Nokia n900 review

As I write this I’m rocketing across Belgium shortly to transit under the channel on the Eurostar train. I’m crossing a continent rich in history and conflict. But to be honest, it’s an antiseptic journey. Unfortunately, my laptop isn’t on-line, and without a connection it won’t relieve the boredom. Luckily my phone is online. It’s my phone that I’m using to stay connected to the Internet, making sure I’m not missing anything important and keeping me amused during the journey. With it I’m reading e-mail and RSS along with communicating through instant messaging.

As we move towards a world that is mobile and connected the phone is much closer to the type of computing experience I want than the traditional PC. Perhaps without realising it phones are becoming a very significant computing platform. We’re using an increasing number of them – billions of phones ship a year, millions of computers by contrast.  And as you know emerging areas of the world are very big on phones! Finally, smart phones are becoming very powerful, Moores law and all that.

So if you talk about pervasive computing, the incarnation we have of that today is the smart phone: it performs some set of computing tasks and it’s always available to me since I always carry it. Consequently, if you’re interested in what the future of computing looks like then it’s going to have a lot of the characteristics of the phone.

I recently got a Nokia n900 which has a lot of the characteristics that I think are important in a pervasive computing platform. First, for all that we love touch you need data entry and that means a keyboard of some form.  Second, if it’s pervasive then it better be well connected, because I move around a lot. If it’s an always-available computer then it has to be able to do more than one thing at a time, because I’m doing more than one thing at a time. Clearly, it has to have a wide range of applications and that includes full Web capability since lots of “applications” I access like Facebook are on the Web. And it has to be configurable, it’s my device and while it may be managed, I want to customise it.

So having set out my strawman it’s easy for me to conclude that the n900 ticks all those boxes. And it does, the N900 really is a good personal computing platform, it has a lot of the elements I listed. On the other hand, it’s not a very good phone!

OK, so I set the punch line up. Seriously though, if you just want a phone then you’re missing the point of the n900.  Yes, the voice quality is good, and the integration with contacts and conversations is very nice, the embedded usage of Skype and ability to use VOIP/Skype is very interesting.  But it has quirks as a pure phone, and anyway it’s noticeably large, heavy and the battery life borders on terrible.

As a mobile computing platform though it’s very cool. The more I use n900 the more impressed I am with the software package.  Maemo feels very well put together to me, it’s fast, looks good and the UI has some interesting innovations. Maemo is Open Source and Nokia have been working to develop a community around it for a few years. It’s still raw in parts but if it keeps on maturing and benefits from Open Source innovation then it’s going to be great.

Outside from the general user interface the software stack is also very strong. If you want something decent for e-mail then the n900 is a good choice. The native e-mail client handles IMAP very well, the wizards make it easy to set-up and the keyboard is fine – it’s actually better than a blackberry I tried recently, since push e-mail isn’t important to me. It’s got a fantastic full browser that can access heavy Javascript sites. If you use the new mobile Firefox browser then resource hungry sites like Gmail and Google reader are absolutely fine. It’s able to handle instant messaging over a range of different networks which makes for a feeling that you’re constantly in touch with people. The RSS reader is rubbish though, it should be taken outside and quietly shot – seriously no off-line mode!?

If you’re in the market for a new smart phone and you want something a little different, or you’re looking for something a bit more powerful and hackable than the other options out there then check out the N900.

Canonical Voices

Want to know Canonical’s secret business plan? Or find out the latest features we’re working on in Ubuntu or UbuntuOne? Then hop over to the Canonical Voices site.  It’s a blog aggregator that provides a single location for Canonical employees to blog and engage with the wider world.

Many Canonical employees develop Ubuntu directly making them members of the Ubuntu community so their views already appear on Ubuntu Planet. However, there are lots of Canonical employees who work in other areas, such as with OEM’s, or on UbuntuOne, in marketing or with business customers. Canonical voices brings together everyone in the company and provides a single place where you can see the breadth of their views, opinions and thoughts.

As an Open Source technology company we’re working within a variety of communities; sometimes that means an Open Source project, but it could mean a group of users or a set of companies. So it’s important for us to be transparent and to engage in a conversation – encouraging understanding and perhaps sparking interesting ideas. Canonical Voices provides a space for that.

