I got to play with one for a few minutes recently. I wasn't convinced it would be a great general-purpose computer for an adult: the keys aren't designed for full-sized fingers, and it seemed slow.
A fundamental assumption of Linux is that constantly changing interfaces is no problem because the legions of faceless programmers will gladly rewrite everything each time around.
It's not legions of faceless programmers that are supposed to fix it up. It's the person that actually patches the kernel to make that particular kernel change. Submit the driver, and this stuff just happens for you automatically as part of the kernel development process. I mean, sure, there are screwups sometimes, so you still need to retest every now and then. But for the most part API changes get handled for you by the people that make them, once your driver is in the tree.
I won't bother submitting this driver to the free driver project because it's kind of useless without the $3000 piece of hardware it works with (and that's not counting the crates full of minicomputer hardware needed for testing).
Take a look a Documentation/SubmittingDrivers and Documentation/SubmittingPatches in your friendly local kernel tree. There's a lot of stuff they'd like you to do that'll help get drivers accepted more quickly, so I won't claim it's no work at all. But it's not *that* hard (it should be less trouble than continuing to maintain the thing out-of-tree). And nowhere is there any mention of requirements on number of users, cost of hardware, or expense of testing. Obscure drivers are welcomed.
It's unconventional ("we and pogue" would be more idiomatic), but I don't think it's ungrammatical; note that this is a subject, not an object (hence "we", not "us"). Am I missing something?
However, one thing has kept XP on my system (dual-boot)-- drivers.
Which is, of course, why Linux desktop users might be watching these numbers--every additional user is potentially a few more bucks available to device manufacturers who choose to help develop high-quality free Linux drivers.
Re:misleading...Re:Asshole Stereotype
on
When Not to Use chroot
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Man, things like this make me want to NOT switch to Linux... Even though I had a better experience with Ubuntu that I did Vista.
Go ahead. One of the (many) differences between Vista and Linux is that if you want to, you can march up to any of the core Linux kernel architects and tell them they have some fundamental long-standing unix interface totally wrong. The flip side of that is that they also won't stop anyone from flaming you if you do that.
And that's exactly what happened here. This guy wasn't posting a question on a local LUG. He was posting to the Linux kernel mailing list--the place where people actually meet to do kernel development. And he wasn't asking a question, he was arguing with people like Al Viro, a primary architect of the Linux filesystem api's. Which would be great if he was correct. But in fact he was totally wrong. And even that would be OK if he took the time to do his homework and to listen carefully when people explained the issue to him.
But he didn't really, so as a result he got a few flames. Some of the posters to lkml aren't polite in such a situation. I think that's kind of understandable, though actually agree that that's a problem. Are the core Vista kernel developers any better? Who knows? Does the general public doesn't have the option of participating in their development forums?
The problem is that - for many root-running processes - running chroot has often been recommended as a security practice.
Reference? A quick google search for "bind chroot" finds several howto's explaining how to run bind under chroot as a non-root user. None that I can find suggest chroot and root.
My understanding is that userspace applications (like the gsynaptic utility) need the kernel driver to expose an additional api which they didn't for this particular model of touchpad because it wasn't recognized as a synaptics-compatible touchpad. So while a kernel change might not normally be needed to use something like gsynaptic, it was in this case. See this Ubuntu bug.
Actually, I just checked, and as of gutsy (the 1420n is shipping with feisty), my gnome mouse preferences dialog *does* include a "touchpad" tab with options to turn on and off tapping, vertical scrolling, and horizontal scrolling. So they're solving this problem.
What bothers me most about Gnome is that this seems to be a conscious decision on the part of Gnome: They don't want too many config options, because they're afraid of confusing people.
I'm familiar with the argument. I don't think it applies here. For one thing, there does seem to be a gnome-based configuration utility (gsynaptic), but it doesn't look completely ready to me yet. For example, I'd think it would be easier to find if it were part of the regular mouse configuration dialog. It probably wouldn't be too hard to hack on this for anyone interested....
But even with that problem solved they would still have had to deal with the fact that the kernel shipped with Feisty didn't recognize that particular touchpad. I suppose the smart thing would have been to offer an upgrade kernel (or just to apply that one patch; I think it was a simple patch).
