Bratislava

Central square in Bratislava, Slovakia. A rather quiet city.

Santos FC beats Al-Ahly!

A most unexpected result, particuarly after the trashing Santos had on the first leg (3-0). Somehow, the Santos FC boys managed to pick themselves up and show their skills to Angola's new national coach. Hopefully Manuel Jose was suitably impressed with the talents from Girabola, considering the blunders he's already made in the few days ahead of the team...

Santos FC - Al-Ahly. Source: CAF.

Recent Books

Some of the books I went through (or will go through), in no particular order:

• Flashman and the Mountain of Light: Like every other book of the Flashman series - of which I have now read four - it's unbelievably un-PC, and incredibly funny. The cover says it best, really: "farcically outrageous and disgracefully entertaining". Flashman is probably one of my best finds, and this particular book is the best yet. I'm beginning to think that it narrates British colonization a lot more accurately than any real history book. Amongst all the fun and madness, it has some gems of prose. It also seems the author spent a lot of time doing historical analysis, since the detail is amazing. If, like me, you are from a minority group, you will undoubtedly find the book rather offensive; ignore it and keep going, if you can.
• Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina: I had this on my list for a bit but forgot all about it. My interest was rekindled by Chavez, who decided to offer a copy of it to Obama. Cannot recommend this book enough, really. If you want to understand Latin America, and particularly the latest shifts to the left, this is a good starting point. Towering work. Read it in the original Spanish, but there is, of course, an English translation.
  
• High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars: Mandatory read. This book was not at all what I expected - I was looking for a geeky read to lift my spirits. Instead its a gruesome account of the difficulties of startups in the silicon valley. Its really, really good. The language is not as polished as say Galleano's (how can you beat gems such as "People were in prison so that prices could be free"?); in fact, some parts are rather dry, such as the final chapters on market analysis. But this is still incredible stuff. Compelling reading. Should be mandatory for all computer science students (high-school and university).
• Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus: Via Galleano, bumped into this. Ordered the English version (which is quite ironic, since the original is in Portuguese; totally forgot that Miguel had offered to buy me books in Portuguese, if required). Seems very promising.
• Empires of Oil: Corporate Oil in Barbarian Worlds: Couldn't quite finish this one. Although it had rave reviews, and started interestingly enough, it proved to be too dry a reading. It seems to waffle a lot without providing any real insight. I may attempt it again - got half-way through it this time - but not for a good while. Seems a bit pro-oil, but there's nothing wrong with that if the argument is well constructed.
• This is Not a Drill: Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield: Quite unlike the previous one, this is a compelling read. Always wanted to know what exactly oil workers get up to in the middle of nowhere, and this book explained it in great detail. Basically, the boys have a great laugh, while trying not to get killed and working their socks off. Fantastic humour - if somewhat dark.
• Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives: Absolute classic. Must read if you really want to understand the finantial markets.
  

Nerd Food: The Jaunty Jackalope

Winning isn't always finishing first. Sometimes winning is just finishing.
-- Manuel Diotte

That Time of the Year

So here we are again. Another six months have gone by, and we're all ready and eager to see what those Debian and Ubuntu boys and girls were up to. Like everybody else, I dutifully upgraded my Interpid boxes, very much as I have done for every release since Warty. This time though I decided to expand a bit more on my experiences - the main reason being that, for better or for worse, Linux on the desktop is now big business. You may not think so, considering we appear to still be at around 1% market share, and considering most people using computers are still ignorant of Linux and Free Software in general; but, in my personal opinion, we are now on the threshold, on the verge, of starting to build a commercial position.

Thus, we can no longer afford to look at Ubuntu - or at any other Linuces who wish to break through into the desktop mainstream market - as we have until now. This review is not just a typical Linux review. I do not wish in anyway to upset all those people who work so hard to make GNU, Linux, Debian and Ubuntu what they are now - people for which I have the utmost respect. However, I shall endeavour to make a frank accessment of the strong points and weak points of Ubuntu as it stands at 9.04.

If your main concerns are with software freedom, the remainder of this article will not be useful to you at all. I have taken a stance of the "ignorant consumer", the sort of chap who would buy a product based on price and quality; a person who does not really care how product came to be, but focuses only on features and usability. I think its really important to look at the world from this perspective, because to some extent, we have taken all the easy pickings. A lot of people who care deeply about their freedoms and buy products thoughtfully are probably either using GNU/Linux (or some other free operative system) or have made a conscious decision not to use it. It is the nature of this audience to investigate their choices. It is not the nature of the majority of the market though, and to capture them we must play the game on their terms - not on ours.

