Linux Lover

Linux Rock Star Blog

I just stumbled across the "Linux Rock Star" blog, which covers Linux audio applications, hardware, synths, etc.
If you're into audio/music production and run Linux, this site will most definitely come in handy.

There are many music apps available for Linux including Synthesizers, DAW's (Digital Audio Workstations), Trackers, Sequencers and much more. There are also complete Linux Distributions available with all of the programs setup and ready to use. My goal is to cover many of these available programs and make them accessible to the reader.

Sounds like a niche that could use filling! Check it out and be sure to add this one to your feed reader.

Another Fake USB Drive Note

Guess what I just spotted on Geeks.com?

Same packaging, ergo same manufacturer, but different USB key.

Has anyone bought one of these? Can it actually hold ~4 GB of data?

Open Source Graphics Drivers - The Revolution?

Digg scooped up two very important tidbits today:

Intel just released open source drivers for their i965 chipset graphics controller.

InfoWorld is reporting that AMD is "strongly considering open-sourcing at least a functional subset of ATI�s graphics drivers", following the recent aquisition of ATI by AMD.

What's all the fuss about?
First off, Intel has a good history of releasing open source drivers, and they're continuing to set a great example for other big industry players. (Their new "Intel Linux Graphics" site is a good move.) The press coverage that they're getting for these new drivers comes at a particularly opportune time, considering what AMD/ATI's thinking about doing. I think this'll put some pressure on AMD/ATI to release open source graphics drivers, which is a good thing. (The current legal situation with Linux distributions bundling and using binary-only drivers is a bit sticky.)

NVIDIA's closed-source drivers and support have consistently beat the quality of ATI's offerings, so it would be quite the shocker if ATI open-sourced their drivers. ATI would suddenly have much more respect within the Linux community and their graphics cards would (hopefully) all work "out-of-the-box" in Linux. The decision would essentially leave NVIDIA no choice but to similarly open-source their own drivers.

Now, this is all best case scenario - There's other possibilities here as well. I think the worst that could happen if ATI's drivers do get open-sourced is that, well, we have "at least a functional subset". That could mean just 2D acceleration support, which is better than nothing, but not nearly as good as it could be. In that case, I doubt that NVIDIA would end up releasing any form of open source driver in response - ATI just wouldn't have upped the ante enough.

Regardless, the push for open source graphics will definitely be one to keep an eye on over the next year.

Shuttleworth: Communicating Release Goals

Ubuntu head honcho Mark Shuttleworth has just blogged about communicating release goals. Most of the article is an email from Matt Zimmerman (an Ubuntu team member) which talks about the importance of clearly expressing the team's release goals in order to prevent end-user disappointment.

Matt Zimmerman writes:

Many are criticizing shortcomings in Ubuntu which have existed for years now, or deplore the lack of eye candy and other superficial features, as justification for an overall negative impression of the release. In particular, I see repeated mentions of:

- Lack of 3D support out of the box on nVidia chipsets: [0]

- Need to use the command line for certain administrative tasks (including the above) [0] [5]

- Lack of out-of-the-box support for Java, Flash, MP3, DVD, etc. (RestrictedFormats) [0] [4]

- Lack of 3D accelerated desktop effects and other eye candy (e.g. Xgl/AIGLX, prettier usplash) [1] [5]

- Lack of support for a particular hardware component (e.g., wireless card or printer) [1] [2] [4] [6]

- Ubuntu not being easy enough for the typical user [0]

- Lack of availability of development tools in the default install [0] [2]

- Manual partitioning is clunky [0] [3]

None of these are new problems, but they are pointed out as examples of major shortcomings by these reviews. It's notable that in some cases, we're being compared with Windows, rather than other Linux distributions, which is a much higher bar, but overall my impression is that there has been a disconnect between the expectations of the community and what we delivered with Dapper. In particular, I see indications that users expected Dapper:

- to be better-looking ("polished")
- to have more long-standing feature wishes implemented ("polished")
- to have no regressions from Breezy ("polished")
- to have fewer bugs than a typical Ubuntu release ("polished")

(important part bolded for emphasis)

Now, is there anything surprising about the fact that Ubuntu users want "more long-standing feature wishes implemented"?

