Raspberry Pi Android InstallationLinux User & Developer Magazine Issue 1202012

RASPBERRY PI

8 PAGE

SPECIAL

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THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE FOR THE GNU GENERATION

Android Install

Raspberry Pi on your

Build a smart TV • Automate your home Run Android apps • Make a car-puter

Make GNOME extensions

Add new features and functionality to GNOME 3 Adapteva’s founder introduces us to the $99 Supercomputer

30 + pages of expert advice

Ultimate office suite revealed! The best open source alternatives to MS Office

Master Emacs

Take control with the Swiss Army chainsaw of FOSS

20 pages of reviews Definitive opinion on devices, distros and apps

ALSO INSIDE

» GNOME 3.6: our verdict » Create a network of RasPis » What happened to GNU Hurd? » Improve workflow with login scripts

PyCon 2012 Catch up with the hottest events

ISSUEISSN 1202041-3270

9 772041 327002

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Welcome Your team of Linux experts…

to issue 120 of Linux User & Developer Gareth Halfacree has been breaking, fixing,

tinkering and voiding warranties on electrical items for many years, without once receiving a fatal electric shock. This month Gareth brings us the story of the $99 supercomputer (pages 48-51) and reviews the latest release in network-attached storage.

Joey Bernard is a true renaissance man,

splitting his time between building furniture, helping researchers with scientific computing problems and writing Android apps (when the kids let him have some time). This month Joey serves up two tutorials on server monitoring and Emacs, on pages 30-33 and 38-41.

Kunal Deo is a veteran open source developer

leading multiple open source projects. He is also a KDE dev and has contributed to many projects including KDE-Solaris, Belenix and Openmoko. In this issue Kunal demonstrates how to build GNOME Shell extensions in his step-bystep tutorial on pages 52-55.

Jon Masters is a Linux kernel hacker who has

been working on Linux for almost 17 years, since he first attended university at the age of 13. Jon lives in Massachusetts and works for a large enterprise Linux vendor. As well as running kernelpodcast.org he keeps us up to date on the Linux kernel with his column on page 12.

Liam Fraser is the creator of the

RaspberryPiTutorials YouTube series and is a Linux server administrator of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. This month Liam shows us how to build a network of Raspberry Pis with centralised storage. You can find his article starting on page 56.

Rob Zwetsloot studied aerospace engineering

at university, using Python to model complex simulations and configuring Linux HTPCs. This issue Rob reminds us why LibreOffice is the greatest office suite in open source (pages 70-74) and shows us how to install Android on the Raspberry Pi in our cover feature.

This issue

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» Install Android on RasPi » Build GNOME extensions Page 20 » Monitor your home server » Organise yourself with Emacs

Welcome to the latest edition of Linux User & Developer, the UK and America’s favourite high-end open source and Linux magazine. The clocks have gone back and Christmas is fast approaching. While we’ve got some special treats lined up to mark our final issue of 2012 next month, we’ve worked particularly hard this issue to ensure you’ve got plenty of projects to keep you out of trouble as the evenings draw in. The Raspberry Pi owners among you are in particular luck – we’ve got an eight-page special looking at how to get Android up and running, starting on page 22. While there’s still plenty of work to do to get the drivers working smoothly with 3D and media applications, Android opens up a whole world of new possibilities for your $35 computer and we can’t wait to see what the community does with it over the coming months. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous you could join Joey Bernard over on page 38 as he uses Emacs to create to-do lists. If you’ve never dabbled with Emacs before, you’ll probably want to do some extracurricular homework first – even the keyboard shortcuts can be demanding to the uninitiated. Finally a quick mention to Parabella, a Kickstarter project that’s come to be known as ‘the $99 supercomputer’. Check out our interview with its creator starting on page 48 – it looks like the Raspberry Pi might have some serious competition… Russell Barnes, Editor

Get in touch with the team: [email protected] Buy online

Visit us online for more news, opinion, tutorials and reviews:

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Contents 22

Install Android on the Raspberry Pi

Reviews

62 Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1

The Note migrates to the tablet form factor in fine style

64 Synology DS213air

Synology’s latest small and home office NAS box

Open up a world of new apps and projects in just a few easy steps

66 Archos 101XS

Archos adds keys to its latest tablet

68 GNOME 3.6

GNOME moves further down the path of simplification

OpenSource Tutorials

70 Office suite group test

06 News

30 Monitor your server with tmux

12 Opinions

34 Create and manage boot scripts and startup applications

76 CAINE 3.0

94 Letters

38 Make an open source to-do list with Emacs

78 Ubuntu 12.10

Features

Developer tutorials

80 Fractal Design Define R4

The latest from our regular free software columnists Your views on the magazine and the open source scene

16 Get on board with Python

Reporting back from PyCon

22 Install Android on the Raspberry Pi

A world of new possibilities

42 Where’s the Hurd? We investigate the true kernel of the GNU OS

48 Supercomputing for the masses

We talk to Andreas Olofsson about Parallella

70 Office suite super-test Four of the best in open source go head-to-head

86 Q & A

Your problems solved!

Four of the very best open source suites battle it out

Remotely check your server in easy steps

We rate the latest build of this penetration-testing distro

Automate your startup experience

We score Canonical on Ubuntu’s new (and controversial) features

Use Emacs to organise your workflow and take control of your time

The perfect home server case?

52 Build extensions for the GNOME desktop environment

82 GNOME Shell Remix

Exploring GNOME 3’s best new capability

Ubuntu with GNOME 3 Shell

56 Create a network of Raspberry Pis

Bring several Pis together on a network with centralised storage and more

On your free disc

FE AT UR E

The biggest stories from the open source world

96 Cover disc

Test four of the latest distros:

Ubuntu 12.10, Kubuntu Xubuntu Subscribe Lubuntu 20

today!

Save at least 30% on the shop price. US customers can subscribe via page 83

16 Get on board with Python

Linux User’s Richard Smedley reports back from this year’s PyConUK event. Catch up on all the action and learn why Python’s community is one of the best there is.

Join us online for more Linux news, opinion and reviews www.linuxuser.co.uk 4 www.linuxuser.co.uk

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06 News | 12 Opinion | 94 Online HARDWARE

Google & Samsung launch ARM Chromebook Entry-level Linux-based laptop takes aim at the mass market

Samsung has announced another entry in its Chromebook partnership with Google, making the move away from x86-based Intel processors with an ARM-based ultracompact device aimed at buyers on a budget – or, as Google itself would have it, a “computer for everyone.” Based on Samsung’s existing Chromebook platform – a cut-price family of low-power laptops which use Google’s Chrome OS, based on the open source Chromium Linux cloudpowered operating system – the new Samsung Chromebook replaces the typical lightweight x86 Intel chip with a dual-core Exynos V ARMbased processor, a quad-core version of which can be found in Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S III Android smartphone. Running at 1.7GHz, the chip includes a quad-core ARM Mali-T604 graphics processor which handles both the HDMI display connector

■ The Samsungmanufactured Chromebook uses an Exynos V ARMbased processor and runs the Linux-based Chrome OS

and the integrated 11.6-inch 1366x768 display. Storage is handled by an eMMC 16GB solidstate storage device – helping the Chromebook hit a headline-grabbing sub-10-second boot time – while 2GB of DDR3 memory is included as standard. A switch to an ARM processor more commonly found inside smartphones provides the Chromebook with impressive battery life, with around six hours easily available during web-connected usage. More importantly, the use of web apps in Chrome OS – which are rendered through an embedded version of Google’s Chrome web browser – avoids any compatibility issues with legacy apps that normally accompany a shift in architecture. The specifications aside, Google’s positioning of the device as a computer for everyone is interesting indeed. As well as selling the system through the Google Play marketplace alongside its Nexus 7 Android tablets, the company has organised high-street placement for the Chromebook in major chains throughout the world – and just in time for Christmas. In other words, a major brand is attempting to put Linux on the laps of millions – and where Google leads, others are likely to follow. Detractors of the Chromebook project often point out that it’s not a truly open platform: like Android, Google develops Chrome OS privately and often includes code which

is not provided to the public under an open source licence. Much of the code, however, is: Chrome OS itself is based on the open source Chromium OS, while the embedded Chrome browser is available as the open source Chromium project. For consumers, the cut-price Chromebook could well be an entry point into Linux as a dayto-day operating system. For those who know their way around a shell already, the presence of a development mode – accessed by holding Esc, Refresh and Power then pressing Ctrl+D at the boot screen – provides a way to boot from external devices, replace the operating system and turn the Chromebook into a low-cost ARMbased laptop running almost any Linux-based operating system. Google, meanwhile, is positioning the Samsung Chromebook as the answer to Windows users’ prayers. “There’s no need to worry about security updates and maintenance is easy; all you need to do is charge the battery,” boasted Google’s Sundar Pichal, senior vice president of the company’s Chrome division at the launch. “It just works.” Without a Linux kernel at the new machine’s heart, it’s unlikely Pichal would have been able to make such a declaration. The new Samsung Chromebook is available through Google Play, Currys and PC World, priced at £229.

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News

The latest in the Linux community

OPEN SOURCE

Shuttleworth blames critics for new secretive strategy Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that selected aspects of Ubuntu 13.04, codenamed ‘Raring Ringtail,’ are to be developed in secret so as not to attract criticism from the community. Going against the open source ethos of transparent development, some new features to be launched with Ubuntu 13.04 will be kept under wraps at Canonical’s HQ until the OS is ready for release – a move which appears to have much to do with community backlash over the switch to the Canonical-developed Unity desktop environment and the numerous glitches and bugs that followed. Described by Shuttleworth as “a few items with high ‘tada!’ value,” the precise portions of the OS which will be hidden until launch have

■ Mark Shuttleworth, seen here on board the International Space Station, is hiding some parts of Ubuntu 13.04 from the community

not been detailed. Those who are interested can apply for access, however, with Shuttleworth claiming that Canonical is “happy to engage with contributing community members that have established credibility in Ubuntu.” “The skunkworks approach has its detractors,” Shuttleworth admitted in a statement to the community. “We’ve tried it both ways and, in the end, figured out that critics will be critics whether you discuss an idea with them in advance or not. Working on something in a way that lets you refine it till it feels ready to go has advantages: you can take time to craft something, you can be judged when you’re ready, you get a lot more punch when you tell your story, and you get your name in lights.” The secretive projects, which Shuttleworth claims are all “groundbreaking in free software”, cover areas such as web standards, cryptography, and aesthetic and performance improvements, with Canonical keeping each under close guard until launch and inviting only pre-vetted members of the Ubuntu community to help with their development. With Canonical already under the spotlight for what is seen as an increasingly negligent attitude to its community of users and developers, and to the open source community in general, this latest announcement is likely to do little to cool the flames gathering against the company.

Linux calendar 29 Nov 2012

Canonical hides Ubuntu 13.04 development from the community

30 Nov - 02 Dec 2012

OPEN SOURCE

the addition of support in the Aurora Firefox for Android build marks the first time it has been available on mobile devices. Sadly, the service is still closed off from some: Mozilla’s decision to focus exclusively on developing for the ARM architecture means Firefox for Android can’t be installed on devices with Intel’s x86-based Atom processor, like ■ Marketplace is now available on Android, the Motorola Razr i smartphone. The Aurora build of Firefox is at: providing a new route www.mozilla.org/mobile/aurora. for installing web apps

09-14 Dec 2012

Users testing the cutting-edge build of Firefox for Android, from the Aurora branch, are now able to access Mozilla’s Firefox Marketplace. Designed as an answer to Google’s Chrome Store, the Firefox Marketplace provides free and paid-for web apps which are designed specifically for the open source Firefox browser. While users have been able to test the Marketplace on desktop Firefox releases for some time,

» www.littlegreenrobot.co.uk Android Magazine, your best and only print source for everything Android, is coming out today. Check out what’s in store over on page 60.

CloudStack Collaboration Conference » The Venetian, Las Vegas, Nevada » USA » http://collab12.cloudstack.org/ The Apache-run conference will have presentations from the developers contributing to the Apache CloudStack project, as well admins who are using CloudStack to build clouds to scale.

LISA ’12

ANDROID

Mozilla opens Firefox Marketplace on Android

Android Magazine – issue 19

» Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina, San Diego, California » USA » h t t p s : // w w w . u s e n i x . o r g / conference/lisa12 In addition to the wide variety of topics covered in the LISA ’12 programme, the programme committee has created three specific conference themes, or tracks, for those looking to focus on a key subject; these cover the areas of cloud computing, IPv6 and sysadmin skills.

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INDUSTRY

Windows 8 harms user freedom

■ Jim Zemlin believes that mobile computing is the future

■ The gnu is a symbol of software freedom

well into a transition period, and Linux is helping to drive this as the base for Android and Chrome OS. “Microsoft is stuck in the liminal space between the desktop-driven, cost-persoftware licence world they dominated and the era we are just now entering: a world driven by open source software and services,” continued Zemlin, pointing out that the price of Microsoft hardware is up to six times more than hardware powered by Linux. He attributes this to companies like Google not having to spend so much on R&D, with the Linux kernel and its estimated $10 billion (£6.2 billion) worth of development readily available, along with FOSS such as WebKit. The Free Software Foundation agrees with this, and activists set out on the morning of release to New York’s Microsoft store to hand out pamphlets to the people braving the cold to attend the launch event. In it, they warned of the dangers of proprietary software: “Microsoft has already spent almost 2 billion dollars on slick advertisements to convince people that Windows 8 will revolutionise the way they use computers,” said Libby Reinish, campaigns manager at the FSF. “The fact is,

it’s basically Windows 7 with new surveillance ‘features’ and even more restrictions on users’ freedom. Whether or not Microsoft wants you to know it, it’s easy to switch to free software instead of choosing a downgrade to your rights as a computer user – for example, your rights to know what the system is doing and to change behaviours you don’t like. We’re here because we want people to know that they don’t have to buy Windows 8 – this is a great time to upgrade to free ‘as in freedom’ software.”

CC: www.fsf.org

The launch of Windows 8 occurred very recently – Microsoft’s new, one-size-fitsall operating system for desktop, tablets, and smartphones. Thanks to the Interface Formerly Known As Metro, the folks at Redmond plan to claw back their market share in the PC space by finally cracking the portable computing market. Or at least, that’s the idea. Microsoft is going through the same motions that Canonical and GNOME have done in recent years, trying to convince people that their interfaces are fine for mouse and keyboard even when the results seem to contradict this. On the day of launch, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, wrote a blog on how Windows 8’s hybrid approach is too little too late: “A lot has changed in the three years since the last major Windows announcement. Netbooks were on the rise. The iPad wouldn’t be introduced for another six months and Nokia still had the lead for most smartphone sales in the world… that is no longer the case. Google’s Android OS only accounted for a 3.9% share of the smartphone market in 2009 (according to Gartner Group); last year that rose to 64% of the smartphone market. In 2011, smartphones for the first time outsold PCs (including tablets). With hundreds of millions of those smartphones running Android, the consumer market is fully accustomed to Linuxbased software.” Zemlin argues that we are living somewhat in a postdesk top world, or at least

CC: www.fsf.org

The recent release of Windows 8 has caused concern for the leaders of the free software world

■ Libby Reinish says that Windows 8 cuts down on user freedom

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News

The latest in the Linux community

OPEN SOURCE PUBLISHING

Grab Linux User digitally at greatdigitalmags.com In case you missed it, Linux User magazine is available to read on any digital format thanks to the excellent digital editions super-site, www.greatdigitalmags.com. The site brings together Linux User’s offerings on Zinio and Newsstand, allowing you to enjoy your favourite mag on your Mac, PC, iPad, Android and a host of other devices. There are some incredible subscription incentives up for grabs too, not just for Linux User but for all Imagine Publishing titles. To find these amazing deals, head over to www.greatdigitalmags.com, where you can find links to back issues, subscriptions and more, across almost every platform. It’s all available in just one place, and there are massive savings to be had!

PUBLISHING

All About Space

All About Space, the most exciting space magazine ever, is out now! Imagine Publishing’s All About Space magazine is available in print and digital formats right now. Packed full of cosmic content, All About Space delves into the wonders of space exploration, astronomy and space science every month, providing indepth knowledge from a team of experts on an amazing array of topics. The magazine is unlike anything else out there and will appeal to seasoned space fans and new explorers alike, with a regular dose of amazing articles, exclusive interviews and jaw-dropping images. Inside you’ll find some mind-blowing articles and features explaining the amazing universe around us. The latest issue reveals how some of the biggest explosions in the universe, namely

PUBLISHING

Save 10% on all Christmas orders of Linux User

Unsure what to get sysadmins, coders or FOSS advocates this Christmas? We might have an idea for you It’s only a month until Christmas now, and while the more organised folks may have already got gifts for all their family, friends and secret Santas, the rest of us have probably been a bit too busy to even figure out who’s getting gifts. Well, Linux User is here to give you a helping hand as we’re offering 10% off on all orders from the ImagineShop until 24 December 2012. This offer is valid on subscriptions to the magazine, back issues of Linux User, bookazines such as the Linux & Open Source Genius Guide Vol. 2, and DVDs from Web Designer. There are further discounts available on all of these that you can find out about on page 75. You should also keep an eye on our Twitter feed – we regularly tweet out links for fantastic subscription deals that you can redeem on the ImagineShop, such as getting the first three magazines in a subscription for £1 each. So if you’re scrambling for a present to give to a tech friend or colleague, you can sit back and get them some magazines from the comfort of your desk chair, and properly enjoy the holiday season.

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■ All About Space

shows you how to get stargazing

supernovas, work. There are also excellent articles on tracking hazardous asteroids, the first moonwalk, NASA’s first space station, the groundbreaking Cassini mission and much more. All About Space also makes astronomy accessible to everyone with a host of stargazing articles explaining how to buy a telescope and what to look for in the night sky. All About Space is available online at the Imagine eShop (www.imagineshop.co.uk) and in all good newsagents and supermarkets right now. You can also download the digital version for iPhone, iPad and Android from www.greatdigitalmagazines.com. Visit the magazine’s website at www.spaceanswers.com to get your online space fix.

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OPEN SOURCE

The Linux Foundation obtains UEFI key

Foundation takes action to ensure everybody can continue using open source operating systems There have been plenty of valid concerns regarding the future of computing with regard to UEFI Secure Boot, mainly with how it will lock out people wanting to install a Linux distribution. The Linux Foundation has been following the situation and has decided to take action by purchasing a key from Microsoft, and signing its own small pre-bootloader that will be available to all users of open source. The Linux Foundation explained the reasoning behind this move in a blog post: “The Linux Foundation is committed to giving users freedom of choice on their platforms. Conforming to this stance, we have already published a variety of tools to permit users to take control of their secure boot platforms by replacing the Platform Key and managing (or replacing) the installed Key Exchange Keys… however, as one of the enablers of the Linux

ecosystem, the Foundation recognises that not everyone is willing (or able) to do this, so it was also necessary to find a solution that would enable people to continue to try out Linux and other open source operating systems in spite of the barriers UEFI Secure Boot would place in their way and without requiring that they understand how to take control of their platforms. Therefore, we also formulated a technical plan, which is implemented in this pre-bootloader, to allow distributions to continue functioning in a secure boot environment.” The source code for the pre-bootloader is available at the moment without the key, and you can get it from the Git repo as Loader.c. The Linux Foundation admits that it will take a little time for the key and signature to be obtained, but it will announce when it receives one.

■ The future

of firmware interfaces is closed

■ The Linux Foundation’s goal is to promote and protect the Linux kernel

OPEN SOURCE

Donate to Canonical and steer Ubuntu

Users can now tell Canonical what parts of Ubuntu need work, for a price Ubuntu is a free operating system, free as in speech and as in beer, and Canonical is keen to reinforce this Richard Stallman ethos as it announces a new way for users to optionally contribute to Canonical before they download the desktop version of Ubuntu. This comes in the form of real money donations. It’s not just a fixed donation – there are eight categories that people can selectively give money to. This will let Canonical know which parts of Ubuntu people want improved. Categories include Unity, performance optimisation, hardware support, phone and tablet versions, support of different Ubuntu flavours, and a general tip to Canonical. You don’t have to give to each category, though, and donations start at $1 per category. Obviously you don’t have to make any contributions if you don’t want to – although

■ A screen Ubuntu users may have to get used to

the donation page shows up before you can download the ISO, and has a recommended $2 donation to each category already filled in by default. There’s a link at the bottom of the page to skip it entirely and go straight to the download page.

Now that Ubuntu 12.10 is out and more people will be downloading the distro, it will be interesting to see what contributions are made, and what they go towards. You can see the page by selecting Ubuntu Desktop (and then a version) at: www.ubuntu.com/download.

