There are some desktop backup tools available for Linux, but most of them are not developed anymore. Areca however is under constant development and also provides a user friendly GUI.

Backups and Linux are a twofold thing: if you have hundreds or thousands of computers backups are not a problem at all: Amanda, Bacula, Restore and others are your friends. Also, if you want to create backups on single machines, there are many tools available: rsync, tar, and many, many more.
However, all these solutions are not suitable for the average user.

In the last years several projects were started to provide user friendly solutions for the backup of Linux desktop machines. A year ago I already reported about SBackup. Also, the Ubuntu team developed the solution TimeVault and last but not least there is flyback which I used for several months to keep a backup of my thesis. But despite their advantages they all suffer from stalled development: all mentioned projects are effectively dead at the moment.

There is only one exception: the little known Areca. This in Java programmed backup solution provides a user friendly GUI and is even suited for desktop users who have a quite complex idea of backup systems.

Despite some current bugs (it chokes on large numbers of files, you have to use several backup rules in such cases) and some shortcomings (the file choose dialog only allows to mark one single file each time) the program has matured over the time and can easily be used in a productive environment. Besides the usual backup/restore it also features statistics, the ability of merging backups, different backup profiles, encryption and other gimmicks. But be sure to quickly read through the documentation so that you understand what backup groups and backup targets are before you start!

The only problem I now have is that it is not packed for Fedora - or any other bigger distribution besides Ubuntu. The download section provides pre-compiled tar.gz packages, however I would prefer a rpm I could automatically fetch with yum.

VirtualBox has released the newest version of its virtual machine software. Among the features is seamless window support for Linux guests and MacOS and Solaris host support.

The new version is the first majoer release of VirtualBox since the company behind, Innotek, was acquired by SUN. And this release comes along with a set of new features:

• Solaris and Mac OS X host support
• Seamless windowing for Linux and Solaris guests
• Guest Additions for Solaris
• A webservice API
• SATA hard disk (AHCI) controller
• Experimental Physical Address Extension (PAE) support
• GUI: added accessibility support (50
• VMM: many fixes for VT-x/SVM hardware-supported virtualization
• Linux installer: support DKMS for compiling the kernel module
• Linux additions: several fixes, experimental support for RandR 1.2
• Linux host: compatibility fixes with Linux 2.6.25

The changelog lists numerous additional changes. Among them are notes that the general system has been improved speed and power wise. This is reflected by a new file format: after the update VirtualBox asks to update the file system from linux-1.2 to linux-1.3.
Additionally the download section now has precompiled binaries for more distribution versions. There are even rpms available for the fugure Fedora 9.

The new release is again an evolutionary improvement which again introduces a set of new supported machines. The new ownvership of SUN can only be seen by numerous improvements in the Solaris support. Otherwise, the development of VirtualBox seems to be just like usual: evolving, stable but always with a set of new features.

In a recent interview with the German IT online magazine Golem.de the kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman mentioned that the USB video device support will soon be merged into the vanilla kernel.

Many USB video devices (like Webcams, etc.) do work via the UVC standard. There is of course a Linux driver available, however this is not part of the vanilla kernel yet due to problems with the Video4Linux implementation. Therefore it has to be compiled manually or is added afterwards as a patch by the distributions. Fedora 9 and the new Ubuntu 8.04 for example do include the driver with their kernels.

Now in an interview with the German Golem.de Greg Kroah-Hartman mentioned that it is planned to merge that device driver in the near future into the mainline kernel:

There is a standard for USB video devices and the corresponding driver will soon be merged into the kernel.

If this really happens than video devices on Linux will make a big step forward: first of all a huge set of devices will be supported out of the box. Second, the support can be expected - therefore application developers can rely on it and can develop applications incorporating such video devices. Third, the developers behind the driver finally get credit for their great work and can continue the development on a stable base and with a clear future. And last but not least, the distributions have one patch less to worry.

Besides this information GKH identifies two big problematic fields in the current Linux device driver world: WLAN and video devices. WLAN just became much more sane and easy due to the new stack, but Broadcom devices are still a problem due to lacking support from Broadcam. And while video graphic cards support is getting better due to published specifications (NVIDIA, you are the only one missing!) many devices like video cameras and similar are still a problem and not well supported yet.

It is good to see that the kernel device developers have a clear picture of which device drivers are missing. And btw., it is nice to see that these drivers are for average desktop devices for normal users. So in this regard the kernel developers have an eye on the desktop.

There are several audio players out there capable of playing Ogg Vorbis. One of these which works perfectly together with Linux is the Meizu M3.

