The Linux Experiment

If you’re like me you’ve been suffering through a crazy high-pitched sound emanating from your laptop speakers. Apparently this is a common issue with certain types of audio devices. Thankfully via the power of the Internet I’ve been able to finally find a solution!

It turns out that the issue actually stems from some power saving features (of all things) in the Intel HDA driver. So I simply turned it off and guess what? It worked.

1) Open up (using root) /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/intel-audio-powersave

2) Replace or comment out the line:

INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE=${INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE:-true}

3) In its place put the line:

INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE=false

4) Reboot

Hopefully this also works for you but if not check out the site I found the solution at for some additional tips/things to try.

I recently upgraded my laptop to a brand new Lenovo Y410P and promptly replaced Windows 8 with a Linux install. Unfortunately I immediately ran into a very strange driver(?) issue where, on boot, the computer would default to the absolute lowest screen brightness level. This meant that I would need to manually adjust the screen brightness up just to see the login screen. Thankfully after some help from the excellent people over on the Ubuntu Forums I managed to find a very easy work around.

1) As root open up /etc/default/grub

I did this by simply issuing the following command:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

2) Find the line that says GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX= and add “acpi_backlight=vendor” to the list of options.

3) From a terminal run this command to update GRUB

sudo update-grub

4) Reboot!

That’s pretty much it. My computer now boots with the correct screen brightness as one would expect.

Some of you may remember my earlier post about contemplating an upgrade from Windows Home Server (Version 1) to a Linux alternative. Since then, I have decided the following:

Amahi isn’t worth my time

This conclusion was reached after a fruitless install of the latest Amahi 7 installation on the 500 GB ‘system’ drive, included with the EX470. After backing up the Windows Home Server to a single external 2 TB drive (talk about nerve-wracking!), I popped the drive into a spare PC and installed Amahi with the default options.

No, I’m not 13. Yes, this image accurately reflects my frustrations.

Moving the drive back into the EX470 yielded precisely zero results, no matter what I tried – the machine would not respond to a ‘ping’ command, and since I’ve opted to try and do this without a debug board, I don’t even have VGA to tell me what the hell is going on. So, that’s it for Amahi.

When all else fails, Ubuntu

After deciding that I really didn’t feel like a repeat of my earlier Fedora experiment, I decided to try out the Linux ‘Old Faithful’ as it were – Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I opted for the LTS version due to – well, you know – the ‘long-term support’ deal.

Oh, and I upgraded my storage (new 1 TB system drive not shown, and I apologize for the potato-quality image):

The only kind of ‘TB’ I like. Not tuberculosis.

Following from the earlier Amahi instructions, I popped the primary 1 TB drive into a spare machine and allowed the Ubuntu installer to do its thing. Easy enough! From there, I installed the following two additional items (having to add an additional repository for the latter):

• Openssh-Server

This allows me to easily control the machine through SSH, and – as I understand it – is pretty much a must for someone wanting to control a headless box. Setup was easy-breezy, in that it required nothing at all.

• Greyhole

For those unfamiliar, Greyhole is – in their own words – an ‘Easily expandable and redundant storage pool for home servers’. One of my favourite things about WHS v1 was its ‘disk pooling’ capability – essentially a JBOD with software-managed share duplication, ensuring that each selected share was copied over to one other disk in the array.

After those were done with, I popped the drive into the EX470, and – lo and behold! – I was able to SSH in.

This? This is what relatively minor success looks like.

So at this point, I’m feeling relatively confident. I shut down the server (don’t forget -h!) over SSH, popped in the first of the three 3 TB drives, and…

…nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. The server happily blinks away like a small puppy wags its tail, excited to see its owner but clearly bereft of purpose when left to its owner. I can’t ping it, I can’t… well, that’s really it. I can’t ping it, so there’s nothing I can do. Looking to see if GRUB was stuck at the menu, I stuck in a USB keyboard and hit ‘Enter’ to no effect. Yes, my troubleshooting skills are that good.