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Your source of Linux news and views

THE KERNEL COLUMN

Jon Masters

Jon Masters summarises the latest goings-on in the Linux kernel community, including a look at the features being merged for the upcoming 3.7 release Jon Masters is a Linux kernel hacker who has been working on Linux for almost 17 years, since he first attended university at the age of 13. Jon lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and works for a large enterprise Linux vendor. He publishes a daily Linux kernel mailing list summary at kernelpodcast.org Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 3.6 kernel, saying that while the release did not contain earth-shattering new architectures or file systems, it did overall represent “solid progress”. We summarised some of the new features that landed in Linux 3.6 last issue. With the release of 3.6 came the traditional opening of the merge window for 3.7. This is the period of time during which Linus is willing to pull potentially disruptive patches (changes) into the kernel. This typically lasts for two weeks and is followed by a period of stabilisation, and multiple RC (release candidate) kernels are made available for testing. Linus gave a heads-up that he would be travelling for much of the merge window, but that didn’t seem to pose much of a problem. Features pulled in during the merge window included a brand new architecture (AArch64, also known as ARMv8 or ‘arm64’ in the kernel community). This is the latest architecture revision from ARM, the company that powers about 90 per cent of all cellphones and has had its designs shipped in billions of processors so far this year alone. ARM has traditionally been an ‘embedded’ architecture. The billions of ARM-powered processors in use worldwide are typically found within gadgets, such as this author’s ‘fitbit’ personal step counter, or in

washing machines and automotive control and entertainment systems. In this context, there are many different levels of ARM processor, from the more deeply embedded simpler cores without the ability to run a full OS, to higherend multiprocessor cores running Linux on Android smartphones. ARM is known for its focus on low energy, as well as the licensed nature of the architecture. ARM doesn’t make processors – it licenses its designs for use by the many others who do make processors. Linux has run on suitable 32-bit ARM-based systems for well over a decade, and in recent years has gained popularity as the foundation upon which most Android devices are built. And over the last few years, organisations such as Linaro have helped to drive the development of Linux support for ARM by bringing together a wider community of companies and ecosystem players involved. Over the past few years, a new opportunity has emerged to take advantage of the low-energy DNA that drives ARM by using these processors in server-class systems. Servers can be 32-bit based, but many workloads require 64-bit support. That’s where the new AArch64 ARM architecture comes in. It brings many new features to ARM, not least of which is 64-bit addressing. The new support within the Linux kernel, contained within arch/arm64 (renamed after community debate around the original ‘aarch64’ choice of directory) enables the core architecture features but does not yet have support for any real processors. Those will come later. The initial support was merged after several months of review on the Linux Kernel Mailing List by upstream maintainers such as Arnd Bergmann, who is responsible for many of the de facto standards required of new architecture code added to Linux.

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Opinion

The kernel column – Jon Masters

Another feature pulled into Linux 3.7 is support for the ‘supervisor mode access prevention’ on Intel processors. This aims to prevent kernel code from being able to compromise the running system, even if it is exploited by passing bad values in from user space (such as were done by various example ‘NULL’ pointer kernel exploits several years ago). By toggling a special bit in the CPU control registers, the kernel can effectively instruct the hardware to prevent the kernel from accessing user space (regular user process) memory except under explicit control. Therefore various classes of exploit are removed because even though the kernel has the power to disable the protection again, a simple pointer access to user space cannot simultaneously disable the SMAP protection, so exploit code has no straightforward way to use such simple attacks. One final feature of particular note in 3.7 is the removal of udev from the critical path of loading some system firmware. The kernel’s built-in firmware loader will now always attempt to load firmware files directly from user space (from the file system) without invoking udev. Udev (the user-space device management daemon) typically handles firmware loading, as well as device driver requests, and new hardware device detection, by receiving messages from the kernel over a special netlink socket and reacting according to various customisable rules. Unfortunately, recent changes to udev to restructure its approach to parallelised loading of drivers frustrated Linus into having the kernel handle this itself by default. Udev can still handle firmware loading, but the kernel will first attempt to load files itself, from /lib/firmware.

Alignment faults in 3.6

Linux supports many different architectures, some of which behave quite differently from the x86 Linus originally used way back in 1991. In particular, many modern RISC architectures embrace the notion of simple being better by having limited support for ‘misaligned’ memory accesses. On these architectures (such as ARM), it is not possible to directly perform an operation on a memory location. Instead, the architecture behaves in a ‘load store’ fashion such that all memory locations must be loaded into a register, then manipulated, then the result stored back.

n Linus

Torvalds: the 3.6 kernel is “solid progress”

Alignment is a natural property of all data types. A 4-byte integer value, the default on many systems, has a natural alignment on a 4-byte memory boundary. So, for example, attempting to load or store such a value at an odd-numbered memory address would be in clear violation of the natural alignment requirement of this type. Many modern architectures hide such alignment issues by having the hardware perform expensive multiload operations behind the scenes under such circumstances, while others will generate an alignment fault and insist that the programmer (or the compiler) do the right thing and fix the underlying code. ARM is one such architecture that started life with very strict requirements, and has relaxed more recently. Modern ARM systems do include (limited) support for unaligned data access. Though they are more expensive (in terms of performance overhead), they are handled behind the scenes. There are some circumstances under which this is not possible due to specific instructions being used. In such cases, the hardware will generate an ‘alignment fault’, which will be handled by the kernel. The kernel typically performs a more expensive version of the intended load or store ‘transparently’, optionally recording a warning about the inefficient waste of processor

“Linus said he would be travelling for much of the merge window”

CC. GFDL. Permission of Martin Streicher, Editor-in-Chief, LINUXMAG.com

open source

resources. During this operation, it may make a call to the kernel’s schedule() algorithm to give another process time to run. Unfortunately, there are some situations wherein the scheduler must not be called. These include certain critical ‘atomic’ parts of the kernel itself. In the case of Linux 3.6, it appeared as if this required was being violated, with warnings of ‘scheduling while atomic’ being emitted. It ultimately turned out that certain device drivers were exposing a problem in the alignment handler. By accessing misaligned IP header fragments, the driver concerned was triggering an alignment exception within an atomic-critical section of kernel code, which was then resulting in the scheduler being called from within the alignment handler. Although the driver was later fixed to improve performance (by using only aligned data), the problem with the alignment handler itself did require fixing to prevent unwanted system crashes. A patch has been successfully tested and will be merged. Finally this month, there has been an ongoing discussion around ext4 file system corruption that can occur under very specific circumstances involving a system crash during an update to an ext4 file system running with journal checksums turned on. This is not the default, and it is a rare situation, but all users are advised to update their systems.

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Your source of Linux news and views

THE OPEN SOURCE COLUMN

Throwing away an iPad Apple’s latest product launch was met with disdain from many of its customers. But why, wonders Simon

■ The mini wasn’t the only new iPad launched

Simon Brew is a technology writer and editor, working across the Linux, Windows and Mac OS X platforms

The Android fightback?

In the smartphone sector, Android continues to lead the way over Apple and its iOS-based products. In tablets, its success has been less significant, but might there now be signs that Android-based competitors are making inroads? Certainly products like the Nexus 7 and – to a lesser extent – the Kindle Fire help. But there’s a long way to go to topple Apple and its all-conquering (so far) iPad.

Watching the live reactions to an Apple announcement rarely tends to expose you to some of the more considered thoughts on a product launch. Yet the response to Apple’s unveiling on 23 October of a pair of new iPad products was a testament to just how warped the technology business has become. Appreciating it’s traditional to bash Apple at every opportunity, I find myself admiring the firm in some ways. Granted, its closed gate approach to computing is something that continually needs fighting, but its marriage of software and hardware remains pretty much unparalleled over the past decade or so. At Apple’s event in October, though, it sprung a surprise. It had widely been expected that the firm would showcase the iPad mini, and that’s exactly what it did. But then it had something else up its sleeve: a fourth generation of the iPad. This was just over half a year after it had launched the third generation of the iPad to similar fanfare. And people were not happy. To paraphrase what, at one stage, was appearing to be something of a consensus, the feeling seemed to be ‘but I only bought one of those half a year ago, and now they’ve gone and changed’. So let’s think about that for a second. What Apple has successfully propagated is a feeling among its customers and many in the technology world that you absolutely have to have the latest and greatest. Notwithstanding the fact that the original iPad is still doing the job that it was designed for perfectly well, there appears to be abject horror in places at the thought that people will have to upgrade a product that was only new on the shelves earlier in the year.

But where did this craving come from? What new feature does the fourth-generation iPad possess that the third didn’t, that people can’t possibly live without? Within minutes of the announcement, eBay was no doubt filling up with pretty much brand spanking new iPads, as the disposal culture of modern technology continues to take hold. That in itself is a burgeoning problem. Firms like Apple like to lock us out of upgrading products, and even the likes of HTC is now making phones where you’re not even allowed to change the battery yourself (when did we start to accept this insanity as the norm, I continue to wonder). The ramification of this, longer term, is that more and more people will just throw something away after a year, in order to get the latest model. People will change their phone just because it’s less hassle than sending it off to get a new battery put in. That’s madness, isn’t it? What Apple’s announcement showed is that you don’t actually need to add that much for people to instantly decide to spend another £500 or so on another piece of technology, just to keep up with the proverbial Joneses. Wouldn’t it be refreshing, though, if a firm such as Apple, that has so blazed the trail for persuading people to replace their technology on an annual basis, actually made a stand to say enough is enough. It’ll never happen, but just how long can the world at large support a culture where intricate technologies are so disposable? Looking at the reaction to the aforementioned Apple launch, it’s going to have to do so for a great deal longer, sadly…

14 www.linuxuser.co.uk

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Opinion

The free software column

open source

the Free software column

Raspberry Pi for schools The Raspberry Pi can be the affordable route to teaching schoolchildren the lost idea that computer programming can be fun

Richard Hillesley writes about

art, music, digital rights, Linux and free software for a variety of publications

n Programming can be

fun and easy to learn for schoolchildren, and the ultra-low-cost Raspberry Pi is an ideal tool for teaching

As everybody knows by now, the Raspberry Pi is the perfect geek toy, a credit-card-sized computer that costs very little and comes with its own operating system, Raspbian, which is an optimised reworking of Debian GNU/Linux. The Raspberry Pi can be plugged into a TV and a keyboard, and will do most of the useful things a PC can do. An SD card is used for booting and storage of data. Raspbian defaults to an LXDE desktop, and comes with development tools and most of the basic applications and utilities for working and playing on a computer. The Raspberry Pi is also shockingly cheap – $35. But the interesting part of the Raspberry Pi is the ambition of its caretakers that it should become an ultra-low-cost tool for introducing schoolchildren to the lost idea that computer programming can be fun, as it was for the kids who grew up with the Sinclair QL, ZX Spectrum or BBC Micro three of four decades ago. The early home computers were cheap and cheerful, but you could get inside and look at the source, take them apart and learn. Some of the kids who grew up with BBC Basic, Dungeons & Dragons and Pac-Man became the first generation of developers to work on Linux and other free software. Jeremy Allison, for instance, had a Sinclair QL, which was a 32-bit

machine, even though it had an 8-bit bus. The source code of the operating system, QDOS, was included, perfectly legally. “The assembler source, the commented source, you could buy and look at, and take apart and understand,” says Allison. “It was burnt into ROM, but you could modify it – there was a company that had disassembled it for me, legally – and then along came the IBM PC and Microsoft and crushed all the creativity out of it, just ground over it with a tank tread. “So the kids growing up these days don’t know any of that stuff. They don’t know the basics of how the thing works. They’ve got black boxes that rattle because they’re broken, and they can’t look inside. You can’t learn from that.” “I want anyone in the world to have the same opportunities that I had when I was growing up”, adds Allison. “The early Eighties was a period of intense creativity in the computer industry in Britain.” But ICT in schools went backwards in the UK and has been locked in to a costly Microsoftonly world, where children have been educated as users rather than doers. Lock-in and the upgrade cycle have resulted in the same escalating costs that have afflicted other sectors of the IT industry, forcing increased expenditure for smaller and smaller returns. For most children, ICT in schools has been little more than a training programme for using Windows and Microsoft Office – useful for secretaries and filing clerks, but not helpful for getting to know how the technology works. A common complaint has been that “no ICT course has a programming or a systems module, instead students are taught to be mere consumers of technology, and operators of applications.” Programming can be fun, and the principles are easy to learn. The Raspberry Pi can be the affordable route to learning this lesson.

15 www.linuxuser.co.uk

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WorldMags.net Feature

Get on board with Python

Get on board

with Python From medieval Coventry, via the classroom, to Africa, and even operetta and the high seas, PyConUK represents the best of the Python community

■ Last year’s PyConUK Blitz theme reappeared as the PyCon poster

Despite masterpieces of medieval and 20th Century architecture, and a fascinating industrial heritage, Coventry isn’t everyone’s ideal long weekend getaway. That changed for the last four days of September, when the city hosted PyConUK – the annual gathering of the country’s enthusiastic and growing Python community – for the second time. Regular readers will know that, while LUD maintains an even-handed approach to open source languages and technologies, we find ourselves reporting a lot of cool Python projects, and it’s increasingly the language of choice for everything from education and banking to research and big data. Many programming languages have a strong community around their use, but Pythonistas seem to have a sense of belonging – as if they’ve somehow, in finding Python, come home – that is normally reserved for Lisp programmers, and all without the smugness occasionally seen in the latter group. This is a confident community, and one not without a sense of humour – as you would expect from a language named in honour of the surreal Monty Python show. Music and fun were on offer at PyConUK, alongside some serious hacking, very cool projects and some productive coding in worthy causes. Let’s start with the cool tech.

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Get on board with Python

The PyConUK 2012 conference

FEATURE

Slice of Pi

Python is the official programming language of the Raspberry Pi, and Alex Bradbury – the lead Linux software developer at the Raspberry Pi Foundation – gave the story so far, and the challenges ahead. The Raspberry Pi was created as a lowcost educational tool, but hackers have taken it to their heart, even running breweries and data centres with it. The community has contributed many improvements to the core stack, such as dynamic overclock, and great software like the 3D Penguins Puzzle game. There’s much more to be done and Bradbury was frank about the limitations of the current software while optimistic about future developments, the possibilities of more eduspecific software releases and the potential for the Pi in the developing world. Shoaib Sufi of the Software Sustainability Institute spoke of his mission to promote “better software engineering and management for better research outcomes”. As “software is everywhere,” and all-pervasive in science, Sufi demands “better software [to produce] better research.”

Catch up

Videos of most of the PyConUK 2012 sessions, with synchronised slides, are up on the PyConUK website, thanks to the dedicated filming by Birmingham LUG’s Tim Williams: http://autoview.autotrain.org/course/view.php?id=15 Get involved with creating resources for the next generation of coders at the Python Edu Google Group: http://goo.gl/BXBLu

“We get to introduce free & open source to a wider community of children and older people” Alex Bradbury, Raspberry Pi Foundation

Intelligent approach

‘Big A, little i’ was a well-illustrated talk by games programmer Tendayi Mawushe, pleading the case for more use of AI algorithms by developers. Software provides a better user experience when programs display awareness of their context, and with good use of examples like the familiar farmer/fox/goose/corn puzzle (represented as states and transitions) and moving blocks games, Mawushe demonstrated making a program give answers about its own behaviour by tracing method calls. Various heuristics were examined, giving attendees ideas of how to bring some AI goodness to their own code. Dealing with a more mundane annoyance, Vladimir Keleshev introduced docopt, to “build beautiful commandline interfaces”. Replacing the current opaque systems with a mere 384 lines of code, docopt works from simple rules to allow the program to take the POSIX standard of usage pattern and turn it into your UI. As well as the Python reference implementation, docopt has been implemented in Ruby, CoffeeScript/

■ Python is the official programming language of the Raspberry Pi

CC: @tdobson

■ Coders and teachers learnt from each other in a rewarding education sprint

■ Simply pass usage to docopt in this familiar form, and your command-line UI is built

■ Stephen Hawkes came up with the Victorian theme of the publicity – which also extended to a Gilbert & Sullivan song

17 www.linuxuser.co.uk

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Get on board with Python

JavaScript, PHP and Bash, with ports to Lua and a C code generator on their way. With so many competing talks on the three tracks, we’re grateful to the PyConUK organisers for making many of the talks available as online videos (see ‘Catch up’, page 17). Those who could only make the weekend missed some informative sessions on the opening Friday, including the TiddlyWeb architecture – originally created as an open source, reference implementation of an HTTP API for serverside storage of TiddlyWiki tiddlers, the revolutionary onepage app giving a reusable nonlinear personal web notebook.

Follow the rabbit

Starting with the Alan Perlis quote, “The best book about programming for the layperson is Alice in Wonderland. But that’s because the best book about anything for the layperson is Alice in Wonderland”, programmer and philosopher David Miller entertained while drawing lessons from the book.

n Farmer, grain, goose, fox the AI way – represented as states and transitions

Sarah Mount gave an eloquent summary of the problems of parallelism and concurrency in Python, and the case for using Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). This is an area of many competing philosophies, and it was good to hear a knowledgeable opinion put so clearly. Plenty of space was given for lightning talks over the two main days, with ‘Lightning Talk Man’ Harald Massa’s Gesamtkunstwerk of anecdotes to fill each gap as speakers changed laptops and PowerBook VGA dongles. In these fiveminute sessions, delegates learned about mixing dynamic and static typing; errors and complexity in finding musical temperaments; prescons, an effective presentation console for Python demonstrations; using Python for digital forensics; and easy roll-outs of your own cloud.

Ask the duck

Further highlights included typing to yourself – an IRC for one to log your thoughts with timestamps, and even put them into version control – in a talk that introduced rubber duck debugging (if you can explain the problem to a rubber duck, then you’re on the path to understanding: try it!);

n Miss P: bringing Python into the classroom

Bringing the education community to the Python community Making strenuous efforts to reach the teaching meritocracy, sharing of resources and learning community, the PyCon organisers invited several from the examples of others”, as Tollervey put it. teachers to attend a special education track at the Following the sprint, and a lightning conference, led by teacher-turned-coder Nicholas talk by ‘Miss P’ (Carrie Philbin, a GoogleTollervey. It included introductory Python tuition, certified teacher), there’s now a mailing list and coders sprinkled around the class to help for Pythonistas who want to contribute to the teachers with their questions. Hearing of the resources for teaching: http://t.co/M7ViLkcP. locked-down conditions of schools’ IT, fixed on Additionally, there’s an education summit at stone-age technology like Internet Explorer 6, was next March’s PyCon in California – https:// a shocking discovery for many of the programmers. us.pycon.org/2013/events/edusummit/ – and, Groups of programmers worked with teachers according to Philburn, who was a guest at in a coding sprint to produce educational material the weekend’s Python Software Foundation around programming tasks including a text-based meeting: “Happily, it looks like an education game and a maze solver. The event introduced portal will become part of the scope for the teachers to the “collaboration, debate, openness, redesign of the python.org website.”

CC: Alan O’Donohoe

Teaching the teachers

n Teachers and coders found common cause

in the education sprint

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Get on board with Python

The PyConUK 2012 conference

CC: @ntoll

feature

Evidence for Development

Using Python to deliver effective, evidence-based overseas aid Much overseas aid is spent inappropriately Evidence for Development sprint aimed to – at best wasteful, at worst undermining extract something meaningful from it. local markets and farmers’ self-sufficiency. “We’re using the technology to apply Evidence for Development aims to see household economy methodology”, Petty told that aid gets to where it’s really needed, by us. This takes a sophisticated view of how backing evidence-based decisions with an people can meet their food energy needs, understanding of local economics “to build rather than measuring money income alone. capacity in organisations and institutions School attendance, lack of access to start-up in Africa”, Celia Petty, the project founder, capital and many other factors are measured told Linux User & Developer. “The World to see what help people need to achieving Bank data is problematic”, so the PyConUK their own economic self-sufficiency.

“PyConUK seems to have hit the sweet spot between technical tell-how and friendly community” Tim Golden

along with a Django-based P2P food market from Transition Cambridge, SustainableSouk.com, which encourages goodquality local food by allowing anyone to sell or swap what they produce. ‘Writing Code for Fun and Profit’ presented the joys of the “side project”, in this case luzme.com which offers price comparisons for eBooks. In further pursuit of fun, Nicholas Tollervey and Ben Croston (whose day job is Python-automated brewing!) performed a tuba duet of the Sousa march well-known as the theme tune to Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The link between musicianship and coding is a well-known one, but the opening Sunday lightning talk of an energetic hip-hop rap, screened Pythonically, was a real surprise. More conventional, but no less delightful, was the PyConUK song – to the G&S tune used in Tom Lehrer’s Elements song, with words (Python keywords in fact) by Tollervey and Stephen Hawkes, who came up with the Victorian theme of this year’s publicity materials.

Quo vadis?

Saturday had ended with the keynote ‘Remaking the PSF: The next ten years of Python’ by the Python Software Foundation’s Van Lindberg, covering the challenges for the language community and the role of the PSF. As Python has become the glue language of the movie-making industry, is replacing Perl in bio-informatics, is beginning to dominate the financial space, and is finally supplanting Java in the educational world, does it really matter that it has lost its cool or “underdog edge”? Lindberg praised the uniqueness of the Python community, combining “kindness and professionalism”, and outlined where

the community and the PSF could go together, with more local and regional activity. There’s certainly a lot of UK Python activity already, with regional groups formed at PyConUK 2007 still going strong, The conference organisers have gone out of their way to attract as broad a spectrum of people as possible – from IT teachers who are new to Python (see ‘Teaching the teachers’, page 18) to core developers – with £100 early-bird tickets and a budget hotel price offering astonishing value. Combined with this were beginner and intermediate tutorial days, and sprints that welcomed all levels of ability. There was even a non-Python track, touring around Coventry’s heritage, for noncoding partners and offspring.

n Doctor Korovic’s Flying Atomic Squid – Daniel Pope’s Pygame programming demo

Future-facing

Despite all this, and despite the speaker list containing some talented and interesting female programmers, a look around the venue showed more than 90 per cent of attendees were male – a continuing problem in IT generally, but particularly in the free software community. PyConUK, ever ambitious, is addressing this problem at source, with direct outreach to schools to increase the numbers going into programming, both generally and to Python. The teachers who attended were taken through introductory Python programming, then paired with Python programmers for a development sprint for educational resources. Other education sessions included a session on Turtle, the Python version of Logo, and some surprisingly sophisticated uses – such as Sierpinski triangles and Lissajous figures – with very few lines of code. As well as giving the best introduction to functions that we’ve heard – “We teach the computer a new word” – discussion ranged over taking Turtle into the physical world with Lego Mindstorms, to a planned Arduino/ Raspberry Pi DIY oscilloscope. John Pinner, Zeth and the rest of the organisational team were a tireless, friendly and helpful presence throughout the event. Having organised UK PyCons since 2007, and a past EuroPython, the organisers are not resting on their laurels – next year an additional event is planned around sprints aboard a ship from Plymouth to Santander and back. If you want to get involved with both a great community and a fantastic language, all we can say is get on board!

