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Full pg.indd 1 22/01/2013 10:01Gareth Halfacree
has been breaking, fi xing, tinkering and voiding warranties on electrical items for many years, without once receiving a fatal electric shock. This issue Gareth brings us his thoughts on the latest mini-PC to hit the market - the CuBox. See what he thinks on pages 68-69.Kunal Deo
is a veteran open source developer leading multiple open source projects. He is also a KDE developer and has contributed to many projects including KDE-Solaris, Belenix and Openmoko. This month Kunal shows us how advanced users and developers can leverage Wine (pages 56-59).Liam Fraser
is the creator of the hugely popularRaspberryPiTutorials YouTube
series and is a Linux server admin for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. This month Liam delves into the dark art of VPN to show how the Raspberry Pi can be used to create a viable virtual private network. Follow along on pages 52-55.
Joey Bernard
has been using Linux at home for almost 20 years and he’s now getting paid for it as a computational research consultant with ACEnet. This month Joey shows us how to create a family tree using open source software in his geneology with Linux tutorial (pages 32-35).Rory MacDonald
is our resident open source reporter with a keen nose for a story and a good eye for detail. In the news starting on page 6 this month, Rory brings us up to speed on the latest developments in mobile technology and discovers that CES has lost out on this year’s big announcements to MWC.Rob Zwetsloot
studied aerospace engineering at university, using Python to model complex simulations in class while configuring Linux HTPCs at home. In this issue Rob reveals Canonical’s latest plans with his special news report on the Ubuntu Phone (pages 6-7) among other things.Yo
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Welcome
to issue 123 of Linux User & Developer
Welcome to the latest edition of Linux User &
Developer, the UK and America’s favourite
high-end open source and Linux magazine.
This issue we’re celebrating the fi rst birthday of
the Raspberry Pi in grand style with two very special
features and another excellent ‘how-to’ article from
the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s own Liam Fraser.
Our fi rst special feature required us to gather together
three key members of the Raspberry Pi Foundation for tea,
a slice of birthday cake and a whole host of questions. In our
exclusive interview starting on page 46, Eben, Liz and Pete
take time out of their packed schedules to tell us all about the
fi rst year on sale and what we can expect in the future.
Our second birthday treat is a huge 12-page exposé of the
very best projects Raspberry Pi enthusiasts have created. It’s
quite incredible what can be achieved with a £25 computer and
a bit of imagination – see pages 18-29 to fi nd our favourites.
We’ve already started compiling our top-picks for the
next ten amazing Raspberry Pi projects, so if you’ve got an
amazing idea and have been waiting for an excuse to put it
into action, get in touch with the magazine and let us know!
Enjoy the issue…
Russell Barnes, Editor
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The Ubuntu Phone revealed
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Contents
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4
06
News
The biggest stories from the open source world
12
Opinions
The latest from your favourite free software columnists
94
Letters
Your views on the magazine and the open source scene
Open
Source
96
Cover disc
The very latest distros on one DVD
On your free disc
Fuduntu 2013.1
Knoppix 7.0.5
Parted Magic
Fedora 18
Tutorials
32
Genealogy with Gramps
Track your family history with open source
36
Install Cinnamon on your distro
Add this exciting new desktop experience to your favourite distribution
40
Protect your network with Snort
Spot attacks and protect your network
Developer tutorials
Features
18
10 amazing Raspberry
Pi projects
Incredible things you can do with a $25 computer!
46
RasPi Foundation
exclusive interview
We celebrate the occasion with Eben, Pete and Liz
60
Kolab: David & Goliath
Can Kolab beat the likes of Microsoft at their own game?
72
Live distro super-test
Four of the best fi ght it out
86
Q & A
Your problems solved!
F
EAT
UR
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46
Celebrating the life of Pi
We sit down with three core members of the Raspberry Pi Foundation to celebrate the first year on sale and to find out what 2013 has in store
52
Create a VPN with the RasPi
Master the mysterious art of virtual private networks with the aid of the Raspberry Pi
56
Wine for Developers
Build and run Windows apps sans Microsoft Tax
Reviews
18. Revealed:
Incredible things
you can do with
the $25 PC
10 amazing
Raspberry
Pi projects
Subscribe
today!
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Save at least 30% on the shop price. US customers can subscribe via page 84
66
HTC One X+
HTC updates its flagship smartphone for 2013
68
SolidRun CuBox
Another tiny-PC contender
70
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2
The market leader takes another shot at budget handsets
72
Live distro super-test
The latest live distros fight to earn space on your USB stick
78
Fedora 18
The Spherical Cow has finally entered the field!
80
Pear Linux 6.1
We put the squeeze on the latest Pear build to see if it’s ripe
82
Fuduntu 2013.1
A fun and functional desktop for everyday use
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6
the Android Board Support Package, effectively allowing the OS to run on any current Android hardware with very little modifi cations needed. To begin with, entry-level phones for the OS will need mid- to high-range specs, with a dual-core CPU and plenty of RAM recommended. However, within a few years the plan is to optimise it for even the most low-powered phones. At the highest end, Ubuntu for Phones also includes the full Ubuntu desktop, accessible via docking similar to the Ubuntu for Android implementation; however, it’s recommended to use a quad-core CPU for this.
