Discovering the wonders of fstab

I’ve recently had to format my Ubuntu partition because of a Kernel Panic. This happened when I hit the “suspend” button in Boxee. The OS freezed still (it didn’t suspend) and there was no way to resurrect it than resetting the system. When I rebooted the there came the Kernel Panic. During the brief unsuccessful efforts to fix the problem I checked the fstab file to see if Boxee did somehow mess with it. I did not know much about fstab so, now that my system is fresh again, I want to discuss the wonders of fstab, this tiny yet superimportant text file.

fstab stands for file system table and it’s basically a configuration file which gives the kernel all the necessary information to mount partitions (usually only the internal ones; external partitions like usb flash drives and similar are mounted via volume managers). Being a configuration file fstab is located under the /etc directory; to read it you can just locate and open it by the graphical interface, however only root can write to it so if you need to modify it you must access with su (super user) privileges.

Disclaimer: Critical system files in Linux can only be modified by ROOT and not by the user(s). The rationale behind this is to make the system more safe against security attacks and mishandling by users. Having said that, use super user privileges to access system files only if you fall into one of the following categories:

- You know exactly what you’re doing

- You’re in an experiment environment

- Your system is completely and –by your point of view- irrevocably compromised so you judge you have nothing to lose

To read-only your fstab gile in console type:

~$ cat /etc/fstab

To open the fstab file in write mode open a console and type:

~$ sudo gedit /etc/fstab

As I said before the information contained in fstab is plain text, organized in rows and columns and laid out as follows

[device] [mount point] [file system type] [options] [dump] [pass]

[device] > indicates the device or partition that contains the file system
Note for Ubuntu: Canonical’s distro now uses UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) by default to identify partitions. In order to listyour devices by UUID you can use ~$ sudo blkid

[file system types] > indicates the type of file system. On Ubuntu you will likely see ext3 or ext4 for the main partition where root resides. Depending on the type of partitions or devices in your computer you could encounter any of the following file system types:

• ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs (don’t miss the macabre gossip related to this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser), etc.
• auto (commonly used for removable devices in order to try to detect the specific file system of the device)
• vfat (identify FAT partitions)
• ntfs (identify NTFS partitions)
• udf,iso9660 (identify optical media -aka CD/DVD-)
• swap (a hard disk partition where a page of memory is copied to free up that page of memory)
• procfs (stands for process file system and it’s a pseudo file system (dynamically generated at boot) used to access process information from the kernel. The file system is often mounted at the /proc directory and occupies no storage space

[options] > there are several options which specify how the partition is handled and what can or cannot do. I’ll try to cover them briefly here and let you google for them if you need an in depth description.

• auto / noauto specify if the partition has to be automatically mounted or not at boot or when mount –a command is executed. auto itself it’s almost useless because it’s the default behavior. noauto is more interesting as it blocks a partition to be mounted unless you manually mount it.
• sync / async are for I/O to the file system and indicate whether it has to be done synchronously (at the same time a I/O operation is issued) or asyinchronously. The meaning of this gets more clear if you imagine to issue a command to execute data transfer to a floppy disk or rw optical media.
• exec / noexec is meant either to allow or prevent execution of binaries within the partition. If you set you’re the partition where root dwells as noexec your system is screwed
• dev / nodev interpret or not interpret character or block special devices on the file system
• ro / rw is used to specify if the partition is read-only or read-write mounted
• suid / nosuid allow or block operations of suid or sgid bits. Suid and sgid stand for set user id and set group id. When a suid or sgid file is executed, the process which runs it is granted access to system resources based on the user who owns the file and not the user who created the process.
• user / nouser are used to specify the user related permissions to mount the file system. user means that all the users can mount the file system and by consequence of this the noexec, nosuid,nodev options are automatically implied. nouser means instead that only root can mount the file system and this is the default setting.
• defaults uses the default settings which are rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, async.
• _netdev is for a network device which has to be mounted after bringing up the network and it’s only valid for nfs (Network File System)

Note for Ubuntu: from the 8.04 release Ubuntu uses relatime as default for linux native file systems. This options replaces atime and it’s used to know when a file was last used. Read more about atime and relatime here.

[dump] > this field specifies if the backup utility dump is enabled -1- or not -0-. Dump is a application which backs up and restores file systems as a whole. This field is usually set to 0.