A connected point is that Canonical hires a lot of intelligent, opinionated and interesting people who are great communicators. Hopefully, Voices will provide a focus and context for those that want to blog, sparking everyone within the company to feel they are part of an organisation wide conversation. Personally, I’ve been reading Voices regularly for the last few weeks and I’ve already learnt lots of interesting things about other projects within Canonical.

I can’t promise that I’ll be any better at blogging regularly, I’ve already broken quite a few promises and resolutions on that front! Nonetheless, I’ve started aggregating posts about Ubuntu, Linux and Canonical over to the Voices site. Please check it out and become part of the conversation!

Arkeia Network Backup for Ubuntu

A very long time ago, in a parallel universe managing backups on Linux was a real headache.  If you can remember all the way back to the mid 90’s these wasn’t journaling or iSCSI and Linux wasn’t as stable as it is now – so having good backups was your only lifeline! Arkeia was the the first back-up software that I used for the linux systems, at the time most of the other vendors didn’t support Linux. Of course there were free software options, but they were really hard to use. And anyway, we didn’t want backup, we wanted restore. So Arkeia it was, and it worked very well.

As backup is so easy to ignore, anything that makes it easier is good news. That’s why it’s great news that Arkeia now supports Ubuntu. They recently announced that Arkeia Network Backup version 8 is available on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Arkeia have also signed up as a Silver Partner in the Ubuntu Partner programme.

Arkeia is a network backup system, so it’s suitable for a networked environment. There’s a central backup server where all the backups are stored on disk or tape, and individual clients are installed on each system within the network. The agent itself is available for Ubuntu, RH, Novell SUSE, OSX and Windows. So in one scenario you can use an Ubuntu server as the central backup server and install agents on all the other systems in your network. Alternatively, if you have an existing Arkeia set-up this announcement means you can install the agent on your Ubuntu systems and back them up to your existing backup server.

If you’d like to try out Arkeia they’re also offering a free version for Ubuntu users. A pre-licensed version is available through the Ubuntu partner repository, so if you have this switched on then a simple apt-get install arkeia will download and install it. With this free license you can backup two systems (any platform including Windows and OSX) with up to 250GB of files whether tape or disk based. See their documentation for more information.

If you don’t have a backup system this is a great way to get started.

Ubuntu home server

One of the most common requests the Ubuntu community asks for is a home server or small business server.  This Beepstar post, The trouble with Ubuntu Server for beginners, encapsulates the argument nicely when the article says:

“95% of the would-be “nixers” are completely stunned, at that point when the Ubuntu Server installation states that it has finished and all that’s offered to the user is a black screen and a prompt line. Users … basically scrap the whole thing, install Windows and use … solutions which lack raw power but come with an comprehensive interface”

It’s certainly an interesting point, we can surmise that one of the things that heavily assisted the growth of Windows on the server was the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that came with NT 3.5 and NT 4. At the time the competitive product was Netware which was the dominant technology for providing servers in LAN’s, and networks were themselves reasonably new for small business networks. Windows rode the networking trend really well, and gave advanced technical users (rather than professional IT staff) the idea that they could run their own servers.

I’ll come back to the question of whether Ubuntu server should be trying to focus in this area for a moment, and just focus on technology problems we face in providing a home server. There’s two elements:

a. A set of common services
The use-cases are relatively straight-forward but the key is the integration.  So we’d want thinks like basic file and print, with network services.

b. A nice user experience
An easy to use interface that can guide the user through the initial installation, but also the reconfiguration and management of the services.

We’ve been working on common services in Ubuntu server and ensuring that they’re well integrated and easy to set-up as this makes every system administrators life easier.  So making LAMP easy to install, integrating the experience of attaching to a Windows Network and the recent e-mail stack work all make setting up common services easy and quick.

To provide a graphical user experience there are a range of options.  There’s some well-known free software options, the two most well-know are E-Box and Webmin.  There’s also commercial control panels such as Plesk which is used a lot by hosting providers.

It’s difficult to see a way to integrate one of these panels as the default way of adminstering  an Ubuntu server as the impact on professional users would be dramatic.  For various reasons these tools assume that you only manage the system through the GUI.  So there’s no way to integrate them that would maintain the freedom of professional system administrators to manage the system using the command line interface.

