Jamie's Random Musings

It's been about a week since the final release of Moblin 2.1 suddenly showed up on their web page. I've been distracted with Ubuntu Karmic and Mandriva 2010, though, and although I loaded it on the ASUS N10J, I haven't had time to really take much of a look at it. But it seems like "now or never", with the openSuSE 11.2 release imminent, and Fedora not far behind that. So, here we go.

The Moblin download is an ".img" file, which can be written to a USB drive or a CD. Instructions for various ways of doing either are on the Moblin web site. Once you have done that, you can either boot and run directly from the Live media, or you can install from that onto your hard drive. First impressions are good at this stage, as Moblin is one of the fastest Linux distributions I have ever installed, by a pretty good margin. It's the kind of thing where you turn around and say "wow, done already?".

The first thing I noticed when I booted the installed Moblin system was that the graphics look considerably nicer than they did in the 2.0 release. The second thing I noticed was that if you are more than about 13 years old, the graphics are likely to look quite childish to you. The third thing I noticed was that they are still using the same bizarre hieroglyphics for the main menu. I just don't get this, what use are icons which are so obscure that you have to move the mouse to them and read the associated text to figure out what they represent? Or perhaps I'm missing some obvious connection that should tell me why two concentric circles mean "Internet", or a jagged line means "Status"?

The good news here, at least, is that there is a new icon in this release, for Bluetooth connections. I have tested that with a bluetooth mouse, and it is easy to use and seems to work just fine. Well done. This was the first place that I came across the new "On/Off" switches, in this case to enable and disable Bluetooth, and it was easy, obvious, and worked well. Click it off, the bluetooth mouse stops working; click it back on and it takes a few seconds for the computer and mouse to pair again, and then it works just fine again. There is also a large "Send file from your computer" button, which I suppose would be used with other computers, mobile phones and the like. This is where I think the Moblin interface is at its best, when things are clean, clear and simple, and not insulting or obscure.

The other place where I noticed major changes is on the Networks panel, where there is now a list of detected WiFi networks, with the signal strength and encryption status of each, and On/Off switches for WiFi, Wired, 3G and WiMAX connectivity (and Bluetooth thrown in here as well), as well as an "Offline Mode" switch, which serves as a sort of "Master" switch to cut off all external connections. Again, I think this is good design, and it seemed to work just fine for me. I was able to connect to my home wired and wireless (WPA2) network with no difficulty at all.

The Sound panel has also had the same kind of On/Off switches add, for Mute and Alert Sounds. I also cross-checked these with the Fn-keys on the ASUS, and they worked as they should, the mute switch goes on and off as I enable and disable sound using the Fn-key, and the volume goes up and down as I adjust it that way as well. Nice.

Unfortunately, that's about it for the "whizzy new parts and improvements". Once the shine was gone from those, I was still left sitting in front of a netbook that I didn't really understand or have much use for. As I have said previously, if "social networking" is the center of your netbook use, perhaps Moblin is right for you. But I'm not even sure about that, because it seems to me, as Adrian pointed out the other day, that while Moblin has been fixing things that should have been done a release or two ago, they still haven't filled in many of the holes in what it really should be use for. Setting up your "social networks", for example, gives you a choice between last.fm and twitter. Period. I don't see any of the other well-known networks, such as Google, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo or whatever. I don't see any sort of chat/VoIP/video clients.

Perhaps I am too old, or "social networking" is too foreign to me, and I just don't see what to do or where to do it. But I can't imagine that a system that should focus on that is still missing so much of the functionality. If it really is missing that much, then I can't imagine how anyone would actually manage to use it for much of anything. Maybe I'm wrong. I've said this before, if you are using Moblin, and find it useful, please feel free to comment with all the details of what you are doing and how.

