handyfloss

Simply a page with some interesting TeX tricks: volkerschatz.com.

La propaganda de MediaMarkt que hoy acompañaba al periódico me ha sorprendido bastante. Como se puede ver en la imágen (sacada de su página web), no solo ofrecen una PDA con Linux, sino que la palabra “Linux” aparece dentro de la flechita blanca que utilizan para resaltar los “puntos fuertes” del producto.

Clic para ver folleto completo

No quiere esto decir que se hayan vuelto “buenos”, pero hasta ahora (y como todos los vendedores) han estado vendidos al Enemigo Oscuro incondicionalmente. Ya sé que si venden gadgets con Linux o lo anuncian es simplemente por marketing: es una palabra de moda y vende más. Lo que me llena de alegría es precisamente que “Linux” sea una palabra que venda más y pueda ser utilizada por motivos de marketing. Eso significa que cada vez hay una base más amplia de consumidores que lo toman en cuenta, ¿no?

This YouTube video shows Compiz Fusion running on my work computer. It has a fairly decent CPU (P4 3.00GHz), but no “useless” things like sound cards or (more relevant for this issue) graphics card. The only thing it has is an Intel 82865G graphics chip integrated in the motherboard. We are talking about an integrated chip (not dedicated graphics card) released in May 2003.

Judge the performance for yourself (take into account that the actual performance is higher, since the recording program to make the video also uses up some resources):

Intro

Any GNU/Linux user ends up hearing, sooner or later, the Ultimate Argument(tm) from a Windows fanboy:

If Linux is so good, and is given away for free, how can Windows still be so prominent?

Ironically, many Windows users answer the question themselves, when explaining why they can’t make the switch to Linux:

• There are no games for Linux
• Photoshop or AutoCAD are vital for me, and they only work under Windows
• I fear some pieces of hardware won’t work under Linux
• The web page of my bank only displays correctly under IE
• My friends/colleagues/business partners share documents in MS Office formats, and I need to be compatible

The concept than embraces all the preceding points, and answers the rhetorical question above, is vendor lock-in. I will try to explain the concept with a humble tale I have used twice so far in comments to entries in Enrique Dans’s blog.

Tales of bicycles and cars

Imagine a country with no bicycles.

One day a guy comes up with the idea of making them, and starts to produce, and sell, bicycles that we shall call of type A. Being an empty market, the A-type bicycles quickly triumph, and the maker makes a lot of money.

But some time later, a second guy devises a better bike design (type B), and decides to produce and sell it. The price and the quality are better, so when people buy a new bike or replace an old one, they tend to buy bikes of type B. Soon enough, the market is dominated by the new, better, bicycle.

Now imagine a country with no cars.

One day a guy comes up with the idea of making cars, and starts to produce and sell cars of type A. As cars need petrol to run, A-type gas stations develop in parallel to car sales. Building gas stations is expensive, but sales are guaranteed, as everyone has or will have A-type cars, and they need A-type petrol: their growth is synergistic.

But some time later, a second guy devises a better car design (type B) and decides to produce and sell it. The price and the quality are better, BUT drivers can not buy B-type cars, because there is no B-type gas station. The problem is that, since noone has a B-type car, making B-type gas stations is doomed to bankrupt. So, no B-type cars are sold, because there are no B-type gas stations, and B-type gas stations will not be made until B-type cars are popular!

The result is a vendor lock-in.

Consequences

When a market (such as the one in the tale above) is dominated by vendor lock-ins, the producers benefited by the lock-in have little, if any, incentive to make better products. Their sales are guaranteed by the lock-in situation, not by their superior product in a fair market.

On the other hand, other producers will have an extremely hard time for competing, as their products will be almost unusable for the buyers.

The moral is that the lock-in situation is bad for either the potential users of the product locked-out (the B-type car above) and the locked-in one (the A-type car). Even if a consumer would never choose the locked-out product, the lack of competition will adversely affect the evolution of the product they do choose. The lock-in is bad for everyone: all consumers and all producers but the locker ones.