No, that doesn't work. What he wants to be able to do is control the sensitivity of the touchpad--how hard you have to press on it before it registers a touch--and the tap feature. I have this same notebook (the 1420n), it is quite easy to accidentally produce a "tap" which is effectively a left-click. The only way I know of to fix the problem is with a kernel upgrade (alowing it to recognize this particular hardware as a touchpad with something more than a minimal ps/2 mouse interface) and a touchpad-specific configuration utility.
I'm very happy with the 1420n. It's a great machine for a Linux enthusiast (and it's an advance in terms of usability), but it's not yet a great machine for the average user who doesn't care what OS they get. This looks like a very well-done review to me, and accurate based on my experiences.
They're not configured to be sensitive enough for me. It's a preference and as long as you can configure it simply I don't see the problem if it's still useable enough to get to System / Preferences / Mouse.
No, I have a 1420n myself, and the necessary preference isn't there. The sort of sensitivity he's talking about isn't configurable via the ordinary gnome mouse dialog--you need an extra synaptics-specific configuration utility that wasn't installed by default, and (if I remember correctly) a kernel patch to recognize the touchpad as something more than an ordinary ps/2 mouse.
Whilst reviews are great, it would have been nice if he could've asked a simple question about this on the ubuntu forum - I guess Windows users aren't used to the option of doing that.
He may well have done that, but the answer he would have gotten (upgrade your kernel, etc.) wouldn't have been interesting to the intended audience for this article, and he would have ended up saying the same thing anyway (that workarounds were available, but that most users would find them complex).
And, by the way, I'm quite happy with my 1420n. Like him, I'd recommend it to people that are interested specifically in trying Linux, but wouldn't recommend it to the general computer user yet.
Yah. Not to put words in the original poster's mouth, but I'm guessing what they meant was "under a license compatible with the upstream projects", and the upstream project they came immediately to mind was the GPL-licensed kernel.
The important thing is not to end up in a situation like openafs, say, where the code's under an open source license that has some technical conflict with the GPL and as a result has to be maintained outside the tree for ever....
The same is true in my state. But in elections that aren't big national elections (like city council) it's rare for there to be a line. People should pay more attention to local politics....
outsourcing to India (they talk a lot about India actually)
They don't talk about outsourcing anywhere; the word isn't even used once as far as I can tell.
The interview appears to have been conducted (and the questions provided by) Indians, so questions like "[how could we] encourage Indians to get involved and contribute heavily [to open source]?" are not surprising. I thought they were interesting questions, actually.
Re:I don't think it means what you think it does.
on
The Linux Weather Forecast
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think the word "roadmap" would imply some control over the process--this is what we plan to do next and when we're hoping to do it by, etc.
The nature of the Linux community is such that there's not really anybody with the authority to give such a roadmap. Linus can say "no" to people, but he can't make them work on anything they're not interested in. And it's difficult for the various groups implementing new features to guarantee somebody else won't come up with a valid objection that will delay acceptance.
So "forecast" seems more appropriate. They can examine various projects, guess which are closer to being done and which aren't, but can't promise anything.
Re:Fair??? Language, please...
on
SCO Loses
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· Score: 1
I figure he probably did believe that.
So what? Evaluating the quality of the information he's being fed is part of his job. And it's not as though this SCO-IBM case was some minor sideline for him. If it was what he was spending most of his time on for several years, couldn't he have devoted just a few days to actually studying the arguments for and against their case? It's not as though they were rocket science.
At some point I find it a little hard to distinguish between someone who's actively cheating and someone who's just showing gross incompetence that happens to be in their favor....
Are there notebooks with Ubuntu that have a modem built in?
The Dell 1420n that I'm posting from has a modem that is "supported" by the preinstalled Ubuntu OS. With "supported" in quotes only because the supported depends on a proprietary bits. (And I haven't heard anything to indicate that's likely to change soon.) But it should work. I haven't tried to use it, though.
OK, fair enough, I don't remember that previous announcement.