I will also add a brief rant that I have made before about Moblin. There is STILL no Logout/Reboot/Shutdown button(s). It seems to be assumed that "anyone" would know that the only way to shut down is to push the power button, and the only way to reboot is to hit Ctl-Alt-Del, and it will do the right things in an orderly way in either case. The entire concept of Logout/Login, and even user names, seems to be unknown in Moblin. Also, customization seems to be lacking. Not only can I not change those idiot hieroglyphics to something more obvious, or even to just plain text, I can't even seem to adjust simple things like the date and time format in the title bar. Much to my amazement, when I went into Applications/System/Date and Time, the time was presented to me in 24-hour format, which is what much of Europe expects... but there was no way to specify that for the desktop display, and sure enough when I went out of there, the title bar still had AM/PM time format. Sigh.

For my own part, I tried to continue using Moblin for some of the every day things that I do, and started running into the same kinds of crashing and hanging programs that I had found in the previous release. So I gave up, left the installation in place so I can go back to it if/when I think necessary, and went back to the variety of "real" Linux installations that I have on that machine.

jw 10/11/2009

In Part 1 of this series I looked at some general netbook concepts, and the "standard" Ubuntu distribution. Part 2 I looked at the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which is probably the best known of the netbook-centric versions. Part 3 was devoted to Kubuntu Netbook, which is the new kid on the block, and is based on the ongoing KDE Netbook development. For this final part I will look at Xubuntu, the Ubuntu distribution based on the Xfce desktop.

While Xubuntu is not a specifically netbook-oriented distribution, I have been happily using it (or other Xfce distributions such as Linux Mint Xfce Community Edition) for quite some time now. Its advantages are that it is generally lighter weight and faster than either Gnome or KDE desktops and I find it to be generally a little bit easier to configure. The Xubuntu distribution seems not to be regarded within the Xfce community as one of the best, but it is certainly good enough to be a good starting point to see if you are going to like it. It is also worth mentioning that both the Xubuntu and Kubuntu distributions are in fact more than just the standard Ubuntu distribution with whichever alternate desktop package installed. There has been significant additional work done to fully integrate and customize the desktops with Ubuntu, so you can't get the same "experience" by just installing the standard Ubuntu distribution, adding the KDE/Xfce packages and then selecting the session on login.

When you first log in to Xubuntu, you will see top and bottom panels on the screen, somewhat similar to the standard Ubuntu/Gnome panels. I choose to customize them in a way similar to what I described in Part 1 for the standard distribution, but as even a bit more extensively. The changes are based on my basic feeling that there is more space horizontally then vertically on a netbook screen, so you are generally better off with side panels rather than top/bottom panels.

Customizing Xfce panels is done by right-clicking anywhere on a panel and choosing "Customize Panel" (Duh). The interesting thing is that once you are into the Panel applet, you can customize any of the panels, not just the one you click on - and add or delete panels as well, for that matter. My goal was to end up with a panel at the bottom of the screen with whatever icons had text associated, meaning the menus, task bar and digital clock; a panel on one side with the "status" icons, such as the notifier, audio and desktop selector, and a panel on the other side with application launchers, such as Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP and such. Each panel is set to a fixed position at the center of its edge of the screen, is "normal width" rather than full width, and Autohide is enabled. Rather than bore you with the details of doing that, I'll leave you with one tip - you can move icons between panels by simply right-clicking, select Move, and then drag them to whatever panel you want. I find the end result of those three panels very pleasing; the only part that I might eventually change is not Auto-hiding the application panel.

The default Xubuntu desktop contains icons for Home, Filesystem and Trash, which I find unnecessary and distracting. Have we become such slaves of reproducing the Windows desktop that we feel we HAVE to have a trash bin on the desktop? In any case, you can right-click on the desktop, choose "Desktop Settings...", then select the Icons tab, and un-check the Home, Filesystem and Trash in Default icons. I leave Removable Devices checked, so that I have convenient access to USB drives.