And this relates to Windows vs. Linux in what way?

In a really straightforward way. Microsoft, cunning as they are, have tried their best to get as many lock-ins on the software market as they can. Ironically, instead of abhorring this practice, most Windows users happily continue not only using, but even defending the product. I shudder at the simpleton comment that “freedom is not using Linux, but using Windows and Linux whenever you feel like it”. Literally taken, it is a very wise argument. But unfortunately the reality is not so simple: using Windows helps enforce a lock-in that keeps Linux out (while in this case the contrary is not true). You can not use Windows/Linux 50/50, because Windows asks you for monogamy.

The many lock-ins that MS has forced down the throats of the users, while the latter still claim them to be benefits of Windows include (as mentioned at the beginning):

• Proprietary communication protocols that will not work with any other OS. This includes modifications on the IE web browser, so that web pages had to be done for it, and then be incompatible with other browsers. Or the MSN protocol, that is kept as closed as possible, to make free clones of the MSN client as little compatible as possible.
• Proprietary file formats that will not be possible to modify with tools other than the “official” MS ones: WMV for video, DOC, XLS, PPT for office documents.
• As much “Windows-only” software as possible, including games. Making games for platforms other than Windows ensues the wrath of MS, something that game makers can not take lightly, since their sales depend on the game actually running under Windows.
• As much “Windows-only” hardware as possible. The first idea that someone gets about an OS is that it is the piece of software that interacts with the hardware. If so, it is astonishing why it is not MS the one incorporating the drivers in the OS, instead of the hardware makers (hardware != software) providing them. We have all grown accustomed to buying printers, mice, external CD/DVD/HDs… with a CD with the “Drivers for Windows 98” or some such. Why? Windows can not make the drivers out of the blue, true. But the hardware makers can just make the necessary data public, so anyone will be able to make drivers. If the maker keeps these specifications secret, they will simply not sell anything.

One argument I tend to hear from Windows users is that in Windows you can do as much as you can with Linux, and that the technical advantages of Linux only show up if you are really an utter geek. This is one of (I hope) a series of entries in my blog, illustrating some cases where this doesn’t hold: I took advantage of tools provided by Linux in a way that anyone could have, not just geeks.

The moral of it all is that Windows encourages a lack of choice and flexibility that makes users tend not to be creative, and think the cage Windows keeps them in is actually a shelter from the storm, when it’s not. They think that what can’t be done with Windows, needs not be done. I think otherwise…

Today I will try to provide an example in which hard links can be useful. Under Windows XP hard links can be created, using the fsutil utility, but only for NTFS file systems, and only by the Administrator account (and only from the command line). If you want to learn more about links and specially Windows links, read this interesting sell-shocked.org article.

The problem

I download a lot of music from Jamendo, using the BitTorrent p2p protocol. After having downloaded a given album, I tend to leave the torrent open, so that people can continue uploading from my computer.

However, I also want to have my music collection tidy and ordered, so I immediately organize the newly-dowloaded songs moving them to a neat directory tree I have, will all my music.

So, there is a conflict between keeping the files in the bittorrent download/upload dir, and properly organizing them. I don’t want to have to wait until I decide to stop sharing a file to organize it, and I don’t want to risk deleting the files if I remove them from the bittorrent client before saving them elsewhere. I could get over all this by simply making a copy of the files… but then I would be filling twice as much disk space, and with GBs of shared files, this is not neat at all.

The solution

What I do is hardlink all the downloaded files to their final location. If I download all torrents to /scratch/ktorrent/, a downloaded album will look like that:

% ls /scratch/ktorrent/album1/
song1.ogg song2.ogg song3.ogg [...]

If I want to save the album under my artist1 directory, I do the following:

% mkdir /scratch/music/artist1/album1
% ln /scratch/ktorrent/album1/* /scratch/music/artist1/album1/

This way all the “song*.ogg” files will appear to be in both /scratch/music/artist1/album1/ and /scratch/ktorrent/album1/ at the same time.