But I figure linux on the desktop is going to be a long gradual effort, and this sort of thing is going to keep happening--companies will try it out, then drop it again, then try it again; when they try it, they'll probably keep it well distinct from their windows offerings to minimize the risk of anybody getting a laptop that doesn't run the software 99% of their customers want to run. Etc. I don't really care about being "treated as a second class citizen" if I can still find something I need at a price I can accept.
(That said, my most recent experience with Lenovo didn't endear me to them: an over 2-month-delay on a laptop initially projected to deliver in a couple weeks, failure of the 1400x1050 screen, rma which silently replaced it by a 1024x768 screen, then finally (after a month back at the repair center), replacement with a screen of the correct resolution that failed in the same way after 3 days, plus miscellaneous other damage done at the repair center. Ugh. I eventually got a refund, and am now posting this from a Dell 1420n, which I'm happier with....)
Also, that probably isn't being distributed - my guess is, it's downloading the drivers on first boot - Ubuntu gives you the option to do that if you have hardware that's supported by a closed source driver.
No, those drivers were installed from the start.
At least, it certainly didn't ask me if I wanted to download them. I'll admit ethernet was plugged in on first boot, so it *could* in theory have downloaded them silently without telling me, but that seems unlikely.
Their wiki also suggests that "restricted" drivers are pre-installed.
I'm glad to hear that someone is having a good experience with the 1420n 'cuz I'm about to get one myself.
I'd recommend it for someone that's looking for a Linux laptop. I don't think I'd recommend it for somebody that just wants a laptop (and doesn't care about the OS) yet.
Physically it's bigger than I'm used to--all my previous laptops have had 10-12" screens, this is 14"--and I do find it a little cumbersome, but it's not bad. I got the high-resolution screen, which looks fantastic, though the glossiness might make it impractical for, say, working with your back to a window. Keyboard and the rest seem fine. The speakers seem less crummy than the average laptop speakers, if you care.
From the free software point of view--it looks like it has just the two proprietary bits (wireless and modem drivers), with the need for the former hopefully going away in future kernels. They seem to be *very* close to just plain upstream ubuntu (some details here--it seems to be not much more than installing a few extra packages and changing the default firefox home page.) Problems are being tracked in Ubuntu's bug tracker.
Problems I've seen so far: the worst is that using any sort of 3D stuff crashes the system (requiring a reboot!): so don't try to play tuxracer or turn on desktop effects. The new intel driver fixes this but doesn't seem quite ready yet. I suspect if I really cared I could install something experimental and get it working. Less major: the gnome volume applet dies after suspend/resume, so you get a "reload this applet?" dialog on every resume unless you just remove it.
It's set up with one big partition plus a small boot partition. There's some recovery software on there somewhere, I guess, so you can reinstall from scratch from the hard drive if needed.
Ubuntu has some impressive little bits of polish: wireless network discovery and setup is nicely automated, and it switches between wired and wireless automatically when you insert or remove the ethernet cable; updates are very easy; running a non-installed command results in a prompt suggesting which package you might want to install; running totem with an uninstalled codec similarly leads to help installing it (though of course it doesn't work for the usual patent- and drm- encode codecs--if you want to watch your DVD's you get to go track down the necessary 3rd-party apt repo on your own. Which isn't hard.); the silly media buttons (volume, fast-forward/rewind, etc.) all seem to work with the programs you'd expect them to. Etc.
The packaging still shows some signs of this being a first effort: the paper user-manual, though it has useful OS-neutral stuff (how to remove the keyboard, access the memory sockets, etc.), also has Windows-specific instructions. The only reference to Ubuntu is one copy of a Ubuntu CD.
I did the obvious test, that I've done for a number of other such "Linux is available on FOO" announcements: I went to lenovo.com, and tried to configure a laptop that ran linux.
I think you missed the use of the future tense in this particular announcement....
The really interesting thing about having Linux per-installed is that they can't include binary-blobs that link to the kernel (e.g. ATi and nVidia drivers).
I have one of the Ubuntu-preinstalled Dell laptops (the 1420n), and it does include two binary drivers: one for the wireless, and one for the modem. The wireless card is actually supported by free drivers (albeit with non-free firmware) in more recent kernels, just not in the particular kernel supported in Feisty Fawn. Dell is also selling Ubuntu desktops with nVidia video.
It does seem dubious, and hope they'll be able to do better in the future. Oh well.
