Using Dell’s D/Dock docking station with Linux

Dell is shipping docking stations for it’s Latitude Laptops. I’ve tested a D/Dock and it does work with Linux. The only real problems have their roots in Linux’ shortcomings.

My new laptop has docking station support, and since these docking stations can be bought second hand at very reasonable prices I got myself a D/Dock.

It worked out of the box: the laptop, plugged to the docking station, just works. External devices connected via USB or the external monitor also work as they would be plugged directly to the laptop. I didn’t test the media bay, the DVI connector or the additional PCI slot, so I’m not sure if they would work. However, since there were no other problems I would at least be confident in trying these.

Hotplugging is also not an issue: the laptop can be plugged on or off the docking station while it is running. Of course, mounted USB devices connected to the docking stations should be unmounted before plugging off! But besides that there are no real problems.

The only real disadvantages of the docking station itself I was so far able to recognize are that it has too few USB ports and that it is a bit noisier than I would have expected.
There are just 3 USB slots at the back plus one at the side (which is a bit extended to work with Dell stuff, but still works as a normal USB slot), but I would have preferred to have at least 6. Mouse, keyboard, external hard disk, webcam, USB stick and a MP3 player are not uncommon devices these days.
The other problem is the noise of the docking station fan: while it is not really disturbing and far away from the fan of my former laptop it is at least noisier than the laptop’s fan. But since the docking station was quite cheap I might open it to check if I can do anything about it.

So basically everything works very well - however, there is one problem due to the shortcoming of Linux - or X to be more specific - itself: the external monitor is not detected and activated automatically. And the other way around, if the external monitor is activated alone and the laptop is unplugged, the laptop screen stays blank and there is no way to bring it back.
So the actual shortcoming is that, while the basic hotplugging support is available, there is too little automation there: X should make clear that at least one connected output device is active all the time! Also, there should be easy ways to define specific situations: if monitor xyz is connected, switch to xyz only, if monitor abc is connected, switch to abc and laptop monitor. The first one would be the external monitor of the docking station, the second one could be a projector.

But again, this is a problem due to Linux, not due to the docking station. I guess this will have to wait until the proprietary drivers deliver XRandR 1.2 support and until the distributions ship XRandR 1.2 GUIs at a larger scale and really implement these into the system. Fedora 9 will ship with a Gnome interface, and afaik KDE 4 has basic XRandR 1.2 support anyway. Still, I’m not aware of any demon like capabilities to enable automatic device selection as mentioned above…

Howto: Test the WebKit engine in Fedora

The Fedora repository contains a set of WebKit packages. Once installed they can give a first impression of WebKit’s abilities.

WebKit is a browser engine which was once forked from KHTML by Apple. Nowadays it is developed by the WebKit project where Apple still has quite some weight, but others are in the boat as well: Trolltech, Nokia, Adobe, some KDE developers, some GNOME developers, etc. Besides, WebKit will be part of the upcoming Qt 4.4, will play an important role in KDE’s Plasma and can also be used as a backend in GNOME’s Epiphany browser.

However, at the moment most of these developments are not here yet. But Fedora’s WebKit packages come along with basic WebKit browsers which can be used to test some websites against WebKit:

# rpm -qa|grep -i webkit
WebKit-doc-1.0.0-0.3.svn28482.fc8
WebKit-gtk-devel-1.0.0-0.3.svn28482.fc8
WebKit-qt-devel-1.0.0-0.3.svn28482.fc8
WebKit-qt-1.0.0-0.3.svn28482.fc8
WebKit-gtk-1.0.0-0.3.svn28482.fc8

# rpm -ql WebKit-qt
/usr/lib/libQtWebKit.so.1
/usr/lib/libQtWebKit.so.1.0
/usr/lib/libQtWebKit.so.1.0.0
/usr/libexec/WebKit
/usr/libexec/WebKit/QtLauncher

# ls /usr/libexec/WebKit/
DumpRenderTree  GtkLauncher  QtLauncher

The two executables QtLauncher and GtkLauncher are a simple browser based on Qt or Gtk, respectively. Since the path is usually not part of PATH the browsers must be started from the command line with the full path, /usr/libexec/WebKit/QtLauncher for example. After you’ve called that line via ALT+F2 the browser comes up.

