OZILLA is arguably responsible for restoring competition on the Web browsers front and also for ensuring that Web designers target more than just one browser. For that, companies like Apple and Google have a sort of ‘debt’ to Mozilla and it’s reassuring to hear that Google funds Mozilla to a great degree, still. But Mozilla has been having issues with its browser — issues that are perhaps more perceptual than real (technical). But moreover, the peril that Mozilla is having would have to be new competitors, some of whom rely on the KHTML engine (which sort of became WebKit). KHTML and WebKit also make their way into KDE in the form of new browsers like Rekonq, which are excellent (better than Konqueror for some tasks). These integrate well with a Qt-based environment, they are lightweight, and they interact better with the K Desktop Environment (or KDE SC). For KDE users who look for a Firefox alternative, rekonq is worth a look.

VERY once in a while we hear someone tell the public that, based on anecdotal evidence alone, people leave GNU/Linux for Apple. Well, on the phone front, if not on all fronts, Linux is actually beating Apple, which is why Apple is suing like mad.

My friend Fabio Milho described himself as an “Apple fanboi” a few months ago, but days ago he said he had a susprise for me and then he showed me that he had bought an Android phone, just days or weeks after I told him about the evils of Apple. He no longer uses his iPhone. No wonder Apple is scared. Taken using his Android phone was the following photo (less than a day ago).

oday I received an early Christmas gift of sorts — a package from a fellow advocate of GNU/Linux called Kari Laine. It will provide a lot of geeky-type fun for a home project I Intend to write a review about at a later date.

The company behind Entrypt Key is apparently based on England, but the product was sent to me from Finland Interestingly, I first studied Shannon’s entropy quite thoroughly while I was starting my Ph.D. in 2003. My work was an extension inspired by Jorma Rissanen‘s Minimum Description Length (MDL), which built upon entropy research. He is Finnish.

Setting everything up is a project on its own, possibly taking an hour if not a whole weekend (depending on how deeply one dives into it). The installation process seems simple enough and the instructions are clear. The fun begins when it comes to studying the theory and application, which promise to secure one’s environment by generating good random passwords without depending on something more common like system clock or mouse movement. Some go further to reduce predictability, e.g. using observation of a lava lamp. Very exotic.

Entropy key should be aimed at geeks like myself, who like to learn how things work and also have some associated equipment and gadgets, e.g. to set servers up in a more professional way. It would make a great gift to science/computer science enthusiasts.

More information can be found in http://www.entropykey.co.uk/

• The “Curious Troll” pretends to be using/experimenting with Linux, but only ever bashes it.
• The “But[t] Troll” is similar to the above, but every apparent compliment is followed by “but… [insert FUD here].” I’s like controlled opposition in a sense.
• The “Concerned Troll” insists that s/he is trying to help Linux, but only even smears Linux and uses this “concern” as an excuse.
• The “Revisionist Troll” likes to pretend that s/he is informing while every once in a while injecting a quick rewrite of history. Some former Microsoft staff is like that.
• The “Nasty Troll” just attacks people, sometimes with libel.
• The “Pond Scum Troll” is just trying to ruin forums by acting like a nut house escapee and projecting this on the rest of the people in the forum.

e are fortunate enough to live at a time when many (if not most) phones run Linux and the overwhelming majority of Web servers do too. Those who say that GNU/Linux is “not ready for the desktop” hardly exist anymore. So for those who insist on running it on their desktop/s, there is rarely a major barrier. Videos work just fine (increasingly with HTML5 and free codecs, not Flash), a lot of applications are Web based, and some of the world’s best Web browsers are available for GNU/Linux, so how can one complain? Among developers and producers, there is no real pitfall associated with GNU/Linux (those that are brought up can easily be defended against, e.g. “fragmentation”).

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of installing the latest Debian GNU/Linux on my home server. I used an SD card mounted onto a USB converter to pass a small ISO image which in turn bootstrapped the system, brought up the network card, and fetch all the remaining packages over the Internet. This made a multi-functional server with KDE4 and GNOME on top of it for some administration. It all started with an SD card and the installation was simple enough for most people to walk through. When even Debian becomes an easy distribution to install it ought to become clear that GNU/Linux continues to mature not only in that little corner called “Ubuntu”. The same components are shared and reused to make the optimal system.

