Linux Desktop

Probably it's just a question of me not paying enough attention to the news... So: pointers welcome.

There are quie a few shiny new filesystems for local storage, like btrfs or HAMMER (and nilfs, Tux3, ext4, Reiser4...)

It seems the distributed storage side is covered as well, with ceph being merged recently. There are other systems (like, for example, Lustre), but they haven't appeared much in the news channels I tend to read. What I'd be curious is if any of these support hierarchical storage architectures like pushing out rarely used data to tape libraries. (But this is just idle speculation, I don't need this anywhere.)

But what I would really need is a replacement for NFS (v3): a classical client-server filesystem. I'm not sure NFSv4 is the “right” solution (where I'd use it, I currently can't because we rely too much on POSIX ACLs there, making the transition to NFSv4 quite a chore.) I think POHMELFS might be a solution in the long term, or CRFS, but I'm not sure how much progress there is on these; apt-cache search is silent, not a good sign. There's Samba 4 — I guess I'll have to look at it, since it's supposed to be much cleaner and nicer to use than its predecessors and might be a good solution even if no Microsoft systems are involved. Is this what small environments (a fileserver and 100 clients or so) will want to use? Comments are very welcome.

As a complete outsider and with my obvious bias as a Debian Developer: how can anybody call Ubuntu a “community distribution” when it's obvious that Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth can, and will, take decisions for reasons that are not made clear, and with only little or no community involvment?

This rethorical question refers, of course, to the current debate about purple vs. brown and the best position of the window close button (Bug report and LWN coverage.)

Conclusion? Let's be fair and call it a community support commercial distribution. Perhaps we should found a non-profit to award a (trademarked) “True Community Effort” label to operating system distributions where no commercial body has the final say?

Wow. I just stumbled over the SIL Fonts, which I haven't heard of before. Looks like an absolutely great project. Not only are these fornts released under an open license (I haven't read it myself, but many of these fonts are in Debian...), but above all I really liked the selection of supported systems with icons by each entry: The Old Windows 3.1 Windows flag stands for “tested on Windows”, the very old rainbow colored apple for “tested on Mac”, our official (and current :-) familiar swirl not only for tested on Debian, but for “Debian package available”.

I mean: while it's not uncommon today to see some kind of Linux support in software (or other downloads), explicit Debian support is not that widespread. And seeing this side by side with the two very outdated logos for the two other mainstream OSs (and Ubunut not even being mentioned on this page) is ... what, exactly? Wishful thinking? An ironic comment on how the (conputing) landscape should look like? Made me smile, in any case.

Second part (and biggest in terms of space) is my new Lenovo desktop computer with a nice NEC 26" screen. The screen is quite a bit better than my bulky 19" CRT, but the story of buying the desktop was more involved.

I've read the widely reported Linux Foundation announcement about new membership benefits and promptly fell for it. Thumbs down for LF, because they absolutely failed to mention that the discounts on HP, Dell and Lenovo products are only available within the U.S. [insert here: cheap joke about U.S. Americans not knowing that the rest of the world even exists.]

Thumbs up for Lenovo, though: after a few emails with both the LF and Lenovo, I got a 40% discount on their original price for my system.

Now obviously big brand computers like these are still overpriced (or less powerful at the same price) when compared with a white box. And I almost went with a barebone, CPU, etc. because I quite like putting hardware together. On the other hand, I haven't really kept up with CPU socket types etc., and since I absolutely wanted an Intel GPU, the 36 months on site support won out. And when the new computer went beep beep beep (and dark) on the third or fourth boot, I was quite happy that I didn't go the white box route after all...

I won't bore you with installation details (I'll be getting back CHF 45 for my unused copy of Vista, of course), suffice to say that today's dual core 64 bit 3GHz / 4GB RAM machines are a bit faster than the 32 bit ca 1 GHz / 1GB RAM with mostly unaccelerated graphics from five years ago...

Ok, I admit I did that to get you to read the article...

I'm just a bit saddened that Microsoft Exchange compatibility seems to be the holy grail of Open Source (Free Software if you like) PIM application developers. Right now I've read Gary Greene's announcement that he'll bring KDE PIM closer to Exchange, but other PIM clients (Evolution, IIRC) are also working hard at being good frontends to Exchange servers. Meanwhile, I've run into problems with various Open Source groupware servers (strictly speaking Open Source, you'll probably remember me ranting about this before) when trying to use KDE PIM.

So, the the way into the future seems to be to run KDE PIM with the soon to be completed ;-) MS Exchange connector, running an almost-Open Source groupware server with a commercial Outlook Connector plug-in. (Update: Clarification: running a groupware server with an outlook connectivity plug-in. I think Zimbra offers something like this, for example.)

