The first thing I noticed is a subtle change to the menu when you boot from an Ubuntu CD. Before there used to be an option called “Start or Install Ubuntu”. Now there are two separate options “Try Ubuntu Without Changing Your Computer” and “Install Ubuntu”. That’s a very smart change that is going to make a big difference for new users. Also, they have supposedly made changes to how the Live CD works when you put it into a computer that has Windows presently booted. Handing out CDs is going to be a much more effective way of spreading the love.

Also, there were a bunch of features included in the Feisty Fawn, and also the Gutsy Gibbon, that weren’t 100% perfect. This includes some of the audio and graphics support. All those things have been polished a great deal. I think that is because Hardy is an LTS release. That’s actually a big deal because Dapper has reached the point where it is too old to be still useful. I’m actually thinking that I might use Hardy full on until the next LTS release. Though, I don’t know if I’ll be able to hold myself back from upgrading for so long. Maybe I can do it on my computer at work.

I don’t really have that much else to say other than that I tried the Xubuntu Hardy Heron to see what was up. I used Xfce way back in the day on Gentoo machines, and I was a fan. I really like the idea and style of Xfce, but since I switched to Ubuntu and Gnome, I can’t deal with Xfce. Basically, when I use Gnome, I only use a fraction of the features it offers. Most of the other stuff is cruft. Xfce is sort of like Gnome light, even though Xfce people will probably yell at you if you say that. I like that it has most of the Gnome features I want, and takes out pretty much all the ones I don’t want. The thing that keeps me away is that there are always a handful of things I really need that Xfce leaves out. It’s getting better, but I don’t see myself using it anytime soon.

Everyone, I mean everyone, with a PC, should at least try the Hardy Heron. Even if you’ve tried Linuxes or Ubuntus in the past, that doesn’t matter. Try this one. This is the real deal.

Anyway, one of my major disappointments with the iPhone is the lack of podcatching software. If it had a podcatcher, I probably would have bought one right off the bat. Android has presented me with the opportunity to write my own mobile podcatching software. I’ve decided that I’m going to go for it. Being an Ubuntu user, I had to setup the SDK to get working. However, I ran into a few problems along the way. Since I suspect many other Ubuntu users out there also might want to get into the Android developing business, here I will post how I got the development environment setup in Ubuntu.

The first thing you need is a computer with Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon installed. The computer should be connected to the Internet. Ubuntu by default tries to use open source versions of Java, and while these are pretty good, they will not work for android development. The fact that Ubuntu will not default to using Sun Java, even after you install it explicitly, is the primary reason this how to is necessary. Anyway, the first step is to update your packages and install Eclipse and Sun Java.

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude install eclipse sun-java6-jdk

If you want to use Sun Java as the default JVM in your web browsers, run this command as well.

sudo aptitude install sun-java6-plugin

Now you need to make Sun Java the default jvm in Ubuntu. You can do that with this command.

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

We also need to edit the file /etc/jvm. Edit that file as root with your favorite text editor.

sudo gedit /etc/jvm

The contents of the file will look something like this.

/usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj
/usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-1.5.0-sun
/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun
/usr

Change it to look like this, then save and quit your text editor.

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
/usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj
/usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-1.5.0-sun
/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun
/usr

When certain programs on your system want to run java, they will look at this file to figure out which JVM to use. They will try every JVM in the list starting with the one on top until one of them works. Eclipse, however, does not use this file. It has its own file that works in the same way. First edit the eclipse java_home file as root.

sudo vim /etc/eclipse/java_home

There should already be a line in that file for Sun Java 6. Move this line to the top of the file. Add it to the top if it isn’t there.

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

Now your Ubuntu system is ready to run the Android development kit. Go to the Android documentation site and follow the directions there. Have fun making mobile apps in Java!

