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?

For those who don’t know, manga is the Japanese equivalent of comics; anime is animation, heavilly influenced by manga styles and typically includes characters with large eyes, big hair and elongated limbs, among other things. What I find amazing with these forms of art is that they compass all subjects, from typical romance, sports, drama, comedy, and other things as well!

If you have some friends that like these kinds of art (I’m pretty sure a lot of people nowadays like anime and manga), and would like to introduce linux to them, why not give them a manga-styled comic that teaches them linux?

Introducing Ubunchu!

This manga is all about the adventures of three school students in a system-admin club learning ubuntu. All the chapters of this manga are presented in a fun way, that any manga lover would appreciate.

The neat thing is, the one promoting linux (or ubuntu) is a girl! Not the guy – he’s a PC user (weird guy, weird guy, boo!)

Don’t worry though, he gets it more or less as the series progresses.

There are currently 5 chapters to this manga. In the spirit of open-source collaboration, these are translated into different languages by volunteers.

Each manga chapter introduces different topics; the first chapter for example, we see how linux has come a long way from it’s command prompt days, to a point where it is now easy to install. Moving forward to chapter 4, we are introduced to licenses. All of it is done in a funny and light way too.

Got you interested? Head to http://www.ubunchu.net/ now and download these chapters for free!

From the blog, it states that they “are taking the best pieces from these two open source projects and are creating the MeeGo software platform. Both teams have worked for a long time to support the needs of the mobile user experience – and MeeGo will make this even better.”

As I knew that Maemo’s interface was more suited for the mobile phone area for Meego, I decided to look into Moblin itself and see how it would serve the role of addressing the netbook part of the new platform.

As we see it currently, the pre-built Moblin live image is a largely Fedora 10 based distribution. It can however be built from Fedora 12, and Ubuntu 9.10. It is interestingly enough that the resulting build with be rpm based, not deb based.

Installing the live image to harddisk on my Benq Joybook was simple enough – it was actually similar to the Fedora/RedHat installs that I am used to.

Booting up was a treat: compared to Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the interface was intuitive and smooth.

The Miser interface upon first boot shows practically a wonderful display of your tasks, favorite apps, documents opened and other stuff that you’ve just used.

Different tabs allows the user to navigate through different sections of Moblin – easily categorized into media, internet, status, applications, zones, people and pasteboard.

The way that Moblin is organized is, in my opinion, one of the best interfaces that I’ve seen in a linux distribution for netbooks. It simply is the best optimization of space for 8″ to 12″ screens.

There are drawbacks however.

For one thing, NTFS is not supported in moblin. And due to licensing issues, the MP3s and H264 video is not supported out of the box, as well as proprietary codecs.

Another thing is that Moblin’s repository is still rather small. Understandable though, because this distribution is meant for netbooks.

There are a number of hacks you can do though, one is you can use the Fedora 10 (and sometimes 11) repository to download other programs.

Another option is to compile the source rpms from the fedora repositories yourself. The trick is to enable the development tools of moblin by typing in the command:

sudo yum groupinstall “Development Tools”

If you’re a little lazy to compile gstreamer yourself, you can use a repository created by a Moblin user named Matthi. The repository, albeit small, includes some nice programs to install for Moblin, such as WINE, Blender, and the gstreamer plugins to make your Moblin distribution run codecs supported by ffmpeg. You can get instructions for his repository here.

What is the Moblin’s future as Meego? I would say, rather bright. Seeing how the interface really compliments the Intel Atom netbook specifications nicely, I believe that most of the GUI Moblin has implemented will be carried on in the netbook versions of Meego. A possible challenge will be on how to implement the user experience on the Qt toolkit (Meego will be based on it, rather on GTK that Moblin uses). Since Moblin uses the Mozilla codebase for it’s integrated browser, it is not farfetched to assume that Meego will implement the Webkit browser as it’s integrated browser for the Qt for it’s WM/Miser interface.

As Qt has integrated media, browsing, APIs, as well as a compositing engine compared to GTK (Gnome still uses Compiz as it’s compisiting engine), we would probably see a more integrated architecture internally, when Meego reaches it’s final stages of development into stable.

