A Man and his Penguin

Panasonic plasmas run Linux

SPOTTED: In the Setup menu of a Panasonic TH42PX7A (42 inch plasma), a menu item called "Software License". When you press OK, you get displayed a copy of the GPL v 2 and a URL where you can download the source code for the following things:

Linux kernel
Autofs (whatever that is)
glibc
mtd
mount
sash (a small self-contained shell, I think).

I don't know what proprietary software layer might be inside these tellys, or if this is maybe all there is (to facilitate firmware upgrades?) but I found it interesting.

The source code can be downloaded here: http://www.am-linux.jp/dl/EUIDTV5/

The new distribution type

With Linux, there have always been power-user distributions. The ones where the user relinquishes no control to the operating system - where the user has the say on EVERYTHING. But then the user needs to have a lot of knowledge in order to drive the operating system. Examples of these would be Arch Linux, Slackware and Gentoo.

Then there's the user-friendly distributions. The operating system assists the user, but still never gets in the way of what the user wants to do. Or, hopefully not. Examples of these would be Mandriva, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS etc.

But now we're seeing a new sort of distribution emerge. These haven't yet been named or even really identified, but they are designed for people who can barely use a computer. The operating system protects itself and the user from the user's mistakes. Such mistakes could include moving the panels, getting rid of your own permissions, or "storing" items in the trash can. Examples of these sort of distributions would be gOS and the EeePC's version of Xandros. Both operating systems present the user with a limit set of things that they can do, don't talk jargon and don't present the user with too many paradymes that could be misinterpreted.

With the number of cheap computers being made and sold with Linux now, and the fact that most people are still barely computer-literate (INCLUDING school children, which is very concerning!), I figure we've got a market for distributions like this third group.

I've decided to start my own distribution again. This time, it won't run on PowerPC :-)  But it will be easy for the people who I work with (including one who hasn't quite worked out "minimising", and another who thought all the data on a computer was stored inside the monitor) to use for their basic tasks, without being able to break it. It will also be easy for me, or anyone else, to remotely administer (or administer in-person). The user will still be able to add new programs, but only from an approved list.

We're talking basic, locked-down. But the applications on Linux are often home to jargon-filled error messages that are great for an experienced user to work out the problem, but not so good for someone who is likely to get scared by them. So if I have time, I could possibly modify error message strings in the programs to be friendlier.

We're also likely talking about automated error reports to the "administrator" of the computer - usually the friend or family member who has set up the computer for their Gran or their friend. We're also talking about direct IM connection to the administrator, available at the touch of a button.

We're talking about Touch Linux.

Who's next?

Novell.

Xandros.

Linspire.

Mandriva?

It *is* slow

Yes, my computer definately feels slow... time for a spot of rkhunter I suspect. Audacity (I couldn't get the latest version to compile) took a mammoth amount of time to output the 1 hr 40 minute podcast to mono WAV. Gimp took about 20 seconds to output a 1024x768 simple image to PNG.

You know the girl from Novell's Mac ad spoofs? I've been saying for days that someone should make a wallpaper of her. Well, in true open-source software fashion, I did it myself! (admittedly, it's terribly unartistic, but a beautiful screen capture of her).

I also support the concept of nicknaming her "Beryl". :-)

My comment to the blog I linked to was rejected. I'm not terribly surprised - it began with the sentence "If she's Linux, does that mean anyone is allowed to use her any way they wish?"!

Got Sabayon to boot

Hey! I got Sabayon Linux to boot on my computer!

Before, it froze up during the loading sequence, but after deleting some kernel arguments and editing one to point to my 1 gig RAM stick, it finally booted.

And I must say I'm impressed. Not with the red theme, which looks ugly IMHO. Not with the fact that (the CD version) comes with SuperKaramba but no actual widgets for it. But I *am* impressed with the performance of Beryl on it. Beryl is freakin' speedy on this live distro - my desktop cube was spinning so fast, my computer generated a gravitational field! The windows were so ablaze, I had grabbed a fire extinguisher before realising that it was just a desktop effect!

