Linux Biased

I wanted to preface this by sharing that I am a Ubuntu Linux user, and as such there were several reasons why an Android based tablet makes more sense. Developers will find the iPad impossible to develop for unless you own a Mac. In addition, music collections are designed to work through iTunes, which besides the clumsy interface, becomes a pain if you and your family want to store music libraries on multiple computers. Apple also enforces policies which prevent common sense features like Amazon actually having a link to it’s own store in the Kindle application.

Specifications

• 10.1” HD Multi-Touch Display: (1280 x 800) resolution, 16:10 aspect ratio
• Android™ 4.0 Operating System (Ice Cream Sandwich)
• NVIDIA Tegra 3 Quad Core (1.3GHz)
• 1GB DDR2 Memory
• 32GB internal storage

Usage

The default Ice Cream Sandwich load with the Acer customizations works well and is fluid. Reading books using the Kindle application works great, and I found it substantially easier to read technical books on it’s 10.1″ screen vs. the Kindle Fire’s 7″ screen. The Tegra 3 itself is a very powerful 3d graphics unit, and I was able to run Grand Theft Auto 3 on it with complete smoothness and great graphics, while still receiving Google mail and Facebook messages. I wasn’t expecting the Acer to be so powerful, and was pleasantly surprised.

Battery Life

The battery life on this tablet is what sets it apart from the pack, with between 10 and 13 hours depending on usage. I wasn’t able to find another 10.1″ tablet which could compare with this across the board.

Size

The Iconia feels nice to hold, although it is definitely thicker than many of it’s competitors. I have no problem holding it while reading a ebook etc, and the weight makes it feel more robust. Having the extra screen real estate makes a big difference for PDF documents, along with applications designed with these tablets in mind.

Other Features

The Iconia comes with built in cameras which work very well, GPS, Bluetooth and an SD card slot.

Conclusion

Acer has designed a surprisingly good tablet that can compete with any on the market today. With it’s powerful tegra 3 graphics and best in class battery, it can go with you and stay on through long trips and varied workloads. It’s a great time for Linux across the board.

Related posts:

1. Ubuntu 12.04 and the HP Envy 15

This gave me everything I was looking for. It boots in 5-6 seconds flat, has a ton of SSD storage, all of my frequent files get cached in ram anyways and it works great. It also has the added advantage of not having only a Intel HD 3000 card (which does horrible on actual 3d applications), but has an Nvidia GT540M card which is fully supported by Ubuntu 12.04 and the Bumblebee Project.

Total: $1000

Adding Components

Once I removed the middle screw towards the front of the laptop, the panel came off by just sliding it forward. Here I replaced the slow tradition SSD and single 4GB module of ram:

Hardware Complete and Ready To Go

Software Steps

Once I had the hardware ready, it was time to install Ubuntu 12.04 (which you can now download straight from ubuntu.com without any special links). When I partitioned the drive, I made the following partitions. This is largely up to personal preference, but this best suited my use:

After the installation was finished, I edited my fstab for all partitions to use the noatime,discard option as I didn’t want too much writing to my SSD. “discard” will enable TRIM support for the SSD. I changed the file by running “gksudo gedit /etc/fstab”:


UUID=ff44d983-f944-4790-95c7-f2e9982cf70 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1

to

UUID=ff44d983-f944-4790-95c7-f2e9982cf70 / ext4 noatime,discard,errors=remount-ro 0 1


Display Settings

Out of the box, the system cannot change brightness. I added the following lines to my default grub:

sudo -i
echo 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="quiet splash pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"' > /etc/default/grub
update-grub2


Wifi

Wifi worked out of the box, however with my wireless N access point I had to force it to not use wireless N:

sudo -i
echo "options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1" > /etc/modprobe.d/disable-iwlwifi-n.conf


Nvidia Graphics

By default the system will use the Intel graphics, however this is quite slow for anything other than web browsing. To use the Nvidia Optimus features, I installed Bumblebee

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia
sudo usermod -a -G bumblebee $USER


After rebooting, you can then check out the dramatic FPS difference between these:

# Intel 3000
glxspheres
# Nvidia
optirun glxspheres


Bluetooth

Bluetooth works, however it does take a little tweaking out of the box:

sudo -i
cat << EOF > /etc/rc.local
#!/bin/sh -e
modprobe btusb
echo "0489 e033" > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/btusb/new_id
EOF


