Introducing Linux and Open Source Software
Inspired by ever increasing publicity and debate I’ve decided to write a post on Linux Operating Systems and Free Open Source Software (FOSS).
For the uninitiated, the Linux Kernel is a bit of code at the heart of any Linux system, be it Ubuntu (a popular desktop Operating System), Android (Google’s mobile phone Operating System) or what runs inside everday gadgets (like this)
The Kernel is like the foundation Lego brick that any Linux system uses at it’s core. That’s why Linux can look and feel different depending on it’s release. It could look like a mobile phone, it could be a media player or games console, or it could be an Operating System a little like Apple’s OSX or Microsoft Windows.
Here’s a few things that make Linux and FOSS different from OSX and Windows:
- It is free (“as in beer” / £0)
- It is free (“as in freedom” – I’ll explain further in a moment)
- It’s stable (Nasa/Google/NSA etc all rely on it)
- All the code is “open” to explore and change
- The transparency/openness breeds trust.
- Don’t like it? Change it! (Wikipedia model)
- And finally – Microsoft are criminal – just look at the fines
To give a little added insight – the first mentioning of the term free means just that – it costs nothing. Although this does not apply to all FOSS products it is common throughout Linux OSes and FOSS. “How do the companies/programmers make their money?” you may ask – well, it’s usually through services (such as support) rather than the product (the software).
The second mention of being free refers to freedom. Those behind FOSS wanted to allow things to flurish in the open and they knew that keeping ties on how this would happen hindered that development. The result is a vast array of different people trying to achieve frequently similar aims. They can do this together by joining Open Source projects or they can take different routes like the major desktop interfaces, KDE and Gnome. Those two do roughly the same job but in different ways. This gives the user total freedom to choose and the choices often seem endless.
But, as with everything that has quality to it – the critics rave, people on the internet catch on and in no time at all – it’s a hit 
For most people – this is the entry point for using Linux OSes or FOSS. If there enough other people using it you can get answers to questions in Forums or on official support sites and, hey “that many people can’t be wrong” has some truth to it.
To dip your toes in to FOSS as a Mac or Windows user try the following:
Open Office – If you have used Microsoft Office before (Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc) this software is deisgned for the same purpose – word processing, spreadsheets, slideshows and so on. It will save to open formats like .odf as well as being able to save as or open .doc files (as created by Microsoft Word). If you have ever felt the need to pirate MS Office just to open and work with files, here’s your opportunity to try a different approach.
Firefox – I’m guessing you’ve already heard of this high flyer. Firefox is one of the most highly used web browsers on the internet today and it’s all open source. It is easily expandable through the use of add-ons – which, are more simple to create as developers have access to as much or little of the open source code as they would like. Thanks to it’s transparent code it has also seen development of better security at it’s core than closed rival Internet Explorer. This has come in the form of companies and individuals all providing feedback when they noticed something in the code that could be improved.
7-Zip – When you receive a compressed file you need to decompress it. Windows has a program built in to Vista and Windows 7 that does this for you sometimes. Well getting a copy of 7-zip lets you open and create compressed files of all types! Finally you can have one great application that you know will handle all variations of compressed file.
VLC - This is an all-round video and media player. As with Open Office and 7-zip the power of this application comes with it’s ability to play all manor of file types without the need for additional codecs. VLC is soon to be releasing a video editor as well, building on the success of it’s media player.
For the more adventurous among you I can suggest 3 ways to try out Linux based Operating Systems.
Wubi - It’s an acronym for Windows Ubuntu Installer (you’ll find a lot of acronyms used as FOSS names) and with it you can install a copy of Ubuntu alongside your Windows installation with the same ease as installing any Windows application. This has to be the easiest way to try Ubuntu (or any Linux OS).
LiveUSB / LiveCD – Simply put this is an install disk which can sit on either a CD or a USB stick. But it’s more than that! You can also try the whole Operating System before you install it 
So, to achieve this just grab a recordable CD or a USB stick and use the appropriate link in the title of this paragraph. The USB link will take you to a program called LinuxLiveUSB – this manages the process of putting a LiveOS of your choice. I’d recommend Jolicloud/Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint from it’s list of options as they are great for beginners to get going. If instead you don’t have a USB stick click any of the following to get the .iso file (this is a CD Image ready to burn to disc) Jolicloud, Ubuntu, Fedora or Mint – please note that if you use the Mint link you’ll need to click on a link in the list of “Mirrors”. The Live method should let you get started with the Operating System as a whole, although if you would like to make certain changes and then come back to those changes when the machine is rebooted look for the “persistence” options. Jolicloud / LinuxLiveUSB and Wubi should offer simple set up of this.
Virtualisation -Virtualisation refers to the ability to install an Operating System within a virtual environment that replicates a normal install. Think of it as a testing environment which is like a spare machine you have lying around. The only difference is the spare machine is a program on your current Operating System – in this case we’re using Virtualbox. This allows people to try one or more versions of different Operating Systems and figure out the pros and cons without having to continually reboot. The virtual environment will be accessible inside your current OS! If you have ever seen a Mac user using Windows inside their MacOS then this was how it was done. Just as with the LiveCD option you will need a .iso once you have Virtualbox installed, so go ahead and use of those above links to download that file and install it in your new virtual environment.