[pass] > this field is related to the fsck system utility. fsck, which stands for “file system check”, is a program which check the state of the file system. In case of a system crash or a forced shutdown fsck

should detect it and then proceed automatically or user guided to fix the damaged parts. The options are the following:

• 0 -> don’t check
• 1 -> check this partition first
• 2 -> check this partition next

fsck checks the file system every 30 mount operations as default. It’s possible to modify this interval (mostly by using tune2fs)

Here belows my fstab file commented by the system. Try to read it and retrieve the various specifications and options described before. You will surely encounter elements not covered in my description of fstab – i.e. ‘sw’, ‘utf8’ ‘errors=remount-ro’, ecc..- as you possibly will by reading your own fstab. This is common because technologies are for their nature prone to rapid changes and, like systems, tends to accumulates details in times. We have caught a couple of them like relatime and UUID while for the few remaining others you can google them to find more information or issue the command ~$ man fstab in a terminal

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use ‘vol_id –uuid’ to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=197ac49c-16f9-41a6-9c18-40e87231f4ba / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=84365e80-cbc7-495f-9e46-46a852bef3c2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

The Ubuntu Software Store revealed

Phoronix has recently published an article previewing The Ubuntu Software Store: a rather dull name for a project which is really triggering my hype.

If you read some of my past articles on Ubuntu and Linux in general, you probably know that I consider application distribution and handling (installation/remove) one of the major drawback and “keep out sign” of the desktop oriented Linux distributions.

It’s not that the Ubuntu installation environment isn’t good, on the contrary both synaptic and gdebi are fantastic and full of potentiality. The fact is that as it happens with most community driven things sometimes the spur of productivity has a counterproductive side effect. Diversification isn’t a drawback per se but there are times when concentration can serve better when the target is an important application or system part. This is surely the case of the software installation on Ubuntu. As far as it is right now I’ve no problem to say that the user experience is awful. Installing an application on Ubuntu (and I doesn’t consider the whole Linux based distros on purpose) means dealing with multiple processes plus other random perceived factors. And that’s frustrating at the least.

Just to make some examples each time I install a Ubuntu release I always and immediately install five applications which require five different installation processes:

• Miro player –> add repository to Synaptic packet manager then browse for Miro and install it via Synaptic

• Truecrypt cryptography software –> download the bin, open and execute, follow the instruction of the graphic installation application

• GoogleEarth geography app –> download the bin, open a terminal and mess with bash then follow the instructions provided by the graphic installation interface

• Ubuntuzilla Updater for Mozilla apps –> download the .deb file, install it with gdebi, open a terminal and mess with bash then follow the instructions provided by the graphic installation interface

• Flash player –> download the .deb file and install it with gdebi (painless double click -Windows reminder- operation)

These are just a sample because there are  several other cases where for example you must compile the software following obscure tutorials,  retrieving and install a bunch of other applications (each having its own peculiar process) to satisfy dependencies, etc…

In my opinion this is completely unacceptable.

You can imagine the smile on my face when I read that Canonical is working on a project to unify various graphical install applications in a single graphical interface.

The Ubuntu Software Store is being built on the basics of the Add/Remove Applications (which is another way, not mentioned before, to install and remove software). Surprisingly we will see the first “installment” of TUSS with limited functions shipped with the Karmic Koala October release. According to the TUSS wiki page the 1.0 version of TUSS will hit four goals:

• a graphically pleasing interface
• an improved use of apt: links to replace bash commands and standalone packages
• fine-tune the interface presented when software updates are available.
• involve Launchpad with the goal of acquiring better and up to date information about the applications

With the Ubuntu 10.04 release the TUSS team hope for their app to substitute Synaptic, gdebi, add/remove softwares, Software Sources and hopefully even the Update Manager,conveying all these systems in a common interface. Another very exciting feature which could be included in the early 2010 release is the possibility to manage non-graphical software (programming utilities, fonts, database software, etc) within the Store.

The roadmap goes until 2011 when, according to the plans, TUSS will be mature enough to include rich functions like “sharing and tracking of software, overviews of installed software by license, cost, or maintenance timetable, discovering software by what your friends have installed, visible history of past installations/removals/purchases, including the ability to undo specific changes, specialized interfaces for browsing and installing particular classes of package like fonts, screensavers, Windows applications, etc”.