Suspend / Resume

Looks like there is still the suspend / resume bug for the EHCI controller on a few different netbooks, this fixes it if your laptop shows a black screen resuming from suspend, download this file and copy it to /etc/pm/sleep.d/20_suspendfix

Terminal Settings

As soon as I get a new system up, I apply my bash defaults that I posted to the Ubuntu wiki with a detailed description of what they do: Enhanced Bash

Programs

I install the following programs right away:

sudo apt-get install git mercurial bzr build-essential vim seahorse xchat keepassx vlc gimp chromium-browser fonts-droid fonts-inconsolata devscripts


Summary

I am really enjoying both this laptop and the Ubuntu 12.04 release (running Unity). I was able to hook up my external 25″ monitor through the HDMI port and it detected and used it seamlessly. It suspends and resumes with no problem, audio controls and brightness controls also work. Two finger scrolling works once enabled under touchpad settings, and the battery life is over 7 hours.

Related posts:

1. ECS GF8200A under Ubuntu Intrepid
2. Finding the difference between two files
3. Installing Groupwise 8 Client in Ubuntu Jaunty AMD64

The HP Envy 15

The laptop is the same form factor as a MacBook Pro 15″, and has an aluminum body. It has a hardware volume control which works out of the box on Ubuntu. The keyboard itself feels natural and is easy to type on, although the laptop supports Bluetooth if you wanted to easily add an external keyboard. The keyboard is also backlit, which makes it much easier to see the keys in low light conditions.

The Envy sets itself apart from endless models with low resolution screens by providing a 1920×1080 15″ LCD. The screen allows for much more content on screen than the traditional 1366×768 panels and looks beautiful. Having recently purchased a laptop with a 1366×768 screen, I can say that no matter how much you try and make apps fullscreen and decrease fontsize, that they simply don’t compare to the higher resolution display of the Envy.

Ubuntu Experience

Touchpad / Clickpad

After a little bit of searching I found that it is 10x easier to google calling it a clickpad. Run this to make click-dragging work in 12.04 (must be ran each time you start up):

#!/bin/bash
# Taken from http://www.theorangenotebook.com/2012/02/call-for-testing-clickpad.html
xinput set-prop "13" "Synaptics ClickPad" 1

Video

By default it works great, including with Unity. However, you could get better 3d performance if you use ATI’s Catalyst drivers. They can be installed through the Additional Drivers window. If you don’t want both cards running at once (ie you are on battery power):

echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

This will switch the ATI card off leaving only the Intel card on

Wireless

I have a pretty awesome router that runs DD-WRT (ASUS RT-N16), however it doesn’t appear I can use wireless N. To disable wireless N:

cat << EOF > /etc/modprobe.d/disable-n.conf
options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1
EOF

Processors

Here you can see them scaling their frequencies as expected:

sharms@dawnstar:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz
cpu MHz		: 800.000
cpu MHz		: 800.000
cpu MHz		: 800.000
cpu MHz		: 800.000
cpu MHz		: 800.000
cpu MHz		: 800.000
cpu MHz		: 2201.000
cpu MHz		: 800.000

Related posts:

1. Dell D620 on Linux
2. Finding a great Ubuntu Linux laptop for < $1000

Install KeepassX
You can install KeepassX by opening a terminal and running ‘apt-get install keepassx’, or by opening the Ubuntu Software Center and searching for it there:

Create a password database
After installing the first thing you are going to want to do is create a password database.  This is where your passwords will be stored on your hard disk.

Add a new entry
Now that you have created a password database, you can start adding entries in

Generate a password
One of the best features of using a password manager like KeepassX is that for every single site you use, you can use a very long password, and a different password for each website.  Here we can hit the button labelled ‘gen’ and create a password

Right click your entry
Now you can right click your new entry, copy the new password and paste it into sites. This is much more secure, as if you use the same password for every website you visit, and one of them gets hacked, you will have to change your password on the other sites, if you even get a chance before they exploit your information. In addition, KeepassX is cross platform, working on Windows and OS X also.

Related posts:

1. A thousand passwords
2. Dropbox on Ubuntu
3. Migrated to a VPS

Recently I have been using the newest Macbook Pro 15″, and I thought I would update my direct experience on how Ubuntu and OS X stack up.