Shuttleworth was keen to show off the way Ubuntu for Phones works, with its fairly unique interface based on the phone’s edges. Swiping
On the fi rst working day of the year, Linux User & Developer attended a conference at Canonical HQ, where a top secret Ubuntu product would be shown off for the very fi rst time. The rumour mill had been churning over
the Christmas holiday period as to what we’d be seeing, and needless to say when Mark Shuttleworth revealed the Ubuntu Phone, it was not totally unexpected. Taking a special Galaxy Nexus from his jacket pocket loaded with Ubuntu for Phones, he then proceeded to give us a fi rst look at what is essentially a full Ubuntu OS for smartphones.
Although the Galaxy Nexus is test hardware for now, it’s indicative of the functionality Ubuntu for Phones will have. It currently uses
Ubuntu for Android evolves
into a full phone OS
SUPERPHONE INCLUDING DESKTOP For a high-end smartphone that docks as a portable desktop, you’ll need:
CPU: Quad-core Cortex-A9 or Intel Atom
Memory: 1GB
Internal fl ash storage: 32GB
Multi-touch: Yes
Desktop: Yes
Swipe
Each edge of the phone has a specifi c use. Here’s what happens when you swipe from the top…
All the icons on the top bar represent accessible system settings, such as Wi-Fi, mobile network, battery settings and even message notifi cations. All you need to do is touch the one you wish to access.
Pull down the bar with your fi nger part of the way to get a description of what the icon means. You can swipe left to right from here to move between the different icons on the bar if you need to.
When you want to access the particular setting or notifi cation, pull down the rest of the bar right over the running app, similar to Android notifi cations. This allows you to change system settings without going to a whole different menu.
THE SPECS
ENTRY-LEVEL SMARTPHONE For a solid competitor to today’s smartphone, you’ll need:CPU: Dual-core Cortex-A9
Memory: 512MB-1GB
Internal fl ash storage: 4-8GB
Multi-touch: Yes
Desktop: No
■ High-end phones like the Galaxy S III can run the desktop ■ The Galaxy S II meets
the minimum specs
The Ubuntu phone
06
News
|
12
Opinion
|
94
Letters
■ Mark Shuttleworth believes in the vision of one OS for all your devices
ANDROID
Ubuntu for Android
What’s going on with the Android dock?
Canonical released Ubuntu for Android to little fanfare late last year – and it plans to support it outside of Ubuntu for Phones. Making its debut last year at CES 2012, the original image we saw allowed you to access the Android phone through an emulation window – this has now been mostly removed, as Ubuntu for Android can access the full telephony stack of more Android phones now, allowing you to call and text from a dedicated
app on the desktop. It still contains the ability to retrieve data from the Android portion, such as contacts, documents and photos. There is unfortunately no phone or network provider that uses it just yet – however, 2011 and 2012 saw a few failures in terms of phone-powered desktop experiences, and we’re only just seeing the advent of smartphones powerful enough to provide a seamless experience.
from the left edge brings out the Unity app bar, where you can place some of your favourite apps and then also access the full home screen. Swiping from the right edge allows you to go back through all the apps you’ve been using, and swiping up from the bottom brings up the app-specifi c controls. Swiping down from the top allows quick access to system settings for time, volume, networking, messaging, battery etc – each can be modifi ed without leaving the current screen, as well.
On the Galaxy Nexus the interface was fairly slick and responsive. The edge gestures worked well – although trying to select items in the corners was sometimes a little tricky, but it is still in development.
App development wise, Canonical says it has been working closely with some of the major smartphone app developers for native Twitter, Facebook and other popular apps to be ready for Ubuntu phones. Shuttleworth reiterated that the OS was more open than any other current mobile OS, and that development of apps and tools would be much easier using the Ubuntu framework.
There are no current release plans for an Ubuntu Phone, and while talks are underway with networks and manufacturers, no deal has been reached as of yet. Images for Ubuntu for Phones are going to be released to the public sometime in February, though, so those with decent Android phones will be able to give it a try.
v2
Lean smartphones
Estimated OS stretch by 2016
<
>
v3 v4
Mid-range smartphones High-end smartphones Superphones
allowing you to call and text from a dedicated seamless experience.
from the left edge brings out the Unity app bar, where you can place some of your favourite apps and then also access the full home screen. Swiping from the right edge allows you to go back through all the apps you’ve been using, and swiping up from the bottom brings up the app-specifi c controls. Swiping down from the top allows quick access to system settings for time, volume, networking, messaging, battery etc – each can be modifi ed
The latest in the Linux community
News
OPEN SOURCE
When it comes to new, market-ready smartphones and mobile devices, this year’s CES was widely seen as a disappointment.
What the trade show has revealed, however, is a serious selection of the latest mobile processors that will be found at the core of the devices we eventually see at Mobile World Congress (MWC) on 25-28 February.
Nvidia announced its successor to the Tegra 3 chipset, used in 2012’s most successful high-end Android devices, such as the Nexus 7. Billed as the world’s fastest mobile processor, the
www.
linuxuser.co.uk
8
■The Tizen OS is gaining momentum ■The Tegra 4 offers blistering mobile power
New processors reveal what we can expect
Ubuntu Mobile is not the only new game in town –
Tizen looks set to grow in 2013
pioneers the LiMo Foundation. The project took the groups’ existing investments into MeeGo Linux and several other mobile Linux variants and redeveloped these into an even more sophisticated and up-to-date mobile platform. With a heavy focus on open HTML5-based applications, Tizen has been making signifi cant inroads into both the IVI and smartphone markets. However, Samsung is the fi rst major manufacturer to confi rm plans for smartphones built on the new platform.
With Samsung’s current smartphone success built on Android, it is no secret that the company has been looking for alternatives that would allow it to hedge its bets against overdependence on the Google-dominated platform. Google’s decision to buy Motorola
While the loudest noise on the Linux front came from the new Ubuntu Mobile distro (see page 6), it was not the only signifi cant mobile Linux development at CES.
