I’m getting old.

When I was young, I was fascinated with hardware and programming low-level stuff to do something nice as an experiment.

I got into programming DOS programs in assembly language (8086). In school, I was fascinated with 6502 assembly language (which wasn’t really that far from 8086, the concepts were mainly the same). As an Electronics Engineer student, my hardware thesis involved creating a hardware interface that detects acidity (pH) in soil with the added twist that it was plugged into the printer port (yes, PCs had parallel ports back in the day) and a program interprets the values that was in the printer port and records them. And yes, the program was in Visual Basic (shocker, right? An unusual use of the Evil Empire’s program environment).

Even friends from the Computer Engineering class asked my help in developing their computer interface projects (which included a voice recognition project for security and a vending machine – which detects what money was inserted into the machine).

One may ask… OK, you’re talking about the past, what has this got to do with Linux?

Let me give you an opinion that will be a shocker to you… Linux might never make it big into the desktop.

Let me start by telling you my experience with Linux. Don’t you get picky with me saying that Linux is the kernel. I am familiar with that.

I started delving into Linux when I was a sales agent of an isp. During that time, all of us sales agents have 8 hours of free internet (dial-up). I started into connecting my 33.6kbps modem through trumpet winsock and downloaded my first linux distribution: Monkey Linux. From that time on, I was hooked. Tried other hobby linux distributions (trilinux, looplinux, etc, settled for a few years with peanutlinux and gained quite a number of friends in the forums), and for a number of years, I was happy. I became an open source advocate. I remember downloading the 100Mb peanutlinux distribution for almost a day (dialup, whoooopeee). I brought linux into a company I worked for as an instructor (before that, I taught short courses for people like MS Office, and Basic computer instruction – I remember teaching a group of PLDT operators, yes operators, the ones that answer the line when you call 109 or 108 for long distance dialing). As I developed instruction modules for Visual Basic, I developed instruction modules for Linux (made even a mod of Peanutlinux, with Jay’s help in giving instructions, called Berkeley Linux, for internal use and passing on to students of the courses) – complete with Gnome environment (1.x at that point), and with WINE, to run some windows programs like winamp on Linux. As usual, I included Xitami and php in the mix of that mod, as standard.

I even got to create instruction modules for OpenOffice (then 1.x); but before that I used StarOffice 5 (when the license was not GPL, but rather free for non-commercial use).

Then reality set in. At first I didn’t mind it. Sound issues. Graphics issues. Wifi and network issues. I simply moved from one distribution to the next (PCLinux, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, and currently my laptop distribution, Meego).

And you know what? Even until today, these are still issues!

So, what’s keeping Linux from ever conquering the desktop? A big issue are drivers.

I love linux, don’t get me wrong. Don’t ever accuse me of being an troll – as you’ve seen on my blog, I dig linux.

However, one thing I’ve noticed is that the API for drivers is virtually non-existent. At least with OSX, they have a framework for extending or creating drivers (usually in userspace). Windows has also a framework for driver development (take your pick, WDM, vxD for older version of windows, etc)

When you update kernel versions, you have to recompile your drivers. Yes, I know, there is dkms. I’m not talking about that.

Linux simply has no formal frameworks for drivers. There was an attempt by Intel before (1998 to be exact), to create a framework named UDI, but was dissed upon by Richard Stallman and open source advocates. An excellent point for UDI was given by a former developer in this forum post.

I am a pragmatic person. I use whatever tools are necessary to get the job done. And that means using windows if that gets the job done – I would’ve preferred using open source, but if there is no software equivalent in linux (which is usually the case, unfortunately), I use windows or osx. Looking back, that decision in my opinion would fit in the category of boneheaded decisions of the open source community.

Linux advocates have a NIH syndrome. Instead of using stuff that works, they create a new one, usually REALLY buggy.

Case in point: pulseaudio. A big heaping piece of dog poo. Well, it has gotten better, but the latency issues are soooo annoying.

Yes, useability has gotten better, but when suspend/hibernate issues still exist even today, and wifi issues still exist, there is something definitely wrong. A friend of mine bought a laptop and installed Ubuntu, or Mint on it, and found out it didn’t work. Tried other distributions, didn’t work too. He almost gave up, but was lucky enough to get some instructions from friends who instructed him to get some firmware code through his driver cd and some command line stuff. I was even surprised by this even today, broadcom drivers are an issue (despite having broadcom-wl drivers and bcm driver stuff already).

