// HomeFeed aggregator

Feed aggregator

Linux Outlaws 140 - So Say We All

Linux Outlaws Podcast - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 22:47

Ogg Vorbis - 1 hour 28 minutes 24 seconds, 43.5 MB — you can also download all our episodes in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format from the Outlaw Archives.

This week on Linux Outlaws: Ubuntu redesign, Novell for sale?, US eases sanctions, Chris DiBona on Android and the kernel, Fab smokes a pipe and much more…

If you have any feedback on the show, please leave it in the forums — preferably in the thread for this episode.

Linux Outlaws is brought to you by Sixgun Productions.

SHOW NOTES WILL BE POSTED SOON

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, except the music at the end of the show which is always licensed under the Creative Commons license specified by the artist under the provided link.

Categories: Podcasts

The Business Of Show

Adventures In Open Source - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 21:05

Hey folks, I realise I’ve missed my usual Weekly Rewind but it’s been far too hectic around here lately. I will get back to it next Sunday I promise. One of the many reasons for my omission is because I’ve just put the tickets for my Rathole Radio gig on sale. I’m doing the whole system myself (right down to licking the stamps) rather than use a ticketing company because I feel it’s the right thing to do. Besides, the punk ethos has always been “do it yourself” and I abide by that. I hate these big companies and the way they screw over music fans, Ticketmaster being a prime example (allegedly!). Not that they’d be interested in my little gig, but I still wanted to make the process personal and keep costs down. I’ve had a few people asking questions about the organisation of the gig in general, so I wanted to clear up the details here quickly.

Printed Tickets

The tickets are for sale now though the Rathole Radio website priced at £5 each plus £1.50 per order for processing and postage. I’ve kept them cheap because it’s not a money making exercise. If I sell all 200 odd tickets I will just break even, and only then. I’m putting this on because I want to have something cool for everyone to do in Liverpool the night before OggCamp, I also get the chance to play a gig alongside some of my favourite artists and that’s my payment. I’m taking it easy on public promotion this week to give OggCampers the chance to get in first and get tickets, after that I will be promoting hard and selling to the general public, once they’re sold out I’m afraid it’s tough. The venue has very limited capacity so the bottom line is this… IF YOU WANT TO COME BUY A TICKET. A lot of people seem to feel they’ll just wander in on the night and that may not be possible.

David Rovics

So far I’ve sold around 40 tickets since Sunday and it’s great to see people posting on Identi.ca that they’ve received them, that’s very satisfying and rewarding. But I’m still £807 in the hole staging this (I have a spreadsheet) and that tends to focus your mind. I’m not complaining or bitching, I enjoy doing the work and I will continue to, I’m confident we’ll sell out. I just want to make sure everyone understands the situation. If you want to come along please book now before I start pushing tickets outside of our usual circle. Besides, it’s going to be a great night and you should come and celebrate music, technology and Creative Commons with us. I’m already discussing innovative ways to bring technology into this event with some hacker friends. We’re looking at message walls, live streams and perhaps a robotic (might be a slight exaggeration) audience member who can make noise based on the reaction of the online chatroom. It’s going to be something quite unique and it’s not to be missed.

I have no problem with OggCamp attendees not being interested in this or not wanting to come, that’s absolutely fair enough. But if you ARE interested book now or risk being disappointed and turned away. I want to avoid that wherever possible but limited space and financial constraints mean I have to be strict.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Tickets can be purchased direct from http://ratholeradio.org/gig

If you don’t have Paypal or for some reason don’t want to buy online, email show@ratholeradio.org and we can try to make alternative arrangements for you.

Thanks for reading this rant. Take care everyone a be lucky

Dan


Categories: Writings

Episode 21 – 7th Mar 10

Rathole Radio - Mon, 03/08/2010 - 16:58
Download Ogg – Download Mp3 Another Rathole Radio is upon us. I played a wide range of music as always, sang a live tune, chatted to folks listening live and also launched the gig tickets for sale. You can buy them by clicking “gig tickets” on the menu at the top there, you don’t need to [...]
Categories: Podcasts

Linux Outlaws 139 - The Facegroup Twisness Model

Linux Outlaws Podcast - Sun, 03/07/2010 - 15:42

Ogg Vorbis - 1 hour 34 minutes 23 seconds, 46.3 MB — you can also download all our episodes in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format from the Outlaw Archives.

This week on Linux Outlaws: Amazon signs a patent deal with Microsoft, German data retention law unconstitutional, Microsoft can’t code, the Task Pooper and much more…

If you have any feedback on the show, please leave it in the forums — preferably in the thread for this episode.

Linux Outlaws is brought to you by Sixgun Productions.

0:01:22 | Introduction

0:14:04 | Releases & News

0:49:40 | Microwatch

1:04:09 | Spotlight

1:08:31 | Feedback

  • Donations: Thanks to Paul Corbett, Andre Hugo and Mark Gardner
  • Forums: Taking photos at OggCamp

  • Bernd Schlapsi sends an email about his experience with buying music from 7digital in Austria
  • Alison Chaiken sends us this great Nerdcore song: kill -9
  • Julian Aloofi sends us a link about Oracle allegedly scrapping support for free versions of Solaris
  • Ezequiel Bruni is a missionary in Mexico and is trying to get his fellow Christian missionaries to use Linux
  • Karlis (aka. skazhy) says Fedora is restricted by US sanctions too which sucks
  • Patrick Archibald has set up oggcasts.com which aggregates Ogg feeds and show related business via identi.ca
  • Other emails this week from Rob Munro, Mac, B1ackcr0w, Bing, Raphael Ong, Cult, DarthSydwayZ, Tony Ciak, Adam Meltzer, Mathew Stahl, Jason Bowles, Ravel Lopez, Dylan Thiedeke (who pisses in out pockets again… we’d only just dried them out), Sergei Van Hardeveld, Joe Ressington, Reine and Paul Adams

  • Event: muscaLUG meeting at the Musser Public Library on March 20

Song: Mr President by Afreekanxpress from the album Remember Senegal

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, except the music at the end of the show which is always licensed under the Creative Commons license specified by the artist under the provided link.

Categories: Podcasts

Tip: Making Gmail Default In Firefox

Adventures In Open Source - Thu, 03/04/2010 - 14:16

Just a quick tip for you today. It may be that everyone already knows about this, but I ran into an interesting problem this week and wanted to share the solution. My mum has been using Ubuntu on her laptop for a long time now and she likes it a lot. The other day though she asked me why it opened “some other weird box” when she clicked on email links in web pages. She’s a savvy computer user, she taught me how to use a computer when I was a kid, but this confused her.

It was launching the Evolution mail client and starting a new mail message every time a “mailto:” link was encountered. I remember this behaviour from years ago with Outlook on Windows. I have never bothered to do anything about it on my own machine because I tend to copy and paste an email address from a page straight into a new message. I’m a geek though and trying to explain that to non-technical users is hard, it shouldn’t really be necessary either. Clicking a link and expecting it to open a new message in the client you use is not unreasonable. So after some searching around I found that the solution is actually very simple. You can set Firefox to use Gmail or other webmail providers for email links in the preferences. It’s 2 second job, and here’s how you do it.