Benefits:

1 – I can keep sharing the files in /scratch/ktorrent/album1/, while listening to and/or manipulating the /scratch/music/artist1/album1/ files as if I had 2 copies of each.

2 – The total size is not affected. The hard links do not “occupy” space (only a few bytes each).

3 – I can delete the files in the shared directory without any fear. Only the “copy” in /scratch/ktorrent/ disappears, while the other “copy” in /scratch/music/artist1/album1/ becomes the only copy (just as if it had always been a “normal” file, and the only one).

Recall that all files are hard links. Normally a given file is the only hard link to a given piece of data in the hard disk, but there can be more “links” pointing to that data. When we remove files, we only remove the “link” pointing to the data.

This is a short HowTo for making unicode work in Linux, specifically in the command line. Yet more specifically, in the konsole terminal. This is useful if you want to be able to use characters like ‘ñ’ or accents like in ‘á’ and ‘ö’.

1 – Modify your shell locale variables

You need locale settings that support UTF (for example en_US.UTF-8). For that, you can add the following lines to .tcshrc or whatever script run at login:

setenv mylang   en_US.UTF-8
setenv LANG     $mylang
setenv LC_CTYPE $mylang
setenv LANGUAGE $mylang
setenv LC_ALL   $mylang

The ‘$mylang’ thing is just because I’m lazy, and I might want to change them all in the future, and I don’t want to type too much.

2 – Modify your global locales

I don’t know if this is needed, but it doesn’t hurt. In Debian:

% dpkg-reconfigure locales

and follow the instructions, using en_US.UTF-8 or something similar as default.

3 – Modify the encoding of Konsole

In the menus:

Settings->Encoding->Unicode (utf8)

Make this permanent with:

Settings->Save as Default

Then choose xterm and not linux as keyboard setting:

Settings->Keyboard->Xterm (XFree 4.x.x)

You can make this permanent in the Session tab of:

Settings->Configure Konsole

namely inserting “xterm” in the box labeled “$TERM”.

If you follow these instructions, you will be able to introduce non-ASCII text in the terminal, and use non-ASCII filenames without problem.

I have been using Subversion for a while (after having it recommended by my colleague Thomas), and I must confess I’m a happy user. Subversion is a revision control system, designed to supersede, and replace, the (maybe) more popular CVS.

Subversion (svn) is good for much more than collaborative development, as a single person can keep track of versions of her own documents/scripts/whatever. Usually you only want the last version of whatever you work with. But whenever you find yourself saving a version somewhere else, to keep it like that even if further changes are made to the “current” version, svn is your friend. Whenever you wish you had saved an earlier version of the stuff you’re working with, you’re missing (know it or not) svn.

I came across a blog post [es] talking about Windows 7, the planned sucessor of the current Windows Vista. The same can be found elsewhere, e.g. in Ars Technica.

The article summarized some features that Windows users would like to see in W7. You can also see a picture with the whole W7 wishlist. What struck me was that, although the Redmond giant tried its best to copy every single innovation from free software, they still missed important points that users value enough to make a wishlist out of them.

Some points in the list are new and exciting. Some others are everyday things for us free software users, and it’s so amazing that Windows still does not include them:

1. Request for an integrated font manager
   One of the problems of proprietary software: the pieces each programs uses (including fonts) are property of the maker, so sharing is largely hindered. In Debian we have things like Defoma, and font management is quite lean in any distro, anyway.
2. Explorer toggle button to quickly show/hide hidden files or system files
   Files starting with a dot are hidden in Linux. All file managers I know of have the hability to show/hide them with a click or a shortcut (Ctrl-H in Thunar and Nautilus, no default but configurable shortcut for Konqueror).
3. Network/Internet bandwidth monitor
   Most, if not all, docks/taskbars in FLOSS desktops (Xfce, GNOME, KDE…) have a widget for that.
4. DirectX update on Windows Update/Microsoft Update
   I use Debian, and it manages the installed software with APT (other distros have other systems). With it, I run “aptitude update” and it searches the online repositories for the last version of all the packages that exist in them. When I do “aptitude safe-upgrade“, it automatically upgrades all the packages for which there are updates, and notifies me if some upgrade requieres to install a new package (without upgrading it until I agree to install that new package). And it’s been like this for years.