Xubutnu comes with a somewhat different set of applications and packages preinstalled than either standard Ubuntu or Kubuntu. One obvious difference is the absence of OpenOffice.org; I find this a bit of a pain, but since I'm talking about netbook installations here, one could easily argue that to be a good decision. For that, or whatever else you might decide you need and can't find, you can always go to the Synaptic Package Manager and get what you need.

I think Xfce does a good job of giving you what you need, and staying out of your way so you can work. Although Xubuntu is not targeted specifically at netbooks, with a few simple changes it becomes a very good fit.

jw 9/11/2009

A long time ago at a Usenix conference (I think it was the one in Salt Lake City), there was a "quiz" passed around. I'm going to update one of the questions I remember from that, because it is absolutely perfect for what I just went through.

Fill in the blank: Using Windows is like kicking a ________ down the beach.

The correct answer is dead whale.

Here's the story. The son of a close friend called, because he had a problem with his computer. Without going into the gory details, I had to reload it from scratch. Of course, at the time that he bought the computer, it was ONLY available with Vista. So I started reloading from the DVD. About two hours into the load/update/reboot/update/reboot cycle, it puked all over itself and then couldn't install an update. I found something at Microsoft that purported to fix this problem, tried that, and it made the situation even worse, the computer then just looped through booting, saying "Installing updates 3 of 3 ..." and then rebooting, over and over again.

So I figured I had made a mistake. Started over from scratch. A couple of hours later, the exact same thing. Resisting the urge to throw the computer and the stinking DVDs out the window, I remembered that I still had a somewhat newer Vista DVD that another friend had left here.

I started again, with the newer disk, and this time it worked. Well, "worked" might not be the right word, especially for anything to do with Windows, but at least it installed without error. So after another 6 hours of update/reboot/download drivers/update/reboot/whatever, it was working again.

Total time wasted on kicking the dead whale down the beach: 20 hours. Likelihood that sooner or later that system will barf all over itself and go belly up again: very high.

What should I do to reduce that likelihood? Tell him (or his parents) that they should throw another couple of hundred francs down the toilet to get Windows 7? What do I say when they ask me if that will stop this from happening again? How do I justify it, anyway - with the standard description used even by Microsoft apologists, "Well, Vista was garbage, but this time Microsoft got it right - at least we think so, so far, maybe..."?

Anyone for a walk on the beach?

jw 7/11/2009

In Part 1 of this series, I looked at the "standard" Ubuntu distribution, and found that with some adjustments, it could be made into what I considered to be a fairly nicely usable netbook. In Part 2 I looked at the Karmic Netbook Remix release, and found it to be significantly improved over the previous releases, at least in cosmetic terms. Now, in Part 3, I am going to look at "the new kid on the block", the Kubuntu "Technical Preview" of the KDE Netbook Plasma-Netbook project.

The first, and probably most important, thing to say at this point is that this is still a development project, and it is still very much in the middle of dynamic development; it is not scheduled for release until February 2010. I was prepared to temper my expectations and comments based on this status, but in fact what happened was that I was completely blown away. It is very, very impressive.

The concepts and implementation of KDE Netbook are quite different from those of UNR, and I have been struggling to find a way to do them justice without getting bogged down in endless descriptions of details. I'm going to try to describe it (at least superficially) in the same way that I did UNR. I have a feeling that won't do it justice, though.

The initial desktop has three main areas of interest. There is a Task/System/Icon/Status/Whatever bar across the top of the screen, with many of the usual icons and controls on it (Battery status, Network/Bluetooth status, Audio control, Notifier, Clock and Lock/Shutdown). There is a rather large horizontal bar across the screen, which contains large, colorful icons for most of the typical menu groups (Office, Internet, Multimedia, System and so on). Between that menu bar and the top of the screen there is another horizontal bar, initially empty, which turns out to be a "Favorites" area.

When you click on any of the menu icons, the contents of that menu are shown in the bar, and a "Home" icon appears at the top left of the screen which will get you back to the top level menu. I assume from this structure and action that menus are by definition only one level deep, but that is arguably a good thing anyway.