My next step was to pop both the 1 TB and 3 TB drives into the ‘spare’ machine; this ran fine. Running lshw -short -c disk shows a 1 TB and 3 TB drive without issue. I also ran these parted commands:

mklabel gpt

mkpart primary -1 1

(I think that last command is right.) So, all set, right? Cool. Pop the drive back in to the EX470, and…

STILL NOTHING. At this point, I’m ready to go pick up a new four-bay NAS, but I feel like that may be overkill. If anyone has any recommendations on how to get the stupid thing to boot with a 3 TB drive, I’m open to suggestions.

So you want to host an open source project using one of the many free services available but can’t decide which one to use? If only someone would put together a quick summary of each of the major offerings…

Hosting providers covered in this post:

• Bitbucket
• CodePlex
• GitHub
• Gitorious
• Google Code
• Launchpad
• SourceForge

Bitbucket

Bitbucket is a hosting site for the distributed version control systems (DVCS) Git and Mercurial. The service offering includes an issue tracker and wiki, as well as integration with a number of popular services such as Basecamp, Flowdock, and Twitter.

Features:

• Supports both Git and Mercurial
• Allows private repositories for free, up to 5 users
• Unlimited repositories
• Has JIRA integration for issue tracking
• Has its own REST API

Downsides:

• Only allows up to 5 users for free (a user defined as someone with read or write access)

CodePlex

CodePlex is Microsoft’s free open source project hosting site. You can create projects to share with the world, collaborate with others on their projects, and download open source software.

Features:

• Supports both Git & Mercurial
• Integrated Wiki that allows to add rich documentation and nice looking pages
• Bug Tracker and Discussion Forums included

Downsides:

• Often times feels more like a code publishing platform than a collaboration site
• Primarily geared toward .NET projects

GitHub

Build software better, together. Powerful collaboration, code review, and code management for open source and private projects.

Features:

• Supports Git
• Powerful and easy to use graphical tools
• Easy team management
• Integrated wiki, issue tracker and code review

Downsides:

• Only supports Git
• Quite a few ‘dead’ projects on the site

Gitorious

The Git hosting software that you can install yourself. Gitorious.org provides free hosting for open source projects that use Git.

Features:

• Supports Git
• Free project hosting
• Integrated wiki
• Can download the software and install it on your own server

Downsides:

• Only supports Git

Google Code

Project Hosting on Google Code provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects.

Features:

• Supports Subversion, Mercurial Git
• Integrated wiki

Downsides:

• Not very pretty

Launchpad

Launchpad is a software collaboration platform.

Features:

• Supports Bazaar
• Integrated bug tracking and code reviews
• Ubuntu package building and hosting
• Mailing lists

Downsides:

• Only supports Bazaar
• Geared toward Ubuntu (which can be a downside depending on your project)

SourceForge

Find, Create, and Publish Open Source software for free.

Features:

• Supports Git, Mercurial, Subversion
• Integrated issue tracking, wiki, discussion forums
• Stat tracking

Downsides:

• Ads
• A lot of ‘dead’ projects

Now obviously I’ve missed some things and glossed over others but my goal here was to provide a quick ‘at a glance’ summary of each. Check the individual websites for more. Thanks to the people over at Stack Exchange for doing a lot of the legwork.

I’m not even sure what to say about this one… it looks like I might have an angry video card.

I sat down at my machine after it had been sitting for three or four days to find this… wtf?

I’ll have to admit that during the previous week or so, I haven’t been able to exclusively use FreeBSD at home or Linux as a workstation in the office. Kayla and I have still been using Kubuntu (now with improved PulseAudio support) on the basement machine, and that’s been working quite well for both Netflix and media files stored over NFS. Even Dragon Player, the default KDE association for .avi and .mkv files, is quite reasonable for lightweight playback and has given us no issues.

