There seems to be a number of people that do not like Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth.  I'm not going to express my opinions just yet, but thought that it may be interesting to present two stories I read over the weekend.

Adam Williamson's "Why I don't like Canonical" and the response from Canonical's Community Manager, Jono Bacon.

Have a read, and comment with your thoughts, I'd be interested to hear opinions.

Alright, so I've had the 901 now for a week and I thought it would be a good time to put up a post giving my thoughts on actually running it.  (also, I started preparing this blog entry whilst sitting on the tube at 7am on a Sunday morning - how cool is that)

Firstly, and probably most importantly was the email I received from Sam on Tuesday regarding a fantastic package called eee-control.  I think this is a little bit like the ubuntu eee holy grail.  It requires that you are running adamm's customised kernel, and one or two extra python packages, but nothing too stressful due to the joy of deb's dependency solving.  Once installed and rebooted I can now turn on/off my wifi, bluetooth, camera and sdcard reader (all good when maximising battery potential).  I can also reconfigure the 4 hotkeys to do whatever I want them to... brilliant.  Very chuffed with this, and the system-tray icon is a very snazy Eee.

One of the things that I forgot to mention about the Eee 901 previously is the amazing touchpad.  I think that it is a really good size for this machine, but the coolest thing is that it is multi-touch.  Using 2 fingers on the touchpad means that you can scroll up and down, you can 'pinch and pull' images to zoom in and out.  What I also discovered this week was that you can use three fingers on the pad as well, and this relates to a right click.  It takes a bit of getting used to, but all in all fabulous.

I'm still getting used to the keyboard, but it really is not all that terrible.  I wouldn't like to try and type up a thesis on it, but for emails and and perhaps a couple of hours typing,  It's not all that bad.

Now for the issue - and only one so far which I believe might be a small manufacturing defect on my physical machine.  For whatever reason, randomly, the OS gets the signal that the lid has been closed, and opened.  I initially had the Eee set to go into standby when shutting the lid.  As you can imagine, this started causing serious havoc.  I would be working away and suddenly the machine would go into standby.  I've disabled all power management features with regards to the lid, so for now, it doesn't appear to be an issue, although every now and then the screen flickers on and off.  Below you can see an image of what my power history looks like.  Note all the lid open and lid closed notifications.  Although at this time the lid was fully up. 

The question I'm struggling with, is do I send the machine back to Asus for a repair - I have a year manufacturers warranty, or do I just live with it... I'm not sure about it because I have put ubuntu on...  plus it has a few stickers on it as well.

Finally, I have bitten the bullet and decided to buy myself an Eee PC. Those that know me personally, will know that I have been harping on about getting one for quite some time now. A couple of weeks ago I walked into my local PCWorld to discover that they had the 904HD. This started to get me very excited, although it left me with a dilemma... do I go for the 901, the 904HD or the 1000 version (link to see the differences). 

In the end I decided on the 901 and here where my reasons. 20GB of SSD hard drive space is more than enough for what an Eee PC is for and a 10" screen I think is the upper limit for a netbook and possibly even too big (plus I couldn't really justify the extra £100). The next question was black or white... no really, did I go for the 'Fine Ebony' or 'Pearl White'. The decision was black, because as much as I initially wanted a white one, the black one is so much sexier (yes, I used the s-word).

After unpacking it, adorning it with selected Ubuntu stickers. It went on charge for about 3hrs. Then it was play time!

Ubuntu Installation

I decided that I wanted to run a 'normal' Ubuntu OS. There are some good Eee derivatives (such as Ubuntu-Eee or eeebuntu), but I felt more comfortable using a normal Ubuntu install. Luckily for me, Intrepid has a funky 'create a USB start disk' application for just this sort of occasion. Pretty easy, put USB stick into my desktop, downloaded the newest ISO, point click, point click and I theoretically I had a bootable USB live CD.
(As an aside, it appears that you can also set aside an amount of space on the USB stick for settings and documents. I think this means that you can effectively have Linux on a stick that will work on a USB bootable PC and then have your personal settings and applications already installed?? I will research this further.)

Plug into the Eee, startup, hit F2 for BIOS. Here I had a few issues. The boot selection had 'removable media' as an option. This did not work. I fiddled a little bit more and in the boot -> hard drive disk section, an option for USB drive (make sure that your USB stick is plugged in when doing this). Turned this on, reset the boot order, saved BIOS and restarted. Weehee! Ubuntu install started! 