(For what it's worth, I'm quite happy with this laptop (which I'm posting from). It was nice for once to be able to just take the laptop out of the box, turn it on, and use it, without the usual fuss required to install the OS I actually need. And they seem to be working well with upstream--the factory install seems to be *very* close to a stock Ubuntu installation, so I don't have any worries about it being abandoned.)
Actually, it doesn't work like that. What actually happens is that the code which is maintained poorly gets dropped.
That's a pretty unfortunate situation if the unmaintained code is still actually used by someone. Even if another alternative has come along with a superset of the given features, if they provide different system interfaces--so if it would mean rewriting scripts or applications or retraining users--then the migration can be a pain. And you want people to be able to drop a new kernel into an old working system--otherwise it's hard for them to get security fixes, for example.
So userspace-visible stuff shouldn't really be going into the kernel unless everybody's pretty confident that it can be maintained indefinitely.
That said, yeah, if someone notices that filesystem FooFS has been completely broken for ages and nobody has even noticed, then that's a pretty good argument for dropping it. But even then it's not just because it's unmaintained, it's because at that point you're pretty sure nobody really gives a crap about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I got to play with one for a few minutes recently. I wasn't convinced it would be a great general-purpose computer for an adult: the keys aren't designed for full-sized fingers, and it seemed slow.
But I have to admit, it's absolutely adorable.
It's not legions of faceless programmers that are supposed to fix it up. It's the person that actually patches the kernel to make that particular kernel change. Submit the driver, and this stuff just happens for you automatically as part of the kernel development process. I mean, sure, there are screwups sometimes, so you still need to retest every now and then. But for the most part API changes get handled for you by the people that make them, once your driver is in the tree.
Take a look a Documentation/SubmittingDrivers and Documentation/SubmittingPatches in your friendly local kernel tree. There's a lot of stuff they'd like you to do that'll help get drivers accepted more quickly, so I won't claim it's no work at all. But it's not *that* hard (it should be less trouble than continuing to maintain the thing out-of-tree). And nowhere is there any mention of requirements on number of users, cost of hardware, or expense of testing. Obscure drivers are welcomed.
Oh, probably just a particularly dumb case of guilt by association--I probably accepted the first AC's misreading of the comment.
It's unconventional ("we and pogue" would be more idiomatic), but I don't think it's ungrammatical; note that this is a subject, not an object (hence "we", not "us"). Am I missing something?
Which is, of course, why Linux desktop users might be watching these numbers--every additional user is potentially a few more bucks available to device manufacturers who choose to help develop high-quality free Linux drivers.
Go ahead. One of the (many) differences between Vista and Linux is that if you want to, you can march up to any of the core Linux kernel architects and tell them they have some fundamental long-standing unix interface totally wrong. The flip side of that is that they also won't stop anyone from flaming you if you do that.
And that's exactly what happened here. This guy wasn't posting a question on a local LUG. He was posting to the Linux kernel mailing list--the place where people actually meet to do kernel development. And he wasn't asking a question, he was arguing with people like Al Viro, a primary architect of the Linux filesystem api's. Which would be great if he was correct. But in fact he was totally wrong. And even that would be OK if he took the time to do his homework and to listen carefully when people explained the issue to him.
But he didn't really, so as a result he got a few flames. Some of the posters to lkml aren't polite in such a situation. I think that's kind of understandable, though actually agree that that's a problem. Are the core Vista kernel developers any better? Who knows? Does the general public doesn't have the option of participating in their development forums?
Reference? A quick google search for "bind chroot" finds several howto's explaining how to run bind under chroot as a non-root user. None that I can find suggest chroot and root.
My understanding is that userspace applications (like the gsynaptic utility) need the kernel driver to expose an additional api which they didn't for this particular model of touchpad because it wasn't recognized as a synaptics-compatible touchpad. So while a kernel change might not normally be needed to use something like gsynaptic, it was in this case. See this Ubuntu bug.
Actually, I just checked, and as of gutsy (the 1420n is shipping with feisty), my gnome mouse preferences dialog *does* include a "touchpad" tab with options to turn on and off tapping, vertical scrolling, and horizontal scrolling. So they're solving this problem.
