racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

It’s the post-PC era, as the late Steve Jobs has called it. tablets and smartphones have far overtaken desktops and notebooks in terms of growth. And given the varied price points at which consumers can acquire mobile phones and tablet PCs (what with the cheap China-made Android tablets), computers are becoming cheaper and cheaper. But Microsoft is focusing on a post-post-PC era. Microsoft has already hinted that its upcoming Windows 8 operating system will run on both mobile and desktop platforms.

Will Microsoft merge its mobile and desktop operating systems with Windows 8? Microsoft has reassigned its chief of the Windows Mobile 7 division to a secret project under CEO Steve Ballmer. But whether this means they’re surrendering in the smartphone market, or they’re planning a resurgence through a unified OS, we will know by 2012, when Windows 8 launches.

They say the next logical step in the evolution of operating systems (if there ever is such a process) is bringing it online. There have been various steps taken toward this end, such as companies coming out with online versions of common Desktop tools, such as word processors, spreadsheets and notepad applications.

ajaxWindows does more, by actually offering a desktop-like interface on your Web browser, consolidating most of today’s popular Web-based apps. It even a media player one can use online!

ajaxwindows (image source)

Ron Miller says the people behind this nifty site might actually get to market their “online OS” soon.

There’s a lot to like there, but conceptually it’s mind-boggling because if you can put the whole OS on the internet, it changes the whole way we interact with and use our computers. The likes of Microsoft (and its high prices) become, dare I say, irrelevant. Of course, there is the entire matter of a business model and it’s not clear what that is. According to the About page on the ajax13 web site they are in fact a software development company, which would suggest they hope to make money from this venture. How they do that isn’t completely clear to me.

Of course in this logical progression of things (i.e., then vs. now being desktop-based vs. online-based computing), the new battlefront would be on the browser arena. Let’s not talk thin clients for now, since I think that’s too drastic.

I don’t see Internet-based OSes as being too mainstream too soon, especially given bandwidth considerations (particularly in my country), and given the marketing and lobbying power of the software giants (this means you, Microsoft). However, apps like ajaxWindows look like small steps in the right direction.

If you want to skip the long story and go straight to the fix, click here.

I’ve been a Windows guy for most of my computing life (I have used DOS, of course, then desQview on top of that, and then Windows 3.1 onwards). Then I got hooked on the Mac. Since then, my computing was split between Windows and OS X, with the Mac dominating sometimes, and PC the rest of the time. When I got my PC laptop back from the service center (with a lot of parts being replaced at the tail-end of warranty period) I shifted my preference toward PC. But I wanted something more, and Windows XP just didn’t cut it.

Sure, it was stable (as how I usually build up my machines), but after a year of every day wear and tear, XP was starting to slow down.

So I took the plunge and installed Linux on My Presario V2000.

It’s not actually my first time to explore Linux, as I may have mentioned before. I used to use Linux on my work machine back in the corporate world (cost saving measures, and because some tech companies tend to have this preference for open source). I tried running Ubuntu on all my laptops so far using the Live distribution CD (from 5.10, to 6.06 LTS, and now 7.04, a.k.a. “Feisty Fawn”). I even ran 6.06 on my PowerBook the first time I got it, since the pre-installed OS X release was 10.1, and it didn’t support some of my devices, such as the Cardbus wireless adapter. But that’s not the same as actually installing it and using it as your main OS.It’s only now that I’ve committed Linux to my laptop.

So here are some thoughts about blogging on Linux, and Linux in general.

A quick comparison

First off, a comparison among Windows, Linux and the Mac, from my perspective. That means someone who’s not really a hardcore hacker, and someone who’s not exactly an idiot, either. I’m an enthusiast who loves to explore, but I don’t have the time to do uber-serious tweaking. I just want something that works.

Windows XP – Seems to be a reliable and stable OS–that is, if you know how to secure yourself from malware. XP is solid as a rock as long as you prioritize security, meaning you’ve installed a good Antivirus (AVG recommended), anti-spyware (such as Spybot S & D), and you let auto-update do its thing. Of course, there’s the human aspect, so security doesn’t preclude your being victim to social engineering attacks.

Don’t even ask me about Vista (I’ve used it, but I’m not about to install Vista on any of my computers anytime soon).

OS X – It just effin’ works. I hope that’s enough said, but then again to the uninitiated, OS X was supposed to be designed from ground up by Apple to work 100% well with Apple hardware. So there should be no glitches, hardware incompatibilities, and other such difficulties you might expect with an OS of wide distribution like Windows.

The Mac is supposed to be simple and straightforward enough for a dummy user to use. But it also accommodates the more advanced users–it’s a UNIX-like operating system, after all. I’ve had my share of command-line hacking and tweaking via Terminal, myself. So basically, it’s a solid, secure UNIX-based operating system with great eye candy for a user interface. Actually, the GUI is not all eye-candy. There are usability and efficiency concerns, too. Like Expose is not only supposed to be a beautiful way of switching across windows. You can make your workflow more productive and efficient with it.