Open the Preferences dialog in Firefox (on the “edit” menu in Linux)…

…go to the applications tab…

…type “mailto” in the filter box to bring up the mail settings. You can then use the drop down box to select Gmail, Yahoo or others.

That’s it, next time you click on an email link it’ll open a new message in your web mail. A simple little tip which everyone may already know but I didn’t until recently. This will of course work in Firefox running on any platform, Linux, Mac or Windows. The preferences link is under the “tools” menu and not “edit”  in Windows, it may be different on Mac too. Hope this tip helps someone and gets your mail links fixed. Other web browsers are also available of course

Cheers,

Dan


Categories: Writings

Linux Outlaws 138 - Interview Special: Zonker

Linux Outlaws Podcast - Wed, 03/03/2010 - 19:24

Ogg Vorbis - 42 minutes 11 seconds, 20.2 MB — you can also download all our episodes in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format from the Outlaw Archives.

In this special episode, Dan and Fab interview former OpenSuse community manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier about leaving Novell, his plans for the future, more general Linux topics and totally unrelated stuff as well.

If you have any feedback on the show, please leave it in the forums — preferably in the thread for this episode.

Linux Outlaws is brought to you by Sixgun Productions.

Interview: Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier

We interview former OpenSuse community manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier about him quitting his job at Novell, his plans for the future and a lot of other general Linux topics. We talk about the role of a community manager and the responsibilities and perks involved, what else Zonker did while at Novell, the past and future direction of Suse and its community, SLED and Zonker’s views on journalism and being a writer.

Zonker is @jzb on identi.ca, if you want to follow his journalistic exploits in the future. Also check out his podcast OpenMic with Zonker on Network World.

Song: Hold On To Your Structure from the album A good Path to follow… by The Hoboscopes

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, except the music at the end of the show which is always licensed under the Creative Commons license specified by the artist under the provided link.

Categories: Podcasts

Weekly Rewind #53

Adventures In Open Source - Sun, 02/28/2010 - 19:48

It’s time for Weekly Rewind number 53 and for once it’s not late, wonders never cease. Since my last update included Monday and some of Tuesday of this week, I’ll just start from Tuesday and make this a little shorter. I’ve still been a bit ill this week at times but overall I’m feeling much better right now I’m pleased to say.

So, on Tuesday I synced up the audio from Linux Outlaws and shipped it back to Fab. It was a little bit longer than expected as I said in my earlier post, but I think we’ll settle into the new format with practice. That was later released as episode 137 “Bing!”. It seemed to be pretty well received and downloads for the podcast in general have been shooting up lately, good news. I think we might have finally jumped the shark. I also got on with sorting out sponsorship for OggCamp and various other things. We’ve been working on an advert to appear in Linux Format magazine very soon. They wrote am article about us this month in very kind terms and we appreciate the support. They’re even offering Oggcamp attendees 40% off a year’s magazine subscription. So, without further ado here are our wonderful OggCamp10 sponsors: (drum roll needed)

Media Partners: Linux Format Magazine

(trumpets)

I’m still working with some sponsors who are confidential right now, rest assured I’ll let you know as soon as I can. It may be a cliche but we really couldn’t put this event on without their support. It costs a lot of money and it would probably bankrupt us, we’re a non-profit community event. It sounds dramatic but it’s true. So a hearty thanks to these folks for their support, we appreciate it.

Zonker

Anyway, back to events of the week. On Wednesday I worked on some Drupal sites for a while. I’ll give you more details on those in coming weeks when I’m allowed but it’s quite exciting. I also did more research for my Firefox Mobile article and wrote up some notes. On Thursday I interviewed former OpenSUSE Community Manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier for Linux Outlaws. I’m still working on the audio at the moment but you should be able too hear that as a special episode next week. It’ll be about 45mins in total. It was a very interesting chat I thought. Sadly I missed Chester LUG on Thursday evening because I was still feeling pretty rough. I’ll have to make it up to them next month.

On Friday I wrote, edited, formatted and published my FF Mobile review with some screen shots. It’s been pretty well received so far and I hope people enjoy it. I think mobile web browsing is a big area right now, and with the expansion of the smartphone market that’s only going to grow. I also spent some time working on HTML and CSS for a client site on Friday night. Trying to tweak a style sheet of over 1000 lines that someone else originally wrote can feel like chewing razor blades at times, but I finally got somewhere by the wee hours of the morning. Over the weekend I’ve been working on the Zonker interview audio, answering tons of email and I’m now editing the next Software Freedom Law Show for release on Tuesday. I’m also working on my 5 minute presentation for the Ignite Liverpool event next week. More on that in a second.

Upcoming:

Next week I’ll be getting onto OggCamp exhibition planning now that sponsors are mostly sorted. I also need to start working on a technical plan with the people at the venue. We’re going to be doing Outlaws live on Tuesday night at 7pm rather than Monday. Then it’ll be LivLUG on Wednesday night and I hope to be in good shape for that after missing Chester. On Thursday night I’m going to be giving a presentation at the Ignite Liverpool event, part of global O’Reilly Global Ignite Week. The idea is that you have 20 slides and 5 minutes to talk. The slides automatically advance every 15 seconds. I wasn’t sure what to talk about but now the idea of a 5 minute “Blaggers Guide To Linux” seems good to me. I get so many emails, phone calls and face to face enquiries from people asking me what Linux actually is, I think it would be good to give a quick foundation. Hopefully I can make it funny too, I’ll try. Come along to the Design Academy at Liverpool John Moores University at 6pm if you fancy seeing the result. You’re more than welcome. I’m sure there’ll be plenty else to get my teeth into next week. There’ll be more Rathole Radio at the weekend and I hope to have more news on gig tickets very soon. I’ll report back ASAP. Take care till then, see ya,

Dan


Categories: Writings

App Review: Firefox Mobile & Weave

Adventures In Open Source - Fri, 02/26/2010 - 19:03

FF Mobile In Action

Today I’d like to tell you about Firefox Mobile on the N900, running in conjunction with the new Mozilla Weave web service. I’ve been testing them out on my handset for about a month now since the beta release of Fennec (the codename for Firefox Mobile). The N900 is the first device to get Firefox Mobile but it should also appear on Google Android phones in the near future. There is talk from Mozilla of an iPhone version too, but Apple are so draconian with 3rd party software I’m not sure that’ll happen. I just can’t see them allowing another browser on the iPhone to compete with Safari. (correction: According to Fab the iPhone has allowed some 3rd party browsers already, see link in comments) Anyway, here’s my thoughts upon testing Firefox Mobile for some time.

Facing The Critics:
It seems fashionable with some people to bash Firefox right now and use it as the butt of their jokes. I think many of them are too quick to forget the great work Mozilla have done for us in spreading Open Source software to the masses. Many users get their first exposure to the wonderful world of FOSS through the likes of OpenOffice.org and Firefox. Sure it’s not perfect, it has it’s bugs and it can be slow at times too. But I think the emergence of real competitors like Google Chrome has and will continue to improve Open Source browsers in general. I like Chromium but Firefox is still the browser of choice on my desktop. Weave is also an interesting prospect and I’ll talk more about that in a minute. I was curious to see if I would like this new compact Firefox quite as much as I like it’s big brother.

What’s Weave?