If I were to do this again, I would do it differently. I opted for the normal graphical install - be warned, not all the installation option windows fit on the small resolution screen. I had to be careful and use the TAB and ENTER keys selectively to hope that I was on the 'next' button. This model has 2 SSD drives, one 4GB and one 16GB. They have been formatted EXT2 with the 4GB mounting as / and the 16GB mounting as /home. Wasn't too bad in the end, and a cuppa tea later I was installed and ready to go! 

Wifi

Yip, that old chestnut! Didn't work out the box, then again, who ever expects that it will, but UbuntuForums are your friend. After a little research, it seemed that one of the best solutions to all things Ubuntu and Eee was to use a customised kernel provided by array.org. I added the repositories (plugged into the router via an ethernet cable), added the medibuntu repositories, selected a number of packages to install, hit apply and made the second cup of tea! Rebooted to the new kernel, and Bob's your Uncle and Sarah's your Aunt, everything worked. Wifi, webcam, sound, bluetooth, shortcut keys. You name it, it worked! (just a point here, the webcam, wifi and bluetooth were disabled in bios, apparently the default xandros ignores this and still works, I had to enable them). 

Overall thoughts

I LOVE THIS MACHINE! It is everything that a netbook should be, small, light, fast (the atom processor has so far seriously impressed me). I can scale the CPU, choosing between 800MHz, 1.00GHz, 1.2GHz or the full 1.6GHz. Also has the on demand setting so that the CPU will scale as required. So far, and this is only on the second charge cycle, I'm getting about 5hrs of normal usage (with the wifi turned on and being used). Suspend and resume works, very cool. Now for a bit more usage. I had it up a the University library today and it was stellar, it fulfilled it's purpose, 110%. I could even connect to the Uni's wifi network!

I am a very very happy Eee owner!
 

So, 8.10 has arrived. I'm not likely to be giving it a go on anything but my testbed desktop at home, but I'm curious to hear what you early adopter whippersnappers have to say about it. Voice your opinions via the comments!

One thing that caught my eye reading one of the reviews was a bit alarming: "Incidentally, 8.10 does away entirely with the X.org configuration file, long the bane of newbies but also the savior of more experienced users. The idea is that the graphical subsystem "just works", and if it doesn't you're supposed to file a bug report."

X has come a hell of a long way since my earliest experiences with it (which frequently included blacking out in a terrible rage and waking up in a room full of inexplicably murdered computer parts) but I'd still question this move. I've had display issues necessitating xorg.conf hacking as recently as 8.04, so I hope they've done their homework.

Phoronix thinks so. It's Wirth's Law in action, of course... Ubuntu isn't immune just because it's open source, unfortunately.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_bench_2008&num=1

If you are a Virtualbox user (the commercial one from Sun), and recently had Ubuntu upgrade the kernel from 2.6.24-19 to 2.6.24-21.  You may have your virtual box freeze on you with a small window stating: spawning session.

You need to rebuild the kernel module for vbox, this achieved by running the following command:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Should work after that :-)

Nice... should be interesting to see what this does to their market share.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081009-wikipedia-adopts-ubuntu-fo...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/05/ibm_ubuntu/

Good news for us laptop folks.

http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Software/4473.html

Only 8 years later since I first started delving into Linux, and I have finally realised that I need to do give something back to the community that I am so fond of.  Sure, I have advocated and told as many people as I possibly could tell, but I need to do something a little more serious.

So, I am now officially a member of the Ubuntu Documentation Student Team and am being mentored through my first Document Revision. YAY

I will fill you in on the progress as things progress, but here we go :-)

Remember, if you too want to contribute to Ubuntu then visit the Community website and find an area that interests you.  Or join a LUG/Mailing List in your area.

Feeling inspired by Quinn's post below, I thought I would pick up where he left off and attempt some of my own tests with wine. 