Meanwhile, professional system administrators face a different set of problems.  The shift of delivering everything through a web server and the introduction of virtualization and cloud computing is causing an explosion of server instances.  So for these use cases the focus is on a small, efficient server with centralised configuration management capability.

The compromise may well be a small, powerful server platform aimed for cloud computing.  Then a range of appliances (virtual or otherwise) built  to meet the specific needs of both professional and personal (ie home) users.  There’s been a few different community efforts along these lines and I hope we’ll see more.

A few members of the Ubuntu Server Team wrote about this a while ago, so check out the posts by Dustin, Soren and Thierry.

ubuntu, server, linux

Linux eclipses Windows

The Eclipse team released a survey that shows Linux is the most popular deployment platform, outstripping Microsoft Windows. Ubuntu is the second most popular Linux deployment platform, just behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). On the development side the Linux desktop shows strong growth, with 27% of developers using it.

The survey itself had over 1,300 participants from a range of different organisations, you can get the full results from their site. Eclipse is popular with Java developers or developers not strongly tied to Microsoft technologies, so the survey gives good insight into their behaviour.

From the survey Linux is used by 27% of developers as their desktop environment, up from 20% in 2007. This is very strong growth, and shows that Linux continues to expand its reach on the desktop. Ubuntu is the lead distribution with 14.5% of users, RHEL/Fedora is next on 4.7% and then SUSE/Novell on 3.2%. Windows is still the largest platform but has lost 10% market share; it was 74% in 2007 and has now dropped to 64% in the 2009 survey.

The survey also asked what platform was used for deployment. There’s a dramatic shift from previous surveys as Linux now represents the majority on 43% and Microsoft Windows 41%. The breakdown is also interesting. RHEL/Fedora is the lead distribution with 13.1%, Ubuntu comes second with 12.0% and SUSE/Novell is used by 5.3% for deployments.

The desktop Linux trend is really good news as it’s another strong data point showing that Linux is growing on the desktop. Developers are power users who tweak and play with their environment, so if they’re satisfied with Ubuntu then it bodes well for other broader users.

For Ubuntu the deployment platform data is also good news as it shows continuing growth for the server. By it’s nature the server isn’t as flashy as the desktop, it’s strengths and capabilities are more subtle. It’s great to see that developers are appreciating that the server edition is capable of delivering the full range of enterprise workloads, including Java application serving. A lot of work has been put into making LAMP and Tomcat easy to install and maintain, to my mind this survey demonstrates that the work is paying off – we’re helping users deploy Java more simply.

If you’re interested in more analysis of the survey then Ian Skerret’s blog post is a good place to start. And for some more commentary on the Ubuntu element see Nick Barcet’s post.

Ubuntu Server survey

Ubuntu is widely used as a server platform, across organisations of all sizes, particularly for web and application delivery.  Those are the results from a survey of 7000 Ubuntu users that we released a while ago, in conjunction with RedMonk.  The press coverage was good, and now it’s died down I thought I’d add a few other thoughts.

The first question has to be why we undertook a survey.  Understanding how platform’s used, what users value and what features they want is incredibly important.  We use that input to guide our development, inform our decisions and focus our attention.  Open source development provides significant detailed and direct feedback, but surveys offer some other insights.

First, they’re a route to reach people that don’t take part in the development process directly – which is the majority of users.  Second, the volume of input gives us a strong statistical basis for examining trends – 7000 users is a significant pool of input. Finally, it’s an objective confirmation to qualitative feedback that we receive through other mechanisms, this helps confirm assessments we’ve made or trends we’ve observed. If you took the survey thanks very much for your time and input!

What are the main take-aways from the survey? Well clearly our users depend on Ubuntu as a server platform, it’s used for serious production deployments.  It’s used across a wide range of organisation sizes and industries.  That’s important because it tells us that our efforts to develop the platform, and spread the message that Ubuntu has a strong server capability are meeting with success.  It’s also a data driven stake through the heart of the myth that Ubuntu server is only used by small business or hobbyists.