I will say again here that the icons are very large and colorful, and seem to me to be particularly well suited to a netbook display. I think they are much better than those of the other two major contenders in this area. I would say that UNR is not bad, but the menu bar icons are too small and the text too large - the goal here is supposed to be to make things simple and intuitive, and good pictures beat reading text at that every time. Moblin... well, uh, Moblin... What the heck are those stick-figure icons supposed to represent, anyway? Why use icons that are so abstract that the user is going to have to read the associated text to figure out what they mean anyway?

Getting back to Kubuntu Netbook, when you click on a launcher and start a program, the window does NOT automatically come up maximized (unlike UNR). It is a window with normal decoration and controls, so you can minimize, maximize or close it as you wish. It seems to me that average users are often disturbed or confused when the click on something and the whole screen changes, so I find this approach better than UNR automatically maximizing everything you start, or Moblin creating new "Zones" and putting things into them every time. There is one other interesting effect when you start a program - the Task Bar (panel) across the top of the screen disappears. If you move the mouse cursor to the top edge of the screen, or if you return to an empty desktop, it comes back. This is an interesting variation on "Autohide" that I have not come across before, and I find it nice and intuitive.

Things get interesting when you want to start another program. If you either minimize the open window, or just click on the desktop outside of that window, the window disappears! Gone without a trace! Well, not entirely without a trace, but at least without the usual icon on the task bar or whatever. If you look at the top left corner of the screen, you will see that it says "1 running app". Click on that, and if you have a graphic card that supports advanced graphics (the Intel Atom/945 is good enough), you get a tiled presentation of the main desktop and all currently active applications, and you can then click on any of those to select one. If your graphic driver isn't good enough (neither my HP 2133 VIA nor my HP 1010ez Radeon was), nothing happens. Don't despair, just fall back on the old standard Alt-Tab to select windows. Again, if your graphic driver is good enough, you will get a spiffy "rotating wheel" of windows to choose from; continue holding the Alt key, and each time you press and release Tab it will move to the next window. Wow! This is a sure-fire way to impress your friends. If your graphic card isn't up to that, you will get a more typcial-looking list of active applications to choose from.

Ok, enough already about the user interface. It's good, it's flashy, and I could write about it for a lot longer and I don't think you would get a lot better feel for it. I'll just add a few words about specific applications included in Kubuntu Netbook.

As this is a KDE distribution, I suppose it is not too surprising that it has the Konqueror browser installed, but at least it has a link to install Firefox. The really good news for most users, though, is that it includes OpenOffice, rather than the more obscure Koffice. It has Dragon Player and Amarok for Multimedia, a reasonable selection of games and educational programs, and Ksnapshot and Gwenview for digital picture viewing and organization.

Finally, there is the "Newspaper" panel. Here's my theory on that. The KDE developers have taken a lot of criticism since the release of KDE 4. They have said all along that they are working toward a much larger goal, and the changes would pay off in the long term. I think the Newspaper panel is included as an example of how that payoff can come. When you select it, you actually get a different desktop from the original "Application" panel. It includes a news feed reader, weather reader, calendar and note block. I haven't really investigated it yet, but I assume all those and others are selectable and configurable, so you could have things like micro-blogger applets and such on there too. I suspect that this is one of the areas where there is going to be a lot more development before the final release comes out, but it already looks very interesting.

To wrap it all up, if you need a finished, stable desktop then you probably don't want to risk loading Kubuntu Netbook quite yet. There are some quirks, rough edges and bugs still in it. But if you want to see some of the latest, greatest ideas in netbook desktops, or if you just don't find either UNR or Moblin very pleasing, this could be just what you are looking for. Trying it from a Live USB stick is quick, easy and painless, so go for it!

jw 6/11/2009

In Part 1 I discussed some generalities about the new Ubuntu 9.10 distribution, and some issues related to using it on netbook computers. Now it is time to move on to the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, a special version produced by Canonical themselves, as opposed to the various "Community" remixes and other derivatives. As I did for the first part, I am using my ASUS N10J netbook for this evaluation. It is a relatively standard netbook, so these comments and observations should be applicable for most netbooks in general.