Nokia and Intel would benefit each other, because for one reason, Nokia has a netbook. Also, Nokia’s design principles are horrible and clunky (see the S60 interface on symbian as an example) and is also seeing pressure on their interface designs from competitors like Google and Apple. One thing that Nokia has, is that they’re great at hardware R&D (especially mobile), and it is my belief that Intel is also looking into the mobile sector, especially considering that OSes like chrome, and android run on ARM processors and are indirectly competitors with Intel on this space.

All in all, I would say that if both Intel and Nokia play their cards right, Meego will be a very good competitive platform for mobile and netbook apps in the future.

He started: “Like many other people, our church and, more importantly, our Christian school, ran the Windows operating system on all computers.”

Basically the computers he had in the school amounted to 40 computers initially, with some 65 computers donated a year ago. The problem that came about was of licensing all those computers. Although they had 100 licenses of Windows 2000, the software was obsolete and unsupported already, and basically, all of their computers don’t have enough processing power in them to handle Windows 7.

In short, they replaced their Operating Systems with Ubuntu, and run their windows software (Rosetta Stone, an online language program for their students in learning new languages, and Firefox) in WINE.

All in all it’s a really pragmatic and practical way to avoid lock-ins and costs. If you want to see the details on how he did it, read about it more in his blog.

Mainly because since I’m researching on some things, and I’ve got a little spare time on my hands, why not make a Chromium Build?  I’ve got the newest Ubuntu version, some modest harddisk space allocated to it (20Gb), and I’m also curious on how this baby works on my BenQ joybook (I personally have 3 netbooks, BenQ Joybook, Neo Vivid 1100, and the Blue H1).

Should be interesting to see how this would work out, especially on the Blue H1 (which is essentially an One Mini A110 netbook), which is basically a 1st generation netbook (7″ screen), and a Via processor.

So what do you guys think?  It’s a go?  If I have made builds for the Chromium OS, I might become generous enough to upload this for you to tinker and test out.

By the way, if any of you guys have the Blue H1, you should find the A110 wiki interesting enough.  This was made by a Debian developer.  Warning: these are geeky stuff.

http://www.a110wiki.de/wiki/Main_Page

Although this writeup is based on setting it up on Ubuntu Intrepid, the following steps should be applicable to other distributions as well.  You may want to improve on these steps by placing these commands on a bash script, but what I’m giving you is the staightforward way of doing it.

Here are the steps:

Download the usb_modeswitch binaries and the latest usb_modeswitch.conf file here:

http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/#download

Extract the usb_modeswitch binary and place it in a place like /usr/sbin.  usb_modeswitch.conf goes to the /etc folder. Comment out the lines which has the headers Alcatel OT-X020.  You have to disable the other modem enabled on this config file, or usb_modeswitch won’t work.

Edit your wvdial.conf file (located in /etc) to look like this (As a bonus, I added a default dialer section for your nokia cellphone – I have a Nokia E61i to connect to the smart internet network):

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet"
Modem Type = USB Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
New PPPD = yes
Baud = 460800
Idle Seconds = 3000
Auto DNS = 1
Stupid Mode = 1
Compuserve = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Ask Password = 0
FlowControl = NOFLOW

[Dialer smartbro]
Init1 = ATZ
#Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init2 = ATE1
#Init2 = ATE0V1&D2&C1S0=0
#Init3 = at_opsys=0
#Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","smartbro","",0,0
Modem Type = USB Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
New PPPD = yes
Baud = 912600
Idle Seconds = 3000
Auto DNS = 1
Stupid Mode = 1
Compuserve = 0
Dial Command = ATD
Ask Password = 0
FlowControl = NOFLOW

Write down this code and save it as initmodem.sh and place it in /usr/sbin:

#!/bin/sh
modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1c9e product=0×6061 && usb_modeswitch
sleep 3

Plug in your SmartBro USB dongle and run:
# sudo /usr/sbin/initmodem

To connect to the internet, just type in:
# sudo wvdial smartbro

and to disconnect, just press CTRL+C, or kill the pppd process

I think this should work also with SmartBro 1500 as well.  Enjoy your smartbro connection!

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