Weave At Work

I mentioned Mozilla Weave earlier, it’s a new web service designed to make syncing your browsing history, bookmarks, tabs, form data and even passwords easy over multiple installations of Firefox. Imagine you have Firefox installed on a few different computers around the house, a laptop and a desktop perhaps. Having them synced up and sharing data means you’re always up to date whichever machine you’re on. There have long been extensions to share bookmarks but this takes it to a whole new level. Add in the fact that Firefox Mobile supports this on your phone and it becomes a much more interesting prospect. Wherever I happen to be a quick click on my phone brings up all the tabs I have open on my laptop. This is all achieved by syncing the data to a remote Mozilla web server and then sharing it between devices. You have to sign up for an account with Weave which is free, but a lot of people will have serious security concerns about it. According to Mozilla the data is all encrypted locally before it’s sent to their server, so even they can’t access it without your permission. I still don’t trust it with precious things like passwords and form data though, perhaps I’m paranoid. I use Weave to sync browsing history, bookmarks and tabs. It’s very easy to change these settings and it doesn’t share your passwords by default, which is a good thing I think. It’ll be interesting to see if it takes off as the browser spreads to more devices.

UI Design:

A drag to the left...

Obviously mobile devices have much less screen real estate for developers to use and the last thing you want is to have your page blocked out by copious toolbars, “tool” being the operative term in that sentence. The N900 has a pretty respectable 800×480 screen resolution but I’m still pleased to see the Mozilla guys have thought about using it wisely. They’ve done this by hiding extra controls to the left and right of the main display area. You can expose them by dragging the page left or right with you finger. To the right you have forward & back buttons, a “bookmark this page” shortcut and access to the app settings.

...and a drag to the right

To the left you have tabs and access to Weave integration. I have to admit I was dubious about this interface design at first and I didn’t think dragging the whole page to the side would work. It actually becomes second nature pretty quickly and the ability to have multiple pages open in tabs is very cool. I also like the fact that the “awesome” bar works the same as its desktop counterpart. If you start typing part of an address you’ve visited before it will narrow down helpful suggestions. This actually speeds up browsing a lot and in my laziness I use this feature far more than bookmarks. Having it integrated with your other Firefox installations through Weave makes this much more powerful too. Firefox Mobile helps you fill out forms quicker and jump between fields which is handy. Overall the adapted UI works well, despite my initial reservations I got used to it very quickly.

Performance:
This is the area where most people have issues with Firefox and on a mobile device your patience tends to be even shorter. I have two browsers on the N900 right now: Micro B which is the official Maemo browser, and Firefox Mobile. There’s no doubt that Firefox takes longer to start up and performance is generally slower. The really odd thing about this is that both browsers are Mozilla based so they should be similar. I don’t know what they did to speed it up Micro B but they need to pass that knowledge back so Firefox can be improved. If only Firefox was under the GPL they’d have to pass it back (edit: Possibly not, see comments), but that’s another matter. In fairness the final 1.0 release saw a speed improvement over the beta and RC. Once the browser is loaded it runs quickly enough but does occasionally bog down and crash. I can hear the Firefox haters laughing in the distance. It still needs a little work in this department I feel.

Extensions, But No Flash:

Managing Extensions

Unlike Micro B I don’t seem to have support for Flash in Firefox Mobile. This may be because Micro B comes pre-tweaked as part of the OS, I don’t know. I have my issues with Flash but I do still find support for it important in browsers. Hopefully that will change as HTML5 takes off, but right now I still want Flash support sorry. I tend to switch to Micro B to use YouTube and other sites. Mozilla don’t want to distribute proprietary software and this is probably the main reason Flash isn’t pre-configured, a position I respect. It’s also possible that I could install it myself with a little hacking. Trying to do that automatically in the browser or via a .deb package didn’t work though. On a positive note you do have access to extensions in Firefox Mobile, which many people have become used to on the desktop. I have a few installed and the selection is growing all the time, right now the main one for me is Weave, I don’t use a lot else.

Conclusions:

The Awsome Bar At Work

I enjoy using Firefox Mobile, particularly in conjunction with Weave and I think there’s much to commend about it. However, I’m afraid the overall impression it leaves is of performance problems which still need to be fixed. Slowness and random crashes are not something most users will put up with, especially on mobile devices. I use Micro B a lot more on the N900 because it’s quicker and more stable. There are some interesting features in Firefox Mobile and I do think it has great potential for the future, it’s only just come out of beta so I don’t want to be too harsh. How it will fare on other platforms like Android I’m not sure. The N900 has pretty quick hardware and I shudder to think how slow it might be on a G1 or other handset.

At the moment the browser situation on the N900 is similar to the one I see on my desktop, and at the same time completely different. Bear with me I haven’t lost my mind. It’s great to have a choice of browsers and competition is always good. On the desktop I use Firefox 80% of the time and Chromium the other 20%. On the mobile though it’s Micro B 80% of the time and Firefox 20%. Once the performance improves and I fix flash support that balance may shift. For now though my verdict on Firefox Mobile 1.0 is nice try, I really like the potential, but come back when it’s a bit more polished.

You can download Firefox Mobile here.

Also check out the full slideshow for more pics.


Categories: Writings

Linux Outlaws 137 - Bing!

Linux Outlaws Podcast - Thu, 02/25/2010 - 22:19

Ogg Vorbis - 1 hour 36 minutes 4 seconds, 47.2 MB — you can also download all our episodes in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format from the Outlaw Archives.

This week on the show: The Ubuntu One Music Store, big GPL case settled, Ubuntu soon powered by Bing, Google sued over Buzz, Apple hates naked people and much more…

If you have any feedback on the show, please leave it in the forums — preferably in the thread for this episode.

Linux Outlaws is brought to you by Sixgun Productions.

0:01:34 | Introduction

0:19:54 | Releases & News

0:50:21 | Microwatch

0:57:16 | Spotlight

  • Zattoo, a native Linux client to watch TV (in Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland & the UK) — sadly works only on Ubuntu
  • Gowalla beta for Android, a check-in application

1:03:41 | Feedback

Song: She by TenPenny Joke from the album Ambush On All Sides — thanks to Niklas Grahn for the tip!

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, except the music at the end of the show which is always licensed under the Creative Commons license specified by the artist under the provided link.