By reading the dedicated wiki page it’s clear that Canonical is fully aware that the way applications are handled right now it’s one of their greatest Achill’s talons. The way they are facing it it’s something that make me proud of running Ubuntu as my first and main operating system.

Despite all the smaller and bigger problems user constantly face (nearly all of them are caused by the scandalous and evil lack of support from hardware manufacturers) Ubuntu (as many other Linux distros) is capable of beam the user with a sense of pleasure in using it which is generated by the stability and safety you clearly perceive in everyday usage. More than that, the continuous improvements are introduced in each six month release and make you feel on the edge of technology and part of project that, because of its scope and vision, is good and brings welfare to the people who use it and mankind as a whole.

Having said that I’m really impatient to see the first release of The Ubuntu Software Store and review it. So stay tuned.

Images are from The Ubuntu Software Store wiki. One is an interface sketch and the other is one of the proposed logos. This one is by SebastianPorta

KDE 4.3.0 Caizen Released

Today the KDE community announced the released of their 4.3.0 desktop environment, codenamed Caizen.

If you don’t know KDE you should give it a peek because, either you like the philosophy behind or not, the project is important and daring.

As I mentioned before KDE is a desktop environment. It’s commonly related to the Kubuntu official derivation of Ubuntu Linux and other Linux distributions in general, but the environment can be installed also on Windows and Mac.

The main purpose of the KDE community is that of providing a strongly integrated, easy to use and stunningly stylish desktop. This is pursued not just by a pure aesthetic work but by a strong effort to propose and follow a their own concept of human-machine interface. The stress is always on the integration of the applications with the desktop composed of a stylish layout and sleek objects seen as track leading to simplicity and tidiness. The desktop is completely composed by widgets which float over the surface like objects on a table. Unlike a table however you can’t just drop a file onto the surface, the way you would with any other desktop environment, but you must place them inside a dedicated desktop widget. This can be frustrating at the beginning but after a while you will likely find the desktop widget easy to use, intuitive and helpful in driving you to keep your monitor free from the mess.

A strong asset of KDE is that it’s built on Qt libraries which is an extremely powerful and modern UI and application framework (probably the best). For this reason all a series of features, like graphics, graphical effects, etc.. are comparable to those found on Mac OSX and far better than those implemented in Vista, with the surplus of working smoothly even on my 4 years old average end laptop.

Unfortunately but physiological given the youth and ambition of the project, KDE suffered of many bugs during its life. However the community behind KDE is strong and the bug solving process did not lag behind. With the 4.3.0 version they claim the “community fixed over 10,000 bugs and implemented almost 2,000 feature requests in the last 6 months“.

Check all the freshly implemented features of KDE 4.3.0 Caizen here.

Jono Bacon @ Floss Weekly

Last week’s Floss Weekly was really very interesting and funny. This show is part of Leo Laporte’s Twit network and features on weekly schedule, various projects belonging to open source world.

With episode 65 Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte interviewed Jono Bacon the outstanding community manager of Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Notwithstanding the imminent (at the show time) release of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, the purpose of the show was different. After a brief presentation of Jono’s work and career at Canonical, the show focused on discussing the importance of communities for open source and free software projects and even commercial software in general.

Even though the discussion wasn’t a geeky one, I mean they did not discuss of Ubuntu’s new release or the trends in Ubuntu’s development and marketing, I think they hit an interesting field too often overlooked by the open source and free software world. To support the economics behind free software it’s not sufficient to create a consistent and refined product. Like an object belonging to an ecosystem, it’s necessary to engineer how to deploy the product in the social environment. A product (and by this word I mean not just the software but all it’s surroundings -website, documentation, brochures, etc..) must fulfill several requirements in this sense; it must be appealing, well documented, easy going and have a community to hold people together and attract new stakeholders. In this last aspect communities literally do the difference. Say that you’re interested in learning 3D graphics it. There are a few open source choices and among those one project in particular (Blender) has a strong community representing an expanding sea of resources which metaphorically embraces the newcomer and reassure her/him with tutorials, free models a forum and even commercially available books and video guides.

