Total Immersion

This must be desktop operating system geek heaven - but even as I say that I realise ‘m missing out on a whole bunch of ‘em. To the point, I have recently come into the possession of a MacBook Pro, which is running OSX 10.4. With that, I’ve got XP running in a (donated, thanks) VMware Fusion virtual machine - which runs like it’s native. Meanwhile, on my old Samsung laptop I’ve gone for a dual boot with Ubuntu Hardy Heron on one partition, and (also donated, thanks too) Windows Vista on the other. What of Solaris or indeed OS/2, I hear you cry.

Its an interesting set-up. A key question is interoperability - which I define as, “Being able to do whatever I want on any platform, without seeing the joins.” I think that’s a bit different to the interoperability Microsoft keeps banging on about, which sometimes seems more about keeping the more evangelical chatterati at bay (incidentally, my suggestion was to ask the silent majority what they thought - I believe there’s far less anti-Microsoft sentiment out there than some bloggers might imply). But the world of Mac interoperability is questionable - iTunes will only recognise iPods for example. Is it a problem? I honestly don’t know - the slickness that the fanboys love so much is a consequence of a tighter control over hardware, and no doubt software specs. Balancing such usability with interoperability is an issue we see in the large in corporate IT shops, and it is no coincidence that CIOs often talk in terms of “One throat to choke.” Thinking out loud: would ‘proprietary’ be such a bad thing, if it just worked?

But I digress. Just one last thing to do is to re-install Lilo, then I’m done.

I’ve been road testing my new acquisition - the OQO Model 01+ UMPC running Windows Tablet. I’ve been hankering after one of these for a while, but it is only recently that price has dropped to a justifiable level (340 quid + VAT from Expansys). So, what’s so good about it?

1. It really is a real Windows computer.  Not a PDA, or some other device running Symbian or Linux, but a fully fledged Windows PC.  This isn’t some Microsoft hugging statement, more a simple question of broad application support, specifically for voice recognition (see 3) and mind mapping. Bluntly, the things I want to do with this device, I can.
2. I can get it out on the Tube.  Indeed, I can get the OQO out just about anywhere.  It is all very well checking a map on a laptop, but it is a bit of a drag having to walk the streets with a 15 inch computer screen open in front of you.  Much of the challenge is logistical (see 8), but equally, the London Underground is not seen as a place for laptops - journeys are shorter, and the potential for theft is reputedly higher (see 7).
3. It really does work as a voice recognition Dictaphone.  This was the main reason for justifying the purchase of the OQO, as a proof of concept: I am very surprised that such a capability has not been tested publicly before.  It’s not perfect, but it does indeed work: I shall be writing more about this in a future post.
4. It is a tablet PC.  If XP Tablet edition is installed, the benefits that apply to tablet PC’s also apply to the OQO.  This includes quite reasonable handwriting recognition: some people prefer to write than type, and indeed it is a lot more friendly in meetings having someone scribbling on a tablet, then tapping behind a laptop.
5. It really is very small.  This may sound like in stating the obvious, but it is true.  The advantage of size is that it can be taken places where a normal computer could not go: it can fit, for example, in a jacket pocket.  Yes, you absolutely know it’s there, but it’s not half as obtrusive as a full-size laptop.  So if, like me, you sometimes find yourself with that dilemma of whether to take a computer or not, for example to a meeting - then you still can, taking all your files with you.
6. It can be taken on holiday. Yes, yes, I know, it should be necessary to take computers on holiday.  However, those working in smaller companies don’t always have the luxury of choice; equally there are plenty of uses of a computer that have nothing to do with work.  The convenience of the OQO means that it can be put into the bottom of the case and forgotten until it should be needed.
7. It more surreptitious than a laptop. Because of (4) it is easier, nay possible to put an OQO into the glove compartment of the car, and it is less of a theft-magnet in general than a fully fledged laptop. From a near distance it looks like some obscure games console.
8. It can be used standing up, or while walking. My train ride home yesterday involved an hour’s standing in a tightly packed carriage, but I was still able to finish off the day’s affairs by completing a report and closing down my email. It does require two hands to use the keyboard or pen, however.As another example, a pretty standard thing for me to do on a flight is to get back up-to-date with my e-mail.  With the OQO on Tuesday, I was able to upload my e-mail as soon as my plane had landed and the seatbelt light had gone off, which for me was a real boon as I could then go straight to my car in the knowledge that all those pesky messages had been sent to area.
9. It can be powered by a portable battery. A couple of years ago I bought a 12V extension battery from Brookstone in the US, for the express purpose to act as a backup power supply for my gadgets when I was out and about. The extension battery is completely inadequate for laptop use, but it can power the OQO via the latter’s own 12V adaptor input. Together with (6), this makes the OQO a much more suitable device for camping trips etc, when access to mains power may be sporadic.
10. It looks good. This is very much “last but not least” - but I did get a buzz when the usually dour security staff at Gatwick struck up a conversation about it. Having technology as a talking point doesn’t have to be limited to Mac fanboys, you know!