Web Browsing
On both platforms Chrome, in my view, is the defacto standard for nerds and an ever increasing porportion of the general population. Having used Safari for the first month to try ‘the apple way’, I can say that Chrome feels faster, has better features, and was just really well thought out. Both platforms are a wash on this one.

Flash Plugin
This one is also a wash, both platforms have support for flash — I actually think Ubuntu has an edge here since Flash can be installed via the package manager, instead of an entirely separate installer in OS X.

Text Editing
Textmate is a very cool application, with tons of pre-defined bundles that allow for quick completion, and a great project view.  However for Java development, it seems that IDE autocompletion / debugger integration is hard to beat (Eclipse / Netbeans work on both platforms), while for Python / Ruby etc Vim was a better fit for both platforms, as an advanced user.  Definitely a great entry level editor that is an inbetween for Gedit / Vim.

Terminals
I think here gnome-terminal blows away terminal.app — gnome-terminal is noticeably faster and the design was clearly by people using the terminal day in and out.  I think the Mac community feels the same way, and in general uses ITerm, or the recently released ITerm2 (not same authors as ITerm oddly enough).  ITerm2 does work well, but again it feels like the terminal lacks speed in comparison.

Performance
One thing that struck me was the lack of responsiveness / speed.  This Macbook is a quad core with an ATI dedicated graphics card, but for most operations the OS feels quite sluggish.  Starting up iTunes or Safari takes much longer than you would expect for a $2000 USD piece of machinery.  I will however note that I only use Gnome 2, so Gnome 3 may suffer from a similar issue, but I am not experienced enough to write about it.

Application Installation Method
I was able to install apps through the Mac App Store, in the same manner I do in Ubuntu using the Software Center.  The Mac App store has many more commercial applications, however most of them like Photoshop are just not needed for a Linux veteran as Gimp does everything needed.  I also purchased XCode 4, but was underwhelmed other than the Iphone emulator which ran awesome in comparison to the Android emulator I was previously used to.

Email
I am sure a lot of people use Mail.app and like it, but I have always been a fan of the GMail interface.  I guess if we are comparing Apples to Apples, Evolution and Mail.app are both not very strong competitors (ie the rest of the world either runs on Outlook or Gmail).

Photo Management
iPhoto is a strong point, it is very easy, intuitive and nice looking to manage photos.   Linux alternatives here are weak.

Music Management
iTunes is a horrible, slow monster of expensive music.  One thing I miss is my Droid and the Amazon MP3 application, as that was by far a better deal, and my purchases went straight to the cloud.  iCloud is coming shortly, but Amazon is still my vendor of choice, and they already have proven to get the cloud right.

Gaming
OS X and Ubuntu both have my favorite game, Heroes of Newerth.  Mac OS X has Steam, which is definitely a benefit and World of Warcraft.  Ubuntu can’t really compete in this arena, so it is something to consider.

Conclusion
So, if you were like me, and curious about Mac OS X, you can see I am not overall impressed.  Maybe I am just biased towards Ubuntu, but I find overall it has favorable performance, and I can change out any pieces I don’t like.   I would recommend OS X if you wanted a generally worse experience but the ability to install Photoshop and a few more games (still nothing compared to Windows in this respect).

Related posts:

1. Workspaces
2. The Cherokee Webserver
3. Terminator color palettes

I just ran a ‘git diff’ on my gitorious tree, and here are the changes I made to make it work:

diff --git a/config/initializers/session_store.rb b/config/initializers/session_store.rb
index 7384f93..2409810 100644
--- a/config/initializers/session_store.rb
+++ b/config/initializers/session_store.rb
@@ -8,7 +8,8 @@ gitorious_yaml = YAML::load_file(File.join(Rails.root, "config/gitorious.yml"))[
 ActionController::Base.session = {
   :key    => '_gitorious_sess',
   :secret => gitorious_yaml['cookie_secret'],
-  :domain => ".#{gitorious_yaml["gitorious_host"]}",
+#  :domain => ".#{gitorious_yaml["gitorious_host"]}",
+  :domain => "10.80.21.73",
   :expire_after => 3.weeks,
 }

And also:

diff --git a/app/models/repository.rb b/app/models/repository.rb
index c4fd612..1df689c 100644
--- a/app/models/repository.rb
+++ b/app/models/repository.rb
@@ -226,7 +226,7 @@ class Repository < ActiveRecord::Base
   end

   def http_clone_url
-    "http://git.#{GitoriousConfig['gitorious_host']}/#{gitdir}"
+    "http://#{GitoriousConfig['gitorious_host']}/#{gitdir}"
   end

   def http_cloning?

