“Since we are are not charging anything extra for installing the software, it means that we are actually not trading in pirated software. For us this is just a sewa (selfless act) that we are offering to our customers. Besides, the pricing of their operating systems is way too high for the Indian markets.”

In my various talks involving Linux advocacy, I started out saying Linux was a free alternative to Windows and other related productivity tools. The audience never connected well with this idea. Well, the reason was simple. No one bought a copy of Windows or M$ Office – ever. So, whats the point in replacing software that is running well with Linux and related applications? So when you talk about the “free” as in beer, be very careful. Most guys don’t even know that they are supposed to pay for the M$ software they are using. Go into any independent PC assembler’s office here in Chennai and you will see that software is installed free of cost for any customer who wants to buy an assembled PC. It is all done in the open. Nothing’s hidden.

In the advocacy talks, I moved to free as in freedom and this seem to help a lot. First, is to make the people realize how they can get trapped and then to make them understand the merits of FOSS in the area. Again, if you are talking to business people, they are interested in the traps and the snares. But, if you are speaking to students who are busy learning C with Turbo C, VB and VC++, then this trap business won’t make sense to them. They have never been in a “trap” and so they can’t realize the horror of one. Talk to them about code. Ask them if they have seen the code for a real operating system. This will interest them – take it forward from there.

”
Virtualization is going mainstream and there are several tools being
developed by many 3rd parties that deal with various virtual machine
technologies. Several of these tools are licensed under the GPL. One
promising library, LibVirt (http://libvirt.org) is licensed under the
LGPL. As of today, Libvirt supports KVM, Xen and QEMU. If it needs to
support OpenVZ quickly, it would be great if the userland control code
is available in a library format under the LGPL, whereas the utilities
can still be GPL. Re-inventing the wheel is a waste of time for
everyone involved since it will take considerable time to include
freshly writen code to control OpenVZ based VMs into LibVirt.

Will OpenVZ(SWSoft) be willing to release the userland control code
(most of it in the “lib” directory of the vzctl distribution) under
the LGPL so that other tools can use it efficiently?
“

There was one user, who came forward to do the work, by properly splitting the tools and core functions into and library proper and programs that link to it, if it was agreed that the code be released under the LGPL.

After many days, there seems to have been some consideration on those lines. One SWSoft(the company behind OpenVZ) employee,  has replied to a user who is having problems with the current library thus:

”
current libvzctl imho is brain damaged as it was never actually been designed properly. after the licensing question will be resolved I think it will be greately reworked.
“

If the tools are reworked on, and a LGPL version of the tools is available, then integration into LibVirt will be a breeze and it will save a lot of “reinventing the wheel”.

Running traditional virtual machines like the free as in beer VMWare can be taxing if you have an older machine. Running multiple virtual machines with VMWare for development sucks up all resources on my Pentium D system which has 512M RAM. To try out the latest hardware assisted virtualization, I went and bought myself an AMD Athlon based system that features SVM. The Linux kernel, from version 2.6.20 onwards features KVM, that lets you run unmodified operating systems at native speeds! If your processor supports hardware assisted virtualization, that is.

Now running multiple systems is a pain, especially if you have limited desk space. I can’t have 2 sets of keyboard, mouse and monitor. A really nice thing to have now is a KVM (keyboard, video and mouse)switch. This lets you share those indispensable I/O devices among multiple systems. The ones that I have seen earlier provide a switching panel and can handle multiple systems. But I was running only 2 systems. So I got myself a simpler one from Chennai’s own Ritchie street. This neatly designed KVM switch can switch between PCs when the scroll lock is pressed twice in quick succession. This is an incredible tool! I really don’t miss manually switching cables when I needed to install different distributions. For other things, there is SSH.

Many of my friends, when they come visiting plugin their MP3 players into my PC to warm the batteries up. Computers have become so common that the MP3 player manufacturers have wired up the charging mechanism via the USB ports. You may sometimes, however feel the need for a traditional adaptor. During these times, you can make use of Swaroop and co’s ION. This is a pretty useful device providing the much needed USB port, sans the computer. The other end of this device is a standard power cable  that you can shove into a wall socket. Your iPod/MP3 player couldn’t be happier. I think Swaroop and co must put this on eBay, it will give them good coverage. For Rs. 399, this is a neat device.

