1. The Mac effect

For a geek, having choices is all that matters. I love the fact that there are 100s of Linux distributions, and I'm eager to recommend Linux distributions to other people, however everytime I come to recommending a specific Linux distribution to a friend, they have always some specific requirements. For example recently a friend of mine wanted a good bibliographic software to work with OpenOffice, to my knowledge there isn't one which I would recommend esp. since he was used to commercial software like Biblioscape. Then he had difficulties installing Maple 12 in his Ubuntu 8.04 (It turned out that the company supported only Ubuntu 7!). Further along, he could not run a specific mathematical research software because the developer had released binaries for redhat 9 only!.

Fed up with all this, he got a Mac, and the strength of the Mac is that it marries a strong GUI with a Unix based subsystem. Now I could recommend excellent referencing software such as EndNote, Bookends or Papers. Maple has a release the Mac, which is not tied to a specific version of OSX. The mathematical research software also had a DMG which was created for PowerPC macs, however he had no problems running it thorugh Rosetta (built-in hypervisor for PowerPC). Everything fell into place for him when he switched to a Mac.

So for Linux to survive in the user's desktops, I think more concerted efforts should be made by the Linux community to standardize cross-distribution package formats, enabling the universal installation of binaries and simplify software development for Linux. Both these things will help commercial companies develop software for Linux and then in future, hopefully, I can recommend the Bookends Linux release as well.

2. Who provides free tech support?

I'm always eager to help friends out with their Linux problems, and I used to think that linux forums such as LinuxQuestions.org are the ultimate free tech support. However because there are 100s of distributions tech support for Linux is becoming increasingly fragmented. Often the reply to a question on the a forum is: "Just install this and this package, type yum PACKAGENAME" or someone else says "just type apt-get install PACKAGEName". The old world where people would recommend source packages which would work in any distribution is gone it seams.

3. Linux users "unfriendly" to NooBs?

Largely I would say this was true a few years ago, however with the penetration of Ubuntu and an increasing number of non-technical users using Linux, this problem has largely faded.

Yesterday I was attracted to the CrossOver free Software give-away. I downloaded CrossOver Pro for Mac, and instantly tried out installing some software. I was impressed how smooth the installation of Office 2007 went. MS Visio 2007 installation failed, but Visio 2003 installation went smooth.

I'm disappointed though how few games are supported on CrossOver Games. But that doesn't mean that WINE lacks in the gaming department. Many of the recent games for the Mac are using a Transgaming product Cider, which allows companies such as EA to run unmodified Windows games, such as Spore, Command and Conquer 3 on Mac using WINE. Cider has impressive performance, and I have played and enjoyed a couple of cider games, which include Spore. It been quit a journey for Transgaming because their initial product, WineX, which was a directX implementation on WINE supported only a few games, but was powerful enough to run Warcraft 3.

CrossOver Pro is based on WINE. WINE requires numerous configurations for it to work on complex software. CrossOver makes those configurations easier. Previous versions of CrossOver Office were not easy to use. Check this link here, and you can see some real geekery was involved in installing Office 2007 in previous versions.

This software give-away definitely benefited CrossOver. Because with the hue and cry about virtualization, people had forgotten that it was possible to run common Windows software without installing a complete VM. I expect this company to get more visibility in future.

Some screenshots, of successful software installation with CrossOver.

While installing MS Office 2007:

After a Successful Install

Acronis TrueImage is advertised as a Windows only solution, however it can be used in Linux as well with ease. This tutorial will show how:

1., Get yourselves a copy of Acronis TrueImage. The software is priced reasonably. I do my computing exclusively on my laptop, and laptops have pretty high rate of hard disk failure because of the wear and tear, so once a failure occurs the disruption for me would be far beyond the cost for paying for such a solution like this.

2., Once you purchase Acronis, they don't ship you a media rather offer an internet download, which is an exe file. You can install the software through Wine, without any problems.

3., After the software is installed, you can not use the GUI because of sporadic errors which you will get for example, when you to create a backup:

So the normal GUI does not work well in Linux, however, Acronis offers a great feature in which you can load the application into a bootable cdrom, and you can use this cdrom to boot your computer and create your backups.

You can access the option from:

The bootable CD has almost all options the normal GUI offers, and form the CD you can select your drives and back them up to FTP/ another computer in the network/external hard drive etc. You can select either the data or sector by sector backup. Acronis apparently only supports ext2 and 3 so if your using an exotic file system, you will have to do with the sector by sector backup. Backups can be encrypted and password secured.

With the inclusion the of these technologies, the linux kernel provides researchers an environment where they can play around with various techniques and advance the state of the art in Virtualization. I look forward to a future where nearly all the innovations to virtualization will come not from proprietary platforms like MS Virtual PC or VMware but from opensource hypervisors. Linux has played a key role in the past in advancing Virtualization. VMware was one of the first full virtualization solutions and start the revival of the virtualization market, however it was an open source virtualization hypervisor Xen, which actually managed to introduce a software which allowed near native performance virtualization. It was again Xen, which provided support to hardware assisted platforms like Intel VT and AMD SVM.

To just give a flavor what the open source world is up against when it comes to web development IDEs. Just have a look at the latest enhancements to the already powerful Visual Studio (not a web development IDE par se, however VS always has supported web development due to ASP). Then of course, no comparison is complete without the mention of Adobe Dreamweaver, MS Expression Designer although seen as lame in the Windows world is light years ahead of any open source web development IDE unfortunately.

