Munckfish.net

I just heard today that RM will be selling a tiny Asus laptop pre-installed with Linux. It’s a very small machine 22.5 x 16.5 x 2.1-3.5cm and will cost only £169.

Instead of a hard drive it will use solid state memory apparently either 2GB or 4GB. Anecdotal evidence from the comments on this page, suggest it will be running a version of Suse Linux.

This is more great news for Linux as it shows that there is a growing confidence that it is a viable alternative to Windows and Mac. We already have Dell introducing Ubuntu pre-installed machines into for the European market. RM are a big supplier of IT hardware and services into schools and this laptop will probably be targeted directly at the education market. Lets hope we see more and more of the education market share heading towards Linux (and Mac) so there’s a more level playing field and kids don’t grow up thinking that computers and Windows are the same thing.

Update: Here’s the link to the product description page on the RM site - RM Asus miniBook. I notice in the features page the operating system is described as an “Asus developed Linux based operating system”. A little Googling turns up a story on Slashdot from from last Sunday mentioning about an ASUS motherboard called the P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP@n that includes an embedded Linux OS called Splashtop which boots from the BIOS on the motherboard and allows you to use Firefox+Flash, and Skype in under 5 seconds from pressing ‘Power On’. The Splashtop site has a decent FAQ, and even a blog-post with a YouTube vid demostrating the OS. I’m not sure this is definitely the exact technologies the RM machine is using because Splashtop is developed by DeviceVM not Asus. The RM machine is basically a rebranded Asus Eee PC. The Eee PC site doesn’t give specific detail on the version of Linux it uses but it’s support page does link to Xandros Linux.

I’ve just read over the Gnome 2.20 Release Notes and I must say I’m looking forward to using it in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy). There are quite a few small improvements that I’ve been waiting for. For instance:

• Finally the Evolution mail client has an icon for the Gnome Panel’s Notification Area, I hope it supports minimizing of Evolution too (without leaving behind the task bar button).
• Evolution now has a built-in backup utility to help export and move settings to another machine.
• The properties dialog for a mounted disk now shows a disk-usage pie chart - very useful.
• One neat feature is that if you lock your screen and go away someone can leave you a message to read once you return (no more sticky post-its stuck to your screen).
• Automatic unlocking of the Gnome Keyring (Password Manager) when you login or unlock your screen.

However, the thing I am most happy to see is the new Gnome Library documentation site. This is a very polished site collecting together Gnome related tutorials, manuals, and API references. I think this is a great step forward for the Gnome project; I have felt in the past the resources were not as well presented or well maintained as they could be, particularly developer docs on subjects such as Gtk and Glib.

Came across an excellent JavaOne conference session on software packaging for Ubuntu/Debian. It has a specific focus on packaging Java software but I found it gave an excellent general insight into the process of getting a piece of software, commercial or free, into the Ubuntu repositories. The main example used was the experience of the Sun engineer Harpreet Singh who was responsible for packaging the Glassfish application server which is now available in the Ubuntu multiverse repository.

Here’s the link, you will need a Sun Online account to access the talk:

JavaOne Technical Sessions - Packaging Java Platform Applications into Ubuntu

I’ve been studying shell scripting in more depth recently. Here’s some of the things I found useful on the way.

1) Write your scripts to run on a real POSIX / Bourne Shell compatible sh interpreter first rather than bash or any of the other advanced shells. This improves the portability of your scripts and helps you to clearly learn the differences between the basic shell syntax and the advanced syntax introduced in shells such as bash.

On most Linux systems in recent years /bin/sh is a symlink to bash which has allowed people to ‘leak’ bash syntax in without error. Scripts like this only fail when run on a system that’s using a strict sh like on the FreeBSD or Ubuntu Feisty where /bin/sh is symlinked to ‘dash’ - The Debian Almquist Shell, which is a “lightweight POSIX compliant Bourne shell implementation”. IMO this is a better way to internalize the differences between sh and bash than using tools like ‘checkbashisms’ after you’ve created your script.

Firstly always specify ‘/bin/sh’ in the ’shebang’ line at the top of your scripts:

To see what your /bin/sh is linked to try this:

You’ll see that on my system (Ubuntu Feisty) the output at the end of the ls command is ‘/bin/sh -> dash’ which indicates that /bin/sh is linked (->) to dash. If on your system it links to bash do not try to link sh to anything else! If you do you may not be able to boot your system! Instead install the ‘ash’ or ‘dash’ shells and run you script in those directly like this:

2) Bookmark and read these reference manuals:

• Bourne Shell Manual - Steve Parker’s html version of the original Bourne Shell manual great to check exactly what syntax is available in the real Bourne Shell.
• Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide - The best tutorial on bash with loads of practical examples. The section on ‘tests’ (conditional logic) is particularly good.
• Bash Reference Manual - The actual bash manual. It can be a little difficult to find things in this sometimes so it’s worth getting used to its structure

3) Use shell options to help you debug problems. You can do this either by using the ’set’ command (in bash type ‘help set’ to see usage or ‘man sh’ to view the man page) in your script or by passing the option on the command line as you run your script e.g.