If you take the newest version of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, you can install it on just about any standard desktop PC, and it will work. The video card will most likely work just fine. It will work even better if you take the two clicks to install a binary driver, if necessary. The mouse, keyboard, and other peripherals will work. All of your drives will work. It is only incredibly rare hardware, such as some proprietary enterprise RAID controllers, that will be completely unsupported. Also, if you have an extremely new high-end motherboard, it may not work perfectly. However, problems with new motherboards seem to get fixed in the next kernel release. You can’t expect much more than that, especially considering the incredibly rapid kernel development cycle. I can not honestly say the situation is perfect. There are still a lot of drivers that need writing. However, it has been a very long time since I have encountered any completely unsupported desktop hardware, and more drivers being written every day.

If my experience is not uncommon, why is there still a common perception that Linux lacks hardware support? Perhaps people tried Linux back when hardware support was terrible, and they don’t realize how far it has come since then? Perhaps people who have this impression have never really tried Linux, and they just go by what they read in the tech news? These are possibilities, but whatever the cause, I can tell you that there is actually another, bigger, problem looming in the Linux world. The problem I see is that many existing Linux drivers are incomplete.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to say the drivers are low quality. In fact, Linux drivers are among the best in terms of stability, security, and performance. What I mean by incomplete is that the drivers do not support every feature of the hardware. Sure, they support the core functionality, but many pieces of supported hardware have non-essential features which are unsupported. If the Linux drivers were complete, as well as quality, we could honestly say that Linux actually supports hardware better than Windows does. Instead we continue to play catch-up. To fully demonstrate my meaning, let me give you some personal examples of incomplete Linux hardware support. Just as a note, I am aware that not all of these examples should be solved in the domain of kernel drivers, but how the solutions should be implemented is irrelevant to my fundamental thesis.

On my desktop at home I have a Logitech MX1000. It is a wireless USB laser mouse with thirteen different buttons. The core functionality works perfectly in Linux. I can point, I can click, I can scroll, and I can hotplug the USB. This is a big improvement from the Linux of just a few years ago. However, all is not well. Many of these 13 buttons do not work properly, or easily, under Linux. Also, this mouse is designed to run at 800cpi. In Linux I must install and use a command line application to set it to 800cpi instead of the default of 400cpi. I also have to use the same application to change the cruise control setting. This is a very powerful mouse, but under Linux it is no better than a normal wireless USB wheel mouse. The user can do a lot of tweaks to improve the situation, but at the present time you can not achieve anything close to the features offered by Logitech SetPoint under Windows. Linux may be free as in beer, but it effectively costs me $50 if it reduces my $80 mouse to the feature set of a $30 mouse.

Now let’s look at some high-end motherboards. As I said, brand new motherboards tend to have flaky Linux support until a new kernel version is released. That is to be expected. However, many enthusiast motherboards produced by companies like Abit and ASUS have extra features not found on the motherboard in your average Dell. Many of these motherboards allow flashing of the BIOS while the OS is running. Others allow live overclocking. I personally would never suggest using such features, but that is besides the point. The point is that the hardware has features which are not available to the Linux user. The advantages of software freedom appear quite diminished when you realize that to get them you will not get everything out of your hardware that you paid for.

I have a Fujitsu P7230 notebook running Ubuntu Gutsy. I am using it to write this very article. It works extremely well, but, as you would expect, not every feature of the laptop is functional under Linux. This laptop has a g-force sensor. In Windows it uses that sensor to determine when to park the drive heads. In Linux this feature is completely unsupported. The fingerprint reader, two custom buttons, and the internal microphones are all unsupported. The internal memory card reader works, but has IO errors with some SD cards. The basic functionality of my laptop computer is all there with Ubuntu, but none of the weird special features are. Those weird and special features might seem relatively unimportant, but people want to use them. When they pop in a Linux LiveCD and a feature they use is not available, to them it is no better than if it hadn’t worked at all.

Let me now bring back my longest lasting Linux gripe, sound. Audio has improved a lot in Linux since I last blogged about it, but it is still the one department where I feel Linux needs the most work. Let us look at the sound card in my desktop as an example. It’s an on-board Nvidia/Realtek sound card. It can produce and capture analog stereo sound, and it can output PCM audio through the optical output. The basic functionality of the sound card works perfectly, and with some tricky configuration of alsa it can do a bit more. However, if you want more than that, just give up. I’ve been waiting for years, and there has been no improvement whatsoever.