Going back to the Floss episode, Jono Bacon also presented “The Art of Community” a book, published by O’Reilly, about to create and maintain a community which is going to be released either for free under a Creative Common License or for Purchase. The book is currently being written by Jono so it’s scheduled for release during the next summer.

For more information read here below the very announcement of the book made by Jono on his blog

Today I am proud as punch to announce the Art Of Community.

A while back I was approached by Andy Oram, a senior editor at O’Reilly to write a definitive book about how to grow, build and energise a community. This book will be called the Art Of Community.

The book covers a wide range of topics designed to build strong community. This includes the structure and social economy behind community, building effective and easy to use infrastructure, setting up community processes, creating buzz and excitement, governance, conflict resolution, scalability and more.

This book is much more than merely a textbook on building a compelling community. I believe that we learn how to build strong community through the exchange of stories and experiences. We all have great insight into community. These stories are illustrative vessels for important lessons and subtleties in how great communities work. The Art Of Community is a compendium of stories, anecdotes and experiences inside and outside the Open Source world. These stories illustrate the many concepts scattered throughout the book, and many of these stories will include some of you reading this and your projects.

I am currently part-way through the writing process, and we have an expected release date this summer.

The release of Art Of Community is actually rather exciting. The book will be available in two forms.

• Firstly, there will be a normal printed copy available to buy. This will be available from the usual places you can buy O’Reilly books.
• Secondly, The book will also be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. This provides everyone with the opportunity to share, modify and re-use the content.

O’Reilly has my utmost respect for embracing the Creative Commons. This is a great opportunity for O’Reilly, Creative Commons content and community building.

In addition to the announcement, I am also pleased to announce a website devoted to the book over at www.artofcommunityonline.org.

The website will feature updates, sneak peeks of the content, profiles of the topics and stories in the book, profiles of the editors and proof readers and more. I am really keen to hear your stories and experiences, and there will be plenty of opportunities to get involved in the discussion. Also, when we release the book, the top ten posters with the most number of comments on the articles there will get a free signed printed copy of the book.

So, exciting times. Lots of work, but exciting times nonetheless. Lets get rolling…

For those that after having listened to the show think it’s a pity it wasn’t that into Ubuntu’s behind the scenes, just know that Randal Schwartz announced a so called “FLOSSing with Bacon” project so we will hopefully hear from Jono very soon.
Finally, kudos to Leo and Randal for the great job they do in presenting open source and free software projects. With respect to what I’ve written above, they play an important role for the cause.

How I messed up my laptop with Kubuntu 8.10 KDE 4.2

I’m a Linux user since Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbons”, then we can say I’m quite a freshman.

I took the decision to migrate my XP laptop to Linux mostly because I wanted to sail new waters after being a MS user since MS-DOS 5.0.

Until now I must say that my experience was pretty positive. I had no major problems switching to a new system. I found substitutes for most of the software I was used to and for those few I didn’t find an alternative, I relied on VirtualBox OSE and my old XP home edition. I was quite impressed by the stability and safety of the system. My laptop and me experienced a new speed we weren’t accustomed to. The only thing made me a bit crazy was the impossibility to run the composite manager with application based on OpenGL or which worked with video rendering (basically Google Earth and VLC for watching videos). I understood that this was because of my ATI video card yet I was disappointed by the fact that the situation remained always the same either with Hardy and lately with Intrepid.

With the advent of the 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” release I decided to try again something new and switched to the Kubuntu fork. At the beginning I felt both dizzy and bewildered by the KDE4 environment. It took me some times to get somewhat accustomed to the new desktop manager which sets a complete new concept of user interface. The learning curve wasn’t so flat but I judged the worth the effort. On the other face of the coin the stability of the system was terrible. Panels got messed up once in a while causing me to swear first and sweat after to get everything in place. Contextual menu were sometimes weird (I couldn’t open a pdf from the web on the fly but was forced to download and open it after), the ark tool won’t compress -it didn’t see them- some kind of files (like pdf) and folders, trying to erase a file caused the system to drain an insane amount of resources without apparent reason (but pressing shift+canc didn’t), etc… With KDE4.2 version things im proved quite much and this was a great relief. However something dark was coming…