Here are the options I find most useful:

• -x Prints commands and their arguments as they are executed
• -u Treat unset variables as an error when substituting
• -e Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status. Note this should be used with caution as there will be no warning when ths happens, you need to use -x to help discover where the problem is happening

There are loads so it’s worth looking through the list.

4) Use bash to discover syntax errors not highlighted by sh. If you script is failing silently in sh it can sometimes be due to a syntax error. On my system dash isn’t reporting these but I’ve found that explicitly running the script in bash often helps locate the cause of the problem.

5) Consider portability. If you know your script is going to be used across many different systems then it’s worth making sure you are only using commands available in the POSIX standard or on Linux now we can use the ones defined in the Linux Standards Base. See LSB Base - Commands and Utilities for more information.

The annual GNOME Users and Developers Conference is to held in the UK this year from 15-21 July 2007. I hope I can arrange to go along. Here’s the link to its home page:

GUADEC2007

This years Debian Conference is going to hosted in Edinburgh, UK from Sunday 17 to Saturday 23 June 2007. I’m definitely going to go along. Here’s the main event info page: DebConf7.

Netbeans is not currently available in the Ubuntu/Debian repositories. I believe this is because it uses the Sun CDDL licence which is considered incompatible with the GPL.

However, as an end-user you may wish to use Netbeans despite that. Although it comes with a neat installer wizard I personally prefer to try to get native .deb packages where possible in order to get native package management and menu/launcher icons. I found a debian packaged version by Daniel Baumann. It appears he put it on the Debian new queue but is wasn’t accepted. He’s made the prepacked binaries available here:

http://archive.daniel-baumann.ch/debian/packages/netbeans/5.5-1/

However, I wanted to learn something so I decided to try building a package using the current 5.5 source dist from Netbeans archive and Daniel Baumann’s debian package source. Here are the steps I took.

Building and Packaging Netbeans 5.5 for Ubuntu

1) Grab daniel-baumann’s patch here

netbeans_5.5-1.diff.gz

2) Get the Netbeans 5.5 source from:

http://www.netbeans.info/downloads/all.php?b_id=2180&src=1

I picked up the ’source’ tgz file from the table of links at the bottom of the page.

3) Untar the sources

4) Now apply the patch to the sources

The patch simply installs the debian packaging kit into the Netbeans 5.5 src directory. After applying you will find the new files under the newly created debian directory. For more info on what these files do see The Ubuntu Packaging Guide or the Debian New Maintainers Guide.

6) Next build the packages and install

When debuild completes there will be 2 .deb files left in the directory above:

netbeans-ide_5.5-1_all.deb
netbeans-platform_5.5-1_all.deb


debi installs both files by reading the netbeans_5.5-1_i386.changes file which will have been generated in the directory above.

Update: As of Fri 19th Jan 07 Java 6 has now been officially included into the Dapper Backports repository. See it’s package page.

Today I found out how to package Java for Ubuntu/Debian. I wanted to see if a .deb package file of Java 6 was available for Ubuntu I found details on creating one in the following forum post: Re: JDK 6 Available…now when is a deb coming?. The instructions there are great except they don’t work perfectly for Dapper so here are the modified steps for Dapper:

1) Patch ‘java-package’

The Debian Java Maintainers have created a tool make-jpkg which is a neat script to take the Sun Java native linux .bin installer and turn it into a .deb package. This script comes in the ‘java-package’ package which is in the multiverse repo in Ubuntu.

Dapper stocks the 0.27 version which does not support conversion of Java 6 yet. However, mlind attached a patch to his forum post (link above) to add support for Java 6 to java-package version 0.28. Luckily it’s not difficult to tweak the patch for 0.27. Here’s the modified version of the patch:

java-package_sun-java6.dapper.patch

Here’s the instructions on how apply the patch and build the updated package:

2) Package sun-jdk6

Now that you’ve updated java-package it’s time to package Java 6. First download Java 6 from Sun. You need to download the Linux self extracting file (jdk-6-linux-i586.bin). Here are the instructions on building it (taken from the forum post listed above).

Yesterday announcements were made that Java has been released under the GPL2 Open Source licence. Here’s some of the relevant links:

• Java.net Editorial: Not a Hoax
• Free and Open Source Java
• OpenJDK - The home of the new open Java development, including mailing lists, Subversion source repository, etc.

Apparently it’s an early version of Java 7 that is immediately available under the new licence, this includes the Hotspot VM and the ‘javac’ compiler. However, the Java API class libraries and certain 3rd party components are still not yet open.

Personally I think this is great news. Adoption of Java has clearly been hampered on open source operating systems because it remained under a closed source licence for so long. It has allowed technologies such as Mono/.Net and Python to get ahead for development of cross platform desktop apps where Java may have a been a viable choice if only it’s licence had allowed it to be shipped along with standard packages.

The new release of Ubuntu is out. Seems it happened about a week ago so I’m behind the times already.

• Announcement here.
• Detailed Release Notes (with pics) available here