Pretty much zero of the advanced features of the sound card are supported under Linux. Under Windows the sound card will mix, in hardware, all outgoing audio into a single Dolby Digital signal and send that out of the optical output. It can also do lots of other things involving the routing of sound to different speakers, or routing the PC speaker to the optical output. It’s actually quite incredible that the on-board sound card has more features than most home theater receivers. Regardless, only the most basic features of playing and recording audio function under Linux. Support for surround sound in Linux in general is complete shit. People these days have these incredible DSPs in their computers capable of advanced hardware audio processing, but under Linux they might as well all be Sound Blaster 16s. This is a case where we have a driver for a piece of hardware, and it works, but it does not implement every available feature of that hardware properly.

For one more example, let’s look at my scanner. It’s a CanoScan LiDE-50. It used to be completely unsupported under Linux, but it works now. However, it works like shit. Under Windows it scans very quickly, under Linux it scans slowly. Also, there are four buttons on the face of the scanner. Under Windows these buttons allow launching of the scanner application, or even taking the current scan and directly attaching it to an e-mail. Under Linux these buttons are unavailable. Sure, it’s nice that the scanner works, but the fact that it works worse than it does in Windows is not going to give someone a reason to switch. What we need to strive for is making the scanner work better in Linux than it does anywhere else. Not only should it scan at the proper speed, but perhaps the functionality of the buttons could be customizable by the user. Perhaps some open source scanning application could find some new and intuitive uses for those buttons and make Linux superior to Windows in even more ways.

When people try out Linux, they don’t care just that their hardware works. Even if Linux hardware support were exactly the same as Windows hardware support, many people would not switch. They have no reason to switch, because there is no advantage. However, if Linux actually supported the hardware better than Windows did, that would be something. Imagine someone putting in a LiveCD to find that their scanner scans faster. Imagine someone finding out that with Linux they can use the g-force sensor in their laptop as a theft alarm. What attracts most average people to Linux in the first place is its superior performance, stability, and security. However, those advantages will be overshadowed if someone finds out that they can’t do everything they used to do with the exact same hardware.

I want to conclude by clarifying that I am well aware that not all of these unsupported hardware problems are a result of incomplete kernel drivers. Many of these problems should be solved in userspace in one way or another. That is all irrelevant. What is important is that when you have a piece of hardware primarily designed to do function X, but capable of Y and Z, you can’t support just feature X and consider that to be satisfactory. Unless every single feature of a given piece of hardware is pushed to the absolute limit by the software, then the user is not getting everything they have paid for in that hardware. The failure to implement features Y and Z is keeping Linux back these days much more so than the failure to implement X. If there are Linux developers out there looking for things to work on, go back and take another look at hardware which is currently considered to be supported, and make sure that every single feature is supported 100%. If not, you’ve got some work to do.

This article begins by referencing professional tech analysts who say Linux isn’t ready. Keep in mind that tech analysts are people who know about computers. They use computers in advanced ways for advanced things. They most likely use Max OSX or Windows. They use it on machines with 100% compatible hardware. They use the machines only for things that their machines are capable of doing.

If these people try Linux, they will try to do all the things they do with their old OS with Linux. If any one thing doesn’t go just right, they will say it isn’t ready. Well, not ready for their desktop at least. What if someone else doesn’t need to do that particular thing? For those people who are not tech analysts, it might be ready.

Here is how we can calculate Linux’s desktop readiness. Take the total number of desktop computers in the world. Subtract those which have so much unsupported hardware that Linux won’t work on them. Now figure out what the users of the remaining machines want to be able to do. If what they want to do is possible on Linux in an easy and user friendly fashion, then that is one desktop ready machine. Divide the number of desktop ready machines by the total number of desktop machines in the world, and you’ve got the Linux desktop readiness quotient.