Out of the blue the headphones just stopped working. The weird was that by inserting the jack I got the feed for about one sec and then all went silent. After searching forums I did understand that the problem was probably related to ALSA and they advised to uninstall it and recompile. You know how it is when you happen to have an uncommon problem; the resources are few and often contrasting. As I said I’m a freshman and what is worse, a freshman without the time and will to learn bash and compiling and stuff the way I used to enjoy with MS-DOS when I was a teen. So I did what I usually do when I don’t know where to slam my head against what in Linux. I opened Adept and looked for ALSA related package. And I had the great idea to uninstall one package (probably libasound-2, or alsa-base). The computer crashed and I was forced to restart. Guess what it happened when I tried to access to my user session again? See below…

Then I got scared. The computer was full of documents, all expendable except the fact I had a big bunch of new pictures of my son I didn’t backuped. I was cold sweating and already thinking of my wife chasing me down like Sauron with the Fellowship of the Ring, except I wasn’t likely to make it… I accessed my user from console to try to backup the pictures directory by cp-ing it to the external drive. But I could find the external drive in the /media directory and all my attempts to mount it were a failure. At this point I booted from the live cd and managed to have access to the folder and copy it to a safe location. At least I managed to sleep that night…

The day after (which is two days ago) I wiped the hard disk and installed Ubuntu 8.10 which is now running onto my laptop. I enjoy a immediate feel of improved stability and boosted speed. However the headphones problem keeps on haunting me!

I’ve grown loving Linux but there are things that really piss me off. I worship over all the concept of ergonomics and elegance in all human manufactured products, so also for what concerns software. In their way the distros I used are ergonomic and elegant but there are a few things I can’t stand. Installing new software is a completely insane process. Left behind the add/remove tool, all what remains is chaos. Sometimes you just download a software from a website, double click and it installs and goes into the right place of the menu (Truecryp on Ubuntu). Sometimes you download it and then you must go and search for instructions to install it, copy&paste those on the terminal and that’s it (Google Earth) but then how you uninstall it?? Sometimes you must add the repositories and, if you’re lucky, the software get installed without issues and goes in the right menu place. Some other times you must mess with bash to copy files to some root place with sudo etc… As far as I’m concerned this is something crazy and one of the things which keeps new user at bay from say Ubuntu. Nowadays many people are willing and able to search the internet for open source alternative software, but how many of them can or want to the same to learn how to install it? Again, let’s be frank, apart from the add/remove and, in a shorter range, synaptic, tool it needs a super user to install software on Ubuntu.

Anyway I could stand all this installation matter and bound to let’s time be my teacher. The headphones trouble is though something completely unacceptable. We’re speaking of a pretty basic function and a priority one. I will probably take my time and try some solution in a protected environment like VirtualBox but again this takes time and to me it’s really a pain in the rear to waste a lot of time trying to solve this headphones related issue!

I won’t surely go back to Windows, but I’m looking forward an iMac as my next computer.

Verical Scrolling on (K)Ubuntu touchpads updated to 8.10

Not so many days ago my good friend Carlo posted a column on his blog court of misanthropy with the instructions to enable the Mac flavored vertical finger scrolling on Ubuntu and Kubuntu laptops. You can find my plug of his article here.

Anyway since the updated Xorg 7.4 running onto the freshly delivered 8.10 Intrepid Ibex version of the Ubuntu and Kubuntu distros those “old” instructions aren’t valid anymore.

But Carlo’s a smart guy and has already provided a new procedure which he tested and should therefore run smoothly on your laptops.

As far as Carlo’s concerned it seems that the problem is the enabling of SHMConfing within an untrusted environment which is share among different users. It follows that the safest way to enable the two-fingers scrolling is use an XML file for the Hardware Abstraction Layer with the setting for this function.