But don’t expect too much: these are just basic browsers to show off the capabilities of the WebKit engine - nothing more. They are definitely not ready for production use - or any real use at all. The Qt version does not know how to handle addresses without the http://, usual shortcuts like Ctrl+L are not working, and plugins are not embedded at all. However, the Qt launcher has a nice effect of showing a link address when you hover over a link. The Gtk launcher is in a bit better shape: it does at least understand addresses, but than again it does not fill in the http:// after loading the page.

But nevertheless these two launchers can give you a first impression how this web engine works on a web page - in case you are a web developer this might come in handy. Also, if you are up for tests, you can check the current state of WebKit in regards to the Acid3-Test. Also, the first impression of the engine is rather nice: it seems to be rather quick and layouts web pages just nice. I’m looking forward to see new browsers based on WebKit.

An incomplete list of high quality Open Source games

It is often mentioned that many games are not available on Linux. While several big titles are indeed missing such Linux ports, the Open Source community itself produced some impressive titles. Here is a short list together with some promo videos.

Most of the Linux Distributions out there are shipped with the set of games included in GNOME or KDE. These games are nice for short breaks, but not comparable with big, hour consuming games sold by the big publishers. However, the Open Source community stepped up there to deliver its own products, and many of them are not only interesting, but simply impressive. Also, there is a game for almost every taste available.

First of all the games where I also found a promo video:
The first person shooter Nexuiz speaks for itself:

The same is true for the first person shooter Tremulous:

In case you loved the UFO-XCOM series, you will find yourself at home at UFO: Alien Invasion:

Glest, a real time strategy game with wizards, trolls and the like:

In case you love classical Jump’n'Run games, Secret Maryo Chronicles is the way to go:

Next a set of games which might be a bit calmer (and don’t have a promo video), but are nevertheless exciting:

• Freeciv is the game of choice for everyone who loves to crush and rebuild entire civilizations.
• Wormux is - as the name suggests - a Worms clone.
• FlightGear gives you a fuzzy feeling if you love to fly from one airport to another with different types of machines.

All of these entries above have three things in common: they are all actively developed by a healthy community, they are all very appealing and have high quality graphics, and they are all comparable to the proprietary competitors of the corresponding game type. Some of them are better, some of them are as good as, some of them fall a bit behind - but not much. And they definitely meet the requirements of the occasional player and are a way to spend hours and hours.

Of course I’m well aware that there are many more Free Software games - but I’ve kept my focus on the games which at least released one full working (feature complete, playable) version and are in active development. And of course I only listed games I know of. Although I think I covered all the shooting stars of the Free Software games genre I am open to any other suggestion!

But while these games are great, the Open Source community sometimes fails to advertise them. For example, many of these games are included in the distributions - but did you ever see a Linux distribution review featuring the included games? It should be included in the release notes and reviews that a Linux distribution most often is not only a nice set of Office software but also comes along with a rich set of high quality games.

Fedora for example has a dedicated project for games, the Fedora Special Interest Group Games which helped to bring many games to Fedora. Except Secret Maryo Chronicles all games above are available on Fedora and just a click away. It takes more than 1 GB to install all these games - but that is definitely worth the space. And if you like them: promote them!

There is btw. only one genre which I personally miss badly: MMORPG. Of course there are projects dealing with it, but none of them has released a full, stable version yet. But that might be not too bad for my person because I still have to finish and hand in my final thesis these days, and a free MMORPG would give me quite some time problems.

Klik2 RC to be around in February 2008

The Klik project plans to release the new klik2 RC in February next year. Among other technical improvements the new version will feature a new mount mechanism and simpler dependencies.

Klik2 basics

The first test version of klik2 was released in August this year by the klik project and featured the new mount mechanism based on FUSE instead of the old loop mounts. FUSE will make it possible to mount as many images as the user wants instead of a number which have to compiled into the kernel. Additionally klik2 will not any longer require X to run a GUI but will run on the command line as well.
In September the klik2 project released a first screencast of a new Gnome GUI interface of klik2. ALso it was announced that klik2 will run on any distribution which is LSB compliant, which should be most distributions. While the old klik was targeting on deb distributions mainly klik2 will be fully distribution agnostic.