Linux – It’s the OS for enthusiasts. Frankly, I’ve tried a handful of distributions in my life (including Red Hat, Mandrake / Mandriva, Slackware, and even locally-developed Bayanihan Linux, and as well as several live CD distros like Damn Small Linux and Knoppix), but none have been desktop- and laptop-ready as Ubuntu.

By this, I mean Ubuntu is the only distro I’ve encountered so far that a user can just pop into his computer, install, and run without much trouble.

Of course, this is relative. Sure, you will still encounter some incompatibilities, and you still have to tweak configurations and install patches. But compared to other distros, this one is less of a hassle. Great thing with most distros is that as long as you’re online you could download or install updates straight off the web (like with apt-get). You’ll have to spend some time searching for fixes to problems or issues, though.

I could go on and on, but that would be too much rambling on my part (and something that I would rather not do, as you would read further on).

Blogging about Linux

Now the thing with using Linux is that you would inevitably have to get online to read up on blogs, forums, bug reports, and other such online resources. That’s because you will encounter some glitches one time or another. And these are usually fixed either by updating your OS, or applying fixes/patches, or fixing something that doesn’t work natively–meaning a hardware incompatibility or unsupported hardware/devices.

For instance, I was really amazed by how Ubuntu Feisty got to detect all my hardware, including the built-in Intel Pro 2200BG wireless card. On Windows, I had to download and install drivers from Intel before this worked (silly, eh?). Same with audio and video drivers. Ubuntu worked like a charm when I first ran it. Windows XP needed specific drivers for the Intel 915GM chipset for video and the sound, and these I had to download from HP and Intel.

So here’s an observation I have with bloggers who blog about Linux (I’m generalizing here). Most of the time, the posts are about:

* Comparison between their experiences with Linux and other OSes, like Windows.
* How-tos, hacks, and fixes, like how to make incompatible or unsupported devices work.
* Bashing other OSes, or telling the world how better off they are with Linux than other OSes.

Okay, I guess I’ve adequately met most of these criteria. Now on to the fix.

ACPI and Network Manager Fix

While Ubuntu was generally able to detect my hardware and use the appropriate drivers (where Windows failed to do automatically), I still faced several issues. One, whenever I woke up the laptop from sleep, my wireless networking will not always turn on. In fact, sometimes, Network Manager would just stop working, and I would have to restart the computer just to get WiFi and wired networking back on.

I added a few scripts that forced Network Manager off before sleeping and forced it on again during resume. Here are the files I added (based on this fix on the Ubuntu forums):

/etc/acpi/suspend.d/05-network-manager.sh

#!/bin/sh

dbus-send --system \
--dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager \
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager \
org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.sleep


And,

/etc/acpi/resume.d/91-network-manager.sh


#!/bin/sh
dbus-send --system \
--dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager \
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager \
org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.wake

I made sure to make the files executable by running:

sudo chmod +x /etc/acpi/resume.d/91-network-manager.sh

and

sudo chmod +x /etc/acpi/suspend.d/05-network-manager.sh

I also had to edit /etc/default/acpi-support to include the following line, so the Intel Pro 2200BG driver would be enabled upon resume after standby:

MODULES="ipw2200"

Then another problem I noticed was that while my laptop LCD blanked when idle, the backlight would turn on after a couple of minutes, and stay this way until the computer was put to sleep or when the screen was awaken . This was so, even when the LCD had actually blanked out. I try manually turning off the LCD backlight using the command

xset dpms force off

but I still experience the problem–backlight turns on after a few seconds. Same if I substitute “off” with “suspend” or “standby.”

I scoured the web for a week until I found a fix that worked. Apparently, battery events (such as charging, full charge, switching to and from AC adaptor power) reported by the system caused the backlight to turn on. Using the NoPM option prevents these events from being misinterpreted (okay, not really a technical explanation, but it’s something like that).

The fix involves adding this line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf to add the following line under Section “ServerLayout”:

Option "NoPM" "yes"

I’m actually in doubt as to what this exactly does, since the X.org manual just says the following about “NoPM” “Yes”:

Disables something to do with power management events. Default: PM enabled on platforms that support it.

How descriptive, eh? At least it says the option has something to do with power management events, some of which–namely the battery events like charge update and power supply changes–were causing the backlight to turn on.

If you’ve been experiencing the same problems, I hope these fixes could help. For reference, my machine is a Compaq Presario V2617TS, with a Celeron-M 750 processor, Intel 915GM chipset, and an added Intel Pro 220BG mini PCI wireless card, DVD-RW drive (all of which work with Ubuntu 7.04).