Categories: Podcasts

Weekly Rewind #52

Adventures In Open Source - Wed, 02/24/2010 - 15:34

Welcome to an incredibly late Weekly Rewind. I was hoping to get this out on Sunday but with all the preparation for Rathole Radio and that fact is was my good mate Will’s 30th birthday, things got away from me. It’s number 52, a whole year’s worth of rewinds. Although actually we passed the first anniversary a couple of weeks ago and I missed it, doh! People asked me what “special stuff” I was going to do for this fifty second edition but to be honest I can’t think of anything that special to do. I could look back at some highlights of the previous editions, but then I did that only recently in my review of 2009. So I’m just going to stick with the usual format in the arrogant belief that this is “special” enough. We’ll see if you agree by the end

I’m very busy with event planning at the moment and sponsorship stuff, a lot of which I’m not really at liberty to talk about yet. So if this update seems brief rest assured there has been plenty of OggCamp business and you’ll hear about it soon. It all began last Monday with another recording of Linux Outlaws, a recording which would become episode 136  “Make Love, Not Proprietary Software”. Following this blog announcement by Fab earlier in the day, we were experimenting with a new slightly leaner format. I think it worked well and the show was still 75mins long, hardly too short by any means. A lot of people told me they preferred it and we’ll keep trying to do that in future. Having said this on the last recording for episode 137 this Monday we went well over time. So I guess it’s a learning process. Personally I’ve long said that 60-80mins is the ideal length of show for me. That’s not to say I haven’t played my part in derailing shows and making them longer; I’m as guilty of that as anyone, but I do try to push us on and keep to some semblance of schedule. Some people completely disagree with my view and think the show should be 15 million hours long every week, which is cool, it’s nice that they feel they enjoy it that much. The amount of work this entails for us is what causes the problem though. Beyond about an hour show time the editing gets very time consuming and tiring. It’s a weekly show after all, so it’s not as if people don’t hear plenty of us anyway. Listenership has shot up lately which is fantastic, but I’m convinced keeping the show closer to an hour each week would make it much more accessible to a wider audience. I’ve now spent ages discussing not going on too long, oh the irony. Anyway, let’s move on (my catchphrase).

In the last 10 days or so I haven’t gotten any real distro hopping or writing done. Other things have overtaken that and I’m still trying to get back on track. Hopefully you’ll see a substantial article in the next 2 days. My February blog stats could certainly use it, there hasn’t been much to draw people to the site this month. I’ve also been a bit ill the last week and that’s slowed me down, I’m still trying to get back on a more even keel. Other things I’ve been up to in the last 10 days include: hacking Drupal sites, recording a new Rathole Radio, doing gig preparation and trying to sort out tickets for sale, constantly emailing and phoning people with OggCamp business and much more.

One particular highlight was last night, I attended my first Wirral Tweet Up event. I’ve been to many in Liverpool but missed the first Wirral one. I caught up with some good friends from the Scribblepool writing group and also met some interesting new people. It was an informal event held at Cromwell’s restaurant in Irby. Lot’s of hard work was put into making food and also making everyone feel welcome by proprietors Kay and Kate. I’d like to thank them for their work and also everyone else involved in setting up the event. It was a lot of fun. Many of my freedom crusading friends wonder why I go to these Twitter events and don’t just stick to Identi.ca only. I can see their point of view but the vast majority of the general geek community, not even the general public just techy types, use things like Facebook and Twitter heavily. I like to engage with them and help spread the word about Open Source, Linux and other things in a friendly sociable manner. The FOSS world can be incredibly insular and while I love my friends within it, there’s just no sense in preaching to the converted all the time. You have to get out and engage with others, get other points of view and expand your horizons, rather than just have your old views reinforced by a group of friends who agree. A good example is the fact that I was surrounded by iPhones last night and I casually worked the conversation onto the sat on the table N900 between them; what’s cool about it, Android, Linux and other mobile things. Not in a preachy way but just in general conversation. A lot of people had never heard of these things and took a genuine interest. I don’t expect all of them, if any actually, to run home and install a Linux distribution on their computer, but it’s a start. I’ve noticed the tendency within Open Source to think we are a bigger part of the tech crowd and society in general than we actually are. It’s good to get some perspective from people outside and bring that back to the group. It gives ideas for how we can engage with more people and improve what we do. It reinforces my beliefs in the principals of FOSS rather than weakening them. Enough rambling about that though.

I released a couple of albums on Jamendo last week. One of Kagnee, my old ska punk band, and another from an even older project called The Shed Collective. You can download, share and copy the music under the CC BY-SA license. It also prompted me to sort out my main site a little. If you look at danlynch.org/music you can see this starting to take shape. The list of tracks is easier to read and more compact but the RSS feed still works like a proper blog with full posts. My mastery of Drupal Views knows no bounds… ok, maybe a few. I’m going to keep working on that and making the content more useful as and when I get time. Eventually I’ll redirect shedmusic.net to it, as the old music blog is largely dead right now. Stay tuned for more on that.

Upcoming:

So in the next few days I should be off to Chester LUG tomorrow night with any luck. I have an interview booked with former OpenSUSE community manager Zonker for Linux Outlaws tomorrow, there’ll be another Software Freedom Law Show, more celebration of Will’s 30th (mine is looming in May) and a whole lot more OggCamp business. I hope I won’t be so late with updates next time but please bear with me, things are hectic. I’ll be in touch again very soon. Until then take care of yourselves and stay lucky,

See ya,

Dan


Categories: Writings

Episode 20 – 21st Feb 10

Rathole Radio - Mon, 02/22/2010 - 01:25
Download Ogg – Download Mp3 Episode 20 of Rathole Radio is here! Lots of electronic music in this show but also some nice acoustic tunes, some rock, a serving of hip hop and a live performance from myself. There were plenty of people in the chat room listening live and we had a good time. Come [...]
Categories: Podcasts

Linux Outlaws 136 - Make Love, Not Proprietary Software

Linux Outlaws Podcast - Wed, 02/17/2010 - 22:28

Ogg Vorbis - 1 hour 17 minutes 6 seconds, 38.3 MB — you can also download all our episodes in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format from the Outlaw Archives.

This week on the show: Moblin and Maemo now MeeGo, Google launches Buzz, the Olympics on Linux, no more freeze in Fedora Rawhide and more…

If you have any feedback on the show, please leave it in the forums — preferably in the thread for this episode.

Linux Outlaws is brought to you by Sixgun Productions.

0:01:45 | Introduction

0:11:55 | Releases & News

0:50:58 | Microwatch

0:57:46 | Feedback

  • Donations: Thanks a bunch to Blake Mattern, George Naylor and Jessie Berlin!
  • Forums: Check out linuxoutlaws.com/flamewar

  • Frank Bell doesn’t like Aldiko because he finds it “aggressively unfree”, he prefers FBreader
  • In contrast stark, George Naylor loved it and even supported them with his money
  • Daniel “Not Cloud Man” Devine sent us this cool beer backport patch for Episode 134:
  • Les “Quarter” Pounder” says Blackpool LUG are looking for new members to join them every Saturday between 10am and 12pm
  • Beeza wrote us with his thoughts concerning Fab’s comments on VB and Windows development
  • Other emails this week from John Scheuvront, Juan Mares, scarffo, Andreas Marschke, Reine, Len Cooley, Nathan Neff, Stephen Parsons, Dan Dart, Rex Djere and Dan Scott
  • The Ubuntu UK Podcast is back!

  • Event: FOSScon in Rochester, NY on June 19

Song: Out Of My Mind by Cavashawn from their self-titled single

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, except the music at the end of the show which is always licensed under the Creative Commons license specified by the artist under the provided link.

Categories: Podcasts

Weekly Rewind #51

Adventures In Open Source - Sun, 02/14/2010 - 23:09

Evening everyone, it’s Sunday and you know what that means? It’s time for another weekly rewind. I’d like to start off by apologising for the lack of substantial articles in the last couple of weeks. Event organisation and other things have kept me so busy I just haven’t managed it. I’ve been meaning to get the distro hopping and reviewing under way again for a while. I even went as far as trying to install PC-BSD, only to discover it needs more disk space than I have available with my normal system partition layout. Luckily it warned me and I didn’t get as far as wiping my system. I’ll have to think about how best to fix this. I have some other things to write about, I’ll focus on those next week. So, let’s talk about what actually did happen.