In addition, one must bear in mind that GNU/Linux is challenging a strong incumbent, and a very strong second place; being as good as Windows or MacOS won't win any prizes, because they both possess huge advantges: large installed base, marketing, familiarity, large amounts of money. From whatever angle you look, these are formidable oponents. To beat them at their own game, one must be pretty special indeed.

Without further ado, my views on Jaunty.

Booting the Live CD

One of the many advantages Apple and Microsoft have over Ubuntu is installation. Its not that their installation is better - its just that the vast majority of their users have never installed an operative system in their lives. Consumers buy boxes with the operative system pre-installed, giving them the false impression that installation is trivial. A lot of people see a new operative system only when buying a new machine, and, given the choice, would probably revert back to the previous version.

This is in stark contrast with Ubuntu. SWAGging, I'd say the vast majority of Ubuntu installations are/were done by either the end user or its local computer nerd. Dell notwithstanding, until a large number of manufacturers offer Ubuntu pre-installed, installation will always be a key battlefield, and a really though battle to fight. After all, its very difficult to compete against an idealized installation process which is just assumed to be easy.

Overall, I think Ubuntu does a good job with installation - although there are a few niggles. For instance, first impressions are extremely important, and unfortunately, the language menu does not quite give the best first impression. It takes a lot of screen real estate and uses an approach that is just not scalable (what will we do when we have more languages than fit the screen?):

Language Menu. Source: Softpedia.

Its understandable that such an internationalised product as Ubuntu wouldn't want to force non-English speakers to understand just what "F2 Language" means; but the approach taken just doesn't look professional. A lot of thought should have been given to the language list, making it scalable and easy to navigate.

The boot menu has good and bad points. On the plus side, "Try Ubuntu without any changes to your computer" is a good idea, as many a newbie wouldn't understand the concept of a live CD and will think that choosing "Install Ubuntu" will be a non-reversible operation, or one which won't take you to a regular desktop. However, all other options should really be under a sub-menu - or perhaps accessible via F6 Other Options or another such shortcut - because they may needlessly alarm users (why do I need to test memory? is this going to corrupt it? Is my disc defective? what does that mean?)

Language Menu. Source: Softpedia.

If one were to think in terms of flow, the vast majority of users will go through the following two use cases:

1. Choose language, try Ubuntu
2. Choose language, install Ubuntu.
   

Anyone trying anything else is an advanced user who knows what they're doing. As such, I'd say the boot process should start with a full screen combo-box which allows one to scroll up and down to choose a language; once the language is chosen, the second menu has two options: "Install Ubuntu" and "Try Ubuntu without any changes to your computer". At the bottom, the shortcuts should be:

1. F1 Help
2. F2 Language
3. F3 Accessibility (with, if at all possible, a accessibility icon)
   
4. F4 Advanced
   

All these options are perfectly meaningful to any basic user; anything which requires domain knowledge is hidden in "Advanced".

At anu rate, once Install Ubuntu is chosen, the boot process is elegant and blazing fast - a great improvement over Intrepid.

Installing

Overall, the installation process is very clean, with as few steps as possible. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that Ubuntu installation is probably second to none now. I wasn't very keen on live CDs when they first came out - couldn't quite see the point - but I now understand the error of my ways. Having the ability of starting your PC with a full blown version of the operative system you're about to install is fantastic. You can quickly assess which bits of hardware are going to be more problematic, as well as giving Ubuntu a good run. For the average consumer this is great, a sort of taste before you buy, if you like. The only change I'd perhaps make to the live disc - for systems with plenty of RAM (say 2 Gb or more) - is to create a RAM disc with all the apps, to avoid reading so much from the (slow) CD-Rom.

With regards to the actual installation steps, there are two points which may warrant a bit of attention.

Partitioning is clearly the scariest aspect of the installation process, so its important to be clear and reassuring to users. It would perhaps be a good idea to make the partitioning options slightly clearer, in particular with regards to resizing an existing Windows partition. It would also be a good idea to ensure the text below "Use the entire hard disc" is clearly disabled, as just the words "This will delete Windows XP..." are enough to dissuade many a newbie.

Partitioning. Source: Softpedia.

Users and passwords are also rather important. It is common for a single PC to be shared by two or more people, so multi-user support is very important. It is also very common for users not to want to type a password every time they log in. These use cases are not very well served by this dialog:

Users and passwords. Source: Softpedia.

Ideally all the user wants is one of two scenarios:

1. Setup one or more users and, for each user, decide whether to use a password or not.
2. For a single user box, probably allow automatically login.
   

Multi-user polish will be addressed further on in this article.

