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Ubuntu plus Dell equals better support for devices in Linux

One of the best things that has happened to Linux enthusiasts the world over is the confluence of two big players one in the Linux arena (Ubuntu aka Canonical) and the other in the PC hardware space (Dell). And the end users have already started reaping the benefits.

The benefits include device driver support for hardware components which were otherwise not compatible with Linux. A couple of years back, I had to struggle getting my internal modem based on a conexant chip to work with Linux. These internal modems are infamously known as winmodems because they delegate some of its job to the parent operating system and work flawlessly only in Windows.

Because they were not full modems, most of them are incompatible with Linux and are as good as paper weight. I have documented how I got my internal modem to work with Linux with some difficulty.

Now the good news is that Dell has released device drivers for the conexant internal modems for their E1505n and 1420n machines which is available here for download.

The driver is provided as a deb package and so will be compatible with other Debian based Linux distributions.

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Canonical, Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, today announced that it won Enterprise Open Source Magazine’s Readers’ Choice Award for the “Best Linux Distribution,” voted on by members of the open source community. The award was announced at the 2007 Enterprise Open Source Conference in New York.

New York, NY (PRWEB) July 9, 2007 — Canonical, Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, today announced that it won Enterprise Open Source Magazine’s Readers’ Choice Award for the “Best Linux Distribution,” voted on by members of the open source community.

The winners of the Readers’ Choice Awards were revealed by SYS-CON, the parent publishing company for Enterprise Open Source Magazine, at the second annual Enterprise Open Source Conference in New York last week. This year the Enterprise Open Source Conference was co-located with the SOA World Conference & Expo 2007.

“The Ubuntu community and our end-users strive to create and work with a version of Linux that is simple, elegant and easy to use,” said Jane Silber, director of Operations, Canonical Ltd. “The Readers’ Choice Award is another proof point that we are achieving our goals and meeting the needs of the greater computing community.”

The Enterprise Open Source Readers’ Choice Awards program is community-driven, and participating products are nominated and chosen by the readers of Enterprise Open Source Magazine and the open source community at large.

About Canonical and Ubuntu
Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, is a global organisation headquartered in Europe committed to the development, distribution and support of open source software products and communities. World-class 24×7 commercial support for Ubuntu is available through Canonical’s global support team and partners. Since its launch in October 2004 Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world. Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem.

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– Microsoft Corp. yesterday said that it expects Windows XP, the operating system supposedly made moot by Windows Vista, to make up a significantly larger part of sales in the coming year.

During a conference call with analysts following the earnings results release yesterday afternoon, Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said the company has changed its fiscal year 2008 forecast from an 85/15 split in sales between Vista and XP to a 78/22 split. Windows XP sales will, in other words, be nearly 50% higher in the next 12 months than Microsoft had estimated earlier.

“We fine-tuned the Vista/XP mix for next year” during the company’s usual budgeting last month, said Liddell. “We changed it from 85% to 78%. Now, it’s a lower number [for Vista], but it’s still a very high number overall from our perspective, so 78% Vista mix in terms of sales next year.”

According to Liddell, Microsoft will generate the same revenue, more or less, under the new Vista vs. XP numbers, although there might be some slight differences because Vista sales have tended to involve more of the higher-priced versions, dubbed premium by the company, than has XP. The financial forecast didn’t spell out that directly, however. The only clue was a $120 million difference in what Microsoft pegged as the “undelivered elements” it assigned to unearned income for the coming year.

“Undelivered elements” are revenue set-asides to account for as-yet-unknown upgrades and enhancements to software. The set-aside shrunk from $660 million in the last 2008 forecast to $540 in the estimate presented yesterday.

“Because of that change [in the OS split], then the amount of undelivered element that comes from Vista is slightly lower than it would be otherwise,” Liddell explained.

His remarks caught the attention of Michael Cherry, analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash.-based research company. “What that seems to say is that XP has stronger legs than you would expect after the release of a new operating system.”

Clues that users aren’t ready to ditch XP have not been hard to find. In April, for example, Dell Inc. retreated from its earlier Vista-only position and announced it would return XP to the operating system choice list for consumer PCs. Three months before that, Microsoft extended support to Windows XP Home and XP Media Center to match Windows XP Professional’s drop-dead date of April 2014.