(To give you a bit background data: We run Zimbra at a client, which has a nice web frontend and runs very well with its own fat client. Using KDE PIM is not really an option, too many features don't work. Open-Xchange was what we had there before Zimbra; KDE PIM integration is not really possible either, they don't have a fat client, and while the web frontend is nice, they had a poor track record with reacting to issues (and we did have the paid for version with 150 users, and at least one integrator claimed that with 150 users we were big enough that they would react immediately to our complaints...) I had a very quick look at eGroupWare, but that was right around the time when Tine 2.0 forked away from it, so we weren't sure where the community was going. I didn't look closely at OpenGroupware.org/SOGo; from what I remember they dropped out of the evaluation early because of missing features.) Kolab should, as far as I know, have the desired integration with KDE PIM, but I'm not sure what the status is on that front, and when I last looked, there was basically no web frontend at all, and the KDE PIM integration did at least at some time in the past require its own version of the KDE appliactions.)

Reading Kyle's view on Konqueror and KHTML's current status: I couldn't agree more. I use konqueror instead of Firefox because I quite like its GUI, and its integration into KDE is obviously better than Firefox'. Issues with various websites prompt me to have an Iceweasel window open as well quite a large part of the time. Let's just switch to WebKit, so the market only has to care about Gecko and WebKit and can ignore one more marginal rendering engine.

I see libqt-webkit 4.5 is in experimental and a Google query on “debian konqueror webkit” at least shows an Ubuntu packaging effort of the Konqueror WebKit KPart, so the days of khtml on my Desktop are certainly nearing its end.

At this point: Kudos to the KDE folks (Debian and upstream). KDE4.2 is really, really usable, the remaining issues are really small. And, if I don't try to manually interfer like I did in my first attempt, migrating the KDE settings from ~/.kde4 to ~/.kde actually did work just fine on my netbook.

I'm eternally confused about the state of powermanagement in Debian (or in Linux generally? Not using any other distribution seriously, I have no idea.) There are just too many scripts who interact or merely run in parallel (see my short note in my first posting about my shiny toy. While I don't actively invest time to educate myself about the situation, I've just tried to uninstall a round of unneeded packages and got rid of apmd and hibernate, which both were installed by default (or by dependencies of other stuff I've got rid of earlier?) but seem not to be necessary. At least the laptop still suspends when I close the lid. This is without rebooting or even just logging out, though, so if it doesn't work out, I'll have to update this entry.

Update: Thanks to Michael's comment, pointing to #451380. Scope for a Google Summer of Code project, perhaps? This would be 90% talk to people and get a consensus and only 10% coding, though, but I think it would be worth it so that squeeze would have a powermanagement /acpi framework where different components don't stand on other components' toes all the time.

Last week, I couldn't resist and bought myself an Acer Aspire One (AOA 150Ab) netbook. It has 1G RAM, 120G HDD, unfortunately needs a fan, and is the model without 3G modem. It comes with Linpus Linux pre-installed. Looks quite nice, but is obviously ultimately the wrong OS ... Besides, it's locked down quite a bit, there's not even an easy way to start a terminal :-) I still have kept it, in a dual-boot configuration, to play around or show to people.

Installing Lenny went very well, and to make things more fun I'm running quite a few things from experimental: KDE 4.2, xorg 7.4 (1:7.4~5 right now) and Oo.org 3. And, to get DRI2, also the 2.6.28 kernel from the newer-than-sid repository of the kernel team (2.6.28-2~snapshot.12850, but I hear 2.6.28 has now been uploaded.) While the whole thing is fun to use and didn't make any real problems, there are a few remaining issues (yes, this is a Dear Lazyweb posting, feel free to comment. I'll try to add updates to this article as this progresses):