Loging in

The new login screen may be perhaps a bit too dark for users with accessibility needs, but overall its a triumph of parsimony. Its literally impossible to get confused using it. The only slight snag is the missing user list. Most people will probably prefer not to type a password, so it makes sense not to type a username either. The security conscious will no doubt complain, scream and shout - but from the perspective of the regular user, it makes complete sense (it's my house, not a public computer!).

Login Screen. Source: Softpedia.

The Proprietary Question

One of the greatest problems with Ubuntu (and most linuces) is the hidden steps of "additional setup". These can be extremely costly. Whilst there are enumerable articles, detailing exhaustively what needs to be done, and whilst most guides can be followed blindly by even the newbiest of all newbies, the very existence of the "additional setup" is a huge barrier of entry to many users. The additional setup is exclusively related to installing and configuring proprietary applications and drivers. For me these are:

• NVidia/ATI drivers
• MP3 support
• Getting (encrypted) DVDs to play
• Wireless drivers
  
• Flash
• Adobe acrobat
• Skype
  

For a very large number of users out there, a PC is not usable unless all these have been successfully installed and configured. The additional setup process has been trimmed to its absolute minimum, methinks, particularly if one compares it to how things used to be 5 or 10 years ago. It is, in fact, trivial in most cases. But this is the problem: when we look at where we are, we inevitably see things in terms of a natural evolution. A Windows or MacOS user will not see things that way; it will become instantly apparent to him or her that a lot of things are not setup on Ubuntu out of the box, and setting them up is non-trivial (even if all we're talking about is following a very simple and detailed procedure) because this is just not the way they are used to work.

In my mind, just like we have gNewSense for the purists, we also need a "compromised" Ubuntu, _even_ if it requires users to pay for it to ensure all licences are in working order. After all, time is money, and I'd much rather pay Canonical 10-30 EUR twice a year for a "compromised" version with all the proprietary stuff installed, rather than having to waste time doing it. The "compromised" version should also be used in any pre-installed PCs.

Alas, this is not how things are at the moment. To make matters worse, my "additional setup" has been very far from trouble-free. These are the issues I've faced:

• Wireless (WPA) is utterly broken for my laptop. Try as I might, I just can't get my laptop to connect, even though it used to work well with Intrepid. Some people reported this issue in Kubuntu, but I'm seeing it with regular Ubuntu. A few of the proposed workarounds don't seem to work for me either, such as typing the password in hex. Its a rather annoying regression, and until it gets fixed, I've got a big fat Ethernet wire in my living room.
• Recommended NVidia drivers (v180) are broken for my card. This is #366222. For me there was a very simple workaround, which was to downgrade the drivers back to v173. No problems since then. Its an annoying bug though.
• Epiphany still crashes frequently after closing tabs when I'm using flash heavily. This is not a regression; I've had this problem for a long time. Its similar to #196588.
• Sound in Skype is not working. This is a regression prior to Intrepid - in fact, since PulseAudio. Its getting really close to working though; now the problem seems to be that Skype somehow lowers the volume of the microphone on startup (I can see this from the PulseAudio volume control). I followed many a tutorial (including this one, with amazing screenshots of volume control configuration), to no avail.
  
• Sound in RealAudio is not working. Same as for Skype really.
  

Lets make a few things clear. Setting things up and chasing bug tickets is not something that would put me off Ubuntu and GNU/Linux the least - after all, I've been using GNU/Linux for over 10 years, and I value FOSS highly. Also, it is important to understand that none of these problems have anything at all to do with FOSS - these are exactly the issues people have been warning us about with regards to binary drivers and closed software. After all, PulseAudio works incredibly well for all my other applications - its the closed source ones that are and have always been the problem (in fact, the only real FOSS problem I have with Jaunty is #366083).

However, this is not an excuse for a commercial company looking to increase their market share at the expense of two ferociously competitive companies such as Apple and Microsoft. If I was Ubuntu, Novell or RedHat, I would have had personal meetings with all key companies providing commercial software (Flash and Skype are certainly key applications in the desktop space, even if RealAudio is not) and would have made available engineers to work with them to sort out the PulseAudio mess once and for all. Pulse is the future and its an increadible piece of software; Its just that the commercial companies seem unable to keep up. The same applies to NVidia/ATI.

Wireless is slightly more complicated, and its a symptom of a more difficult problem. The truth is GNU/Linux and Windows work in extremely complex ecosystems, with mind-bogglingly complex hardware combinations. Many things just cannot be known until releases hit the wild and people complain. Microsoft attenuates this problem by massively regression testing the most common hardware combinations; as far as I am aware, no Linux vendor does something similar. In a way, it shouldn't be necessary; after all, the software is provided to all at all points of development, so in theory regressions should be picked up quickly. Release soon, release often right? In practice, it doesn't quite work this way.