What’s there not to like? Well. I wouldn’t suggest the OQO as a desktop replacement - with the caveat that I have bought what is now an old model, the OQO is underpowered compared to what multicore desktops can do. Having said that, my virtualisation experiences have led me to believe in the model of smaller computers that are scaled to suit the workload, and the OQO 01+ is an adequate base for office and email use, running on XP. Even so, the screen size is a decidedly limiting factor when it comes to usability - I have found myself frowning when starting to use it, as though some part of my brain is trying to understand if the OQO is just a normal sized computer, but a little too far away.

A second issue is around power. The first OQO I was shipped had a faulty power supply, which I understand is a common fault; the battery when fully charged can power the device for up to 2 hours only, though there is a double capacity battery available (Expansys was shipping spare batteries for 20 quid each, so I bought two of these instead). Finally, a battery “feature” is that, if fully discharged they need to be plugged in for sometimes up to 24-48 hours before they will trip back into charging mode. Nice.

Having said all of that, as a proof of concept (to me) it is keeping  its end up admirably. I would love to see an OQO-sized brick that could be inserted into a laptop or desktop form factor like a hard drive, and I am surprised, given its clear usefulness, that we do not see a wider audience for the OQO - I would speculate that this is because few have the luxury of two computers. From the research we conducted last year it was clear that PDAs wouldn’t be replacing PCs any time soon - as costs continue to tumble I expect to see the UMPC form factor to reach a much wider market, not to replace the laptop, but to extend the web of mobile computing still further.

I wrote this review of Bluetooth and infrared keyboards a while back, and then promptly forgot to do anything about it, so here it is. A word of warning - I have had issues with the (increasingly locked down) drivers for the Freedom Keyboard. Still, while I’m loving my OQO (review to follow), I can still see a place for these things. I hope its useful!

A random thought, prompted by a discussion with APC a few years ago. I was surprised to discover (having clearly been a poor student in O Level Physics) that the amount of heat output by a rack of processors, storage etc was exactly equivalent to the amount of power that went in. I know, its so obvious it hurts. More recently, there are plenty of stories of office blocks being heated using computer equipment. The question - as I sit in a relatively warm room,  no doubt due to the two computers pumping out hot air right now - is whether such a strategy could also be adopted by the “connected home”?

Which begs the next question - which is the more efficient heating device - the computer  or  the oil-fired radiator - and why? It would be funny if, at some point in the future,  processor cycles were seen as a knock-on benefit of our silicon-based wall heaters…

I confess, I nearly did away with Linux last week. Something was consistently going wrong and for the life of me I couldn’t work out what - the result was that, at far-too-regular intervals, my machine was hanging/locking/freezing. At first I took it as it came (good moment to sit back and stave off the back pain) but after a few weeks it was becoming untenable. Until - finally - I stumbled across the message threads (for example) that suggested setting “pci-noacpi” in the boot script. Blow me if it doesn’t work, though I’m sure I’m missing out on all kinds of clever stuff!