System information is as follows:

• Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy)
• Kernel 2.6.22-15-generic
• Memory 1.5GB
• AMD Athlon XP 2400+
• Nvidia Geforce 6600GS (XFX)
• wine v1.0.0

I was able to install steam with no troubles, except that when it wanted to update itself after the install it continually crashed at the 26% mark.  This, luckily, is not uncommon, and can be solved by running wine at a different priority by using the following command:

$nice -n 19 wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/steam.exe

It's been recommended that running steam with the following command line code produces the best results:

$WINEDEBUG=-all wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/steam.exe

I have an account with steam, and have a Half-Life 1 product code.  Using this I was offered a range of games in the "My Games" section. I then installed Counter Strike through steam, hit the launch button and away I went.  It runs brilliantly! I dialled up the AA and AF to 4x using nvidia-settings and it was still pumping out over 40fps at 1280x1024. I would assume that it can be just as easy to run all the other HL1 spin-off games via this method (the original HL runs fine as well).  Of course if you have bandwidth restrictions, it may be an issue.

I then tried the Half-Life 2 demo also downloaded and installed via steam.  Installation was no issue, but when launching the game I got nothing but black screen and a message that said the monitor mode was not supported - some dodgy default settings causing problems.  So did a bit of reading, and if you right-click on the game and select properties you can set the launch options.  I used the following:

-width 1280 -height 1024 -refresh 60 -novid -console

This worked and we had action! The game performance is far from superior, but dialling everything back, I get between 15fps and 40fps depending on the environment.  The demo was playable and good God, I had forgotten just how fun it is to play around with the physics!

If valve do eventually port the source engine to linux, I will be the first to buy the Orange Box :-)

Gaming in Linux, oh boy. A controversial topic at best, an invitation to an insane flamefest at worst. Still, one that should be talked about, as it remains for many folks the last big stumbling block when converting from Windows. They can put up with a surprising amount of crap, but you'd be surprised how often their favourite games not working is cited as a reason for people sticking with That Other OS, especially among the more clued-up technorati.

I have to be honest here - a few years ago this was a huge issue for me. I owned PCs primarily to play games, and if they also let me do some work and general personal stuff on the side, well, that was nice but certainly not a deal-breaker. In those days the idea of buying a game and having it not run properly on my machine was unthinkable, and not having the latest bleeding edge video cards and hardware drivers was the sort of thing that kept me up at night. Windows got clean-installed at least once a month, and I lived, breathed and dreamed FPS.

If this is you now, I can save you a long and depressing read through the rest of this guide - install Windows and Linux dual boot, and boot to Windows to play your games. Simple as that. Linux has improved enormously, but it isn't quite there yet.

If however you're more like I am nowadays, you try to take a more balanced approach to life, and the computer is a general purpose hub of various activities of which gaming is just one. In such a milieu, Linux as the sole OS is much more feasible. It's very capable of doing everything Windows does in the way of software development, web browsing, email, office apps, photos, music, video, etc etc etc, and it additionally is able to run a fair share of games if you're willing to be persistent and tolerate the occasional failure.

Here follows a bullet list of what I've tried, mostly just noted down as I was doing it, so apologies if it comes over a bit terse. I started with an unremarkable clean install of Hardy Heron on my desktop PC at home, which is now getting quite long in the tooth for gaming - shame :P. It's a Shuttle XPC with an AMD Athlon64 3200+ (the 2GHz 1024k cache version) on an nForce 150 platform, an Nvidia GeForce 6800 128MB with some, er, "hacks" (less said about that the better ;-), and various other hardware bits that no one cares about and aren't germane to the discussion below. I'll also warn you now of some bias: I enjoy first person shooters. I know other kinds of games exist, but (a) I suck at them, and (b) I really suck at them, both of which result in me usually not enjoying them very much. There are exceptions of course, but that's a fair comment on the general state of my gaming predilections. This list is also not entirely complete, as I haven't tested either Diablo 2 or StarCraft, both of which are currently sitting at work. I can tell you that Blizzard's never made native installers for those games, so you'll be stuck using wine which I don't like much anyway (more on this later).

Right, let's get started...

Drivers:
Video - Installed NVidia GF drivers from Ubuntu restricted drivers manager. I don't even know what version they are (eish Reynolds - how far the mighty have fallen), but I assume they're reasonably current, and this way Ubuntu looks after updating them for me.
Sound - Whatever default OSS drivers installed with Ubuntu for the onboard sound. I only use stereo speakers anyway, so fine for my purposes.