The potential number of testers is huge - just have a look at the number of people that downloaded Jaunty on the last betas and since it has gone gold - but a very large percentage of users will not download until close to the release date. This means that the bugs reported during the development process are not representative of those that will be found post going gold; and people reporting bugs after the official release will be rather more upset with problems than those doing the alpha/beta testing. If there was some traceability, one could "register" all the different hardware combinations out there (say those using Jaunty over the next 6 months), and then check to see how many of those were tried during the development phase. But there is no such data, so one is driving blind. Metrics here are fundamental, and knowing what was tested and when is vital. I'm sure many people would contribute (after all, a lot of the testing can be done by booting a live CD) if only they understood where they fit in the big scheme of things.

All these problems are clearly distribution issues, and can only be fixed if distributors make an incredible effort. In order to have any semblance of a chance at attacking the desktop mass market, they must be addressed thoroughly and convincingly, or else we risk the ire of many a user.

Multi-User Deficiencies

UNIX is the multi-user operative system par-excellence, and GNU/Linux carries on that tradition. However, there is a need to update the multi-user view of the world to today's reality. The challenge these days is not so much isolating users so that they cannot damage eachother or the system, but to create ways in which a machine can be shared sensibly. The issues I constantly keep on bumping into are:

• Music. I spend a lot of time creating groups, shares, permissioning, etc. just to ensure all users of the main PC have got access to a central music collection in RhythmBox. The setup is now more or less stable, but its not conceivable that a newbie would stumble on it after half-hour of googling (I'll write it up one day). This is an incredibly common use case: to have a shared music collection as well as a private music collection. The second problem is to access your music collection from another device, such as a laptop. I've had no luck in setting up DAAP from RhythmBox.
• Photos. I love F-Spot, its great. But I just cannot set it up in a multi-user environment - again with a set of private photos, as well as a set of shared photos that all users in the PC have got access to. As with DAAP, it would be nice to be able to browse the photo collection from a different device too.
• Printers. Setting up a local printer in Ubuntu is amazingly trivial. However, sharing that printer over the network is not trivial at all. It should really be a matter of right-clicking on a printer and choosing "Share". and, funnily enough, there is just such an option in "Printer Configuration". Problem is, my printer remained invisible to my laptop even after sharing. Making it visible required a large amount of faffing with CUPS config files and the CUPS web-based config.
• Shutdown with multiple users logged in requires entering a password. This won't go down well with the average user; a big notice would have sufficed.
  

All these complaints are sympthoms of a larger problem, which is a lack of use case based usability analysis. This should probably be done at the Gnome level, as it is not a distribution issue as such. There is a lot of focus on Gnome 3.0 these days, but it seems to me that the job of Gnome 2.0 is not yet done; the architectural work is excellent, but the polish wasn't quite finished.

The final thing with regards to multi-users, is user switching. It seems this will be comprehensively sorted out with KMS, at least technology-wise, but it will be interesting to see if the user switching process is made much smoother (no flickering; allowing switching with no password; allowing switching with music still playing from previous user; etc.).

Grumpy Old Man?

By now you probably have made up your mind and judged me as a typical grumpy old man, lost to FOSS and soon to migrate to Windows 7 or MacOS. In fact, its quite the contrary: I'm a very satisfied Ubuntu user, and I think the future will belong, undoubtedly, to Free Software.

There are many, many good things to say about Jaunty, and in a way, the criticisms laid out above demonstrate just how far we have come. After all, Jaunty did do a sterling job of detecting all my hardware, other than the wireless / NVidia issues, and NVidia is working just fine with v173.

The best thing about Jaunty for me is performance. Its nothing short of amazing. I'm using EXT4 for all partitions other than home, but I'm not sure if the filesystem is enough to explain the snapiness of this baby. For instance, with two users logged in, quite a lot of applications open, playing music, 3D effects, etc and my CPU usage rarely goes above 10% and my memory usage has oscillated between 400 Mb and 1 Gb! Its amazing. All apps have slimmed down so much as to be unrecognisable. A two day old loaded Epiphany is still below 100 Mb, a sight I don't recall ever seeing. Booting and shutting down are now lightening fast. And there are so many unsung heroes: Evolution, Evince, Liferea, Nautilus - so many applications that just work, and do what they're told. I most certaintly recommend upgrading to all Interpid users, and I'll certainly will be waiting unpatiently for karmic and all the KMS goodness (NVidia/ATI permitting).