Originally I had an iAudio U2 player - that device was close to perfect: long battery life time, 2 GB storage, small, beautiful, capable of playing MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, and so on. Unfortunately, that one was stolen quite some time ago (the first thing ever stolen from me :/ ).

Later my girlfriend wanted to have a MP3 player and settled for the Samsung YP-T9JQB (which has of course Ogg Vorbis support). With a new firmware this one also worked pretty well with Linux. The only shortcoming is that you have to invoke a rescan of the music database manually after unplugging the device and that it is detected as two drives by Linux.

Now it was time to get myself a new player - and I chose the Meizu M3 - called “Music Card” - in white with 8 GB. Besides the obvious Ogg Vorbis support it also has the ability to switch between USB Mass Storage and MTP. This makes it possible to use the player just as you like with all kinds of operating systems (especially with older Linux, Windows 2k or Windows XP without the newest Windows Media Player) since these do only support USB Mass Storage. Luckily it also rescans the music database automatically after unplugging. Also it is sold at reasonable prices. I would only have wished that the battery life was as unbelievable as with the U2, but for a price around 100 Euros you can’t expect everything.

So if you look for a shiny new audio player and don’t want to buy iAudio, Meizu is another good option.

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…

My recently acquired Laptop made some strange noises several times a minute. With some help I was able to identify the hard disk power management as the source of the problem. This was easy to fix with some power management system scripts.

My recently bought new Laptophad had one problem: a strange noise bugged me. It came up several times a minute, even in idle mode. With some very helpful comments of some friendly readers (thanks Chris, Rui and Michael!) I was able to identify the hard disk as the main problem: the Load Cycle Count went up much too often per minute.

# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
/dev/sda: ST9160821AS: 37°C
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       2330
# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
/dev/sda: ST9160821AS: 37°C
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       2333
[...]

I went through the comments and through several bug reports and howtos to determine the best way to fix the issue: the fix should be easy, should work with suspend/resume and should be as native as possible, so should use the tools which are thought to be used for such cases.

The (for me) optimal solution was explained in the OpenSuse Wiki in the article “Disk Power Management”: a script is dropped at /etc/pm/config.d/disk which defines the parameters for the disk disk for the powersave mode and the normal mode. The explanation is easy to understand and does not use distribution-specific tools, so it should work on every distribution out there - it dead certainly work here at my Fedora machine.

The only question left now is if I should report my specific hard disk model anywhere to make sure that this problem is fixed automatically in the future.

In Konqueror the font in web pages could always be increased directly by pressing Ctrl and move the mouse wheel. But since it just increased the font size, not the graphics size, and therefore destroyed the layout of the web pages totally.

With KDE 4 this behaviour has changed: the images are now zoomed as well, so the entire layout is kept and showed to the viewers as expected.

This is one of the smaller hints you do not know until someone tells you

The microsoft ecosystem is often mentioned to be long term reliable and therefore be a good option for companies with long term plans or needs. However, recently some parts of Microsoft’s ecosystem fall apart and became incompatible, which is not what you expect from a reliable system.

The Microsoft ecosystem consists of thousands of services and applications provided by 3rd parties. However, the foundation of this system is provided by Microsoft’s services, applications and it’s Operating System. When these are suddenly not reliable anymore the ecosystem is suddenly not stable at all.
And there have been three large cracks in the near past which should make everyone worry who bases his or her IT on Microsoft’s products: PlayForSure, Outlook Express/Hotmail, and to some degree even OOXML.

PlayForSure

PlayForSure (DRM codename: Janus) was introduced by Microsoft in 2004/2005 to mark players which have been certified to follow Microsoft’s dream list: Windows Media Player compatibility, DRM support, MTP-only support, and so on. Originally this was also an attempt to push Ogg Vorbis out of the field.
The basic idea was that every player could be used on any Windows System which had Windows Media Player 10 installed. And that every player would play any music sold in any PlayForSure store.

The shortcoming for the user would be that the players and music wouldn’t work outside of this system (Apple, Linux, Windows 2000, Windows XP without the WMP 10, etc., other MP3 players). And if the user wanted to switch to a new computer, he/she had to re-download a licence for the new computer. That’s a usual problem with DRM, but is important in this regard.

So the ecosystem was built up, and almost every new MP3 player on the market was certified against PlayForSure. Millions of songs were presumably sold to probably millions of users.

But then Microsoft decided that PlayForeSure is not as cool as the iPod, and published an iPod enemy, the Zune. But since the Zune had to be Microsoft-Only it wasn’t Play Fore sure. The ecosystem got it’s first crack. And then Microsoft thought that having two systems was a bit confusing and closed down PlayForSure at the end of 2006. In the future the label “Certified for Microsoft Windows Vista” is supposed to replace PlayForSure. But while that certificate has some elements of the former PlayForSure it - for example - requires Windows Vista and has other, additional requirements. It is a new logo.