Even my meego laptop, the lcd brightness control doesn’t work. And I had to compile OpenVPN for it myself (which reminds me, I’ll have to compile the newest OpenVPN and upload to the repository, when I get the time).

The list goes on and on. Enough of my rant. I’m an old guy. My experimentation and tweaking with the OS days are getting to an end (real life has come in – need money to pay my bills). I just need something that works.

Just to end (almost), I’ll give you some pseudo-code for a harmless virus I made as an experiment to learn how DOS works (this simple non-overwriting .com program became my thesis for a fifth-year paper on computer viruses – I created this experiment during my summer vacation in second year college).

Ordinary pseudo-code for a typical .com program:

jmp code
[data]
….
code:
….

My assembly code:
jmp [viral code]
[original data]
…
[original code]
…
viral code:
check if it is already resident (calls a modified int 22h hook with subfunction to see if it is installed)
if(not installed)
move viral code above DOS program memory
call int21h function to modify interrupt table to chain int 21h to viral code
edit 3 bytes at the beginning of the program to the original code
jmp [beginning of code]
[int 21 viral code]
…

Sounds unconventional, right? But this experiment I made in college helped me a lot in how OSes and computers work. DOS was excellent during that time because they provided a unified API – if I used purely assembly code and manipulated IO/Disk hardware registers directly, my code would have gone way over 1000 bytes (and wouldn’t have worked on all computers at that time) – even using an int13h bios code function would be more complicated to do. After all, it was all about developers. I would like to thank Ralph Brown for his excellent DOS Internals book (duh)! With this knowledge incidentally, I was able to make an anti-virus program in Turbo Pascal for the Tadpole virus (created by some students in another university) during my third year college.

If only linux had a unified driver interface, plus a unified media interface, and graphics interface with frameworks, then it would have leaped above windows and osx. Unfortunately, with the state linux is in, and the bickering and infighting of different groups in them (and misguided open source fanaticism), I really doubt linux will ever reach mainstream status (maybe android and chrome os).

Enough of my rant. What do you guys think? Am I a grumpy old man? Or do I talk sense?

One of those very short postings. I created a metapackage rpm for the Open Office 3.2.0 suite in aLinux and passed it through the contribs section of aLinux.

Should have Open Office in aLinux soon enough.

Update: Ok, it’s now in the contribs directory in the aLinux site (ibiblio): http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/peanut/contribs/RPMS/COMMUNITY/Clint/

Funny, I see my last rpm contributions from aLinux 12.7 – it should work there I think… I really need to update those!

From a comment in one of my blog articles, WINE 1.1.40 is now available on the official aLinux rpm repository. Please update your aLinux 12.9 through synaptic now!

I’ve been experimenting with linux since mid to late 1990s and started with single 3.5 linux disks. I remember fondly downloading for over an hour using dialup trilinux and monkeylinux and experimenting with the command line on such curiousities for hours on end.

It was on those times that I stumbled upon a minimalist hobbyist linux distribution named Peanut Linux. It was one of the more well-known linux distributions during its time for sporting a spiffy desktop and easy to use installer. During that time, the Peanut Linux community was a lively band of people from different walks on life looking for the best linux desktop experience ever. Mind you, these were the days when Red Hat was still available in boxed form, Caldera was still around, and most of the installs were done using text displays.

From its minimalist origins (the first Peanut Linux version I used was 8.4, if I remembered correctly), running enlightenment, the distribution went on from being a distro of only about a little less than 100mb to about 700mb in 12.4, while changing it’s name to aLinux from Peanut Linux (we acquired the name to use Peanut Linux in pnutproject from Jay 5 few years ago, since like what he said, the Peanut was now like a Watermelon in size).

It has also changed considerably from being a tgz based package to an rpm one in 9.x and in 12.3, through last time efforts to revitalize the sagging aLinux community, a few of us experimented and suggested with Jay that he implement apt4rpm (using synaptic and rpm repositories).

Why am I blabbing this out? Peanut Linux was what started me fully in experimenting and implementing linux on my desktop, and indirectly introduced me to learn server administration on my own.

I even made a respin of Peanut Linux for use in the company I was working with to be used as promotion materials (rebranded of course to show our company logo as wallpaper). The company I was working for had short courses and I was tasked to develop a module to teach linux basics to students (linux during that time was only known to systems administrators and practically the Philippines during that time was largely – and still is – a Microsoft country). The teaching module I made for the short course was based on, as you may have guessed it, Peanut Linux. Jay even helped me out with the respin.

