A new user interface

One of the most obvious changes is the user interface. The ARM version of Ubuntu’s previous release, Karmic Koala, booted to the default Ubuntu desktop. For some this was fine but typically today’s ARM devices tend to be different. At present, they tend to have smaller screens, less resources and little in the way of graphics acceleration. To overcome some of these limitations in the x86 netbook world, the netbook-launcher user interface was created. Based on Clutter, netbook-launcher could not run on the ARM devices Ubuntu was targeting due to a lack of 3D acceleration. Enter netbook-launcher-efl, a 2D version of the x86 netbook interface written using EFL packages.

Read more about the 2D EFL based launcher.

Faster Live CD boots

Booting a Live CD is something that most new Ubuntu users do (and many existing users too). Its often their first experience of an Ubuntu release and should give a good impression. Well, on some ARM hardware, booting this Live CD image took over 3 minutes, not exactly the impression we would hope. So investigations happened into what was causing this slowness. In the end the final boot time was reduced by around 35% on all Ubuntu Live images, not just ARM ones.

Read more about the Live CD boot time improvements.

Web Office and Web Mail integration

Open Office on a resource limited platform isn’t the greatest experience and to make matters worse, on the ARM architecture there are issues building it correctly. A new way of viewing, editing and saving office documents was needed and for the Lucid cycle a web-based solution was integrated into the desktop called webservice-office-zoho.

Read more about the web office integration.

Similarly, Evolution could be considered too heavy-weight for ARM device needs. A solution was implemented to enable integration with several online mail providers.

Read more about the web mail integration.

Optimized Tool Chain Defaults

This release includes a complete archive rebuild using more modern tool chain defaults that the latest ARM hardware can take advantage of. As of Lucid Lynx, packages are built using Thumb-2 to reduce code size and improve performance, NEON for accelerate multimedia and signal processing, and are optimized for ARMv7A based chips. Although this means that some older hardware will not work with the latest Ubuntu release it does mean that the images perform much better on modern hardware.

Other Improvements

Much bug fixing went on this cycle. The fail to build list (FTBFS), a list of packages that fail to build on a given architecture, was a focal point of activity. For the first time ever, the number of packages that failed to build on ARM from the main archive was zero (apart from libx86 which refuses to leave the build queue for ARM due to a bug), a great achievement.

The Chromium browser now works on ARM, rootstock, the tool to build ARM rootfs tarballs gained a gui frontend, we added support for the very popular OMAP platform (beagle board) and many small improvements were implemented, making this the best Ubuntu ARM release ever.

We here at Canonical are very proud of the Lucid Lynx on ARM and are extremely excited at what future releases will bring.

Desktop Integration with the cloud is hot news. Ubuntu One is a great example of this. Currently Ubuntu One integrates file storage, contacts and notes sync, and now you can even buy music from the online store, delivered straight to the Rythmbox media player. But for some devices, integration with the cloud isn’t just a nice feature, it completely changes the user experience (UX). Take for instance a low powered, possibly mobile/embedded system with limited processing power and memory. A cloud based service for these devices could allow resource intensive tasks to be offloaded to an online server somewhere, greatly improving the UX. One set of tasks that are used often but can put a strain on resources are related to office document editing.

Ubuntu’s Current Offerings

The standard Ubuntu image currently contains the Open Office suite. For those that do not know, Open Office is, from the website:

“OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers.”

Open Office also has around 9 million lines of code spread over 30 thousand files, in short, its a large project. Running this on a device with limited resources is a recipe for disaster. Of course there are alternatives, Abiword and Gnumeric are examples of two applications that replicate functionality found in Open Office’s Writer and Calc respectively. There are also online services such as Google Docs and Zoho but neither of these are tightly integrated with the desktop, until now. Enter webservice-office-zoho.

Why Zoho?

First off, why Zoho and not, for instance, Google Docs. Both services offer great functionality and are very competitive but the ultimate decision came down to which suited our use case the most. What we wanted was for a user to double click on a document which would then seamlessly open ready for editing. From there the user would edit, read, and maybe even save it back to the local device. No fuss, no logging in, no other requirements, just open and get on with it. Similary, when a user launches the application on its own, we wanted the correct type of service to open ready for the user to concentrate on their document. The service that allowed us to do this was Zoho. Zoho allows the user to do all of this without ever registering or logging in. Of course you get online storage with Zoho if you do register, but if you choose not to you can still get a full featured experience.

Integrating Zoho with the Desktop

So what do you get with this new integration. Well as alluded to before you can:

• Open, read, edit and save email document attachments.
• Open, read, edit and save local documents.
• Open, read, edit and save remote documents linked to with a url.
• Launch the required application, Writer, Show or Sheet (Word Processor, Presentations, Spreadsheets) which will present the user with an empty document of that type ready to edit.
• More functionality to come in Maverick Meerkat.

webservice-office-zoho shown here installed along side Open Office

The Future

This functionality is currently only available as default on Ubuntu’s ARM images, typically where limited hardware resources are more commonly found. But that’s not to say webservice-office-zoho can’t be used on any other Ubuntu install. As the package is in the main Ubuntu repository, a simple:

sudo apt-get install webservice-office-zoho

will install it on your Lucid based machine or if you are feeling brave, checkout the latest bazaar branch with:

bzr branch lp:webservice-office-zoho

There are lots of things planned for the future of webservice-office-zoho. If you have comments, idea’s or just want to rant, come along to the web integration UDS session this May, either in person or via online methods or just leave your thoughts here.

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.

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.