“Most of the machines I see pitched in catalogs are in the $700 range, certainly under $1,000,” said Cherry. “Computers with that amount of hardware are a better fit for XP. With Vista’s requirements, people may be thinking about sticking with XP, and putting less money into the hardware.”

It’s possible, Cherry added, that Microsoft might find itself forced to recognize more reality in the future. “At some point, they might have to consider limiting the availability of XP” to push people to Vista

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I only met my brother’s ex-girlfriend’s family once — the year they invited our family over to share Thanksgiving dinner. Since we were basically a group of strangers looking to make a good first impression, the table conversation was nothing more than friendly idle chitchat.

When I asked our hostess for more mashed potatoes, she took the opportunity to ask me about myself while dishing out my second helping — “So Shaun, what do you do for a living?”

Hesitantly, I responded: “I work in computer support.”

The transition to silence was immediate. All eyes suddenly turned to me, raised eyebrows all around. If you hadn’t heard my response, judging from everyone’s reaction you might think I said something outrageous like I was a male stripper or a gynecologist — but I knew the awkward silence would soon be broken by an overwhelming outpouring of computer questions.

“Oh wow, a computer guy!” — “So you know how to remove spyware and viruses and stuff, right?” — “Our family computer is really slow, I think it has a virus.” — “Do you have a business card, or can I get your number?”

I politely and patiently answered their questions, hoping that we’d exhaust the subject in a matter of minutes and then move on to something else. As it would turn out, my hopeful prediction was very wrong — the gentleman sitting next to me scooted his seat closer to me to begin an interrogation.

This man I was meeting for the first time must’ve truly believed that I was going to help him with his problem at that very moment. It didn’t matter how uninterested I looked or sounded, he was convinced that I must know the answer he’s looking for and he was determined he would get it.

Situations like this one were common for me. I’ve had eavesdropping strangers approach me with questions about their computer while I was eating in a restaurant. I’ve had oblivious coworkers step in front of me in a buffet line to tell me about their computer problems while I was serving myself food. I’ve had neighbors who spotted me from their window rush outside to coax me into working on their home computer while I was walking to the corner market. My knack for solving people’s computer problems had become so well-known among my neighborhood that these circumstances were near impossible to avoid.

You might be thinking, “So why complain? If your help is in high demand, why not embrace your talents and charge people for your time?”

I tried to for seven years. I’ve worked in the computer industry in various ways — help desk support, web design, consulting and sales, field technician, freelance computer specialist, and whatever other fancy name you want to give “the computer guy.”

I stopped enjoying it. There were certainly times when I enjoyed myself, but most of those times were when my computer talents were still developing. Once I stopped learning new things on the job, I would become fidgety and want to move on to something else.

From my career-hopping experiences in the computer industry, I’ve become acquainted with the Top Ten Reasons it doesn’t pay to be the computer guy:

Reason #10 – Most Of Your Accomplishments Are Invisible

The computer guy never hears anyone tell him, “I just want to let you know … everything is working fine!”

The reality is that people call the computer guy when something is wrong.

As a computer guy, if you work really hard to make everything work the way that it should, and things work fine, then people believe you don’t do anything. Everything you manage to get working correctly or do perfectly will forever remain unnoticed by computer users. They’ll only ever notice that you do anything when something isn’t working correctly, and you are called upon to fix it.

Reason #9 – Every Conversation You Have Is Roughly The Same

When the computer guy dares to mention what he does for a living, the typical response is, “I have a question about my home computer…”

Or when the computer guy first hears about a widespread problem within the computer network he’s responsible for, he can barely begin to assess the problem before a dozen other people call to report the same problem.

Or when the computer guy explains a certain process on a computer to a user who is incapable of retaining the process, he will inevitably need to reinstruct the user of this same process — indefinitely.

Reason #8 – You’re An Expert Of Bleeding-Edge Technology Products, Aren’t You?

The computer guy often finds himself in situations where someone is asking him for advice on a pending investment of the technological variety.

“I heard about (some hardware or software product) that can do (something desirable) for me. I brought you these (advertisements/reviews/printouts) because I wanted your recommendation. Which would you buy?”

Although the inquiring person sincerely trusts the computer guy’s judgment over their own, in almost every instance the real objective of these meetings is to ensure their own immunity from making a risky purchase.

If it turns out to be a bad investment, and they cannot get (the hardware or software product) to do (anything desirable), then you will be their personal scapegoat — “But honey, the computer guy said I should buy it!”

