Vinayak Hegde

I had bought a Asus EeePC (model 1005HA) sometime back. I use it to take notes and as portable browsing and storage device whenever I travel. It came pre-installed with Windows and a crippled version of Office. So when Ubuntu 10.04 – Lucid Lynx came out last week, I decided to install Ubuntu – netbook edition on it as I had heard good reviews of it. This would also help me to do any casual programming on the go. Ubuntu 10.04 is also a long term support (LTS) release. I have written a small howto as installing linux on a netbook is slightly more involved than popping a CD and clicking next (as most Netbooks do not have a CDROM drive).

Step-by-Step guide to install Lucid Lynx Ubuntu 10.04 on a Asus EeePC 1005HA netbook.
1. Go to the Lucid Lynx release page and download the netbook ISO. I suggest you get the torrent and download using a bittorrent client. It is faster and you save some bandwidth (for the mirrors) for the less tech-savvy.

2a. If on Windows, download the USB disk creator, choose the downloaded ISO image and the amount of read-write space you want and follow instructions to create the disk.

2b. If you are on Linux, you can burn the ISO image to a disk and boot from it (by selecting the CDROM drive as the primary drive). Once you are logged in go to System => Administration and select Startup Disk creator. Select the ISO image and the drive to use and click next. You are done in a few minutes.

3. Next reboot the Asus EeePC and press F2 to go to the boot setting screen. Select Boot => Boot Device Priority. Set Removable Device as the 1st boot Device and disable “Boot Booster”. “Boot Booster” feature does some caching to enable fast booting. Since we are changing the boot sequence we need to disable this.

4. Once the BIOS setting are done, plug in the USB drive with the image and boot from it. It will give you an option to install to disk. From there on it is a normal Ubuntu Install.

5. Wireless did not work out of the box. Run the following commands to
get it working.
$ sudo apt-cache search linux-backports

See the output of the above command and install the wireless x86 packages.

But before that, check if the wireless is switched on in the BIOS. I wasted a lot of time realising that it had been switched off in BIOS and the keyboard function keys wouldn’t work.

Posting this on an ASUS EeePC on Lucid Lynx with wireless working
For more info look here.

Day 1

Atul talked about how the focus of the event had changed over the year to focus more and more on developers and actual contributions. There were several workouts planned and people were hacking code in the rooms provided to them. There were lesser people on the first day compared to the earlier conferences (probably because of less publicity and less focus on talks) and it was great to see a lot more students at foss.in this time.

Harald talked about how fragmented the embedded linux market is and how embedded linux vendors disregard free software principles and do not reap the benefits of working with community. This leads to hardware that has lots of unpatched vulnerabilities and kernels that do not take advantages of the latest developments. Next talk I that I attended was Khasim’s Talk on Beagleboard. Khasim started his talk explaining how our culture and upbringing places barriers on team work and sharing. Beagleboard is a low-cost, low power, OMAP3-based board which can be used to build movie players (it has han an onboard DSP which can be used for decoding HD-quality video), portable wifi / GPS devices (via additional USB connects) or even power a laptop.

Day 2

On day two I attended most of the Maemo talks. Maemo is the mostly open source platform that powers Nokia Internet tablets such as Nokia N810. Yannick Pallet talked about the software that comprises maemo and The community development process to acquaint developers who want to contribute to maemo. Nokia as a company understands opensource and the community surrounding it, as I heard Yannick ask contributors to contribute their patches upstream several times. Doing so would automatically improve maemo as it uses components directly from the various component releases.

Telepathy is a framework which provides an abstraction layer for several realtime communications including support for audio and video. Telepathy uses discrete components which communicate with each other via messages and programs and libraries licensed under different licenses can be interact without any hindrances. The demo of the video chat built using Telepathy was cool. audio and video support on Linux has come a long way (in terms on interoperability, format support and ease of configuration) from the early days. I spent rest of the day speaking to various people on a variety of issues (or “corridor talks”). These are the best part of any conference and foss.in is no exception.

Day 3

I was not feeling well, so I came in late and just attended Philip’s talk on YUI and the Lustre filesystem talk later in the evening. I would have liked both talks to have more discussion about code and design philosophies (Philip did talk a little bit about design and had some code). The Lustre talk was disappointing as most of the content could be found out by reading documentation so it got boring pretty quickly.