Samsung let slip that 2013 will see it launching a new range of phones built on the Tizen OS. Tizen was developed by the Linux Foundation and mobile Linux
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last year will almost certainly have added extra impetus to Samsung’s search.
Samsung, a key founder member of the former LiMo Foundation, had been working on Bada, its own mobile Linux distro. But with limited uptake of Bada, much of this work was subsequently rolled into Tizen.
The vision of Tizen – to provide a Google-free, unifi ed platform running across phones, cars, home entertainment and broader smart devices – is compelling. With other Tizen Foundation members including Intel, Huawei, NEC, Panasonic and some of the world’s largest mobile carriers, this vision is looking increasingly viable as a new force across the consumer electronics industry.
Offi cial details of Samsung’s Tizen-phone plans have yet to emerge. However, early reports on the Japanese Daily Yomiuri Online news site were confi rmed at CES, when a Samsung spokesperson told CNET reporters that the company plans “to unveil competitive Tizen devices within this year.”
Mobile World Congress
steals device launches
TIZEN
Tizen set to rival Android
Tegra 4 combines an eye-watering 72 custom GeForce GPU cores (six times the graphics processing power of the Tegra 3) with the fi rst quad-core implementation of ARM’s newest Cortex A-15 CPU and a second-generation battery saver core for less intensive tasks.
As with most of the new high-end chips announced at the show, the Tegra 4 can deliver 4K Ultra HD video. However, 4G mobile support requires an additional chipset. Importantly, given the criticisms of the Tegra 3, Nvidia also claimed that the new processor consumes up to 45 per cent less power than its predecessor “in common use cases” and enables up to 14 hours of HD video playback on phones.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm announced its quad-core Snapdragon 800, with a 75 per cent performance increase on the S4 Pro. It will be based on four of Qualcomm’s own Krait 400 CPU cores, which can be clocked at up to 2.3GHz each. Graphics will be delivered by an Adreno 330 GPU, which doubles the power available on
the S4 Pro. The Snapdragon 800 also supports 4G on the chip, which will reduce costs for device manufacturers. The inclusion of a dual image signal processor to allow the capture of 3D images and standard resolution video also gives the Snapdragon an added edge.
Although many of Samsung’s 2012 phones featured Qualcomm processors, the fi rm has been working on updating its own Exynos range. The Exynos 5 ‘Octa’ unveiled at CES offers an eight-core design, based on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. It uses four low-power ARM Cortex-A7 cores for less CPU-intensive tasks and four Cortex-A15s to handle heavy loads. The intention is to reduce power consumption, with Samsung claiming a 70 per cent increase in battery life for the dual-core Exynos 5.
Finally, Intel, whose Atom x86-based chips have been rivalling ARM in 2012, announced that devices based on the ‘Bay-Trail’ quad-core Atom chip are scheduled to hit the shelves towards the end of 2013.
■A new Snapdragon
Linux
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Android Magazine –
issue 22
»www.littlegreenrobot.co.ukAndroid Magazine, our best and only print source for everything Android, is coming out today. Check out what’s in store over on page 64.
SCALE 11x
» Hilton Los Angeles International Airport, Los Angeles, CA
» USA
» www.socallinuxexpo.org/ scale11x
The 11th annual Southern California Linux Expo is the fi rst Linux and open source software expo this year in North America, and will be host to more than 100 exhibitors and 70 speakers.
Linux User &
Developer – issue 124
»www.linuxuser.co.ukThe next issue of Linux User will be out today – fi nd out what will be in issue 124 on page 98…
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Online retail giant Amazon is currently putting different variants of the Google Chromebook at the top of its hourly updated listings of the bestselling notebooks in the UK and the US. At the time of writing, Samsung’s 11-inch
offering is in the number-one position for US sales, while the Acer C7 Chromebook is sitting
Xi3, a fi rm formed as a Kickstarter project to create small, modular Linux-based PCs, caused a stir at CES amid rumours that the company’s new Piston PC was, in fact, a pre-release version of Valve’s upcoming Steambox gaming console. Xi3 has taken investment
from Valve and executives said they have been
PyCon 2013
» Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA
» USA
» https://us.pycon.org/2013/
The largest annual gathering for the Python community, PyCon is a diverse conference dedicated to providing an enjoyable experience for everyone who attends. Tutorials, talks, summits and open spaces are available at the conference.
14 M
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Samsung model top in US
Based on Xi3 Piston PC
The latest in the Linux community
News
OPEN SOURCE
HARDWARE
HARDWARE
Google has tasked Lior Ron, ex-chief technology offi cer of the Israeli Army Intelligence, to head up the team to develop a new Android super-phone, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal. The
‘X-Phone’ is part of a plan for Google to increase the profi tability of its Motorola Mobility unit and claw back a share of the smartphone hardware market now dominated by Samsung and Apple.
When Google fi rst bought Motorola Mobility last year, the company carefully stage-managed the deal. The focus was placed on
Ex-CTO of Israeli military to head up development
Motorola’s patent portfolio as the chief reason for the acquisition. Google initially played down any talk of the company creating its own in-house, end-to-end, Android ecosystem.
“Google remains fi rmly committed to Android as an open platform and a vibrant open source community,” Andy Rubin, Google’s senior vice president of mobile, commented at the time. “We will continue to work with all of our valued Android partners to develop and distribute innovative Android-powered devices.”