This is to say that Ubuntu is certainly working very hard, and releasing a product with a lot of quality. But as I said on my opening words, good is not good enough; one has to be much better than Apple and Microsoft if one is to challenge them.

For me, the big question is: can we put the fantastic engine of FOSS to good use in the hard problems of testing and usability? This is the key to unlock the mass market consumer desktop market.

Before and After

One month ago, in Bilene (Mocambique):


Now, in England:

Here we go again...

Four days to go for the olympic games! and our basketball boys have got their job cut out for them in group B:

Angola
China
Spain
USA
Germany
Greece

In fact, all the teams in the Olympic games seem to be quite strong, with the exception of Iran I guess, whom I never really saw playing.

The place to be is fiba.com:

http://www.fiba.com/pages/eng/fe/08/olym/men/olympic_basketball_men.asp

Nerd Food: On the UbuntuBox

The Regular User

As with many other geeks, I find myself in the unofficial position of "computer guy" for family and friends (F&F). This entails sorting out broken computers, providing advice on new purchases for a variety of devices and software packages, installing said devices and packages, doing security updates and giving security advice, providing mini-tutorials on applications, teaching basic programming - the list goes on and on. The funny thing is, much like all other nerds, I may moan about my duties but secretly I enjoy performing them. Sometimes I get to setup people with cheap Ubuntu boxen, which they may complain about a little in the beginning but eventually use in extremely productive ways; and even on windows setups, I get to understand what drives people to Microsoft and what its weak and strong points are. Its a very instructive job.

Things got even more interesting since I bought my eee PC, a device that is selling like fire in the polar winter. The eee PC helped me understand a bit better how most people think. All along we, the Linux community, have focused on providing a user experience that is very similar to Windows: you may not have a Start Menu but you have the Ubuntu logo; toolbars and menus are very similar and so on. Even the newest eye-candy is similar to Mac and Vista's way of doing things (although there's always the chicken-and-egg problem). The end result is interesting: developers and regular Linux users are now convinced that no one should have any difficulties at all moving from Windows to KDE or Gnome; on the other hand, as soon as you sit a user down on a Linux box, he or she immediately tells you that something is not right. Objectively, the average user will probably not be able to point out what's wrong, if anything at all, other than "this is not Windows, can we not have Windows please".

The fantastic thing about the eee PC was that, of all people I showed it to, not a single one said: bah, this is not Windows. Most of them got on with the user interface immediately, and found it really intuitive. In all my years of advocating Linux I never before seen a reaction like this. I did absolutely no advocating whatsoever, no mention about freedom or the superiority of free software. Just letting them play with it was enough. As an example, my girlfriend has been using Linux for over 5 years, and I get the periodic complains of "why can't we just use windows" whenever I have some difficulties installing a device, or I break the world on a dist-upgrade. But within minutes of playing with the eee, her reaction was: "I want one of these!!".

The reactions I've seen towards the eee PC are almost the opposite of the few Vista users I've spoken to. Sure, Vista looks nice, but have you tried installing a one-click wireless router? That's when F&F call me out, when it all goes wrong with the "one-click" cheap product they bought. But thing is, I can't say much in Ubuntu's defense either. For example, I spent several days installing a Huawei e220 modem to provide 3G Internet access to my nephews, and let me just tell you, trivial would not have been a word one could apply to any part of the process. Vodaphone's new clever GUI may be good for Vodaphone users but I never got the damn thing to cooperate. True, the whole exercise wasn't taxing for a nerd - hey, its fun to look at AT commands now and then - but there is no way, just noooo waaaay a regular user would have gone through the pain, even with the brilliant Ubuntu forums to hand.

Now, before we go any further, I can already hear the complaints: "so you've chatted to what, twenty people, and now you think you understand the market?". Well, that much is true, I cannot claim any statistical accuracy to my diagnostics. These are my opinions; the entire article is based on empiricism and small samples. However, if my line argumentation is done correctly and rightly interprets the success of the eee, then there must be some truth to my views because I've tried to align them with the eee. The market has given a verdict on this gadget, loudly and unequivocally.

The eee PC is also a brilliant illustration of the huge divide between regular users and the developers who are tasked with providing software for them. At a moment in time where the Gnome community is yet again rethinking the future of Gnome, not a single regular user would find this debate interesting. This should send all the alarm bells ringing, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case. The truth is, regular users don't want flashy 3D desktops, although they can eventually cope with them; they don't need spinning cubes although they may start using them once they understand it. What they really want is simplicity. They have a simple set of tasks to perform, and they want to do so cheaply and reliably, and they truly do not understand why everything has to be so complicated and why do computers have to change so much so often.