As a result, I’ve decided to stick with Ubuntu Gutsy as my base operating system, for the time being. There’s a whole stack of reasons - advantages and disadvantages - and I wouldn’t advise Linux (even Ubuntu) for just everybody. I’ll get round to documenting these over the coming week or so.

This shouldn’t necessarily be construed as some massive switch from Windows to Linux. There are still things I either need, or like to do in Windows, so I am sticking with a hybrid configuration; however, as already discussed, with its smaller footprint (about 650Mb of memory in active use, rather than the 1.2Gb I found was required for Vista in the same scenario) Linux is the preferred base OS for virtualisation. Perhaps the biggest leap of faith is the fact I have just deleted the dual boot: I’m finding that running XP in a VirtualBox virtual machine is just as usable, and far more accessible than having to boot into a separate configuation to access Windows-based applications. It also means I’m working with just one set of files, rather than synchronising between my virtual file store and real, though of course equally virtual file store.

This last point was quite an epiphany for me. At the start I was concerned about what might happen, should the virtual hard disk get corrupted… until I remembered I was equally concerned by (and experienced in) real disks getting corrupted. The answer, of course, was doing a backup. Then, of course, one remembers that everything is virtual, imaginary, made up combinations of electronic signals to give us the impression of data. Phew, but in a good way.

The configuration I have now is much simpler than trying to manage dual boot - there are less file systems to mount, less apps to install and keep up to date, etc. And of course, I can access all my applications at once. On the data side, I still need to delve deeper into questions of file sharing between base and virtual machines - in principle it is quite simple (for example, using virtual network shares in VirtualBox) but I still don’t understand how things like indexing are handled, or for example what is the performance hit on very large files, if they are accessed over a pseudo-network.

For now at least, everything is working fine, and so I can get on with writing about technology, rather than playing with it

I had a bit of a screwdriver couple of days this weekend, building (or, in modern flat-pack parlance) assembling a bed, and also replacing the hard drive in my Archos 340 (AV300 series) audio/video jukebox. This latter task had been a while coming, as my music collection alone now takes up 48GB - the straw that broke the camel’s back was inheriting a collection of classical CD’s from a good friend. These are now digitised and the originals stowed, leaving me the listening pleasure but also causing difficulty in knowing what to store, where.

So, I finally succumbed and purchased a 160GB hard drive. There’s quite a lot of information on the Web about upgrading an Archos AV300 series - thanks guys - the one thing I didn’t know was whether it could take a 160GB, though I had read reports of success with the 120GB drives. Answer: no it can’t - I now have a 125GB partition for stuff the Archos can play, and a 35GB partition for various videos it cannot. Live and, through a number of attempts at reformatting, learn (second answer: accept the first partition size the Archos proposes, around 128GB I think).

Having then spent a slow and boring time transferring files from the RAID box to the Archos, I now have a bunch of films recorded from the TV, the aforementioned 48Gb of music and our entire digital collection of family photos. I don’t know if I am now in that gadget honeymoon period (you know, when anything new seems really, really useful) but it is quite remarkable what a difference it can make to have everything in one place. There are some films, for example, that I have been meaning to watch ever since they were recorded - but now I might actually do so, given the fact they are conveniently placed on the jukebox, rather than stuck away somewhere on the server. Right now I’m listening to a bit of Dvorak on a long-haul flight, you can guarantee I couldn’t have done without the new drive.

It takes me back to my IT manager days, when we seemed to be forever struggling against a tide of data. The answer would invariably be the same - to adopt coping strategies for as long as possible before planning in some downtime and going through a consolidation exercise. Things would be great for a while, before eventually our best-laid plans would give way to the pressures referred to by my previous boss Rob Hailstone as “the wardrobe principle.”

Perhaps the worst example of this was caused quite ironically from having too much storage. Sun Microsystems, in their infinite generosity supplied a batch of 40 SS10 workstations with an equal number of - if my memory serves me correctly - external 400 MB drives. At first we were daunted and gleeful in equal measure - this was free stuff, after all - but over time the discs became incorporated into the IT environment. Oracle was a hungry beast, not just because of the database sizes but the number of test instances we needed to run.