The file must contain the following code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="input.x11_driver" contains="synaptics">
    <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">On</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton2" type="string">3</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton3" type="string">2</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.VertTwoFingerScroll" type="string">1</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.HorizTwoFingerScroll" type="string">1</merge>
  </match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

And it must be saved as:

/etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-synaptics-options.fdi

If you’re no Linux overlord just follow these plug ‘n’play instructions:

1- Download this file already cooked by Carlo and save it in your home folder (i.e. /home/TheOneElectronic)

2- Open up the console, check you’re in your /home and type:

sudo cp 11-synaptics-options.fdi /etc/hal/fdi/policy/

3- Restart the computer (it’s not enough to restart X)

The two-finger scrolling should now be working

Further option: how to enable (Q)GSynaptics e SHMConfig

If you happen to be the only user of your pc you could anyway enabling GSynaptics (QSynaptics for KDE) you must create the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi containing the following code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
 <deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
 <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
 <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
 </match>
 </device>
 </deviceinfo>

And here’s the simplified version:

1- download this file already prepared for you and put it in your /home

2- Open up the console, check you’re in your /home and type:

sudo cp shmconfig.fdi /etc/hal/fdi/policy/

3- Restart the computer

4- search and install (Q)GSynaptics with Synaptic or Adept

That’s all folks!

The Linux road to heaven

One article by Ed Bott on Zdnet made me think of how Linux enthusiast often underestimate the complexity of the scenario regarding Linux based systems market share and penetration.
Bott reported MSI concerns about their Linux based machines which, they state, suffer from a higher return rate (up to 4 times) from end users than windows based machines. They say they will stick to their effort to manufacture and sell Linux laptops but disclose the problems they must face in offering such machines to the desktop public (e.g. higher costs for software development and support, especially when we speak of low price sub notebooks like those of their Wind line). I can accept this complaint as a general one but in the specific I wonder why the huge success of similar products (Asus EEE PC for one) occurred despite the problems MSI disclosed.
Bott admits he writes about Windows for a living and though we can judge his opinion as biased and MSI example as poorly relevant one, but this is not the point and not certainly the object of my thought.
Up to today there’s no competition in the OS market shares, except for an ongoing insurrection from the part of OSX. With OSX we’d better speak of system ascent, but I bet the share of Linux distros altogether is nothing more than a tiny biodiversity in the personal computers world ecosystem. I say this without a solid statistic base given that I haven’t really found any statistics I’m comfortable with on the web.
Focusing on the desktop environment and considering the most spread distros I am more than conscious that Linux is a valuable alternative to Microsoft Windows. From the day I migrated to Ubuntu I’ve always done my best to convert friends and colleagues to a Linux distro. Sometimes I even got close to it. I never succeeded though.

I share Bott’s opinion when he talks about habits. Men stick to their habits and they’re not prone to invest time end energy in trying different things, especially when these things aren’t always full interchangeable. From the many problems which prevent Linux to penetrate the mainstream market I think this is the most relevant one. Microsoft is a colossus and despite all the attacks it suffers from geeks it has indeed been able to create and promote a system in such a massive way that nowadays the mass of people just consider Windows as a standard. More of that, they believe it’s a standard! For those people it’s just inconceivable to have a PC running an operating system different to the one they’re used to see and use. Sometimes when I enthusiastically speak of all the wonders and advantages (which are far from few and irrelevant) of a Linux system to people, they just listen to me with that attitude which says “yes, they also say you can receive broadcast tv with your screw driver”… That’s enervating but it’s just a normal reaction.
So, how could Linux improve its market share?

Well, I’m no business guru but I have some points about this issue. There are three marketing tricks which I think might give the market a little shake.

First: Focus the target.
Many distros have made (and are constantly making) giant leaps as desktop environment solutions. This is precisely why I took the decision to wipe out XP from my laptop and install Ubuntu. Despite these improvements Linux needs to strike those places where people are obliged to use a system which had been already chosen for them. With this I mean the work places. Let’s take Canonical as reference for our example. Say that Canonical propels LUGS or member of LUGS to start an activity to promote Ubuntu distro. Activities could be scheduled to propose small, medium sized and even large companies (in particular those belonging to the public administration) to consider the Linux distro when the desktop stations renewal is scheduled.

Second: Strike carefully
When carefully proposed, with a rational set of elements -an assertive mood and a clear presentation- there are strong reasons for such target companies to switch partially or fully to one Linux based distro. A partially switch is especially advisable as target because it permits to focus on a specific business sector more prone to be converted to Linux. Thinking of the company where I work, I found it difficult to imagine a sudden switch to say Ubuntu in the engineering department where there are mass investments on software running under XP. On the contrary it could be more convenient to convert the machines running in other departments such as administration, planning, warehouse, production, quality, to Linux. In my company the main problem would certainly be the management tool which is commonly used by all these departments and run under XP. Nevertheless a long time schedule conversion to Linux to such kind of departments can indeed offer strong advantages which are so much relevant for an organization to result in money saving and work flow improvement. Let aside the money aspect, two of the basic problems affecting the average company computer network are instability issues and system damages caused by viruses. Many people are illiterate when concerning even the basic aspects of information technology. I personally assisted to a warehouse man who wrongly typed DHL URL and when a nice gurl showed up with the sentence “click me” on her boobs, guess what he did?