No, that doesn't work. What he wants to be able to do is control the sensitivity of the touchpad--how hard you have to press on it before it registers a touch--and the tap feature. I have this same notebook (the 1420n), it is quite easy to accidentally produce a "tap" which is effectively a left-click. The only way I know of to fix the problem is with a kernel upgrade (alowing it to recognize this particular hardware as a touchpad with something more than a minimal ps/2 mouse interface) and a touchpad-specific configuration utility.
I'm very happy with the 1420n. It's a great machine for a Linux enthusiast (and it's an advance in terms of usability), but it's not yet a great machine for the average user who doesn't care what OS they get. This looks like a very well-done review to me, and accurate based on my experiences.
No, I have a 1420n myself, and the necessary preference isn't there. The sort of sensitivity he's talking about isn't configurable via the ordinary gnome mouse dialog--you need an extra synaptics-specific configuration utility that wasn't installed by default, and (if I remember correctly) a kernel patch to recognize the touchpad as something more than an ordinary ps/2 mouse.
He may well have done that, but the answer he would have gotten (upgrade your kernel, etc.) wouldn't have been interesting to the intended audience for this article, and he would have ended up saying the same thing anyway (that workarounds were available, but that most users would find them complex).
And, by the way, I'm quite happy with my 1420n. Like him, I'd recommend it to people that are interested specifically in trying Linux, but wouldn't recommend it to the general computer user yet.
Yah. Not to put words in the original poster's mouth, but I'm guessing what they meant was "under a license compatible with the upstream projects", and the upstream project they came immediately to mind was the GPL-licensed kernel.
The important thing is not to end up in a situation like openafs, say, where the code's under an open source license that has some technical conflict with the GPL and as a result has to be maintained outside the tree for ever....
The same is true in my state. But in elections that aren't big national elections (like city council) it's rare for there to be a line. People should pay more attention to local politics....
They don't talk about outsourcing anywhere; the word isn't even used once as far as I can tell.
The interview appears to have been conducted (and the questions provided by) Indians, so questions like "[how could we] encourage Indians to get involved and contribute heavily [to open source]?" are not surprising. I thought they were interesting questions, actually.
I think the word "roadmap" would imply some control over the process--this is what we plan to do next and when we're hoping to do it by, etc.
The nature of the Linux community is such that there's not really anybody with the authority to give such a roadmap. Linus can say "no" to people, but he can't make them work on anything they're not interested in. And it's difficult for the various groups implementing new features to guarantee somebody else won't come up with a valid objection that will delay acceptance.
So "forecast" seems more appropriate. They can examine various projects, guess which are closer to being done and which aren't, but can't promise anything.
So what? Evaluating the quality of the information he's being fed is part of his job. And it's not as though this SCO-IBM case was some minor sideline for him. If it was what he was spending most of his time on for several years, couldn't he have devoted just a few days to actually studying the arguments for and against their case? It's not as though they were rocket science.
At some point I find it a little hard to distinguish between someone who's actively cheating and someone who's just showing gross incompetence that happens to be in their favor....
The Dell 1420n that I'm posting from has a modem that is "supported" by the preinstalled Ubuntu OS. With "supported" in quotes only because the supported depends on a proprietary bits. (And I haven't heard anything to indicate that's likely to change soon.) But it should work. I haven't tried to use it, though.
OK, fair enough, I don't remember that previous announcement.
But I figure linux on the desktop is going to be a long gradual effort, and this sort of thing is going to keep happening--companies will try it out, then drop it again, then try it again; when they try it, they'll probably keep it well distinct from their windows offerings to minimize the risk of anybody getting a laptop that doesn't run the software 99% of their customers want to run. Etc. I don't really care about being "treated as a second class citizen" if I can still find something I need at a price I can accept.
(That said, my most recent experience with Lenovo didn't endear me to them: an over 2-month-delay on a laptop initially projected to deliver in a couple weeks, failure of the 1400x1050 screen, rma which silently replaced it by a 1024x768 screen, then finally (after a month back at the repair center), replacement with a screen of the correct resolution that failed in the same way after 3 days, plus miscellaneous other damage done at the repair center. Ugh. I eventually got a refund, and am now posting this from a Dell 1420n, which I'm happier with....)
