crash.

Chromium can now display most sites correctly and I can open a new tab by clicking on the "+" sign. It's still early days though as I just crashed Chromium trying to cut / paste a few words in this post. It also does nothing with embedded flash objects and many of the menu items like, "Options" and "About Chromium", are mere stubs.

While these development versions of Chromium require SSE2 to be implemented on a CPU in order to run, a commenter to my blog post on that topic says SSE2 won't be required in the release version later on, so they should run on anything at that point.

Here is how it looked on my PC today. Click on the image for the full size. 

Chromium browser for Linux requires IA-32 + SSE2

Following the bug tracking for the Linux version of Google's Chrome browser, "Chromium" , it turns out Chromium requires a CPU supporting the SSE2 extensions to IA-32.

Oh.

I've been trying the daily updates of the Chromium browser for linux with no success. It crashes instantly on startup. The output says something isn't implemented. It appears that it isn't the browser code that isn't implementing, it's my PC(s).

I have several AMD athlon XP systems and none of them qualify for Chromium. There also doesn't appear to be any to extend the CPU function in software.

The list (Wikipaedia) of supported CPUs is:

• AMD K8-based CPUs (Athlon 64, Sempron 64, Turion 64, etc)
• AMD Phenom CPUs
• Intel NetBurst-based CPUs (Pentium 4, Xeon, Celeron, Celeron D, etc)
• Intel Pentium M and Celeron M
• Intel Core-based CPUs (Core Duo, Core Solo, etc)
• Intel Core 2-based CPUs (Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, etc)
• Intel Atom
• Transmeta Efficeon
• VIA C7
• VIA Nano

These don't. They're too old. (Wikipaedia)

• AMD CPUs prior to Athlon 64, including all Socket A-based CPUs
• Intel CPUs prior to Pentium 4
• Via C3
• Transmeta Crusoe

Looks like Intel CPUs are well supported, going back several years, but AMD's very popular Athlon series missed out on SSE2.

Ooooh......all right then. Guess I'll stop downloading those Chromium packages every morning, though maybe it will work on my AMD Opteron 64-bit system via IA32 support....and SSE2.


UPDATE 3/4/09: Installed the Chromium browser on my AMD Opteron system. The first screen warns you that it is pre-alpha and full of holes and asks you not to talk too much about it as it is very much incomplete. As I understand it, "chrome" (used by Safari and Google Chrome) has no Linux equivalent and 'Chromium' is the project trying to create that. So it isn't just about the browser. It's about the platform of APIs the browser needs to exist. Non-trivial! So if you get a window up at all and create additional tabs (see screen shot of today's build) is something of a triumph, even it crashes before you're actually able to access any web sites. It does seem to work well with the Chromium developer pages if you click on the links on the warning page. There is promise here.

Adobe AIR, Tweetdeck and Twhirl on Linux

Google Fodder: If you want to run some of the latest, best and coolest Twitter clients, then you want to install Adobe AIR on your Linux system. AIR is Adobe's cross-platform application environment and in v1.5.1 it seems to work very well.

On top of AIR, you can install and run both Tweetdeck and Twhirl. Each has their advantages and I'm not going to address them in detail here. I just want you to know you can get them, you can install them easily (just allow Adobe AIR Installer to open the download, rather than save the file) and you can run them on Linux - 32-bit or 64-bit. 

The one caveat I have found so far is that running an AIR app (Tweetdeck or Twhirl) on 64-bit Ubuntu, will cause the Adobe Flash player for 64-bit Linux to crash. The Flash player is only available for 64-bit linux as an alpha version, so bugs are to be expected. YouTube mostly works OK for a while, but if you go to a site like Metacafe, your browser (Firefox, SeaMonkey - whatever) will crash instantly as it tries to load the Flash content on the home page.  This problem does not occur on 32-bit Linux. I've opened bug FP-1670 with bugs.adobe.com. 