5. Infinite desktop, virtual desktop idea
   Although it probably refers to zooming interfaces, Linux has had the idea of virtual desktops for years.
6. Profile data: Move locations of all user folders and data to another location
   This is trivial in Linux since the dawn of its times.

7. Option to “Reopen Closed tabs” in IE
   Firefox has this option through add-ons like Tab Mix plus. Not only that, but many other things are possible, like: periodic reloading of some or all tabs, closing all tabs but the current one, duplicating tabs (along with all their history), freezing tabs (so they can not be accidentally closed or moved away from), change the name of the tab…
8. Auto clean of Temp folders
   Temporary file management in Linux is flawless. I never saw a tmp location full because the system forgot to clean it.
9. Provide Manual Duplex Printing in Windows Pring Dialog
   It is really lame to need to ask the maker of a big, monolithic, OS for stupid changes like that. The printing dialogs should be made by the desktop environment (a small part of the OS), or the application, and it should communicate with the printing server (another smaaaaall part of the OS). Details like that one should be fixed by updates in only one/some small packages related to the desktop environment.
10. IE should have a close button on each tab
    See point 7.
11. Disk Manager needs to have the ability to expand partitions
    Tools like GParted make partition management a breeze. In Windows, you need commercial third party tools for that. Tough luck.
12. Image (ISO, BIN) support in Windows
    What? In Windows you can not mount ISO images as if they were actual filesystems? In Linux, you sure can.
13. Family license
    It must suck to buy a copy of the OS and being able to use it only in one PC. With Linux and free software, you obviously don’t have this problem, and you don’t need to go crying to your dealer for a more mercyfull license
14. No dialog should take keyboard focus away from what you are doing
    With all serious desktop environments, you can configure this behaviour, as well as if focus follows mouse, or if you have to click on a window to make it active and so on.
15. Patch operating system without having to reboot
    With Linux, you only need to reboot if you install a new kernel (you can’t use a different kerner without rebooting). For everything else, you don’t need to.
16. Add folder size to data displayed by Windows Explorer
    Wow, it must suck being stuck with a single choice for a file manager (or any other task), and not being able to configure stupid things like that to your liking. Another con of Windows, I guess.
17. Live CD or DVD to boot from to recover from a crash or virus that would allow to transfer files
    But there is a tool for that task on Windows! It is called “Linux Live CD”, and many distros have it. I have read that it is pretty popular among some Windows users: when their system is utterly destroyed, a Linux Live CD can save the precious data in their disks.
18. Disallow removable (USB/Firewire) drives to default to next available drive letter when the letter is already used by other network drives
    I know the issue of wanting to have permanent names for given devices, no matter what. The solution is called udev.
19. Windows Mail should be minimizable to the system tray
    I use KMail and it is. Probably Thunderbird is, too. By the way… ever guess how similar to the former two Windows Mail is (by the looks in the Wikipedia article)?
20. Command Prompt should be improved
    Hehehe. I have no words.
21. Integrated Anti-Virus
    What is a virus? Please explain, I’m an ignorant Debian user!
22. More desktop themes should be offered in the default installation of the next version of Windows
    I thought Windows users wanted consistency and simplicity, and everything to look the way uncle Microsoft wanted. In Linux, we have soooo much to choose from. You doubt it? Take a look at KDE-look.org, or Xfce-look.org.
23. IE direct download – do not download to temp folder
    With any free browser (e.g. Firefox) you can choose the default dir for the downloads, and you can choose for each download where to put it (if you don’t want it in the default folder). Is it not like that in IE?

Maybe some slipped through, but I’m too tired to be more throughout.

Actually it is two applications I want to highlight: Filelight and Baobab. Both are disk usage analyzers, the former for KDE (see Figure 1), and the latter for GNOME (see Figure 2).

