ZenLinux Blog

My interest in internet tablets started when Nokia announced the N770, a really innovative tablet (long before the existence of smartphones) that ran an open source software stack called Maemo. Unfortunately, the N770 was a toy and far too underpowered to be particularly useful. Some time later I upgraded to a Nokia N800, which again was annoyingly slow to use. But it was also just useful enough that I started bringing it with me to read a web article or PDF while taking public transit.

As time went on, a few Android-based web tablets started hitting the market, and I decided to buy an Archos A5IT several months ago. This is a quick review of the device.

The Good:

• It runs Android. Now I could find out what the Android phenomenon was all about (to this day I still don’t own a smartphone)
• The screen quality is outstanding – very bright and crisp
• It has decent battery life, and can stand up to multiple days of heavy use before needing a recharge
• The web browser is decent (the Maemo web browsers were way out of date and incredibly buggy, having something that worked consistently was a big step up for me)
• It’s a great ebook reader. I use the Aldiko ebook reader and have bought a few DRM-free books in ePUB format.
• It’s reasonably fast. The usability in terms of application speed is comfortable.

I use this thing daily as an mp3/ogg player, read ebooks and articles on the web, check the weather forecast, and keep up with twitter. I’ve even occasionally used Instant Messaging with it. And of course I played Angry Birds when it was back-ported to Android 1.6.

The Bad:

• It runs Android 1.6, with no OS updates on the horizon. Archos occasionally releases firmware updates (which are simple to apply over a wifi connection), but Android 1.6 is extremely dated. Bugs I feel are related to Android 1.6 are:
• The wifi frequently does not re-associate when waking from sleep, about 20% of the time. I then have to go into the settings and manually turn off/turn on wifi to work around this.
• Everything slows to a crawl as it runs out of RAM. The use of Advanced Task Killer helps in this regard, but doesn’t clean up apps automatically the way I’d like it to. I have to use it to kill apps manually when I notice the slowdown.
• I can’t run Mobile Firefox, which requires Android 2.x
• It has a resistive touchscreen, which is generally annoying to use. Every smartphone I know of has a capacitive touchscreen, which requires less pressure.
• The screen size is unusual, even today with more tablets on the market. The screen measures 4.8 inches diagonally, and for whatever reason some apps like Aldiko and InstaFetch don’t always apply margins correctly, causing odd layout and overlapping issues.
• The GPS is useless. I’ve tried several times to get it to sync up with the GPS satellites, but even after a half-hour with a good view of the sky it doesn’t even appear to get a full lock on one of them.

I give Archos credit for making an attractive tablet at a reasonable price, and I rely on this thing just about every day. But now that the market is really heating up with non-smartphone tablet options, I can’t recommend it any more. Especially due to the ancient version of Android it still uses.

In fact, I recently decided it’s not worth putting up with these shortcomings any longer, and with a bit of apprehension just ordered an Archos 43 tablet, which is the new generation from Archos, runs Android 2.2, and addresses most (but not all) of the shortcomings I mentioned above. After a few months with the Archos 43 I’ll do a similar review and let you know what I think of it.

Last year marked a new first for Portland, OR – the birth of the Open Source Bridge technical conference. In a previous post I expressed a great deal of enthusiasm about how awesome last year’s event was. Those weren’t just kind words – I found myself moved enough by the incredible activism and community in the Portland tech scene to get involved for this year’s conference as a volunteer. That’s right, Open Source Bridge is back in 2010! June 1-4, to be exact.

This year’s event has an outstanding presentation lineup and will be held at the Mark Building of the Portland Art Museum. I had a chance to tour the venue with the OSB organizing crew and must say that the location is really unique, inspiring, and truly fitting for a conference of people who are working to improve the world through quality open source software projects. There will once again be a 24-hour hacker lounge (a major highlight from last year), this time on-site at the Mark Building.

One of the great things about OSB is that it’s a very diverse gathering of open source citizens, and offers a great opportunity to expand your horizons to learn about tools and platforms you may not have encountered before. I will also be giving a variation of my PLUG Advanced Topics talk on OpenEmbedded if embedded Linux systems pique your interest.

Check out the Open Source Bridge website to learn more and register. Trust me – it’s gonna rock your socks.

A big warning to the many users behind a proxy server who will be installing Ubuntu Lucid Lynx soon: wget isn’t going to work. You can read the details in this bug report on Launchpad.

Basically the problem is that if your proxy exclusion list ends with a comma character, wget can’t parse the $no_proxy environment variable and defaults to not using your proxy (usually configured in ~/.wgetrc or via the $http_proxy/$ftp_proxy environment variables). And the GNOME Network Proxy UI apparently leaves a trailing comma in there if you make changes to the ignored hosts list.

The quick workaround is to add the following to your ~/.bashrc:

export no_proxy=$(echo $no_proxy | sed 's/,$//')

I spent a couple of days figuring this out, so I hope it helps someone else. I don’t see any way the fix will be included in Lucid before it ships on Thursday, so people will need to use this workaround until then. It’s a shame because as an LTS release, a lot of enterprise users are going to run into problems right out of the gate.

Last weekend I had an incredible time launching an idea at Portland Startup Weekend. Somewhere around 50 folks showed up, and exciting products were started by nine different teams.

I had my heart set to work on an embedded Linux project over the weekend, and pitched an idea to create a device that could play internet radio streams over FM. This simple media server would allow you to walk around your home with a cheap FM radio and listen to internet radio. Given that the purpose of the event was to embrace constraints and have something noteworthy to demo by the end of the weekend, I felt this was a viable goal to work toward, even if the feature was somewhat of a novelty.