I’m going to end this post here but stay tuned and I will continue from where I’ve left of and provide more news of where Linux and FOSS is going next.
Thanks for reading this far – now get back to work!
Tablets – The right dosage
The gadgets that are cirulating this year in the run up to Christmas are much the same as last years but this time in HighDefinition, multi-touch and always with the better battery life or new Operating System… That’s why I’m choosing to write about what should have been the big product this Christmas – the Apple Tablet.
I have been yearning over a decent size tablet-only form factor device coming to the UK for a while now. And as the idea isn’t exactly a new one what with swivel-screen laptops having been available for a decade - why could this Christmas be the best time to enter the market?
Lets start with talking about the proposed functionailty of such devices. If I can just dream outloud for a moment, I would liek to see my new tablet made to support the following:
- Android style social network integration (Facebook/Twitter/Flickr ).
- Fully developed apps for web browsing, media playback, image viewing and video conferencing.
- Decent and simple server syncing for Email/Webmail, Contacts, Calendars.
- Android/iPhone style app marketplace for all those little things like PDF viewing, touchscreen PC media remotes.
This should be relatively simple given the strength of the Android system on phones so far. The required hardware would not even need a speedy CPU if the hardware was not to run a full blown Linux distro and simply a lightweight Android system. Saying that – I’m not sure how video would fare especially when the world of HD is moving into the mainstream. – but there are low cost solutions to these quandaries.
The issue is that I know I would always want to do slightly more than an Android system would allow, such as use that touchscreen for drawing and graphics editing, possibly even video editing, but if it were HD video and the OS were Android that would not be a lot of fun. The other thing is the low low cost of netbooks over the past 18months has lead people to understand how little they need spend to get great functionality. This article for instance is being written on an Acer Aspire One netbook which is just a N270 Atom powered 9″ £150 bargain! Luckily a Linux OS – Fedora 12 – picks up where the hardware leaves off and I achieve a large amount of my workload using an inexpensive piece of kit.
So, bar the cost of a multi-touch screen this should all be acheivable on a budget right? Well… that depends on what you want to run on it – whether you’d accept an Android system, a full Linux based distro, Windows 7 or OSX. Obviously Android and Linux can run on cheaper specialised hardware like Via/Qualcomm/ARM etc whereas Windows and OSX will likely only be supported or even workable on more mainstream CPUs.
In terms of those wanting the iTablet (or whatever they’re going to call it) to be capable of everything their £800 macbook can do – you’re going to have to wait. Jobs isn’t bringing anything out in time for Christmas so late and he will have also priced many out of the sweet spot for these devices. What I would concentrate on is the convergence of digital photoframes / alarm clocks / touchscreen remotes / ebook readers etc but all with an expandable OS and larger screen than any current smartphone (or even the Archos PMPs). And that is the next point – to PMP or not to PMP?
The answer is that these devices will converge like just about anything else (sat nav / mp3 / calendars) onto the appropriate smartphone or tablet. For me that means I will continue to play my mp3s back from a netbook/desktop/smartphone as and when it takes my fancy. But do I want to take a massive collection of media everywhere I go? Well, massive no – but 8-16GB SD cards are cheap enough now for me to think 16GB in my phone and 16-32GB in a tablet (via expansion slot obv) is not too much to ask. As both my phone and the tablet would be wirelessly bonded via bluetooth or Wifi I could playback videos taken with my phone on the tablet. Or I can sync important folders between the two. But where does this leave PMPs? I would say, dead in the water unless they bring much bigger touchscreens to their PMPs and only offer an Anrdoid OS / Linux / Windows option. No more homegrown OSes. They’re worse than useless and people expect more.
If you happened to be wishing for the same gadgets in your stockings as I am, here is where I would keep a watchful eye:
Engadget’s Apple Tablet page (face it they’ll know about it within seconds of Apple’s announcements)
Update : The Crunchpad will not be available anytime soon 
Microsoft releases 20,000 lines of code under open source license
Although Microsoft has released source code before – specifically when products were in development stages (exclude Chinese Windows licenses for now) – yesterday they released device driver code under the GPL v.2 license aiming the code at convergence between the two OS types – Windows and Linux. The hierarchy, from Microsoft’s perspective is, of course, to be considered in that order.
The move is to optimise the virtualisation of Linux server OSs on a Microsoft server OS.
Some people in open source communities are hesitant to introduce this code asking “What’s the catch?”or whether this open sourcing of code could lead to a “patent trap”.
Also as users of this code will not have the ability to recompile and redistribute, fixing it where appropriate, how open is it really? And can it really be considered free in terms of freedom?
Microsoft is quite obviously not touting itself as a FOSS R&D firm just yet although does like to brag about it’s FOSS efforts to date.
“…we understand that reducing complexity is a key factor to reducing cost.”
And there we have it – Microsoft’s attempt to get developers together on a single platform for reasons of “simplicity” – as if administrators are struggling with Linux servers OSs?!?!
