Apps worry me

Apps are worrying me.  I should explain.

By apps, I means the apps that you installed on you Android phone or iPhone.  They’re great and useful (sometimes), but they are not free in an Open Source way at all (and here I’m referring to Android) and yet I heard lots of so called Open Source people talking like this is the new way.

Rubbish.  Shotofjaq talked about using apps as an example to gain games for Linux (because lets face it Linux games are mostly crap), via micro payment.  But that undermines the hard works that, for example, the GNOME and KDE guys have put in, for FREE.  Why should games be any different?  What makes games so special that its OK to pay for them, and not OK to pay for Open Office? And do I get the source code if I pay for it?  Somehow I doubt it!  Jono and Aq really need to think about what they are saying here.

Apps, in the Android world are akin to the freeware world of 10-15 years ago.  Great stuff, but it was replaced by Open Source.  My worry if that this is being slowly reversed by Apps and no one is seeing it, and when they do it’ll be too late.

Do I really think the iPad is a problem, no I don’t, that’s over hyped, but its amazing how many people are using their phone to do 90% of what you’d use a computer to do 2 years ago, email, twitter, casual browsing etc.  Thats the worry, not tablets.

Maybe I’m over worrying, but somehow I don’t think so.

 

Excellent overview of useful kernel and driver tweaks

Been doing some research on 10GBE network tuning and came across this excellent article covering various kernel settings that can help you in your performance quest.

Some of this I have covered already, but other areas may be worth investigating.

The article is here

 

Linux Package Formats

Unlike most things in Linux, packages in Linux are not a single standard rather they come in many formats, though the most popular of course are rpm and deb packages.

The deb and rpm holy war has raged on for many years and originally, without doubt Debian deb packages where the superior package format, with the package manager being able to handle and install any dependances a package needed to work.  rpm packages did not have this luxuary and the phrase “rpm dependancy hell” was rightly coined.

These days, with yum and zypper package managers, those days of rpm dependancy issues are long gone, but the idea that it still exist is still held onto by some.

However for me, rpm is now the better package format to use.  10 years ago the reverse would have been true.

Why? Because building rpm package is straight forward and requires only a small learning curve whilst deb are a complete pig to build as many will agree with.

rpm spec files are very easy to work with, as is rpmbuild itself.  Creating yum repository is simply a case of starting a http server and creating a standard repository directory structure, placing the rpms you need into in it and running creatrepo.

If you still think debs are superior to rpms its worth you revisiting that assumption.  I believe you’ll find the opposite is true.

 

Ubuntu

Before I start I should point out that I love Ubuntu and think its one of the best Linux distros out there.  I still use it one many of my PCs and will do so for the forseeable future……but…….

I think that Karmic was a very bad release for Ubuntu.  Its been, unfairly, called Ubuntu’s Vista, because of the many issues there have been with it.  I have been stung by the nasty problem it has with SSD based systems with my EEEPC, which was a bit scary.  But I don’t really see that as a problem so much as the approach taken my various employees to these issues.

I very much disliked the attitude of some.  The most moronic comment to come out was went along the lines of “this just shows how popular Ubuntu is”.  WTF??  It won’t be popular if there is another release like this.

If Ubuntu is truely Linux for the masses then the idea that the “community” should help test and find the bugs has got to go.  Can’t believe I’m saying that, as I really believe in it, but to run a company hoping that this approach will ensure you product will be solid is not gonna fly.

The best route Ubuntu can take is to stop the 6 month upgrade cycle insanity.  No one cares that much, outside of the hardcore set (and they can handle this by themselves).  At most a 12 month upgrade is enough, but I’d be tempted to move that to 18 month, with core applications such as Firefox and Openoffice being kept relatively up to date within the time frame.

Why?  Well, there just isn’t enough time to fix all the bug, and issues that there are in the current Karmic release, so they get labelled won’t fixed, or take just too long to fix.  With a saner time frame there would be more time for people to spend fixing these issues, without having to worry about the next release.

The other option is to be more honest about what the 6 months releases are.  If they are developement releases, call them as such so people know what they are installing and therefore are not shocked when it doesn’t quite work correctly.  This reduces the negative opinions as you have told them that this is a not-quite-there release.

Most people just want they PC to work.  My LTS system does this fine, it just works and does everything I want it to do (although sound has just broken…again).

So, in a nutshell, Ubuntu please stop worrying about having the latest bells and heavily concentrate on building a truely quality system that everyone who loves Linux really wants.  Forget the 6 months cycle, it’ll kill you off.

