Prakash Advani's Blog

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Raspberry Pi Foundation is offering a $25 Ubuntu PC. Its very tiny, has an HDMI port at one end and USB at the other. This brings in a very low cost computing solution to the market. Its also low power consumption due to the ARM processor.

Vital Stats!

• 700MHz ARM11
• 128MB of SDRAM
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
• Composite and HDMI video output
• USB 2.0
• SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
• General-purpose I/O
• Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)

What is special about the Open-PC?

• Hardware and Software is selected by the Linux Community
• The PC is preconfigured and easy to use by everybody
• Telephone and Email support is included.
• Only free software is used, including the drivers
• Only fully documented hardware is used
• There are different manufacturers who build and sell the Open-PCs
• A part of the price is a donation to KDE
• Everything, including the software, is developed in the open. Everybody can contribute.

Open PC.

I have been using 64-Bit Ubuntu for a while and all the apps that I was using were available in 64-Bit version. Until I was to install Adobe Air. The binary provided on Adobe’s side is 32-Bit only. Found this nice blog post which explains how to make it work on 64-bit Ubuntu, this documentation is better than the suggestions given in Adobe’s knowledge base.

I have uploaded the file, You can down it from here if you need:

64-Bit version of Adobe Air for Ubuntu.

There is new patch for the X, which can improve the FPS (Frames Per Second) by upto 60 percent

This will benefit applications that use indirect rendering only which means it only affects applications which don’t directly write to the frame buffer. Which most of the high end games do, to get optimal performance.

It still a big improvement, read more.

After the Motorola Atrix which runs both Android and a Linux based OS, ARM showcased a TI OMAP4 based phone that runs Ubuntu and Android.

Todays phones have become powerful enough to as a phone as well as provide basic PC functionality. This should get more PCs accessible to People, as more people today have mobile phones than PCs.

We organised the Ubuntu Developer Day in Bangalore and received 350+ attendees. We had people travel all the way from Sri Lanka, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and elsewhere..

Most of the people were already Ubuntu users and I was happy to see the laptops people were using, all of them running Ubuntu.

This was Canonicals first event and presentations can be downloaded from: http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntudeveloperday

Here is some nice coverage we received.

First ever Ubuntu developer day in India renews tryst with Open Source

Nigel also did a nice blog post and so did Raghavendra .

Here are some photos of People, food and the goody bags 🙂

More than 40% of U.S. customers who purchased smartphones over the last six months have chosen Android-based phones.

Apple is still leading with 28.6 percent, followed by RIM (Blackberry) at 26.1 percent and Andorid at 25. percent. With the current growth, it won’t be long before Andorid becomes number 1. Read the complete report.

I accidently set my default application for PDF to OpenOffice, it was a royal pain, you know where..:)

After googling, I came across many articles which explained how to setup a default application, but none of them explained how to change it.

Here is a simple way to change it. You may already know this, however this is for someone who gets stuck and doesn’t know how to change this.

Right click on the file, that you want you want to change the association.

Select Properties-Open With and change the default application.

The London Stock Exchange has said its new Linux-based system is delivering world record networking speed, with 126 microsecond trading times.

The 126 microsecond speed is “twice as fast” as its main international competitors, the London Stock Exchange said. BATS Europe and Chi-X, two dedicated electronic rivals to the LSE, are reported to have an average latency of 250 and 175 microseconds respectively. Netiher company immediately provided details. But many of the LSE’s older and more traditional rivals offer speeds of around 300 to 400 microseconds. Nevertheless, Linux is now standard in many exchanges.

Read More

Nginx (pronounced as engine-X) is beating Apache as a web server in terms of performance. Its being used by WordPress, Hulu and SourceForge. As per recent Netcraft survey, its already the number 3 web server after Apache and Microsoft with 6.62 percent marketshare.

In a test carried out by Linux Journal, Nginx beat Apache by nearly double performance with less than 1/2 the resources. Its able to do this because of its architecture and yes its open source.

To know more:

Official Web site

Wiki

If you want to jazz up your open office presentation, you can install openoffice OpenGL transition library to get very cool 3D transition effects.