We began on Monday with another live Linux Outlaws show as always. It was great fun and Fab released that later in the week as episode 135 – “So Good They Tried To Patent Him”. I also released a new Rathole Radio in the afternoon. I finally got around to making a Facebook page for the show as well. I don’t use Facebook much, but it seems the rest of the world does and I want to spread the word. Hopefully it will help get some new listeners on board.

Dave Lee - Drawing not be to scale

A lot of time this week has been taken up talking to various potential Oggcamp10 sponsors. I’m pleased to say we’re finally making good progress on that and I might not have to go bankrupt after all, which would be nice. I’ve also been working on some Drupal stuff and trying to organise my home site a little. It’s still a work in progress and it looks like crap, but the information is improving. I looked at some old albums I did as parts of various bands and other projects. I’ve uploaded some of them to Jamendo and if they’re approved I’ll post the links here soon. I’d like to get some of the music I’ve made over the years out there for others too hear, and with Jamendo I can do that under a Creative Commons license. Cool hey? I have some ideas to work on new music this year, but it may have to wait until the Oggcamp madness dies down. I’ll let you know.

On Friday night I tuned into The Bugcast live recording. The host Dave Lee was kind enough to play one of my songs and it was good fun chatting to everyone. Dave does a great job and I believe his wife Caroline usually co-hosts but sadly she was ill this week. They play some great music and make a really good show. Go and have a listen.

Ok I’m gonna keep this update a little shorter than normal, but there isn’t a lot else to tell at this time. I hope to announce some more Oggcamp related news very soon I promise. One of the most important things to remember is please book your accommodation now if you want to come. I’ve been saying this for a month but I’m still hearing from people who are taking their time. It’s a busy weekend, if you keep waiting you’ll have trouble finding anything. Head to laterooms.com and search Liverpool on the relevant dates. It’s the best resource I’ve found. I hope to see many of you joining us at the event for fun and Free Software.

Upcoming:

As I mentioned at the top, my distro hopping has stalled at the moment, hopefully I’ll fix that this week. I plan to write about my experience of testing Firefox Mobile and Weave in the meantime. There will also be another Linux Outlaws live show tomorrow night and I hope you’ll join us for that. Don’t forget Rathole Radio next Sunday Feb 21st at 9pm too.

Take care everyone and have a nice week,

Dan


Categories: Writings

Linux Outlaws 135 - So Good, They Tried to Patent Him

Linux Outlaws Podcast - Fri, 02/12/2010 - 22:53

Ogg Vorbis - 1 hour 31 minutes 19 seconds, 44.4 MB — you can also download all our episodes in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format from the Outlaw Archives.

This week on Linux Outlaws: Company tries to patent Bradley Kuhn, Symbian now open source, Matt Asay becomes new Canonical COO, Windows 7 kills laptop batteries and much more…

If you have any feedback on the show, please leave it in the forums — preferably in the thread for this episode.

Linux Outlaws is brought to you by Sixgun Productions.

0:01:35 | Introduction

0:16:45 | Releases & News

0:55:42 | Microwatch

1:01:17 | Feedback

Song: If You’re Lost For Somewhere Else To Be by The Heavens from their self-titled debut album

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, except the music at the end of the show which is always licensed under the Creative Commons license specified by the artist under the provided link.

Categories: Podcasts

Episode 19 – 7th Feb 10

Rathole Radio - Mon, 02/08/2010 - 23:57
Download Ogg – Download Mp3 It’s time for another Rathole Radio. Episode 19 this time, n-n-n-n-n-n-nineteen! Hope you enjoy it. There’s an eclectic mix of music as always, some waffing and a live performance from yours truly. Enjoy the show. 00:00 – Eclectek – We’re Gonna Elecfunk Your Ass – CC BY-NC-SA Licensed from Lille, France A correction. [...]
Categories: Podcasts

Weekly Rewind #50

Adventures In Open Source - Sun, 02/07/2010 - 23:47

Greetings all and welcome to Weekly Rewind number 50. The big “five oh”, I’m referring to the number there and not using ghetto slang for the police. I do listen to a lot of hip hop but it hasn’t completely taken over my brain just yet. I once got a royal ripping (Liverpool slang for skitting) from my band mates for using the term “five oh” as a police car drove past. We laughed hard about that. Anyway this is all by the by, so let’s get into it.

On Monday we recorded another Linux Outlaws and streamed it live as usual. Unfortunately Fab has been ill this week so best wishes to him, despite this he still got the show out on Friday though. Nice work! On Tuesday I worked on some audio stuff along with many other jobs. I put some stuff together as an audio trailer for OggCamp10 and released that here later in the week. I also got a chance to catch up with some good friends on Tuesday night which was nice. On Wednesday I attended LivLUG where we had a fascinating talk about ZFS and BtrFS from Tom Hall, a storage and filesystems guru. Tom’s a good speaker and it was very entertaining. One of the LUG members (Neil Bothwick) later described it as a bit of a Jim Bowen moment though. For those who have no clue what I’m on about there, ZFS is under a license not compatible with the Linux kernel, so it’s doubtful we’ll see it in there any time soon. Jim Bowen is a British game show host famous for saying “…and here’s what you could of won”. Jokes are always better when you have to explain them aren’t they? I wasn’t sure Jim Bowen’s fame had spread from far from these shores yet, but it made me laugh anyway..

Thursday was pretty quiet and I got on with jobs but on Friday I went over to Liverpool on the train. I had a meeting at the Bad Format Social Club, the venue for my Rathole Roadshow gig and sorted out some arrangements for that. I then walked up to the FACT building for lunch with some friends and potential sponsors. I have some good leads there but we could always use more. If you or your employer would be interested in sponsoring OggCamp please drop me a line. Finally, I popped into the Black-E to sort some stuff some out with them before hopping on the train home. I used the N900 to keep up with emails and everything else during the day rather than taking my laptop, and I got a surprising amount done on the device. It did affect the battery life a little as I used it much more heavily, but it was a good test. I don’t normally go out for the day like that without a laptop if I have work to do. I listened to some teenage lad on the train trying to convince his mum he “really needed an iPad”. “It’s not a toy it’s for serious work, I’m going to do spreadsheets on it” he pleaded. I resisted the strong urge to jump in with a comment like “Spreadsheets my arse, it’s a big iPod Touch!! You can’t even install software on it. Get a proper computer you idiot” but it wasn’t easy. He kept looking over at the N900 to try and work out what it was I was using. Some sort of iPhone he hadn’t seen perhaps? Thankfully not. I engaged “smug mode” and remained quiet.

On Saturday I was interviewed for the Open Source Musician podcast which was a lot of fun. I was honoured to be asked on the show but felt like a bit of a fraud. I still have a dual-boot setup on my studio machine. I use Ubuntu Studio a lot but it does also have Windows XP on there which I occasionally use. It’s not a secret, I’m open about it, but it’s not something I’m proud of either. I’ve been “in the process” of going 100% Linux in the studio for about 18 months now. I never seem to get the time to actually concentrate on it with so much else going on. I’m proud to say I do all of my podcast production on Linux, but music is still a work in progress for me. I’m only 70% there. Must try harder, as it would probably say on my school report. Finally, today I streamed and recorded another Rathole Radio show which was great fun. I played a wide range of music and had a lot of fun as always. I’ve processed the audio just now and will release it tomorrow. It’s getting too late to do it tonight.