Anyways, back to the present, a few weeks ago, I talked to Jay (we remained friends during the years), and asked him if he can package up the unreleased version of aLinux for me to give a short review. aLinux was considered a dead distro; practically all of us from the Peanut Linux community moved on – some even joined the PCLinuxOS community, others created their own Linux distribution from scratch, a person I know moved to BSD (he was one of those responsible for testing apt4rpm on aLinux 12.1/.2, along with Craig and I). Jay always preferred to work alone – we can only suggest, it was his baby.

And so on February 22, 2010. aLinux 12.9 stable was released to the public on ibiblio, after practically 3 years of waiting.

Is aLinux radically changed, sporting a new GUI installer or live cd mode? This I can say, if you’ve used Peanut/aLinux before, expect the install process to be wholly the same.

Cd boot screen is now a little bit prettier.

Installs are practically the same

aLinux is indeed a blast into the past. Whereareas grub is used by practically all distributions nowadays, aLinux still uses lilo.

It is also one of those distributions which still uses KDE 3.5.10 as it’s main DE. Call me old school, but I still prefer KDE 3.5.x over 4.x.

For such a hobbyist distribution, you may wonder why the size of the cd installer is over 1 Gig. It is because the whole development system of aLinux is included by default.

I always reminisce and smile whenever I see the apt4rpm system that we helped tested and ported to aLinux – those were the good old days of pnutproject, when I had so much free time, unfortunately, real life came and well, I got married, and got busy with my work as well.

How did I find aLinux 12.9? It surprisingly worked real well, for a hobbyist distribution. Packages were as usual, a hybrid of pretty old stuff and new libraries. GCC is a bit outdated; WINE is included in the install as well (it’s old though).

The planets screensaver for the screensaver settings in KDE always crashed for me. Other than that, all else worked fine.

Playing with it, I’d have to say that it’s pretty good and fast, once you get over the outdated install. All in all, if you want some distribution just to play around and experiment, this might be an option for you.

What’s next for aLinux? I frankly do not know. Jay pops in and out of the picture more often than not, and sometimes disappears for months at a time. He releases whenever he likes.

For me, all I can say is this: without hobbyist distributions like Peanut/aLinux in the past, I wouldn’t have learned about linux and use them for practically all of my work now (servers and the like). I only keep windows for web development and the games – all licensed of course. Thanks for all the fish!

I happened to chat with Jay Klepacs, aLinux creator, a little over a month ago (we’ve been friends since 2000s, during the PeanutLinux days).

If you’re wondering what aLinux was, it was a linux distribution derived from looplinux and was basically a hybrid of sorts (in it’s early days, it was very slackware linux inspired, but sporting rpms as it’s package format) and was featured in distrowatch years ago.

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20050829

I asked him how he was, and what’s up in aLinux land (which hasn’t seen a release for quite a while). In fact, I haven’t worked on pnutproject for quite a while either with Craig… real life since has taken over and I’ve been working quite busy for a start up company which I’ve been in for almost 3 years (never had so much fun programming and doing cool stuff with linux too!).

To make the long story short, aLinux lives, but not for distribution… yet. I don’t know if Jay would release it to the public either (it still uses KDE 3.5.x, btw which I still prefer over KDE 4.x).

Anyways, here’s the screenshot for you to enjoy. Have fun!

Hello World!

This would be my first blog post about Open Source and Tech stuff.  This would also be my personal blog site as well (I’ll try to be figuring out how to categorize these writeups in this blogging site, so please be patient with me )

Funny thing how this came about.  I’ve been wanting to do this for years, but haven’t gotten to it until now. In the past I’ve written articles for wine-reviews like playforlinux, and some other stuff for a friend of mine Tom Wickline, and helped out on a few open source projects like aLinux and pnutproject (even was a wine applications maintainer).

To make the long story short, I landed a job in a small tech company, and got sooo busy, that I had hardly time to tinker around like I used to… until now

So here I am, running Ubuntu 8.10 on my Neo Vivid 1100 (installed through Wubi) on a SmartBro Prepaid Account (coz my internet got messed up).

Anyways, that that.  I’ll be writing stuff for the next few days when I’m not that busy – starting with how to connect to smartbro prepaid – probably