Basically, I just want people to stop asking whether or not Linux is desktop ready. The question in itself is fallacious. The correct question to ask is “Is your desktop ready for Linux?” I will be the first to admit that the answer is not yes for everybody. However, the vast majority of people do very few things with their computers. They browse the web, read and send e-mail, send instant messages, watch videos, listen to music, manage their photos, and play games. I think I can say that the vast majority of average users out there who have desktop computers are ready for Linux. The only ones you can subtract are people with advanced needs, e.g: 3D gaming or HD video editing, and people with incredibly incompatible hardware.

So stop writing articles about whether Linux is ready for the desktop. Instead, grab yourself an Ubuntu LiveCD, and determine whether Linux is ready for your desktop. I make no guarantees, but it doesn’t cost you anything to at least try it out.

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Being a former Gentoo user, I can understand some of the frustration with waiting for new packages. For example, the current version of Banshee is 0.11.1, but in Ubuntu Dapper the newest available version is 0.10.10. 0.11.1 has many significant improvements over the older version that vastly improve the user experience. But because of the nature of Ubuntu development, you have to choose between using older, crappier, software or risking your system integrity.

This is very very annoying, especially if you are used to an operating system like Windows. On Windows, you can use the newest version of Firefox the day it comes out. You don’t have to wait for a bunch of dependencies to be marked stable before you can get the new version. You can get your new features and your new version that same day. And if anyone cares about new features and upgrading ASAP, it’s enthusiasts who use Linux.

So what we end up with are two separate problems. On the one hand we have users who screw up their systems because they demand to have the latest and greatest software. On the other hand we have package repository maintainers who aren’t making the latest and greatest stuff available quickly enough.

What’s the solution? I think it’s possible to kill two birds with one stone. What we need is a GUI application which allows users to take any source package and turn it into a proper deb package which installs from a local repository. Too many unofficial debs and repositories provide malformed packages which do more harm than good. Normal users do not know how to build and install applications from source. Even if you do successfully build a package from source, the package manager does not recognize it. It is also unreasonable to expect that every open source development team also maintain builds for every possible distribution. And don’t even get me started about dependencies.

The only reason this won’t work is because of dependency hell. Someone will write an application which requires version 4.0012 instead of version 4.0011 of some library. Some other piece of software requires version 4.0011 and will not work with 4.0012. Somehow, both of these programs may not run on the same system. The solution to this is to have a system where multiple versions of the same applications and libraries can simultaneously exist. Each application should link to the newest versions of the libraries with which it is compatible. Also, old libraries which are no longer needed should be discarded to avoid clutter.

In the end, this is just one of those very annoying aspects of Linux on the desktop. It’s awesome that new versions of new applications are coming out all the time. It’s awesome that users are getting access to all sorts of new features on a sometimes daily basis. What’s not awesome is when the middle-man, the distribution, gets between the users and the shiny new applications. Barring mistakes made by application developers, we need a distribution which can provide desktop users with the newest versions of desktop applications at all times. People are willing to screw up their systems to get this stuff. The only way I see to prevent them from doing so is to take away the incentive.

I am a big-time Linux user. I’m going on 7 years of heavy Linux desktop and server use. However, I do not have the hangup that everything has to be free. I use Linux because it is a better operating system. I use Firefox because it is a better browser. I use it because it is an environment in which I can be more productive in my computing. I use it because it allows me to use my computer the way I want to. It is only a vocal minority of the open source community who disagree.

If you ask Linux desktop users, the people who will use Firefox on Debian, most of them want the original icon back, and they will go to great lengths to get it back. There is an extremely popular thread on the Ubuntu forums for a script that simply re-adds the original Firefox logo. People actually care about the icon. They even care about a dialog box they will never look at. They don’t care about two silly patches they will never notice, and they don’t care about using only 100% free software. Only a few crazy idealists like RMS care, and they’re ruining it for the rest of us.