To achieve this, I took an older model Gumstix Connex embedded ARM board, loaded Angstrom (an OpenEmbedded-based distro) onto it, and paired it with an off-the-shelf FM radio transmitter I picked up Sunday morning from Radio Shack. I organized the following milestones and knocked them down one by one:

Milestone 1: Select a command-line media player that can play remote mp3 streams (I used mpg123) and verify that it can be run on the gumstix board with good performance (cpu utilization was only around 10%). Some scripts also had to be developed to make sure that network streams would get restarted if they failed or cut out suddenly (this can happen frequently with internet radio).

Milestone 2: Create a web-based interface for controlling the device, allowing the user to select one of several streams and start or stop playback of them, using a crude user interface.

Milestone 3: Improve the user interface by AJAX-ifying the playback controls, and add an indicator to show which stream is currently playing. This was done using the jQuery javascript library. The resulting web page still lacked a lot in the way of style, but it worked as intended and the HTML passed W3C validation.

Milestone 4: Integrate and test this setup with the FM transmitter and portable receiver. Polish the concept and prepare the demo.

The final result? Check it out:

As you can see, I had a bit of fun with the project. I named the device Streamasourus Rex. The T-Rex was lifted from Dinosaur Comics. Also, the guys from Mugasha (a Portland-based electronic music webapp startup) were at the event, so I thought it would be fun to surprise them by playing one of the DJ sets they offer from their site during my demo.

I have no intention to follow-through and actually create a business or product out of this, as I have my hands full of interesting projects as it is. But the exercise itself was extremely valuable and is something I hope to keep doing. It’s also wonderful and energizing to meet and hang out with people who don’t just think about ideas, but actually execute them and take some risks.

At the end of the event, each team demonstrated their progress before a panel of experienced entrepreneurs. EyeClash, a team working on integrating videoconferencing with online flash gaming, was chosen by the panel as one of the most exciting projects, and they are receiving three free months of office space at NedSpace.

I’d like to thank everyone who came out and put effort into trying something new, and especially to the organizers of the event, who did a great job keeping things rolling. I doubt this will be my last Startup Weekend!

In a kind of interesting mix between unconferences and programming contests like the Rails Rumble, Portland is holding a Startup Weekend event the first weekend in March. The idea is to bring together people of different backgrounds – including software developers, marketers, attorneys, and so on – and see what kind of product ideas they can start developing over a focused weekend of effort. With a bit of luck and a lot of elbow grease, some of these ideas and teams are likely to blossom into full-fledged technology startup businesses.

When I first read about this event I felt a kind of nervous energy as the realization crept in that yes, this was going to be one hell of an effort, and I would have very deep regrets if I didn’t give it a shot. So I registered for the event and look forward to some high-intensity growth experiences.

For the most part I expect the product ideas to be web application or web service-related. However given my background in embedded Linux systems, I’m planning to bring a couple of embedded boards with me and see if anyone is interested in developing an idea based on a physical product that could be sold. I’ve been becoming a big fan of the gumstix platform, but am also quite excited about the Sheeva Plug.

If anyone else in the Portland area is reading this and is even remotely considering attending, I urge you to go for it! Even if a viable business doesn’t come out of the weekend, there’s no doubt it’s going to be an incredible way of networking with other startuppy people and learning a lot about yourself.

I am extremely grateful for all of the people who showed up to hear my OpenEmbedded talk this evening at Roots. Michael Dexter noted that we had one of the best turnouts for a PLUG Advanced Topics meeting in a long time.

Here are the slides from the presentation. Unfortunately a lot of the good, interactive stuff happened during the live demo portion of the talk, but the slides do give a good overview of what the rest of the talk was about.

Enjoy!

Next week I’ll be giving a presentation on OpenEmbedded at the Portland Linux User Group’s Advanced Topics meeting:

Getting started in embedded Linux development can be intimidating. Every hardware device vendor seems to have its own embedded Linux distribution and way of developing for it. OpenEmbedded (OE) is a framework for creating highly customizable embedded Linux distributions. It provides a well-designed build system and cross-compilation environment to developers, and a robust package management system for setting up and maintaining your embedded Linux system.

Find out why OpenEmbedded is taking the embedded world by storm and improving the lives of embedded Linux developers.

Feel free to join us at Roots Organic Brewing, 1520 SE 7th Ave in Portland, at 7pm on Wednesday, Feb. 17. We meet in a room toward the back of the building. I’ve noticed the acoustics of the place are pretty poor, so I’ll be borrowing a sound system to help improve the presentation.

SpamAssassin is one of those mission-critical services that I run on my mail server, and if you haven’t heard, there is a bug in SpamAssassin that has been marking legitimate messages (ham) as spam if the date of the email was 2010 or later. Now that it really is 2010, this is a serious problem. More details about the bug can be found here.

I’ve confirmed that my CentOS 5.4 install was vulnerable and I had to apply a workaround. There are a couple of ways to do this. You can either edit your local.cf file and disable the rule with the following line (on CentOS it’s in /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf):

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

Or you can enable the cron job to run sa-update nightly, which I would recommend. My CentOS system had the cron entry commented out in /etc/cron.d/sa-update, so I uncommented it.

If you’re running spamd on your system, don’t forget to restart the service for the new rules to be reloaded.