Second, that our users value the key qualities that we provide – the heritage from Debian, the regular releases, the focus on a tight and efficient platform for all the common workloads.  I was particularly struck by the range of workloads that Ubuntu is being used for.  We see Ubuntu being used for edge of network infrastucture (DNS/Web), but also internal application delivery (Java app serving/Databases) and it’s starting to make its way into line of business (CRM/ERP) delivery.  These aspects are important because they guide our focus for future development as we make our way towards the next LTS release in 2010.

Finally, the range of geographies and individual situations where the server is deployed is incredibly exciting.  Between the geographical data from Shipit and this survey we can conclude that Ubuntu is used globally. From a large media delivery platform in Europe, to a school in the Phillipines, each is spreading Ubuntu and benefiting from it in their own unique way.  In the long-run this reach broadens the tent of Ubuntu (and Linux) supporters and developers.  If the next 8 million users come from the developing world image what we can accomplish!

My thanks to Nick Barcet and the server community who put the survey together – it was a lot of work but has been really beneficial.  I hope we’ll continue to run surveys in the future so that we can build up a picture of how things change.  If you’d like to see the results with a deeper analysis then pop over to Gerry Carr’s blog post to download the whitepaper.

Comfortable wiki editing

Wikis are great for collaboration, and using your favourite editor makes life more comfortable.  These directions show you how to use Vim on Ubuntu to edit a MoinMoin wiki.

If you spend a lot of time editing a wiki you soon realise that working in a tiny browser text box isn’t that comfortable.  It would be much better if you could use your favourite editor.  That way if Firefox crashes you still have a local copy.  With local editing you can also keep working while the wiki previews your page.  And, re-united with your editor you get to use all those cool productivity-enhancing key combinations that you paid for with serious RSI!

The trick is to use the Firefox add-on It’s All Text! by docwhat. This add-on lets you specify a local editor to use when you edit a textarea.  When you edit a wiki page instead of typing in it you can run your mouse over the bottom of the text area and a small blue “edit” button appears.  If you click this the external editor you specified is launched.

I’m using gvim, so when I click the edit button a gvim window pops up with the mark-up and contents of the wiki page there read for me to edit.  If I save the file then the textarea flashes yellow in my browser as it updates from my gvim window.  When I’ve finished with my page I dismiss the gvim window, preview my page and save.

As Ubuntu uses MoinMoin I wanted to add highlighting so that when I’m editing a wiki page it looks neat and tidy.  Since It’s All Text! provides the buffer as a normal .txt file I needed to tell it how to highlight the MoinMoin file when it loads it.  Here are the steps:

1.  Get the MoinMoin syntax file
There’s a MoinMoin syntax file on Vim Scripts directory so download and save it into ~/.vim/syntax/moin.vim

Just for completeness I’m actually using Gustavo’s moin.vim which is in the latest version of his editmoin. I use a dark background and his highlights are a bit more straightforward.

After you’ve done this you can check it works by saving a MoinMoin wiki page to your system.  Then opening it in vim and running the following command which will show highlights:
:setf moin

2.  Tell vim about locally saved files
Add the following to your ~/.vim/filetype.vim

augroup filetypedetect
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.moin setf moin
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.wiki setf moin
augroup END

This comes from a Wikipedia page on Text editor support when editing Wikipedia.  I believe you only need this step if you’re going to be keeping local copies of your wiki pages as something .moin.  I do this a lot as I like local backups and want to see the highlights when I open them in vim.

At this point you can check it’s working by opening a locally saved MoinMoin page and the highlights should take effect automatically.

3.  Tell It’s All Text! how to launch gvim
Finally, you need to tell the It’s All Text! extension how to launch gvim with the MoinMoin syntax highlighting turned on.  First you need to add a small script somewhere in your path (for me in ~/bin/), it contains:

#!/bin/bash
set -eu
exec /usr/bin/gvim -c “setf moin” “$@”

Just edit the Preferences for It’s All Text! and test it out.  It should launch your gvim window and set the file to being moin so that your highlights are applied.

This is very applicable to other editors, such as Emacs, and perhaps even OpenOffice’ new wiki editor.

The only thing I can’t work out how to do is to apply different settings and highlights depending on which wiki I’m editing.  This is a feature editmoin has that’s pretty useful.

MoinMoin, ItsAllText!

