Vendors are trying to work around it, especially as there is the expectation of a ramp-up in the availability of ARM based hardware. Super long-life netbooks, low powered touch based computers, and even a flurry of smaller embedded devices are forecast to hit the market this year, many of which will be based on the Linux operating system. Ubuntu would be a great match for this.

Ubuntu and ARM

Ubuntu runs very well on some ARM based platforms and there is a sustained effort to make it work more ubiquitously across many more. To that end our goal is to have Ubuntu running on any ARM based device (as long as there is hardware available). A lofty goal but one which we would like to see happen.

So what can we do about the 3D graphics licensing issue? Legally not very much. The companies that own the IP (Intellectual Property) rights to these drivers often want large licensing fees for their technology. This is a model for single product lines (take the Nokia N900 for instance) but for Ubuntu where we are targeting a more broad approach, this isn't ideal.

So when you buy your new, ARM based netbook that has an obscene amount of battery life and you just want to install the 3D clutter based, wonderfully rich UI that Ubuntu Netbook Edition offers, what do you do?

Well Ubuntu recognizes this problem and as part of the Lucid Lynx release there is an effort to bring a similarly wonderfully rich UI to non-3D-accelerated hardware.

The new 2D EFL based Launcher

Above you can see the default UI for Ubuntu's ARM based releases starting from Lucid (10.04). It's a direct clone of the UI found in the 9.10 Karmic release on i386 although this one is based on EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) meaning that its fast on non-accelerated platforms. If there is 3D hardware available it can use that but it works perfectly fine without.

Another great thing about the 2D launcher is that isn't not restricted to ARM hardware only, in fact if you have Lucid installed now, getting the launcher couldn't be simpler. At the command prompt just type the following (make sure you have the universe repository enabled):

sudo apt-get install netbook-launcher-efl

and voila, your UI switches to the new launcher. Of course a simple:

sudo apt-get remove netbook-launcher-efl

will remove it if you decide its not what you want.

Beyond Netbook Launcher

Another of the great things about this launcher, as apposed to the 3D launcher shipped with Karmic, is that its extremely theme-able. The theme file is contained in:

/usr/share/netbook-launcher-efl/data/themes/default.edj

Theme files use the edje declarative layout format. By changing this file you can completely change the way the UI looks. For example, see the alternate UI screenshot above, both are based on the same code, the only difference is that they have a different theme file.

So if you have ARM based hardware but no 3D acceleration, fear not, you can get the same great user experience that your i386 cousins have in Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

How do you boot a live cd session?

The first thing to do was find out why it was slow. There are a few ways to do this but I chose to first use simple time-stamping methods and afterwards, the much prettier bootchart package.

A bit of background on how the live cd session is booted. There are two broad steps in the process of booting a live cd, the first is setting up the environment ready for the session, and the second, you guessed it, is actually booting into the session. Initial hunches were that the first step, setting up the session, was the major cause of slowness so investigations started there.

Casper

Setting up the session is the responsibility of a project called casper. Casper is a set of scripts that are run on boot to do such things as unpack the initial filesystem, add a dummy user, setup languages and keyboard layouts and so forth. Its mainly written in perl.

The time-stamping stage of investigates confirmed that casper was indeed slower than it should be. I'll skip ahead to the bootchart part of the story as thats much more visually interesting.

Casper before

Above you can see the casper section of the live cd boot process. I've highlighted the bits that immediately stand out. The overall boot was 3 minutes and 15 seconds with casper responsible for around 2 minutes of that.

The highlighted bits seemed to have one thing in common, they all interacted with the debconf database. From the debconf programmers tutorial document:

"debconf is a backend database, with a frontend that talks to it and presents an interface to the user. There can be many different types of frontends, from plain text to a web frontend. The frontend also talks to a special config script in the control section of a debian package, and it can talk to postinst scripts and other scripts as well, all using a special protocol. These scripts tell the frontend what values they need from the database, and the frontend asks the user questions to get those values if they aren't set."

So communicating with the debconf database was slowing the boot. Initiating the call, sending the data and receiving a response, was taking up to 4 seconds at a time and when there are many of these calls, they all soon add up.

After many a head-scratching moment it was decided that the best way to solve this would be to initiate the communication once and keep it open so that when debconf was needed, the overhead in setting it up was removed. The implementation details are all in the code history but the results are much easier to show.