Upcoming:

Not sure exactly what I have planned in the next week but I know something will take up my time. I’m not 100% sure if Fab will be fit enough to do Linux Outlaws tomorrow night either, but hopefully so. I didn’t get chance to install a BSD and test it this week. I still need to do that for a review. I’ll also be doing much more Oggcamp business and trying to move all that forward. We made good progress on sponsorship this week and that’s my major focus right now. There’ll be another Software Freedom Law Show to produce and much more besides. Join me next week to find out what unfolds.

Take care,

Dan


Categories: Writings

Linux Outlaws 134 - The Greppy Awards

Linux Outlaws Podcast - Fri, 02/05/2010 - 22:07

Ogg Vorbis - 1 hour 38 minutes 15 seconds, 47.3 MB — you can also download all our episodes in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format from the Outlaw Archives.

This week’s show is brought to you by Bang Bros and Adobe, we also talk about the iTampon, Defective by Design, Ubuntu switching to Yahoo for search, Sourceforge blocking whole countries and much more…

If you have any feedback on the show, please leave it in the forums — preferably in the thread for this episode.

Linux Outlaws is brought to you by Sixgun Productions.

0:02:08 | Introduction

  • Fab thanks Jon Tomaszewski from Red Hat for sending him one of the iconic red fedoras
  • Errata: MJJZF was thinking of Adam Williamson of Mandriva when talking about another community manager who has quit his job last week, we are glad to hear Max Spevak is still rocking it at Fedora because he’s a great guy — actually Williamson is at Red Hat now too, we hear
  • We had 52,886 downloads in January on Libsyn alone, a new record — the new weekly record is 13,866 for last week
  • The Fender Android phone is out now
  • GCC to merge Go support
  • Wikileaks needs donations
  • Check out Dan’s monster N900 review

0:11:56 | Releases, MicroCrapplewatch & News

1:04:06 | Software Picks

1:09:41 | Feedback

  • Donations: Thanks to Tom Link, Mark Wright and Ryan Kohler
  • Forums: Coordinate OggCamp travel

  • We had a couple of emails on the SourceForge blockade from Pete Smith and Badry Darkoush from Syria — Chad Vader sketch
  • Tom Link from Canada reports that he took his car for an oil change to Mr. Lube and was surprised to see that all their workstations run Ubuntu
  • Dave Purse sent us information about his new distro Simplicity Linux which comes with Linux Outlaws pre-loaded in the podcatcher — good on ya, Dave!
  • MJJZF says the Danish parliament, Folketinget, decided that ODF should be used as the only document format in state documents
  • JonathanD pimps Freenode’s “7for7” campaign, go and donate because Freenode is ace!
  • We also had emails from Ravel Lopez, Peter Cannon, Bo Kullmar, Joshua K., Jack, Mark Law, Reine, Sven Lankes, Kelly, Paul W.B., Quarter Pounder, Parth Lawate, Morgan, Russ Axford, Rich Brown, Mark, Rick and Vytenis

  • Event: Fedora Activity Day (FAD), March 27/28 in Mönchengladbach

Song: Oppositional Defiance Disorder (live) by David Rovics from the album The Commons

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, except the music at the end of the show which is always licensed under the Creative Commons license specified by the artist under the provided link.

Categories: Podcasts

OggCamp10 Trailer

Adventures In Open Source - Thu, 02/04/2010 - 23:33

Evening all, I just wanted to share with you something I’ve been working on this week. It’s an audio trailer for our OggCamp10 event on 1st-2nd of May 2010 in Liverpool, UK. I threw this together quite quickly with a short script and some sound effects. It came out well though and I hope you enjoy it. Obviously this is licensed under Creative Commons, as with all my other work. So if you’d like to use it in any way feel free. It’s a promo after all so I hope too hear it everywhere!!

Ogg Version (1mb)

Mp3 Version (1mb)

FLAC Version (3.5mb)

The work contains some samples taken from FreeSound.org and in keeping with their CC license I’d like to thank dobroide for the pedestrian noise, and rutgermuller for some extra footsteps. The music is an old track of my own which isn’t actually released yet. I’ll get the full version uploaded as soon as I can. Oggcamp business has me very busy right now. I will also be making a shorter 30 second cut of the ad very soon.

That’s all for now, take care out there,

Dan


Categories: Writings

Weekly Rewind #49

Adventures In Open Source - Sun, 01/31/2010 - 21:46

Welcome to another Weekly Rewind. It’s been a little quieter for me in the last 7 days, but only marginally. This update finds me sat at home in the kitchen, contemplating what to make for dinner. Fried rice is looking favourite right now, but I’m sure this sort of riveting information is not what you’re hear to read. So let’s get on with it.

On Monday we did a Linux Outlaws live show as usual, streaming video and audio as we went. There was some confusion when someone in the IRC channel told us Max Spevak (Fedora Community Manager) had left his post. It turned out they were “thinking of someone else”, but I guess the lesson is don’t always trust the wisdom of IRC, especially on a live show. They’re generally right on most things though to be fair, and having the stream has actually cut down the amount of email corrections we get. If we say something outrageously wrong someone will usually pick us up on it and we can fix it immediately. It’s nicer than getting 20 emails telling you the same thing for the next week. Somehow we ended up doing some pretty poor impressions of Shabba Ranks at the end of the show. Quite how these things occur I’m never sure, but if you want to find out you should join us live on Monday nights at 7pm GMT. I processed the audio from the show the next day and Fab released it as episode 133 “Shabba!” on Thursday. I also released a new Rathole Radio on Monday afternoon. It featured an interview with Creative Commons metaller Jono Bacon and it’s been pretty well received. A few people only tuned into the show because of Jono’s presenc,e but said they liked it and would come back in future which is nice. I need to build up the listenership a bit. Moving to Libsyn has meant I get far more accurate stats, and they don’t make as pleasant reading as I’d hoped. Perhaps it’s because of my very eclectic music taste that a lot of people don’t “get” the show, I don’t know. But I shall persevere and win them round eventually. Speaking of which, I received a very nice review for Rathole Radio from Peter Cannon. He’s not a man to mince his words and despite only catching the show by accident I think I may have won him over. If I can manage that then I’m sure more will follow. If you listen to Rathole Radio and enjoy it please help spread the word to other music fans you know. Go on, I’ll be your best mate.

Kryten (from Red Dwarf)

I spent a fair amount of time writing my long N900 review this week. I published that late on Friday night, technically Saturday morning but who’s counting. I’m enjoying the device a lot and today I discovered how to sync the internal calendar easily with my Google calendar which is nice. I’ll write some tips on that and post them during the week, it’s actually very simple. I’m also going to get hold of the Maemo SDK and see what I can do with it. I’ve mentioned my Python darts scoring program before. It actually runs on the N900 pretty well already, but I’m curious to see if the VM included with the SDK makes development quicker. I also want to investigate packaging that for the device. It will all make good experience for future writing. I’ve been called into action a few times in the last 7 days as family geek. You know how it is, you’re the one in the family who knows about computers so you end up fixing them for relatives, friends and sometimes people you’ve never even met. I wrestled with an ailing Vista laptop but discovered the hard drive was actually failing in the end. For once it wasn’t Windows fault, who would have guessed. On Thursday night I went to Chester LUG and bored everyone senseless with the N900. They seemed pretty interested actually and there was even excitement as I installed Vim on it in the pub. How geeky.