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Androidon your Raspberry Pi Install

Android ports are now available for Raspberry Pi, opening up a whole new world of possibilities. Here’s how to get started…

Advisor

Rob Zwetsloot models

complex systems and is a web developer proficient in Python, Django and PHP. He loves to experiment with computing

22 www.linuxuser.co.uk

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Install Android on your Raspberry Pi

Projects for smart TV, home automation and an in-car computer

FEATURE

While one of the main reasons for the creation of the Raspberry Pi was to offer a cheap way for people to get into programming and using Linux, there are plenty of people who see it being used as a replacement for other forms of computing tasks. With the Pi being so small, the concept of using it for purposes where space is a premium is definitely not too far-fetched. Its form factor, weight and low power requirements make it ideal for use in a number of situations; however, the software may not always be the best for the task. Where Linux may be lacking, though, Android is there to cover it. Android ports to Raspberry Pi have been in the works for a little while now, but they’ve only just been made a usable reality thanks to the recent open-sourcing of the VideoCore GPU driver code. This allows for full hardware acceleration of Android, something that was previously having to be done purely by the CPU. Android can offer a very different experience and interface than a standard Linux distribution, without having to obtain custom distros so it’s optimised for a particular use. This means you can experiment with the sort of applications you’d want to use Android for without carrying around multiple SD cards in lieu of wiping them every time. Thanks to an ever growing development community, Google recently announced that there had been 25 billion Android app downloads by the end of September, five billion up from the number at the end of July, from its 675,000-strong selection. With this rate of expansion, there are always a number of apps for pretty much anything you’d want an Android device to do. With access to this range of possibilities on the Raspberry Pi, you can create a system that has the advantages of using a mobile, user-friendly OS, with the price of the Pi. And the addition of more I/O ports from the Pi can make it fit in better than your standard Android smartphone.

There are three types of projects we’re going to cover over the next few pages: a smart TV, a home automation remote and an in-car computer. While such distros like XBian and OpenELEC exist for media centres and home theatre PCs using the Raspberry Pi, the XBMC apps do not have the same kind of range as Android. With apps going outside the concept of plain media watching, and even the inclusion of Android games, there’s a lot more you can do with an Android-run smart TV. For home automation, there are very mature X10 and Z-Wave remote control apps available on Android that are optimised for the kind of interface you’d want to use for a remote control, unlike the mainly mouse-focused tweaking tools used on Linux distros. Finally, with in-car computers, the touch-screen optimisations and grid array for apps allow for easy navigation to music, podcast and other media apps, as well as plenty of fantastic GPS and satellite navigation applications native to Android.

Meet Razdroid

The team makes the first project to get Android on your Pi Before the release of the VideoCore drivers, some community members decided they wanted to have a go at porting Android to Raspberry Pi, creating Razdroid. Based mainly on CyanogenMod, the project got far enough to have a couple of working ports, only limited by the lack of hardware acceleration. Since then, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has created its own ports, and eventually released the VideoCore driver to make ports of Android and other software a lot smoother.

■ All you need is a Raspberry Pi set up and ready to go!

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Install Android on your Raspberry Pi

It’s easy to install Android…

Follow our step-by-step guide to get up and running You can put Android on your Raspberry Pi right now by visiting the Razdroid site at www.razdroid.net. There are currently a couple of images, based around both CyanogenMod 7.2 and 9, with different performance capabilities and app compatibility. The images can be put on an SD card using the same method as you would a Linux distro image, and will run from boot without any extra setup needed.

If you’re feeling a little more adventurous, you can compile the images from source instead. You’ll be able to make changes, updates and additions as well, if you want to improve the build. The steps on this page will guide you through a basic build of CyanogenMod 7.2, based on Android 2.3, for the Raspberry Pi, using the same files as the Razdroid image to get it working.

■ Using a standard dd operation, you can get your Raspberry Pi running Android

Eben Upton speaks

The co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation

CC: Jim Killock

Without Eben Upton, the Raspberry Pi would not have been possible. Coming from a background of computing and teaching, Upton is currently a technical director at Broadcom and is responsible for the overall software and hardware architecture on the Raspberry Pi.

01

Install libraries

You’ll need to get the necessary libraries for the build to work:

$ sudo apt-get install git-core gnupg flex bison gperf buildessential zip curl libc6-dev libncurses5-dev:i386 x11proto-coredev libx11-dev:i386 libreadline6dev:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libgl1-mesa-dev g++-multilib mingw32 openjdk-6-jdk tofrodos pythonmarkdown libxml2-utils xsltproc zlib1g-dev:i386 $ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linuxgnu/mesa/libGL.so.1 /usr/lib/i386linux-gnu/libGL.so

When the Raspberry Pi was first created, there were some very specific goals in mind for the finished product. Thanks to the way it met these goals, it has blown up as the darling of hobbyists and other tech enthusiasts for all manner of projects. To further understand the relationship between the original goals and this new concept of putting Android on the Raspberry Pi, we spoke to the co-creator of the Raspberry Pi himself, Eben Upton. Upton told us that there had never really been any plans originally for Android to be supported by the Raspberry Pi. However, developments in recent times had changed the view of the Foundation: “A significant minority of our customers want to see it, so that makes it important to us.” When the Foundation originally announced it was working on Android compatibility, it already had a working prototype. “This implementation uses a different kernel and VideoCore binary image from the one available on GitHub,” explained Upton, “which is why we’ve been keeping quiet about it so far.” This was in late July, and it took the Foundation a further three months to finally get the VideoCore drivers open-sourced. Upton told us shortly before its release why it had been delayed so long: “The issue around releasing the Broadcom Android version is that we’d need a separate microcode image for the GPU, and we really don’t want to fork the community.”

24 www.linuxuser.co.uk

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Install Android on your Raspberry Pi

Projects for smart TV, home automation and an in-car computer

FEATURE

04

Device tree

After the sync has finished, create a new directory and download the device tree for your build:

02

Working directory

We need to download the source to a folder that we can make executable. First create the directory:

$ mkdir ~/bin Then add it to your path:

$ PATH=~/bin:$PATH And finally, download and chmod:

$ curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/ googlesource/git-repo/repo > ~/bin/ repo $ chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

03

$ mkdir -p ~/android_pi/device/rpi $ cd ~/android_pi/device/rpi/ $ git clone https://github.com/ Mathijsz/device_rpi.git $ mv device_rpi rpi

05

Initial setup

Before we do the actual build, we need to run a little script to properly prepare the source code:

$ cd ~/gingerbread_pi/device/rpi/rpi $ ./initial_setup.sh $ cd ~/gingerbread_pi This will automatically make the changes.

Build environment

Now we’ll make a directory for the build environment and initialise it for the repo sync. First:

$ mkdir ~/android_pi Then move to it and initialise:

$ cd ~/android_pi $ repo init -u git://github. com/CyanogenMod/android.git -b gingerbread And finally sync:

$ repo sync -j16

06

The build

We’re now ready to build our Razdroid image. Make sure to do following to start the build:

$ source build/envsetup.sh $ lunch $ make -j4 Be aware that this may take a while.

Now the source code has been released, via the ARM Userland on GitHub, and marks the first time a full ARMbased, multimedia SoC has received vendor-provided opensourced drivers, and Broadcom is the first company to open up its mobile GPU drivers in this way. With it, people can get down to finishing Android ports and starting new ones. Android is well known as being used on touch-screen interfaces, but earlier devices included keyboards and trackballs. While this has gone out of vogue for smartphones and other handheld devices, for testing out your Android-powered Pi it would be useful to have this option. Is it available now, though? “I’m not aware of any significant challenges in this area.” Upton told us when we asked about traditional inputs. “We expect most people would use Android with a mouse and keyboard, and this seems to be a well-supported option from ICS (Android 4.0) onward.” So with this native mouse and keyboard support, you’re going to be able to find a lot more applications for a Raspberry Pi running Android than you could do with even an Android smartphone. On top of that, you will likely get the same kind of performance as a Linux distro according to Upton: “I would expect them to be very close in terms of performance. There may be more UI acceleration in Android, though, which we hope to bring into Linux.”

■ The Play Store will initially be missing from any ports

Finally, one of the main reasons to use Android would be to access the huge array of apps. We asked Upton about the issue with Google Play – those into the Android scene might know that CyanogenMod had to remove this from the standard build for legal reasons. Upton told us there were currently no plans to obtain a licence for the store; however, Android allows you install the APK files without the store, and these are usually very easy to obtain.

■ The concept of the Raspberry Pi is a spiritual successor to the BBC Micro

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Install Android on your Raspberry Pi

Smart TV

Use your Raspberry Pi to make any TV ‘smart’ Smart TV is a very recent and popular buzzword for a more advanced media PC running inside your TV, which add a whole host of different apps as well as being able to stream your content from around a network. Android itself does not need any specific apps or skinning to turn it into a functional smart TV – the display is already

■ The Raspberry SAFE VESA Mount add-on attaches the Pi to most flat-screen TVs

Game on! Why not turn your smart TV into a games console?

If the buzz around the Ouya is anything to go by, a lot of people are interested in how to turn Android into a games console. With a Raspberry Pi running Android, you’re already part way there. While you could use a mouse and keyboard for some games, others will probably work better with a joypad, and this is where the MOGA controller comes in. It connects via Bluetooth to Android and is able to control a number of Android games.

Get OnLive If Android games don’t really do it for you, how about fullblown PC games? The OnLive streaming service allows you

configured for easy access to all the installed software, and using home replacement apps such as Launcher Pro will allow you to increase the number of on-screen apps if the stock launcher displays too few for you. This usage for Android has not gone unnoticed by other people, with a few companies already on board. Recently, a highprofile Kickstarter project was successfully funded, called Pocket TV by Infinitec, which while definitely not the first Android-powered smart TV device, is notable for running off a USB stick. Like the Pocket TV, the Raspberry Pi is capable of running 1080p video without an issue. The benefits of Android even go beyond the TV, as Ahmad Zahran, founder of Infinitec, explains: “[You] get access to all your information, games, TV streaming channels, work documents and your entire digital life. You’ll have all the benefits that you get from carrying your smartphone but with the ability to display it on a much bigger screen. Imagine walking into a meeting and doing a presentation without a laptop.” As well as having access to simple information apps such as the Weather and Stocks, you can also use Android widgets to add a news feed or social network streams, and you can even connect to streaming websites like Netflix or the BBC iPlayer, as well as browsing the web. Once you’ve got your Raspberry Pi set up as an Android smart TV, you may be wondering where to put it. Well luckily, there are a few cases out there that support VESA mounts, the standard used to attach flat-screen TVs to brackets and walls. The Raspberry SAFE case by Solarbotics is just the tool to tuck it out the way.

to buy and rent games and play them anywhere, thanks to all the legwork being done in the cloud. Using the OnLive Android app, you can access these games from your Android-powered Raspberry Pi and play them directly on your television without the need for a bulky PC in your living room. And it also works out much cheaper than the official OnLive console.

■ The MOGA

can also cradle Android phones, hence the square shape

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Install Android on your Raspberry Pi

Projects for smart TV, home automation and an in-car computer

FEATURE

Home automation

There’s no need for costly official controllers Using home automation can be fairly simple. There are a number of different standards used for achieving it, such as powerline-based X10, or the RF-controlled Z-Wave products. These are usually controlled by very expensive remotes and wall screens, vastly increasing the price over the hardware you’d need in the first place.

There’s also a problem with running on open source operating systems. We spoke to an open source home automator, Conrad Vassallo, about the problems he faced even getting it started: “I did some research on systems that provided home automation and concluded that Z-Wave was the best option for me… soon I could control the lights in my living room with the touch of a button on a remote control. However, this was not enough: I wanted to have the system controlled by timed events and so the quest for a Z-Wave computer interface was on. First I bought a ControlThink USB stick, which did work fine for my needs; however, my home server runs on CentOS and the ControlThink USB stick was only supported under Windows. So I had to run the system on a virtual machine, which was not the best option on an Intel Atom PC.” Luckily he was able to get a setup running using code from the Open Z-Wave project, creating his own controller out of it – you can obtain the source code from here: code.google.com/p/ open-zwave-controller/source/checkout. The benefit of running these Z-Wave systems is that you can control them using Android apps. A Raspberry Pi and a small screen to connect it to cost a lot less than the officially made products and generally work better for the purpose, as you can always use the extra Android apps on the device anyway, whether it’s mounted on a wall or a small box on your coffee table.

Kitchen computer

■ Conrad Vassallo has tried a few solutions for home automation, including some using the Pi

The size of a Raspberry Pi allows it to fit in a lot of spaces – add a touch screen and it takes up very little room. Putting it in a discreet location like the corner of a kitchen worktop gives you instant access to the internet and your home network for

In-car computer Fit a Raspberry Pi in your car

The main issues usually associated with carputers are finding a small enough computer with enough power to do the tasks you’d want it to do, and then making sure you have a proper way to actually power the system once it’s in place in your vehicle. On its own, the Raspberry Pi is a solution to this problem, with the ability to be powered solely from the cigarette lighter using a USB adaptor that you’d normally find for phones. Running Android on top of that makes it the perfect in-car computer. In the past, even with a touch screen, navigating around an operating system was tricky, especially while on the move. While there have been a lot of recent improvements to the Linux kernel and X for touch and

looking up information, such as recipes via the Epicurious app, or using it to stream music from your file server while you cook.

Home automation controller Using your Android-powered Pi to control the house is fairly simple once you have it up and running. However, you can make it completely customisable using software like Open Z-Wave to set up timed events and remote access using your Raspberry Pi as the controller. “When I got my first Raspberry Pi, I thought it would make the project more interesting to have a dedicated appliance to control my lights,” explained Conrad Vassallo, who already had a fully working solution. “So the next step was to install SSH, Apache, PHP and MySQL and my code on the Raspberry Pi. Now my system was consuming very little power and performed flawless!” The system created by Conrad also supports Android input. “The Raspberry Pi is an excellent piece of hardware to ‘embed’ systems into. First, it is very small, silent, green and provides the services offered by larger, more expensive PCs.”

multi-touch inputs, the desktop environments themselves are optimised for mouse and keyboard – at least, the lightweight ones like LXDE that would run on a carputer. With Android, that is no longer an issue. As well as a fantastic selection of apps for music and podcast playback, you also have the fairly advanced satnav apps like Waze and even the native Navigation software. To top it off, there’s also a customisable car dock mode that gives you bigger buttons and default access to car-friendly apps.

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Install Android on your Raspberry Pi

The making of Razdroid

Razdroid was developed by a small team of like-minded people, eager to test out the Raspberry Pi’s limits. We spoke to three members of the team, Viktor Warg, Les de Ridder and Mathijs de Jager, about their involvement Linux User & Developer: What caused you guys to start the project in the first place? Viktor Warg: Well, I had just gotten my Raspberry Pi and instead of just loading up Debian as suggested, I started browsing the forums for something more, well, fun, to run on it. Stumbled upon the Android thread and knew instantly that I wanted Android on my Pi. Started collaborating with Mathijs and Les and one thing led to another, and here we are! Les de Ridder: The only real reason I was interested in doing it was because it hadn’t been done before. I thought it would be really nice to be part of something like this, as I had never done any porting or even embedded projects before. What limitations did you experience with the Raspberry Pi? VW: The main limitation was the lack of open source libraries for the VideoCore IV (the Pi’s GPU) which had put the project in somewhat of a slumber for a few months. This led to the fact that we had a fully functional Android system but lacked the appropriate graphics libraries to make it hardware accelerated and thus the response times for the UI were sluggish at best.

■ The team want to get Roku-style streaming on the Raspberry Pi

■ The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s successful attempt at running Android on a Raspberry Pi

LdR: Well, mostly Android compatibility issues. First of all, support for the Pi’s relatively old CPU was pretty much broken in the thenavailable Android sources; Mathijs luckily managed to fix this. Other limitations were obviously the RAM: with 256MB, Gingerbread works, but Ice Cream Sandwich runs… well… much slower to say the least. This is not only caused by the RAM, but also by the lack of hardware graphics acceleration. Android requires people to build custom accelerated drivers for its libraries (eg Bionic). We couldn’t do this at the time when we first built ICS for the Pi and still cannot, because the drivers’ sources are sadly closed source. How challenging was it to build Android for the Raspberry Pi? VW: It was quite a challenge at first, seeing as none of us (as far as I know) had been involved in similar projects at all. As we progressed (or didn’t, in some cases), things fell into place, though. Eventually, I’d venture as far as to saying that all three of us knew what most of the issues we faced stemmed from and how to solve them. One issue we had quite early was that the Raspberry Pi kernel wasn’t compatible with some of the patches Android needed, mainly the IPC-Binder that it relies on heavily. If I recall correctly, that was solved by our main kernel guy (Mathijs) after a few days of brainstorming. Mathijs de Jager: Another issue was a strange problem with executables crashing all the time (‘segfaulting’). After some help from the #cyanogenmod-dev channel, it turned out to be a bug regarding the ageing ARMv6

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Install Android on your Raspberry Pi

Projects for smart TV, home automation and an in-car computer

FEATURE

architecture in the CyanogenMod sources we used. Additional build flags, almost specific to the Pi, were needed too. This had us stuck for quite a while. What project ideas do you guys have for a finished product? LdR: I personally would like to make a build that anyone who owns a Pi can use, whether it’s a Model A with limited peripheral support or a new fancy Model B with 512MB RAM. This might mean that we would have to remove some features, but I think that we will be able to find a good configuration that works for the largest part of the people who are interested in running Android on their Pi, suiting as many people as possible. For people who are interested in making their own builds, we will supply patches so they can make their own configuration but still use our patches for the Pi. I don’t really have any personal projects, but using it as a Google TV-like internet player would be nice.

“The Pi kernel wasn’t compatible with some patches Android needed” Any future plans for ports or development on the Pi? MdJ: Netflix on Android on the Pi seems attractive and I can imagine a lot of people would want that, but I heard some DRM module

is needed. The Broadcom CPU seems to have it (for example the Roku 2 has Netflix and has the same Broadcom CPU), but needs to have it enabled. Maybe the Pi Foundation can eventually get a licensing thing going, just like the MPEG2-decoding licence.

What had you been using the Raspberry Pi for before Razdroid? MdJ: Mine had been running as a local web server for testing. VW: Nothing at all. I had just gotten my Pi when I started helping the Razdroid project. LdR: Not much to be honest. I only had just received my Pi when I started working on Razdroid. I was still waiting for my Pi electronics starter kit to arrive back then, which I later used for learning some basic electronics, like using resistors, LEDs, transistors etc.

■ Razdroid is based mainly on the CyanogenMod Android firmware

Contribute to Razdroid

Here’s some ways you can help port Android As Eben Upton said, the Raspberry Pi is about content creation, and what better way to do this than by getting in on a project and helping out with the Android port? Razdroid’s Viktor Warg tells us that the drivers are a good start, but they need a little more: “We’ve analysed the libraries and figured out that we need to implement our own userland gralloc-module, and none of us have even the slightest idea on where to start on that.” The best place to start is to visit the Razdroid wiki, www.razdroid.net,, and check on the current progress. There’s also an IRC channel, #razdroid on Freenode, where the developers regularly talk about their current work, and the entire project is maintained on GitHub. Of course you can always start your own project, either by using the official Android source from the AOSP, modding CyanogenMod, or forking Razdroid. Happy hacking!

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Monitoring your server with tmux

Using ‘tail -f’, you can monitor log files like /var/log/syslog

You can monitor the processes using up memory on your system with ‘top’

You can monitor the processes using up CPU cycles on your system with ‘top’

You can use ‘watch’ to periodically run informational programs that don’t have their own refresh option

Monitoring your server with tmux

With tmux, you can create a monitoring system allowing you to check on your server remotely and get the perfect overview of what’s happening. Joey Bernard explains how… Resources tmux: Launchpad:

http://tmux.sourceforge.net https://launchpad.net/byobu

Advisor

Joey Bernard As a true renaissance

man, he splits his time between building furniture, helping researchers with scientific computing problems and writing Android apps. When the kids let him have some time, that is

There are lots of systems and utilities available to monitor your system. Many of these are web-based, or they run as a client-server system. Unfortunately, there are several instances where the only allowed connection to the server of interest is over SSH. This might be for several reasons, the least of which being security. In these cases, you will likely still want some way of easily monitoring what is going on with your server. Using tmux, you can create a session which will run all of your monitoring software and

keep it running, regardless of whether you lose your connection or not. This article will cover the basics of creating such a session, which you should be able to tune and tweak to fit your specific requirements. This way, you can simply log in using any available SSH connection and see, in an instant, all of the information that is of interest to you. Also, since you need to log into the system over SSH, you don’t need to worry about the problems of locking down other software, such as a web server.

