First Driver for USB 3.0 (Linux goes first!)

(Anika Kehrer)

Jun 09, 2009

After a year-and-a-half's worth of work, Intel hacker Sarah Sharp announced that Linux will be the first operating system supporting USB 3.0.

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200th post

I did it. I made it to my 200^th post. Yes it did take a long time but I made it. A lot has changed in that time. Back in 2005 the Linux kernel I was using was 2.6.10. In the last 3 years, Microsoft has encountered more competition from Linux on the desktop than probably all of the other years combined. While its presence is felt to most of the world's data centers and large corporate networks it is also beginning to show up on desktop computers in major corporations, and large banks. Close to half of Google’s 20,000 employees use a slightly modified version of Ubuntu. Dell started to sell PCs and desktops with the software in 2007, and I.B.M. more recently began making Ubuntu the basis of a software package that competes against Windows.

This is not at hate blog. I don't hate open or closed source. I don't hate WinXP nor OSX. I just tend to live in a world without Vista & Leopard. Gnu & Linux are big time grass root movements. My idea was to put the thought into the minds of people ever were that, Gnu/Linux shouldn’t necessarily try to be the other the OSes and people new to it should come to it with open minds. You come to this grassroots os because you believe it to be better, but is disappointed. It is impossible for any thing to be better than something if its completely identical to it. A perfect copy can be equal, but can never surpass the first. So when you gave Gnu/Linux a try in hopes that it would be better, you were inevitably hoping that it would be different. In deed it has a way to go in terms of education, mind share and credibility because of the lack of pop apps. In 2009 there is such wealth and depth of applications that as a power user I seldom miss anything. It is all so still true that occasionally you may encounter a certain Windows application for which no Linux equivalent exists, and that you simply can't live without. In those cases a software program called Cross over Linux available through codeweaver did sometimes help. It's a layer that lets you run native Windows software in Gnu. It doesn't work for many applications, but the list of supported programs is growing all the time.

Back in 2003 I found that I did like a lot of what I saw in the Gnu/Linux ego system. I preferred it over xp in many ways because I did not need to worry about the quality of my GPU or how much RAM my computer had. It just worked with what I had, which was not much at the time. Linux Mint is what we should want for any operating system: less attention on the operating system and more attention on higher-level features. While it shares a lot with Ubuntu, it has its own unique ways, which gets my nomination for one the easiest desktop Gnu/Linux distro candidate. Once installed the system works fine with as low as 256MB RAM. Also a Gnu/Linux download & upgrade gave me the newest drivers available for my machine, whereas in Windows I would have to surf to multiple sites and download all the upgrades individually. It's a very different process, and I found that to be very, well user friendly.

What brought me to Gnu/Linux was Linspire Inc Lindows 3.0. Linspire Inc. was founded in 2001 by MP3.com creator Michael Robertson. The company and its desktop Linux OS were originally dubbed “Lindows,” leading to a legal challenge by Microsoft over the latter’s “Windows” trademark. The squabble was eventually settled out of court; Microsoft reportedly paid $20 million to Lindows, and Lindows changed its company and OS name to Linspire. Then Linspire Five-O hit the street and it emerged as my favorite distro because of its Click-N-Run (CNR) software platform. Linspire 5-0 could handle many office and media file types including QuickTime, Windows Media, Flash, Java, Real, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .mp3, .pdf, .mpg, out of the box. Linspire called their product the world’s easiest desktop Linux. And it was. As for my experience, it took me a grand total of 15 minutes to boot my Pentium 4 , put in the Linspire CD, reboot, install 5-0, reboot again, adjust the time, date and sound level, and then start the desktop. At the time I could not wait for Linspire 6.0 to hit. It's after installation of the new Linspire 6 I was like, what happened to the world’s easiest desktop Linux? Linspire's previous major release, Linspire 5.0, was a show-stopper of a distro The new Linspire 6.0 could not even mount the FAT32 and NTFS Windows partitions on my computer.

Sad to say the Linspire is no more. On July 2, 2008, Xandros, Inc. took them over. The web site says

“Xandros and Linspire are the only Linux vendors with digital distribution warehouses that let users download and install both free and commercial applications with a single mouse click. Together, the companies will offer the best digital software distribution warehouse for a variety of Linux platforms, including Freespire, which will continue to be maintained as an open source project.”

Linspire helped bring much needed commercial attention to Linux when companies were looking for an alternative to Windows 98 or even Windows 2000. It will be missed.