I wrote a mail to the OpenVZ maintainers, but these things take time to decide. Or there may be no release at all, since SWSoft, the company that sponsors OpenVZ development, actually sells an improved version with tools called Virtuozzo. If they make the code available under the LGPL, that would mean that commercial , non-open source software is free to link with it and utilize its services.

The approach I used in EasyVZ is simple. The OpenVZ utilities are very scripting friendly with a very regular text output format. So, I used Python to read the output, parse it and used it. This technique I call camera print technique. It comes from this:

You get legal, original DVDs from the market, or you can also get poor quality, shoddy DVDs that are theatre -> handycam -> DVD copies. Well, you can hear the audience laughing when there is a good joke or you can see someone go out to take a piss or a smoke when the director gets uncreative. These illegal copies are said to be shattering the life of many producers, especially with movies riding on crores of rupees.

Executing an external binary and parsing its output is an easy way to avoid GPL-LGPL issues, but there is a cost performance-wise and also resource-wise. The camera print technique has helped me though, and it seems to come in handy once more with Libvirt. I have no clue if the maintainers will be interested in horrible code like this, but only time will tell.

OpenVZ is a operating system level virtualization solution that lets users run many instances of virtual servers(each can be a different distro) on the same hardware. Whats more, the overhead is almost negligible.

EasyVZ is currently alpha quality software and definitely contains bugs and incomplete features and is released in the spirit of “releasing early”.

The project page is here.

But this year I was informed of the event about 2 months in advance, which allowed me to plan well. I chose to speak on a couple of topics:

1. The history of the PC

2. Linux development tools

My talk was scheduled on the 16th and I took a train from Chennai on the night of 15th. Thrisur is about 10 hours by train. There is no airport in Thrisur and a flight plan was ruled out. The train must have reached by around 7 a.m or so and as I walked towards the exit, there were 3 students from GEC, one holding a plackard. I was then taken to “Ramanilayam”, which Pramode later told me is a guest house for ministers. It is a very simple place with many large rooms.

This is the same place that I stayed the last time I was here. After having a shower and breakfast, I was picked up and taken to the college auditorium where the inaugural function was to take place.

The hospitable students took very good care of me and in a while Pramode walked in. After the event was declared open in the inauguration, first up was Anivar Aravind’s talk on “Free Software Philosophy”. The slides he prepared were just wonderful and concentrated more on general culture rather than on the terse philosophy. I think the point that he was trying to drive home was that humans are just too used to copying, in all forms of art and that should be the case with software as well. I agree with him.

Later, Pramode, Anivar and I visited the FOSS exhibition, where interesting projects were on display. Here are some of them.

Insignia 06 was attended by many school students, which I think is very good for them. On the right you can see an old Wipro computer, to me it looks like a mini.

On the the left you see a student demonstrating PWM using RTAI, or atleast it was the intention. She told Pramode that there was some problem getting an RTAI patched kernel to run on that machine. Still, the concept was conveyed. Pramode has writen an article on the subject. You can read it up here. On to the right you can see wires hooked on to a PC’s paralle port. Many interesting projects were done by using the PC’s parallel port and controlling it from Linux.

The guy on the left demonstrates a Puppy Linux Live CD and on to the right is an openMosix 2 PC cluster. You can find an article I wrote for “Linux for You” on the subjects in the “Articles” section.

Some antiques were on display. Look at the platters of a hard disk and the thr right is the famous M68K CPU.

On to the left is a web cam controlled with a stepper motor. Added to that is Motion, a motion detection software used mostly for security applications. To the right is a Lynx/Lyx stall.

As a kid, I was always enthralled by battery powered toys, especially trains, since you did not have to run behind them. Here is one controlled by the parallel port. The “station” can detect it using a reed relay. You can see the magnet on the train in the picture on the right.

To the left is an electromagnetic Tux and on the right are posters made on Computer Science greats, Pramode and Anivar Aravind look on.
Post lunch talks are challenging. No matter how talented a speaker you may be, keeping the audience awake can be a struggle. The better you are, lesser people sleep. My second talk was dropped since there were not enough “technical” audience.

In the afternoon, I had the chance of attending the “Hack a mobile with Python” workshop by a couple of dudes. It described the capabilities of Nokia’s Python port to the Series 60 Symbian phones. I must say that more than the capabilities of the phone itself, the demo items were very interesting. Almost all the demos were done in association with a Linux PC that had a bluetooth dongle. Then by running programs that both on the PC and the phone, some amusing results were attained.