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Monitoring your server with tmux

Use the terminal multiplexer to view and manage monitoring tools

TUTORIal

n Adding a second top instance

Getting tmux

Tmux originated as part of the OpenBSD system. It should be available in most distributions. For example, you can get it in Ubuntu with ‘sudo apt-get install tmux’. If you need the latest and greatest features, you can download the source code from SourceForge.

02

Building tmux

The build system uses the usual ‘./configure; make; make install’ steps to build tmux. The reason you may want to build your own is that many distributions are behind one or more versions on the software provided by their respective repositories.

n Starting up a fresh tmux session

03

Starting tmux

Starting top – memory sorted

07

Navigating windows

With a new window, you can start a new instance of top, sorting it on some other criteria. One of interest to most system administrators is which processes are using up memory. To sort the processes in this way, you will need to enter ‘M’. This may vary for other versions of top, so always check your version’s man page. You might also want to change the refresh rate by entering ‘d’ and setting the number seconds between each display.

n The tmux source code is available on SourceForge

01

06

n Checking CPU usage with top

04

Starting top – CPU sorted

05

Getting a new window

Now that you have multiple windows, you need to be able to navigate between them. The simplest way is to use the shortcut navigation keys. To move to a specific window, you can use ‘C-b’ and then the window number. Remember that window numbering starts at 0. If you simply want to move to the next or previous window, use ‘C-b n’ or ‘C-b p’.

One of the things you will be interested in monitoring is which processes are using up the most CPU cycles on your server. A good tool for this is ‘top’. The default when you first start it is to sort processes based on CPU usage, so that is fine.

Here we come to one of the features of tmux; we need to create a new window in this tmux session. There are two ways to handle this: first, you can use the shortcut ‘C-b c’, or you can enter the complete command ‘new-window’. To enter commands, you need to enter ‘C-b :’ and then the command. This will put your current window into the background and open a new window in the foreground.

Starting tmux is as simple as typing ‘tmux’ and hitting Enter. Your console will clear for a split second, and then you will be presented with a Bash prompt again, along with a status bar located at the bottom of your screen. This status bar will contain information about your current tmux session.

n Getting vertically split pane

08

Creating new panes

The next great feature of tmux is the ability to break up windows into panes. This lets you have multiple programs running in the same window. To split the current pane horizontally, use ‘C-b %’ to get two panes, left and right. If you wish to split the current pane vertically, you would use ‘C-b "’.

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Monitoring your server with tmux

13

Disconnecting tmux

The next powerful feature of tmux is the ability to take your session and detach it from the console that you are currently using. To do this, you can use the shortcut key ‘C-b d’. This puts tmux into the background, allowing you to logout of the server if you wish. The great thing is this also works if your connection simply dies, too.

n Tailing the syslog file in a pane (from step 8)

09

Navigating panes

Once you end up with multiple panes, you need to be able to navigate them. To move to the next pane in the current window, you would use the shortcut ‘C-b o’. You can also rearrange panes within a window. To swap the current pane with the previous pane, use the ‘C-b {’ keyboard shortcut. To do so with the next pane, use ‘C-b }’.

10

11

Following dmesg

Kernel messages can be followed by using the program dmesg. The problem is that it doesn’t do automatic refreshing. You can accomplish this with ‘watch -n 3 “dmesg | tail -n 15” ’, where the 3 is the number of seconds between refreshes, and the 15 is the number of lines to display.

Using tail

Now that you have tmux essentials under your belt, it’s time to add some systems monitoring. You’ll want to monitor system logs, and you can do so in multiple panes, giving you an overall view. For example, navigate to an empty pane and enter

tail -f /var/log/syslog in order to get a continually updating view of system messages.

n Watching dmesg and syslog at the same time

n Monitoring network connections

12

Network statistics

The next area you will want to monitor is networking. One utility you can use is netstat. To see all of the current connections on your server, you can use ‘netstat -at | grep -v LISTEN’. This is non-refreshing, so again you will likely want to pass it to watch in order to get an updating output.

n Reconnecting to currently

running tmux session

14

Reconnecting tmux

15

Byobu

Now that you have a tmux session set up that is monitoring all of the parts of your server that you are interested in, you may want to check in on it. You can log into your server and simply reattach to the existing tmux session with ‘tmux attach-session’.

There is an alternative program available called Byobu. This program is actually a wrapper around both tmux and screen. It provides a prettier interface to tmux, including a more detailed, two-line status bar at the bottom of the screen. This improved status bar will give you more information, like battery level, CPU frequency and temperature, and even whether there are updates available for your system. These extras are all configurable, and there is even the option of creating a custom notification. You should consider checking Byobu out as a ‘tmux+’ option for your monitoring setup.

Now that you have tmux essentials under your belt, it’s time to add some systems monitoring

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Monitoring your server with tmux

Use the terminal multiplexer to view and manage monitoring tools

TUTORIal

20

Naming windows

Naming windows is done through the option ‘-n NAME’. This is important as it makes managing the windows easier. This name gets used to label the window, and it also gets used when you target a window with some particular command through the ‘-t TARGET’ option.

n The default Byobu configuration on Ubuntu (from step 15)

16

Naming windows

Once you have your monitoring windows set up, you will likely want to name them so that they are easier to manage. You can do so with the ‘C-b ,’ shortcut. This will rename the current window, and this new name will appear in the list at the bottom of the screen.

n Creating a new window called ‘new_win’

17

Configuration files

All of the commands you have used so far to create your monitoring session manually can be done automatically through the use of a configuration file. Each of the shortcuts has an equivalent long command which can be used in the configuration file.

18

Creating windows

To create a new window, you need to add the line ‘new-window’ to the configuration file. When you create this new window, you can give it a target of a current window whose index is where your new window will be inserted.

n Starting up top

19

Starting top

Another important option to the ‘newwindow’ command is a shell command to execute upon launching the new window. This is where you would place the command to start up ‘top’ within your new window.

n Creating panes with split-window

21

Creating panes

22

Starting tail in a pane

23

Loading a configuration file

24

What else can you do?

To create a pane, you will need to know which window you want to do so in. You can use the ‘split-window’ command, with either the ‘-h’ option for horizontal splitting or ‘-v’ for vertical splitting. Panes are identified through their 0-based index in the current window.

To start up a program in your new pane, you can add the command to the end of your ‘split-window’ tmux command. You can change this at runtime with the tmux command ‘respawn-pane -k -t TARGET-PANE command’, which will kill the current process and start up your new one.

After all of this work, you should have a configuration file that will load your entire monitoring session. To do so, you can save it to the default filename ‘~/.tmux.conf’, or you can save it to another filename and load it with ‘tmux -f filename’.

This has only been a start. You can take this and add your own monitoring programs to your tmux session to help in your system administrator duties. You can now connect to your system on a whim and see what is going on in a matter of moments.

n Creating a new window

n Naming your windows

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Create and manage boot scripts and startup applications

The differences in update-rc.d over chkconfig are explained

Learn how to use chkconfig in Red Hat-based distros

Create scripts to start up applications using graphical tools or custom scripts

Automate your boot time by launching browsers, music and scripts the way you want to

Create and manage boot scripts and startup applications Automate your boot time using init scripts to start programs, services and other functions on multiple distros and desktop environments Advisor

Rob Zwetsloot models

complex systems and is a web developer proficient in Python, Django and PHP. He loves to experiment with computing

Automating computer tasks is a fantastic way to increase your workflow and productivity. One of the best ways to automate is to create some init scripts to occur during boot time, as there are always applications you tend to start up the moment your system is ready – whether it’s simply a web browser and media player, or an IDE and system monitoring tools. This will be of use whether you’re waiting a few moments before your desktop environment properly loads, grabbing a quick

hot drink while the whole system loads up, or simply just like to see your system come to life with little interaction on your part. The process is not the same on different distros, though – while Debian-based systems use one method, other distributions will need another, and in this tutorial we will cover the different methods so you can properly apply them. We’ll also show you how to start up applications automatically in different desktop environments, and run other types of scripts.

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Create & manage boot scripts & startup applications

Customise which programs and services start up at boot time

TUTORIal

01

Understanding rc.d

Debian and Debian-based distros use the tool update-rc.d to manage init scripts, and it’s very simple compared to chkconfig of Fedora and other Red Hat-based distributions. Simply knowing the location of a script or the name of a service means you can add it to boot.

05

About chkconfig

Used by Fedora, openSUSE and other non-Debian distros, chkconfig is a different tool that manages init scripts, although it works somewhat similarly to update-rc.d. Chkconfig uses the same concepts of run levels, but they are different per machine.

06

Chkconfig service

To add a service using chkconfig using default values, input the following:

02

Update rc.d

Let’s try a simple one to start with. Select a service that resides in /etc/init.d/, which should be most packages that you’ve installed via the repos. To add to startup, use:

$ chkconfig --add {service} The default run levels are included in the init script, although it will use values from INIT INFO instead if there are some.

04

You can also reset them to default with:

$ chkconfig{service} res

08

Chkconfig remove

You can have a service removed from boot time and chkconfig’s list by using the following command:

$ chkconfig --del {service} Make sure it’s not a service that will affect normal boot time before you remove it, though.

Chkconfig list

A great way to manage your boot services is to use the list command with chkconfig like so:

The defaults part adds it to specific run levels, which govern when programs start during boot.

$ chkconfig --list

Debian run levels

Most Linux systems have seven run levels, from 0 to 6, but not all are the same. All Debian distros use the following classifications: 0 ..............................................................................Halt 1......................................................Single User Mode 2-5 ......... Multi User Mode with Display Manager 6.........................................................................Reboot Default adds services to start at run levels 2 through 5, and to stop at 0, 1 and 6.

$ chkconfig --levels 016 {service} off

09

$ update-rc.d {service} defaults

03

And off:

07

Chkconfig run levels

You can specify what levels you want to use with the following commands for run:

This will show all managed services, and whether or not the services are running at different levels. You can also specify the service name after ‘--list’ and get details on only that.

$ chkconfig --levels 2345 {service} on

Advanced update

As well as being able to add services to boot using update-rc.d, we can also remove them with:

$ update-rc.d {service} remove We can also specify which levels the service should run at:

$ update-rc.d {service} start 45 stop 01236

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10

Create and manage boot scripts and startup applications

Startup applications

For applications and programs to launch after login, we need to use tools included with the desktop environments to let us achieve this. GNOME, KDE, LXDE and Xfce all use different methods; however, Unity and Cinnamon are the same as GNOME because they’re based on it.

12

GNOME startup browser

13

GNOME startup advanced

Let’s simply add Firefox to the list of startup programs. Enter gnome-sessionproperties and click on ‘Add’ to bring up the Add Program window. Name and comment on it how you wish, but make sure you add the correct command to the relevant field – in the case of Firefox, it launches merely with ‘firefox’.

As the command-line entry is the same as running Firefox in the terminal, you can also add extra options to the field – and in this case, ask it to navigate to a different URL than perhaps your home address. The syntax is as follows:

firefox http://www.website.com -option Some of the options you might want to consider are things like private, -P for different profiles, and safe-mode.

11

GNOME startup

GNOME uses the gnome-sessionproperties tool to add applications to startup. You can access it by typing ‘gnome-sessionproperties’ into the terminal, or by pressing Alt+F2 to do the same thing. It’s a simple graphical utility that lets you add, remove, edit and disable startup programs.

hidden folder /.config in the home directory. You can open it up in a text editor to see the syntax that the gnome-session-properties uses, and edit it from there or create your own.

15

GNOME manual autostart

Let’s do something a bit more advanced by making a script ourselves. We can use Rhythmbox, say, to have music start up as soon as our system has booted. Begin the file like so: [Desktop Entry] Type = Application Exec = Hidden = false NoDisplay = false X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled = true Name = Play Music Comment = Play Music Rhythmbox needs to be started, then controlled with rhythmbox-client. Our code will look something like this:

$ rhythmbox-client --play-uri={file location}

14

GNOME autostart

The scripts for the startup programs are kept in the autostart folder, which is usually in the

You can also add an external media stream instead of a file location. It will begin to play from all music, so you’ll be able to shuffle through all your music.

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Create & manage boot scripts & startup applications

Customise which programs and services start up at boot time

TUTORIal

18

KDE advanced startup

The autostart scripts are kept in the same place as the GNOME ones, /.config/autostart in the home directory. The syntax to create the script from scratch is a little different, and allows you to add icons and detailed info on what the application supports.

21

Xfce advanced startup

22

LXDE autostart

23

Cross startup

24

The end

As with the other desktop environments, Xfce uses the .desktop files. The syntax in this case is exactly the same as the simple one used by GNOME, with the NAME, TYPE, EXEC etc fields to fill in.

16

KDE startup

The KDE autostart tool is found in System Settings>Startup and Shutdown. You can use this to add and manage init scripts as well as startup programs. To start, click the ‘Add Program’ button. You can manually search for the program, or enter its package name. Back to the Firefox example, you can just put ‘firefox’.

19

KDE startup template

Actions = NewWindow; Categories = Comment = Exec = GenericName = Name = Path = StartupNotify = true Terminal = false TerminalOptions = Type = Application X-KDE-SubstituteUID = false X-MultipleArgs = false

LXDE does not have a simple graphical tool to help you create startup rules – but it does use the same .desktop files that we’ve been using on the other distributions, albeit much more simply: [Desktop Entry] Type = Application Exec = Make sure to use ‘chmod +x’ on the file before rebooting.

As the .desktop files are similar across the major desktop environments, if you create a script in one, it will work in others. They may not always work between specific desktops, though, so you’ll have to make sure all the relevant information is included. KDE also has an option in the graphical interface that makes the script only work in KDE, however.

17

KDE startup options

In the properties for the startup entry, the Application tab gives you more options on how to name and start up the application, with the ability to add the same style of terminal options as we were able to do in GNOME.

20

Xfce startup

Xfce uses a very similar tool to the one used in GNOME, located in the Settings Manager under Session and Startup. Clicking ‘add’ will bring up the same sort of dialog box, although you’ll have to make sure you know the command you want to use, or the location of the program, as there is no search function.

Now you know how to have services and applications run on startup at a system level or after being logged in. There’s a lot more you can do with them, and you can find out by experimenting with the steps in this tutorials, or with terminal commands and executable shell scripts.

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Make an open source to-do list with Emacs

This is where you place the task states tracked by Toodledo

Scheduled jobs are labelled with the property ‘SCHEDULED:’

Each of the tracked tasks has a ToodledoID and a hash

Make an open source to-do list with Emacs

Advisor

Harness the power of Emacs to organise your work, as well as some options to track your to-do list when you’re on the go

Joey Bernard As a true renaissance

Resources

use org-mode to build a to-do list and plan out the work that you need to do. While this works great when you are at your desktop, more and more often people are on the move. We will also look at how to keep your to-do list with you while you are out and about. The method is to actually use the web application Toodledo to act as an intermediary between Emacs and your mobile device of choice. This way, you have your choice of mobile interface to your task list.

Emacs:

www.gnu.org/software/emacs/



http://orgmode.org



https://github.com/christopherjwhite/ org-toodledo

OrgMode:

org-toodledo:

There are at least as many ways to track tasks as there are people on the planet. A very powerful tool is available in the Emacs editor. Emacs runs in modes, and behaves differently depending on which mode it is in. Most modes are activated when editing files of particular types. There are several modes that are useful for task planning and tracking. The two most popular modes are planner-el and org-mode. In this article, we will look at how to set up and

man, he splits his time between building furniture, helping researchers with scientific computing problems and writing Android apps. When the kids let him have some time, that is

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Make an open source to-do list with Emacs

Use Emacs and org-toodledo to create a portable to-do list

TUTORIAL

06

Changing task states

07

Setting deadlines

08

Scheduling your work

Now that you have your tasks and their workflow defined, it’s time to actually work. As you get tasks done, you need to change their state. You can simply edit the tag directly and change the task state. Or, you can use the keyboard shortcut ‘C-c C-t’ to cycle through the options.

01

Get Emacs

The first step is to get Emacs installed on your system. Since Emacs has been around for so long, it has been ported to almost every system in existence. On Linux, it should be available in any distribution you use. This is not usually the latest version. If you want the latest functionality, you may want to download the source code.

some items to your ‘.emacs’ file. If you installed from source, you will want to add ‘(require 'org-install)’. Otherwise, you will want to add ‘(require 'org)’. You will also want to add lines to tell Emacs to use org-mode when opening files that end in ‘.org’.

04 02

Get org-mode

In any recent version of Emacs, org-mode is available as part of the bundled modes. This usually tracks behind the latest version available. Again, if you want the latest version’s features, you will need to download and install from source.

Initial setup

In order to use the most basic org-mode functions, you will need to add

First to-do file

Your task list resides in an org file. These are just plain text files with particular tags which org-mode uses to decipher things like priorities, deadlines and contexts. Tasks are started with asterisks, which identify the level. Subtasks are identified with an extra asterisk.

05 03

Some tasks have to be done by some time. You can get org-mode to set and track deadlines with the keyboard shortcut ‘C-c C-d’. You can use shortcuts like ‘tue’ for the next Tuesday, or you can enter the full data and time for a task.

Setting task states

Your workflow is defined by the states that your tasks can take. These can be defined either in your ‘.emacs’ file, or in the org file itself. The states are broken into those states for active tasks (like TODO) and those for inactive tasks (like DONE).

The other time function in org-mode is scheduling. You can set a date and time for when your task should be started by using the keyboard shortcut ‘C-c C-s’. This will add an extra property to your task. Schedules and deadlines can also be added manually by editing the text.

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09

Make an open source to-do list with Emacs

Setting priorities

Priorities can be set by using the keyboard shortcut ‘C-c ,’. Or, you can add them manually by typing ‘[#A]’ or ‘[#B]’ or ‘[#C]’, where A is the highest priority level and C is the lowest.

10

Estimating effort

Part of planning is estimating how long each of your tasks will take. You can set this by setting the effort property with the keyboard shortcut ‘C-c C-x e’. This effort can be used in several different functions, including ones you may write yourself.

11

12

Looking at your agenda

There are several built-in agenda functions available. The default agenda view is compiled using the shortcut ‘C-c a a’. This will give you a list for the week. If you want a list of all of your to-dos, use ‘C-c a t’. This agenda is interactive, allowing you to edit the tasks involved. You can also create your own agenda views, tailored to your workflow.

13

Planning your day

14

MobileOrg

Now that you are able to set deadlines, schedule tasks and view your agendas, you can plan out your day’s work and actually get some things done now. This is the real reason for all task management systems.

iOS and Android, called MobileOrg. This app can synchronise with your org files via Dropbox, WebDAV or an SD card.

15

While it is fully functional, some people do not like the workflow MobileOrg uses on your mobile device. There are many different apps available which provide different layouts and workflows. Most of these apps synchronise with various web apps. One popular web app is Toodledo, and there are several mobile apps giving you access to your tasks. If you wish to use this, you will need to synchronise org-mode with Toodledo. The first step is to go and sign up and get your Toodledo account. Once you do, you can get Emacs configured.

Adding files to your agenda

Org-mode has the concept of an agenda. Agenda functions use files include in the agenda list to calculate the jobs for a given time. You can add the current open org file to the list with the shortcut ‘C-c [’. Or you can manually add the files by editing the values stored in the variable ‘orgagenda-files’ in your ‘.emacs’ file.

Setting up Toodledo

This will get you working on tasks on your desktop system, but what if you want to go mobile? There is an app, available on both

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Make an open source to-do list with Emacs

Use Emacs and org-toodledo to create a portable to-do list

TUTORIAL

This is the real reason for all task management systems

16

Getting org-toodledo

The project org-toodledo is hosted on GitHub, where you can download zip files or grab a copy of the Git repository. Once you download it, you need to add the directory to the Emacs search path with ‘(push “/path/to/ org-toodledo” load-path)’. You will also want to add the variables ‘org-toodledo-userid’ and ‘org-toodledo-password’ to allow access to your Toodledo account.

17

Patching Emacs

18

Initialising a file for Toodledo

19

Setting task states

Task states need to be synchronised between Toodledo and your org-mode setup. You will want to be sure that your org file has all of the task states from Toodledo. These can be set by including the line

#+SEQ_TODO: TODO(t) DELEGATED(g) SOMEDAY(s) WAITING(w) | DONE(d) CANCELLED(c) REFERENCE(r) somewhere in your org file.

Depending on your version of Emacs, you may need to patch some of the functions in the url-http file. If you installed from source, simply apply the patches before compiling and installing. If you install from your distribution, you will only have compiled elisp files. You will need to download the source files for your version from the Emacs site, patch the file url_http.el, then copy it over to the installed location.

The first step is to create and initialise a file to use for the interface to Toodledo. Create a new file, open it and run the command ‘A-x orgtoodledo-initialize’. This will log into your Toodledo account, create a new heading called ‘TASKS’ and do an initial pull of all of the tasks you have created there.

20

Toodledo. If you want to force a sync, say at startup, you can run ‘A-x org-toodledo-sync’. With Emacs, you can set a keyboard shortcut, or incorporate this synchronisation into some other function or trigger.

21

Mapping time properties

22

Getting rid of old tasks

23

Mobile apps

24

Where to now?

There are different time properties, both in Toodledo and org-mode. This means that there needs to be some form of mapping. The org-mode deadline maps to the duedate and duetime in Toodledo, while the scheduled value in org-mode maps to the startdate and starttime in Toodledo.