Here be dragons

It’s a combination of things that have contributed to my slide back to Windows/OS X. First has been time at the office. When there are several urgent projects, it’s significantly easier to use the tools and infrastructure that are already set up on a Windows partition by virtue of Group Policy or already-existing tools. Wasting several hours because you can’t access a DFS share that would take one click from Outlook on Windows is unproductive.

What’s more, my choice of Arch Linux meant that there were several “rough around the edges” spots where I was missing packages or things just weren’t as polished as something like Fedora or Ubuntu. Font smoothing, for example, wasn’t quite what I was expecting and replacing/editing complicated XML files was going to be very frustrating. Arch seems very powerful and customizable, but that’s not something I can justify when there is a corporate-provided Ubuntu image available for install at the office.

FreeBSD has been fairly standard, to say the least. It supports the usual assortment of desktop applications, but the missing 20% of things that I do under Windows start to really show after a few weeks. My large Steam library sitting on another drive becomes almost worthless, and tasks such as scanning a document are also painful – Brother, for example, does a great job of shipping OS X and Linux (.deb and .rpm-enclosed) drivers but when it comes down to just needing a PDF, it’s way easier to grab the nearest Windows laptop and get things done.

What am I going to try next? After some review, I will be installing PC-BSD 9.1 (based on FreeBSD) and seeing if there’s a more polished experience available out of the box. I’m also going to be reviewing and polishing some of my GitHub-hosted scripts for BSD compatibility.

Lately I’ve been taking a look at the various open source software licenses in an attempt to better understand the differences between them. Here is my five minute summary of the most popular licenses:

GNU Public License (GPL)

Requires that any project using a GPL-licensed component must also be made available under the GPL. Basically once you go GPL you can’t go back.

Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL)

Basically the same as the GPL except that if something uses software licensed as LGPL it also doesn’t need to be licensed the same. So if you write a program that uses an LGPL library, say a program with a GTK+ user interface, it doesn’t need to be licensed LGPL. This is useful for commercial applications that rely on open source technology.

v2 vs v3

There are a number of differences between version 2 and version 3 of the GPL and LGPL licenses. Version 3 attempts to clarify a number of issues in version 2 including how patents, DRM, etc. are handled but a number of developers don’t seem to like the differences so version 2 is still quite popular.

MIT

This license allows for almost anything as long as a copy of the license and copyright are included in any distribution of the code. It can be used in commercial software without issue.

BSD3

Similar to the MIT, this license basically only requires that a copy of the license and copyright are included in any distribution of the code. The major difference between this and the MIT is that the BSD3 prohibits the use of the copyright holder’s name in any promotion of derivative work.

Apache

Apache is similar to the BSD license in that you have to provide a copy of the license in any derivative works. In addition there are a number of extra safeguards, such as patent grants, that set it apart from BSD.

Elementary OS is the latest darling for the Linux community at large and with some good reason. It isn’t that Elementary OS is The. Best. Distro. Ever. In fact being only version 0.2 I doubt its own authors would try to make that claim. It does however bring something poorly needed to the Linux desktop – application focus.

Focus?

Most distributions are put together in such a way as to make sure it works well enough for everyone that will end up using it. This is an admirable goal but one that often ends up falling short of greatness. Elementary OS seems to take a different approach, one that focuses on selecting applications that do the basics extremely well even if they don’t support all of those extra features. Take the aptly named (Maya) Calendar application. You know what it does? That’s right, calendar things.

Yeah, a calendar. What else were you expecting?

Or the Geary e-mail client, another example of a beautiful application that just does the basics. So what if it doesn’t have all of the plugins that an application like Thunderbird does? It still lets you read and send e-mail in style.

It does e-mail

Probably the best example of how far this refinement goes is in the music application Noise. Noise looks a lot like your standard iTunes-ish media player but that familiarity betrays the simplicity that Noise brings. As you may have guessed by now, it simply plays music and plays it well.

The best thing about Noise is that it plays music well

But what about feature X?