From the user's perspective, UNR has been changed in two critical ways from the "standard" Ubuntu (Gnome) distribution. First, the usual Gnome desktop with upper and lower Panels has been replaced with a more obvious (blatant) Launcher which lays everything out directly on the desktop. Those who have previously tried the UNR 9.04 release will notice that the desktop has been refined somewhat, and I think the changes make it quite a bit better. The large vertical bar on the right side of the screen, which basically contained the "Places" menu, has been merged into the single remaining left side vertical menu bar. This makes the desktop look much less cluttered and leaves more room for launcher icons, which really should be one of the highest priorities for limited-size netbook screens. In addition, I think the entire desktop looks more "refined", rather than just sort of "everything slapped up there" as it was previously, but that is a very subjective evaluation. Second, application windows are automatically maximized (made full screen) when they are started. They are also represented in the task list, at the top left of the screen, by an icon only, without text. Those icons are your most convenient means of window control and selection, by the way. Simply clicking on them will minimize/unminimize/select the window, and by right-clicking you can then unmaximize, if you really want to have several windows open together on your (presumably small) netbook screen.

Other than merging in Places (now called "Files & Folders"), the content of the menus is essentially the same in Karmic as it was in Jaunty. One nice touch is the "Favorites" menu, which I consider to be sort of the equivalent to having launchers on the Panel or Desktop of the standard Gnome desktop. It gives you a way of having things handy, rather than having to slog through the menus every time to find commonly used programs. When you are in the other menus, you will see a "+" at the top right of the launcher highlight, which you can click to add that launcher to the Favorites menu. I don't recall this from the previous UNR release, and I think it is a good addition.

The top Panel/Task Bar/Title Bar/Whatever has been improved a bit in the Karmic release as well. It resembles the standard Ubuntu (Gnome) panel more closely, with the notifier, shutdown options and the like there, rather than taking space in the main screen menu bar, which seems much more logical to me.

The "selection" effect, which is show when the mouse is over an icon on the desktop, has been completely changed in the new release. Instead of "growing" the icon (my term, I don't know what the proper name for it is), it displays a box with a darker background around the icon. This is certainly less overhead than the old effect (although arguably less "cool" or "flashy"), so I was quite disappointed to find that UNR still needs 3D/GL support in the graphic driver to perform in any reasonably usable way. That means that for netbooks such as my HP 2133 Mini-Note (VIA Chrome 9) and HP Pavillion dv2-1010ez (ATI Radeon 3410), running UNR is out of the question. Of course, by far the most common graphic hardware for netbooks is the Intel 945/950 chipset, and those drivers are more than adequate for UNR.

The Netbook Remix distribution includes a few more packages than the standard Ubuntu distribution, presumably to make the netbook more "user friendly", and a few others have been removed, either to save space or because they aren't considered "typically useful" on netbooks. In the added category are things like Adobe Flash and the Cheese webcam program; while removed includes CD/DVD creators (most netbooks don't have optical drives), GIMP (perhaps they think most netbooks are not up to it, or most netbook users?), XSane (scanner support) and Remote Desktop and Terminal Server Client (not relevant?).

Ok, so much for slogging through a lot of the details. Overall, I like the Karmic Netbook Release better than I did the previous ones. I think it is visually better, clearer, easier to understand and use. Some time ago I set up an HP Mini 2140 with UNR for a friend. I will be seeing her again soon, and I will show her the new UNR release and ask if she would like for me to upgrade it for her.

It will be interesting to see what the future brings for the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Canonical has announced support for Moblin v2, and are providing an "Ubuntu Moblin Remix" for the Dell Mini 10v. I wonder if that will have any impact on the future of the Netbook Remix? Time will tell.

jw 5/11/2009