• Power events (power button, battery level critical) are handled by two sets of scripts. Not sure if the blame lies with acpid, acpi-support or KDE for this one. Symptom: when setting up, in KDE, that the power button should bring up the logout dialog, this results in: the power button does indeed show the logout dialog, but then immediately the system is shut down. Adding an “exit 0” in /etc/acpi/powerbtn-acpi-support.sh before the final shutdown command in that file fixes this, though. Similarly, the battery critical event brings up a warning that the system will soon be forcibly suspended and then immediately suspends to RAM. (I'll have to investigate if there's already a bug about this in the bts.)
• The X server has quite a few issues. It sometimes blanks the display without any reason. Causing any of the fancy full screen effects (like “present windows”) to happen sometimes fixes this, sometimes a quick suspend to RAM and wakeup cycle fixes it. Sometimes it does not and I need to reboot (and I have yet to set up a hotkey for log out without questions.) Also, the screen stays black after a switch back from a text console, and after logout. Oh, well, I guess I'll just wait a few Intel driver and perhaps kernel releases (not sure: do I already have kernel modesetting, btw?)
• KDE sometimes complains that X compositing is too slow and disables it. I immediately re-enable it, because while some of the effects do indeed demonstrate the limits of the graphics hardware, I've become used to things like “present windows” and, especially on the small screen, the screen magnifier. UPDATE: Since I wrote the article, kernel, KDE and various X components have been updated repeatedly, and stability is much improved. Switching between X and text console works now, too.
• Also a feature of the new X server is HAL powered handling of input devices, which left me without my desired keyboard layout in X. After some hunting around at places like #447666 I found a very simple x11-input.fdi file somewhere I can't remember and installed that:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <deviceinfo version="0.2">
    <device>
      <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keys">
        <merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">ch</merge>
        <merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string">de</merge>
      </match>
    </device>
  </deviceinfo>
  

  I now realize that just installing hal-info from squeeze or sid might (UPDATE: does) also fix the issue.
• Also related to the new input hotplugging: how do I pass options to the synaptic driver? Probably another XML file for HAL, haven't hunted for this yet. As it is, the touchpad works but tapping won't click, and there's no scrolling on the edges of the pad. Update: Mark points me to the correct HAL invocation, thanks.. Now I only need to find the right values for all the options...(at least tapping doesn't work yet when I use the same values as the Linpus installation uses.)
• The various “ Fn” key keyboard functions situation is very inconsistent. Some of the keys just work (Num-lock, the completely useless Scroll-lock, Home, End, volume up, down; Even brings up a graphical notification, blank screen). Mute/unmute is caught by userspace but doesn't work correctly: it just displays the current volume instead of muting/unmuting audio (it also shows “HalPower::slotButtonPressed: Unknown button type” in .xsession-errors. Same message but no effect whatsoever for the Zz sleep button.) The deactivate touchpad key works but gets “unknown key pressed/released” kernel messages, as does the (off-keyboard) WiFi power switch. “Switch video output” only shows the “unknown key pressed/released” messages but doesn't do anything. Finally, some work but are also mapped to keycodes where they shouldn't be (dim screen is also mapped to “^@”, it appears, while increase screen brightness is mapped to “±”.)
• WLAN only works with the “options acer_wmi wireless=1” option, and without the LED, as described on the Debian Acer Aspire One wiki page. This is with the ath5k driver, haven't tried the MadWifi one yet.
• Powertop claims that the camera is always on, unloading all related modules () seems to solve this (at least, powertop doesn't complain anymore, and power is down by 0.5W.) Powertop also claims that USB autosuspend is off, but it's just set to 2 instead of 1 which if I read this correctly is the timeout to use for USB devices.
• KDE4 doesn't have a network manager applet frontend in Debian. I guess this is an upstream problem. (Although I note that the OpenSUSE people already have an applet ;-) Update: Sune tells me it's in NEW already, thanks.
• While network-manager (lenny version) does work properly and switches between wired and wireless as needed, it strangely keeps sending out DHCP requests on eth0 even though no cable is attached (and mii-tool correctly reports no link.)

Ok, this has become rather a long list. But at least, as you can see, it's mostly minor issues, and hopefully a few where it's just missing configuration. One other issue is battery life: I see that there should be a large battery available for this thing. If it doesn't cost me as much as the whole netbook again, I'll seriously have to think about this... The 3-cell battery does last about 2.5h (and has, right now, uncovered a little bug where the battery monitoring applet tells me “No AC adaptor plugged in, battery capacity: 50%, charging”. Whee! I have a perpetuum mobile! I'm gonna be RICH!)

On the risk of repeating myself...

While I do understand aseigo's dismay at the recent Linus-goes-to-GNOME-land media hype, caught by LWN amongst others — is anyone taking bets if and when Linus will return to KDE? — and I share LWN's (Jake Edge's) view that Red Hat/Fedora (I have no idea how far the latter really is a community project nowadays) has a long history of questionable release decisions regarding its inclusion of “newer than bleeding edge” software in releases, ultimately it's still KDE's fault for releasing KDE 4.0 with that ominous 4.0 version number in a move to get as many testers as possible for this public beta program (at least users didn't have to pay lots of money for this KDE Vista.) Why not just call it 3.9, if a “beta” label should be avoided? It would have been a release and avoided the bad press of staying in eternal beta, but the dot nine version would have made clear that it's not finished.