Gnu/Linux has grown up a lot in the past five years. There are distros that almost anybody can install, even distros that live on CDs and detect all your hardware for you without any intervention. There are many misconceptions surrounding Linux with “command line”. In GNU I rarely go to the command line any more, because the gui’s are everywhere and varied enough to do just about anything one would want to do to solve just about any problem you might have. I have sat with people that have never used any computer and found GNOME or KDE to be equally qualified desktops for doing simple things like web browsing, text-editing, and so on,without issue.

Its been a long 3 years of coming up with things to write about. I intend on keeping this site more up to date than I have in the past.

Firefox 3 market share crawls past IE 7 in Europe

According to Web analytics firm StatCounter, Firefox 3 has finally surpassed the popularity of Internet Explorer 7 in Europe. Internet Explorer's total marketshare across all versions, however, still exceeds that of Firefox.

By Ryan Paul | Last updated March 31, 2009 10:25 PM CT

Mozilla's Firefox Web browser has made impressive market share gains in Europe over the past few years. In the latest marketshare report released by StatCounter, Firefox 3 has finally surpassed Internet Explorer 7 as the most popular browser in Europe in a breakdown by version number.

Firefox 3 holds 35 percent and IE 7 has 34 percent in that region. The recent decline of IE 7 in the past week can largely be attributed to the release of IE 8, Microsoft's new browser. According to StatCounter, IE 8 has grown to 2.3 percent in Europe, with most of those users upgrading from IE 7. This change was enough to put Firefox 3 on top. IE 6, however, still has 11 percent marketshare, which means that all users of Microsoft's browser across all versions still outnumber the total number of Firefox users.

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Trekstor ibeat Move + Banshee + Amazon MP3

Trekstor ibeat Move + Banshee + Amazon MP3


Well recently I was in pursuit of a new mp3 player. I’m happy to report that a few weeks ago I got a trekstor ibeat move and I've been having a lot of fun with it. It has pretty much all the basic features I wanted, decent battery life, and a fm radio. It's small and light and the display is really sharp. It features direct recording from the built-in FM radio, 25 radio station presets with automatic station search. On top of that, the Move features a microSD card slot for up to an additional 2 GB of swappable room.

I wanted to put trax on it, so I used the open source Banshee media player. Basically, this does everything iTunes does now days including video playback, podcasts, remembering last-played position for audiobooks, ripping and burning as I said it acts very much like iTunes. Banshee 1.4 offers automatic library synchronization for mobile devices and can also handle device playlists. It works with iPods and MTP players in addition to USB mass storage devices. I used it to rip my Tori Amos Collection: Tales Of A Librarian CD to my Move at a variable bit rate of 256kbps. I am sure that there is a lot of people that will unfairly compare the trekstor ibeat move to an ipod or other expensive players,but it fit my price range.

The next thing I wanted to do was buy some MP3 tracks online, but many sites across the web traditionally have to impose some form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions on downloadable content as a requirement by the recording industry. So I went to Amazon MP3 where their music is always DRM-free and will play on any device. There are a few restrictions. One of the biggest is that there's no re-downloading of tracks; you'd better make a backup, because if you lose a song, you'll have to purchase it again to get another copy. Individual tracks can be downloaded directly to the hard drive, but full album purchases have to use Amazons download application. The Amazon MP3 Downloader is currently available for Windows, Mac OS X and for GNU/Linux users their offering the program in both Debian's DEB and the RPM format. To make it easier to install, Amazon is including versions for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE. The Amazon MP3 Downloader, program displays what your songs you're downloading. You should install the MP3 Downloader before your first purchase. Its not hard. I just double clicked the one marked Ubuntu because thats what my Dell 1420n runs. The "Package Installer" GDebi Package opened. I them Clicked the "Install Package" button, put in my root past word and launched the Amazon MP3 Downloader to complete the installation process. Before you purchase a song or album, the Amazon MP3 store lets you play a 30-second music clip via an embedded music player.

When I was ready I bought Valhalla by Emily Richards & the 80s Pop Hits full MP3 albums along with the MP3 single of Coldplay's, Viva La Vida. Buying songs from Amazon MP3 was fairly painless. You click on the 'Buy MP3' button, Amazon asks to make sure you meant to buy that track and then you are taken to a Thank You page which explains what is happening. Each one the MP3s came with embedded high-resolution album art, which showed up on my trekstor ibeat move and Banshee 1.4 just fine.