The cropped screen capture in this post is of Twhirl 0.9 running on my 64-bit "Intrepid Ibex" Ubuntu 8.10 desktop.

Tweetdeck crashes Flash player

Google Fodder: On my 64-bit Ubuntu Linux 8.10, the latest (February 3rd file date) alpha 64-bit Adobe Flash Player for Linux will crash any browser (Firefox or SeaMonkey) if you access some embedded flash content while Tweetdeck is running. Tweetdeck (v0.22b) is an Adobe AIR app running on the 64-bit version of Adobe AIR for linux.

If Tweetdeck is NOT running, the Flash Player is stable....or at least a LOT more stable.

An example of content that crashes the Flash every time is: http://www.thedailyshow.com/index.jhtml

Plus simply opening www.metacafe.com will crash the Flash. The more Flash content there is on the page, the better the chance the Flash will crash.....and take the browser with it.

I've logged bug FP-1670 on the Adobe bug site.

"The Cloud" and Ten reasons why Linux will triumph over Windows

Jack Whalen, of TechRepublic, blogs 10 reasons why Linux will triumph over Windows. Most of them are pretty good in my humble opinion, but I'm left wondering what the nature of the 'triumph" will be.

I ponder that point because more and more I find myself computing in "the cloud". My first choice for word processing and spreadshets is now Google Docs. I use Gmail for all my Internet email. My video comes mainly from YouTube and conventional shows are often via bittorrent rather than wait a year or three (if!) to see them where I live. For work, over the past 18 months, Google has more than proven itself to me through two campaigns involving dispersed teams of volunters. Google Docs doesn't care what your OS is as long as you have an adequate web browser.

My Apple iPod Touch is now my favourite portable computing device. Waaay sub-netbook! It provides ready, easy access to all the most important stuff the Cloud has to offer, either as-delivered or via downloadable applications that extend its function and capability. If it could cut and paste it would be perfect...and even there, there are work-arounds already. I think that soon there will be many such devices running a variety of operating systems: Linux, Android...whatever.  

It probably won't matter.

Absolutely there will still be a big market for conventional  PCs in roles like gaming and multimedia and as application and data servers, and for systems in environments where poor connectivity renders the Cloud too diffcult to employ for large amounts of data.

But the computing world is steadily creeping toward the kind of system that fits easily in your shirt or hip pocket....and the OS that devices run won't be of much concern to anyone. Most of the OSes will be open platforms in order to build the kind of ecology that will deliver choice, innovation and quality.

In that sense, the Cloud will likely be based on Open Source software of one ind or another....so in that sense, yeah, linux will be kicking kick ass, in spirit, as the greatest forerunner of the re-assertion of community and sharing for the benefit of all people in a given community....like human society usually was (technologically) for millenia prior to the stifling confinement  - even ownership - of knowledge in 'closed' sysems of all kinds from single vendors. If your neighbour made a better bone fish hook, he probably showed his family and his neighbours how to make it, too. That is how it should be. Thanks to Open Source.....that is how it is becoming once again - at least in the world of the Cloud.

'Linux beats Windows' is a metaphor for community trumping monopoly.

Pinnacle PCTV Nano Stick (73e)

Google Fodder: I bought a PCTV Nano Stick yesterday at DSE for $129. Yes, it was an impulse buy. The sexy thing about this half-thumb sized USB device is it provides Freeview digital TV on your computer for barely more than third of what it costs to buy a stand-alone Freeview box for the telly.

It comes with software for Windows XP and Vista. Even better, it also works on Ubuntu 8.10 Linux out of the box and you need only install a digital-TV capable app like Kaffeine or VLC. It took 3 minutes and 21 seconds to download Kaffeine and install it. The Windows drivers and software took about 30 minutes to install. I'm not joking. Linux takes the lead. In either case, reception of the channels was no problem with the wee antenna provided with the PCTV Nano Stick.

But....and don't you grow to hate those "but"s?