Leaving the ranting aside, I congratulate the KDE crew for getting 4.2 out of the door, and the Debian KDE team for their decision to stay with KDE 3 in Lenny and providing KDE 4 via backports. I'm very happy with KDE 3 on my office workhorse, and have KDE 4 on the home machine and am quite impressed, but with reservations since I see parts of it crashing far too often for my taste (in the latest version I have installed, kmail rarely survives longer than 10min.)

... and I completely missed it. I've been ranting on and off about the Linux desktop world needing a shakeup, about non-techies shaking their head and not understanding why a “Linux Desktop” needs further clarification so that anybody knows what it means. Seems I'm absolutely not the only one: KDE's aKademy conference and GNOME's GUADEC are to be held side by side as the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009 in early July this year. I finally saw this in connection with LWN's coverage (subscriber only at this time, sorry) of the recent Qt relicensing by Nokia.

The true Year of the Linux Desktop finally? I doubt it, seeing that many people with little computer skills are still completely unaware of what's happening. And currently, I share the pessimism about OpenOffice.org's future as shown in Michael Meeks' interpretation of the commit stats. A real killer in the collaboration platform space is still missing, as well: there are numerous commercial players, quite a few “commercial pseudo-opensource” packages, tons of real opensource frameworks, but none that can be recommended, in my opinion, without its share of doubts, either about the features, the licensing, or the future.

Still, it's been the year of the Linux desktop for me since about 1997 (and that means Debian since not long after that), and I do see the situation improving year for year, so here's a big thank you to all working on it.

Christmas is over, and unfortunately it comes with an Nvidia graphics chip, and I doubt the color calibration feature works under Linux. Nonetheless: I want one. Dual screen on a Laptop! Who wouldn't want that? And, in addition, a keyboard with a numeric keypad.

No, I don't claim KDE is perfect. Especially the way the transition to KDE 4 is (not) being handled. (I don't mean within Debian, this is a KDE problem.) But beyond dumbing down the UI as even a very prominent Linux developer repeatedly commented on, Josselin Mouette just confirmed my decision to stay away from GNOME.

Yes, there are other desktop environments and window managers, and I haven't done more than look at XFCE very briefly, but just now I'm quite happy with KDE 3.5, and am waiting for KDE 4 to become actually useable.

Q: is a mobile phone (nice hardware, shitty firmware, btw) waterproof? A: I now got this new toy (Sony Ericsson S500i) as aresult. And because I don't really like losing contacts again (I never managed to connect to the old phone from Linux and was too lazy to use the Windows software), I have now fired up kitchensync with the OBEX SyncML client from the OpenSync project. And was very surprised that after only very little fiddling with the configuration I could indeed copy the contacts from the phone to KDE's addressbook.

There seems to be a — not so usual anymore in this decade — utf8 problem somewhere (it looks as if the encoding from the phone is converted to utf8 twice, or it is latin1 to utf8 encoded but was already utf8 on the phone), and synchronisation is only one way so far (from the phone to KDE-PIM), with changes on the KDE side being overwritten. No idea which component those bugs are in, and documentation I've found is not very verbose. So, to start with:

I've gotten this nice dump with hcidump. Now, how do I extract the actual data streams from that dump? I know I have to use wbxml2xml on the data, but first I need to unwrap the network data, and I haven't found that (probably read past it in the manpage of hcidump because I'm a bit tired.) Of course, if anybody out there has solved my issues I'd be just as happy with information on how that was done instead. In the mean time, I at least have reasonable back up of my phone's contact database again.

Sune Vuorela raises a few interesting points about integration of various (meta)data storage frameworks on your KDE desktop (read the comments, too, as several of these issues have been or are being addressed.)

A huge, somewhat related, itch to me is that the end user of a Linux desktop still has to care if an application uses KDE, GNOME, XFCE, GNUstep, “old style” X11 or whatever. As an end user, I don't care that GIMP is a GTK application. Somebody told me that I can use fish:/ URLs to open remote files and I've duly noted down the syntax because I have no idea what this does, but it does open this file the webdude has told me I should edit with kolourpaint, and now I want to use GIMP because it's much nicer to use ... Similar issues with settings (I did set the web proxy in the system settings, now why do half of the application not respect this?) and all kinds of other stuff.

I believe it's issues like this that will hamper the Linux on the Desktop the most in future. Obviously, in a controlled (corporate) environment, this is not a big problem because it's a problem for the IT staff, but in the SOHO and home computer market, these are real, difficult problems, and since they don't know any of the technical problems behind it it's also very hard to explain why it's not easy for me to set up their system so it works like they feel it should (I already have problems explaining why there should be different Linux distributions at all ... )

Update: It occurs to me that this is the kind of stuff we (distribution developers) should be concentrating on, by putting pressure on upstream and doing some of the work. I guess we've concentrated too much on “just” packaging the stuff.