Read the news from the horses mouth here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Jul09/07-20LinuxQA.mspx
Update:
The UK website theregister today announced why Microsoft may have released the code in this manner. It appears as though Microsoft chose the GPL license to defend themselves from copyright violation having mixed GPL code from Linux into their own proprietary code. This was against the terms of the GPL – not allowing for open and proprietary code to be mixed. Check out the full story here.
Fedora 11 installed on Acer Aspire One (SSD)
I have finally been able to take time out from the doing of things and backtracked to write about the things I’ve been doing.
To follow on from my previous post regarding the release of Fedora 11 here I will be covering the install onto the Acer Aspire One netbook – specifically the model with the SSD rather than a regular HDD.
Well, lets start at the beginning. Downloading and installing the new release – F11.
Hold on to your hats because this may not be straight forward for Linux noobs, but lets see how we get on.
Firstly you can find the ISO (the Operating System disc image to install from) here
To make things simple and to see what will work straight out of the box on your system I always advise trying the ‘live’ image first. This will let you run the whole OS from a CD, or in our case a USB stick, without installing or worrying about having made a jump and getting a non-perfect OS in return.
I have opted for the regular Gnome desktop as per the standard install but you can go with KDE or XFCE if they take your fancy – the following instructions will work for all variations, just download the option that you prefer.
While downloading the ISO (directly or by bittorrent) you want to prep your USB stick by formatting to FAT32 and marking the partition to boot. I am going to keep to the simplest route as often as possible and in this case it means using gparted on an existing Linux OS.
Insert your USB stick, open gparted and input your root password if prompted. Select your USB from the top-right-hand drop box, ensuring you have the USB and not the internal SSD – you don’t want to erase your current OS just yet.
Right click on the USB partition and unmount it before right clicking again and formatting to FAT32. Click apply when you are ready and it’s done – nice and simple. If it isn’t already flagged as bootable you can do that by right clicking again.
Your live ISO image now needs to be written to the USB. Unfortunately I found Fedora 10 to be a bit of a pain in doing this. F10 had a bug which would screw with things. Some people overcame this by typing ‘sudo yum update’ in terminal however I didn’t find this any help.
That means we’ll need an app to do the work for us – something like unetbootin/LiveUSB (rather than livecdtools or other non GUI processes) and, although I hate to say it, found unetbootin to perform much better under windows, so that’s what I would advise.
So, in unetbootin I selected the downloaded ISO – although you can specify any listed OS from the drop box for automatic download and creation – and it created the USB image in no time at all. Done. USB all ready
This really was the hardest part. I fiddled with various options for a while with no avail, but using those gparted and unetbootin GUI apps sure made things easier. If there’s anything I’d like to see come out of development before F12 it would be an advancement in unetbootin or gui live USB creators for Linux so anti-MS folk could leave Windows alone when it comes to Linux installs. /rant.
Insert the USB if it’s not there already and restart your netbook ensuring your bios is set to boot from the USB.
On booting you will be offered a choice of options including the live boot, memtest etc. Choose nothing and the default option of live boot kicks in.
When greeted with the login screen there is no password necessary so you can get straight in there and start looking around. Your webcam, wifi, sound etc should all be working out of the box so we’ll suppose you have backed up all your important stuff and are ready to install. Double click the desktop icon – you’ll have to use the left button as the touchpad isn’t set to emulate button clicks by default – and the GUI will lead you through the basics.
I took most advice from The Road To Elysium when configuring the partition file system types although the GUI install told me I couldn’t install without LVM, so I’ve gone ahead and installed using LVM.
There should be two partitions – 1 to boot and 1 for the rest of the filesystem. I would choose to use either ext4 or ext2 as the filesystem as ext3 slows things down with it’s journalling.
You should get through the rest of it as if you were being spoon fed. Recent Linux installs really have made installing easy.
Tune in next time to read about the essential apps to use on your AAO and how to config them.
Fedora 10 and 11 on the Acer Aspire One
I have been using various flavours of Linux on a variety of platforms for a couple of years and have most recently been using Fedora 10 on an Acer Aspire One.
I can only say that the out-of-box usage after installing from a Live USB image was 100% and beat the 8.10 Ubuntu distro hands down. The install was fast and simple, although ext3 file system was installed by default and the indexing used is known to slow performance. However with SELinux disabled for added speed and some fedoraproject.org tips on speeding up the SSD usage and converting the filesystem things started to look snappy.
Where Ubuntu had struggled with WiFi simplicity Fedora did not and networking on my LAN with other PCs was as easily achievable.
Now though, after a few months of toying, upgrading the RAM by 1gb and so on, I want more speed if possible and just an upgrade to the stable, new releases of Linux OS building blocks – Gnome, Ext FS, nautilus, pidgin etc that really make a difference to everyday usage.
This evening I downloaded Fedora 11 and this time I’m going for the xfce desktop varient that should perform a shade faster than gnome or KDE on the netbook. I’ll be uploading a post as soon as I’ve tested out the Live version and am comfortable installing to give a mroe thorough review.