So what made the eee popular? In my opinion, there are two key points:

• Its cheap. No one would even have a look at it if it was 400 GBP
• Its easy.
  

These are the key selling points to a regular user. To illustrate the second point, when I said to my girlfriend I was thinking about installing Ubuntu Hardy on the eee, she replied in dismay: "Why would you do that??".

The Regular User Use Cases

The key thing to notice about the eee is that most users don't even know its not running Windows. Its just an appliance, a bit like a PlayStation, and thus there is no need to enquire about it's operative system. Like an appliance, it is also expected to be switched on and just work - the fast boot reinforces this idea. The interface provided is also designed for the tasks common to the vast majority of regular computer users, and allows them to find things fast. But, looking at the wider problem, what do our regular users do with their computers? I compiled a list of all use cases I found in my user base:

• Internet: email, browsing, playing on-line games and youtube;
• Listen to music, sync with their music player;
• Watch local video content;
• Talk with their friends: IM, VOIP
• Play (basic) games: on all cases, real gaming is done on the PlayStation;
• Work: word-processor by far, some spreadsheet use but "it's quite hard";
• Burning and ripping;
• Downloading: torrents, etc. Not very popular because "its complicated";
• Digital photo management: storage, some very basic manipulation (make it smaller for emailing);
• Printing: mainly for school/University; pictures in very few cases.
  

In addition to these, some additional requirements crop up:

• Windows users all have proprietary firewalls and virus scanners;
• All machines are multi-user, and data must be kept private - especially with the youngsters;
• Machines must withstand battering: switched off at any point, banged about, dropped, etc;
• Internet connectivity is vital, ADSL, cable and 3G are used. Computers are useless without the Internet;
• Wireless around the house is vital. External wireless is nice, but not frequently used because "it's too complicated";
• Costs must be kept exceedingly low as IT budget is normally very low;
  

That's it. You'd be amazed with the percentage of the market one covers with only these use cases; not just doing them, but doing them well, like a PlayStation plays games.

And what are the biggest complaints about computers?

• They're really hard. Installing hardware and software is a nightmare, and they'd be stuffed without the local nerd;
• They break easily. One of my Vista users is still in disbelief that installing wireless drivers could cause the DVD drive to stop working;
• They're expensive. Sure you can get a cheap'ish box but then everything else is expensive (software, peripherals, etc);
• They change far too frequently. Most users just about got around XPs user interface just to see it all change again;
• They're insecure. They don't know how or why but that's what they've heard. That and the constant popups that look like viruses.
  

On one hand, the regular user is quite advanced, making multi-user and networking a central part of its computer experience. On the other hand, he/she is very naive: the vast majority of computing power goes under-utilised - the OS gobbling most of the resources for no good reason - and the majority of software expenses easily avoidable by using freely available applications. Regular users haven't got nowhere near using Media Centres, "clever" media management software, or even connecting their PCs to the TVs. All these things they consider "advanced" and yet nerds and more savvy users have been doing it for years. One cannot help but feel that there is a massive market out there for the taking - a market that Vista cannot aim to grab because it's diametrically opposed to its needs - and yet, no one else seems to find the path to its door.

UbuntuBox: The Hardware Platform

The rest of this article is an Ubuntero Gedankenexperiment: if I was a manufacturer, what sort of box would I like my F&F to have? What would make my life and their life easier? The short answer to that question is a PlayStation 2 like box but with PC-like functionality. The long answer is, well, long.

I'm not going to bother with engineering reality here - I'm sure some requirements will be so conflicting they cannot possibly be implemented. However, I've got zero experience in hardware manufacturing, weights, cooling, large scale deployment and so on - so much so that I'm not even going to bother pretending; any assumptions I'd make would be wrong anyway. So, to make matters easy, I'll just ask for it all - impossible or not - and wait for the reality check to come in.

The first, very different thing about our box is that it's not a computer. Well, inside it is a regular PC of course, but it doesn't look like one. It is designed to look exactly like a DVD player, and to fit your living room. A bog-standard black-box with a basic LED display would do. Inside, it has:

• Multiple cores: four would be ideal, but at least two. They don't have to be particularly fast (1.x Ghz would do, but I guess 2 Ghz would be easier to find);
• 4 GB of RAM: can be the slowest around, but we need at least 4; the more the merrier, of course;
• 250 to 500 GB hard drive: the more the merrier. Doesn't have to be fast, we just need the space;
• Average video card: key things are RGB/HDMI and TV out; resolution decent enough to play most games (not the latest);
• Loads of USB ports;
• RW DVD drive;
• Analog TV + DVB card (for FreeView in England);
• Wired and Wireless Ethernet;
• Sound card with 5.1 surround sound: doesn't have to be a super card, just an entry level one would do;
• SD card, compact flash readers;
• Ability to control the box with a remote control;

And now the key limiting factor:

• The overall cost of the box must not exceed 200 GBP. This may require some tweaking, e.g. if raising it to 299 means we can put all features in, it may be worthwhile.