OK I understand that this approach to application development isn’t for everyone. In fact it is something that larger players, such as Apple, get called out over all the time over. Personally though I think there is a fine balance between streamlined simplicity and refinement. The Linux desktop has come a long way in the past few years but one thing that is still missing from a large portion of it is that refined user experience that you do get with something like an Apple product, or the applications selected for inclusion in Elementary OS. Too often open source projects happily jump ahead with new feature development long before the existing feature set is refined. To be clear I don’t blame them, programming new exciting features is always more fun than fixing the old broken or cumbersome ones, although this is definitely one area where improvements could be made.

Perhaps other projects can (or will) take the approach that Elementary has and dedicate one release, every so often, to making these refinements reality. I’m thinking something like Ubuntu’s One Hundred Paper Cuts but on a smaller scale. In the meantime I will continue to enjoy the simplicity that Elementary OS is currently bringing my desktop Linux computing life.

Full disclosure: I live with Kayla, and had to jump in to help resolve an enraging problem we ran into on the Kubuntu installation with KDE, PulseAudio and the undesirable experience of not having sound in applications. It involved a fair bit of terminal work and investigation, plus a minimal understanding of how sound works on Linux. TuxRadar has a good article that tries to explain things. When there are problems, though, the diagram looks much more like the (admittedly outdated) 2007 version:

The traditional spiderweb of complexity involved in Linux audio.

To give you some background, the sound solution for the projection system is more complicated than “audio out from PC, into amplifier”. I’ve had a large amount of success in the past with optical out (S/PDIF) from Linux, with only a single trip to alsamixer required to unmute the relevant output. No, of course the audio path from this environment has to be more complicated, and looks something like:

As a result, the video card actually acts as the sound output device, and the amplifier takes care of both passing the video signal to the projector and decoding/outputting the audio signal to the speakers and subwoofer. Under Windows, this works very well: in Control Panel > Sound, you right-click on the nVidia HDMI audio output and set it as the default device, then restart whatever application plays audio.

In the KDE environment, sound is managed by a utility called Phonon in the System Settings > Multimedia panel, which has multiple backends for ALSA and PulseAudio. It will essentially communicate with the highest-level sound output system installed that it has support for. When you make a change in a default Kubuntu install in Phonon it appears to be talking to PulseAudio, which in turn changes necessary ALSA settings. Sort of complicated, but I guess it handles the idea that multiple applications can play audio and not tie up the sound card at the same time – which has not always been the case with Linux.

In my traditional experience with the GNOME and Unity interfaces, it always seems like KDE took its own path with audio that wasn’t exactly standard. Here’s the problem I ran into: KDE listed the two audio devices (Intel HDA and nVidia HDA), with the nVidia interface containing four possible outputs – two stereo and two listed as 5.1. In the Phonon control panel, only one of these four was selectable at a time, and not necessarily corresponding to multiple channel output. Testing the output did not play audio, and it was apparent that none of it was making it to the amplifier to be decoded or output to the speakers.

Using some documentation from the ArchLinux wiki on ALSA, I was able to use the aplay -l command to find out the list of detected devices – there were four provided by the video card:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC892 Analog [ALC892 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: ALC892 Digital [ALC892 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

and then use aplay -D plughw:1,N /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav repeatedly where N is the number of one of the nVidia detected devices. Trial and error let me discover that card 1, device 7 was the desired output – but there was still no sound from the speakers in any KDE applications or the Netflix Desktop client. Using the ALSA output directly in VLC, I was able to get an MP3 file to play properly when selecting the second nVidia HDMI output in the list. This corresponds to the position in the aplay output, but VLC is opaque about the exact card/device that is selected.

At this point my patience was wearing pretty thin. Examining the audio listing further – and I don’t exactly remember how I got to this point – the “active” HDMI output presented in Phonon was actually presented as card 1, device 3. PulseAudio essentially grabbed the first available output and wouldn’t let me select any others. There were some additional PulseAudio tools provided that showed the only possible “sink” was card 1,3.