On Ubuntu, just install this package

openoffice.org-ogltrans

Now you will have these additional slide transitions which you can use. You would find these at the end of the list of slide transitions.

• Flipping tiles
• Outside turning cube
• Revolving circles
• Turning helix
• Inside turning cube
• Fall
• Turn around
• Iris
• Turn down
• Rochade

Have Fun 🙂 and impress your Powerpoint friends.

The good old X Server is finally getting a replacement. Wayland will provide a replacement but can co-exists along side X Server for compatibility and features. It will also reduce the complexity today where for 3D effect, we are running Compiz.

The X architecture has been around for a decades now. It has gone through many iterations and improvements, however it still suffers from complexities and performance issues. These become bigger challenges when you are working on smaller devices such as phones, where X becomes an over head.

The X Server provides a network layer which is useful when you are running application on one device and output is displayed on another. Such as in thin clients setups. However even there X has been replaced by NX, VNC etc. The Qt team created Qt Extended (formerly known as Qtopia) which made direct calls to the frame buffer and eliminiated the need for X. This was a useful for embedded devices, however was limited to applications that used pure Qt APIs and didn’t make any X calls, which means all X applications were out. This limited its use, and never became a replacement for X.

Now Wayland is been designed to be a replacement for X and you should see it in your favourite distribution in the next 12 months.  Hold your breath, this would still require applications to be modified to use Wayland APIs instead of X APIs.

X Architecture today.

Wayland Architecture.

Full explanation of the Architecture.

Frequently Asked Questions.

I have updated the Ubuntu vs Windows Hardware requirements to include Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 10.04, memory requirements still remains a humble 256MB which hasn’t changed in the last 10 releases 🙂

Nice article from PC World.

I have been using Torrents for Ubuntu downloads, do you?

If you are planning to run torrent on a remote computer which you want to control using a browser, then TorrentFlux is for you. It allows multiple users to use one system as a torrent server.

I am running TorrentFlux on the Plug Computer, it works well. Its also easy to use and manage. Its available on standard Ubuntu repository so you can set it up on any desktop/netbook running Ubuntu.

Once Installed, just go to the IP address of the computer where Torrent Flux is installed. Eg.

http://192.168.0.1/torrentflux

Where 192.168.0.1 is the IP address of the computer where TorrentFlux is installed.

Here are the list of features.

• Upload Torrents via URL or File Upload
• Start, Stop, and Delete Torrents with a click
• Advanced Torrent start options (encryption, ports, speeds, etc.)
• Multi-user interface
• RSS Feeds, download Torrents files with a click
• View Download Progress of all torrents at a glance
• View drive space at a glance
• View Torrent file meta information
• Built-in User management and Security
• Private Messaging between users.
• Themes (selectable per user)
• Upload History
• Detailed User Administration
• Admin Searchable Logs
• Advanced Torrent Search (many major sites included)
• Cookie support at the user level for private trackers
• Queue Manager
• Maketorrent — supports making torrents
• Language Support
• Open Source (GPL)

TorrentFlux official website.

I am highly fascinated by the Plug Computer, ever since I got one (courtesy Marvell). Since its small, consumers very little power (2 watts) hence environmental friendly and can do a number of things like downloading latest Ubuntu  over night 🙂

I was trying to get Reliance Netconnect data card to setup on the Plug Computer, to be able to download during the night when its more cost effective to download. I have the plug sitting around for a year now but I finally thought of putting it to some use. The plug computer was pre-installed with Ubuntu 9.10, that runs an older kernel on which my data card was not detected. Hence I decided to install Debian.

I followed These instructions:  Installing Deiban on flashi.

Note: It is a long process to install, so attempt if you have ample amount of time and know Linux reasonably well. And yes are willing to burn the midnight oil 🙂

Most of the steps given on the wiki worked well. Here are a few suggestions based on my experience in installing.