Notice that all the hardware will be standard on all boxes of the same generation. This is all commodity hardware - certainly nothing proprietary - but without the heterogeneity that is associated with it. Note that control is a key feature - the limiting of user and vendor freedom to swap things at will. We'll return to the topic later on, as I'm sure it will prove controversial.

Now, how does the box behave for the regular use case? Well, you buy it, plug it in, set all the cables up and start it up. You will see only two things on boot: the logo (say the Ubuntu logo) fading in and out, and the console password. That's it. No BIOS, no flashing X-Server, nothing else. Within a few seconds you'll be prompted for the console password and given an option of not needing a password in the future (Note: console is _not_ root). Lets leave the desktop at that for the moment as we'll cover it properly in the next section.

What about Internet access, you ask? Well, you will need to buy one of the available modems:

• 3G;
• ADSL;
• Cable.
  

Each of these modems are made available at market prices (i.e. as cheap as possible); however, they will have been officially and exhaustively tested and stamped with a "UbuntuBox compliant vX" or some such, where vX is the box's generation. To be compliant means that your hardware has been throughly tested and is known to work with the hardware and software in a given generation. When you plug any of these devices after console login, a simple wizard will appear asking you to choose a provider. Each provider will have been also part of a certification program before inclusion.

The other networking device is an Ethernet Switch. This is only required if your modem does not come with switching abilities (maybe in the 3G case). Network Manager already does a pretty good job of this, so all you'll need to do is setup the network on your console session (SSID, etc). You can use a USB keyboard for this or just endure typing from the remote control.

Note that the certification requirement is extended to all hardware used with the box. In other words, there is a pretty draconian control on the hardware platform. Users are, of course, free to do as they wish with the device they bought, but if they go down the uncertified route, all support contracts are rendered void (more on this later). The truth is, its impossible to provide cost-effective support to all possible permutations of off-the-shelf hardware - a fact all Linux and Windows nerds are all too aware, as are Mac engineers. There will always be some weird combination that makes things break, and it can take many, many man-days to fix it; when you have 1M boxen out there, this cost would be prohibitive. The only way is to control the standard platform.

For all of its closeness, the certification process is actually open when compared with other companies. All the criteria involved is made available in public websites, APIs with all the hooks required to extend wizards are public (with examples), companies are free to do public dry runs and any company can request a slot for validation. Perhaps some cost needs to be associated with the process (time is money after all, and we must discourage the less serious companies), but in general, the process is fair and public. The tests, however, are stringent; hardware that passes _cannot_ fail when deployed in the wild.

One final note with regards to entry level hardware. Some people may not be aware, but the computing power available as standard today is incredibly high. For example, one of the PCs I maintain has a 1Ghz CPU, 512 MB of ram, 10 GB hard drive and an average ATI card; I bought it for 60 GBP. This machine runs Ubuntu Hardy and sometimes has to cope with as many as 3 users logged on. It doesn't do any of the 3D Compiz special effects due to the dodgy ATI card, but it does pretty much everything else. You'd be surprised on what you can do with the slowest RAM, cheapest sound-card and so on.

UbuntuBox: The Software Platform

By now you must have guessed that the box would be running Ubuntu; but this is not your average Ubuntu. Using an interface along the lines of Remix, we would make a clear statement that this is an appliance - not a PC. As the eee has demonstrated, perceptions matter the most. Remix's interface will remind no one of Windows, whilst at the same time making the most common tasks really easy to locate.

In addition to regular Ubuntu, the software platform would provide, out-of-the box, complete media support. This entails having GStreamer will all the proprietary plugins, Adobe's flash and any other plug-ins that may be required for it to play all the media one can throw at it.

The UbuntuBox is mainly a clever Media Centre, and, as such, applications such as Elisa, Rhythmbox/Banshee, F-Spot, etc are at the core of the user experience. These applications would need to be modified slightly to allow for a better multi-user experience (e.g. shared photo/music collections, good PVR and DVB support, etc), but on the whole the functionality they already provide is more than sufficient for most users.