The brute-force, ham-handed solution was to remove PulseAudio from a terminal (sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio) and restart KDE, presenting me with the following list of possible devices read directly from ALSA. I bumped the “hw:1,7″ card to the top and also quit the system tray version of Amarok.

A list of all the raw ALSA devices detected by KDE/Phonon after removing PulseAudio.

Result: Bliss! By forcing KDE to output to the correct device through ALSA, all applications started playing sounds and harmony was restored to the household.

At some point after the experiment I will see if I can get PulseAudio to work properly with this configuration, but both Kayla and I are OK with the limitations of this setup. And hey – audio works wonderfully now.

Every since we announced the start of the third Linux Experiment I’ve been trying to think of a way in which I could contribute that would be different from the excellent ideas the others have come up with so far. After batting around some ideas over the past week I think I’ve finally come up with how I want to contribute back to the community. But first a little back story.

A large project now, GNOME was started because there wasn’t a good open source alternative at the time

During the day I develop commercial software. An unfortunate result of this is that my personal hobby projects often get put on the back burner because in all honesty when I get home I’d rather be doing something else. As a result I’ve developed, pun intended, quite a catalogue of projects which are currently on hold until I can find time/motivation to actually make something of them. These projects run the gamut of little helper scripts, written to make my life more convenient, all the way up to desktop applications, designed to take on bigger tasks. The sad thing is that while a lot of these projects have potential I simply haven’t been able to finish them, and I know that if I just could they would be of use to others as well. So for this Experiment I’ve decided to finally do something with them.

Thanks to OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice and others there are actual viable open source alternatives to Microsoft Office

Open source software is made up of many different components. It is simultaneously one part idea, perhaps a different way to accomplish X would be better, one part ideal, belief that sometimes it is best to give code away for free, one part execution, often times a developer just “scratching an itch” or trying a new technology, and one part delivery, someone enthusiastically giving it away and building a community around it. In fact that’s the wonderful thing about all of the projects we all know and love; they all started because someone somewhere thought they had something to share with the world. And that’s what I plan to do. For this Linux Experiment I plan on giving back by setting one of my hobby projects free.

Before this open source web browser we were all stuck with Internet Explorer 6

Now obviously this is not only ambitious but perhaps quite naive as well especially given the framework of The Linux Experiment – I fully recognize that I have quite a bit of work ahead of me before any of my hobby code is ready to be viewed, let alone be used, by anyone else. I also understand that, given my own personal commitments and available time, it may be quite a while before anything actually comes of this plan. All of this isn’t exactly well suited for something like The Linux Experiment, which thrives on fresh content; there’s no point in me taking part in the Experiment if I won’t be ready to make a new post until months from now. That is why for my Experiment contributions I won’t be only relying on the open sourcing of my code, but rather I will be posting about the thought process and research that I am doing in order to start an open source project.

Topics that I intend to cover are things relevant to people wishing to free their own creations and will include things such as:

• weighing the pros and cons as well as discussing the differences between the various open source licenses
• the best place to host code
• how to structure the project in order to (hopefully) get good community involvement
• etc.

An interesting side effect of this approach will be somewhat of a new look into the process of open sourcing a project as it is written piece by piece, step by step, rather than in retrospect.

The first billion dollar company built on open source software

Coincidentally as I write this post the excellent website tuxmachines.org has put together a group of links discussing the pros of starting open source projects. I’ll be sure to read up on those after I first commit to this

Linux: a hobby project initially created and open sourced by one 21 year old developer

I hope that by the end of this Experiment I’ll have at least provided enough information for others to take their own back burner projects to the point where they too can share their ideas and creations with the world… even if I never actually get to that point myself.

P.S. If anyone out there has experience in starting an open source project from scratch or has any helpful insights or suggestions please post in the comments below, I would really love to hear them.