So what is a Linux web developer to do? Put up with crashing, feature deficient web development applications, or get the proprietary ones and run in them in through virtualization (this is the path I'm thinking of adapting)?

Since 1995 various groups have been working on adding support for NTFS to Linux, however their efforts were dealt a severe blow when Microsoft significantly changed the filesystem in Windows 2000. The project which came most near to a providing a complete support for NTFS was Captive NTFS which used Windows's own native ntfs driver wrapped in ReactOS, however due to proprietary issues Captive NTFS could not be accepted as a mainstream solution.

Now after 12 years in development, there is a full driver at last! NTFS-3G, which uses Filesystem in User Space (FUSE), and provides full read/write support for NTFS partitions. Such was the demand that within 5 days of release the projects main page, received 2 million hits! Here is a brief tutorial how to make use of it.

Installing NTFS-3G

The entire software can be downloaded from http://www.ntfs-3g.org/index.html, many distribution specific packages exist.OpenSUSE users can refer to this.

Creating a Parition

For full guide, check the official how-to by TLDP

Formatting the partition to ntfs

use the mkfs.ntfs utility to format a partition to NTFS, you could also use any Windows installation for this purpose (I would recommend the latter, as mkfs.ntfs is very slow)

usage:

mkfs.ntfs drive-name [eg. mkfs.ntfs /dev/sdb1]

Mounting NTFS drive

mount -t ntfs-3g drive-name mount-point [eg. mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1]

Unmounting the NTFS drive

umount drive-name

Intially when I installed ntfs-3g, I faced lots of stability problems. It complained something about using a kernel less than 2.6.20, I was using opensuse's default kernel 2.6.18-34, and I faced data corruption twice. Now I'm using the 2.6.22-2 kernel, and it seems to be working stable now. Additionally it was reported in the media that writing is slow in this driver, however I have not noticed any difference, maybe because I was writing to an external hard disk and the bottleneck was in the USB interface. Real performance can be measured in internal hard disk partitions.

KDE's default sound subsystems, aRts (Analog realtime synthesizer) has been part of KDE since ages. I really appreciate the quality of lots of software it comes with, however aRts is a real disappointment. Since Windows 98 I believe MS Windows's sound system had the capability of running multiple sound streams at the same time, this is 2007, and one of the most popular window managers for Linux lacks this capability.

I was yesterday running an online video conferencing application, based on Java, and due to some bandwidth issue it wasn't going so well. So I logged into Skype, and guess what? Skype couldn't open the sound device, because it was already engaged by the Java application, hence I could run only one sound application at once. I've been aware of this problem since ages, from a previous Slackware 9.0 experience, however when I encountered the problem again yesterday I was both surprised and shocked how this problem could have gone unaddressed since ages. It turns out that since Dec 2004 development on aRts has been abandoned.

And if your wondering? No! There are many sound subsystems for Linux, which do not have this problem, you can run Amarok on Xine, and play some DVD movies on Xine at the same time, and you'll face no problem or you can run two instances of mplayer without any issue, however mplayer is an application. And there is no way

Fortunately, in the next major KDE release aRts will be replaced by an engine which makes it easier use more capable backends like Xine. In the meantime while KDE 4.0 is not out, we have to bear with aRts!

However I have come across a problem which has been purely setup by open source "fundamentalists"! As soon as I installed VMWare I tried out various hardware including USB flash drives and USB camera, but they won't work? And upon investigation it was revealed that this was due to a method for accessing the USB port, which was claimed to be insecure, hence support for it was discontinued in openSUSE 10.2, in a heated discussion in the forums, it was very clear who was behind all this, a respected kernel hacker. Greg KH recently jumped the canon and was the one who posted a patch to the LKML, for eliminating binary drivers. I respect him; however he does not seem to have any for users. In a post he said:

"We are not supporting VMWare, because it is closed source and proprietary"

It indeed is, but is there any other open source solution that beats it? Xen requires kernel modification and hence does not work with Windows, the only solution to virtualize windows on Linux computer right now (KVM may change that in future, however it is in the initial stages of development, and runs only on the latest processors) is to use VMWare. In effect VMware is doing us a favour by porting VMWare to Linux at all! I'm 100% certain that the openSuse 10.2 kernel team is doing the right thing by closing a potential exploitable thing, however the approach they have adopted is completely unacceptable! If the concerned methods is indeed exploitable, it is only in the application developers own interest to adopt a more secure method for accessing USB ports, however why can't all Linux distributions follow the same standard then? I can well imagine why VMWare didn't use the openSuse method of 'securely' accessing USB ports, because it would conflict with other popular distributions and if they try to support each method, would result in excessive workload to the company. The best method in this case would be to use something like the OSDL (what's the job of OSDL anyway?) to provide recommendations to the linux distributions in order to standardize kernel level interfaces, so that application developers do not end up supporting dozens of methods for a trivial task as accessing a USB port.

For the time being while Windows runs on more than 90% of the worlds desktops, and is a lucrative market for Independent Software Vendors, we can not ignore users who have applications which are Windows dependant; there are 1,000 times more such applications than Linux dependant apps. And the only way to allows users to run those applications on Linux for the time being is to use virtualization (WINE in my opinion, is progressing nicely, but still has some way to go).

PS. Instead of just ranting here, I will be releasing an openSUSE default kernel with the USB access feature turned on, so that people who need it now can use it

I would love to write the ISO image of the DVD so that someone can burn a copy for their friends.

If you are in Pakistan and are interested in trying out openSuse 10.2, please mail your address to freesuse@phantomos.org