Third: Development and development
Big things come out of small things. How can we seriously expect a big company involved in big projects requiring huge investments spread on a pipeline of hundreds of people to release a version of their best seller software for a platform which is to their eyes sterile? In this I strongly agree with those who say that commercial software isn’t necessarily evil. Some forms of exploitation of commercial software or some commercial practices are. For this reason the promotion to those small workshops which can produce and release innovative and quality software for Linux is much important. Take games for example. I’m motivated to think that a strongly engaged and highly skilled team of independent people can realise games that are at least for some aspect comparable to the million dollars productions that bust the market nowadays. Don’t forget that such a small team would work under completely different organisational and money constraints, especially when the team represent a start up entity for the members. Linux game scenario is today rich of high quality and completely free and open source games being developed by communities of enthusiasts whose main aim is no other than to see their game to grow and flourish. Free tools are also there to help this process. We have Blender which is a 3D modelling tool comparable to the professional ones used in “serious” game productions. Blender is also equipped with an integrated game engine, and we even have more powerful engines like Ogre3D, Crystal Space, and Panda3D which is maintained and used in Disney’s commercial game products.

Linux is a great operating system with big capabilities and a vast community of supporters. I do believe that Linux in general is really one tool that can help improve the world we are living in. We just need to be more focused and less dispersive. I know that dispersion is one of the main characteristics of Linux, as highlighted by the multitude of distros, but I’m truly convinced that the success of our cause will pass through unity.

Ubuntu success in achieving a vast public knowledge is there just to witness this concept.

Pictures by:

phauly licensed under this creative commons license

tripu licensed under this creative commons license

….Tim licensed under this creative commons license

Mac-flavored two-fingers scroll for any Linux touchpad

I’m speaking to you, proud possessor of a Ubuntu based laptop. Have you ever been mocked by your Mac pal ‘cause she/he could scroll web pages with an elegant and trendy two-fingered movement on the touchpad? Well, I have just discovered that the same advanced Mac feature is present on the vast majority of the Synaptics touchpads.

My good friend Carlo, of the Italian technology podcast Tecnica Arcana, posted a quick tutorial, in Italian, on his blog Court of Misanthropy. By reading it I’ve noticed that it’s pretty simple to apply the modification needed to activate the two fingers scroll feature. I’ve followed the tutorial which worked perfectly. I must admit that now when I scroll pages with two fingers my touchpad behaves quite weirdly. Often the page leaps forward of a big amount of lines. Then when the scroll reaches the end of the page it’s impossible to scroll up with the two finger gesture because when doing so the page keeps bouncing backwards. By the way this issue is likely to be related to my own touchpad model or to some other configuration. My friend Carlo and other people who followed his tutorial have found no problem with this feature.

Let’s start the quick guide. You basically need to add a few lines to your xorg.conf file and install a controller from the repositories. I’ve done this tutorial on my Packard Bell laptop with distro Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.

1- let’s backup xorg.conf

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.copy

2- open xorg.conf

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

3- go to the section “input synaptics” and add the following three lines at the end of the section (just before “end section”)

Option “SHMConfig” “on”
Option “VertTwoFingerScroll” “true”
Option “HorizTwoFingerScroll” “true”

The section will resemble something like this

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
Driver “synaptics”
Option “SendCoreEvents” “true”
Option “Device” “/dev/psaux”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
Option “HorizEdgeScroll” “0″
Option “SHMConfig” “on”
Option “VertTwoFingerScroll” “true”
Option “HorizTwoFingerScroll” “true”
EndSection

4- install gsynaptics from the repositories (you will then found it under system/preferences).

gsynaptics is an application which allow you to adjust the setting for your touchpad. You can also enable the single finger and two fingers tapping which respectively recreate the left mouse button and the press of the mouse scroll wheel (it opens a new tab in firefox)

5- reload X with ctrl+alt+backspace (or restart the system)

If you are an Italian speaker you can watch a youtube video tutorial on Carlo’s blog. More than this I strongly recommend you to listen to Tecnica Arcana podcast which is a simply outstanding podcast rich of interesting technological discussion.