I’ve continued to email up a storm with Oggcamp organisation and progress is good. Next step is hitting the sponsorship trail with a vengeance. We’ve had some false starts on this but with a large bill for the venue and other things hanging over my head, my mind is pretty focused. If by some chance anyone reading this wants to help out with sponsorship please drop me a line. We’d be very glad too hear from you.

Yesterday I edited the next Software Freedom Law Show and you can hear that on Tuesday. It includes my friend Bradley Kuhn trying to impersonate Fab and mostly failing to be honest. It’s very funny though. Check it out. In other business I also found time for a trip to Bolton this week and to make myself look stupid on Wii Tennis. The two are unrelated however hehe.

Upcoming:

So, tomorrow there will be more Outlaws live in the evening. I’ll be doing much more work on Oggcamp and I’ll prepare another Rathole Radio for the weekend. I also intend to get distro hopping again on my main laptop and I’m thinking it might finally be time for a BSD. I’ll report back on how that goes and also on my many adventures with the N900. It’s Liverpool LUG on Wednesday night and I know at least one other member has an N900. So we can both “engage smug mode” as Kryten would say, and piss everyone off. Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you next week.

Dan


Categories: Writings

Handset Review: Nokia N900

Adventures In Open Source - Sat, 01/30/2010 - 01:06

Nokia N900

It’s been a while since my last substantial review but I’m back with something a little different for you today. I’d like to talk about the Nokia N900 Linux-based phone I’ve been testing for the past 6 weeks. It’s the first Maemo powered device to feature phone functions. Does this move signal a new direction for Nokia? Nobody seems quite sure just yet, but the hardware and software are causing a lot of interest in the Linux community. Here’s my thoughts on the experience so far.

Vital Stats:
  • Processor: ARM Cortex-A8 600mhz, PowerVR SGX graphics
  • RAM: 256mb
  • Storage: 32gb internal memory, 16gb MicroSD slot for expansion
  • Camera: Carl Zeiss, Tessar 2.8/5.2, AF 5MP
  • Operating System: Maemo 5 (based on Debian)
  • Kernel: 2.6.28-omap1
  • Connectivity: GRPS, EDGE, HSDPA, HSUPA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, DLNA, Infra red, microUSB v2.0
  • Other Features: FM Radio transmitter, GPS, TV-out
Introduction:

Back of Device

In the interests of full disclosure I should start off by pointing out a couple of quick things. Firstly this handset was sent to me for trial by Nokia, I didn’t buy it and it has to be returned at some point. I’ve had it 6 weeks at the time of this writing. Secondly I’m no phone expert. I haven’t used a lot of smartphones, so I can’t compare this directly to Android devices or others. I’ve only used them in passing. I do know a thing or two about Linux though and hopefully that will balance this out.

With Google Android making weekly headlines at the moment it’s an interesting time for Nokia to bring out their first proper Linux-based phone device. Of course you’ll never hear them refer to it as a phone. They strictly only call it a mobile computer and they’re keen to differentiate between this and their Symbian smartphones. Exactly where a smartphone ends and a mobile computer begins I’ll let you decide, I’m not sure I know. Whether Nokia like it or not though people will compare the N900 to the iPhone, Palm Pre and various Android handsets on the market. I’m not convinced this attempt to brand it as a mould-breaking device will work for them. However, the thought of Debian on a proper working phone certainly excited the kilt wearing geek within me. I’d seen a lot of N900 reviews online and I was very keen to get my hands on one. They’re quite expensive handsets at £500 from Nokia Direct in the UK. The best deal I’ve seen on contract here was £35pm for 24 months on Vodafone (handset included), but it did come with a good amount of phone minutes, SMS and “unlimited” data. As much as any of these contracts are ever truly unlimited. Vodafone is the only network officially carrying the N900 here in the UK right now. There are rumours that it will be available on other networks in future. I guess we’ll find out.

Hardware:

Keyboard Open

Let’s begin by talking about the hardware you get for your money. The handset is heavier than most other similar devices I’ve tried but only slightly, and it does include a slide out hardware keyboard. It’s solid and well built. It feels very similar to the HTC G1 in form. You get a pretty impressive 32gb of internal storage and this can be expanded to 48gb with a MicroSD card slot. The card slot is located under the battery cover though, so you can’t swap cards easily which isn’t ideal. In practice this hasn’t been a problem because I tend to just put a card in and forget about it. With 48gb of memory to play with it’s not as if I’m going to run out any time soon. It’s a generous amount by any estimation. The processor is an ARM Cortex-A8 which runs at 600mhz and there’s also 256mb of RAM. Even when running 4 or 5 applications at once it doesn’t seem to struggle. You do get the occasional slowdown when a particular application hangs, but think is a software error in those applications rather than hardware. The experience has been very smooth and slick overall.

End View

The main data connection is through a MicroUSB port on the top of the phone. If you’re on Windows you can install the Nokia PC Suite software for syncing your calendar and contacts, but I’m not keen on that. Besides I’m a Linux desktop user anyway and there’s no Linux version. Perhaps this is a blessing as much as a curse. I am pleased to say the device works perfectly as a mass storage drive on any platform via USB. You can also charge it from this port using the standalone wall charger or a computer. The 5 mega-pixel camera seems very good for a device of this kind. It’s a Carl Zeiss optic and while I know nothing about photography, I’ve been assured by friends that this is a good make. The way I take photos I need all the help I can get. There’s also a standard 3.5mm mini-jack connection which is a must for me. I hate proprietary headphone connections with a passion. Then there are the usual power, volume, camera and lock buttons you’d expect around the periphery of the handset. You also get a stylus tucked away at one end. At first I expected to hate using the stylus, but it’s actually quite grown on me. The touch screen is good enough to use with your fingers, which I do 90% of the time, but occasionally when doing something that requires more fine accuracy I pull out the stylus.

Size Comparison

I’ve heard many friends complaining about the battery life on their G1 or Hero and I wasn’t looking forward to charging my phone every 8 hours. This hasn’t been the case at all though. I don’t use the device heavily for phone calls but I am always using data for email and other things, playing music and even using the FM transmitter. Despite all this I get well over 24 hours out of one charge. I’ve been very happy with that. I get a solid and quick 3G connection with O2 UK. I downloaded a 52mb podcast file over 3G to test this. It came in at 600kbps all the way. That’s almost as fast as I get on wi-fi, impressive! You can also use WLAN, BlueTooth and even the Infra Red port for connectivity if you want.

The GPS seems pretty good but the mapping application is let down by the lack of decent maps for me. OVI maps don’t contain the same amount of data as Google Maps from what I’ve seen. You also don’t get turn by turn directions when using the GPS in the car. This may well be fixed by software updates in future. I’ve heard more 3rd party GPS apps for Maemo are in the pipeline.