Reason #7 – Your Talents Are Forcibly Undervalued

Thanks to the constantly declining price of new computers, the computer guy cannot charge labor sums without a dispute. If he asks to be paid what he is worth, he will likely be met with the “why not buy new?” argument.

That is, desktop computers are always getting smaller, faster, and cheaper. It’s possible to purchase a new desktop computer for under $400. If the computer guy spends five hours fixing a computer and wants $100/hour for his time, his customer will be outraged, exclaiming “I didn’t even spend this much to BUY the computer, why should I pay this much just to FIX it?”

Reason #6 – You’re Never Allowed A Moment’s Peace

The computer guy is so prone to interruption that he rarely finds an opportunity to work on his own problems. This is because:

1. Computers never sleep.
2. Computer problems aren’t scheduled.
3. Every problem takes time to diagnose.
4. The computer guy can only give one problem his full attention.
5. Each user believes their problem deserves attention now.

Consequently, the computer guy has a 24/7 obligation to keep critical computer systems running, while simultaneously juggling everyone’s problems. He’ll often need to forfeit any opportunities to tend to his own needs for the sake of others — because at any moment, of any day, he can be interrupted by someone who wants to make their problem his problem.

Reason #5 – People Ask You To Perform Miracles

The computer guy is often mistaken for someone who possesses the combined skills of an old priest and a young priest. I’ll sum this up easily by example:

“No, I really can’t recover any files from your thumb drive, even if you did find it after it passed through your dog.”

Reason #4 – Your Assumed “All-Knowing” Status Sets You Up To Let People Down

There is no common understanding that there are smaller divisions within the computer industry, and that the computer guy cannot be an expert in all areas. What makes things worse, is when the computer guy attempts to explain this to someone asking for help, the person will often believe that the computer guy is withholding the desired knowledge to avoid having to help.

This is somewhat related to the next reason:

Reason #3 – You Possess Unlimited Responsibility

The computer guy is expected to solve problems. It is difficult to determine the boundaries of that expectation.

Some of the oddest things that I’ve been asked to do include:

1. Use pirated software to undelete important company files.
2. Create an Intranet, after explaining I didn’t know how to.
3. Teach someone how to hide their pornography collection.

Solving problems can range from replacing batteries in a wireless keyboard to investigating why the entire building loses power at the same time every morning. Resolutions can necessitate weaving a 50-foot cable through a drop ceiling, or wriggling under a house on your belly to add an electrical outlet.

Reasons #4 and #3 boil down to this: no matter how often you want to play the role of a hero, there will always be circumstances that test the limits of your ability to be one. It’s difficult to judge when helping someone means doing something immoral, and it’s even harder to admit you are unable to solve someone’s problem — and chances are, that someone will view you as incompetent because you were unable to help them.

Reason #2 – A Life Of Alienation

People only talk to the computer guy when they need him to fix something. Also, when the computer guy approaches a user, they’ll hop up out of their chair under the presumption that he’s there to fix something — as if it would never be expected that he only wants to strike up a conversation.

The fact that the computer guy never gets a moment’s peace can also practically force him to withdraw into solitude. His co-workers don’t understand that he doesn’t want to hear about their computer problems during his lunch hour — he does that every other hour of the day. That’s why the computer guy eats lunch alone with his door closed, or goes out to eat every day — not because he’s unfriendly, but because he needs to escape the incessant interruptions.

Reason #1 – You Have No Identity

It’s an awful experience when the computer guy shows up at a neighbor’s doorstep with a plate of Christmas cookies, only to have the child who answered the door call out, “Mom, the computer guy is here!” He begs for an identity that is not directly associated with computers, but “the computer guy” label walks ahead of him — it simply cannot be avoided. I was given a name and I’d love to be addressed by it.

Having read these reasons, you may believe that I’m complaining. It’s true that I was upset with many aspects of my life as the computer guy, but I’m past the point of complaining.

I took a good hard look at my existence and realized that things were not likely to change in the line of work I had chosen. Instead of just complaining, I took action and began making positive changes in my life.

Working in the computer industry isn’t for everybody. It wasn’t for me. I’ve compiled my reasons for putting it behind me and placed them here, so that anyone who is unsatisfied with their life working in computers might recognize it’s not for them either.