Day 4
Could not attend I was down with fever and cold. I was looking forward to the kernel workouts and had prepared by downloading the kernel but unfortunately could not make it that day.

Day 5

I was looking at the UFraw code and seeing if I could add capability for EXIF information manipulation using exiv2 libraries during the first part of the day. I attended Anant’s talks on Mozilla lab projects. He talked about Mozilla Weave, Prism and Personas. It was nice to hear that Prism was graduating and will be incorporated into Firefox. Prism enables the development of site-specific browsers. It would be intersting if some of the Google gears capabilties could be added to Prism then it might be possible to run some web applications offline just like desktops apps. Foss.in 2008 ended with Kalyan’s keynote on sharing and caring. He talked on a variety of subjects such as security, photography and the role of communities. I enjoyed the photographs as well as the example for breaking the security of webapps using the rediff shopping example. Overall the conference was good with it’s focus on contributions (I think they have succeeded).

However there is some scope for improvements:

1. It was surprising that the organisers ran of out of delegate kits quite frequently and they were given out sporadically and on an adhoc basis. This could have been managed better.
2. The quality of talks could have definitely been better overall so could have the event publicity. I think it was partially due to the difficult economic climate and lesser sponsorship.
3. Less publicity could also have been the cause that there were not many projects exhibiting at the FOSS Expo this time.
4. Atul should be more diplomatic (WONTFIX) . Running a good conference for several years (that too with unpaid volunteers) is a tough task so that should be an answer to detractors in itself.

Kudos to Team Foss.in for organizing a good conference.

Open Source developers contribute code for a variety of reasons:

1. To scratch an itch – fulfill a particular current need and release it to the world hoping that someone finds it useful.
2. To contribute back to the community they are part of or has helped them in the past.
3. Some contribute it because they enjoy writing code and feel altruistic because they help the world.
4. Some release code to help it get widespread adoption (marketing strategy by companies) so they can charge for premium support and build a community of committed contributers.

These varied motivations are visible in the multiple licenses in the Open Source community. The most popular licenses are GNU GPL, GNU LGPL, BSD, MIT and Apache Licenses. The relationship between these open source software (OSS) licenses is illustrated below :

Attribution: David Wheeler [http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html]

Software was earlier delivered via floppies then CDROMS and now software downloads. Enter the internet and the web. They have completed changed the way people work and communicate. The web moved from static html pages to Web 2.0. Software is increasing moving away from the delivery to the “hosted” model. Computing resource acquisitions is moving from buying to renting. This has given rise to new paradigms of delivering software such as Software-as-a-Service or SaaS and Cloud Computing.

Open source software has been one of the key enablers of these new revolution alongwith open standards (HTML, HTTP, CSS, XML etc). Whether it is Linux or Apache or Firefox or Python. As mentioned above the GPL which is by far the most popular Open Source licence. When the GPL was written, the modes of software delivery were either through physical media or by downloading from a FTP server (GPL v2 was written in 1991 when the web was in it’s infancy). The GPL has a strong copyleft clause (called as tit-for-tat by Linus Torvalds) which was crucial to the success of Linux, GCC and MySQL – three of the building blocks of much of the SaaS and Cloud Computing infrastucture. It has given the programmers who contributed to it the confidence that their work would benefit the whole world and remain free for distribution, rather than being exploited by software companies that would not have to give anything back to the community. This ethos is central to the motivation of many of the programmers who contribute to open source software (OSS).

However the GPL has some “loopholes” which Application Service Providers (ASPs) exploit. Since the distribution clauses of GPL v2 (and now GPL v3) do not govern the software whose functionality is accessed over a network (mostly the Internet), ASPs and SaaS companies were able to make changes to OSS and not give them back to the community. The license that fixed this loophole was the Affero GPL v3. This has a clause that governs the usage of a software over the Internet.

This clause is important to all Cloud Computing and SaaS vendors as any modifications they make to the software licensed under Affero GPL will have to be released to the users who use that software at nominal or no cost. This has made atleast a few vendors unhappy.