Since then, Google has avoided any sign of favouritism to Motorola. The ‘Nexus’ branded contract to premiere the latest version of Android has been awarded to a string of other hardware vendors in the Android ecosystem. However, the appointment of a heavy hitter such as Ron to head up its in-house hardware development will undoubtedly strike fear into the hearts of an already paranoid Android hardware community.
■X marks the spot for a new Google phone
MOBILE
Google plans new ‘X-Phone’
Chromebook
tops the charts
Steambox is
confirmed
■Samsung’s 11-inch Chromebook
■Piston PC
at the number-two spot in the UK. Although the Windows 8-powered Acer Aspire E1 currently holds the top spot in the UK, Windows has been knocked into third place by the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro in the US. It certainly seems that Microsoft’s one-time dominance of computer hardware is now in question.
working together to optimise the Piston PC for running Steam on Linux. However, Valve founder Gabe Newell fi nally laid all speculation to rest after the show. “We’ll come out with our own,” Newell told reporters at The Verge, “and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves.”
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Linux, customised with the project’s own Sugar user interface.
The Tablet’s new XO Learning interface is an Android-compatible software suite for child-centric learning. The interface was developed by OLPC together with Yves Behar’s fuseproject and Common Sense Media, a non-profit organisation dedicated to helping parents and teachers make informed decisions about media. “OLPCA and Common Sense Media share the same vision of a world in which all kids have access to the limitless learning opportunities that technology provides,” OLPC commented in the official launch announcement. “Every child has dreams, and XO Learning directs the child’s passion, creativity and energy for these dreams into a new user interface that has 12 dreams. Such dreams include ‘I want to be’ an artist, a musician and a scientist. Each dream features a rich learning experience and applications, books, games and videos that allow children ages 3 to 12 to naturally explore their dreams and learn at the same time.”
XO Learning provides a full range of parental controls and user IDs for up to three children, plus a dashboard where the child or the parent can review usage, types of content and the skills
Less cutting-edge, more at the cuddly edge of Linux, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) association was also showing off its latest wares at this year’s CES. OLPC suffered a bumpy ride into the world of tablets, shelving initial plans for the XO 3.0 device. However, with
the new XO Learning Tablet and XO 4.0 Touch, the project seems to have found its feed again.
The XO 4.0 Touch is the fourth generation of OLPC’s now iconic green and white notebook aimed at providing a modern education to children through a rugged, low-cost, connected computing device. It features a robust swiveling Neonode touch screen to convert between notebook and tablet mode. The processor has been updated to a 1GHz Marvell Armada multicore ARM processor with hybrid-SMP technology. Memory and storage have been left as flexible as possible, with the option for either 1 or 2GB of DDR RAM, 4 or 8GB of drop-proof NAND flash storage, internal microSD and a full-size external SD slot.
The XO 4.0 is designed with a focus on power efficiency in order to cope with the erratic electricity supplies in the developing nations where OLPC predominantly operates. However, running a customised version of Fedora 18, the device still delivers sterling performance and the new touch screen is usable in an unlit classroom or in direct sunlight.
OLPC’s first pure touch device, the XO Learning Tablet, offers even more poke with a dual-core 1.6GHz processor and 1GB of RAM (for full specs, see below right). The XO Learning Tablet also marks a change for OLPC, as it is the project’s first Android-based device. To date, the XO notebook range has run Fedora
Two new low-cost learning devices, both with touch screens
hardwarE
the child is developing. Current content partners include Sesame Street, MyCityWay and Little Pim, and OLPCA is currently in negotiations with many more of the world’s leading companies to provide unique experiences in time for the product’s expected launch in May 2013.
In contrast to the traditional XO models which were always hard to come by in the Western world, the XO Learning Tablet is intended for truly global use and is likely to be made available through high-street retailers. We will keep you updated.
OLPC previews new touch devices at CES
nThe OLPC XO 4.0 Touch
nOLPC XO Learning Tablet – scheduled for widespread release in May 2013
display size 7.0-inch
Processor 1.6Ghz dual-core
raM 1GB
wi-Fi SDIO 802.11b/g/n
Screen resolution 1024x600 pixels
Free apps 100 preloaded
Parental control Built-in
Storage 8GB
Battery 3,800mA
I/O microSD, HDMI, micro-USB, stereo headset
Cameras 1.3MP 720 HD (front); 2.0MP (rear)
Vivitar licensed XO Learning Tablet
Technical specs
The latest in the Linux community
News
OPEN SOURCE
Online fi lm and TV provider Netfl ix aims to strengthen its position in the open source community by holding an Open House event at its Los Gatos offi ces in California. In the
past year, the fi rm has released 16 of its core infrastructure components as open source projects on GitHub (http://netfl ix.github.com). These releases have included its Asgard cloud management tool, Eureka load balancing software and the Simian Monkey suite of cloud network and cloud infrastructure testing tools.
The Netfl ixOSS Open House event will provide a showcase for the company’s existing GitHub releases and the opportunity to “deep-dive” into
the technologies with their core developers. In addition, Netfl ix is promising more new releases. Despite several requests to the event’s organisers, we have yet to determine if the Open House will be streamed live (given Netfl ix’s business, we’d expect it to be). However, it will almost certainly develop interest and activity around some of the more useful open source technologies to have been released last year.
It is also worth noting that Netfl ix is clearly not releasing new tools and holding this type of event simply to be friendly to its new open source community: the company is clearly looking to attract new developer talent.
In case you missed it, Linux User magazine is available to read on any digital format thanks to the excellent digital editions super-site, www.greatdigitalmags.com.
