Open Source

HP gives WebOS to FOSS community as token gesture

December 9, 2011 By Benjamin Kerensa

I’m kind of skeptical towards the announcement by HP today that they are going to contribute the WebOS platform to the Free Open Source Software community. As a former owner of a HP WebOS device I’m still a bit disgruntled in a sense to how they treated their customers and never really made it right and better yet I was shocked to see HP layoff quite a good amount off their really talented employees who work with FOSS when they train-wrecked WebOS.

I’m not sure that I agree with HP’s CEO Meg Whitman when she says that WebOS is the only platform built from the ground up to be “mobile, cloud-connected and scalable” because if it is such a great platform why did it fail so hard? Personally I think in the end it was a token gesture at best when their efforts to sell the platform fell short.

Hopefully WebOS will benefit someone in the FOSS community but with the news of Ubuntu getting into mobile devices and TV’s in the future I think WebOS is going to be nothing more than some abandonware that happened to get open sourced.

I guess I’m just wondering what license it will be released under? Perhaps the Chicken Dance License?

Ubuntu Smartphones And Tablets In The Near Future

October 31, 2011 By Benjamin Kerensa

I was pleasantly surprised to read Mark Shuttleworth’s optimistic visions for 14.04 including his belief that Ubuntu will power Tablets and Smartphones by Ubuntu’s 14.04 LTS release.

v3 Quotes Mark Shuttleworth as saying:

“We think the time is right for a free software platform, independent of a major industry force like Google, to emerge as a partner for industry, for folks who are building their own devices,” explained Shuttleworth, who said that Ubuntu “could become the de facto standard starting point for those who are building the next generation of consumer electronics around Linux”

I think a mobile version of Ubuntu geared for Tablets and Smartphones is an excellent thing and I honestly think Ubuntu could do better than other mobile platforms including some which have failed like WebOS.

If Ubuntu powers Smartphones in a few years you can bet that I will trade in whatever I have at the time and use a Ubuntu Phone or whatever trendy name they give it. Ultimately I think Canonical and the Ubuntu Community will benefit greatly by moving into the mobile phone and tablet markets.

The big question that remains is who will Canonical give exclusive rights for developing Ubuntu Smartphones and Tablets and better yet what carriers will sell them. I look forward to learning more about the keynote he gave at UDS and also any other exciting developments occurring in the Ubuntu Community.

UEFI Headaches Begin For Linux Users

October 23, 2011 By Benjamin Kerensa

A Follow-up post is available here since this post has become viral and controversial some how

As I was preparing to head out to the Ubuntu Oregon Ocelot 11.10 Release Party the other night I received a e-mail from a LoCo member in Salem, Oregon who passed on this message and felt it was an important matter to begin discussing:

Recent articles regarding UEFI and Windows 8 suggest the problem of the former blocking Linux bootloader installation is a matter that will appear at the introduction of the latter. That is not the case. It is on Win 7 machines and blocking GRUB installation now.

My friend recently got an HP s5-1110 with Win 7 installed. UEFI has prevented the installation of GRUB on this machine. I could find no way in the BIOS to disable the feature and so far, as I work my way up the HP tech support ladder, I have found no HP techs who have a clue what I’m talking about.

Just a heads up and a possible topic for discussion at the party. Of course, if anyone has more information on this issue, I’d be glad to hear from you.

The next morning I began looking into UEFI more since I had not done a lot of research but did know it was discovered around the time Windows 8 Developer was released. Anyways Ubuntu has a Community Documentation Article that discusses some workarounds for the UEFI problem and I have personally been considering how greatly the UEFI problem could affect Linux Users. I think there is some positive discussion going on and brainstorming occurring that will allow the Linux community to find reliable workarounds and solutions before UEFI becomes a standard.

Apparently Dell has had UEFI laptops for a while so it is no surprise that a new HP laptop has UEFI by default although with HP doing quite a bit of stuff in the FOSS community I figured they might have provided better support for someone trying to install Linux. Hopefully some sort of legislation will pass that requires manufacturers to list that a certain device is only capable of running a certain OS out of the box and further the whole issue seems very anti-competitive.

Update on Situation as of 4:37 PM Today:

Disturbingly, there were no error messages at all. Neither the Kubuntu installer nor the Boot Repair disk I subsequently tried gave any indication of failure, but the boot partition remained untouched. (I found the Boot Repair disk recommended on the Ubuntu wiki. It is a nice GUI which calls various command line utilities to produce reports on the disk and, of course, grub-install to actually install the bootloader. I must assume that it is, ultimately, grub-install which is failing silently.) The BIOS did have an entry for UEFI, but choosing it produced no response at all.

At this point I have found no firmware updates for the system nor anyone at HP who even knows what UEFI is, much less if there is a way around it.

I’m sure we all appreciate your efforts getting the word out.

Will Spotify improve their Linux Preview?

September 9, 2011 By Benjamin Kerensa

I got a first look at Spotify Premium when Klout gave me a free month of service and I was impressed by the quality of the Spotify service and in fact found it to be superior to any other music service around right now. I personally contemplated paying the small monthly fee but figured in the end I would not use it quite enough to justify the cost.

I was saddened to find out that the Spotify Linux Preview client does not currently have support for Free Accounts because Spotify Developers say that they have not found a reliable way to embed advertisements to support free accounts using the client.

It troubles me to figure out how the Spotify Developers came to the conclusion that adding ads to a Linux Client would be troublesome or even hard because there are plenty of other apps that do have ads including Slacker’s Linux-based application.

I sent an e-mail to Spotify about two weeks ago but have yet to receive any response and I wish their community had better interaction with developers. I’m hopeful that Spotify’s management team will realize that this Linux Preview client should be a priority because if Free accounts can use it that means more exposure to the service and likely more conversions to paid accounts.

Do not underestimate the power of porting your applications to Linux…. Adobe has made this mistake and nobody should follow their footsteps!

I’m Learning Python

August 31, 2011 By Benjamin Kerensa

So for the last few days I have been diving into the Python Programming language because I really wanna start making some cool Gnome applets and other things of course. Thus far I have found the language to be epic easy compared to other stuff I have had to learn in the past.

I’m hoping that within the next six months I will be releasing so wicked Python Apps to run on Ubuntu or any Linux distro for that matter.

I often jump from personal project to personal project due to time limitations in my own life but I hope such antics will not get in the way of my mastery of Python because I have seen the power of this language and the ability to quickly throw together useful apps.