Open source people often promote the fact that OSS is all about choice. Users are given choices. However, most users aren’t smart enough to make those choices. I know how to build Linux from scratch, but my mom doesn’t. She runs Ubuntu though, so whatever Ubuntu decides is what she gets. When IceWeasel appears, she is going to be confused. When we have less than 1% of the users imposing their ideology on the rest of us, that is not choice. It is not freedom. If you demand in ideological 100% freedom, you actually end up losing the freedom to use something that is not 100% free. In trying to fight for more freedom they have somehow achieved less freedom.

Imagine a Linux distribution just like Ubuntu. Now imagine this Linux distribution comes with ndiswrapper all set out of the box. It comes with NTFS read/write support out of the box. It comes with NVidia and Ati drivers. It comes with Xgl/Compiz/latest 3d shiny stuff out of the box. It comes with demos of some of the few proprietary games that run on Linux, perhaps from Introversion. It comes with wine already setup and working. It comes with real Sun java and real Adobe/Macromedia Flash already working. It has codecs and players for every multimedia format that exist right out of the box. This would rapidly become the dominant Linux distribution on the desktop.

That distribution would have questionable legality, but, if it existed, it would make every other Linux distribution insignificant on the desktop. Nobody would continue to use distros like Debian on the desktop except for the scant few crazies who support things like IceWeasel. There would be no reason to. I help people convert to Ubuntu very often, and such a distribution would eliminate 90% of the things I have to tell people. How many of those people give up on Linux forever because ndiswrapper is hard to set up? Why deny these people? Why hurt Linux for the sake of useless ideology? Have we forsaken the practicality that makes the Linux platform so great in the first place? I haven’t.yeah

Most people just want their computer to work and accomplish certain tasks. They don’t care if it’s 100% free. They care that their wireless card works. They care that they can visit websites with Flash. And yes, they actually care about a Firefox icon. Linux can do all these things! It just can’t do them easily, because zealots are holding us back. We could have awesome Linux on the desktop right now. Look how good Ubuntu is. It is so close to perfection, it’s not even funny. The only problems we have left are in places where proprietary software has fulfilled a function that open source can not. The only thing stopping us is the unwillingness of a few people to use the proprietary software or to make deals with proprietary software companies.

There is a point at which you can try to promote something with such zeal that you end up hurting it. We have reached this point. Stop it.

But as you all know, Gentoo is a bitch to setup. It takes forever, and for any non-important system it just isn’t worth the time. The solution to this of course is Debian. But Debian is a pain in the ass too. The installer is perhaps the worst thing ever, other than LFS. Every other major distro suffers the disease of being non-standard. I don’t mean non-standard in the usual sense, but more of a subjective “it’s not REAL Linux” sense. That is to say that distros like Mandrake, Suse, Fedora, etc. are nice and easy, but all do things a little differently than just plain old Linux. They have their own quirks and tendencies that usually cause distro-specific issues. For example, its not trivial to build software for fedora. The complete gcc tool-chain isn’t standard kit, and even if you install it it doesn’t work perfectly. Not to mention the hell that is rpms. The yum and apt package managers for Fedora don’t really give you a wide selection of software. And trying to download rpms from the net is a nightmare.

So all the rave about this new Ubuntu Linux really seemed like it might be the final solution. Well, it is and it isn’t. Ubuntu Linux is basically Debian, plain and simple. It doesn’t have any strange quirks that make it stand apart from Debian other than the fact that Xorg, gnome, Firefox, evolution and OpenOffice are all installed by default. Debian starts you out with a minimal base system after an install. It also has a liveCD which will boot you into an environment identical to a clean install of Ubuntu. But the best part is that the installer is simple and perfect. You get all the power of a perfect Debian with less effort than a Fedora. It’s exactly what I’ve always been looking for. Something easy for most people that shows of the true quality and power of what Linux is like without the Mandrake/Fedora/Suse crap getting in the way.