The system this device needs to drive it properly is much more grunty than anything I own. All my systems are between 1.6GHz and 2.0GHz, mostly AMD CPUs of one sort (32-bit or 64-bit) or another, though my laptop is an Intel M430 at 1.73GHz. These systems are more than fast enough for everything else I use, so I have not seen any need to buy anything faster (and more expensive).

Systems like this can - at best - reliably play Internet radio and the radio available via Freeview (National Radio, BaseFM). For TV, they can handle the test patterns on the Parliamentary channel. But absolutely no way is anything remotely dynamic watchable.

On my 1.73Ghz laptop, the Windows software (TVCenter Pro) warns me my CPU isn't up to the job, and when I continue anyway, it simply seizes up after about a minute or so and you have to use the Task manager to kill it. On the same laptop, booting to Ubuntu Linux, Kaffeine will merrily play the (usually) fragmented, pixelated and essentially unwatchable video for as long as I care to watch. The video looked like I squashed a pile of blueberries on a mirror. The sound dies after about 10 seconds. Apparently I need a newer version of the FAAD sound support for the AAC-encoded sound. Or something like that. Google was my friend.

Bottom line for this device is: Don't buy it unless - as the box says (who reads the box? Lol!) you have a system with at least the CPU rating listed below.

• Intel Pentium 4.2Ghz or
• Pentium M 1.3GHz or
• AMD Athlon XP

I have none of those at the moment....but I plan to soon, so the device won't be going back to the shop. I also note that PB Tech sell it for $89. Oh well.

Linux: Atheros wifi can't see channels 12 and 13

Google Fodder: I had set my D-Link 624S wifi router to automagically select the channel with the least interference. It opted for channel 13. That was cool with all my systems except my laptop (Acer Travelmate 2483 with Atheros wifi chipset).

Googled around and found the bug on Launchpad. The key piece to sorting this out was adding this line to my /etc/modprobe.d/options and then re-starting my system (simple - brute force!):

options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom="EU"

"iwlist wlan0 channel" previously only reported channels 1 to 11, but now shows all of them. No problems connecting to the AP now on channel 13:

steve@steve-laptop:~$ iwlist wlan0 channel
wlan0 13 channels in total; available frequencies :
Channel 01 : 2.412 GHz
Channel 02 : 2.417 GHz
( blah blah blah blah )
Channel 11 : 2.462 GHz
Channel 12 : 2.467 GHz
Channel 13 : 2.472 GHz
Current Frequency=2.472 GHz (Channel 13)

Beats Per Minute (BPM) software on Linux

Google Fodder: This is one of those blog posts you write so people will find SOMETHING on the topic when they Google it.

I was trying to sort out a playlist on the iPod that would be suitable for a long (couple of hours) fast, walk. Heart pounding stuff for uphill or down, mindfull that music with at least 100 beats / minute was best for a variety of physical pursuits, including keeping time while administering CPR.

I Googled around a bit and found that Amarok had a "BPM" column, so using "sudo apt-get install amarok" in a terminal, I installed Amarok on my Ubuntu 8.10 Linux laptop system and found......that it was just a column. It wouldn't calculate the BPM's for me. I would have to sort that out myself. Ta.

Back to Google. Located "bpm calc 4 amarok". It's a script that drives 'soundstretch' to work out the BPM for songs for use in Amarok. It adds the info directly to the music database! Great! Sounds like what I need.

I installed "bpm calc 4 amarok" and found that the author only supports MySQL databases, not the SQLite database Amarok uses by default. Well, I'm not adding the complexity of MySQL setup, admin and network access to my chosen problem. Not yet anyway. Maybe another day.

I reviewed options and chose another path. Maybe Windows.

Pistonsoft's "BPM Detector" looked promising and it's free. I downloaded it and was going to boot to Windows Vista, but instead decided to install the "WINE" support for running Windows apps on Linux. I had recently been very happy with DosBox on Linux for running my old DOS games, so maybe WINE was as good as that by now.