Hot Hosted Apps

Consumers, technologists and start-ups have taken heavily to running hosted applications. Squash reminded us a while back that a lot of the basics still need to be covered. Still, it’s interesting to consider whether this is a trend that consumers, medium business and enterprises will take-up with a vengeance.

The rise of Gmail really kicked the trend off and the Google team have done a great job expanding the capabilities. The buzz around Web 2.0 doesn’t do any hard either to getting people excited and experimenting. However, it’s worth remembering that lots of “trends” seen by the digerati don’t take-off. For example, while I couldn’t live without RSS it’s not used by most users (according to Yahoo, only 4% of surveyed users are RSS users). While I assume that this figure has changed since that survey I don’t think it’s the majority!

The main hosted applications I use are:

Gmail
E-mail is intrinsic to how people use the Web, and Google changed the game with it. They’ve done everything possible to make it feel like you’re not locked in, while locking you in with all the features!

LinkedIn
I’m not a big social networking user, but I do use Linkedin to stay in touch with business contacts and look for job candidates.

Del.icio.us
The oldest of social networking sites. Perhaps not the prettiest but I have all my bookmarks there and there hasn’t been anything more compelling.

So far, every other application I use is on the desktop. File storage is the one that I’d really like to solve but there doesn’t seem to be a clear winner that is cross-platform. Which hot hosted applications do you find indispensable?

Developing great technology

Irving Wladawsky-Berger is an interesting technologist and strategist, whose blog is worth reading if you have spare cycles for good quality input. He’s known for having been deeply involved in many of IBM’s technical strategy decisions, for example he was a key actor in their Linux strategy. He officially retired this year and Eweek did a wide-ranging interview that finally made it to the top of my reading list. A key quote that struck me as true is when he’s asked where he got his vision from:

“The answer is easy: Find where the smart people are and hang out with them. I’m serious. The smart people have a lot of ideas …”

IBM has resources both money and brain-power that are far beyond those of most organisations. But it strikes me as true that if you find smart people with a range of views and get into an exchange of ideas then you’ve got a much better chance of doing something amazing. That’s definitely true of Open Source, but it applies generally. He continues,

“But the way I looked at it a new idea was whether it was something we should do, and then how we should do it in IBM. Because just because it’s something we should do, doesn’t mean we have to do it like everybody else is doing.”

This second point is really important to me, although it’s often difficult to practise. Sometimes, the accepted way of meeting a need is the right way to do it. Sometimes people want a better mousetrap, not an entirely new mouse removal system. Perhaps the problem is well understood, and there are no better approaches, or at least none worth the effort for the benefit.

But generally, if something is worth doing, it’s worth examining it from the underlying principles and wondering whether it can be done with a different approach. It’s really the only way to develop something really innovative and different.

The rub seems to be when do you do the former, and when the latter, perhaps there are ways to combine the two.

Ubucon New York 2007

I really enjoyed Ubucon NY which happened on the Friday after LinuxWorld New York. Ubucon’s are informal gatherings where Ubuntu users get together to learn and socialise. The New York one was set up as an unconference so the attendees decided what the activities and talks would be. They’re organised by active members of the user community. John Mark did a great job organising it, and kept the day clicking along. Leslie and the rest of the Google team deserve thanks for providing the facilities and their overall enthusiasm. I of course returned the favour by making sure that no food on the buffet went
to waste!

It was interesting to see the wide variety of people who are active and interested enough to come along to a community event. The range was amazing, from professional business users who wanted to learn more about Ubuntu, to some of the seasoned Free Software activists.

Fabian did a great talk about our commercial support services for Ubuntu and what it’s like to work at Canonical. I learnt a few things myself! I was supposed to do a talk on the Ubuntu roadmap but there wasn’t enough time at the end of the day. So as people were getting tired I did a quick Q&A session on Canonical and Ubuntu instead. It got picked up in eWeek which was very surprising as it really was short: I think I managed to answer most people’s questions with a reasonable level of clarity!

If you’d like to be notified about upcoming Ubucon’s then you can subscribe to the Wiki page. The plan is for the next one to be in Sevilla, Spain on Saturday May 5th and is being organised by Jono Bacon. We’re also having our first formal user and business conference called Ubuntu Live. It’s in Portland, USA and comes right in front of OSCON July 22nd to 24th – make it a date in your diary!