Casper after

With a couple of other tweaks besides the debconf one, the boot is now down to 1 minute 53 seconds and casper takes just under 50 seconds of that. There is more room for improvement, pre-generating a default locale (although which locale that would be is a tough choice), pre-generating fonts and looking into SSL, but for now, this is a big win.

The bootcharts above are for the ARM based iMX51 device made by Freescale which is only just beginning to proliferate onto the market. Intel/AMD based machines show an equivalent speed-up.

Conclusion

So there you have it. The next time you boot into a Lucid live cd session it shouldn't take quite so long, and now you know why.

Anyway, back to team business. The mobile team managed to get a metric tonne of work done (possibly more) in the 5 short days. To date we now have a new default UNR styled UI, 33% faster-to-boot live-cd images (thats across all images, not just ARM), mature and optimized (can you say Thumb2+NEON) images, the Chrome web browser on ARM, greater integration of testing and many, many, bugs squashed. All this and we are only half-way through the cycle.

ARM hardware is only just proliferating onto the market but when it becomes mainstream, we hope our hard work will make Ubuntu the default operating system. The team is working hard to make Lucid the best ever ARM optimized Linux release and we invite you, if you have hardware, to use, test, and contribute to make Linux the choice for ARM hardware.

To that end, just some of my new years resolutions are below.

• Environmental
  Recycle more. We actively recycle as much as we can at home, or I should rephrase that, we recycle as much as is currently collected. Our council don't collect certain items that could be recycled and we tend not to make the effort to get these said items recycled either. We should collect these and make sure they are recycled.
  Expand our space. Somewhat in contrast to the above is my family either need to move house or expand the one we are in. Currently we are four persons living in a smallish three bedroomed house. We will either move house or extend the one we are in, which ever is environmentally and financially sound.
• Technical
  Lead an open source project I'm proud of. It been a while since I had a major project that I was 'leading'. What I mean by leading is 'lead developer', 'founder', 'steering force'. I've concentrated in making improvements in existing projects for so long that I've forgotten what its like to create one. This year I hope to make a difference with an open source project that is born from my own grey matter.
  Become a MOTU. Something that means a lot to me is becoming a MOTU. I've always been an active contributor to open source software and kind of prided myself in being a free-software hitman. I've flitted between projects, fixing problems, adding functionality, and moving on when projects seem to increase momentum under their own steam. But one thing that has been consistent since Warty, has been my use of Ubuntu as my operating system of choice. I've often looked at the MOTU program and thought I should make strides to become a MOTU but I've always had some other excuse. This year I will become a MOTU.
  Be a game changer. Contribute to a 'game-changing' project. This is on the wish-list, not only for me but for my employer, Canonical. In modern times the iPod was game-changing, as was Google's emergence from search engine to software giant. This year I want to be right there contributing to something I can talk about with members of the family that are 'too old to understand computers' but will of heard of it none-the-less.
• Physical and spiritual goals:
  Explore religion. Lets get this straight, I'm pretty religion-neutral, mainly due to my scientific background. I see lots of merit in people believing in 'something' and the power that brings but every religions rules, scriptures and tales seem to fall down when science is applied to it. One religion that I personally feel has more merit that others is Buddhism. This coming 12 months I will devote time to learning more than I know now about this belief with the hope of bringing something of it into my life.
  Be healthy. My diet is pretty ad-hoc. Sometimes its extremely healthy with many portions of fresh fruit and vegetables, sometimes its random items from the heart-attack list of shame. My goal this coming year is to have a consistently 'good' diet. No extremes, no highs, no lows, just a healthy and balanced diet.
  Be alcohol free. This is a hard one. I've been a very active sports fanatic for sometime, 6 years of rugby union, getting seriously into weight training for many years, running 500+ miles a year but 3 years ago I really busted my shoulder up bad on a cold and rainy afternoon playing rugby. With no chance of training at all for 12 months and doctors advice to never play rugby again I slipped into the habit of 'a few beers'. A 'few beers' with mates down the pub, a 'few beers' watching a film at home, its all taken its toll. I'm still going to the gym semi-regular now that my shoulder is somewhat better but my waist-line has expanded and I seem to have picked up a bad habit in the process. My goal is to go 12 months alcohol free, which is an extremely lofty goal given today's society, perhaps the hardest of all my new years resolutions. Alcohol seems to have slipped under the radar of what is acceptable in today's society making it seem 'abnormal' not to drink but I'm not one for conforming and I like a challenge.