 

Advanced distro myth

There is a dumb idea that out there in Linux distro land that less means more. Take Crunchbang. It positions itself as a distro for advanced users because it uses Openbook rather than Gnome that Ubuntu uses, which it is based on.

Why does this make it so? If you prefer a minimal desktop, great good for you, I have no problem there. But a desktop choice does not make you an advanced user. Far from it.

Crunchbang is no more an. advanced users distro than any of the top distros. If you want a real advanced users distro use Gentoo or Arch, but you’ll spend all you time fixing it. You’ll learn a lot, but do little, the choice is yours.

Just don’t believe that using a minimal desktop makes you an advanced user.

 

Top 5 Android apps

Got myself an Android phone a few weeks ago, the Magic. Great phone, no idea how I survived without it for so long.

So, been playing with apps from the market and these are my top 5 free apps:

• TasKiller

Simply love this. Basically a process killer which allows you to kill off processes that seem to hang around for too long, or processes that autostart on boot. Obviously less processes equals less battery consumption.

• Twidroid

Simply the best Twitter client I’ve found for Android.

• Astrid

A todo app, that can link to sites such as rememberthemilk. Simple to use, providing due dates, duration of task and then a notification when a task is to be done. Simple but very useful.

• Google Sky

Google Sky is amazing as it links into the phones gps and compass so that it can show you exactly what stars, galaxies etc are above you. If you’re into astronomary at all you’ll love this.

• Robo defense

Lastly a game. Build gun towers, missile launchers, ground to air missiles etc to stop the enemy. You have to earn money though to build these by stopping the enemy. More difficult than it sounds and very addictive.

So those are my current top 5 Android apps. Download and enjoy.

 

Arch Linux

Been meaning to mention this for quite a while, but just never seemed to have time.

As I said before I used Easy Linux (yukky name etc etc), which was fine as it goes, nice interface and so on, on my eeepc.  However, the boot time (like most of the 8.x series of Ubuntu)was pretty slow and GNOME is a heavy desktop for a netbook.

So I decided I wanted something lighter, and that meant the easiest route was to ignore most of the “popular” distro as this always come with heavy desktops.  Arch Linux therefore came to mind as I’d used it in the past and very much liked it. Arch Linux would allow me to install exactly what I wanted and nothing else.

So, which desktop?  Well, I wanted a degree of functionality, so Fluxbox was out, and XFCE is very nice, but, franky, I’ve used it for years at work so wanted something else.  E17 therefore seemed the best option.

Right, so installing it.  Easy.  There is a guide on the Arch Wiki on how to do this, and I was up and running, console wise anyway, pretty quickly.  X was another question.  That took quite awhile to get up and running as allowing X to guess didn’t work, so had to hand hack a confg which I’m out of practise with.  But got that running eventually.

E17 is a geat desktop and I’m glad I made that my desktop.  It is amazingly lightweight, but still provides the functions I need on a netbook.  If you haven’t looked at it, do.

Now I have a netbook that boot in less than 20 seconds, and a desktop that looks and works great.

Arch Linux is how I remember, utterly flexible, allow you to build a system the way you want, and I recommend it highly

 

Linux TCP auto-tuning

There does seem to be a lot of confusion over how Linux auto-tuning for TCP works, so here are so links to documents that outline in good details exactly how this does work. After reading all of these you should be up to speed on this topic.

http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~dunigan/netperf/auto.html

http://public.lanl.gov/radiant/pubs/hptcp/hpdc02-drs.pdf

http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/tcptune/#Linux

http://www.broadnets.org/2004/workshop-papers/Pathnets/03_TCPHighSpeedWAN-SylvianRavot.pdf

http://fasterdata.es.net/TCP-tuning//linux.html

 

wii via OpenBSD pf firewall

I’ve been having problems getting my wii to work correctly with internet games such as “Animal Crossing”.  Standard internet access worked fine, and games did work occassionally but dropped out, though oddly enough “Mario Kart” worked fine.

After quite a bit of digging I found this absolutely brillant pf guide on https://calomel.org/pf_config.html.

Basically I needed to add a ‘static-port’ to my nat line for the the wii, and modifying the scrub line to

‘scrub log all random-id min-ttl 254 max-mss 1452 set-tos lowdelay reassemble tcp fragment reassemble’

and then it magically worked correctly.

So if you are having the same issues, refer to this guide, look for the X-Box-360 section, as this will probably help you find the solution with your pf.conf setup.

 

Intel Harpertown layout diagram

To illustrate what I was outlined in my previous post, I’ve found this nice picture of a Hartertown cpu all laid bare. As you can see, it is basically 2 dual cores pasted together (they are a 45nm shrink of Clovertown).