Mark Shuttleworth has just announced during his keynote at Ubuntu Live 2007 that the next Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) release will be Ubuntu 8.04. This will be the first LTS release since Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake. Mark had went on to add that Canonical is committed to delivering a new LTS release every two years. Ubuntu 8.04 will be out in April of 2008.

A little more than a decade ago, I came across a little project called FreeWin95, aiming to create a clone of Windows 95 in much the same way that Linux cloned UNIX. It seemed somewhat interesting, but in order to have a chance at being useful, it needed a working release and at the time it didn’t even have any code.

In 1998, the project was relaunched with the name ReactOS. This time, it aimed to produce a clone of Windows NT. Because Microsoft’s roadmap showed that it would be sticking with the NT kernel for a while (and Microsoft is still using it in Vista), this seemed more promising. As a user of Windows NT 4.0, I decided to keep an eye on it.

Over the years, ReactOS has periodically impinged on my consciousness. I haven’t used Windows seriously for a few years, but I am still rather fond of the NT kernel design. It made some very interesting design decisions, such as the ability to plug in different personalities and support different userspace kernel APIs easily. Unfortunately, it was buried under so much legacy-compatibility cruft that it never really had a chance to show off its strengths.

Over the years, the focus of ReactOS kept slowly shifting. Originally aiming to be a functional clone of Windows NT 4.0, it now incorporates some features from Windows 2000 (NT 5.0), XP (NT 5.1), and 2003 (NT 5.2).

Because ReactOS always aimed to be binary-compatible with Windows, a lot of device drivers can be used directly without modification. While they can’t use any of the Microsoft-supplied drivers for generic hardware, one of the strengths of Windows is that there is a plethora of third-party driver support. Things like nVidia’s display drivers can be used to provide 3D acceleration to applications, as shown off by running Unreal Tournament on ReactOS. It should be noted, however, that this can only be managed with a little patching of the nVidia driver binaries.

Not all drivers will work correctly. While most of the interfaces are identical, some parts are very different. The cache controller and memory manager are completely unlike their Windows NT counterparts, preventing some drivers from working.

Another group has overlapping, if somewhat different, goals to ReactOS. The WINE project aims to provide replacements for most of the userland libraries found on a Windows system. A significant amount of code sharing goes in between the two projects. Some components from WINE can be re-used directly in ReactOS. Some can be used with a few minor changes, and some are superfluous. GUI applications, for example, are run on the native display, and so GDI calls don’t need to be turned into X11 calls.

This code sharing is not all one-way. Code from ReactOS has found its way into various driver wrappers for Linux, such as NDISWrapper for WiFi drivers and Captive for NTFS support. The GNU toolchain for Windows has similarly benefited from contributions by ReactOS developers, as has QEMU. WINE, of course, also accepts some patches.

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The following are the sound instructions from my windows 98.vmx file. To get my missing sound connection working, I copied sound-related instructions from my file shown below.

sound.present = “TRUE” sound.startConnected = “TRUE” sound.fileName = “-1″ sound.autodetect = “TRUE” sound.virtualDev = “es1371″

ODF Converter for Debian and Debian-Derived Distros

ODF Converter makes it possible for people to read and write MS Word 2007 .DOCX files in OpenOffice.org . It’s word processor only, spreadsheets, etc. don’t run at this time with it.

I use Debian-testing. This should also work on Ubuntu, etc.

As anyone who’s looked knows, ODF Converter is distributed by Novell in .rpm format and not in .deb . As it turns out, this is an rpm which can be converted via the Debian alien utility, which can convert rpm format to deb or tarball or other formats. (if “other formats” interests you, $man alien for more information)

Get the files from here

Get both files, download them to anywhere convenient. You should be able to copy and paste each instruction directly into your console window.

So, as root (when the tarball is untarred, you’ll need root access to get the files into /usr):

# alien –to-tgz –scripts odf-converter-1.0.0-5.i586.rpm

# tar -xzvf odf-converter-1.0.0.tgz

Don’t bother cd-ing to the directory the tarball expands to; there isn’t one. The files are all over the disk. Just copy the directories as indicated:

# cp /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/OdfConverter /usr/lib/openoffice/program/

# cp /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/MOOXFilter_cpp.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/

# cp /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/MOOXTypeDetection.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/

This worked for me, but the conversion takes a long time to run and is resource-intensive, I’d guess about 20 minutes or more on a 201 page .DOCX test document I found, and running about 99% CPU utilization in one core of my Athlon 4200×2 dual core processor.