There are many more resolutions but the ones above are a good sub-section of what I want 2010 to bring. I hope my 2010 happens and I wish you all the success that I'm hoping for too.

Now I'm a big media fiend, just ask my wife. We now don't have a garage because I went and converted it into a home cinema room (8 foot screen, HD projector, 500+ films archived, DVD+Blueray+HD-DVD sources ...). I hack on the Entertainer Media Center project (although its a little stale at the moment, effort really appreciated) and I'm a former user of XBMC on the first generation XBOX's from Microsoft and now uPNP of the XBOX 360. So when someone says to me they have a £150 tiny and silent PC, running Linux and decoding HD material, I got a little credit card jumpy.

A couple of days later the Revo arrived. I was a little in two minds on whether this was a good purchase or not. I count at least 23 computers in my house so another was probably not a good idea but none-the-less, I justified it as a replacement for the excellent but slow Viglen MPC-L which, coupled with many USB disks, was a great file server. The first thing I did was install Ubuntu Karmic Koala. Out of the box it worked great (no surprise there ). Install the Nvidia drivers, tweak the screen resolution for my plasma TV, install XBMC and away we go. One tweak every media concerned individual must do on this device is to disable compiz. For some reason, on full screen playback, compiz causes video tearing. It took me a little while to figure this out and I don't mind admitting that I was initially disappointed to see video playback on this machine (when compiz was enabled) but my god did things change.

I enabled my old Windows Media Center remote, added all my video sources to XBMC, tweaked the interface a little and now, all I can say is WOW. The Revo+XBMC combo ranks up there with the best of my purchases. The interface is wonderful; the little things like showing you the actual time a video you are watching is going to end, the UI which puts every set-top-box maker to shame and the shear extensibility of the thing is immense. I won't even mention that this is running Ubuntu, doing my work-related backups, downloading (legal) torrents, running scripts, mail, and a whole host of other services, and drawing a trickle of power.

If your considering replacing a uPNP enabled XBOX (which I did) or PS3, getting rid of your aging server or just wanting a great media experience, I whole-heartedly recommend this combination.

This is going to get an instant dismissal from the Nokia faithful, but bear with me and I guarantee you will see what I see in some capacity.

Lets get one thing straight first, I love what Nokia have done for Linux, from their first offerings pre-770 to what they do today, they do a great job. I know many of the current (and past) team that care so much about how Linux will someday become the default smart-phone choice that I somewhat feel a little sorry that they pioneered a route that may be occupied by others.

Nokia was there way before Google decided to bring Linux to a phone-sized device, Nokia was there long before Internet tablets were considered a cool technology, and Nokia continue to fund many of the projects that matter for Linux users so its with a heavy heart that I declare my dislike for the n900.

When Nokia had a Linux based tablet, it was consider unique and very cool for the geeks that used Linux. It was a great playground for developers and a marketing tool to inform people just what could be done with innovation and a lot of hard work. Fast forward to today and we have Google bringing a Linux based phone OS to the mass market, ARM challenging for supremacy using Linux, and even Palm resurrected their business based on Linux, so what is Nokia's reply, the n900.

Lets not doubt that the device is a great attempt to bring a full operating system to a smart phone. But it fails so miserably on many occasions. Nokia had such a head start that the likes of Google and Palm should of gone to Nokia to license their stack because of their years of maturity, but no, they thought 9 to 12 months of in house R&D could better what Nokia had to offer and guess what, that turned out right.

So when Nokia bring out something resembling a phone that plays in the Google Android, Apple iPhone, Palm Pre and even other "dumb phone" eco-sphere you instantly compare them. I really want to like this phone but at every opportunity it does something that isn't what I want. Email (modest) is terrible (bugs, slowness, imap headaches), the browser is fast but back navigation is form over function and zoom in/out tends to be random, the calendar app never syncs past my initial Google calendar sync, screen presses are hit and miss ... I have a list longer than both my arms [1]. Software faults, hardware incumbency, complete failure in some cases leave this device not on a par with its predecessors but behind because of its lofty ambitions.

Some things are great, the keyboard is surprisingly good, the screen has a great resolution, media playback is excellent, the camera is second to none for a phone but I simply can't use it as a day to day device, and believe me I've tried. I've put my sim in the the n900 more than a dozen times and kept it there for periods of time but I have to swap it back out every time. Coming from a professional Linux developer (an ARM developer at that) this isn't good and on more than a few occasions people have asked me whether or not they should purchase a n900. I have had to say "not yet".