• You can monitor the progress on another laptop, just connect a standard USB cable into your computer and plug the other side micro USB slot into the Plug Computer. Now start any terminal client (such as putty) and configure with the following settings:

Connection Type: Serial

Port: /dev/ttyUSB0

Speed: 115,200

Data Bits: 8

Stop Bits: 1

Parity (Bits): None

Flow Control: None

On Ubuntu,  I just start terminal and type

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

This will show all the bootup messages  on the plug.

• You need an empty SD Card/USB pen drive plugged in. Without this, you will go through the installation process and then at the final stages it will not be able to install. This is because Debian first installs on an external media, and then you can copy the image to internal flash. Note: Ensure that you have 512-1GB free and its a blank SD Card/USB drive with no critical data as it will need to be formatted. I used

• I first tried to start the boot loader from a pen drive but I had all kinds of issues. I tried different pendrives/external drives, etc. But none of them worked. I tried formatting as fat32 and ext2, but no luck. I finally setup a tftpd server and that worked well. My suggestion is use a tftpd server. You can easily set this up on another Ubuntu system on the network. You will also need to open your firewall port for tftp to boot. Note: The standard tftpd server document is outdated, so better to install any other tftpd server such as atftpd or tftpd-hpa. I tried the atptpd and it worked well.

After going through the whole process, I was rather surprised to see that there was no wvdial,  so I used pppconfig, which took sometime to setup but worked with my 3G data card.

While looking for presentation tools, I came across PDF Cube. To use this, you need to convert your presentations into PDF. OpenOffice.org already has this feature of exporting your presentations as PDFs.

You also need to install this utility. On Ubuntu its already there in the  repository, for other Operating system you can download it.

Once your presentation is in PDF just go to terminal and type:

pdfcube filename.pdf

Replace filename.pdf with your actual file name.

Now the keys to use to see the effects during the presentation:

c : Will go to the next slide using a cube transition effect.

z : Will zoom in the center of the slide.

h : Will zoom in the top left part of the slide.

j : Will zoom in the top right part of the slide.

k : will zoom in the bottom left part of the slide.

l : will zoom in the bottom right  part of the slide.

The application is under development and expect to see more effects in the future.

“In terms of sales, smartphones powered by Android are expected to surpass these of Symbian as early as 2012,” he said, reports the Telegraph.

Its time Nokia considers offering Android based phone.

“If Nokia joins the Android party, the support of this eco-system by all key players could help the mobile smartphone industry to potentially commoditise its software business much like what Microsoft did in the PC world,” he said.

If Nokia continues in its current strategy, it would be addressing “niche markets,” Kamal-Saadi added.

Read More.

Broadcom which until now refused to open their Wi-Fi  drivers, has released their Linux WiFi Drivers under Open Source.

This is great for Linux users, as Broadcom was one of the few chipsets for which there were no open source drivers. While you could use Windows drivers on Linux using NDIS wrapper, it had its share of problems.

This should also help Broadcom as people can improve their drivers and fix bugs as well.

Two of the other major Wi-Fi chipsets: Atheros and Intel are already WiFi. Also most of the hardware today works out of the box with Linux. As far as graphics is concerned, Intel and ATI (AMD) have both open sourced their graphic drivers well. NVIDIA has good Linux drivers, however they are proprietary. Looking forward to them opening up next.

Read More.

I was  trying to find the IP address of a device which was connected to the network and had secured the IP address using DHCP.

The easiest way to check was to look for the DHCP Server logs, but since that was not possible I did a port scan. Here are the simple steps on Ubuntu.

This will only work if you know that the particular PC has certain services running such as SSH, only then will this step work as you can search for devices with a particular port open.

First insall nmap, which is a port scanning utility. You can either use Ubuntu Software Software or type apt-get install nmap

Now go to Applications-Accessories-Terminal and type this.

nmap -v -p22 192.168.1.1-255  | grep open

This showed me all devices where port 22 was open.

-p = Port

22 = Port number, 22 is for ssh, 80 for http and so on. 

No spaces between -p and the port number.

If you don’t know which port to scan, this command will give you a list of services and port numbers:  cat /etc/services

192.168.1.1-255 is the range of IP addresses so this will scan all IPs  from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.255

Note: This may show more than one device if there are other devices with similar ports open, so you would need to know which one you are looking for.