Let me know if you found this guide useful!

A roller coaster improvement for Linux

Well, I leave the author presentation stuff to the about part.

Let’s just summarise that this very article is what above all pushed me opening a blog. This article takes also inspiration by some posts Bryan wrote on his blog Lunduke.com.

I’m a fresh new Linux -well.. Ubuntu- user. I switched from XP to gutsy after a long career as microsoft user; I started with DOS (before with a Philips MSX) and ended with XP.

Since the moment I cleared my laptop from the OEM XP OS and installed gutsy, a sorta love between me and the penguin distro began. I say love exactly because this kind of relation is getting more and more complex as I dive into this new OS world. By complex I mean that the feelings are often mixed up just like sensations poured into a melting pot. I just love Ubuntu but sometimes I hate it as well. This is why I decided to write down what I, as an unexperienced Linux user, would like to see changed in the next releases of Ubuntu.

First of all I need to clarify one point. The criticisms I move are related to the desktop concept of the distro. I know well, by reading articles and forums discussions focused somewhat to the same subject of this post, that many hardcore Linux users don’t share the same urgency many other feel about one Linux distro becoming enough sharp to penetrate and get a significant slice of the desktop usage market. On the contrary I do think and refer exactly to that. That is to say a desktop oriented distro of Linux dragging out from cellars, lofts and server rooms, to compete with comparable success with the other two main products of desktop environment.

My reduced but day-to-day based experience made me think that despite the clearly visible advantage Linux/Ubuntu has on the other two systems, there are equally important drawbacks.  Here below I summarise them.

1- lack of commercial software.

open source is a great thing, maybe one of the greatest in IT history, but alone it’s not sufficient. People want to play Call of Duty IV, Assassin Creed, Spore, they want to design with Photoshop and so on. This is where politics becomes an important factor. I’m more than sure Canonical’s doing its best to push companies to release Linux versions of their commercial softwares but this aspect has, in my opinion, the greatest priority. One drawback related to this point is that there are several desktop distro somewhat competing one against the other. This is understandable given the nature of Linux, but it’s clearly drawing resources to the whole (above mentioned) cause.

2-Look

In this concern I share the same opinion Bryan’s extensively expressed in his posts and during some episodes of his (and Chris’) show (The Linux Action Show). Every marketing, advertising, p.r., (and common sense) book states that the general appeal is the first information upon what a third party builds his/her opinion on an object. Taking the same example mentioned by Brian, I happened to be at work when they released Firefox 3. I installed it on my XP desktop and got really pleased about the new look. When I got home the first thing I did was upgrading Firefox on my Ubuntu laptop. What a shock to see the uglier look of the same application on my favourite OS! Like Brian, I don’t ask for earthshaking effects but Jeez, what about an elegant, polished and glamorous design? There is plenty of capable artists and designers out there!

3- Application installation

This is perhaps the most annoying thing an user coming from a MS OS faces using Lnux/Ubuntu. I know that my beloved OS has glorious advantages with respect to say XP (synaptic, add/remove app, repositories, package management, etc..) but there are also irritating drawbacks. I just want to download the program, install, double click, next, next and that’s it. I don’t want to stand things like:

- the program it’s not present in synaptic so let’s try and find it somewhere else

- the version of the program present in synaptic is older than that on the web site (i.e. check blender)

- I download the package from the web site (i.e. google earth) I run it and it’s fine. Then I discover I can add the same app to synaptic through medibuntu. I install it and now I have two google earth. Well, I think, let’s me remove the first one.. yes but how..??

- there’s no binary for the program so you have to build it from source.. ehm.. this is not something the average user want to cope or lose time with…

These 3 are those points I think need urgently to be improved because, from my experience, are also those (especially the first two) which hold people to leap from their OS, which maybe they don’t particularly like but are used to, to Linux. I know at least 5 people who addressed me one of, or both, the two issues when I tried to push them to switch to Ubuntu.

Which is your opinion on this subject?