As with the hardware side, the software platform is tightly controlled. Only official Ubuntu repositories are allowed, and all software is tested and known to work with the current generation of boxen. And, as with hardware, the software platform is made available for third-party who want to deploy their wares. An apt interface similar to click 'n run is made available so that commercial companies can sell their wares on the platform and charge for it. They would have to go through compliance first, of course, but if the number of boxes out there is large enough, there will be companies interested in doing so. This would mean, for example, that a games market could begin to emerge based on Wine; instead of having each user test each Windows application for their particular setup, with many users having mixed results, this would put the onus of the testing on the company owning the platform and on the software vendor. Games would have to be repackaged as debs and be made installable just like any other Debian package. Of course, the same logic could be applied to any windows Application.

As I mentioned previously, boxen come with support contracts. A standard support contract should provide:

• Access to all security fixes;
• Troubleshooting of problems, including someone remotely accessing your machine to help you sort it out.
  

Due its homogeneity, UbuntuBox is very vulnerable to attacks. If an exploit is out in the wild, large number of boxen can be compromised very quickly. To make things a bit safer, the platform has the following features:

• SELinux is used throughout;
• All remote access is done via SSH and is only enabled on demand (e.g. when tech support needs access);
• All users have passwords and must change them regularly;
• There is an encrypted folder (or vault) for important documents, available from each user's desktop.
  

Finally, notice that binary drivers and proprietary applications are avoided when possible - e.g. Intel drivers would be preferable to nVidia, provided they have the same feature-set. However, where the proprietary solutions are technically superior, they should be used. Skype springs to mind.

UbuntuTerm

Readers may be left wondering, "this is all very nice and dandy, but am I supposed to do my word processing using a TV?". Well, not quite. Whilst the TV is central, its use is focused on the gaming and Media Centre aspects of the box. If you want to use UbuntuBox as a regular PC, you will need to buy a UbuntuTerm. Just what is a UbuntuTerm? It is a dumb terminal of "old" in disguise (e.g. LTSP). It is nothing but a LCD display of a moderately decent size (19" say), with an attached PC - the back of the monitor or the base would do, as the hardware is minimal. The PC has a basic single core chip with low power consumption to avoid fans and on-board video, sound and wireless Ethernet. It is designed to boot off the network if BOOTP can be used over wireless; if not, from flash. Whichever way it boots, its configured to find the mothership and start an XDMCP session on it. Its price should hover around the 100 GBP mark.

As with any decent terminal these days, UbuntuTerm is designed to fool you in believing you are sitting on the server. X already does most of the magic required, but we need to take it one level further: if you start playing music, the audio will come out of your local speakers via pulseaudio; if you plug your iPod via its USB port, the device will show up on your desktop; if you start playing a game, the FPSs you get remotely will comparable to playing it on the server. As with everything else mentioned in this article, all of these technologies are readily available on the wider community; its a matter of packaging them in a format that regular users can digest (see Dave's blog for example).

The standard hardware on a UbuntuTerm is as follows:

• Low RAM, basic video card;
• Speakers attached to monitor;
• SD Card, compact flash readers;
• WebCam, headset;
• Lots of USB ports
  

A house can have as many UbuntuTerms as required, and the server should easily cope with at least 6 of them without too much trouble, depending on what sort of activities the users get up to.

Finally, in addition to the UbuntuTerm in hardware, there is also a UbuntuSoftTerm. This is nothing but a basic Cygwin install with X.org, allowing owners of PCs to connect to their UbuntuBox without having to buy an entire UbuntuTerm.

Conclusions

UbuntuBox is an attempt to ride the wave of netbooks; it also tries to make strengths out of Linux's weaknesses. The box is not may not live up to everyone's ideals of Free Software, but its main objective is to increase Ubuntu's installed base, allowing us to start applying leverage against the hardware and software manufacturers. The design of the box takes into account the needs of a very large segment of the market which have basic computing needs, but don't want to became experts - just like a PlayStation owner does not want to know the ins-and-outs of the PowerPC chips.

The UbuntuBox is an appliance, and as such is designed to be used in a fairly rigid number of ways, but that cannot be avoided if one wants to stay true to its nature. The more freedom one gives to users, the worse the end product will be for the Regular User, which cares not for intricate technical detail.

Note also I haven't spent much time talking about business models for the company providing UbuntuBoxen. The opportunities should be there to create a sustainable business, based on revenue streams such as monthly payments for support, fees from OEMs, payments to access the platform (content providers). However, I don't know too much about making money so I leave that as an exercise to the reader. The other interesting aspect is comunity leverage. If managed properly, a project of this nature could enjoy large amounts of comunity participation: in testing, packaging, marketing, support - in fact, pretty much all areas can be shared with the comunity, reducing costs greatly.

All and all, if there was an UbuntuBox out there for sale, I'd buy it. I think such a device would have a good chance of capturing this illusive segment of the market, giving Linux a foothold, however small, on the desktop.