Linux Blog

Everybody knows how annoying the <input type=”file”> HTML tag is right? Does it make you mad when you have to browse and upload each file individually? Sure you can use JavaScript to add / remove the input boxes, but you still need to browse for each file individually, which if you’re uploading lots of files doesn’t make sense.

Would you like a multiple file uploader like Facebook has? Perhaps more of a simple explorer like interface that will allow you to select multiple files? Possibly previewing them, and perhaps processing them on the client side?

Well, I wouldn’t say it was the easiest thing in the world to implement but there is an open source multiple file uploader that might suit your needs. Since its written in Java, its highly expandable (if you know how or pay a development company or freelancer) and can also be partially configured with JavaScript.

What is this fantastic sounding multiple file uploader you speak of?

Its called jupload and can be downloaded from jupload.sourceforge.net. Don’t let the website fool you because this tool is actually pretty neat.

If any one would like examples on how to use it, just write a blog post linking to me saying how cool it is and how much you need it, offer me cash, comment or participate in this blog, offer me goods / services, give me links from your website or just e-mail me politely asking for help and I’ll see what I can do.

If you don’t like it: start reading the documentation like I did, seriously its not that hard.

I’m always looking for ways to integrate Linux into my life more, and harness technology. As a mediocre guitar player and Professional Linux Geek I’ve often thought about Linux and guitar effects. Sure, there is a ton of software and homebrew hardware out there, but I’d like something more than that.

I’m sure by now (since its all over the news) that you’ve probably heard about the OpenStomp. Awesome concept! Lets make something quite complex to build, lets not give out the actual details about the internals of the device and lets claim to be the “Worlds first Open Source Effects Pedal”.

I was considering purchasing one of these until I found out the price. Then I thought, oh. I’ll purchase a parts kit. NO kit available. Then I though, oh I’ll just build one from scratch. HOW, with no public schematics?

Sorry my friends, having a website, a hardware device and a forum that you publish your source code to will not get me to purchase your device. Charging $349 for the pedal that you don’t provide plans for doesn’t go down well. If my commercial “closed box” gets fried, I don’t couldn’t care because it was cheap. The Open Stomp is a different story, What kind of Warranty do you offer?
I know you offer schematics if I purchase it, but what happens if it breaks with no modification in the first day?

What happens if a software update blows my StompBox up? You only have one OS listed on your forums page, are you going to post each version there? Do you have a public subversion repository? Come on StompBox, get your act together and post it on source forge before some one else does. Also while your at it post your schematics so that people can look at them and justify spending the $349 instead of building it. Give them away to capable developers that are interested in your product, you know the ones that will make your product popular by enhancing it.

If you are wondering, this being The Linux Blog and all, if I’m throwing a hissy because there is no Linux version available I’m not.  I couldn’t care less. There are ways around that and if it gets popular enough, there will be a version available. What I’m sour about is the fact that there is nothing “Open Source” about the OpenStomp, other than the huge lack of good documentation, and some source code that is posted in the forum.

I think I’ll go look at the old schematics for some “stomp boxes” and see about building them. Apparently this isn’t open since there is no source code involved. Jeez

By now every bodies probably heard about the SimplifyMedia.com service which just released an application for the iPhone / iTouch that basically lets you stream your, or your friends music though your phone. Its integrated with iTunes, Winamp and RhythmBox on Linux which is pretty cool. I think this is a neat idea and started thinking: “How’d they do that?”

It seems like it would be pretty difficult to achieve something like this, but in fact the concept is quite simple.

iTunes has a DAAP server built in for multimedia streaming media. What Simplify Media does is connect the stream to their server and then when another client (iPhone app / friend) logs in, if the Simplify Media application is running (on your PC) it lets you know and lets you start streaming it.

I have not analyzed to find out the EXACT method of how it works quite yet but I assume that it either uses Simplify Media’s bandwidth to stream (over https) or creates a reverse connection some how. If any one knows the details I’d be interested to know.

My other thoughts / questions on this are:

Will there be a free DAAP client available for the iPhone / iTouch?
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could record the streams?
How long before Apple pulls this application?
Will AT&T or Simplify Media kick you off, throttle, or even worse charge you for using this service?
If they are using Simplify Media’s bandwidth how are they making money?
How long will it be or will there ever be an open implementation of this?

I can’t really answer any of these questions so, if any one wants to take a stab at answering them go for it!

TheLinuxBlog.com was intended to be a blog where I could log my thoughts, findings and generally keep track of how to do stuff. Since it was started this is still the goal. Ultimately I’d like to refer to TheLinuxBlog on how to do something just as much as I refer to google for everything else. That being said, one thing that recently came up for me was “How do I change my desktop on Fedora”.

I had done this before but I couldn’t remember the command to do so. Well, since this blog is as much for me as it is for the reader I figure I can post the how to here and kill two birds out with one blog post, I mean stone.