The result was that both the installer and the app itself work well with WINE.

In \home\steve\desktop, I ran "wine BMPdetector_setup.exe" and followed the installer prompts. I de-selected adding icons or things to the taskbar. Not necessary without a real Windows desktop UI and an unnecessary potential source of error for the install.

Then, to actually run the installed program, I entered:

wine "C:\\Program Files\\Pistonsoft BPM Detector\\bpmdetector.exe"

...and the app runs and gives me BPM values for each song. That done, I created a shortcut / launcher on the desktop so all I have to do now is click on an icon to start BPM Detector. I don't appear to be able "Select All" in a list and batch the BPM caculations, but it works fine if I click on each song one at a time. It can play the songs, too. No problems. Now at least I can get the BPM value for a given song and manually enter it into Amarok. Overall, the MySQL solution and "bpm calc 4 amarok" would have been better and faster if I had MySQL already running and knew more about how to drive it. That "if" was too big for me today. This alternative will get the job done, too.....

Here's a screen shot. Click on it to see a larger version.

Capturing webcam video and audio on Linux

This post is for those who may have tried luvcview or some other, but can't work out how to capture both video and audio from a UVC standard compliant webcam. I've been Googling around and seen a lot of questions and a modest number of almost-useful answers.

I use a UVC compliant / conforming Logitech QuickCam E 3500 webcam on Ubuntu Linux 8.10.
I have installed ffmpeg and all the gstreamer packages - "good", "bad" and "ugly".

This command worked fine for me:

ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s 640x480 -r 25 -i /dev/video0 -f oss -i /dev/dsp1 /home/steve/test.mpg

Once you have it going, you can then tweak / adjust video and sound codecs and see how that works for you. The command above creates an mpeg file, with good light and good sound I can then import directly into my video editing software (kino, kdenlive - whatever) and use.

Kino: Video editing on Linux

This morning marked a milestone of sorts.

It was the first time I have been able to successfully (and without major hassle) edit and render a video on a Linux system. In this case, Ubuntu 8.10 Linux.

Specifically, I used "Kino" to import an MPEG file from my digital camera. I then added a title at the start and a fade out at the end and rendered the amended video out as an MPEG which I then uploaded to YouTube. The only hiccup was Kino telling me I needed to install the "mjpegtools" package in order to successfully render the final product. One "apt-get install" later and the job was done.

For me, this is HUGE. Lack of useful and reliable video editing was the primary reason I had to move from mainly using Linux to mainly using Windows a couple of years ago. I had been almost exclusively a Linux user for the previous 5 years. I had tried everything there was at the time and it was all either flakey (Cinelerra) or didn't work at all (Main Actor, KDEnlive) or was impenetrably obtuse (Cinelerra).

Using Kino for the first time, I was able to work out, in just a few minutes, how to import a video clip, edit it and add effects ot it....then render it out.

There may be better programs out there, as I know there are several under constant development, but Kino is the first I've tried that meets my needs. Hopefully there are more.

Here is the first (very simple) vid I made with Kino: from video shot during a take-off from Auckland Airport on the 28th. Title effect added to the beginning and a fade out at the end.

Vista: deceased (for now) / Ubuntu linux is on the job

On Saturday, the Windows Vista system on my laptop decided it didn't want to boot any more. It's a preload, so I don't have any install media. What I do have is the backup I made when I first bought it. This should return it to the factory defaults.

I ran that restore and it appeared to complete successfully. But when I attempted to boot it, it declared that it had found problems that meant i would have to do a complete re-installation. That isn't possible because my system is a preload. I had just attempted all that it is possible to attempt.

In comes Ubuntu 8.10. I installed that to a USB pndrve, thinking I may be able to somehow resurrect Vista by booting anoher system and having a lurk around. Nothing obvious appeared.

Instead, I did a full install of Ubuntu Linux into a new partition using space stolen from the Visa system partition. I wanted to make a fresh backup of my data file before trashing he whole thing and starting over with preload restore one more time.