You can’t cheat and delete tasks from your org file. If you do so, then they will reappear during the next sync. You need to mark them as done and then synchronise with Toodledo in order to propagate the change. Once that has happened, you can archive the done tasks with the shortcut ‘C-c C-x C-s’.

Synchronising

Any time you make changes to your org file and try to write them, org-toodledo will ask you whether you want to synchronise to

Now that you’re synchronising to Toodledo, you can go to your respective app store and find an app that matches your style of working on your mobile device. Our personal choice is DGT, but there are many more to chose from. This article only covered the most basic functions available in org-mode. Emacs is essentially a full running LISP machine, so you can always change the functionality to match your own personal workflow. Check out the links and see what else you can do.

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WorldMags.net Feature

The Hurd: the true kernel of the GNU operating system

The

Hurd

What happened to the true kernel of the GNU OS?

Work began on the the Hurd, the true kernel of the GNU operating system, in May 1991, but it has yet to materialise as a production-ready kernel. Richard Hillesley tells the story… Although the GNU operating system was first conceived in 1983 and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) had first declared an interest in using the Mach microkernel as the core of the GNU operating system kernel as far back as 1987, the sources of the Mach microkernel – developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) – weren’t released under a suitable licence until 1991, by which time Linus Torvalds had begun his project to write a UNIX-like kernel for the IBM 386. If the Linux kernel hadn’t been written when it was, licensed under the GPLv2 and surrounded by components of the GNU operating system, or Linux hadn’t captured the moment and the imagination of developers, the energy that gathered around Linux might have gone to the Hurd and the world might have been a different

place. But it wasn’t just the rise of Linux, or the choice of the Mach microkernel that slowed the progress of the Hurd. The design of the Hurd was an attempt to embody the spirit and promise of the free software movement in code. As one anonymous hacker employee of the FSF back in the early days of the Hurd project, put it: “The sentiment around the design was, I think it fair to say, somewhat giddy. The free software movement was (and is) all about freeing users from subjugation to those who provide software. The Hurd’s microkernel architecture and the structure of the daemons would securely free users from subjugation to system administrators – each user could securely invoke a set of daemons to create the operating environment he or she wished, no special permissions required.”

A slightly large closet

Richard Stallman had announced his intention to write a complete UNIX-like operating system to be known as GNU, ‘GNU’s Not Unix!’, in September 1983. The years between 1983 and the inception of the Hurd were spent writing the operating system and tools that made the development of a kernel possible, the editors and compilers, Bash, Make, Autoconf, Emacs, GCC, sed, gawk and the command-line tools. GNU paid for itself through the sale of the software. In the early days of the Hurd the FSF employed developers, before “any kind of data over voice or particularly high bandwidth connection was commonplace – so that hacking was over modem connected to text terminal. Mostly we hacked in a shared office which, if you saw it, you’d think ‘Wow, that’s a slightly large closet.’ We were, at that time, guests of MIT.” Linus Torvalds had announced the arrival of “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU) for 386(486) AT clones” on comp.os.minix just a few short months after work began on the Hurd. Torvalds’ choice of a monolithic kernel was not the choice of the purists, but provided the quickest route to a working kernel.

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The Hurd: the true kernel of the GNU operating system

The original GNU UNIX-like kernel was supplanted by Linux but is still under development

FEATURE

The appeal of the Linux kernel to the hackers, hobbyists and academics who swarmed to help in its development was that it was free software, available under GPLv2, and ran on the kind of hardware they had at home. The momentum was with Linux and the community grew surprisingly fast. The community made GNU/ Linux what it was, and while work continued on GNU Hurd, it was at a slower pace. The community wasn’t coming its way.

An idealistic philosophy

From a user perspective, the Hurd was going to be a long time coming, and the Linux developers had slotted Linux into the space that was meant to be occupied by the Hurd at the heart of the GNU operating system. Stallman was initially sceptical. Early versions of Linux were exclusive to the IBM 386, and according to Stallman: “We heard that Linux was not at all portable (this may not be true today, but that’s what we heard then). And we heard that Linux was architecturally on a par with the UNIX kernel; our work was leading to something much more powerful.”

Linux was dependent on GCC and the GNU tools, and its profile began to grow as distributions emerged, and the FSF began to see Linux as an acceptable, if sub-optimal and temporary, substitute for the kernel at the heart of the GNU operating system. As Stallman was quick to point out: “There is no operating system called Linux. The OS called Linux is GNU. Linux is a program – a kernel. A kernel is one part of an OS, the lowest-level program in the OS that keeps track of other programs running, and apportions memory and processor time among them.” He insisted that the GNU operating system with Linux at its heart should be known as GNU/Linux so that “people understand that the system exists because of an idealistic philosophy. Call it Linux and it defeats the philosophy. It’s a very serious problem. Linux is not the system. Linux is one piece of it… The idealistic vision of the GNU project is the reason we have this system.” Work continued on the Hurd but it became obvious that the FSF had chosen a difficult route in its search for perfection. The microkernel

ALIX – THE TRUE GNU KERNEL

Richard Stallman tells the story that the GNU kernel was not originally supposed to be called the Hurd. Its original name was Alix – named after the woman who was my sweetheart at the time. She, a UNIX system administrator, had pointed out how her name would fit a common naming pattern for UNIX system versions; as a joke, she told her friends, ‘Someone should name a kernel after me.’ I said nothing, but decided to surprise her with a kernel named Alix.” It did not stay that way. Michael (now Thomas) Bushnell, the main developer of the kernel, preferred the name Hurd, and redefined Alix to refer to a certain part of the kernel – the part that would trap system calls and handle them by sending messages to Hurd servers.”

■ Richard Stallman announced his intention to write a complete UNIX-like operating system to be known as GNU, ‘GNU’s Not Unix!’, in September 1983

CC: stallman.org (public domain)

Later, Alix and I broke up, and she changed her name; independently, the Hurd design was changed so that the C library would send messages directly to servers, and this made the Alix component disappear from the design.” But before these things happened, a friend of hers came across the name Alix in the Hurd source code and mentioned it to her. So she did have the chance to find a kernel named after her.” Bushnell chose the name Hurd, partly because the Hurd suggested a herd of GNU, and partly because the Hurd was a recursive acronym for ‘Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons’ and a Hird was a ‘Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth’. As Bushnell put it “We have here, to my knowledge, the first software to be named by a pair of mutually recursive acronyms.” Thomas Bushnell is still a Debian developer and a Gregorian friar.

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CC: James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media

The Hurd: the true kernel of the GNU operating system

■ Michael Tiemann founded Cygnus Solutions

and was a GCC developer. Cygnus and Tiemann encouraged the ECGS breakaway from GCC and was a co-founder of the OSI

The principle and the promise presented a series of problems to overcome, and people who might have participated had been diverted to work on Linux, which was usable and bearing fruit. Despite the criticisms of the likes of Andy Tanenbaum at the outset of the Linux project, Torvalds’ choice of a monolithic kernel for Linux made it easier to arrive at a working free operating system. Stallman later admitted, “I take full responsibility for the technical decision to develop the GNU kernel based on Mach, a decision which seems to have been responsible for the slowness of the development. I thought using Mach would speed the work by saving us a large part of the job, but I was wrong.” In latter years the Hurd has been ported to a variety of microkernels, from L4 to Coyotos and to Viengoos, but has never had the community and resources that went the way of Linux.

In the late Nineties there was a schism in the community, symbolised by the ECGS (pronounced ‘eggs’) split of GCC – as an attempt to break GCC development away from the FSF – and the founding of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), to promote a less stringent, or watered down, view of the possibilities of free software. “The main differentiation [the OSI] sought from the FSF is that they would not condemn proprietary software or describe themselves as a freedom movement – they sought to emphasise the economic advantages of having volunteers do work for no pay.” But in the view of some “their main purpose upon founding was to attempt to politically marginalise RMS (a project in which they’ve had some success).” An appearance of the Hurd was first promised in 1994, when Emacs was said to be up and running, and a release was promised in 2001, but never materialised. After the port to the L4 microkernel in 2005, Markus Brinkmann was

AT THE BLEEDING EDGE

Unlike the Linux kernel, which is monolithic, the Hurd uses a microkernel, and functionality is moved out of kernel space and into userland. The microkernel sits between the hardware and most of the activities that are normally assumed by a monolithic kernel. Thomas Bushnell, one of the primary architects of the Hurd in its earlier days, summarised the theory in his paper ‘Towards a New Strategy of OS design’, written in 1996. “The GNU Hurd,” he wrote, “is designed to make the area of system code as limited as possible. Programs are required to communicate only with a few essential parts of the kernel; the rest of the system is replaceable dynamically. Users can use whatever parts of the remainder of the system they want, and can easily add components themselves for other users to take advantage of. No mutual trust need exist in advance for users to use each other’s services, nor does the system become vulnerable by trusting

■ A microkernel puts system processes into userland. “Programs are required to

communicate only with a few essential parts of the kernel…” the services of arbitrary users.” In practice, this means that users do not defer to the superuser for activities like mounting a file system or loading a device driver, which was the case with Linux until recent years, since when Linux has begun to accumulate microkernel-like features of its own.

“It was well understood back then,” an anonymous GNU employee remembered, “and even a point of discussion in academia, that a microkernel architecture posed some difficult problems for performance (related mostly to a greater number of context switches as messages pass between

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daemons rather than syscalls being handled by a monolithic kernel). Rashid’s work [at Carnegie Mellon] had suggested that this problem was not so terribly significant after all. And so, at least to me, it felt like the GNU project was not only doing this shoestring-budget freedomfighting hacking, but also leading

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The Hurd: the true kernel of the GNU operating system

The original GNU UNIX-like kernel was supplanted by Linux but is still under development

Debian project leader, wrote the Debian Free Software Guidelines and founded Software in The Public Interest

near the bleeding edge of CS research made practical. Well, that was the theory, anyway, and we were mighty proud of ourselves and generally excited to be there.” The Hurd was a remarkable adventure into the state of the art of operating system theory as it existed at that time. The objective of GNU was to achieve something both UNIX-like and something akin to the operating system of a Lisp machine, the original single-user workstation that had grown out of the hacker culture of the AI Lab at MIT, where Stallman had learnt his craft. “Emacs (with its Lisp extensibility) was taken to be a paradigm for how interactive programs might work. Originally, it was even envisioned that the window system would be Lisp based. “One early change to the original GNU vision occurred when it became clear that X11 worked pretty well and was here to stay and would be free software. As a practical matter: just use that.”

promising “we can now easily explore and develop the system in any way we want,” but was forced to admit that “with my glibc port, I can already build simple applications, but most won’t run because they need a file system or other gimmicks (like, uhm, fork and exec), and I only have stubs (dummy functions which always return an error) for that now.” In the mid-Nineties Debian arrived on the scene and through the ‘Debian Guidelines’, written by Bruce Perens, became the practical expression and conscience of the free software movement, while the FSF divested itself of much of its role in defining and developing the GNU operating system and put its efforts into the politics of free software. Since 1998, Debian GNU/Hurd has been an active project of the Debian community, who offer an installation CD and live CD, which can be seen as the sanctioned version of the current status of Hurd development, but is still not considered to be an ‘official’ Debian release. The Hurd is not up to production quality, and has some limitations on hardware support, but can be usefully run in a virtual box and is worth a try. Where once the FSF paid developers to work on GNU projects, most are now volunteers or employees of companies paid to work on projects like GCC. Much of the focus went out of the Hurd because Linux does the job, and there was no burning need for another kernel, but the principle and the promise have lingered on, and there may yet be scope for a return to the original vision of the GNU Hurd.

The might have beens

When GNU was first conceived, the obvious solution was to find a ready-made kernel that was already in the public domain. Stallman’s first choice was TRIX, which had been developed on his home ground at MIT, and is mentioned in the GNU Manifesto. “An initial kernel exists but many more features are needed to emulate UNIX,” he wrote in 1984. “When the kernel and compiler are finished, it will be possible to distribute a GNU system suitable for program development.” As late as December 1986, the GNU developers were “working on the changes needed to TRIX”, and it wasn’t until the following year that Stallman began to take an interest in Mach. Other ideas were mooted, including the use of Berkeley’s Sprite operating system and the BSD kernel. “RMS was a very strong believer, wrongly, I think, in a very greedy algorithm approach to code reuse issues,” Thomas Bushnell later remembered. “My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and make a kernel. I knew the code, I knew how to do it. It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today. RMS wanted to work together with people from Berkeley on such an effort. Some of them were interested, but some seem to have been deliberately dragging their feet: and the reason now seems to be that they had the goal of spinning off BSDI. A GNU based on 4.4-Lite would undercut BSDI.” As Bushnell describes it, Stallman came to the conclusion that “Mach is a working kernel. 4.4-Lite is only partial. We will go with Mach.”

CC: Tjeerd Wiersma

n Bruce Perens was a

CC: Manon Anne Ress

feature

n The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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The only Linux magazine for open source developers 100% FOSS focused » Features » Tutorials » Sample code

Build extensions for GNOME Shell Add new features and functionality to your GNOME desktop

Supercomputing for the masses We talk to Andreas Olofsson, founder and CEO of Adapteva, about Parallella Page 48

“Our goal is that this is going to be as successful as the Raspberry Pi”

Build a network of Raspberry Pis Bring many RasPis together with centralised storage and authentication Page 56

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Supercomputing for the masses

We talk to Andreas Olofsson, founder and chief executive of Adapteva, about his company’s project to create a $99 many-core pocket-sized supercomputer: Parallella

Andreas Olofsson is a man who knows his chips. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he gained a BA in Physics, a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in the same discipline, Olofsson worked for semiconductor giant Analog Devices for nearly a decade designing highly parallel digital signal processors (DSPs). Growing tired of working for someone else, Olofsson would leave Analog Devices in 2008 – bringing a few of his colleagues along with him – to found Adapteva, a privately held semiconductor company of just five people.

19.05mm ■ Adapteva’s latest Epiphany-IV processor packs 64 800MHz RISC cores into a tiny, low-power package

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■ Andreas Olofsson, founder and chief

executive of Adapteva, wants to bring supercomputing to everyone

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Supercomputing for the masses

The $99 pocket-sized supercomputer is on its way

FEATURE

“A processor architecture is only as strong as its community” Adapteva might be small, but the firm has a big aim in mind: to revolutionise the semiconductor industry with its extremely low-power yet highly parallel processor architecture. Since successfully raising Series A funding in 2009, Adapteva has launched a series of remarkable chips based around its Epiphany highly parallel architecture, including the Epiphany-III 16-core chip and its bigger brother the Epiphany-IV 64-core chip. Despite drawing around 2W under load, the chips promise masses of power for parallel processing tasks – and to prove it, Olofsson is looking to sell a miniature ‘supercomputer’ based around his design to anyone who wants it, for just $99 (around £62 excluding taxes.) Dubbed Parallella, the board mates a dualcore ARM-based Cortex-A9 processor with an Epiphany-based co-processor. The result, Olofsson claims, is a device no larger than the highly successful Raspberry Pi, but with the sort of processing power that has people sitting up and taking notice. Seeking $750,000 of cash on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter for his project, Olofsson promises to release all the details of the Parallella project – board design, chip documentation and compiler source code – under permissive open source licences.

But why?

LUD: What makes the Epiphany architecture your company builds special, compared to existing architectures such as x86 and ARM? Andreas Olofsson: “We don’t run an operating system, but we are really good at real-time processing, maths acceleration, and the kind of thing that the ARM and Intel processors can’t handle today very energy efficiently. We’ve been building chips over the last few years, four chips so far, and the latest one came out this summer: the 28nm, 64-core Epiphany-IV. “It’s a 64-core co-processor that’s going to sit next to an ARM or Intel host, running at 800MHz, consuming less than 2W for the full chip. That’s about 50GHz of CPU performance – that’s the way we like to count it, because it’s 64 real RISC [reduced instruction set computing] cores that can run a lot of different applications written in C or C++ that are being launched from the host. “One interesting application was the OpenCV library, which is a very popular computer vision library developed by Intel over the years. We took that library and ran it on an x86 processor for face detection. Then we took the inner kernel of the face detection and brought it over to our platform, and started accelerating it and running it at much, much lower power. So basically let the OpenCV machine vision library

do all the camera interface and everything like that, all the high-level application, and then we do the brute-force acceleration. “If I go through what we’ve done over the last year, besides getting the 28nm chip out and verifying it and having it work, it’s really working on our platform, working on our compiler, our debuggers (we put out an OpenCL compiler to allow people to do parallel programming very easily on our platform) and then also building our board offering portfolio to our partners. So, really, the last year has all been about beta customers, early adopters, to get to the point where now we’re ready to bring it to the mass developer audience.” What made you decide to launch a Kickstarter project (the first semiconductor firm to do so) offering a highly parallel development board for just $99? “Until today, our kits have cost thousands of dollars and we’ve had hundreds of people interested in our technology, but they couldn’t afford it. We feel that if we can make it priced at $99 for a parallel computer, now that should be cheap enough that anybody could have it. “A processor architecture is only as strong as its community. That’s been shown time after time: if you can’t get a few thousand users involved in your architecture, to build software and infrastructure, you’re going to have a very

■ Adapteva’s Epiphany architecture promises much, but Olofsson admits it needs the support of the development community to succeed

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Supercomputing for the masses

hard time surviving – especially with parallel computing where you’re up against the old way of doing things, the old software ways, the single-threaded way. We feel that we have a technology which is very compelling from an energy efficiency standpoint, but if we really want to have long-term success we need to grow our community very quickly, and it can be very hard to do that if we keep the price very high. “We’re never going to get the volume up selling onesies and twosies to R&D labs. We really need a bigger audience. One of our biggest development costs is mask sets: at 28nm, they’re millions of dollars, at 65nm they’re hundreds of thousands of dollars. If we can get, through the Kickstarter project, some prepurchases, we can use those pre-purchases to basically buy mask sets and bring the cost of the chip down to something very, very attractive. ”We just needed some kind of platform to do the launch on, and [Kickstarter is] going to be a way for collecting people’s orders. I think they’ve done a great job of setting that up, they’re a good escrow platform, but it wouldn’t be the only one. For us, it’s easy to use, we don’t have to worry about payment. For us it’s the contract: the allor-nothing kind of funding really works for us, because the only way we can pull off this project is if we get certain funding levels. For example, to get the $99 16-core version, we would need to raise $750,000 to make that and to not lose a lot of money per board shipped, and it’s that kind of all-or-nothing – people can give their credit-card numbers safely and know that they won’t be charged unless we hit our funding goal.” The $99 price point you’re targeting is extremely competitive. How sustainable

“The reason I’m an engineer is to build stuff that other people use ” do you think that is? – is that something you’re going to be able to stick to after the Kickstarter project has finished and maintain as a product? “With the right manufacturing partners, absolutely. It comes back to our silicon-area efficiency: we are extremely small, in terms of our chip size. Our 64-core processor, at 28nm, is only 10mm² – so that’s about 3.5mm by 3.5mm. Compare that to large GPUs and large microprocessors, which are hundreds of square millimetres… Just imagine: they’re hundreds of square millimetres, and what they sell for or cost to manufacture, and we’re only ten. “The majority of the cost of a chip is the silicon cost. So we know that we have a very cost-competitive solution. We have a pretty good track record of delivering on time and within budget, but it’s a challenge to bring a product to market for $99 and ship it in high volume. If this is a huge success, finding the manufacturing partner that can produce in those kinds of volumes and committing to that very quickly is our plan.” Why is it so important to you that the Parallella board is priced within the reach of the mass market? “For me, personally, the reason I’m an engineer is to build stuff that other people use – that’s the dream of a chip designer, that you build a platform and it’s a blank canvas, and then other people will make amazing things with that. That’s the reason we’re doing it. “Our big goal is that this is going to be as

successful as the Raspberry Pi. That’s the end-goal. But addressing a different market, obviously. We’re not at $35 or $25, we’re at $99, but with vastly more performance.” One of your target markets for the Parallella is education, much like the Raspberry Pi. How important is it that universities teach the next generation of programmers to harness the parallel processing capabilities found in modern hardware? “I think it’s a huge challenge and problem right now. I mean, everybody knows that the future’s parallel. What GPUs are showing, and what we are showing, is that parallel’s not even the future – it’s now. There are massively parallel systems right now that could give a huge boost to applications, but there’s nobody who has the energy and the know-how to rewrite a lot of applications for that. “In the future, it’s just going to get worse. Single-threaded processors are saturating, and I think there is agreement on that, so you need to go to heterogeneous computing, and to do that you need to educate from scratch all the new programmers who come out. The curriculum needs to change immediately, because we’re losing time. “All the people out there who are experts at single-threaded programming and who maybe haven’t taken the plunge to parallel programming, they need to be educated and retrained and gotten up to speed. It’s a big context switch for the mind, to go from serial to parallel programming, and really the only way

■ Olofsson has a

plan for turning the high-price prototype into a pocket-size and pocket-friendly product

■ The prototype Parallella board – which

uses an external Epiphany daughterboard – already runs Ubuntu Linux

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Supercomputing for the masses

The $99 pocket-sized supercomputer is on its way

FEATURE

Parallella Tech Specs

CPU: .................................................................... Xilinx Zynq dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 at 1GHz Co-Processor: ...................................Epiphany-III 16-core ($99) or Epiphany-IV 64-core ($199) RAM: ......................................................................................................................... 1GB LPDDR2 USB: ..............................................................................................................................2x USB 2.0 Video: ...............................................................................................................................1x HDMI Storage: ...................................................................................................................microSD card Networking: .......................................................................................................Gigabit Ethernet Additional Connectivity: .................................................2x 48-Pin GPIO expansion connectors Power Input: ..................................................................................... 1x micro-USB or 5V DC jack Power Draw: ....................................................................................................... nisclient.img’ and restore the backup to a different card using ‘cat nisclient.img > /dev/mmcblk0’ once you have taken the original card out.