The program I use to change my window manager on Fedora is: switchdesk.

Switchdesk can be installed by Yum or if you installed Fedora from DVD or CD and didn’t fine tune your packages then you probably have it already. All you have to do to run it is type:

switchdesk

Now, if you are in an X session you will get a nice graphical dialog that will help you change your desktop manager. If your at the terminal it will exit and ask you nicely to type either gnome, kde, xfce or any other window manager you may have installed.

Don’t ask me why every distribution has a different named command and interface to achieve the same thing thats just the way it is. Maybe one day I’ll get a list of all of the commands and post them. Alternatively if anyone wants to start a list feel free to post them in comments or by e-mail.

A friend sent me an article from the register on VoIP today (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/12/iphone_voip/)

Now, it states that voip for apps on the iPhone could only be used if cost is an issue. I think that voip on phones is a good idea, even if voip is not on phones it can still be implemented very well. They state that 35 GBP will get you 10 hours of talk time, while this seems like a lot, how much international time is that? With an Asterisk box one can easily set up a voip trunk that would allow its owner to dial in and call internationally for the cell cost of local minutes and the cost of the voip provider. This could potentially save a lot of money.

With every plan, you get unlimited data. If you only get 450 minutes with your plan, you could use a native application with unlimited data to talk more.  I’ve also thought about creating “push-to-talk” PTT, sort of like the other walkie talkie services offered. If you could do this with Voip, it wouldn’t be limited to cell phones like the other major services are, people at their laptops or desktops could also participate where cell phone coverage isn’t available.

I’d like to see more people take advantage of Asterisk and start creating innovative phone services. I don’t think that having an application that utilizes VoIP would necessarily be a bad thing. I actually think that VoIP on the iPhone is a good idea and will continue to do so until it starts interfering with the providers income and in result interfering my bill.

From InformationWeek I quote:

“Stop copying 2001 Windows. That’s not where the usability action is”

By this I think that Bob Sutor (VP of Open Source and Standards at IBM) meant that he didn’t want Linux developers to make a desktop OS. The article goes on to explain how he would like to see it further developments in Virtulization and making Linux more “green.” He believes that the Linux community has not done enough.

He’d like to see Linux take advantage of the small business market and help lower costs to businesses, but in order to do this “turnkey” applications have to be made that require little maintenance. I believe that small medium businesses can lower costs by running Linux technologies in the web applications market but not necessarily with desktop applications. Maybe this is something that should be leveraged? It would be hard to find open source developers that will work on a project that they have little interest in yet profits companies . But if an open source application became more mainstream then the developers would naturally follow as the application grew. Its sort of a catch 22. Who came first, the chicken or the egg?

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting article and I think that Bob Sutor should become an open source motivational speaker. Maybe IBM can fund a conference to get the Linux community to actually do something because they’re getting tired of waiting. I mean, how hard could it possibly be to motivate developers to create “turnkey business solutions” that will make IBM to ton of money?

Using proprietary software to some Linux users is considered a sin, right up there with not reading the manual. Not everyone that runs Linux feels this way. I for one don’t mind using a commercial / propriety product if the product serves the purpose well, and perhaps better than an open source implementation.

Take VMWare server for example. Although it does have its problems, it works very well for virtualization. Its pretty stable, has a good interface, works well and most of all is free. I have no problem installing and using this as long as it works.  I’ve been using it for a while, its what I’m used to and I have no problems with it. The moment VMWare Server stops working, I’ll try to find another alternative. Be it open source or not.

I don’t get why some people are so into the open source movement. Not tainting a system to me has no clear advantages. If I were to not install any proprietary software I would hardly be able to use my Linux box. Think about it, no Java (ok, I’d have the IcedTea runtime and GCJ), but no supported Java for Tomcat / Eclipse, I’d have no Flash, hardly any video codecs and no 3D accelerated graphics. My virtualization, may or may not work depending on what day of the week it was or if I had supported hardware. There is probably a whole lot more that I am missing that I don’t even know about.

So, I’m just interested to know what is every one else’s take on using proprietary software? Am I alone in being “fine” with installing closed source / proprietary software? Is my computer going to go to robot hell and sing with Bender for eternity? Please let me know your thoughts.

Is your Linux box chugging along? Does it take a while for web pages to load or to boot up? Does your screen lag when you scroll a web page?

Well my friends, you’ve come to the right place. The issue with your Linux box performing poorly could be a graphics issue. A lot of distributions do not install the correct graphics drivers by default. Yes, your graphical user interface might work, but without the correct Linux graphic drivers you will not get the performance that you should be getting.

Linux has a default video driver called VESA, most video cards work with this driver but perform poorly. The reason behind this is VESA uses the CPU to do graphics processing and does not rely on the video card for 3D acceleration. If you have a 3D accelerated video card (most ATI / NVIDIA’s I will not go into detail here) then you might be able to offload graphics processing from your CPU onto your GPU.