Nexuiz:
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (bots or multiplayer)
- mode: native, written for Linux
- Install from Ubuntu repositories
- Game runs well

Alien Arena:
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (bots or multiplayer)
- mode: native, written for Linux
- Install from Ubuntu repositories
- Game runs well

Tremulous:
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (multiplayer only)
- mode: native, written for Linux
- Install from Ubuntu repositories
- Game runs well

Quake 3:
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (bots or multiplayer)
- mode: native
- Downloaded id Software installer from http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/q3a/
- Ran installer w/sudo
- Copied pk3 file(s) from Windows install CD to <q3installdir>/baseq3
- Game runs well

Doom 3:
- gametype: FPS single player and deathmatch (multiplayer only)
- mode: native
- Downloaded id Software installer from http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/doom/
- Ran installer w/sudo
- Copied pk4 file(s) 0 thru 5 from Windows install CD(s) to <d3installdir>/base
- Game runs well

Quake 4:
- gametype: FPS single player and deathmatch (multiplayer only)
- mode: native
- Downloaded id Software installer from http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/quake4/ (note: large file, ~275MB)
- Created /usr/local/games/quake4/q4base and copied all pk4 file(s) from Windows install CD(s) to it
- Ran installer w/sudo (do it this way around because installer includes patches which overwrite some of the original pk4's)
- Language defaults to spanish! Search for "seta sys_lang" line in ~/.quake4/q4base/Quake4Config.cfg and change to english :)
- Game runs well

Unreal Tournament 1999 (non-GOTY edition):
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (bots or multiplayer)
- mode: native
- Loki games maintains a Linux installer - downloaded and tested, repeatedly gave "bad checksum" error however.
- Turns out Loki installer is broken on Ubuntu 8.04 and a number of modern distros.
- Downloaded the modified installer from http://www.liflg.org/?catid=6&gameid=51
- Ran modified installer w/sudo (requests Windows install CDs as per Windows installer)
- Installed fine, however, run script created in /usr/local/bin has broken paths ("bad substitution" error)
- Created a two-line bash script to cd to the UT install directory and run the executable from there, i.e.
    <code>
    cd /usr/local/games/ut
    ./ut
    </code>
- Game runs, but game speed is too fast and quite erratic (either set game speed to 30-50% when starting new game, or futz with CPU frequency to get it working ok, still erratic though - this appears to be an issue related to modern CPUs, video cards, and vidcard drivers and is not unique to Linux - may need vsync or other hacks to get it working).

Unreal Tournament 2003:
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (bots or multiplayer)
- mode: native
- Tried installer on 3rd disk, gives similar checksum error as the installer for UT1999 did.
- Fixing "tail -266" bug in a local copy of linux-installer.sh and running as sudo works to get the install going
- Had to ctrl-c out of the CD key check, which it warns you not to do :), but apparently CD key can be manually entered into <ut2k3installdir>/System/cdkey
- Running from command line starts splash screen, blanks screen for a second or so, and then crashes back to the desktop with lots of "Locking assertion failure" errors - seems like a vidcard driver/opengl error.

Serious Sam - The Second Encounter:
- gametype: FPS single player and deathmatch (multiplayer only)
- mode: native (beta)
- Downloaded Loki installer from http://www.liflg.org/?catid=6&gameid=71
- Ran installer w/sudo (needs Windows install CD)
- Game script crashed "ssamtse: line 123:  7198 Aborted" when I ran it.
- Applied the fix here: http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-173418.html
- Game runs, a bit too fast (bad for an already fast-paced game!) and occasionally with graphical bugs

HERE BE DRAGONS - A friendly note to readers. I don't much like wine. It's a hacky, messy, best-effort-and-poor-performance way of doing things, especially games, and games (particularly modern ones) that will only run under wine speak to me of developers who aren't interested in giving open source platforms the time of day. As a result I didn't try nearly as hard to get any wine-emulated games working as I did with those that have native versions, so YMMV.

Half-life 1:
- gametype: FPS single player (multiplayer with CounterStrike and other mods)
- mode: wine
- Failed completely (installer crash)

Half-Life 2:
- gametype: FPS single player (multiplayer with CounterStrike and other mods)
- mode: wine
- Installed Steam relatively painlessly using the instructions here
- Steam runs fine, if a bit slow and clunky (that's emulation for ya). I can login and check my account etc as per windows.
- Tried installing Half-Life 2. I have the CD version (5 discs). The instructions at the link above simply initiate a new install of Steam - useless.
- Tried running the hl2.exe install on the first disc via wine. This works and starts the install, unfortunately wine locks the CD mount point so install fails at "insert CD 2".
- Tried copying all CDs to hdd and running install from there. Fails halfway through with an archive extract error.
- Tried the CD install + force-unmount method detailed at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2484355. Install fails, repeatedly asking for CD 2 even when it is inserted and mounted.