But Ubuntu Linux 8.10 has been doing a great job. It recognised all devices (including Broadcom B43 wireless and my Epson 1670 scanner) except my MS Lifecam VX-3000, which is replacable, and it looke like the video editing package, Kino, now includes filters / converters that let me import the MPEG videos my digital camera produces. Video editing was one of my main issues with Linux and why I was using Vista.


Linux just keeps getting better and better. *Almost* there!

Ubuntu 8.10 on pendrive: Lovin' it

I've been running my Acer Travelmate 2483 laptop (1.73 GHz / 1.5GB RAM) on Ubuntu 8.10 for a week or so. It runs off a 4GB Toshiba USB pendrive.

This is a HUGE improvement over the Windows Vista hog that boots from the hard disk. The system is much more responsive and does everything much faster than Vista. The Ubuntu GNOME desktop gives me most of the eye candy that Microsoft's 'Aero' has copied from Apple and innovative Linux/Unix desktops. Microsoft won't let me have Aero on on my Vista Home Basic system. I'd have to upgrade to Home premium for that.

Ubuntu is cheaper, easier and faster.

If you haven't tried this, do it.

Use a 16GB pendrive though. The 4GB one I'm using leaves me only about 1.5GB of free space for files....which can be a bit tight. I compensate by using another 4GB USB pendrive inserted into my DLink wireless Storage Router for additional space. Ubuntu has no trouble accessing the Windows share on the router, but Vista has problems seeing it and I had to reconfigure the firewall and security settings.

Ubuntu Linux 8.10 from USB pen drive

I was looking forward to Ubuntu Linux 8.10 because it was to have a utility to install Linux to a USB pen drive easily.

The utility was certainly there, but the first time I tried it, all I got for my troubles was a message on boot that said the partition was invalid or damaged.

After Googling around, I found one comment on the forum that said the utility is looking for a partition number on the target partition. This applied to me as my USB key appeared to Ubuntu as a FAT32 partition on /dev/sdb. But that partition name describes a device, but has no number.

I booted Ubuntu and unmounted the USB key (Toshiba 4GB). That allowed 'qparted' to delate and recreate a partition on the USB pen drive. This time the partition was called "/dev/sdb1".

I then ran the USB pen drive utility. It said the partition needed to be formatted, so I formatted it as FAT32 and specified 1.5GB of persistent space. Much more than that on a 4GB drive and you don't have enough room to install Ubuntu and the attempt will fail that way instead of the way already mentioned. My first attempt was at 3GB (of 4) for persistent space and the install errored out saying Ubuntu needed another 690MB. Oh. So that would make it about 1.7GB at least.

The install to /dev/sdb1 on the USB drive went fine and within a few minutes I was up and running on a persistent USB install of Ubuntu.

My Acer Travelmate 2483 laptop's wireless is 'B43' Broadcom 802.11g, so I had to connect to the Internet via ethernet into my router, then click on System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers and download, install and 'activate' to the B43 driver. This went smoothly. A reboot had the driver loaded and in a minute or two I was wirelessly connected to the net.

Even allowing for the stumble over the lack of a partition number and the need to re-partition the key drive, this USB Linux install was my easiest and simplest yet.

Now I just have to figure out how to get the latest kernel update to install correctly. It fails saying it's a LiveCD.

Vista / Linux and windows file shares

I bought a new router the other day. It's a DLink DI-624S '108G Wireless Storage Router'.

It sits behind my other router and effectively gives me two firewalls on the way into my network from the internet. The new router, dubbed "Evermore", has a 16GB USB key inserted into it providing me with an ftp server and - I was hoping - a Windows file server ("DSERVER") with shares for making files available inside the network, independent of whether or not any particular PC has been booted up or not.

The only problem is, the Windows Vista systems in the house (2 of them - both preloads) can't see the router-based 'windows' server or the shared resources it offers.