Here is how to test to see if your frames per second if you are using the VESA standard driver:

[owen@LinuxBlog ~]$ glxgears
2623 frames in 5.0 seconds = 524.096 FPS
1677 frames in 5.0 seconds = 334.784 FPS
1948 frames in 5.0 seconds = 389.488 FPS
XIO: fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server “:0.0″
after 19707 requests (19415 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

Now, the performance of this machine is quite good so the resulting frames per second (FPS) is not too shabby, but its not the best either. After installing the correct Linux video card driver for this Linux box lets take a look at what kind of performance I get:

[owen@LinuxBlog ~]$ glxgears
6179 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1235.749 FPS
6558 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1311.449 FPS
6489 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1295.583 FPS
XIO: fatal IO error 22 (Invalid argument) on X server “:0.0″
after 39 requests (39 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

As you can see from the results the graphics driver make a huge difference in the number of FPS I can achieve, but this is not the only benefit from using the correct 3D accelerated driver. When the correct driver is installed, the graphics card does most of the work therefore freeing up the CPU do other tasks. Its a win-win situation, so get your graphics card set up properly today!

Yakuake - “Pronunciation Key: yuh-kweyk”

Yakuake is a terminal emulator for KDE
“Why do we need another terminal emulator?”
I hear you ask.

Well, the Yakuake terminal emulator resembles the terminal from Quake (hence the name), except the only thing that gets owned when you run Yakuake is your to-do list.

Have you ever been fragged in Quake because you hit the Tilda key by accident?
Ever used this to your advantage while playing two player by pressing your opponents tilda key?

Have no idea what I’m talking about?
envision a terminal that magically pops up when you press a shortcut, hides when your not using it but retains the output / processes and does not show up in the task bar.

Sure there are old school ways of achieving the same thing, but Yakuake is convenient. It is based on Kommander so its highly configurable and customizable but it works right out of the package.

I use it on most of my machines and for quick tasks I find myself using a regular xterm less. If you want a quick easy access to a terminal I’d recommend trying Yakuake out, take a look at all of the keyboard shortcuts and see if there is any way you can make it work better for you.

I have my keyboard shortcuts set up so I can add new sessions, close sessions, rename sessions, move sessions and resize the terminal. It works great with the switch to session shortcuts that I also set up.

Its in the Fedora repositories, I’m sure its included in Debians 18,000 or so packages and probably Gentoo’s too, so give it a shot!

I’ll see what I can do about a video tutorial in the future to demonstrate the power of Yakuake.

You have to admire the open source community. With such a diverse group of people all kinds of things can happen. One thing that cracked me up today was the language used in the NetBeans project (see image.)

I’m a big fan of the project don’t get me wrong, I just thought it was funny. I actually have a personal encounter with something similar when I was the developing a project. I was coding some error handling procedures on a website where all invalid input (temporarily) got directed to an obnoxious error page that read “Error!” with a bright yellow background and black text. When a end user accidentally typed a url in wrong it created the error. Since this website was for a bunch of writers they didn’t like this too much, so they picked on me until it was fixed.

This is part of the problem with the open source community. When an application is created often not enough thought is put into the interface and terminology used or the thought process of the low tech end user. It is different when a company develops an application because they can spend money on designers, interface experts and writers. In the open source community there is a lack of resources and collaboration to make this happen.

Even with well established organizations like Tigris (subversion) cryptic messages that appear in certain products can be difficult to decipher for problems as simple as permissions issues.

I don’t think it is a good idea for every one to “wait a while” to solve this problem because its not going to fix its self. So in closing I propose the question:

“what can the open source community do to solve this problem?”

Please discus.

I was reading articles from one of my local libraries online resource of Linux Journals (they have every issue) and found an article on a comic book store (It can also be found here.) I  read the entire article and have to say that it was a good look back in history.

In regards to quick and dirty scripting not much has changed in the 14 years since this article was written. Any one can learn how to program or write a script. The owner of this business looked at the process and then looked at ways he could automate it. His method worked out well, when after 3 years his small shop grossed 1.5 million in sales.

I think it is quite amazing that a small comic book store was able to gross this amount in the first quarter only 3 years after opening. I wonder if this would have been achieved if the store had to purchase or pay a third party to develop software. It is fortunate that the writer of the article was interested in Linux and pursued scripting. Since this was written in 1994, he was in the right place at the right time. I am sure that if he expanded his system enough he could have possibly done automated phone sales, mail order and online sales. All with simple shell scripts.

If you get a chance try reading some of the old articles from LinuxJournal.com. I think I’m going to continue reading these old articles from the library since they have no ads. I find them very interesting and who knows maybe they will inspire me to do something.