What we have now is a broken ecosystem. And that although most of Microsoft’s partners relied on the availability of PlayForSure - many of them still advertise their products as PlayForSure certified.
So now we have hardware vendors who have to push out a new line of players which can be certified against the new logo. All their old devices now depreciate because they are not certifed against the new logo.
And we have the webshops which sold PlayForSure music. Many of their customers for sure still use Windows XP - which is of course not Vista ready. They are left alone a bit.
Last but not least we have the customers: music which was bought with PlayForSure needs licence upgrades to work on a new computer. Since these licence upgrades will not be provided after PlayForeSure’s shut down the music is essentially worthless. Think of millions of songs here - think of millions of dollars/euros here!

Outlook Express and Hotmail

Outlook Express is an e-mail client shipped with all Microsoft versions since Windows 98 and before Windows Vista. Although it was responsible for many large scaled virus attacks and spreads due to a horrible security concept and had many more, other technical shortcomings and problems it was widely used. And it was of course often used with Microsoft’s own E-Mail service, Hotmail.

However, recently Microsoft decided that the old protocol used for the communication between Outlook Express and Hotmail wasn’t what they would prefer. They wanted to switch every user to the new DeltaSync - and so they decided to drop Outlook Express support in Hotmail. As a resultyou will not be able to use Outlook Express together with Hotmail in the future any more. Instead, you have to upgrade to Windows Live - if you can, because currently it does not support Windows XP 64 or Win2k3. Also, if you used to use another client, that one will also not work anymore.

To summarizes: as a user who relied on Microsoft’s in house e-mail technology you are screwed.

OOXML

The last problem is still in development, and the outcome is not really clear at the moment. But the root of the problem is ISO’s adoption of OOXML.
Originally published by Microsoft to have a pseudo-standard which is very hard to support for other software vendors, the ISO adoption process became necessary because no one was interested in not officially standardized formats by Microsoft.

So OOXML went through the ISO process, and got several comments where it has to be reworked - Microsoft could have avoided this by working together with others right from the beginning! In the end the new format was accepted as a standard. But the necessary revision of the format resulted in a non-compatible Microsoft Office:

Such a test is only indicative, of course, but a few tentative conclusions can be drawn:

• Word documents generated by today’s version of MS Office 2007 do not conform to ISO/IEC 29500
• Making them conform to the STRICT schema is going to require some surgery to the (de)serialisation code of the application
• Making them conform to the TRANSITIONAL will require less of the same sort of surgery (since they’re quite close to conformant as-is)

Given Microsoft’s proven ability to tinker with the Office XML file format between service packs, I am hoping that MS Office will shortly be brought into line with the 29500 specification, and will stay that way.

I’ve included the last part (emphasis not by me) to make the point of view of the poster clear. He thinks/hopes that MS will update the Office suite soon (an ODF test suite can be found here, btw.). However, Microsoft haven’t published any time frame, schedule or plan yet about such an update.

So in the end Microsoft first created an ecosystem around its new file Office Suite and on full purpose introduced a file format which would never become an ISO standard in that form - to afterwards apply for the said standard and change the file format again. As a result Microsoft Office 2007 still is not compatible to the new OOXML version itself atm.

Every organization and every software vendor who already jumped on the OOXML train before the ISO changes therefore has now to reconsider the software strategy: it should prepare for the switch to the updated OOXML - but also wait with it because it is unclear when the switch in MS Office will come.

However, preparing such a big update and keeping it ready consumes quite some resources. And small software vendors might not have these resources. Additionally, even smaller vendors which only had the resources to accept the new file format once are screwed.

And of course we have the users: everyone who tried to base a long-time backup solution on top of the old OOXML is screwed as well and should re-build the entire update again with the new OOXML.

Final words

The main problem behind these cracks in Microsoft’s ecosystem is of course the lack of well proved, open standards. But since Microsoft is not willing to support standards, the cracks are there now, and they are huge.

Of course from Microsoft’s point of view all these things make totally sense: everyone who strictly follows Microsoft as close as possible (use Vista only, etc.) and is ready to lose quite some money once in a while (because the music must be bought again and again or similar) will survive all these changes.

So to summarize the problem with respect to Microsoft’s position: problems only occur where users don’t have money to waste or want to have choice. Microsoft does not want the user to choose anything. The user is there to consume, not to choose - or actually think. This is best expressed by a comment from Omar Shahine, one of Microsoft’s Lead Program Managers, who tried to explain the Outlook Express/Hotmail development:

What we didn’t want to do is offer POP access and then have [...] customers use POP over DeltaSync.