Overall, the hardware is one of the most impressive things about the N900 for me. I love being able to jump in the car, start a podcast and then just press the FM transmitter button to play it back through the radio. You could of course use an external FM transmitter with any device, but having it built in just feels cool. Every time I switch it on I half expect Q to pop up and say “pay attention 007”. Nokia have always made good hardware and this is certainly true here. Most people’s issues with them over the years have been more with their software. So let’s discuss that next.

Software:

One Of 4 Desktops

As I mentioned earlier, the N900 is the first Maemo device from Nokia with phone features. More precisely it comes with Maemo 5, the latest iteration of their Debian-based operating system that won many fans on Internet tablets like the N800 and N810. I’ve only used those devices in passing, but I’ve always heard good things about Maemo from friends. I’m a big Debian fan, and the ability to install a .deb package on your phone has always appealed to me. There are many Maemo repositories containing thousands of packages Linux fans will know well from their desktops. Gpodder, Pidgin, Firefox and Vim to name just a few. Ok, so maybe Vim is more for the hardcore geek I admit, but it is in the repos along with QEmacs, which made me laugh. You can get root access to the N900 any time by typing one command in the X terminal window. A handy feature which in turn means you can run “apt-get install <package>” to install things. A feature to make any Linux fan need a change of trousers if ever I’ve seen one. Of course the first thing I did when I got the N900 was jump into a terminal and install Nano with Apt-Get. That’s pretty damn cool on a phone.

Multiple Apps At Once

The Maemo 5 interface works well with the touch screen and proper multi-tasking is a big bonus. A lot of other phones will run more than one app simultaneously these days (iPhone users look away now), but this is really well implemented. Switching apps is easy and the visual effects on the desktop are almost Compiz-like. The menu system is intuitive enough but I do have one slight problem with it. There’s no obvious way to close some things at first. You have to tap on the desktop outside a menu to go back a screen. It’s easy once you learn how but some clearer instructions would be nice.

The only really negative experience I’ve had so far with the N900 was updating to a new firmware using Nokia’s NSU software. I wrote about this at length on the blog, so I won’t go over all that again. For me the update process needs to be significantly improved if Nokia want ordinary users to buy into the N900, both literally and metaphorically. There are some other areas that could use a little polish. The built-in email client for example isn’t great, it needs to be improved. You can supplement it with other 3rd party apps but this isn’t a long term solution. The dialler on the other hand is very good and has pretty much all the features you would expect. It’s cool to have Skype and Google Talk integrated too. You can call people on Skype directly from your phone book if they’re online, or to a phone if you have Skype Out minutes. I don’t know many other phones that do that at the moment. The included web browser is also excellent. You get full flash support and the full web experience on the device. Nothing is missing. You can also install Mozilla Fennec and have a choice of browsers, which I’ve done.

My Python Gtk App Running

One of the most common digs I hear from Android users is that the N900 is tied to the Ovi Store for new software. I certainly wouldn’t argue that the Android Market is a lot bigger and more popular, but the N900 is in no way tied to Ovi for getting software. There are 1000s of packages in the Maemo repositories and you can also run any Python software with a Gtk or Qt interface. Pretty much everything on the Linux desktop then. I was even able to run some Gtk applications I wrote myself just by copying the source code over to the device. The next stop is to look at packaging this into .debs for easy sharing with other N900 users. For hackers and Linux geeks alike I think this could make a very interesting prospect. The software is still evolving though and I’m keen to see what’s planned for Maemo 6, the odd rough edge is apparent at times. For the average person in the street the convenience and simplicity of the Android Market is probably a winner right now, I can’t argue against that. One of the big buzz phrases you hear from all these companies is “developer mind share”. Basically this means getting developers excited about coding on your platform. I suspect giving these devices to developers and sending them to bloggers like myself is intended to achieve that. For a developer wanting to make a living purely from selling mobile apps it’s hard to see the attraction of the N900 right now. Ovi doesn’t have the user base of the iPhone App Store or Android Market. With so many handsets already running Android and more in the pipeline, I think this is the place for mobile developers to be right now. I really like Maemo 5 and there are already plans for Maemo 6. It has the solid base you would expect from Debian and they’ve built well on this in adding polish. If Nokia put more weight behind it we may see it grow, but with only one device running Maemo 5 and only one more planned for 2010, it’s not going to be easy.

Conclusions:

Getting A Feel For It

This has very much been a Linux users experience of the N900, rather than a phone expert or an average end user. But then I think this is precisely the core market for the device. In many ways it feels like what we all hoped the OpenMoko project would become before it petered out. A really good Open Source Linux-based phone with slick hardware, root access and the ability to run your own code without restrictions. It’s not quite as open as the Freerunner admittedly. You can’t get schematics for the hardware but this is as close as I think you can get right now. Lots of people tell me they can do the same things on their Android devices and this may well be true. I’d need to compare how much effort it is to jailbreak an Android phone.

The biggest barrier for the N900 at the moment my well be Nokia itself. Many people disagree with me on this point, but I think they should be pushing it more. It’s an exclusive hacker device right now both in price and visibility. It’s still new so perhaps it’s a bit early to judge their promotion efforts yet. Developers may get excited by the full Python implementation and ability to use familiar Linux toolkits. My advice to Nokia right now (not that I doubt they worry about my advice) would be to release a rapid application environment for Maemo. Something akin to Quickly on Ubuntu. You could even port Quickly over to the device. It would speed up the appearance of new apps and fuel demand for the handset. An easy to use virtual machine for testing your applications on any desktop would also be very handy. It all depends how much effort they want to put into it. Android developers can already target their apps at devices from within Eclipse. (EDIT: Apparently the Maemo 5 SDK includes a VM, I haven’t tried it yet though)

Threaded Conversations

The question everyone is asking me now is “will you buy an N900 when you have to send that back”? I honestly don’t know for sure yet. I use a lot of Google applications and the integration offered by Android is appealing to a freedom hater like me. I’d like to try an Android device properly for a few weeks to really compare them. £500 is a lot of money for a handset, but then this no ordinary handset. I can almost see why Nokia insist on calling this a mobile computer now. It’s half netbook and half smartphone, whether there’s really a market for that we’ll have to see. If the next model (presumably the N910) makes as much forward progress I think Nokia may yet surprise a few people who’ve written them off. The hardware is excellent and the software feels 90% there, it just needs to cross that final hurdle.

If you’re looking for a consumer-ready, fashionable Linux-based phone platform with a big app store I’d direct you towards Android. However, if you’re a Linux user interested in trying something more like the desktop platform you know and love, the N900 is perfect. I’m really happy with the N900 and each day it moves a little closer to the centre of my heart, is there a doctor in the house? I hope we see many more devices running Maemo in the near future and much development. That’s what it’s going to take for the Android crazed public and media to notice it in the wake of things like the Nexus One.

Upcoming:

I’ll continue to test and write about my experiences with the N900 of course, but I should really get back to distro hopping on my laptop. It’s been a busy start to 2010. I do have a few potential targets for the next hop in mind. If you have any suggestions or requests please feel free to send them to me or leave a comment. Also if someone wants to send me an Android phone to compare with the N900 feel free, it’s not likely but no harm in asking hehe…


Categories: Writings
Syndicate content