Since the new klik2 packages can be generated from unmodified rpm or deb packages with the help of specific recipes it should be fairly easy to provide a large database of klik2 packages for all distributions without the need to worry about incompatibilities. As an example I asked if I could use my Fedora packages to produce klik2 versions out of them - the answer was promising:

To answer you question yes klik2 can use your RPMS ! As a bonus your rpms will then work on just about any modern linux
desktop distro including Debian based ones
[...]
You just need to write a simple recipe telling klik which rpms to use.

As a result it will also become much easier to spread packages of Beta software on Linux: the developer will only have to build one proper package for the distribution of his/her own choice (and complying with the Freedesktop menu spec). Afterwards, klik2 will take care of the rest.

However, it should be clear that Klik2 does not aim at system libraries or services - things like X and the basic libraries should already be there!

The upcoming release

In November the project mentioned the February as a possible release date. I asked back to confirm this and was told that indeed a release candidate can be expacted by that date:

> There is just one question left:
> Is 23 February 2008 a final release or a Beta/RC release?
>
At this point I’d say an RC

We will release the final when its finished

I’m looking forward to test-build some beta versions of applications to see how well this works out.

Feature plans for Fedora 9

Fedora 8 is out now and plans for Fedora 9 are made. The feature list is already in place and contains several entries.

Fedora 8 has just been released, but of course plans for the next version are already under way: a Fedora 9 Feature List has been created in the Wiki, just like the one for Fedora 8, and people and groups now add their plans and aims.

Two outstanding aims are the inclusion of KDE 4 as the default KDE version and the usage of PackageKit as an alternative package management frontend. Since the Fedora 9 release schedule aims at May 2008 both aims should be realistic and possible: KDE 4 is supposed to be released in a working state around christmas, and PackageKit already works pretty well now.

Another feature which is currently lacking in Fedora 8 is real support of RandR 1.2: while everything works in the command line there is now GUI yet. Even worth, the current GUI shipped with Fedora is not aware of the new RandR features and asks you to restart your X - which is totally nuts. There are also no fallbacks implemented to always have at least one working output. At least the first part will hopefully be addressed by the next Fedora release.
Speaking about broken tools and implementations, NetworkManager is again part of the feature list. The team aims at getting NM into shape that it can be activated by default and just works in all situations: with mobile support via blue tooth, support for more than one device, support for system wide configuration via PolicyKit, etc. Since Fedora 8 ships with a development version of NM 0.7 some of these features might find their way into Fedora 8 as an update as well.

For PulseAudio the developers plan to replace current volume control principles by a PulseAudio volume control. The background is that current systems rely on the information exposed by ALSA which are neither user friendly nor useful for everyone. Therefore a PulseAudio logic will be used to also use the possibilities of PulseAudio.

There are also plans to create a new Fedora Spin for that release: Fedora Astronomy. That plan also contains some Fedora related political “problems” is also “political” interesting: Fedora is quite GNOME concentrated, but most of the astronomy software for Linux - KStars, Xephem, Celestia, Stellarium, Partiview - has little to do with GNOME. But KStars, which is quite well known and is used for example to control telescopes of any size requires KDE libraries anyway, so it would be useful to install KDE as the default desktop. But from my point of view I would not be surprised if something else would happen.

Speaking about GNOME, GDM will see a major rework for Fedora 9 as well. It will be ported to all the new possibilities which are around these days on modern desktops: improved fast user switching support, PolicyKit support D-Bus API, etc. While these features make great progress and are supported by more and more distributions and applications, the underlying desktops still fail to support some of these. I don’t know of any work at implementing PolicyKit’s features deep into the KDE libraries at the moment, for example. And in general D-BUS is still not used in a way it could be in both desktops: you could start entire different sets of applications depending on the time, the (network-) location or the mood of the user (photo database together with the image manipulating application, or sets of audio applications for music work, etc.), and you could also give one save&close command to such sets of apps at the same time with D-BUS.
In this regard the rework of GDM is “just another” step, but a necessary and important one.

It shows that Fedora 9 will again come up with multiple changes - many of them are not even listed here. Most of them will be evolutionary (which is not bad!), except maybe for KDE, which will see a revolutionary step to a new level.