For a period there was no problem that couldn’t be solved without throwing extra disk space at it. After a while however, the disks that had held so much promise became a burden of their own, and we had to consolidate things down again.

Still, and no doubt like things will turn out for my newly rejuvenated Archos, it was nice while it lasted.

P.S. Incidentally, a note for Archos lovers - the trick with bending back (carefully) the battery contacts, as remarked upon in a number of places on the Web, really does work to restore battery life. Thanks again!

Its been an interesting experience so far - notably my reading and writing of blogs has suffered as I’ve been tinkering and tweaking, but I think I now have a stable environment, notably:

- Ubuntu 7.10 running Gnome
- VirtualBox for Outlook, Office and Mind Manager access
- Firefox and Thunderbird for Web and personal mail
- KDevelop for Ruby development
- gTwitter, Skype and Xeyes in the toolbar
- OpenOffice for simple word processing and looking at presentations
- Drivel for typing this

And it all works OK - well, it should, shouldn’t it? I’ve tested pretty much all the options and features that could be alternatives to the above, but for the most part they’re either not suited, or not working. Specifically, there appears to be a bug in the current release of Evolution, which is preventing me from accessing Exchange directly. I haven’t spoken to the Evolution guys but I’ve read pretty widely on this and no dice. Its not blocking but it woudl be nice if it worked. I’ve also tried the gadgets tool (name eludes me) - it doesn’t work under Gnome, which for some reason I keep coming back to from KDE, don’t ask me why but its just simpler and cleaner. Ah, that’s why

I have had inordinate problems with screen resolutions, on my external display; I was also having issued with the screen freezing up for periods but it now transpires that the latter was caused, or exacerbated by the former. Newbie tip: don’t try (like I did) to hack your xorg.conf file, before running the command to detect and auto-generate such a file from scratch. This worked much better - its all documented in the Ubuntu display howto here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FixVideoResolutionHowto There are issues with the display freezing in Gutsy, but I would recommend sorting this first and see if it resolves them.

Update:  I was also having an issue with suspend/resume not working, which seems to have “gone away” now I’m running with the new xorg.conf. Spooky

I’ve also got to get my microphone working. I was surprised to receive a Slype call a few days ago - surprised because we don’t tend to use it that much for work any more (default action: reach for phone). I grabbed my headset and plugged it in to find that I needed to configure the ALSA device driver, and it wasn’t going to just play so I left it. Still need to get round to that.

I also want to look at Kandy as an alternative for driving my USB 3G dongle. Apart from that, I think I’m done. It was interesting - a few days ago I went back to my Vista install for some reason, grumbling as I did about the Ubuntu display issue. When I logged in however, I did have a similar issue with recognising the display resolution etc, which made me have a bit of a rethink (conclusion: displays are tough in any OS). I’ve tried a couple of other things - for example installing a software configuration management too for my development efforts, before remembering that it could be quite a tricky thing to deploy, and removing both it and Apache. Lesson learned - there’s such a thing as too much choice!

As a final point I had a sudden ah-ha moment as I used XP within VirtualBox. I had been worrying about what happened to my data if the virtual machine should get corrupted in some way - but then it suddenly occurred to me that everthing within the computer was virtual and at risk, bing converted into a string of 0’s and 1’s and processed through this sexy-looking, but ultimately deceptive Von Neumann machine. The answer: to back up the data, of course. So I have no installed SmartSync within my virtual environment, and it is doing exactly that. Whoa!

Here’s a bit more information about my chosen Linux configuration. I’m using a Samsung Q35 laptop with a Centrino Duo processor and 2 gig of RAM. It’s partitioned with a 30Gb drive for Vista and the rest given over to Ubuntu Linux 7.10. I’ve installed a number of packages on top of the base install, specifically for:

Virtualisation

I wanted to run XP within Ubuntu to access my Outlook email client - though there may be other ways (for example through direct Exchange access). I did have a go with VMWare Player for Linux VM’s, and with Xen as a more general virtualisation platform (no suspend/resume, fwiw) before discovering that KVM worked with the virtualisation features build into the Intel CPU to give a pretty fast and very usable virtual experience.