But all is not perfect in Ubuntu land. The distro, while a very good and large step towards what I would say would be a good candidate for a “default” home desktop distro, is not without flaw. I recently installed it on my parents PC. In fact, I’m using that PC right now. The install was simple enough, but right away I ran into problems. First off, there was no GUI and obvious way to get the DSL network support up in the installer or afterwords. If you aren’t using DHCP, static IP or dial-up you gotta hit the Ubuntu wiki, which is great by the way, to find out what to do. So for pppoe I had to run a program called pppoeconf. It set me up with the DSL perfectly, it even configured the system to automatically bring up the DSL on boot. Now just add this to the installer and we’ll be all set.

There are some other problems too. The package manager is standard Debian apt that gets stuff from Ubuntu repositories. But by default the selection of software is extremely minimal. I had to go around the net looking for more repositories to add so I could get software like mplayer. I can understand not wanting to overwhelm lesser users with tons of software choices. However, in my eyes there are only going to be three types of people using an OS. People who only use the default software and never do anything. People who are smart enough to update existing software and not add any more. And people who will want mplayer and Xmms and Abiword and everything else. Therefore you should definitely add full software repositories of free and non-free software. Listen if its legal for me to go build mplayer and Xmms, then why can’t you just include it? I mean seriously. The people who are so crazy as to care about only using super free software will use real Debian. None of the people who need the easiness of Ubuntu care about that. They want to play any type of video file or audio file ever, perfectly, every time. Xmms and mplayer should be the default and installed with full codecs.

Another problem with Ubuntu is file associations. Even if you manage to install mplayer and such by adding repositories it is difficult to set it as the default player for all users. But this is mostly a problem of gnome/nautilus not providing an easy GUI for this rather than a problem of ubuntu.

The last problem with Ubuntu is its no-root account style. They did this on purpose by the way. Their site explains the decision and defends it very well. But the result is you use sudo for everything. So its not a plan9 style no root, its just sudo instead of su. This is fine, but becomes troublesome. I find myself typing in my password more often than on my Gentoo box for some reason. Also, sudo isn’t exactly the same as su, so sometimes things don’t work perfectly.

The last problem with Ubuntu I had is with giFT. giFT is a p2p program with a plug-in architecture. It runs a demon that connects to any network for which you have an installed and configured plug-in. Then you can search and download from all those networks simultaneously. It supports Gnutella, openFT, FastTrack, etc. But starting the daemon is a bitch. It wasn’t worth the effort and I switched to plain old gtk-gnutella. On Gentoo, which is what I have to compare it to, init scripts are already taken care of when you emerge gift. You can /etc/init.d/gift start and be on your way. Gentoo also doesn’t use System V init. Ubuntu uses System V init to a T, which pisses me off! I hate System V init, its so incredibly painful and useless. Especially if you have to write your own init scripts because the package manager doesn’t put them there.

I’d also like to note that I had a small problem getting the sun JRE to work so I could view applets in Firefox. However, a comment in the wiki fixed my problem. But there really should have just been a package in the repository called sun-Java which just worked. Even if it made me download the file from sun manually.

So in conclusion Ubuntu is definitely a huge step in the right direction for Linux on the home and corporate desktop. It gives you the full high quality Linux experience with the easiness of the major easy distros. The only problems I’ve found are lack of pppoe support in the installer, which is an easy fix, and personal disputes with the default configuration. The liveCD that is exactly like the end product is a nice touch since people can try out Ubuntu risk-free and then when they actually install it they get the same exact thing. I’m sure someone could very easily make a slight mod to Ubuntu to change the default media software, have Java and flash already in there, and make it a full and complete desktop PC from the get go. I wouldn’t use it for my PC or server, but for any desktop PC on which I want to run Linux without having a huge hassle of Gentoo or Debian Ubuntu will definitely be on top of my list. It can only get better from here.

Edit: I found out a few cool extra things about Ubuntu. The test page for the printer is a very slick ubuntu custom printer test page. Also, with xscreensaver the password entry box is a custom ubuntu box, which is infinitely nicer than the default. Little things like this are a big plus in my book.