Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 7, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

New SUSE/Moblin Linux netbook from MSI arrives

What do you get when you mix Novell’s SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 11 with the Linux Foundation’s Moblin 2.1 netbook desktop? A lightweight Linux desktop that’s trying to snag the netbook desktop market before Google’s Chrome OS runs away with it later this year.

How well will Novell do at this? Well, after working with the Linux Foundation and Intel on combining the Moblin and SUSE Linux, we’re about to find out. Today, on January 7th, at the CES (Consumer Electronics Association), we’ll find out. MSI is releasing the first shipping of SUSE Moblin on its MSI U135 netbook.

According to Guy Lunardi, Novell’s director of client preloads, the mix and match of SUSE/Moblin’s core package is built on top of the Moblin 2.1’s 2.6.31 Linux kernel. Above that, most of the software is from SLED 11. Instead of KDE 4.3, though, for the interface, it uses the Moblin Web-oriented interface. So, for example, to use Firefox for your Web browser, you’ll get to it via the Moblin toolbar.

The U135 is powered by a second-generation 1.66GHz Intel Atom 450 Pineview processor. It comes with a 10-inch LED back-lit screen with a resolution of 1,024 x 600 pixels. The U135 also comes with a fully-supported 1.3-megapixel Webcam. Lunardi said that it’s good enough that he now uses the U135 for all his Skype video-calls.

More >

January 7, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Flying the Frightened Skies

In the immediate aftermath of a would-be terrorist trying to blow a plane out of the sky over Detroit on Christmas Day, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) issued a vague set of new warnings that left passengers utterly confused as to what to expect. Now, days later, we know: For domestic air-flight, it’s pretty much business as usual.

At first, would-be passengers were expecting to be frisked as they prepared to board their planes; to have to sit during the first and last hour of their flight; to be unable to keep pillows and blankets on their laps; and you could forget about using any electronics on board. On some flights in late December, all these nuisances happened.

That was then. This is now.

I asked the hundreds of people I know who are now in Las Vegas for CES (Consumer Electronics Show) to let me know what changes, if any, as they made their way to Las Vegas’ McCarran airport. So, what they did see that was different? Nothing. Not one blessed thing.

More >

January 6, 2010
by sjvn01
4 Comments

The next generation of Linux notebooks arrives at CES

After Dell broke the ice for pre-installing Linux on desktops and netbooks in 2007, the other major OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) reluctantly tried it out, and, in some cases, like Lenovo, backed right back out of the Linux desktop market again. As 2010 dawns though, Lenovo and HP are both back in the pre-installed desktop Linux game.

Lenovo gets the ‘credit’ for the oddest laptop, with or without Linux, that I’ve ever seen. The IdeaPad U1 is two computers in one. Or, as my fellow technology writer Mitch Wagner describes it, “It’s the mullet of notebook computers: Business in the front, party in the back.”

What you’ll get, when the IdeaPad U1 ships in June 2010, is a notebook that runs Windows 7 on an Intel Core 2 Duo CULV processor with a 128GB solid-state drive on one side. So where’s the Linux? I’m getting to that.

You see you can pull off the 11.6-inch multi-touch-enabled screen, and, ta-da, you have a full-sized tablet computer, running Lenovo’s Skylight touch-enabled version of Linux on a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM chipset and 16GBs of flash memory.

More >

January 5, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Can Imaging Technologies save us from Terrorists?

We already know that database passenger screening technologies won’t spot all prospective terrorists, but what about imaging technologies like millimeter wave and backscatter imaging? Will they do the trick?

While these two technologies are lumped together as full body scanning, or as EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) prefers to call it, “Digital Strip Search,” they’re not interchangeable.

Millimeter wave technology devices like L3 Communications’ ProVision Whole Body Imager scan you with millimeter wave radio frequency (RF) from two antennas simultaneously as they rotate around you. The TSA (Transportation Security Administration) claims that millimeter wave scanners use far less energy than a cell phone in their scans. The result is a 3-dimensional gray-scale body image. The images are revealing but they aren’t exactly titillating or likely to ever appear in a hypothetical whole body image Web site of the rich and famous.

More >

January 5, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Does VMware buying Zimbra from Yahoo make sense?