If you change 10.80.21.73 to whatever your ip is, all of your troubles should go away.

Related posts:

1. Finding the difference between two files
2. Installing Groupwise 8 Client in Ubuntu Jaunty AMD64
3. SLES 11 SP1 and Novell / SUSE Autoyast with Intel / Dell Raid Controllers

Step 1

Create an Amazon S3 account at http://aws.amazon.com/s3/.  Once your account is created, you will need to create ‘credentials’, which will allow us to authenticate with S3.  You can access this by going to the “Amazon -> Account -> AWS Identity and Access Management” then clicking ‘Security Credentials’ on the left, and then creating a ‘Access Key’.  These keys are composed of 2 parts: a public portion, called the ‘Access Key ID’, and a private portion (never to be shared) called the ‘Secret Access Key’.

Step 2

We need to install a program called ‘s3cmd’.  This will allow us to interface with Amazon S3 via the command line.  On Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install s3cmd

Step 3

Now we need to setup s3cmd to save settings about our setup.  Make sure you have the Access Key ID and the Secret Key.  Run the following command to get started:

s3cmd --configure

From here you will get an interactive prompt:

Enter new values or accept defaults in brackets with Enter.
Refer to user manual for detailed description of all options.

Access key and Secret key are your identifiers for Amazon S3
Access Key: 231231232
Secret Key: 213123123

Encryption password is used to protect your files from reading
by unauthorized persons while in transfer to S3
Encryption password: ubuntu
Path to GPG program [/usr/bin/gpg]: 

When using secure HTTPS protocol all communication with Amazon S3
servers is protected from 3rd party eavesdropping. This method is
slower than plain HTTP and can't be used if you're behind a proxy
Use HTTPS protocol [No]: yes

New settings:
  Access Key: 231231232
  Secret Key: 213123123
  Encryption password: ubuntu
  Path to GPG program: /usr/bin/gpg
  Use HTTPS protocol: True
  HTTP Proxy server name:
  HTTP Proxy server port: 0

Test access with supplied credentials? [Y/n]

I chose to pick “Use HTTPS protocol”, which will upload it via a secure method. This is a good idea, although will slightly impact performance and may use slightly more traffic. In addition, s3cmd also will encrypt the files using gpg, which means that if someone broke into your s3 account, they would still need that pass phrase to decrypt your data.

Step 4
We can now test s3cmd and try to upload a file. You will need to create a ‘bucket’, which is where our files for this project are stored. You can have many buckets, so if you want to separate your projects you could create additional ones for each one. When we make a bucket name, they are globally visible in S3, so you will want to pick something not likely to be taken:

s3cmd mb s3://sharms.org-wordpress-blog

If that command runs successfully, we now have a new bucket called ‘sharms.org-wordpress-blog’. If not, pick a different name and try again. Now we can test uploading a file:

s3cmd put /home/sharms/testfile.txt s3://sharms.org-wordpress-blog

# Verify its where we think it is
s3cmd ls s3://sharms.org-wordpress-blog

Step 5
Using bash, we can automate this, and backup all of our files, daily, weekly, monthly etc. Here is an example, which I put at ‘/usr/local/bin/backup_blog_to_s3.sh’:

bucket="s3://sharms.org-wordpress-blog"

logger -t backup_blog_to_s3.sh "Backing up sharms.org blog to S3"
cd /var/www
tar -cf sharms.org.tar blog
bzip2 -9 sharms.org.tar
s3cmd put sharms.org.tar.bz2 ${bucket}
rm /var/www/sharms.org.tar.bz2

logger -t backup_blog_to_s3.sh "Backing up MySQL database to S3"
mysqldump sharms-wordpress -u databaseuser -p databasepassword -a -r sharms-wordpress.sql
bzip2 -9 sharms-wordpress.sql
s3cmd put sharms-wordpress.sql.bz2 ${bucket}
rm sharms-wordpress.sql.bz2