Start_here:

The “Hack a mobile” workshop guys and the Car demo. The car remote control was hooked up to a PC parallel port. A Nokia mobile was then used to control the car. The Linux PC was equipped with a Bluetooth dongle. A Python program on the mobile communicated with the PC through Bluetooth controlling the car. Confused? goto start_here;

OK, don’t use “goto” other than in kernel code and blogs.

“Hack a mobile” workshop chat program between a PC and a mobile.

In the evening, Pramode took me to an Altermedia showroom. These guys are pretty interesting. I bought a copy of Stallman’s essays for Rs. 110. I was printed locally, with an introduction by a local guy. Free media surely rocks. It was very nice to see a copyleft notice, that read “Verbatim copying of this work in whole or part is permitted, provided this notice is kept intact”, rather than some notice that warns you are legal action if you even tried to photo copy it!

After dinner, I took a train back to Chennai.

Please go here.

CPU power is becoming cheaper by the day. And processors such as the Pentium D are adding to this trend. The Intel Pentium D is one of the dual core processors making the rounds in the market. There are better processors from Intel, however. At the moment they are expensive. The Pentium D is a processor with two Pentium 4 Cedar Mill Dies in a single package. That is a formidable amount of computing power! Its like SMP on a chip! You also must have heard about the Intel Core 2 Duo processors. These are also dual core, but are based on a totally new architecture that Intel has come up with. The Pentium D processor is based on the Intel Netburst architecture that powered processors like the Celeron, Pentium 4 and Xeon. The Core 2 Duo, is however based on the new Intel Core Architecture, that Intel claims, provides that same performace at 40% lesser power!

I really couldn’t wait for Core 2 Duo rates to come down. Currently the processor alone is priced at about Rs. 10,000. The motherboard will cost a heafty Rs.6,700. That is the kind of money I did not have a budget for. So I went ahead, and got myself a Pentium D 2.8 MHz processor, a Intel D101 motherboard, some RAM, a DVD writer and a 160G SATA hard drive. This was replacing my old 1.1GHz celeron based system that was struggling to compile kernels that I was patching and building on an almost daliy basis for sometime.

I started out by installing my favorite distro of Linux, Ubuntu. I had downloaded a later release which came with updated software, so I don’t have to upgrade once I install. This is the case for CDs shipped from http://shipit.ununtu.com. They currently update about 180 packages once they install. I was sure that the SATA drive wouldn’t cause any problems and it didn’t. The installation went on smoothly and I logged into my brand new desktop. I installed mplayer and vlc and then started to play a DVD. The system froze. The display just froze as well. The keyboard wouldn’t respond the so wouldn’t the ATX power button. I knew it was a kernel issue. I rebooted and this time tried to copy files from my old IDE hard drives to my SATA drive. Same problem. I now concluded that the issue was with the IDE driver.
I then installed Debian Etch(Testing) and the issue went away! I was very happy. Then I realized that the kernel that Debian had installed was not SMP enabled. The Ubuntu kernel was SMP enabled. I then installed a Debian SMP kernel and I faced the same issue again! So I reconcluded: the issue was with the IDE driver in SMP mode only. The only difference otherwise was the Ubuntu kernel was 2.6.15 while the Debian kernel was 2.6.16. God knows what other distro-specific patches went into them.

I then passed a command line option “ide=nodma” to the Debian kernel. The same issue. But when I did that to the Ubuntu kernel, the problem went away! But without DMA, I knew that the disk I/O rate would be pathetic and the more CPU would be used, because data has to be copied, word-by word, by the CPU. And it was what I expected. File copying to and from the IDE hard drives is real slow, and the CPU is working much harder. Will I now take DMA for granted?
There is this thing about brand new hardware. Linux dirtros might not work out of the box without glitches. But I think it is only a matter of time before the rough edges are ironed out. A nice thing about this motherboard is that it comes with an onboard ATI Radeon x400 VGA card attached to the PCI Express bus. The sad part is that there is no “Free” (RMS’s Free) driver available for it. But Ubuntu has a restricted kernel modules package that just worked with a little tweaking of my xorg.conf file!

So, who is the kernel hacker who is going to fix my IDE driver problem? I’m no hacker and that ain’t me.