The site brings together Linux User’s offerings on Zinio and Newsstand, allowing you to enjoy your favourite mag on your Mac, PC, iPad, Android and a host of other devices.
There are some incredible subscription incentives up for grabs too – not just for Linux User but for all Imagine Publishing titles.
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■ Netflix is wooing open source developers
Open source developers invited to showcase event
NetflixOSS Open House
promises new insights
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Your source of Linux news and views
OpenSource
Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the
Linux kernel community, including the closing of the
development ‘merge window’ for the 3.8 kernel
Jon Masters
THE KERNEL COLUMN
Linus Torvalds closed the 3.8 kernel ‘merge window’ (the period of time during which disruptive changes are allowed into the kernel, and are then stabilised before fi nal release) just prior to the Christmas holiday.
In his announcement of the fi rst 3.8 ‘release candidate’, Linus said, “The longest night of the year is upon us (and by ‘us’ I mean mainly people in the same time zone and hemisphere as I am. Because I’m too self-centred to care about anybody else), and what better thing to do than get yourself some nice mulled wine, sit back, relax, and play with the most recent RC kernel?” Some readers might question whether this is truly the most relaxing course of action, but nobody can fault Linus for trying to motivate developers to spend some holiday time testing code.
The 3.8 merge window was, according to Linus himself, the biggest merge window in the 3.x kernel series so far (in terms of raw number of changes going into the kernel codebase). It will contain a number of new and exciting features. Two that interest this author in particular are the support for transparent huge zero pages, and newly added support for the AllWinner ‘A1X’ series of system-on-chip ARM processors. The latter are very popular, inexpensive and more capable (in terms of
compute) bigger brothers than the chip used in the Raspberry Pi, while being used in systems of similar price. It is possible, for example, to purchase one of the popular ‘MK802’ plug-in TV dongles built using the AllWinner A10 CPU for $35. That yields a full ARM-based Linux system running at 1GHz, with 1GB RAM, USB, Wi-Fi, an SD card interface and full HDMI output. Even more capable systems of a similar price point are appearing all the time, so the A1X will remain popular.
Transparent zero huge pages are another 3.8 kernel feature that will be popular with users, although if the feature is working correctly, users who use it may never realise that it is even there. Huge pages are a hardware feature of modern CPUs in which the built-in CPU virtual memory translation caches, known as TLBs (translation lookaside buffers), support both the conventional smallest unit of virtual memory page size of (typically) 4KB, as well as a much larger ‘huge’ page of 2 or 4MB or more. This is useful because the CPU has only a limited number of these much faster TLB caches that it uses to store previously looked-up (translated) virtual memory mappings from addresses used by applications to those of the underlying hardware. By using huge pages, the hardware can keep more translations cached and improve performance. But, there is a performance catch to using huge pages.
Historically, huge pages had to be manually assigned, but support for ‘transparent’ or automatic huge pages was added to the kernel some time ago and has been present in distributions for a number of releases. With the introduction of transparent huge pages came the unintended side effect that some systems would actually waste memory in the process. This is because when allocating conventional
Jon Masters
is a Linux kernel hacker who has been working on Linux for almost 17 years, since he fi rst attended university at the age of 13. Jon lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and works for a large enterprise Linux vendor. He publishes a daily Linux kernel mailing list summary atkernelpodcast.org
The kernel column – Jon Masters
Opinion
open source
pages, the kernel has the option of using the ‘zero’ page, a special page that is read-only and full of zeros. When applications attempt to write to it, a process known as copy-on-write actually allocates and sets up the real page entries in the kernel. The transparent huge pages code did not have a similar concept, so applications mapping large amounts of contiguous memory might have a large number of huge pages filled with zeros allocated that were never used. Linux 3.8 addresses this situation by sharing a ‘huge’ zero page, similar to the regular zero page.
During the merge window, some changes to the Video4Linux (V4L) code were merged that broke a user-space application (PulseAudio) by altering the return codes passed by a system call. Linus got particularly angry about this, telling the kernel developer concerned to “SHUT THE F*** UP!” when responding to protests that the user-space application was doing something wrong. Linus reminded everyone of longstanding policy by saying, “[If] a change results in user programs breaking, it’s a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand?” Strong responses aside, there is established history of never questioning even the weirdest of application behaviour, always endeavouring to retain compatibility. The patch in question was reverted by Linus and an alternative reworked.
With the merge window closed, development has returned to a combination of new patch development and refinement of the existing 3.8 release candidates, which are several weeks in as of this writing. There are typically seven or eight release candidate kernels (spread over several months’ duration) for a typical kernel, meaning that we can expect 3.8 final sometime in February.
ongoing development
This past month saw an interesting series of conversations around hash collisions in next-generation file systems. Many modern file systems use a hash-based approach to store the names of individual filename entries within normal directories. A given name, such as ‘passwd’ (as in /etc/passwd) is passed through a hashing algorithm which generates a finite number of possible numeric values. This value
is then used internally within the file system to determine where in the ‘data structure’ within the file-system metadata the given entry will be stored. If multiple files hash to the same location, a list is created. Such lists (buckets) are not typically very large because the hashing algorithm does a good job at keeping hash ‘collisions’ to a minimum. Sometimes, however, these lists can be artificially enlarged by creating special file-system entries that are known to generate collisions. This is what Pascal Junod blogged about in December. He raised a number of known issues with Btrfs and discovered a new bug in the code, which Chris Mason (the author) has now posted a patch intended to address the concern.