Sacrifice:
- gametype: RTS single player
- mode: wine
- Ran install from CD, worked fine and installed the game to ~/.wine/drive_c.
- Game runs, but with major rendering and display errors - tried all three rendering options (wine D3D HAL T&L, wine D3D HAL, and wine D3D RGB), all gave the same result. Also unable to change the resolution from 640x480x16 which annoyingly resets the desktop resolution in the process.

Dungeon Siege 1:
- gametype: RPG single player
- mode: wine
- Failed completely (installer crash)

Dungeon Siege 2:
- gametype: RPG single player
- mode: wine
- Failed completely (installer crash)

System Shock 2:
- gametype: FPS/RPG single player
- mode: wine
- Failed completely (installer crash)

Heretic 2:
- gametype: 3PS single player
- mode: wine
- Failed completely (installer crash)

So there you are. A bit of a hit and miss affair, but if you enjoy id Software's games (and most other games based on their engines) you're golden. Epic aren't quite at the polished point of Linux support id are at, but they're catching up fast, and with rumours that even Valve are at the preliminary stages of beginning to consider the possibility of forming a committee to evaluate the consideration that they might one day make native Linux versions of Steam and the Source engine, things are definitely moving in the right direction.

I'd love to chat more, but I'm off to blast some Strogg now. Have a good one :-)

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a process that turns a scanned picture of a text document into an actual text document, using fancy AI techniques and an assortment of other whizzbang cunningness I'm not going to talk about. If you're in any kind of career that deals with reference material, you occasionally need to resort to OCR to convert hardcopy into ones and zeros.

I suddenly required OCR today when I was faced with a table (several tables, actually, each spanning several pages) full of useful information in a printed book that was unavailable in other formats. The authors of the book wanted to charge me several hundred dollars to send me the same data on a CD, which offended me since they were basically counting on making a quick buck off me being lazy and not wanting to enter in the data manually. Fortunately for you, I am lazy, and did not want to enter the data manually, so instead of wasting a morning doing that (or spending several hundred dollars), I wasted a morning learning how to do OCR.

I'm assuming you already have an installed, working scanner and/or a scanned copy of your document in some sort of image format. In Ubuntu 8.04, you then need to install the following packages through your package manager:

tesseract + dependencies

tesseract-ocr-eng (or whatever language pack is appropriate to your source material)

imagemagick (in theory you can also use GIMP, but a few people on the webtubes have complained about it making TIFF files that tesseract can't read)

OCR is not an exact science; it's worth your while to give tesseract the best chance and spend some time cleaning up your scanned document image first. Fire it up in your favourite image editor and do the following: rotate to get everything as horizontal as possible, crop and erase as much of the non-text graphics (borders, dust marks, embedded figures, etc) as you can, convert to grayscale (or even b&w). Re-save the image file.

tesseract only reads in certain kinds of TIFF files. Save-as-TIFF in GIMP and other image editors may work fine, but the method I used was to edit the original document scan in a lossless format like ppm, and then convert it to TIFF using ImageMagick's convert command-line function:

convert YourDocument.ppm YourDocument.tif

Substitute the .ppm for whatever extension your scanned document has, ImageMagick recognises just about everything.

Now you're ready to go. tesseract also runs from the command-line, like so:

tesseract YourDocument.tif YourOCR

That'll run the TIFF file of your document scan through tesseract's OCR engine and dump the output in a text file called YourOCR.txt. Obviously you can also batch many of these operations together if you have a large number of files.

Since the release of Ubuntu's latest LTS, Mark seems to have been doing the rounds of interviews.  You may find some of these interesting...

 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/148

 http://lwn.net/Articles/284760/

Transcript from a chat I just had with Mike.

(12:51:41) Michael Fletcher: ready for a round of nexiuz!!!!!!!
(12:52:12) Michael Fletcher: :-)
(12:52:18) kittychunk: hehe love to, but about to have lunch and then we're off to the ballet
(12:52:21) kittychunk: omg
(12:52:35) kittychunk: did i just blow off a round of multiplayer gaming for ballet?

Dear lord I'm lame ;-)