When I first started using Ubuntu, I was extremely pleased by the number of things that it "got right". Applications that it shipped with it worked out of the box (I had terrible experiences with older versions of Mandrake), and it's hardware support was among the best of the Linux distributions.

Now, it seems that Ubuntu's pace of continuing to "do things right" has slowed down. The reason why people keeping commenting about Flash/MP3/Multimedia/Nvidia/ATI/etc. support being major negative points is because:
A) Simply put, they are major flaws. (I don't think anyone would deny this.)
B) They haven't been fixed in any Ubuntu release to date.

The community's expectation is for the Ubuntu team to take these problems seriously and to address them (that means fix them). These were major problems two years ago, and they're still major problems now. If the Ubuntu team doesn't move to fix these problems soon, it's going to start wearing down the morale of the community. (Nobody likes developers who ignore the complaints of their end-users.)

So, what have we learned? Perhaps that even if we meet our goals in our own eyes, we may be considered a failure by some if they have a different interpretation of our intentions.

I'm going to agree with Matt on this one, as it's a very important lesson for any developers who have a fair amount of contact with their users. Game developers often make the classic mistake of mentioning planned features that never end up seeing the light of day, which only leaves gamers disappointed.

Lastly,

...of the five specific examples, it's quite likely that no more than one or two will actually be implemented in Edgy.

If Edgy fails to include at least some of the "next-generation" features originally mentioned by Mark Shuttleworth and fails to fix some of the major missing pieces that the community keeps complaining about (Flash, multimedia support, etc.), then there's going to be an excellent opportunity for a new Linux distribution to come along and dethrone Ubuntu.

C'est la vie.

Stop NetworkManager from Harassing You

Back in May, I began using a wireless network connection on my home (Ubuntu 6.06) computer. I decided to install the futuristic (in a usability sense, at least) NetworkManager, which makes networking "pain-free".

The first time I rebooted after I installed NetworkManager, I was prompted to enter my "keyring" password after login, so that NetworkManager could connect to my wireless network. The wireless network I have is encrypted and requires a WPA key to logon. Since the WPA key is essentially a password, it's stored in GNOME's Keyring and thus requires authentication to let an application (in this case, NetworkManager) to access it.

The problem is that if you power down your computer at night to save energy, you'll be prompted to enter your keyring password every time you power it back up. After you punch in your login password, you get another prompt asking you for your keyring password, which seems redundant. This annoyance is compounded by the fact that for some reason unbeknownst to me, I sometimes get asked to enter my keyring password up to 3 times, simply to connect to my wireless network.

I finally found the solution to this problem over at the Ubuntu Forums, in this thread. To make it even easier, there's a .DEB on page 3 in this post with some quick instructions that are very easy to follow. If anyone else has been annoyed by the constant barrage of password entering they have to do, this should ease the pain somewhat. Enjoy!

Fake USB Drives Sleuthing

I was shopping for a new USB key two days ago, and my local Factory Direct store was advertising a pretty good deal: A 2 gigabyte USB stick for $50 CAD. Great price, great size, you can't go wrong - or can you?

After returning to work with my new toy in hand, I plugged the USB stick into my iMac. It appeared on the desktop as a 2 gigabyte removable drive, and I started amassing an arsenal of portable apps to put on the device. After starting to copy some files over, I noticed the USB key was pretty slow. I had been using my Creative Muvo NX (USB 1.1) as my USB key for a while, and I was hoping that my new drive would be significantly faster. It didn't seem any faster at all. I thought to myself, maybe it's just slow because I'm copy lots of little files, so I tried copying the Ubuntu 6.06 desktop CD image over.

This is when the fun started. After about 100 megabytes, Finder locked up on my Mac. I couldn't kill it nor "relaunch" it. I tried to cancel the file transfer, but Finder was still locked hard. The only way out was a reboot. Once the Mac was back, I took a look at the contents of the USB drive. The Ubuntu image was partly there, but I couldn't read it back. I created a new directory, "untitled folder", on the USB key and started copying the CD image over to this directory once again. The file copy eventually stalled completely, but Finder didn't lock this time. However, I did get the nice treat of my "untitled folder" getting turned into a 0-byte file, which had the added bonus of not freeing the space that the half-copied CD image took up.