You can see from the example that we backup all of the files in the ‘blog’ directory, and export all of our data out of a MySQL database. You can even change the file names so they have the date when they were backed up:

tar -cf sharms.org-wordpress-$(date +%d%m%y) blog

Running Automatically
If we wanted to backup the system every day, this is very easy:

sudo cp /usr/local/bin/backup_blog_to_s3.sh /etc/cron.daily
sudo chmod 755 /etc/cron.daily

Security Notes
When considering this setup, you are most vulnerable to someone obtaining access to your server, and getting your Amazon keys. You can always revoke them from the Amazon Webservices Control Panel, but you don’t want an attacker using your S3 account for nefarious means. Beyond the scope of this document, you could setup a user called ‘backups’, and make the file ‘~backups/.s3cmd’ with the permissions ’600′, to stop other users from looking at it’s contents.

Related posts:

1. Fun with Amazon S3 in Ubuntu Hardy
2. Interesting Blogs
3. Dropbox on Ubuntu

Then in the same breath as the above, we are told “Good things come to those who wait”.  How could anyone understand these mindless phrases?  On one hand, I need to live like today is it.  On the other hand, I need to wait a long time for plans to come to fruition.

So I propose from now on, we live life like we will live to the average expected age of our demographics, taking into account time already spent on Earth, and any known medical conditions.

Related posts:

1. Gutsy musings
2. Cool podcast etc
3. Riding the train

I have to say the box art itself is pretty nice, with the rat and the rocket. I opened it up, and it was a Google CR-48 laptop running Chrome OS:

So far so good — it boots really fast, wireless and 3g both worked for me without hassle. The design looks a lot like my brother’s older Macbook, and the touchpad being push to click is pretty good for casual browsing.

I like the design of some of the Apps in the web store (ie the New York Times website customized for it), and it would be interesting to see what games come out using NaCL.

I already used Google Docs for my office work, and Gmail as my email client, so really nothing to transition to. Doing web development on it is a pain, might actually work out if something like Bespin was integrated into cloud deployment backends (some sort of Heroku / Bespin hybrid).

Related posts:

1. Google Chrome
2. The Cherokee Webserver: Great choice for VPS's
3. Fedora 10

It’s All About the Mentality
I respect and admire programmers like @migueldeicaza, @mitsuhiko, mandrake, @dhh for all they have accomplished. One thing they all have in common, present day, is running OS X. Mandrake cowrote Enlightenment (which is the original really cool window manager for Linux), Miguel started Gnome, and the majority of code both Mitsuhiko (wrote almost every useful Python library ever) and DHH (Ruby on Rails) write run on Linux backends to say the least.

What are they most known for? Problem solving skills mixed with actually producing / releasing.

Linux is Open Source
And this, I believe, is why great developers tend to move towards OS X (yes, there are plenty of exceptions). A critical piece of writing software is focus. When a problem solver uses a Linux desktop, they are immediately confronted with the possibility of being able to modify every part of their system. When a problem solver runs OS X, their options are severely limited, by design.

I think all of us are guilty for hunting down PPAs to get a backported browser, or running ‘./configure && make && make install’ at some point. And when you have programming skills, source code can turn into a detriment to productivity when you start modifying projects outside of what you intended to accomplish. All of a sudden you start hacking a project for a few minutes, and wake up days later in a coding haze with all of that time lost.

Personally I have had experience with this while using old Linux distributions. We have SLES 9 systems and SLES 10 systems here at work, and in the past year I have spent countless hours hacking Sprint 3G wireless drivers, USB over IP, Firefox 3 and countless others to work on these older systems. Why? Not because they are the primary goal, but because I could, which in turn took up time from things I actually “wanted” to do.

Time is Valuable
Watching one of Miguel’s presentations, he mentions that he does not have enough years left to “worry about memory management” and that they leave that to the younger folks. This is the crux of the argument. For programmers, there is far too much opportunity for distraction at every avenue. We don’t know how long we will be here for, but certainly we know that nothing we care about will get done as long as our focus is spread so thin across the spectrum of Linux.

Summary
This is all just food for thought, not a judgement against any form of desktop or usage pattern. For reference, I am still running Ubuntu on my desktop, and being wildly unproductive on the tasks I want to finish.

Related posts:

1. Open Source RadeonHD driver 1.2.2 released
2. Creative open sources their driver
3. Boot times: Does anyone actually care?