18

Preparing a disk to be used as a backup area

19

Backing up the server

The instructions for preparing an external disk to be used as a backup area can be found here: www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/build-a-fileserver-with-the-raspberry-pi. Use steps 09 to 11 to do this.

One of the main advantages to having central file storage is that everything can be backed up from one place. More importantly, files that are deleted can be restored. We’ll be using rsync to perform the backups, so you’ll need to install that using the command ‘sudo apt-get install rsync’. We’re going to assume that you’ve set up your backup area in /mnt/data. We’ll be using the command

sudo rsync -avP /home /mnt/data to perform the backups. The switches mean the following: a – preserve the permissions and other properties of the file v – show verbose output P – show progress This command syncs any changes from /home to /mnt/data, but will not get rid of any files that are deleted from the /home directory. Rsync is very efficient: only the changes made to a file are copied over, rather than a new file. We want to run this command regularly, say once an hour or so, so we’ll add it to cron. Cron is a daemon that runs commands at specific intervals according to each user’s crontab. You can edit the pi user’s crontab using the command ‘crontab -e’. Add the following line to the end of the crontab file:

0 * * * * ‘sudo rsync -avP /home / mnt/data’ The crontab file takes lines in the format: minutes hours day-of-month month day-ofweek. The above line tells the cron daemon to run the command in at the start of each hour. Save the changes as you usually would in nano.

20

That’s it!

We now have a central authentication and file storage area that gets backed up, as well as a master image for the client Raspberry Pis filled with useful software. Enjoy!

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Review index

Essential kit, software and resources for the open source scene

REVIEWS

Hardware

62 Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1

The Note migrates to the tablet form factor in fine style

64 Synology DS213air

Synology’s latest small and home office network-attached storage box

66 Archos 101XS

Archos adds keys to its latest tablet

“It’s possible to configure the DS213air without even connecting a network cable” Synology DS213air

80 Fractal Design Define R4

Possibly the perfect home server case

How we review Our experts thoroughly test the kit and grade it using the following criteria Avoid at all costs A designer/developer’s bad day Good but could do better

Software

68 GNOME 3.6

GNOME moves further down the path of simplification

85

Books

The latest Linux reads dissected

Get this. It won’t disappoint Software or hardware nirvana

70 Office suite group test Four of the very best open source suites go head-to-head

76 CAINE 3.0

We rate the latest build of this penetration-testing distro

78 Ubuntu 12.10

We score Canonical on Ubuntu’s new (and controversial) features

82 GNOME Shell Remix

Still running 12.04, this release seeks to fix several problems

61 www.linuxuser.co.uk

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Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1

tablet

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1£389.99 The Note is not just a pocket-sized offering – the range now has a ten-inch version. It’s rather stunning too… Technical specs

Operating system Android 4.0 Processor 1.4GHz quad-core Memory 2GB RAM Storage 16GB internal Dimensions 257.8 x 175.3 x 8.9mm Weight 580g Display size 10.1-inch Display resolution 1280 x 800 pixels Expansion slot microSD

Pros

The stylus is improved; the tablet is superpowerful; great specification with lots of memory

Samsung’s Galaxy Note proved such a surprise hit that the company has not only produced a follow-up handset but also a spin-off in the form of a full-sized tablet. As a Note it does include a pen for scribbling on the screen, but other than that, it is not really a companion device to its smaller ‘phablet’ brother. While that is unique, the Note 10.1 has plenty of competition, not least from Samsung itself with the similarly specced (and much cheaper) Galaxy Tab 2. Has the company gone crazy by splitting its own market in this way, or is it ensuring that it has devices for every need? Well, that rather depends on whether the Galaxy Note meets a need. We aren’t so sure about that. For all the goodness of the pen-based input, it is still limited – and we aren’t sure we’d actually use it a great deal after the initial excitement. Others will disagree, we’re sure.

Cons

Lower resolution than we’d like; stylus will turn some off; proprietary connectors

The stylus sits in a housing on the chassis and you can use it all of the time. Tapping icons with its nib has the same effect as patting them with a fingertip, and you can sweep with the stylus too – for example, on the unlock screen. Not all apps support the stylus, though. A sidebar showing those that do appears when you extract the pen. The list is small: S Note, S Planner, Crayon Physics, PS Touch and Polaris Office. These variously let you make notes, manage your diary, play a physics-based game, draw and edit images and create Office files. There’s handwriting recognition in the Notes app. You’ll find other pen-supporting apps for download, too. It’s all very similar to the Galaxy Note II, except that it runs a slightly older version of the software, including the Ice Cream Sandwich operating system rather than Jelly Bean. There are a couple of other goodies on board. You can splitscreen some apps, viewing two at the same time. But the

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Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Large-screen Android tablet with stylus

REVIEW

With a quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM, this tablet seems to fly along

A suite of apps is included specially for use with the stylus, and you can download more

selection is small. Web browser, video player, Polaris Office, gallery, email and S Note are the full set. You can also take advantage of the same pop-out video player that we saw on the Samsung Galaxy S III. In this larger screen it is a much more interesting proposition. Physically the Galaxy Note 10.1 and Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 are very similar to look at. They share the same front-mounted speaker grilles and silver outer frame. Samsung hasn’t worked really hard to make the Galaxy Note 10.1 look very different. Build quality is reasonable but there is a little flex in the backplate and its plastic might be prone to scratching, so a case will be necessary. The screen delivers 1280x800 pixels when others (eg the Transformer Pad Infinity from Asus) offer 1920x1200, while the much smaller-screened Note II has 1280x720 and is much crisper for it. But it is bright and most definitely clear enough for everyday working.

A stylus sits in a housing on the chassis, ready to be popped out and used at any moment

Some apps are capable of being used side-byside, two at a time. The selection is limited, but it’s a nice idea

The core specifications are strong, with Android 4.0 driven by a 1.4GHz quad-core processor and a very generous 2GB of RAM in support. That’s double the amount of RAM we’ve seen even in top-end devices, and it must be part of the reason the Galaxy Note 10.1 seems to fly. There is 16GB of storage, plus a microSD slot for adding more. It’s irritating that there’s no HDMI output – you need to use an optional extra adaptor for the proprietary mains connector to get HDMI. And that connector also doubles as the USB link. That will no doubt disappoint people who have standardised to USB, though at least Samsung does provide the cable. On the other hand, Samsung includes an infrared port and an app, Peel Smart Remote, which lets you control IR devices such as your TV. It’s an old-fashioned idea being given a new lease of life and we like it.

So how does the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 compare to the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1? We’ve noted the design similarities. The 16GB non-3G version can currently be found online for around £389, while the non-3G Galaxy Tab II is marketed at around £289. Ultimately, the Note 10.1 is Samsung’s best tablet yet, and a better product than the Tab 2, but with a not inconsiderable price difference. It’s up to you to compare specs and consider whether you really need a pen with your tablet. Sandra Vogel

Also consider

Asus Transformer Pad TF300 £399

The Transformer Pad offers a great keyboard and screen combo and has consistently scored highly for quality and technical capabilities. If you’re likely to be working on documents, the physical keyboard will make your life much easier. www.asus.com

More information www.samsung.co.uk

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Synology DS213air

The Wi-Fi capabilities of the DS213air are fully integrated, with a front-facing status LED and no antenna in sight

The Synology logo doubles as an air intake vent, but fails to muffle the sound of internal hard drives

The front-mounted power button provides a safe shutdown if held for four seconds

Sturdy rubber feet keep the DS213air stable, but there’s no option to lay the unit on its side

STORAGE

Synology DS213air£250 Synology’s latest small and home office network-attached storage box packs Wi-Fi capabilities, but is that enough to justify the high-end price tag? Pros

Compact, lightweight and with a near-silent fan, plus the built-in Wi-Fi is extremely versatile

Built around the same dual-bay chassis as the existing DS213, the DS213air NAS unit upgrades its predecessor with 802.11b/g/n wireless networking. While this is limited to 2.4GHz only, it certainly helps to expand the device’s capabilities. The compact dimensions of the device are impressive enough, but it’s the weight that is most surprising: pick up the DS213air and you’d be forgiven for thinking

Cons

The thin plastic casing fails to mute sound from the hard drives; external PSU is disappointing

Synology has forgotten the components. Its plastic chassis – which is secured by two screws in the rear – slides apart to reveal the hard drive bays, and it’s immediately clear why the box is so light: aside from a single motherboard and the SATA II backplane, there is barely anything to the DS213air’s internals. Hidden in the packaging is one of the reasons for such a spartan interior: unlike Synology’s larger NAS units, the DS213air has a laptop-style external power supply, which terminates in a DC plug rather than accepting an IEC mains power input. It’s a disappointment, as the black power brick spoils the DS213air’s clean white aesthetics, but at least it’s compact and includes a generous length of cable. Setting up the DS213air is as easy as screwing the drives into place – both 3.5” and 2.5” hard drives are supported, with the device accepting up to 4GB drives – using the provided screws, sliding the plastic casing back together and then placing two final screws in the rear. Connect the external power brick to the DS213air and a mains socket, hit the power button and you’re off.

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Synology DS213air

Network-attached storage with Wi-Fi

REVIEW

Technical specs

Operating system Synology DiskStation Manager 4.1 (proprietary Linux-based OS) Processor Intel Atom 1.6GHz Memory 256MB DDR3 (not upgradeable) Dimensions 165 x 100 x 225.5mm Weight 940g (excluding drives) Drive Bays 2x SATA II (non-hotswap) Wired networking 1x Gigabit Ethernet Wireless networking 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only) Expansion 2x USB 3.0

The large fan spins nearsilently – a claimed 19dBA – but provides excellent airflow through the case

Also consider

USB 3.0 ports provide highspeed access to external drives, next to a Gigabit Ethernet port The Wi-Fi can be configured with a single press of this button on WPS-equipped networks

Netgear ReadyNAS Duo £90

A Kensington slot is included to provide physical security against theft

This does reveal the first flaw in the design: the thin plastic casing, while sleek, provides little insulation for harddrive noise. Although the integrated fan is near-silent, at a claimed 19dBA, those with ‘clicky’ drives may find themselves positioning the DS213air as far away as possible. It’s possible to configure the DS213air without ever connecting a network cable. By default, the device sets up a public wireless network called DiskStation, providing access to its configuration settings through any web browser. If you do connect a network cable, the DS213air configures itself as a wireless access point. Sadly, there’s no encryption on the connection by default, leaving your network open to intruders until you’ve finished configuration and have switched on WPA or WPA2 encryption. When configured, the system provides the same functionality as any other Synology DSM-based NAS – apart from the wireless functionality. The main interface is clean and tidy, with browser-based GUI control making it easy for newcomers. Synology boxes excel in their flexibility. As well as network storage functionality over numerous protocols, the system provides a Package Centre for installing additional software including virtual private network (VPN) servers, the Asterisk Voice over IP (VoIP) server and even the popular Moodle courseware server. With just 256MB of RAM, though, you need to be careful how many of these packages you run at any one time. With the

same DSM software being shared between Synology’s highend units – which include 2GB of RAM – and the little home office boxes, it’s all to easy to get carried away and watch system performance suffer. For simple NAS services, however, the DS213air performs well and its wireless functionality allows it to act as an access point or even a router when connected to a WAN Ethernet connection – perfect if flashing boxes are taking over the office. With its high price tag, however, it comes hard to recommend. A microserver is roughly the same price and much more flexible, although buyers don’t get the benefit of Synology’s excellent DSM software.

The DS213air is certainly a capable and compact device, with very flexible integrated Wi-Fi, and Synology’s DiskStation Manager improves with every release. With only 256MB of RAM, though, many advanced DSM features perform poorly and the high price tag makes it a difficult sell over similar – but wired – devices from Netgear and HP. Gareth Halfacree

Larger than the compact DS213air, the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo is significantly cheaper and includes the same basic file-sharing functionality and support for secure file access via the internet. There’s no wireless connectivity, however, and it lacks Synology’s excellent DSM operating system. www.netgear.co.uk

HP ProLiant Turion Microserver

£250 (£150 after cashback)

Roughly the same price as the DS213air, the HP ProLiant is a fully fledged server in a compact box. Powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM, the server includes four drive bays and comes with a 250GB drive to get you started. HP also offers £100 cashback on each microserver purchased. www.hp.com

More information www.synology.co.uk

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Archos 101 XS

Android 4.0 is on board at launch, and an update to Android 4.1 is promised before the end of the year

There’s no back-facing camera, but a small front-facing one sits on the screen bezel and is good enough for video chat The device comes with its own keyboard section, and magnets help keep the two parts together when they’re being used and when the keyboard is doubling up as a screen cover

The coverboard houses a reasonable-quality keyboard that doubles up as a protective case when not in use

TABLET

Archos 101 XS £299.99 Archos takes aim at the Asus Transformer range with this Android-powered tablet-keyboard combo Pros

More affordable than most other keyboard tablets; Android 4.1 by Christmas; office software included

Archos has been making screen-only devices for a very long time (we’re talking pre-iPad). The firm has also had a long history of working with Android – with, admittedly, mixed results. Usually Archos sticks to the consumer end of things, happy to push the media side of what its tablets can do, keeping the devices simple. With the 101 XS, Archos has taken a different tack. For one thing, it comes with a coverboard – a keyboard that doubles up as a cover for the screen when it’s not in use. And Archos bundles a copy of Office Suite Pro too. While sadly proprietary software, it does mean the Archos 101 XS could be attractive as a less expensive rival for the popular Asus Transformer

Cons

Less powerful than its competition; doesn’t bundle all cables; magnets aren’t secure enough for travel

range we’ve been reviewing in recent months. At £299 the Archos 101 XS can’t rival the Transformers for build quality or power, of course, but what’s on offer might prove to be good enough for the everyman. The build is certainly attractive. The silver and white chassis to the tablet has a neat appearance, one of the best Archos devices we’ve seen, though it has to be said that the silver parts are metal and scratch fairly easily. There’s no back-facing camera, but we’ve never really been convinced tablets need high-quality back-mounted cameras. The front camera ought to be enough for most of your needs. The coverboard attaches to the main unit via a proprietary connector and is held in place by strong magnets and a

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Archos 101 XS

Android tablet with keyboard

REVIEW

Technical specs

Operating system Processor Memory Storage Dimensions Weight Display size Display resolution Expansion slot

Android 4.0 1.5MHz dual-core 1GB RAM 16GB internal 273 x 170 x 8mm (tablet) 273 x 170 x 5mm (coverboard) 600g (200g coverboard) 10.1-inch 1280 x 800 pixels microSD

foldout stand. The overall effect is that the tablet sits at a good viewing angle and feels fairly sturdy. When not in use, more magnets around the coverboard’s edge hold it onto the tablet, thereby protecting the screen. We found that it slipped out of alignment fairly easily, though, so you will still probably need a separate carrying case for better travel protection. The keys are quite small, but relatively comfortable to use. The minimal amount of travel for the keys means it never threatens to completely replace your laptop in the way a Transformer does. There are plenty of Android-specific keys such as Menu, Home, and recent apps, as well as dedicated keys for media playback, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi toggles, not to mention screen brightness and audio volume. The keyboard has been well thought out and mixes in really well with the screen, providing for a satisfying experience all-round. Archos has been clever enough not only to build in Android 4 but also to promise an upgrade to Android 4.1 before the calendar year is out. Behind the screen you’ll find a dual-core 1.5GHz processor supported by 1GB of RAM. There are far quicker devices around, but what’s on offer is more than good enough for the kinds of tasks you’ll be doing. It is good to see HDMI output here, albeit in mini socket format and Archos doesn’t bundle an adaptor. The micro-USB port features USB Host, so you could attach external peripherals – again, you will need to provide your own adaptor, though.

There’s a microSD card slot on one of the short edges too, making it really easy to double – and more – the built-in 16GB of storage quickly and affordably. The screen is good, but by no means the best. The 10.1” display with its 1280x800 pixel resolution is the same as we’ve seen on the 7-inch Nexus 7, and it can be beaten in a tablet its own size, but we found it an amply comfortable experience. Archos has not left its media-friendly roots behind completely. Of course, the Archos 101 XS handles movies and sound efficiently, and the music and video apps have been tweaked to include a carousel of album covers and movie thumbnails for you to sweep through. A wide range of video formats are supported too.

In all, then, a decent package at a fair price. The design puts a different spin on a concept we’ve seen before and the performance is acceptable if not groundbreaking. Users after a tablet to function as a real laptop alternative will still be better off looking at the various Asus models, but those seeking a to enhance a traditional tablet with a physical keyboard for more casual use should be more than happy. Sandra Vogel

Also consider

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 £389.99

Reviewed over pages 62-63 this very issue, the new 10.1” Note is an impressive offering. With a stylus instead of a physical keyboard, the choice between them comes down to which you’d likely use more. www.samsung.co.uk

More information www.archos.com

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GNOME 3.6

n Putting a lot of necessary functions into the activities overlay slows down your workflow

desktop environment

GNOME 3.6

The latest version of the GNOME Shell is here. Has it addressed the concerns of users, or gone farther down the path of simplification? Pros

Keyboard navigation is still great, and it will probably be very good with a touch-screen device or tablet…

Cons

...only it’s for desktops, with mostly mouse users. GNOME seems to go out of its way to slow down your workflow

The release of GNOME 3 was just over 18 months ago, and it’s been an interesting time to say the least for the desktop environment and its users. With complaints centring around usability and the abandoning of the traditional desktop metaphor, the GNOME project says it’s taking this user feedback to heart, returning oft requested features such as the power button on the user bar in the brand new GNOME 3.6. There are things that GNOME 3 does do well, though – and 3.6 carries on this tradition. Keyboard navigation is pretty great, allowing you to press whatever your equivalent of a Windows key is and search for documents and applications. This is very responsive – and if you know what you’re looking for, you can access apps faster than before. Notifications have always been good as well, and there have been a few updates to allow for multiple events, easier dismissal of boxes, and they only show up important notifications when doing something fullscreen. We even quite like the dynamic workspace, creating new virtual desktops as you start using another. Unfortunately, there is still so much fundamentally wrong with GNOME, and 3.6 seems to have gone even further out of its way to interrupt or generally slow down workflow. The main problem that has been plaguing GNOME 3 since its inception is navigating with a mouse – everything requires too many

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GNOME 3.6

Latest version of desktop environment

Review

n A lock screen designed for smartphones and tablets does not work on a desktop

n The GNOME web browser has no available space to drag it off full-screen

GNOME 3.6 seems to be specifically targeted towards tablet use

n Search in GNOME is still the best part of the DE

actions to perform. In the past, it was going to the hot corner to either go to another open window or workspace – and to open applications, just add a few more steps. None of this has been addressed, and in fact has been made worse. Maximised windows now lose the menu bar, so to close them you need to go to the hot corner and do it from there, or right-click on the top bar to access quit – both an extra action on top of the very simple one used before. With the GNOME web browser, you can’t use the drag feature to return it to windowed mode, instead having to right-click the top bar again. If one of the criticisms of Unity was that it seems optimised for touch-screen devices, then these changes and the new additions in GNOME 3.6 can only be specifically targeted towards tablet use. All the mousing issues and simplification of the UI make sense if you’re primarily using your fingers – no maximise button next to exit in case you press one and not the other, the hot corner, using the activities overlay to change windows, etc. The addition of the new lock screen and a clock application typifies this change to touch-screenfriendly interface. The lock screen works very much like a smartphone or tablet lock screen – it has the good stuff such as notifications and big clock display, but it also has a ridiculous unlock process of using your mouse to click and drag the overlay up to access

the login screen. A few glowing arrows are your only indication of how to do this and, while similar to the iOS ‘Slide to Unlock’ message, these arrows flash up very briefly and quite rarely. You can use Esc or Enter to get past the screen, but you’ll only learn that through experimentation or finding the brief side note in the GNOME documentation. GNOME tell us that they’re listening to user feedback, but the results of 3.6 seem to say otherwise. While touch-screen devices are slowly gaining market share, PCs and laptops still make up the vast majority of systems that can even use GNOME. However, GNOME 3 is no longer just for desktop use..