Despite technical competition and also illegal, anti-competitive practices, GNU/Linux now thrives, so all that Apple or Microsoft can do is build a cartel around software patents. They currently go after Android more than they go after GNU/Linux. But Google is wealthy enough to counter this, e.g. with the purchase of patents. It means that, in the long run, the patent angle is not enough to impede GNU/Linux or Java/Linux adoption.

To a lot of us who are staunch advocates of GNU/Linux and proponents of software freedom, the reality of this irreversibility is a true pleasure. It means that we can sit back and watch Linux take over more and more aspects of our lives, slowly demonstrating the merits of software which is free. Apache does something similar, but fewer people out there are aware of what it is. Little by little we’ll be seeing more Free software in more places. Just like Wikipedia, it spreads too fast to ignore.

2011 has been an important year for Linux. This kernel turns 20 this year (depending on which milestone is celebrated). Let us celebrate.

uppy has become familiar to many as a Live CD option for aging PCs that sit on people’s desktops at home, maybe even at some offices. Puppy recently became more of a derivative of Ubuntu (arguably, depending on the definition of “derivative”), but its legacy and/or its strength was mostly associated with its version that I used. It contains JVM and it can also use other lightweight desktop environments.

For this review, I have used Puppy for a period of 5 days, first as a desktop (ish) on a server machine and then, briefly, as a development environment (it did not get very far). The way I will structure this review will be compartmentalised and it will focus on items that are more or less unique to Puppy. For example, I will ignore GRUB.

Puppy, by default, runs in a mode similar to root and it appears to be quite strictly a single-user OS. It comes preinstalled with a lot of valuable and lightweight applications. It also has Firefox, which is probably the exception when it comes to this defensible ‘weight’ criterion. Chromium is made available through the repositories and it works very well. I tried it and it was perfect. Puppy comes with a variety of themes (about half a dozen) and more can be added in a user-friendly way which, as I unfortunately found out, can lead to a system dependency Hell (it is not entirely clear what caused this). In order to effectively assess Puppy, there ought to be a separation between the boot process, which is fast but lacks polish, the desktop environment, and the applications, some of which are unique to Puppy. The menu which contains these applications is divided into sections that group related items. The problem is, this menu is cumbersome to edit, it is not clear how to create shortcuts on one’s desktop or task bar, and sometimes it is hard to find the category under which is application of interest was placed. Even finding a terminal window application took me minutes of manual searching (no simpler mechanism is available). Configuring the behaviour of the environment is in general very cumbersome compared to newer and heavier desktop environments. This may not be a huge deal when striving to just use this environment to merely host Firefox or OpenOffice.org. It does, however, give little justification to using Puppy on a machine with decent specifications (such as the one I tested Puppy on).

Puppy is generally easy to use and it contains many technical tools in the appropriate menus. It comes preloaded with OpenSSH and other front ends to such “Swiss army knives” that would help advanced users and make it almost suitable for some servers. The problem is, when something is missing (GCC for example), it leaves the user dependent on package managers that do not always succeed at installing desired applications, especially KDE applications and even GNOME applications. The package manager in this release of Puppy offers a gateway into Ubuntu repositories, but there is no guarantee that these would work. And worse — under some of the Puppy packages there are items that explicitly say that they are broken or may break something else. Why even include them? The last thing a user would want is a hosed system; it’s better not to have some software (or having to compile it from source) than to not have the operating system (e.g. in case it gets rendered unbootable). If a package is known to be sensitive and prone to issues, then Barry should probably omit it altogether, leaving the user with something which is not self-nuking. But anyway, I digress.

Here are some of the nice things that I can say about Puppy. Apart from booting fast it is also fast enough while in use, although it may depend greatly on the hardware used and it might scale a lot worse with old processors and deprivation of RAM. This would require another test on a different machine. The selection of themes that Puppy comes with by default is quite pleasing considering the fact that there are no X Composite effects. The task bar (includes more than just user tasks/windows) is not cluttered and the menu cannot baffle any user. Even the names of applications are usually self-explanatory,which is important.