But my Ubuntu 8.04 workstation has no problems at all seeing the server or the shared resources, as you can see from the image I've uploaded here.

Yet again, Linux proves itself to be (in ways that matter to me) a better windows than Windows.

Google Chrome for Linux

If you're looking for a challenge, you can build the latest pre-release versions of Google's Chrome browser yourself. The best platform to do this on is Ubuntu 8.04 as that is the Linux distro that Google are using for development. It's an open source project, so they are making their source code available as they go along.

You can find the details here.

Lightning fast linux on USB pen drive

Shutting out the US presidential race and Winston Peter's latest campaign to bait the media in order to win votes, I turned to my toys.

It's been a goal for the past 15 months to get Linux up and running on my Acer Travelmate 2483 laptop, complete with wireless support, sound and all the usual Internet mod cons.

I moved the idea from thought to action about a couple of weeks ago when I went to DSE and bought a DSE USB Microdrive with 16GB of flash ram.

After some false starts with Ubuntu and Damn Small Linux, tonight I tried the AllInOne version of PenDrive Linux. Pendrive Linux is based on the Mandriva distribution.

I downloaded the 495MB zip file and extracted all the files to the FAT32-formatted USB key. Once I worked out I needed to run the makeboot.bat file from an *administrator* command prompt on Windows Vista, I was then able to boot the laptop from the USB key.

This method also avoids installing the Lilo or Grub bootloaders, leaving the main hard disk untouched.

I then connected to the Internet via ethernet cable (the Marvel Yukon 100Mb ethernet chipset and DHCP worked fine). I then tried to set up the wireless network. Pendrive Linux correctly identified the Broadcom wireless chipset and told me I needed to download the BCM43xxx firmware for it and provided the URL. The wireless setup task then allowed me to select the downloaded firmware and installed it. In another couple of minutes I had configured the wireless network, rebooted and was on the Internet wirelessly, using a Linux system started from the USB pen drive.

The sound works fine and I can play flash videos on YouTube without having to install anything. I used Ksnapshot to capture the image of my new Pendrive Linux desktop in this post and GIMP to scale to a smaller size.

In a word: Awesome.

In another word: FAST

The laptop has 1.5GB of RAM and the CPU runs at 1.73GHz. By modern standards, that's a very ordinary machine. Windows Vista reckens it's too slow to run the Aero user interface. Pendrive Linux, on the other hand, loves it. With all data on flash RAM in the USB drive, this system is much faster than the Windows Vista system it normally runs......despite the USB bus speed being slower than the mainboard data bus.

PenDrive Linux can be run in read-only "live" mode, or in persistent mode. The latter allows the system to save and use the same setings (and any new files), just like on any"normal" system.

I've written this post on it.

Ubuntu and cool stuff

My youngest daughter discovered his week that GIMP (open source equivalent of PhotoShop) runs better on Linux than Windows XP. She uses about a thousand brushes and as many fonts and after a few hours XP just grinds to a near halt. On the same system, Ubuntu Linux 8.04 stays consistently lively across several days with no problems doing exactly the same things.

I've been coming home to find her deep in the grip of the penguin....for hours...designing Bebo skins for her mates. I have to confess I've been seeking tuition on how to use layers and masks and collect brushes of all types for creating interesting graphics. I have a lot of catching up to do. She's been thrashing GIMP for almost 2 years now, to the point where she can do stuff that is REALLY cool....and be completely unable to explain how she did it. It just happens......part of her internal programming.

Still on Tux, she also found that on Ubuntu 8.04 she can preview her MP3 files by hovering the mouse pointer over the file in a folder. She was waving the mouse pointer around "creating" ad hoc sample 'concerts'. It must load them into cache or memory as the switch between songs was instant. Even I, somewhat jaded linux user for 14 years now, thought that was pretty cool. The system has 512MB of RAM and is based on an AMD Athlon 2200+ CPU (approx 1.8Ghz) that was new 5 or 6 years ago.