Figure 1: Filelight (click to enlarge)

Figure 2: Baobab (click to enlarge)

A disk usage analyzer is a tool to conveniently find out how much hard disk space different directories and files are taking up. It combines the effectiveness of the Unix du (if you never used it, stop here and do a man du in your command line immediately. If you do not know what that “command line” thingie is, whip yourself in the back repeatedly), with the convenience of a visual clue of how large directories are compared to one another.

From the two DUAs I mention, I largely prefer Filelight, for some reasons:

1 – When I want to open a terminal in a location chosen from the DUA window, with Baobab it’s two clicks away: “Open file manager here”, then “Open terminal here” in the file manager. With Filelight, it’s just one click: “open terminal here”. Plus Filelight has a handy locator bar at the top, showing the full path to the current location (useful to copy-and-paste with the mouse to an already open terminal).

2 – Filelight shows directories up to individual files. Baobab just dirs.

3 – With Filelight, navigation up and down (and back and forward) in the dir tree is a breeze (web browser-style). With Baobab, it’s a pain.

4 – The presentation is similar, but the one of Filelight is slightly nicer, with more info when the mouse is hovered over the graph.

Probably Baobab can be easily made to behave like Filelight. I just tried them both, and liked the latter better on first sight. I tried Baobab first, and I found some things lacking. When I tried Filelight, five minutes later, I just thought “These are the details Baobab was missing!”

Sin más razón que alimentar mi ego, aquí copio y pego un par de comentarios míos en una noticia de Menéame (8 razones de un usuario de Windows para no cambiar a Linux).

Me gustan sobremanera los comentarios #19 y #20. Analizadlos con un poco de rigor: los Windowseros “talibanes” (y los Linuxeros críticos) critican Linux porque falta software comercial (juegos y otros) y drivers. Los Linuxeros “talibanes” (y los Windowseros críticos) critican Windows porque se cuelga, porque no es seguro, etc.

Si os dáis cuenta, las ventajas de Windows sobre Linux son ajenas a Windows, mientras las ventajas de Linux son intrínsecas a este. Es decir: mañana las compañías de soft podrían decidir sacar todos sus productos solo para Linux, y la ventaja de Windows se vendría abajo. Al revés, no hay manera en el mundo de que la ventaja de Linux se elimine, a menos que alguien reescriba Windows de cero y lo convierta en UNIX 2.0 o algo así.

Yo alucino con los argumentos pro-Windows de la gente. Tomemos uno muy recurrente en este hilo: MSN. La gente dice que no pueden/quieren dejar de usar Windows porque (entre otros motivos), quieren usar el cliente MSN. El problema no es la calidad técnica de dicho cliente o de su protocolo, porque hay otros protocolos y clientes mejores (eso nadie lo duda). El problema es que MSN tiene un protocolo privativo, que MS puede cambiar como y cuando quiera, y al ser una aplicación popular, la gente se ve obligada o bien a usar clones que por fuerza andarán más “atrás” en compatibilidad y cualidades que el cliente nativo, o a usar el cliente nativo en el OS nativo.

Reflexionemos: estamos diciendo que hay un protocolo inferior que nos obliga a usar un cliente concreto, y este a su vez nos obliga a usar un SO concreto. ¿Y esto es una razón a favor de usarlo? Para mí es una razón en contra de usarlo. ¿Qué garantía de calidad se puede exigir a un productor en un mercado cautivo? ¿Cómo puedo ser tan necio de regalar mi libertad a cierto proveedor, y usar el único producto del mercado que me exige exclusividad, cuando hay otros productos mejores, y que no me la exigen? Si hay un(os) protocolo(s) de mensajería que es(son) abierto(s), y tiene(n) mil clientes diferentes (por lo que puedo elegir cliente) de los cuales muchos son multiplataforma (y por tanto puedo elegir el SO), ¿no es esto, precisamente, una razón poderosa para usar ese protocolo, y no MSN?

Vivimos en un mundo de borregos.