Screenshots would have complemented this review had I still been able to start X. The thing is, Puppy was a challenge to set up properly on a widescreen display. It offered some low-level tools for X configuration and display setup, but these never achieved the required display mode, even after 2 hours of persistent attempts (I have a lot of experience with X, so the fault is not purely mine). In command line mode, Puppy has a lot of the tools one might expect to find (editors, file system repair, rsynch and so on). It would probably benefit from a better terminal application which is visually richer and more customisable (the one it currently has offers no customisation at all and it is rather rudimentary). For those who are into the command-line oriented work, Puppy is not a good choice and perhaps it is possible to install a better terminal to make up for it in the future (or at present from the repositories). Good terminal emulators need not take up much space, so this is an area worthy of expansion in the future.

One thing that occurred to me is that the GUI is not always consistent and does not behave in the best of ways. For example, when installing packages, they get installed upon a single click on the package name and it is not possible to tick several for simultaneous or queued installation. Then installation gets very verbose and distracting. Another example is, when trying to change the number of virtual desktops (for pager size) there is a request for keyboard input of a number between 1 and 8, using a textbox without limitation on length. Why not use a slider or a set of buttons to restrict and validate the user’s input? This might be a JVM-only issue, but either way, even Fluxbox does not have such issues (Fluxbox runs on my old laptop). Openbox and IceWM I have not used for a long time, but they too did not have such fragmented and unexpected settings structure. These are both available for Puppy, but I did not get around to testing them.

Now we come to remarking on Puppy as a server. In short, it is not. Puppy’s task bar gives way to the stereotype that it’s a browser-based distribution, as it links only to two browsers, Puppy’s browser and Firefox. If this machine is to be used as a monitoring server, than maybe with a browser up and some terminals it is suitable for the task. But otherwise, given the lack of necessary applications (preinstalled or in the repository), aspirations to run Puppy on a server are a dream pipe. I gave up on this pretty fast, before I even managed to compile a mail server package (too many dependencies and packages were missing).

I wish there was more to tell and I wish I could recommend Puppy for anything other than very old computers, but based on 5 days of use, Puppy is a niche product and it does what it’s intended to do pretty pretty well. A friend warned me over at Identi.ca about dependency nightmare and he was right. It was only days later that I started to experience those myself. At first I failed to install some KDE/Qt applications, but later it was the addition of many more packages that should be ‘safe’ that led to the “nightmare” I had been warned about.

Puppy is available for free download from its well-established Web site. it packs a lot of power in very small size and it is available for use in live mode too, meaning that one can try without committing by full installation. This is probably one of the strengths of this GNULlinux distribution.

Thank you, Puppy. And thank you, Barry, for Puppy.

The Network Effect in action

he myths about “desktop Linux” are mostly associated and tied to “easy of use”. Many people, mostly ones with next to zero experience when it comes to GNU/Linux, have blindly decided that the slow growth of GNOME and KDE is due to an inherent problem other than marketing. But perceptions are changing when people discover that they are surrounded by GNU/Linux, even if their own client machine does not run a Free/libre operating system.

Whenever I perform scientific experiments, I entirely separate my work machine from the computational machines, which are dedicated to a particular task and are optimised for uptime, resilience, and good memory management. These machines exclusively run GNU/Linux, for technical reasons of course. In addition, soon enough one of the Windows clusters will be converted into dual-boot, permitting even more computational power to be amassed from remote nodes, provided one is not a Windows drone. In this modern age when just about any large cluster or computational server runs GNU/Linux, what can a Windows or Mac OS X user do to justify a choice of non-homogeneous platforms, wherein there is basically disharmony and inconsistency between the back end (server) and the desktop/workstation? There is a time penalty associated with moving a program from a proprietary desktop environment to GNU/Linux at the back room. It is not surprising that more and more people in my field are moving to UNIX or Linux on their desktop.

To what extent might the rise of Android impact people’s feelings towards GNU/Linux on the desktop? It does seem like iPhone has already managed to persuade some users to replace a Windows desktop with an OS X desktop. I see examples of this all the time, although as proof it’s merely anecdotal, not statistical.