A lot of memory (virtual and otherwise) work is ongoing. Minchan Kim has continued working on support for volatile memory mappings. Using special parameters, applications can explicitly mark regions of memory as being volatile (the kernel is allowed to trash them at will), and unmark them as volatile when they are needed again. The application is able to determine whether the volatile memory was actually destroyed in the meantime. Related work includes a user-space memory shrinker from Anton Vorontsov, which allows applications to use a mempressure cgroup to register reclaimable chunks. When the system is low on memory, the application will be asked to reclaim a number of chunks. It will then
“Transparent zero huge pages are
a 3.8 feature that will be popular”
update the kernel as to what was reclaimed. Both this and the volatile work are useful, for example, in applications that retain large caches (eg of webpage content) that can easily be regenerated.
Linux 3.7 introduced support for ARM’s new ‘AArch64’ 64-bit ARM architecture. Previous kernel cycles have sometimes introduced more than one new architecture. Although it seems as if this won’t be the case for 3.8, it does look like 3.9 could have two new architectures. James Hogan posted pretty comprehensive support for Imagination’s ‘Meta’ processor cores (hybrid CPU/DSP cores capable of running multiple RTOSs and regular kernels on hardware threads at the same time), while Vineet Gupta reworded the older 3.2 kernel support for Synopsys’s ARC processors to bring it up to date. The latter is interesting because it is intended to be a highly configurable and extensible processor architecture. Those implementing the (licensable) ARC processor can customise the number of instructions, registers and many other features, in a manner described online as being “like Lego blocks”.
Finally this month, a number of kernel developers have been considering putting the ‘Kernel Hacking’ menu options within the kernel Kconfig “on a diet”. Dave Hansen, as well as other developers, consider that 120 possible options is now too large and that a number of these should be removed, or split out. In particular, Dave posted a cleanup patch to move ‘debugfs’ out into the file-systems menu.
n Linus Torvalds encouraged developers to play with the latest RC kernel over the holidays C C. G FD L. P er m is si on o f M ar tin S tr ei ch er , E di to r-in -C hi ef , L IN U XM AG .c om
the open source column
www.
linuxuser.co.uk
14
Your source of linux news and views
opensource
Simon ponders the continued
explosion in the sales of tablet
devices, and wonders how it
can all be turned to good
the tablet the
industry needs?
simon Brew
is a technology writer and editor, working across the Linux, Windows and Mac OS X platformsGiven that the general impression given of the British retail sector in particular post-christmas was one of doom and gloom, with several major chains facing well-documented problems, closer inspection revealed some interesting upward trends in the midst of the figures. And technology, not for the first time, was adding some of the fuel.
Appreciating that there were many contributory factors, the numbers for high-street electrical giant Currys were surprisingly impressive. In line with similar chains in other countries, Currys has spent money making its stores bigger, consolidating its brands under one (very big) roof. I went in one just before Christmas and, truthfully, couldn’t leave fast enough. The PC World segment of the business seems to exist to try to sell us copies
nApple is no longer getting it all its own way in the tablet market of Windows 8 (which I suspect will continue to cause Microsoft as many problems as it resolves), and listening to a salesperson try and sell anti-virus software to someone buying a tablet computer called for rarely seen levels of restraint. The methodology of old remains the same, it seems, even if the products themselves gradually changed.
Two things have buoyed Currys, however. The first is the demise of another big British chain, Comet, which inevitably brought fresh footfall into the market.
But the other, and less UK-specific factor is the staggering, ongoing success of tablet computers. Tablets are now heavily mainstream, as well as filling in niches in the market that a full computer can’t do. Take the rise in educational and child-targeted tablet computers, for instance. Granted, this is usually a cheap Android-powered model that’s had a few apps clustered together on it. But there’s potential here to push the hardware itself into affordable, interesting places, and the low price that’s been asked for such devices suggests that there’s headroom to do more.
What’s particularly interesting about the tablet market too is that Apple no longer appears to be having things its own way, and that’s been crucial to the relaxing of the sector as a whole. Samsung and its Galaxy line is at the top end of Apple’s rivals, and Google’s Nexus line continues to thrive. Sadly, it looks as if Amazon’s less-friendly-than-it-looks Kindle Fire has been making serious headway, though, which is a worry. As those who have used the Kindle Fire extensively can testify, it’s a tablet that exists to get you closer to Amazon’s products and
services above all else. It adds little to nothing to the open source community at all.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. Convincing the mass market to adopt an open source operating system for a desktop PC or laptop was always going to be a proverbial uphill struggle, but there’s a different set of parameters now. While Windows 8 continues to try to win people over, the truth that Microsoft is facing is that, for the first time in a generation, there’s change on a software as well as a hardware level.
Sadly, by allowing the likes of Amazon to seize that, there’s an argument that some opportunities have been lost already. But the taking for granted of a touch-screen interface means that there’s space here for something of note in the retail sector to develop; for devices that work on a genuine framework of open source software, to offer genuine choice.
Remember the days when Dell first introduced its laptop customisation purchase screen that seemed intent on selling you as much as it possibly could? Well, that might just be inverted now. Instead, software becomes the choice. Given that most hardware in the sector is created equal, we’re at a stage where end users can, instead of quibbling over memory and storage space, focus on application and what they actually want a device for.
Currys is unlikely to be interested in that any time soon. But by continuing to fuel the tablet explosion, the retailer may yet have a helping hand in bringing to the fore a more interesting way of computing.
The free software column
Opinion
open source
the Free soFtware column
Igor stravinsky once said that “a good composer does not imitate; he steals”, and ts eliot once said “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” even the idea that good art embraces the work of other good artists is not unique or original.