No, those drivers were installed from the start.
At least, it certainly didn't ask me if I wanted to download them. I'll admit ethernet was plugged in on first boot, so it *could* in theory have downloaded them silently without telling me, but that seems unlikely.
Their wiki also suggests that "restricted" drivers are pre-installed.
I'd recommend it for someone that's looking for a Linux laptop. I don't think I'd recommend it for somebody that just wants a laptop (and doesn't care about the OS) yet.
Physically it's bigger than I'm used to--all my previous laptops have had 10-12" screens, this is 14"--and I do find it a little cumbersome, but it's not bad. I got the high-resolution screen, which looks fantastic, though the glossiness might make it impractical for, say, working with your back to a window. Keyboard and the rest seem fine. The speakers seem less crummy than the average laptop speakers, if you care.
From the free software point of view--it looks like it has just the two proprietary bits (wireless and modem drivers), with the need for the former hopefully going away in future kernels. They seem to be *very* close to just plain upstream ubuntu (some details here--it seems to be not much more than installing a few extra packages and changing the default firefox home page.) Problems are being tracked in Ubuntu's bug tracker.
Problems I've seen so far: the worst is that using any sort of 3D stuff crashes the system (requiring a reboot!): so don't try to play tuxracer or turn on desktop effects. The new intel driver fixes this but doesn't seem quite ready yet. I suspect if I really cared I could install something experimental and get it working. Less major: the gnome volume applet dies after suspend/resume, so you get a "reload this applet?" dialog on every resume unless you just remove it.
It's set up with one big partition plus a small boot partition. There's some recovery software on there somewhere, I guess, so you can reinstall from scratch from the hard drive if needed.
Ubuntu has some impressive little bits of polish: wireless network discovery and setup is nicely automated, and it switches between wired and wireless automatically when you insert or remove the ethernet cable; updates are very easy; running a non-installed command results in a prompt suggesting which package you might want to install; running totem with an uninstalled codec similarly leads to help installing it (though of course it doesn't work for the usual patent- and drm- encode codecs--if you want to watch your DVD's you get to go track down the necessary 3rd-party apt repo on your own. Which isn't hard.); the silly media buttons (volume, fast-forward/rewind, etc.) all seem to work with the programs you'd expect them to. Etc.
The packaging still shows some signs of this being a first effort: the paper user-manual, though it has useful OS-neutral stuff (how to remove the keyboard, access the memory sockets, etc.), also has Windows-specific instructions. The only reference to Ubuntu is one copy of a Ubuntu CD.
So, some problems, but I like it a lot anyway.
I think you missed the use of the future tense in this particular announcement....
I have one of the Ubuntu-preinstalled Dell laptops (the 1420n), and it does include two binary drivers: one for the wireless, and one for the modem. The wireless card is actually supported by free drivers (albeit with non-free firmware) in more recent kernels, just not in the particular kernel supported in Feisty Fawn. Dell is also selling Ubuntu desktops with nVidia video.
It does seem dubious, and hope they'll be able to do better in the future. Oh well.
(For what it's worth, I'm quite happy with this laptop (which I'm posting from). It was nice for once to be able to just take the laptop out of the box, turn it on, and use it, without the usual fuss required to install the OS I actually need. And they seem to be working well with upstream--the factory install seems to be *very* close to a stock Ubuntu installation, so I don't have any worries about it being abandoned.)
That's a pretty unfortunate situation if the unmaintained code is still actually used by someone. Even if another alternative has come along with a superset of the given features, if they provide different system interfaces--so if it would mean rewriting scripts or applications or retraining users--then the migration can be a pain. And you want people to be able to drop a new kernel into an old working system--otherwise it's hard for them to get security fixes, for example.
So userspace-visible stuff shouldn't really be going into the kernel unless everybody's pretty confident that it can be maintained indefinitely.
That said, yeah, if someone notices that filesystem FooFS has been completely broken for ages and nobody has even noticed, then that's a pretty good argument for dropping it. But even then it's not just because it's unmaintained, it's because at that point you're pretty sure nobody really gives a crap about it.
Well, here's one source claiming that usage. I don't know how common it is.