Although Amazon’s library is a little smaller than iTunes' and Napsters, it is a great place to buy DRM- free music downloads. Amazon MP3 uses a more variable pricing model, with most tracks selling between $0.49 and $0.99 USD

Bait-and-switch:The Windows 7 multitasking tax

First let me say that I am not an open-source only evangelist. One of my favorite native GNU programs is NERO Linux 3, nothing open about that one. I must ask one question of the Microsoft apologists. What about this MTT I posted about before. Is it real or did I just make something up? Do I see a bait-and-switch in the works.

It the world of computers, there is something that many of us take for grated every day. Its called multitasking. In computing, multitasking is a method by which multiple tasks are done at once, meaning, running more than one program/process/task at once. No big deal right? The ability to multi task should not cost the user, more should it? We are pre-conditioned to believe that the OS we are run generally does just that, we have been able in the last 10 years run any program as many as we wanted only limited by the performance of our computers.

The Starter edition is aimed at the low cost ultra portable market. I have heard every where that Windows 7 is light-weight enough to actually run on those machines, yet there is a three app rule in place. The three-app rule includes applications running in the background, meaning that a user running Windows Messenger and Fire Fox, for example, could only use one further application on their machine like word or Thunderbird. If you want to open them both your force to close Messenger or Fire Fox. Buyers of ULCPC devices with Windows 7 starter will have the option of upgrading (paying the multitasking tax) to the more powerful versions, Ballmer said.

Now we all know that Microsoft by putting out Vista that Ballmer under estimated the need for an operating system that ran on cheap low spec machines. You want the full power of vista, buy a new high price system was the mainstream line. Then ULCPC devices hit the market place, going for as little as 389.00. That gave rise to GNU/Linux on the new platform. In response to the rapid growth of Linux on these machines, they extended the lifetime of XP and started giving it away nearly free. Falling hardware prices is putting the hurt Microsoft’s profits. The biggest problem with computers these days is that they don’t cost enough to invisibly hide the fees of a Windows PC license.

I tested Windows 7 Ultimate Edition (beta) on a Asus Eee PC 1000HA. Guess what? It runs five apps just fine. There is no need to even have a Windows 7 Starter Edition on similarly configured ULCPC devices. Remember that the three app restriction was to make sure that users can get the best possible performance from power limited hardware. The 1000HA uses the usual Atom N270 processor with 1GB RAM. I did not upgraded any hardware to run Windows 7 beta.

I want Microsoft Windows 7 to be competitive with the forces of open-source. It makes every one work that much harder to improve Firefox, open office, or even KDE. What Microsoft needs to do is just price 7 competitively and not give a deceptive price (pre-multitasking tax) for a crippled product so as to just look price competitive, then force you to pay MTT to get what you really expected in the first place, that ability to open more than 3 apps at once. One could say thats a type of bait-and-switch.

The release of version 1.0 of the Linux kernel was announced on March 14, 1994. When it was released, it contained 176,250 lines of code.

The Linux mascot is a penguin named Tux, created by Larry Ewing. Many variants of the Tux graphic exist. The mascot is a penguin because as Torvalds put it, "Linus likes penguins. That's it." The name Tux was suggested to represent (T)orvalds (U)ni(X), and it stuck.

To day LINUX is used by over 12 million people as well as by groups like the The GNU Project which was founded by Richard Stallman in 1983. GNU's kernel was never finished,it had text editors, a compiler and many programming tools, libraries, filesystem utilities, and so forth. GNU O.S. had everything but a kernel.Linux came along at the perfect moment to fill that hole. The two forces needed each other, One kernel one, O.S. Thats the main reason why Richard Stallman insists that the proper name is GNU/Linux, rather than plain old Linux.

One of Linux + GNU + FOSS most compelling strengths is their one simple screen for the power to download and install a wide range of free software. There need not be any CD for the most part, you get the absolute latest versions, and all dependencies are resolved. GNU/Linux on the desktop grew in 2008 as a number of substantial milestones were reached that promise to continue to move the Linux desktop/notebook ahead in 2009.

A big problem is that several mainstream applications are not available in GNU.One day the world's ISV will wake up and realize the vast market opportunity that lies in GNU/Linux platform.

To date the Linux 2.6 kernel contains 11,010,647 lines of code.

Linux.com to Get a Makeover

Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service

Tuesday, March 03, 2009 3:30 PM PST

The neglected Linux.com domain is about to get a facelift courtesy of the Linux Foundation, which said Tuesday it will take over the site and jazz up its content.

SourceForge, which previously maintained Linux.com, stopped publishing original content to it in January. The Linux Foundation will now provide that content, as well as host the site and provide general oversight. SourceForge will continue to sell Linux.com's advertising.

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