GNOME 3.6 continues the practice of taking half a step forward and several giant leaps back, making it frustrating to use on a standard desktop PC or laptop. The focus on touch-friendly controls has further hampered the user experience and noticeably slowed down workflow, and we don’t believe that this will ever change. Rob Zwetsloot

More information www.gnome.org

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Office suite group test

group test

Office suite group test

We investigate what software selection is the best to help you out in the office or at school for all your reports and presentations

LibreOffice It’s been a great year for LibreOffice, with two major releases both vastly improving the office suite over a period of a few months. Going from strength to strength and, thanks the community, fixing countless bugs left over from the original code (it was forked from OpenOffice in 2010), LibreOffice is one of the shining examples of open source software done right. Now on version 3.6, it has never been better, with added PDF capabilities, improved spreadsheet formulas and even little things like a word count bar in the Writer word processor. The popularity of LibreOffice is such that you probably don’t even need to install it. Most distros have it available as standard, or at least a link to install the full suite from the apps menu. Otherwise it’s in all major repos and there are plenty of options available on the website other than compiling from source, for people who find that a bit daunting. As well as the standard word processor, spreadsheet and presentation apps, LibreOffice also comes with Base for databases, Draw for diagrams, and Math for creating properly formatted

formulas for inclusion in a document. These are presented on a front-end, but you can go straight to each application as you wish. The layout of each app is basically a greatest hits from other popular office suites, and a handful of community-requested features to go with it. The entire interface is heavily customisable, including creating your own formatting menus and bars, and even the individual programs themselves have a lot of customisation to help tweak them to your usage. Compatibility-wise, LibreOffice is one of the best. Able to open and save to just about any kind of relevant file type, its compatibility is ever increasing over each version. Most notably, in our tests, spreadsheets that didn’t work so well with the other competitors were just fine in Calc. There’s very little we can fault with LibreOffice. Its great to use, nowhere near as buggy as it used to be, and each successive update makes some noticeable improvement. In the future we also have Google Docs-style collaboration coming, and ports to Android after that. LibreOffice is truly a masterpiece.

n LibreOffice has a handy

launch manager

scores Installation & support

Huge community backing means it’s readily available in many forms

Ease of use

10 8 9 9

No improvements over the standard office suite layouts, but it does that well

Compatibility

Near perfect, with constant improvements bringing it ever closer

Features

The most feature-packed office suite available

Overall

We love LibreOffice. While there was always lingering doubts about the quality of OpenOffice compared to proprietary office suites, LibreOffice is of a professional quality

n CSV updates

have been added to allow custom imports

9

More information

www.libreoffice.org

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Office suite group test

Four of the best open source office suites go head to head

Review

Apache OpenOffice The tale of the fall of OpenOffice is quite well known by now. While it was still called OpenOffice.org, some of its developers start The Document Foundation due to concerns of Oracle meddling negatively; they eventually release LibreOffice and it quickly overtakes OpenOffice. This surge in popularity was due to a number of reasons, but actually tackling the extensive list of bugs from OpenOffice contributed to it. Since then, Apache has acquired the OpenOffice code and is now That’s not to say OpenOffice is particularly bad developing it itself. OpenOffice is now in version 3.4, one above the – while it definitely wasn’t perfect, it was certainly final Oracle release, and 16 months after 3.3 was very competent, and the compatibility with other originally released. This first version of Apache office suites and file formats was pretty great for OpenOffice is a step towards a version 4.0; everything but the most complex spreadsheets. however, there has been very little in the way of This remains roughly the same, albeit with a bit bug fixes and updates to the code beyond making more language support, a handful of major bug fixes, and general performance increases. it compliant with the Apache licence. Again though, it’s just not enough. When the That pretty much makes it a non-starter. The code was bloated and old when The Document exact same code has been overhauled in the Foundation started with it, and the progress same time it took Apache to even release its it has made in the past two years has been first stable version, it’s a big problem. There’s absolutely phenomenal, squashing numerous absolutely no reason why you’d want to use bugs and fixing or adding countless features. OpenOffice over LibreOffice if you have the The release of AOO 3.4 was far behind the state choice, at least at this stage. While the future of LibreOffice at the time, and while there were may hold a brighter future for OpenOffice once improvements over the Oracle-released beta, the older Lotus suite is integrated into it for 4.0, at present it’s still in the shadow of its successor. using it after LibreOffice is like a step back.

n The quick launch window

was original in OpenOffice

scores Installation & support

Gone from most package managers, and slow to update. You’ll need to remove LibreOffice for it as well

Ease of use

One of the strong suits of the original: OpenOffice is still recognisable and easy to use

Compatibility

It will open most document formats you can throw at it, but not always correctly

Features

It has a full suite of applications that will definitely help you out, whether you’re in a pinch or not

Overall

OpenOffice’s hand-off to Apache has not paid dividends for the ageing software yet, and in the face of LibreOffice it looks especially worse off

4 8 7 8

6

More information

www.openoffice.org

n OpenOffice still has great compatibility

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Office suite group test

GNOME Office Software In lieu of a proper office suite included with GNOME, there are a handful of programs that are considered by the GNOME Project to be part of a loose conglomerate of applications that make up a GNOME Office. These include AbiWord for word processing, Gnumeric for spreadsheets, Inkscape for vector graphics and some presentation work, and Dia for diagrams. Some of the packages in the list are officially part of GNOME, such as Gnumeric, mail client Evolution and document viewer Evince; however, others are simply promoted by GNOME. We’ll be frank – the combination of these applications is not as rich or varied as any of the full suites of software in this group test. The most noticeable reason for this is that the presentation software that is part of the GNOME Office tag is still currently under development, and Inkscape is not great for the kind of slidebased presentations everyone is used to. Otherwise, the rest of the software covers most of the bases. However, application to application, each individual element is not up to the same quality as its rivals. For example, AbiWord is fairly competent. It contains basic formatting and table options, you can open just about any kind of document file type, save the result to even more formats and it’s generally easy to use and nicely laid out. Unfortunately, that’s about it. Features-wise, everything is shown up front, and there’s no customisation for the menu bars or much of the software at all. While it’s a lot more advanced

n AbiWord

oddly aligns page view to the left than a text editor, it is sorely lacking in features that people with serious word processing to do will notice. Much of the same can be said for Gnumeric, although it is relatively a lot more feature rich than AbiWord is. However, we did experience problems with it importing some spreadsheets that the others were able to handle fine, making it possibly the weakest spreadsheet software for compatibility in this group test. It’s clear that this GNOME Office group of programs is not really meant to fully replace a full office suite, but at least it lets you get by until you do install one. As some of it comes with a lot of distros that run GNOME and GNOME forks, it’s at least good for that.

scores Installation & support

5

Ease of use

8 5 4

While some of it does come by default with GNOME, the rest cannot be installed as one GNOME Office package

Generally simple and easy to use, copying the standard office software layouts

Compatibility

Depending on which part, it can be quite bad or quite good

Features

The basics, if that, and no proper presentation software

Overall

The GNOME office packages are good for holiday checklists, but for anything approaching serious office work you’ll be stuck

5

More information

www.gnome.org

n Compatibility in Gnumeric is inconsistent

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Office suite group test

Four of the best open source office suites go head to head

Review

Calligra Suite

The Calligra Suite was originally based on the same code as KOffice, albeit at a much earlier point in its development. While it shares some similarities with KDE’s original office suite, they both went down different paths and when KOffice development came to halt a couple of years ago, Calligra Suite became the de facto KDE office software package. Calligra is readily available in a lot of package managers, especially for distros that support KDE. Unlike LibreOffice and OpenOffice, it doesn’t particularly conflict with anything, meaning you can at the least have it among other office software if you prefer specific features. What you get with your install is Words, the word processor; Stage for presentations; Sheets for spreadsheets; Flow for diagrams; and Kexi, a visual database creator. Calligra’s layout is very different from the classical office software setup. Instead of menu bars and formatting at the top of the window, everything is put down the right-hand side, which has its pros and cons. For starters, the slightly different layout will probably slow folks down who are used to doing a lot of mousing for their workflow. However, for word processing, it’s actually a lot more efficient in terms of screen real estate. The original layout was the best way to orient it for the 4:3 screens of old, but with widescreen and 16:10 monitors the norm now, a

n Words has an interesting interface that

portrait page can easily fit on the side while all the formatting flanks it. You can see more of the page, and that little touch adds a fair bit. Sadly, for a spreadsheet, this has the opposite effect. As you can’t change the orientation, the more complex the spreadsheet, the less you’ll be able to see. Still, there is a lot of customisability in the Calligra suite, enabling you to edit the contents of the menus and some of the basic workings and defaults for each individual app. The compatibility is a bit odd, though – while it will open almost any file we could throw at it, it only has very limited ways to actually save files, sticking to open document formats and nothing else. Overall, Calligra is very inconsistent. While its word processor may be one of the best in terms of layout, the lack of compatibility across the suite and its fixed perspective mean it falls behind LibreOffice in almost every other way.

works well with widescreen displays

scores Installation & support

8

Ease of use

6

Compatibility

2

Features

6

Available as one package in most repos, and is supported by KDE

Depends entirely on the application, but generally it’s just different

Opens a lot of files; has some problems with spreadsheets, though, along with limited saving capabilities

A decent set of features, but nothing that stands out from the competition

Overall

Calligra is definitely not terrible, but it lacks a lot of features and compatibility to truly make it competitive with something like LibreOffice

6

More information n Calligra can open plenty of file types, but save to very few

www.calligra.org

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Office suite group test

In brief: Compare and contrast our verdicts

10

Gone from some repos, cannot install alongside LibreOffice

4

Available in repos, but not as one coherent product

5

Available in repos as one package, files on website

8

Same layout as most office suites, nothing confusing

8

The classic layout is still there, and just as easy to use

8

Like other GNOME apps, they’re all simple and easy to use

8

The unique interface is great for Words, but not for the rest

6

Compatibility

Works with just about anything, with very few holes

9

Compatibility has fallen behind over the past two years

7

Opens and saves to a lot of file types, but has problems with some formulas

5

Opens some file types, not always very well though, and saves to very few

2

Features

Constantly improving, and has the most in this test

9

Good and feature-full applications that are more than stopgaps

8

It only really helps you if you have no other choice

4

A decent set of programs will just about let you do what you need

6

Installation & support

If it’s not already installed, it’s no problem to get

Ease of use

A fantastic software suite that covers every need very well Overall

9

Apache has done very little to fix OpenOffice, while LibreOffice has improved hugely

6

It’s fine if you have to use it, but upgrading is otherwise essential

5

Calligra needs to mature much more before it can be competitive

6

AND THE WINNER IS… LibreOffice

Going into the group test, while we suspected LibreOffice might win, we did not anticipate how far ahead of the rest of the office suites it was. OpenOffice has barely changed since it was taken over by Apache, GNOME Office is a random sprinkling of applications, and Calligra is nowhere near as mature. So LibreOffice wins, almost by default. Of course, a lot of people have done a lot of hard work to get it to the state it’s in today, and it highlights how open source can be incredibly beneficial to developing software. With rapid improvement leading to new full versions twice a year, each with significant updates, and regular bug fixes for them, it’s rare that you’re going to encounter major problems or limitations to the software for every long. We would like to see the Calligra Words interface applied to Writer, though, as that is smart UI design… Rob Zwetsloot

GROUP TEST

WINNER

■ Our group test winner gets the honour of being used to write this article

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WorldMags.net Review

CAINE 3.0

■ The Caine Interface program guides you through all steps of a forensic investigation

DISTRO

CAINE 3.0

CAINE is a well-known specialised Linux distribution focusing on penetration testing. With its latest 3.0 release, it updates itself to the Ubuntu 12.04 base and adds a host of new tools Pros

Offers a lot of tools and scripts to help you with a forensic investigation, also usable as a generalpurpose distribution

CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment, but also named after CSI: Miami ’s head of crime lab Horatio Caine) is a hyperspecialised Linux distro. As its full name implies, it’s aimed at digital forensic practitioners. The latest edition is CAINE 3.0 (codename Quasar), based on Ubuntu 12.04 and Linux kernel 3.2 but with the GNOME 2 fork, MATE, instead of Unity as its desktop environment. Unfortunately, the 1.3GB live DVD image isn’t a hybrid image and it doesn’t work out of the box with UNetbootin either. Writing the ISO to a USB stick and making it bootable is possible, but needs some fiddling. The installer, though, will be familiar to Ubuntu users, as it’s Canonical’s easy-to-use Ubiquity. An interesting difference between CAINE and many other specialised distributions is that it also ships with a lot of

Cons

Some functionality is still rough, such as booting from USB, and CAINE has some peculiarities to watch out for

general-purpose tools. When you have installed CAINE 3.0, MATE’s menu contains many applications that you would find in any regular desktop distribution. This is a good move, because in many other specialised distributions we found ourselves limited if we wanted them to use for daily tasks. You would then have to install many regular applications first, or constantly switch from the specialised distribution to a general-purpose distribution. In contrast, you can use CAINE perfectly as your regular desktop distribution, and on top of that, all the specialised tools are available in the Forensic Tools menu. However, CAINE is much more than just Ubuntu with some forensic tools added. A regular desktop distribution isn’t suitable for forensic purposes, because it automatically mounts available drives as read/write. In a forensic investigation of a computer this is obviously a

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CAINE 3.0

Linux distro for digital forensics

REVIEW

■ PhotoRec is a tried and tested tool to recover deleted files ■ CAINE offers a slew of forensic tools in its menu

CAINE’s policy for mounting devices is unrelenting

recipe for disaster, as it changes last mount times and also risks wiping out (potentially hidden) data when you write to the drive. That’s why CAINE’s policy for mounting devices is unrelenting: it never automatically mounts any device. Mounting is only possible through the Mounter applet in the system tray or on the command line with the mount command. A left-click on the Mounter applet lets you mount or unmount devices and a right-click lets you toggle the system policy for all future mounts with the applet from read-only to read/write and vice versa. If the current policy is read/write, the disk icon in the system tray becomes red to warn you to be careful. Moreover, CAINE streamlines the process of conducting a forensic investigation. Just click on the Caine Interface icon on the desktop and click on ‘Create report’, after which you are guided through a four-step phase from data collection to a report. You can collect information from connected devices; recover files using known headers, footers and data structures; find image files containing hidden (steganographic) content, and so on. More specific tools, such as for forensics of iPhone and BlackBerry devices, can be found in the Forensic Tools menu, and MATE’s file manager Caja has been extended with countless handy scripts in the context menu of your files. This isn’t to say that the distribution is not without its faults, however. We already touched upon the issues with booting the live ISO from a USB stick, but also after installation there are some minor annoyances. For instance, even though we had set a specific keyboard layout in the Ubiquity installer, the

MATE desktop didn’t honour our choice. Moreover, you really have to read the distro’s online documentation, as it has some peculiar behaviour with respect to mounting. Unfortunately, there’s no overarching documentation about what the various tools do, either, so you have to discover their function by trial and error.

■ CAINE extends its file manager with a lot of handy scripts

If you’re searching for a set of computer forensic tools, look no more, you have found it. It takes time to discover all the scripts and get used to the Caine Interface, but with this distribution you have all the relevant tools at your fingertips. Just don’t forget to read the documentation, as CAINE has some peculiarities. Koen Verloesem

More information www.caine-live.net

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WorldMags.net Review

Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal

n Unity, now with more online search results

distro

Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal Pros

The release of Ubuntu rolls around yet again. Has Canonical listened to concerns of the users, or continued to forge its own path?

Lots of software, a huge amount of choice, and generally easy to use for any level of Linux user

Cons

The best part of Unity, the search results, polluted by Amazon unless you find the hidden off switch

The last version of Ubuntu was the much lauded LTS release of the distro, focusing more on stability than adding new features. While the HUD did manage to sneak its way into 12.04, there wasn’t a whole lot else other than the standard package updates. So now it’s back to a standard cycle Ubuntu, we’re interested to see what Canonical has up its sleeve this time. We had to wait a long time to see the changes as well – we initially went through the distro upgrade process from an upto-date Ubuntu 12.04.1 64-bit, and the process took literally hours to complete. While we were fine with the package updates taking a while to download – that’s just par for the course – the fact it then took several hours to apply them on both machines we did it on was shocking. It’s especially odd since the actual fresh install of the system took a leisurely half an hour. We don’t recall previous distro upgrades on Ubuntu ever taking this long. Once we were finally in, we found Ubuntu to be much the same. The LDM has been updated to look a little sharper, and now has the peculiar function of wanting you to press a separate ‘Confirm’ button when selecting a different desktop environment. Unfortunately, if you happen to have a handful of DEs installed, this confirmation button gets hidden down below the screen on lower-resolution displays, leaving you stuck with the default one until you change your display manager, or trim the list. The basic set of applications are pretty much the same as usual: you have Firefox, the LibreOffice suite, Thunderbird

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Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal

Major new release of the popular distro

Review

n The Amazon search results don’t blend in very well

n Upgrading to the new version took us hours to complete n You can turn off the Amazon search results

Amazon results merely pollute the search results with often unrelated items n The new previews give you application information

and a handful of basic GNOME apps to get you going. The Software Centre has as many packages as ever, with Ubuntu’s strength of a vast and complete repo intact for another roll of the distro. Unity has changed the most, and this is mainly due to the inclusion of the online search results, the controversial Amazon results that pop up in your searches. While there were obvious concerns over privacy and such, the actual way the results worked was never really questioned – unfortunately, what could have been its saving grace merely pollutes the search results with often unrelated items, price tag emblazoned on top. You can turn it off, but finding the exact setting for it is a little unintuitive, with the switch under Privacy and not the normal Unity settings. Over the past six months, not much has been said of the HUD, which is strange since HUD integration seems better than it ever has been in Ubuntu. Now finding the menus for just about every app we were using, it also seemed to throw up more relevant results than before. While HUD is not for

everyone, it’s at least good to see that it’s improving for those who might want to use it now or in the future. Of course, it’s Ubuntu, so you have access to all the variety of other desktop environments such as GNOME, KDE, LXDE and Xfce, to name a few. While something like Cinnamon or MATE is still not in the repos, they were available in their own PPAs very shortly after the release for 12.10, proving the popularity of the young desktops. Overall, it’s another Ubuntu release that has people scratching their heads. It works great, which is to be expected, but Unity is just getting further and further away from what the users seem to want.

Canonical is again holding its ground on the use of Unity in Ubuntu, which is a shame as the rest of vanilla Ubuntu is a fantastic, easy-to-use operating system. Luckily, there are the other desktop environments you can use to fit your own workflow, while keeping the great software library and support. Rob Zwetsloot

More information www.ubuntu.com

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WorldMags.net Review

Fractal Design Define R4

Technical specs

Motherboards ATX, Micro ATX and Mini ITX Dimensions 232 x 464 x 523mm Weight 12.3kg Colours Black (Pearl Black), White (Arctic White), Grey (Titanium Grey) Expansion slots 7x normal, 1x vertical HDD slots 8x standard, 2x SSD only

case

Fractal Design Define R4 £90.99

This stunning Scandinavian case is put through its paces to find out if it can handle the server room as well as the office Pros

Big on space and customisability, it also looks fantastic and is very quiet to boot

Fractal Design is well known for the quality and craftsmanship of its computer cases, with the previous Define R3 being a fantastic all-round box. The new Define R4 sounds like an overall update to the R3 on paper, with an extra builtin USB 3.0 slot, the ability to mount SSD cards behind the motherboard, and a few more surprises up its sleeve on top of that. First of all, yet again the case is beautifully designed. The matt black of the Pearl Black case is stealthy and nonreflective, and the minimalist front panel is very efficient and in line with the rest of the case. This front panel includes the power switch and reset, both with a satisfying click so

Cons

Only some very minor issues, like no USB 3.0 to 2.0 adaptor, and case screws can be lost

you know you’ve pressed it, two USB 2.0, two USB 3.0, and audio ports for your headset and microphone. The extra USB 3.0 port is very useful, although the case does not come with a converter in case your motherboard does not have 3.0 compatibility. The legs enable the Define R4 to stand slightly higher at the front, and the door to the front of the case is held in place magnetically so that there are no extra push clips or buttons required to open it. Both sides are held in place by two screws designed for hand tightening, which hold in the panels in firmly enough yet allow for a screwdriver to get them clamped in if necessary. The only issue we have with these screws is that they aren’t overall connected to the panels

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Fractal Design Define R4

Stylish, flexible computer enclosure

Review

n Lower HDD cage in

n Lower HDD cage in

n Lower HDD

standard position

alternative position

cage removed

You can hide a lot of the cables away once the insides are mounted, thanks to space behind the motherboard n You’re not just limited to black either

– a nice touch that we’ve seen in other cases so that you don’t lose them. The insides belie the simplicity of the exterior with thick soundproof padding lining every side surface and myriad tidy cables to power the front panels and fans. Of particular note is the audio cable, which is pre-assembled and not like the fiddly pins of other cases. You can hide a lot of the cables away once the insides are mounted, thanks to space behind the motherboard – accessible via insulated holes in the case – and screw placements on this side allow the mounting of two SSDs. This space-saving feature can help you create a lowpower system with maximum storage over eight HDD bays. Design considerations don’t stop there – the top five HDD bays can be rotated 90 degrees, making extra room for some SATA cables, and easy front access to the bays if you remove the front fan slot altogether. This allows for quick changes and upgrades if you need to do this, especially in home or office server situations. The front fans being removable is part of another decision to allow easy cleaning of intake fans, with dust guards protecting the front fans and the PSU, both easily removable by sliding them out for cleaning. We particularly like these features in modern cases, especially with some of the weird and wonderful locations we find ourselves putting computers in these days.

Otherwise it allows for full ATX motherboards in the case, and includes six horizontal PCI slots for graphics, network and sound cards, depending on the application you have in mind. There’s even a vertical slot for USB-style expansion slots, allowing you to save a PCI slot for something more important while still adding a few extra I/O ports. Frankly, we really like this case. While there are a couple of features elsewhere we’d like to see, generally it’s one of the most design-conscious cases we’ve ever used. With plenty of usage options from storage server all the way to gaming PC, the best part is that it easily fits all these roles without any sacrifices being made.