The test document I used was Office Open XML Part 1 – Fundamentals. You might want to look for a shorter one.

It’s a lot faster for shorter documents. Turning this article into .docx took about 2 seconds. Turning my 34 page business plan into docx took about 30 seconds, opening it in OpenOffice.org took less than a minute. I’m not sure how this handles dual/multicore processors, I saw it using both cores for shorter documents and a single core for longer ones, which doesn’t make sense.

If you change your mind about a document conversion, the best way to shut down ODF Converter is to do ps -A and kill -9 processID. Shutting down the OpenOffice.org Writer window will probably leave the converter running and crash any other OpenOffice.org windows you’ve got running.

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Upload files to Snapfish

——————————————————————————–

I am recently switching over to Ubuntu as a full-time Desktop OS. One of the hardest parts of this though is having it pass the ever critical wife test. So far, wife testing is going well, as she is comfortable using firefox, openoffice and pidgin. But we hit a bump in the road recently when she needed to upload a bunch of pictures to Snapfish. She used to use a Snapfish utility in Windows to do bulk uploads. This option was not available for Linux users, and she certainly was not going to use the standard browser interface to upload a single picture at a time.

The answer? Nautilus Scripts!

Now I can’t claim the idea for my own. The following two posts helped me tremendously in getting this working.

http://heliolith.com/archives/2006/0…fish-on-linux/

http://ceitl.zanestate.edu/blog/arch…from-nautilus/

Both had bits and pieces of functionality I wanted. All I had to do was blend them together.

1) Create a Google Mail account if you don’t already have one.

2) Add this Google Mail account to your Snapfish preferences to accept pictures from e-mail.

3) Install mutt and zenity if they are not already installed:
Code:
sudo apt-get install mutt zenity

4) Download the putmail.py python script;

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf…roup_id=122444

5) Extract and install the script:
Code:
tar -xvf putmail.py-1.4.tar.bz2
sudo ./putmail.py-1.4/install.sh

6) Create a mutt configuration file for your profile:
Code:
gedit ~/.muttrc

7) Enter the following data into the file and save it:
set sendmail=”/usr/local/bin/putmail.py”

Create a putmail directory in your home directory:
Code:
mkdir ~/.putmail

9) Create a putmail configuration file:
Code:
gedit ~/.putmail/putmailrc

10) Put your Google Mail information in it:
[config]
server = smtp.gmail.com
email = youruserid@gmail.com
username = youruserid@gmail.com
password = yourpassword
port = 587
tls = true

11) Download the following script:

http://ceitl.zanestate.edu/blog/wp-c…/05/2gmail.txt

12) Copy it to the Nautilus Scripts directory and rename it.
Code:
cp ./2gmail.txt ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/SendToSnapfish

13) Open the script file:
Code:
gedit ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/SendToSnapfish

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Back in the early days of Personal Computers ( 1980’s era) a workstation was a high end , large , heavy computer with 1,000 k ( a kilobyte which is 1/000 of a megabyte, a gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes).

Cost approximately $ 10,000. A PC was small and insignificant in comparison – 64 k of memory ( versus 1,000 k) , a tiny small computer screen, a floppy or two. Cost $ 4,000 vs $ 10,000.

Even though modern computers are speed supercomputers in comparison to yesteryear’s computers the modern workstation is ahead of the Joneses as well. You can never keep up.

Maybe it is the software the workstations use. Most workstations are designed to run UNIX or Linux based operating systems. PCs run Microsoft Windows or Apple Macintosh software.

Nothing said in stone that your new computer cannot run Linix or a Linux distro as well as Windows and be dual boot.

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AROS
I have a confession to make. I never owned an Amiga. Back when Amiga owners had a multi-tasking GUI running on top of a microkernel, I was using Windows 3.0 on MS-DOS. And I’m still bitter.

For those of us who missed out the first time, the AROS Research Operating System (AROS) provides some surrogate nostalgia. For its era, the AROS OS was an impressive piece of work. It ran on very slow hardware (by today’s standards), but still managed to provide an impressive user experience. Of course, this came at a cost.

Perhaps the biggest price paid by the AROS OS was the lack of protected memory. This is seen as vital these days; the idea that one rogue application could trample over another’s memory seems remarkably quaint. Swapping, something that usually goes hand-in-hand with virtual memory, is similarly absent.

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