At this point, I knew something was terribly wrong. I quickly remembered coming across an eBay guide outlining how to spot fake USB drives that have been flooding eBay. After looking at the list of fake brands, I gulped:
"No Name or Unpopular Brand"

I had most definitely bought an unbranded USB key. I scrolled down to the images of the fake USB drives, and the red fake Sony USB key caught my eye:

It's exactly the same as the one I had bought, albeit in grey and without the Sony name on it:

I immediately emailed Factory Direct, and they told me:

They are not fake USB memory sticks but that particular one may be a defective one.

I was told they would replace it with a "good" one if I returned it to the store. (If I can't get a refund, at least I can try to get a different brand, something that's less likely to be fake.)

After some more sleuthing on the net, I came across this interesting thread over on everythingusb.com. It looks like the USB drives have some funky partitioning to fool the OS into thinking they're larger than they are. If you crack open your USB key and punch the model number of the memory chip that's inside into Google, you'll find out how small the USB drive actually is. From the thread, people have even reported their drives having turned out to have just 16 MB of space. Thanks China!
(There's even been some reports of these fake USB drives containing trojans out-of-the-box. For the record, when I tried plugging mine into an XP box, I do think I saw something fishy flash up on the screen for a second like a command prompt...)

As you can probably guess, I'm a little bit ticked off about this. Because I got ripped off? Yes, but moreso because I bought it from a local retailer in Canada, not some sketchy eBay seller in China. Itching for some consumer action, I contacted the RCMP, who informed me that I should contact Cosumer Affairs to handle this (because in my case, there was no Sony logo, so no copyright infringement).
I'm going to try to head back to the Factory Direct store today and try to press them to give me a refund. Either way, I'll still probably end up reporting this to Consumer Affairs (it's still false advertising/branding(?), and tons of other people are going to get screwed by this.)

Last words of wisdom: If you're buying stuff from a shady liquidation store, watch what you get. Hell, if you're buying stuff from any shady store, be it online or locally, be careful. (I suppose this isn't news to anyone, but I learnt it the hard way.)

Update: There's absolutely no brand markings on the packaging that came with the USB key (just the words "FLASH DRIVE" and a bunch of flags), but I did find a warranty card that must have fallen out of it. The warranty card reads:

MANUFACTURER WARRANTY
This product is under manufacturer warrarnty.
1. This Flash Drive can be exchanged within 30 days from the day of purchase.
2. If you experience difficulties within the 30 days of purchase, please send the productto:
Customer service
8335 Winnetka Ave. Suite #238
Winnetka, Ca 91306

Please allow three to six week for the exchange.
For more information or to download Driver pelase visit our web site:
WWW.FLASHDRIVEMEMORY.COM

3. This warranty card must be marked by sakes.

It's interesting that there's no contact information at all besides the address written on the warranty card. I google mapped the address, and yes, it does exist. (If anyone lives near there and they want to go and see is there's actually someone selling/making USB flash drives there, please do and report back. According to the WHOIS for that site, you're looking for an "Appliance Service Co.")
If you go to their website (who's address I'm not actually linking to so that Google won't up their PageRank), the only contact information you'll find is axm@earthlink.net. (Edit: I've just found another one: info@flashdrivememory.com I've sent them an email asking them about their USB drives, so we'll see what they send back. (Wait a second - They have both www.flashdrivememory.com AND www.flashdriveSmemory.com, under the same no-name label...)
Lastly, the third point in the warranty is pure engrish.

Front of fake USB flash drive packaging

Back of fake USB flash drive packaging

Update #2: Factory Direct took the USB key back and gave me a store credit. They refused to give me a refund, and they didn't appreciate me telling them they might have a shipment of fakes on their hands. The guy said they had sold "hundreds" and only had 3 or 4 returned. I wonder what percentage of people actually tried using more than 256 MB of space (and what percentage tried reading the data back)? 3 or 4 percent? Hmmm....
I received an email back from "FlashDriveMemory" support, and they told me to send the USB key back to them for a replacement.
Did I really just have bad luck and end up with a faulty drive?
I highly doubt it due to the similarity between my experience and others with verified fake USB sticks.
(But that being said, I wonder what would have happened if I had sent it back to the FlashDriveMemory people... )
Oh yeah, and if you WHOIS their domain, you get some more interesting info, but I think I'll stop there. If anyone has anything they'd like to contribute, please leave a comment!