Nitpicking aside, this is one of the best cases we’ve come across in some time. It’s as useful as it is good-looking, with plenty of space and options to customise the interior and the way it holds components to cover most server and office or home PC roles. Rob Zwetsloot

Also consider

CoolerMaster Silencio 550 £70

Another silent, black case with soundproofing and a similar small front panel. You lose the USB slots and extra HDD bays, but gain an extra optical bay and an SD card slot for those who need it. Otherwise it still has plenty of space for cooling. www.coolermaster.co.uk

More information www.fractal-design.com

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WorldMags.net Review

Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix

distro

GNOME Shell Remix

Still running on 12.04, this version of Ubuntu seeks to fix the Unity problems some people have by replacing it with the equally controversial GNOME 3

Ever since Ubuntu 11.04, there has been no official flavour of Canonical’s distro running the GNOME Shell as its main desktop. Of course, you could always install it from the repos, and Unity itself was a fork of GNOME, but there was no ‘Gubuntu’ spin of the popular distro. This is where GNOME Shell Remix comes in, to fill this apparent gap in the market. The latest version of the distro uses the previous Ubuntu, 12.04, as its base, as it is not one of the official releases just yet. The ISOs are both slightly larger than the standard Ubuntu ones, but installation is basically still the same as any other flavour of the distro. It does do some rebranding, though, changing the information screens and colour scheme of Plymouth to match the blues of GNOME. Installation was as quick as usual, depending on your system; however, post-install required nearly 500 updates as it is based on 12.04 and not 12.04.1. Once in, you have the standard GNOME 3 Shell, with options for fallback/classic mode on the non-standard display manager. It’s definitely not GDM, but it’s at least still easy enough to understand, and allows you to select users. Otherwise, the normal default apps are all present: Firefox, LibreOffice and the standard GNOME apps like Empathy and Shotwell. If you were expecting just Ubuntu with GNOME instead, then apparently you’d be correct. Obviously, being based on Ubuntu gives it a lot of advantages, such as one of the best selections of packages available, strong support for updates, and being an LTS release

n Installation

Pros

It’s based on the LTS release of Ubuntu, so it’s stable and has plenty of available packages to use

this support will last for years. However, the GNOME 3 Shell is not really an adequate replacement for Unity. As we’ve covered in the review of GNOME 3.6, both Unity and GNOME 3 are not universally accessible to all types of input. GNOME seems to prefer a hybrid of mouse and keyboard that relies heavily on the keyboard part, and Unity is much the same. In the end, it’s not an official version of Ubuntu, and to make sure you have the latest and greatest while keeping the GNOME Shell, you’re better off starting with vanilla Ubuntu, or another version, and going from there.

It literally is just Ubuntu with GNOME Shell installed and Unity removed – if that’s your thing, though, you’re probably better off doing it yourself from one of the official flavours of Ubuntu anyway. Otherwise it’s a fully functioning version of Ubuntu 12.04 with all the same advantages and disadvantages. Rob Zwetsloot

is the same as standard Ubuntu

Cons

While the GNOME Shell is a little better than Unity in some respects, it’s still not as good as other desktops

n It’s simply

Ubuntu with a GNOME paint job

More information http://ubuntu-gs-remix. sourceforge.net/p/home/

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Book Reviews

Latest Linux books revealed

REVIEWS

COMING SOON The best Linux books heading to a bookshelf near you…

Practical Common Lisp A most practical Lisp tutorial

R in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition Author: Joseph Adler Publisher: O’Reilly ISBN: 978-1449312084 Price: £38.50 A quick and practical guide: you’ll learn how to write R functions and use R packages to help you prepare, visualise and analyse data. Author Joseph Adler illustrates each process with a wealth of examples from medicine, business and sports.

NumPy Cookbook Author: Ivan Idris Publisher: Packt ISBN: 978-1849518925 Price: £44.98

This will teach you to write readable, efficient and fast code that is as close to the language of mathematics as possible with the cutting-edge open source NumPy software library. You will also learn about plotting with Matplotlib and the related SciPy project through examples.

Building Web Applications with Erlang Working with REST and Web Sockets on Yaws Author: Zachary Kessin Publisher: O’Reilly ISBN: 978-1449309961 Price: £15.50 If you are an experienced web developer who knows basic Erlang, you’ll learn how to work with REST, dynamic content, web sockets and concurrency through several examples. In the process, you’ll see first-hand that Erlang is ideal for building businesscritical services.

Author: Peter Siebel Publisher: Apress ISBN: 978-1430242901 Price: £47.99

Another month, another paperback re-release from Apress of an ancient book. Well, seven years is an eon in internet time, it’s true, but Common Lisp is a mature language, and fortunately hasn’t gone through any seismic shifts since Siebel first published his classic guide. See the first word of the title? This is a practical tutorial in Lisp programming. From Hello World, the author jumps straight into a simple database project for cataloguing CDs, a precursor to a streaming MP3 server and intro to server-side web programming in later chapters. In between functions, variables and macros are covered in the lead-up to a practical chapter on building a unit test framework. This pattern continues: groups of topics are taught, then used in practical projects to reinforce learning, and give experience of using Lisp in real-world tasks. With so many Lisp programming books being weighty references, or smug polemics against other, ‘lesser’ languages, Practical Common Lisp still stands out from the crowd.

Ubuntu Made Easy: A Project-Based Introduction to Linux

Newbie-friendly Ubuntu starter with history airbrush

Authors: Rickford Grant, Phil Bull Publisher: No Starch ISBN: 978-1593274252 Price: £27.49 Start at chapter two and this is a most comprehensive guide to the Ubuntu desktop, covering office tasks, multimedia, games, customisation, hardware, security, networking, indeed almost nothing useful is missed out. But chapter one? Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Several pages of GNU/Linux history, but a busy airbrush has removed all traces of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. This, despite a strong sense of community, reflected in a later chapter covering bug reporting, community help and getting involved with Ubuntu. The authors certainly know their Ubuntu. If you want a guide to just about everything you can do on Canonical’s unstoppable distro, from a newbie, GUI point-of-view (yet with a great newbie-friendly intro to the command line, too), and can get past the sins of omission of the first chapter, you won’t find a clearer guide.

Managing Humans Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

The human, and humorous, face of managing programmers

Author: Michael Lopp Publisher: Apress ISBN: 978-1430243144 Price: £19.99 Is this book for engineers who find themselves managers, or those who have to deal with (and are frustrated by) managers, or is it a book which helps you run teams of creative people? It’s all of those, and more. The author’s direct, humorous and occasionally sweary prose holds a whirlwind polemic – which won’t be to everyone’s taste – on how to manage as a manager, how to manage other managers, and how to really get the best from a team of software engineers. Along the way Lopp deals with meetings, performance reviews, saying no, meetings, disasters, hiring, meetings, problem colleagues and… meetings. A collection of blog posts, but each sharp and thoughtful, this is Dilbert for optimists – the skewering, observational humour is the same, but in place of resigned despair we have positive action points to take back to your dysfunctional organisation, to start making it less dysfunctional.

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Linux User & Developer

Your questions

answered

ASK THE EXPERTS

Send us your questions and we’ll do our best to answer them!

This month your questions were answered by…

Russell Barnes has been a computer and technology journalist for many years

n The fstab may look daunting to beginners, but it’s very straightforward

Koen Verloesem has a

master’s degree in computer science and philosophy

Rob Zwetsloot studied aerospace engineering, using Python to model simulations

Richard Hillesley writes

about art, music, digital rights, Linux and free software

Share alike

Gentlemen, I have been using Linux Mint 13 for a while now, and am very pleased with it. There were some initial configuration issues, but I managed to work through them. One issue that is still unresolved is getting Mint to talk to my WD 3TB ‘My Book Live’ NASD drives. The WD support CD configures Windows automatically and assigns a drive letter to each drive. Alas, there is no similar support for Linux. I can’t seem to attach to the drive with a browser address like ‘\Files1\Public\’ as I can in Windows. Nor can I attach to it with a browser address like ‘\169.254.10.130\Public\’ as I can in Windows. Nor can I successfully ping the prior IP address from Linux. I have Windows and Mint on separate pluggable drives, so switching the OS is no big deal. Windows works, Linux doesn’t, so it can’t be the hardware or connections. It has to be a configuration issue.

Okay, so networks are not exactly my strongest suit, but I can follow instructions, and I can chase down resources on the net – and best of all, I can play without fear of bringing down a company network: I own all the pieces and they reside in my basement. I understand TCP/IP at the physical level, but building entire networks is beyond me for now. However, I am educable. So, if you could suggest what I need to do, in as much detail as your time permits, I will try it. If you could suggest good references for something beyond the basics of the wire and packets of networking, I would appreciate it. Even better if they were on the internet. I am sure others would appreciate this as well. WD seems to have no interest in helping its non-Windows customers. I have seen others pose this question, but have seen no appropriate answers. Some guesses about file systems and Samba, but no definitive reply. I know this can be done, I just don’t know how. Any help is greatly appreciated. Greg

86 www.linuxuser.co.uk

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All your technical problems solved

Q/A

Hi Greg, I think I can help you out. The first thing I’ll say is that accessing external or networked hard drives is handled quite differently in Linux than it is in Windows. While you may have noticed USB sticks or other types of flash storage popping up in Linux Mint, this is due to the distribution automatically mounting the drive. Mounting is the process of assigning a place in the overall file system for the storage – and in the case of Linux, letting it know what type of file system it is as well. On the one hand, this make it easier to access without having to remember the different network names to type into a file browser. On the other, it can be confusing to folks such as yourself who are having trouble finding out how to connect networked storage for the first time. First of all, we’ve noticed that you’re trying to access it with an IP address that is for internetbased connections. You’ll need to find the IP address of the hard drive on your local network, which on home hardware will usually start with 192.168 (eg 192.168.0.25). Once you know that, we can tell you that apparently these hard drives use an ext4 file system, the same used by modern Linux distros. To mount it, assuming Public is the folder you want to mount, it would be something like this in the terminal:

$ mount //192.168.0.25/Public /home/ user/Share You can place it anywhere, but make sure to create the folder first. If that doesn’t work, you’ll need to install Samba – you can find it in the Software Centre, or by installing smbfs in the terminal. The mount would then be

$ mount -t smbfs //192.168.0.25/Public /home/user/Share

That should get you started actually seeing the share. To get it to automatically mount at boot, you will need to add an entry to the /etc/fstab file, which you can access in the terminal with something like:

$ sudo nano /etc/fstab …where nano is just a text editor. The line should look something like this:

//192.168.0.25/Public /home/user/Share cifs defaults 0 0 There are plenty of tutorials online for fstab if you get stuck as well. Hope this helps.

Virtual internet

I’ve been having some issues testing out new distros on VirtualBox after an upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10. The internet connection passthrough has not always been working, and I’m at a loss as to how to fix this. I’ve tried switching between the different network interfaces in the settings, but to no avail. Is there a way to fix this? It seems to be working fine on a fresh install on another machine I use. Thanks,

Disc reconstruction

Hi all, I’m wondering if there’s a way to recombine an ISO on Linux? It’s a disc of digitally converted home videos, and a friend of mine split it up so he could send it to me. Unfortunately, they’re not around to tell me how to put it back together again. If it helps, I know he split it up on Windows, but I’m not sure if the software that he uses exists for Linux. Any solutions would be greatly appreciated. Brian Manapul There are a number of methods you could use to get this done, but first make sure the names of the files are fairly uniform (file.iso.1, file.iso.2 etc). You can use the concatenate tool in Linux to try to put the file together with a command like:

$ cat file.iso.i >> file.iso Luke Flynn The quick and simple answer is, you probably need to upgrade VirtualBox. There seems to be a small bug where it won’t properly update the software to the 4.2 series after a distro upgrade, so you can either build it from source or just uninstall it and grab the DEB files from the VirtualBox website. Your files, settings and previous virtual machines should be kept, although you will have to redownload the extensions file. Happy testing.

That should join all the parts together into one ISO. If it doesn’t like that so much, which it sometimes doesn’t depending on the software used to split it up, you can also try using lxsplit. This tool can split and merge files and ISOs; to merge files back together, you can use:

$ lxsplit -j file.iso.1 And it will find the rest of the parts to join back together. Finally, if you’re still having problems, then there is a graphical tool called HJSplit. It will guide you through the process of putting them together again.

n The older

VirtualBox is in the Ubuntu repos

n HJSplit is a popular and cross-

platform file splitter

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Contact us @linuxusermag

Become a fan on

Linux User & Developer

Using your Live DVD STEP 1: Set the BIOS or boot menu

Once you’ve inserted your Linux User DVD into your drive, reboot your computer and press the Delete key to enter the BIOS to ensure your DVD drive is set to boot before your hard drive. Check your PC help files if Delete doesn’t work.

STEP 2: Reboot into the disc menu

When your computer reboots, you should be met with the Linux User DVD selection screen. Should your computer boot to your desktop as usual, ensure the DVD drive is configured correctly and repeat step 1.

Reinstall queries

I’m planning to reinstall my Ubuntu OS – if it’s relevant, I’m running Ubuntu 12.04 on a Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop, 2GB RAM, 40GB internal hard drive. I’m going to erase the partition Linux is on and reinstall it on my external hard drive as I’m running out of room. I know how to reinstall Linux itself, of course, but is there any way to make a list (or better yet, a GRUB code file) of all my installed packages, so that I can easily reinstall them afterwards? I was going to simply look at Synaptic and write down which ones are installed, then go through and manually install them all after Linux installs, but that’s going to take a while. Please note, I am not a Linux newbie but I am a bit of a GRUB newbie! Any help appreciated! Also, would you know also what the file is that contains my bookmarks for the Chromium browser? I’d like to grab and save that too. Nate Shepard Well, the easiest thing about this is saving and restoring your Chromium bookmarks, and there are a number of ways that you can do this. Firstly, and most

conveniently, if you set up Chromium sync, you can have your browser, settings, cookies, apps etc all saved to your Google Account to then be restored to any of your Chrome or Chromium instances of your choosing. Otherwise, not only can you export the bookmarks from Chromium in the bookmarks manager, the actual settings files from Chromium can be found in your home directory. If you look under .config/chromium/, all the files will be there, and the bookmarks are under the Defaults directory. As for saving your applications, there is a fairly simple way of doing this. Before you uninstall your system, use dpkg to make a list of your packages like so:

$ dpkg --get-selections > selections.txt Make sure to save this file. Once you’ve installed the new version of Ubuntu, you can use this list to add the selections to the new dpkg:

$ dpkg --get-selections < selections.txt And finally:

$ apt-get dselect-upgrade This should install all the packages back onto your system.

STEP 3: Choose your distro

All you have to do now is pick which distro from this month’s selection you want to test first. Once you’ve made your choice, sit back and wait for the live desktop to load. No changes will be made to your computer while testing a live distro.

n dpkg can be used otherwise to just list all your packages

Use dpkg to list your packages 88 www.linuxuser.co.uk

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Questions & answers

All your technical problems solved

Q/A

Login font

As a bit of a typography nerd, I’ve been wanting to change the font on the login screen for my system, a Slackware install. I decided to write a little script to get this to work, and came up with this:

if [ $TERM = linux ] then setfont ter-v16n fi I know that ter-v16n is supposed to be the Terminus font; however, it doesn’t seem to be working. Where are the font files located in Slackware? Because I will either add it here, or just choose another font. Al Phillipson Customising Linux completely is something we very much approve of. You can find the available Slackware console fonts in /usr/ share/kbd/consolefonts, although they’re in a different location for other distros. If Terminus isn’t there, then you can just grab the source for it from the official website, which is here: http://terminus-font. sourceforge.net/.

Turbocharged Pi

My Raspberry Pi has had a lot more use than I expected when I first got it. However, I’m starting to feel the constraints of the board’s

■ Terminus font is a clean terminal-style font

somewhat limited power. I heard there are overclock options built into the Pi now that I can turn on. Where do these settings lie? Am I likely to burn out my Pi by turning them on? Thanks. Tom Sullivan Yep, you’re right, there are now official settings for turbo mode, which is made up of five different volt settings to overclock your Raspberry Pi. You can find them in

raspi-config, with the highest setting increasing the processor to 1GHz. According to Eben Upton, co-creator of the Raspberry Pi, it limits the overclock when the core starts reaching high temperatures, and should be fairly safe. They’ve even allowed the warranty to extend to this overclocking, and claim that it won’t reduce the lifespan of the board.

Size matters

Here’s the problem I’m having. I cannot determine slice size for dar, because I cannot figure out exactly what the slice size should be. My output from fdisk -l seems to clash with my output from df: it shows more space. I didn’t create any partitions when I encrypted the drive, so I believed that they should match. Alas, they do not. Which one should I trust? Ant O’Ryan

■ Results

from official tests indicate a 50% speed boost can be obtained

Thanks for your question, Ant. The difference between those tools is basically how they report the data. Using fdisk looks at the actual partitions, whereas df will just look at the file systems. As you encrypted the entire partition, you’d think it wouldn’t make a difference; however, the extra data you’d see from fdisk is going to be the function of the encryption and not usable. In this case, we’d say trust df instead.

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WorldMags.net Your view

Your source of Linux news and views Contact us…

Register and post your comments… www.linuxuser.co.uk/forum/

Email us directly… [email protected]

Canonical contributions

YOUR VIEW

Linux User Letters

I think this is an excellent idea, and that other distros should follow. If someone is to work on a free-for-all product for everyone and that product is to be done professionally, we should be able to easily contribute to helping them make their ends meet and reward them for what they do. It doesn’t have to be either ‘work for free’ or ‘insist on getting paid for every copy’. Still, I think it could be done in a better way. For instance, there could be a text box where users could type in what they want to contribute to. Daniel Blake

Your opinions about the magazine, Linux and open source

We agree with you there: while the contribution part is fine in a time where everything seems to be crowdfunded, if what Canonical wants is raw data on what people wish to have improved, there must be a better way around it. Still, the firm probably gets a lot of people telling it what should be changed on its forums.

S

Our super-review of Ubuntu last issue was our biggest ever, and when we posted it online we expected to see plenty of debate over the quality of the distro in the comments. Surprisingly though, it seems nobody gets riled up over Ubuntu any more. Join in with the conversation at http://bit.ly/QSQdov

F

John said:

I’d like to offer Ubuntu a massive thank-you for such a fabulous OS and providing a route to equally fab free software. I’m also delighted that there’s another Ubuntu long-term release. However, I have an even bigger thank-you to those Ubuntu-based distros and for my personal favourite, Mint. Mainly for replacing that awful Unity frontend and giving us MATE and Cinnamon, which I’m happy to work with.

JohnB said: Well, after trying Windows 8, at least I can find the shutdown button! Actually, compared to Win 8, Unity is much more intuitive to use (IMHO, of course). I found I was able to find my way around Unity much faster and I’ve been a Windows user exclusively since the early Nineties. Of course, Mint with Cinnamon is even easier to navigate and to find the apps I need to use as well as the settings.

NickN said:

U

Geoff said:

D

I’ve been playing with 12.10 and the first thing I did was remove the shopping lens. Unity is a totally pointless user interface for desktops. It takes too many steps to start a program.

U

F

M

No more Ubuntu surprises

D

G S

THREAD BARE

M

G

Meh. Sticking with Mint until someone suggests a good reason not to.

Thomas said: I like Debian, but after a few hours trying to get my laptop to suspend or hibernate, an 18-minute Ubuntu install solved everything. I use GNOME Classic, which I had to install after that. On my Dell XPS, fan noise and other power features also all work in Ubuntu, unlike Debian. I am going to be installing this in my classroom as well, and will see how Unity is for middle school students.

Tom O’Connell said: I switched to Ubuntu GNOME 8.10-11.10, tried 12.04, tnen went to Mint 13 MATE with Ubuntu Software [Centre] and Ubuntu Tweak. I see no reason to return to Ubuntu.

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Your view

Canonical contributions, Ubuntu 12.10, Arch/Gentoo

LETTERS

Under the Arch

I just read the ‘Under the Hood’ article from issue 118. I’ve used both Arch and Gentoo for years; they are very similar and both excellent. I happen to prefer Gentoo for my own personal use, and while Gentoo does not have the mammoth community it once did, it has overcome the challenges mentioned. Sourcebased distros may become more important in coming years, with the proliferation of Linux onto a wide variety of devices. As to the differences between these two distributions, I think the main one is that Arch provides pre-built packages and a secondary capability to customise and build your own, while Gentoo provides source packages and assumes you want to build your own (and if you have multiple similar machines, or you want to create your own distribution, you may create your own repository of binaries). The Gentoo build system is constantly being improved and is extremely powerful. If you have a deep understanding of Linux, as well as end-user computing hardware and software, and you really want a highly customised, highly optimised

source-based distro, Gentoo may be the better choice. If you’re skilled but more ‘intermediate’ than ‘expert’, or you don’t want to ‘waste time watching crap scroll by’ while you compile packages for which your needs are no different than anybody else’s, but you do want the flexibility to do without unwanted software and to build a few packages from source in order to obtain the customisations you want, Arch may be better. If I were an Ubuntu (or similar) user looking to start getting ‘under the hood’, I’d probably opt for Arch and then maybe explore Gentoo later on. John Brendler Arch is a bit kinder to the user trying to get into source-based distros – especially if they’re used to something as repo-heavy as Ubuntu. It’s always going to be a steep learning curve either way, but at least, as you say, Arch will let you fall back on pre-built packages.

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With more and more Android features being merged back into the Linux kernel, it’s becoming easier to develop for one of the most popular mobile operating systems around. With over 25 billion app downloads, and over 100 million Android devices worldwide, there’s a wide audience of folks ready and willing to consume apps. For a more Android-driven editorial, you can look to our sister mag Android Magazine, the only publication dedicated to the platform. Along with news and reviews to keep you up to date on everything Android, there are also tutorials and advice on developing and hacking your hardware. Find out more at: www.littlegreenrobot.co.uk

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