Having downloaded the KVM package, I’ve set up a number of virtual machines, including a 5 gig one to run XP with Outlook and Word - it’s tight, but it works. If I wanted to run any other Windows apps I’d probably have to roll a new VM - at the moment the only software I lack is Groove and Mind Manager, so perhaps I should do this.

The two commands I need to remember to run each time are:

$ sudo modprobe kvm-intel # to insert the necessary libraries into the kernel
$ sudo kvm -boot c -m 768 -smb windows \
-cdrom /dev/cdrom /home/jonno/vm/xpdesk.img

Occasionally KVM will crash on boot - this seems to be a known bug, and I should stress it’s highly repeatable (this is a good thing i.e. it doesn’t happen randomly), which means that once a configuration works, its good to go. Specifically (and ironically) it crashes when trying to load the splash screen from the Ubuntu live CD, for example. The workaround is to run QEMU or KVM with the -no-kvm option, which doesn’t talk directly to the processor. It’s slower, but if this is done for XP installation then it generates a working image that can then be booted normally. Ubuntu server installs OK, but Ubuntu desktop hits the issue every time it boots so for the moment it isn’t an option for a KVM virtual machine.

File access

For the time being, my files remain in the Vista partition, call me old fashioned but this is a pilot test, not a gung-ho let’s-throw-away-the-key epiphany. So I need to be able to access them not only in Linux (easy enough, the partition is mounted by default in /media), but also from inside the XP virtual machine. For this I have installed Samba, which enables files from the host PC to be accessed like they were on a network drive. Hence, by the way, the need for the “-smb” option in the kvm launch line above.

For my own future reference, the IP address of the network drive is the same as the gateway in the XP VM. I had to go through a bit of configuration rigmarole to set up Samba - I recommend just following the standard tutorial to set up a Samba user and smb.conf file, and going from there.

Modem access

This was one of those “cool - it works!” moments. Turns out that the Huawei E220 device that T-Mobile provided me with is a pretty standard piece of kit (who knew?) and that the driver for it is already built into the kernel (how cool is that). Trouble is however with the device, being a la fois a USB thumbdrive and a modem, the OS doesn’t always recognise what its being at the time. To resolve this, some kindly fellow has written a short C program, which needs to be preceded with a modprobe command - at least I think so but I haven’t fully worked out the order yet. This seems to work:

$ modprobe usbserial vendor=0×12d1 product=0×1003
$ sudo /sbin/huaweiAktBbo

For info on the source code, run a Google on huaweiAktBbo, it will also tell you which library to include for the compiler to work (and yes, I popped it into the sbin directory myself). Another couple of tips - use dmesg to see what the latest status is, use lsusb to see whether the requisite 3 USB tty’s have been created, and do check the lights are on on the modem.

I’m using wvdial to connect to T-Mobile in the UK, with the following /etc/wvdial.conf file:

[Dialer Defaults]
Phone = *99***1#
Username = web
Password = web
Stupid Mode = 1
Dial Command = ATDT

[Dialer hsdpa]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 460800
Init2 = ATZ
Init3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
ISDN = 0
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Init5 = AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”general.t-mobile.uk”

Random thoughts

As well as the above there’s some other bits and bobs - like discovering I didn’t need vncserver to get remote access to my Linux desktop (Xvnc works just fine) - incidentally the command line is:

$ x11vnc -usepw -auth /home/jonno/.Xauthority -display :0

Still to be sorted are:

- switching between laptop and external monitor. I have configurations to run either, but I haven’t yet arrived at a point where I can switch from one to the other without any gyp. My Microsoft head says “surely this should just work,” and while I know there will be some clever setup of the xorg.conf file that does just that, the tempting option (kludge) is just to have two xorg.conf files, and to switch between them as necessary.

