10 « December « 2006 « Irfan’s Corner on the Web

10Dec/061

Linux expected to be leading Smartphone OS market by 2010

I just came across this research by Diffusion Group, which found that Linux is set to become the leading Smartphone OS by 2010. I don't have access to the full report which one has to purchase but from my experience from using a Linux based smartphone, Motorola E680i, I can say this is very much possible but some hurdles remain.

Motorola E680i smartphone, is an amazing phone and I fell in love with it when I first saw it. It has everything one would expect from a smartphone: large Touchscreen, bluetooth, voice recognition, productivity applications like Picsel, camera etc. It's based on Montavista Linux, and the price was just a bit over $300. One strength Linux has which other can't compete with is the price! Linux is free, hence Linux based smartphone manufacturers only charge for the hardware and software licensing is kept at a minimum. It does not however mean that there is no money to be made for smartphone Linux providers, because as I previously stated most money in open source is made from services either for open source software (support) or on open source software (Google), not with open source software (selling licenses). Once the Linux smartphone market starts to take off I'm sure a lot of support companies will spring up, aswell as applications which would run on the open source platform.

Now, although the platform (kernel space) is ready to take over the smartphone OS market, the user space is NOT. One thing that bugs me a lot about my smartphone is the lack of native applications, you can run Java applications and there filling most of my needs. Windows CE/Mobile based phone have a large eco-system of applications which they can use, but this eco-system does not exist for Linux. And it was actively discouraged by Motorola in the beginning, when it didn't release the user level libraries to support native application development. Thanks God, Motorola has come around and released those libraries, and a vibrant community (Seem to be having server problems since the last month) has sprung up which provide valuable services to Motorola Linux smartphone users.

Filed under: open source 1 Comment

10Dec/0611

SuSe takes over my Desktop!

Since yesterday I've been evaluating SuSe, and I'm pretty impressed by the distro. It's not the first time I've used SuSe, I used it before Novell acquired it. It was one of the best one at that time, but not ready for the Desktop. After the Novell acquisition I think SuSe has improved greatly! It's an awesome distribution now. However the desktop installation did not go as smoothly as that installation on my laptop. I had to manually configure my soundcard, with alsaconf, that's it.

Now, I don't believe that noobs should use SuSe/Fedora etc. straight when they dive into Linux, yes these distributions make a life a lot simpler with Linux, but I believe that you dont learn much about GNU/Linux, the platform, while you are using these distros. For example, since I have installed SuSe I haven't as of yet needed to compile anything from the sources, and just used YaST. So if some software is not available there some noobs who could think that, that software is just not available on Linux, they will not learn about how to find software from sourceforge and compile it, handle dependencies, or if something is wrong with the graphics settings, how to change to xorg.conf file and make the appropriate changes, or if there some problems with iptables, how to delete/add rules manually. One experience I had with a noob, who was a fedora user, was when he had problems with his networking, and he was testing settings in the GUI tool which ships with Fedora/redhat. I investigated using the ifconfig and route tool, and found out there were problems with the gateway routing rules, within the next few seconds I fixed them. In Slackware there is no GUI tool for networking configurations, and you mostly use either the netconfig script or the ifconfig/route commands to get your network working. Using raw distros like Slackware/Gentoo hence has enormous advantages, and I believe every Linux user should use it atleast once to learn the platform.