We don’t for certain that VMware, the giant proprietary virtualization company, is buying Zimbra, the open-source e-mail server company from Yahoo, but that’s the news from the rumor-mill. But, it’s not just any rumor, Kara Swisher, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and one of the most respected technology reporters around, started the story off when she wrote that Yahoo was close to selling Zimbra to VMware. Since then other sources, including some of my own, have confirmed that the deal is close to happening. The real question is: “Why VMware?”

The question isn’t, “Why is Yahoo trying to sell Zimbra?” If you follow Yahoo you know why that is. Yahoo needs cash for its disgruntled stockholders who still aren’t happy that Microsoft didn’t buy them out.

Besides, as Swisher reported earlier this year Zimbra isn’t a good fit with Yahoo’s attempt to refocus on the consumer market. Zimbra is an excellent business e-mail and groupware server. Zimbra isn’t meant to be an end-user program thoughl; it’s meant to be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange.

More >

January 4, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Chrome: Linux’s best Web browser?

p>I’m a long-time Firefox fan, but I’ve also grown fond of Google’s Chrome browser. In fact, I’ve pretty much switched to Chrome as my browser of choice on my Windows PCs. I’ve stuck with Firefox on Linux, but now that Chrome is available as a beta on Linux, I’m being tempted to switch.

I’ve been using the Chrome developer builds on Linux for months. It was fast but also unstable, so I never seriously considered it as a Firefox replacement. But the Chrome beta is proving to be both faster than fast and stable to boot.

I’ve put this rapidly evolving Web browser to the test primarily on my Dell Inspiron 530s. This desktop PC is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800MHz front side bus, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 Graphics Media Accelerator. On it, I’m running MEPIS 8, one of my favorite desktop Linux distributions.

The first thing I noticed with the beta is that it’s faster than ever. Pages that drag to the screen on Firefox burst on to the screen with Chrome. This wasn’t just my perception. On the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test, Chrome 4.0.249.11 zipped in at 786.2 milliseconds. That’s more than three-times faster than Firefox 3.5.6 with its 2,969.4 milliseconds on the exact same machine. Wow.

Speed isn’t everything though. I’m also pleased that Chrome now supports extensions like Xmarks, my bookmark sync program of choice. While Chrome doesn’t have the wealth of extensions that Firefox has yet, there are already many good and useful Chrome extensions.

Chrome also looks good in Linux. The interface itself is written with the GTK+ toolkit, which is also the foundation for GNOME. While this means that Chrome works best with GNOME’s GTK themes, it also looked and worked great with my MEPIS’ default KDE 3.5.9 desktop. That’s because while KDE is built on top of the Qt framework, I always install GNOME’s fundamentals on my desktop even if I never intend to actually use GNOME on it. This way, when I use some of my favorite GNOME applications such as the Evolution e-mail client and now Chrome, I don’t have to worry with minor incompatibilities.

Speaking of incompatibilities, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Chrome on Linux passed the Acid3 Test with a near-perfect 99 score. This means that Chrome is compatible with Web 2.0 applications and should render correctly the vast majority of up-to-date Web standard-compliant sites and pages.

But there is one major problem with Chrome for some users. While Chrome is built atop the open-source Chromium, Google Chrome itself is a closed-source program. To be exact, in the Google Chrome Terms of Service for the Linux version, section 5.3 of the agreement reads: "Unless you have been specifically permitted to do so in a separate agreement with Google, you agree that you will not reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade or resell the Services for any purpose." The ‘Services’ in this case includes the Chrome program.

It’s a rather odd terms of service since you can always build your own version of the Chrome browser from the Chromium code-base, which is licensed under the very liberal BSD license. The upshot of all this is that, unlike Firefox, you probably won’t see Chrome included in Linux distributions such as Fedora, which are pickier about program licenses. However, since Chrome is freely available in both the DEB and RPM formats almost any Linux users will be able to easily add it to their distribution.

At the end of the day, I’m still fonder for Firefox on Linux, but I think that has more to do with my years of experience with Firefox than it does with the comparative merits of Firefox vs. Chrome. If you can live with the oddities of Chrome’s license, I think you’ll find that Chrome is now Linux’s best Web browser.


A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.