Good art is often a synthesis of thoughts and methodologies that have been poached and recycled from other sources. Very little is entirely new or original, and this understanding is equally true of other aspects of our lives. Ideas are cumulative and depend upon the evolution of techniques, observation and criticism, so it isn’t entirely surprising that inventions and discoveries are often made simultaneously by different people in different locations. It is still a matter of argument, for instance, whether the electric light bulb was invented by Joseph Swan or Thomas Edison, or the telephone by Elisha Gray or Alexander Graham Bell…
The style and design of the prevailing art and everyday items of our lives reflect the zeitgeist and are a refinement and an assimilation of the judgement of their times. Everybody copies everybody else, and style is not a patentable
Android phones are no more a ‘rip-off’ of the iPhone than
the iPhone is a rip-off of earlier mobile phones and technology,
argues Richard Hillesley…
apple scruffs
idea. So the cars of any era, however different they might have seemed in their time, look like other cars of that era – and the same can be said of, say, furniture, graffiti, clothes, hairstyles and mobile computer devices. A mobile phone is based on any number of software and hardware technologies developed by individuals and firms such as Nokia, Samsung and Motorola over a period of 30 years, but a modern phone looks very different to one of 30 years ago.
A mobile phone has some basic requirements. It has to be portable and fit in your pocket, preferably with smooth edges so that it doesn’t catch on the threads of your jacket or shirt. It has to be able to scan the web and talk to other phones. Sometimes we expect a little bit more, but the basic technology and appearance, albeit refined and improved, remains the same, and owes everything to 30 years of research and development by any number of companies and individuals who wormed away at the idea of touch screens and mobile communications, sometimes making breakthroughs and sometimes encountering failure.
The commercial breakthrough of the smartphone is dated to the launch of the iPhone in 2006, but the ideas and technology it embraced did not slip, clean and new, out of Apple’s ownership of one particular part of the ether. Apple was not alone in recognising that the mobile phone had a significant future, but had the advantage of being an outsider to the business, able to take a dispassionate view of the possibilities. Apple synthesised the best aspects of existing mobile phone technologies and smartphones, and added the marketing potential of the idea behind iTunes to make an iPhone out of an iPod – a phone that doubled as an iPod and a web device, and gave access to the Apple store. Marketing and the inertia of the competition did the rest.
The iPhone was the best mobile phone of its time, used the best hardware, and relied
richard hillesley
writes about art, music, digital rights, Linux and free software for a variety of publicationson clean design and usability principles. Apple made all the right decisions, sidestepped the competition and still holds a significant share of the market – but very few of the constituent parts of the iPhone were really unique or original. Competitors adopted Android, which had been under development since 2003, offered all the advantages of the iPhone and cost significantly less.
The justification for Apple’s subsequent righteous war against the Androids is the tendentious claim that Android is a ‘rip-off’ of the iPhone and “a stolen product”. The primary contention is that Samsung and Android have ripped off Apple’s style and look and feel, but Android is no more stolen from the iPhone than the iPhone is a ‘rip-off’ of the pioneering work of the likes of Motorola, Nokia and Samsung itself.
The instrument for Apple’s war has been the acquiescence of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the US courts, ownership of scores of debatable utility and design patents, and its claims against Samsung and others of ‘trade dress infringement’. The good news in recent months is that some of these entitlements, such as Apple’s patent entitled ‘Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics’ (bit.ly/TPWeEw) and ‘the rubber band patent’ (ars.to/SmJ6pP) have come up for review and been found wanting by the USPTO. The bad news is that Apple still has a vast portfolio of debatable patents to draw upon.
Patents are not a defence of the rights of the innovator, but a weapon against competition and invention and the rights of the user. Android is no more a ‘rip-off’ or ‘stolen product’ than the iPhone itself, or the music of Stravinsky or poetry of Eliot.
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TEN AMAZING
RASPBERRY PI
PROJECTS
The £25 computer is celebrating its fi rst
anniversary – here’s to a year’s worth of
magnifi cent, unique and exciting achievements
www.
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18
Feature
10 amazing Raspberry Pi projects
As portable computing goes, the Raspberry Pi could hardly be bettered. Small enough to slip inside a pocket, it can go anywhere and everywhere with you. Yet to use the Pi as a standard Linux machine kind of misses the point – or, at the very least, the opportunities afforded by this small-form-factor, high-spec wonder.
Over the past year, this inexpensive machine, produced as an educational plaything, has taken centre stage for a
whole host of projects. Some have satisfi ed a craving for fun; others for exploration and indulgence. More still have satisfi ed the current trend for performing real-world tasks at the lowest possible price. The Pi is the recession buster with the potential to empower a future generation (as one schoolboy emphatically showed).
Here we present ten of those projects. Each of them, we believe, encapsulates all that is good about the Pi, making great use of two things: the machine itself, with its tiny credit card size; but above all, the bold
imagination of the creators. And the balls to keep going to realise those dreams, of course, but that would be three things.
Over the next few pages, the creators of these projects talk us through their projects. You will fi nd the majority of the source code on our cover disc and we'll also tell you where you can fi nd tutorial instructions, where available, to allow you to replicate them. But more than all of this, we hope it provides you with inspiration for your own projects. You never know – you may see your creation here in a year's time.
Top Raspberry Pi projects to amaze and inspire
10 amazing Raspberry Pi projects
feature
rasPi
1
stbirthday
www.