I know what Nokia and Maemo are capable of but the n900 fall's frustratingly short. Its a step too far for Nokia and I'm sure that the next iteration of devices will be great, but will that be too late?

[1] Some bugs/problems I've encountered:

• imap folders not cached so each mail check takes *minutes*
• modest email client capitalizes inbox to INBOX randomly on one of my accounts making the folder inaccessable
• imap changes not registered sometimes, i.e. I read an email on the n900, its still unread when I check with another client.
• n900 is practically impossible to use one-handed
• lack of portrait mode really is a problem
• maps application is near useless, often can't find the current location and its really slow
• some calls get routed straight to answer phone even though I have a signal
• some calls don't connect (i.e. I get network failure) and checking the number with another phone is fine
• browser back button (not keyboard back button) brings up a UI history of your browsing which is form over function, makes going back a frustrating experience
• device is heavy and sometimes cumbersome to use (try lying on your back and operating it with keyboard open)
• screen touches sometimes don't register even though you get the 'click' sound of a press being made
• zoom on the browser (little circles with your finger) can be quite random
• scroll bars are not shown by default meaning options that are off the screen can be difficult to spot (I have to always try to scroll just in case there are more option)
• Google calendar can sync via the exchange setting, I find it sync's once and never again
• ...

Well in the interests of fairness one Canonical employee decided to send the reporter a netbook with a copy of Karmic (the next Ubuntu release) on it.

Here is the reporters response.

I think its pretty far off the mark. Comments such as

"But, even after some help from a Canonical advisor who came and installed a few add-ons such as Flash, I struggled to work out how I would organise photos, music and video with this system."

are a little off the mark. Linux (not just Ubuntu) has a plethora of applications that can manage photos (oh how I love f-spot), music and videos so I'm not sure where the confusion comes from. I attach my USB camera or phone and I get offered the chance to import to f-spot, I open a video file and equally its easy to play it. As for flash, go to a flash based site and you get presented with an option to install not just flash from Adobe but other free alternatives.

Not wanting to get personal, as the reporter Rory Cellan-Jones may not be up-to-date with his market analysis but comments like:

"Risking another pasting from its supporters, I'll predict that Ubuntu will remain a very niche product - but it's Google's Android which could bring open-source to the mass consumer market."

show a little ignorance. Open source on the cell phone is a little different from the desktop. Android on anything but a cell phone platform is like trying to make a nun get drunk with beer whilst smoking crack (recent small bit of ammo).

The phone war will be fought with Nokia's Maemo (but not the current generation) and Google, the desktop (which he was testing) will be fought with Google (Chrome OS), Windows 7 and some Linux flavour.

I look forward to an unbiased, educated analysis of the technical market by the main-stream media but I don't hold my breath.

On the 15th and 16th of October 2009 around 200 people gathered together in the beautiful south-easten French city of Grenoble, situated at the foot of the French Alps, to talk about embedded Linux. Although there were many talks over the two days the underlying theme of the conference seemed to be boot-time reduction and android.

I made quite a few notes from the talks I attended which can be found here:

http://www.linuxuk.org/docs/elce2009

I greatly enjoyed the event. The talks ranged from high level strategic (e.g. GenIVI) to in-depth and technical (e.g. Device Tree's for ARM) but all were very well done. I also got to meet old and new friends alike which is always good.

ELC continues to be one of my favourite events and I look forward to attending next year.

Oh and on my travels around the city I came across a most innovative shop sign, very cool.

I'm sat in the wonderfully picturesque Grenoble, France, sipping a beer and gazing at the huge mountains around me (but that's for another post). I'm also reminiscing about the Maemo Summit 2009 so I thought I would put a few comments down.

I'm not going to harp on about how great the summit was, or how cool Nokia are for giving away 300 loan devices to the attendees (although I know at least one person left theirs in the back of a taxi in Amsterdam ) but instead I'll just commend Nokia for their efforts with the N900. They have worked tirelessly to get a mainstream, Linux based phone to market that is both hugely configurable and extendable. One could harp on about the seeds of Linux based phones being sown with the likes of the LiMo initiative, Open Moko and more recently, Android, but I know of no other company that has advanced many core Linux components with a huge amount of effort and funding than Nokia.

The current device may not be to everyones taste and may not even be ready for mainstream just yet but I raise my glass to you, well done Nokia!