Okay, I'm embellishing a LOT here, but although I wouldn't use Sabayon as an everyday desktop and I wouldn't recommend it to newbies, I was very impressed with how quick Beryl was on my little integrated ATI graphics card, with absolutely no configuration at all. If you can get it to run, check it out.

On Opera today, she had given all the audience members digital video cameras and thousands of dollars each, on the condition that they spend the money on the people who really need it, and film the results. One of the women ordered pizzas to her home, and gave the guys hundreds of dollars as a tip! You should've seen their faces :-)

I've resisted it quite well so far, but now I'm really interested in this Ugly Betty show, completely against my will. I don't want to watch it, because I'm afraid that I'll be disappointed at the typical American lame humour involving a character wanting to have a monkey as a pet (I'm sure that happens on all US sitcoms). But it does sound like a show I should watch, well, if merely for the reason that I'm ugly too :-)

Austrumi Live CD and E17

Sorry to post twice in a day.

I'm writing this from the Austrumi live CD. It's a CD where you just put it into your computer and it boots up into the Linux environment without touching your hard disk.

This particular Live CD was propelled into semi-stardom when it switched from the Openbox window manager to Enlightenment E17... that is, the development version of Enlightenment.

Enlightenment is an excellent window manager/desktop environment for Unix and Linux, with two focii: It must run okay on older hardware, and it must look good.

Thus, Austrumi looks pretty good. It is stable, fast (the whole CD, being only 50 megs, is running directly from my system memory), and has enough features for a Live CD.

My only little quibbles are these:

1. It starts up in Romainian; you must switch it to English after the desktop has loaded.
2. Even after you switch it to English, the keyboard mappings are a little odd. For instance, if I hit the apostrophe once, nothing appears. If I then press the "s", this appears: š. If I want an apostrophe, I have to hit the apostrophe key twice. Obviously, this is how it's done in Romainia, but it's making this post quite difficult to write!
3. It doesn't set up the Internet connection out-of-the-box - I had to explicitly tell it to use DHCP rather than it scan on startup like most other distros do. But then, when I first used Knoppix I was actually thrown by the fact that my connection was automatically set up; I was trying to set it up and being mystified by the "already in use" errors!
4. It didn't want to run in Qemu.
5. If I try to bring up a menu too close to the edge of the screen, the menu opens off the edge. This is probably an Enlightenment bug though.
6. There's no "man" or "info" commands, but then I think it would've been a tight fit to get full manuals onto the disc.

Other than these little things, it's quite a nice little distro! It fits on a business-card-sized disc, and reportedly you can remaster it.

Tried out DSL in QEMU

Yesterday, I tried out Damn Small Linux (DSL). It only runs on x86 processors and of course my Mac has a PowerPC processor, so I had to use a program called QEMU to emulate a x86 computer.

It was terribly slow. Terribly terribly slow, and the included CPU load monitor showed 50-70% of the emulated CPU even when idle; and whenever I tried to do anything it would go up to 100%.

It also didn't automount the CD-ROM I inserted, although I suspect it's due to a non-implemented part of QEMU. I also take issue with some of the packages included - exactly why would someone run a web server from a Live CD?

But its system requirements are much more modest than Puppy's, which I've never gotten to work in Bochs or QEMU. (probably due to low emulated memory). 48 megs of emulated RAM was enough to boot it and run XMMS. It also doesn't require any setting up. Excellent! It looks more complicated than Ubuntu (I had a look at the file manager and the Preferences dialog), but probably not rocket science.

If you want to try out a fast Linux Live CD, you could do worse than DSL. It's only 50 megs and should download on reasonable broadband in about 20 minutes. Just be aware that it's more difficult to use than many installable Linuxes, and doesn't look so great. If you've got 256 megs of RAM, you should maybe think about Puppy instead - it has persistance (i.e. can save your data back to the CD or to hard disk) and a huge range of programs.

Now I want someone to port Puppy to PPC! Somehow, I don't think I'll be able to do it :-) But it's made me much more interested in learning how to create one's own distro.