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20
Feature
10 amazing Raspberry Pi projects
The Raspberry Pi
Supercomputer
Take some Lego and 64
Pis for a delicious slice of
processing power
Since the ultimate aim of the Raspberry Pi is to encourage children to experiment with computers and understand their inner joy, the supercomputer project built by computational engineers at the University of Southampton could not be a better example of the magical things being done with this miniature marvel.
The creation by Professor Simon Cox and his team cost less than £2,500 to build, excluding the switches, but it also had a special ingredient: Prof Cox’s six-year-old son, James.
It was while playing around with a Pi with his son that the supercomputer expert decided it would be an interesting experiment to buy 64 of the machines and produce something rather spectacular. And it was the young boy who provided specialist support on Lego and system testing, providing an eye-catching aspect to the entire project.
Maker profile: Prof Simon Cox
Simon Cox is professor of Computational Methods at the University of Southampton. His research is about applying and developing high-performance computing and big data to tackle problems in science and engineering. The university of has a powerful 12,000-core intel-based supercomputer which cost millions of pounds.
With 64 raspberry pis and more than 1,000 pieces of lego, this is
a supercomputer in more ways than one
it has 192W total electric power draw, ~4 Gflops of CpU power and ~1500 Gflops of GpU graphics
compute power There is 1TB of Class 10
SD card memory on iridis-pi, which is named
after the University of Southampton’s 12,000-core
iridis supercomputer The supercomputer
runs raspbian oS, which is based on Debian and optimised
for raspberry pi
Top Raspberry Pi projects to amaze and inspire
10 amazing Raspberry Pi projects
■The project started when Prof Simon Cox and his son, James, began to play with a Pi
■Since the drivers for the Pi's video card are open source, the potential to use that video chip for processing opens up 24 gigafl ops of general-purpose computer performance
■ Lego features highly in the project, but so does research. Although the supercomputer uses an ordinary downloadable system image from the Raspberry Pi website, the performance and various other parts of the fi rmware and drivers have been improved by a factor of 50 or more
TRY IT YOURSELF
The Kit:
• 64 Raspberry Pis Model B/256MB = £1,475.20
• 64 Kingston Ultimate X 16GB Class 10 (SD10G2/16GB) = £622.72
• 64 metres of CAT 5E (misc colours) = £90.88
• 64 micro-USB power supply adaptors, UK, 1.2A = £244.48
The Knowhow:
www.soton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi
Plus items that were in the lab:
• 3 Netgear ProSafe 24-port smart switches with PoE / 192W total 4 SFP (GS724TP) = £269.99 each
• DrayTek Vigor 2820N router
• Keyboard
• Monitor
• Mouse
• HDMI-to-monitor cable
• 3 CAT 5E cables to connect the switches together
“The thing about the Raspberry
Pi is that suddenly things can
be done that come within the
budget of a school so you could
actually have term-long projects
and a whole class involved”
Running off a single 13 amp mains socket and using MPI to communicate between nodes using Ethernet, it offers a staggering amount of power when you consider the low cost.
Prof Cox had been impressed straight away by how great the Pi was for playing around with electronics using the GPIO connectors. “The fact you could turn LEDs on and off and
link a little Python computer program to a bar graph LED caught the imagination of myself and my son who built a Lego case for it,” he tells us.
So he waited for a large supply of Pis to became available. “We then had to decide on the network switches. My background researching supercomputers and IT meant I knew you could spend a lot of money on switches. We begged, stole and borrowed some old switches that were being decommissioned from our computing service, which meant we could link them together. I got some power over Ethernet switches from another project I was working on.”
James used his design skills to build the racking out of little plastic bricks before testing it using Python and Scratch. But one of the most time-consuming processes was getting all of the images set up. Prof Cox found it was one thing to download one image on to one SD card, but quite another doing 64 of them.
“The Pi, for the fi rst time, has meant you can assemble a supercomputer for a couple of thousand of pounds. And if you take just four of the units, suddenly you are at £100 and that means that large-scale supercomputing, or the principle of it, can be seen in schools. That's very special.”
FEATURE
RasPi
1
stBIRTHDAY
Feature
10 amazing Raspberry Pi projects
Games have often been said to be a key driver of technology and so we were extremely excited to see the Picade project when it emerged on Kickstarter. Created by Jonathan Williamson and Paul Beech, it looks like a mini, retro-style cabinet and comes in kit form. All people need is a screwdriver, a pair of pliers and an hour of time to put it together.
“The idea had been in our heads for a while,” says Jonathan. “Paul and I have been through a number of startups and we had frequently seen a JAMMA cabinet in the office. It seemed the thing to have. We thought that only people with too much money or time on their hands were getting enjoyment out of them, so we decided it would be good to build one ourselves.”
The pair have been interested in technology for a long time and the Picade has been an accumulation of knowledge. From reading about joysticks to monitors, all of those ideas have come together. “We’ve also benefited from Kickstarter and globalisation,” says Paul. “Having the Pi was amazing.”
As if to underline just how the project has turned heads, Ian Stewart, the founder of Sheffield’s Gremlin Graphics – a games
nIan Stewart from Gremlin Graphics stepped forward and allowed his old games to be available on the Picade
Picade
arcade
cabinet
No need to stand
around in arcades
– bring the action
to your home
Maker profile: Jonathan Williamson and Paul Beech
paul is a designer, hacker and maker. He designed the raspberry pi logo and is the brand and design lead for the foundation. Jon is a software guy and electronics hobbyist. He is the co-founder and technical lead for Netcopy (a digital archiving solution).
www.
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22