- installing a decent Synaptics Touchpad driver. At the moment its too sensitive which means that suddenly I will find myself typing somewhere else in the document than where I started. Shouldn’t be too hard to fix.

- installing some network monitoring software. The 3G modem may work, but its not very forthcoming when it comes to telling me signal strength, connection speed etc. There may be something out there or perhaps I will just write something (yeah, right).

- there remains a bug in suspend/resume - or it could be a configuration error, hard to tell. The symptom is that the screen sits there, black and the disk light stays on, even though there’s no activity (or at least, sound). It’s not the same as X failing to load, as ctl-alt-f1 doesn’t show the terminal window either (and ctl-alt-f7 doesn’t bring back the graphics)

- there’s also the occasional difficulty copying a file. Again I don’t want to be quick to leap onto this as something wrong with the system, as often it can be that a previously unknown fault (eg file corruption) can be revealed by trying to access it with a different platform. I’ll report back on this.

- playing multimedia. Given that I’ve handed over a slab of my disk space to install two base operating systems and run a bunch of VM’s, my MP3 collection is feeling the squeeze so I haven’t got round to installing anything here just yet.

Overall though, I have a working system. The Ubuntu forums have been superlatively useful, and there’s lots of other sources of help out there, which is nice to know.

I’m afraid to say however that I share the feeling that Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) may not have been quite as ready for prime time as it should have been. I had installed Feisty Fawn (the previous Ubuntu version, 7.04) before, and it did seem to “just work” which is of course a major factor with which to judge desktop Linux. First I tried downloading 7.10 as an upgrade, but for reasons I can’t now remember I decided to go the whole hog and replace it with a clean version. Everything seems to be there but there are a few quirks - KDE menu items showing up in Gnome for example, or the fact that every now and then my window manager seems to change - it went from Gnome to Xfce once, and another time from KDE to Gnome. Very strange (though in hindsight it might be associated with installing updates).

Having said that, it is quite usable - I just think if I was installing Ubuntu for somebody else I would default to Feisty. And I’m very, very sorry to say but the arguments “new versions should always be treated carefully” or “with Microsoft it would be worse” just don’t cut the mustard, if mainstream desktop users are being targeted. Once it makes it onto the magazine cover, it’s got to work.

More soon as I work through the other stuff above.

S’funny. There I was thinking that Twitter was in some way different from, well, anything else. To the extent that it had taken the web publishing model and reduced it to the finest level of textual granularity, expressed as a 140-character “tweet”. And it’s a platform, open API’s, the lot.

Meanwhile, we’ve been using Skype as our messaging tool du choix between Freeform team members. We even use it for voice sometimes, but text is the default.

So there I was last night, getting on with various things - with a MadTwitter window open on the left, and a Skype Chat window on the right. And, behold, I was using them both in exactly the same way.

Sure, there’s differences. Twitter is the ultimate in broadcast chat - when I post, it’s like shouting across a crowded room where everyone can hear (and fortunately, not everyone is shouting). Meanwhile, in Skype I have to pre-select people I want to chat with - but I can have multiple chats with individuals and different combinations of groups. I can access Twitter on the Web, through phone or via my handheld, and while I can’t open a Skype window on the web, I can do the latter two. With Twitter, I can write to it from other programs. So I can with Skype. Etc, etc.

Other messaging apps offer a bunch of facilities that are much more controllable than either Twitter or Skype, including IMvironments, talking avatars, enterprise logging features, unified comms and so on - which makes me wonder even more. Aside from the “following/followers” concept, what exactly has Twitter got that traditional messaging hasn’t? It’s important - because while this would be quite a simple feature to add to the majority of text messaging clients, it would be quite a challenge fro Twitter to bulk itself up to offer these stock features.

I’ve probably missed the point entirely, but then, so did the kid who said teh king had no clothes on.

Just seen as I resumed my computer from suspended mode:

“Not enough memory or disk space to update the display.”

Sheesh.