If customers decide to stay with a product despite you offer them a new one - that means the customers prefer the product. Usually a company has to stick with such things in the real world.

However, Microsoft thinks it knows better. Microsoft forces it’s users against any opposition. And against any possible casualties on the consumers side.

The list of the Google Summer of Code projects for KDE was published. The list has several interesting entries to make the life for KDE users much easier.

The results for this year’s Google Summer of Code are out, and several KDE ideas were picked up.

Going through the list I found some items which immediately rouse my interest:

• Media Device Support in Amarok 2 with Collections - This will bring support for collections/playlists to different media devices.
• Amarok and UPnP - UPnP is used in today’s media streamers, and native support for it in Amarok would help integrating such media servers with KDE.
• Notes and Presenter View Support for KPresenter - All big proprietary solutions have such a presentation view and even OOo works at it. So developing one for KPResenter is just sensible to do.
• Easy monitor hot-plug support in KDE - The presentation view requires a second video output device, but to setup such is not easy on KDE - yet.
• Integrate Decibel into the KDE 4 environment - Decibel is so far in a basic shape, but not integrated with KDE atm: think of Plasma applets, KRunner support and similar “glue” to make communication on KDE possible everywhere.
• Jingle video and voice chat in Kopete. - I had great hopes for jingle, and for certain reasons I still think that it is essential to support it everywhere in the FLOSS world.
• KMail enhancements and porting to native Qt4 - KMail is one of the most important apps on the KDE desktop for many users. Therefore having a fully ported, well polished version of KMail is essential for a good user experience on KDE.
• Integration of the QtWebKit based KPart - It is helpful to switch between two engines without a big hassle to compare these or to use one engine when the other doesn’t work.
• Integration of WebKit SVG library with KHTML - Sharing code between KHTML and WebKit does make sense when it is productive and helps both. And that’s the aim of this project.
• StepGame: educational game based on Step - The Incredible Machine as a native KDE game would be awesome!

Of course this is just a small list of the accepted applications - and an accepted application doesn’t necessarily mean that the project will be a success. Additionally, this year the process around the applications and slots wasn’t perfect, but maybe the KDE e.V. can step up there to make the rejected projects possible nevertheless?
An idea would be to collect money through the KDE e.V. to sponsor other applicants, given that KDE finds their applications worth a try. I would be willing to donate some money for a stand-alone, KDE integrated browser based on WebKit, for general video input device support in Phonon or for a full featured Sonnet.

The new Laptop is almost fully supported under Linux. While the install process wasn’t really easy, the hardware was afterwards detected without a problem.

The new laptop works like a charm. After few days I am already sure that my money was well spent. The hardware is almost fully supported, and everything I tested works like expected.

General hardware support

The general hardware is well supported: CPU, hard disk, RAM, screen, touchpad, bluetooth and USB controllers usually don’t make any problems on modern Linux distributions.
Other hardware also works well: the Intel WLAN card works, also does the Intel Audio. I found some articles mentioning problems in this regard, but this was fixed with recent kernels.

The NVIDIA GPU is also supported - with recent proprietary NVIDIA drivers. I would have liked to have a GPU where high quality free drivers are available, like Intel cards or ATI/AMD cards, but there wasn’t a comparable model out there featuring ATI/AMD, and Intel cards simply don’t have enough power. I just hope that NVIDIA starts a similar Open Source attempt as AMD/ATI. For a start full RandR 1.2 support would already help me to re-use all my RandR scripts I wrote over the time for different monitor setups…

Anyway, with the standard Fedora 8 system for the usual hardware and binary drivers for the NVIDIA card I can - without any problems - suspend and resume this machine.

Hardware quirks, untested hardware

There are two things I have noticed so far which are not working perfect or not at all: the first one are several multimedia keys on the keyboard: the mute/volume up/volume down keys are not working. I hope to solve this by following the guide at the hal quirk page.
Another things which is at least not working as perfect as I would it to work is the hard disk: I get a specific sound once in a while, like 2 till 3 times each minute. It sounds to my untrained ears that the hard disk just writes some small data package. The program powertop suggested to do
echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs when I noticed the sound once while powertop was running, but I’m not sure if these things are really related.
The sound is certainly nothing really disturbing, but it is at least noticeable, and I just wonder where this comes from and if it is something I could fix with software improvements.

Besides the here mentioned hardware there is of course hardware I didn’t test yet - like the modem or the docking station connector. I didn’t test the first one because I don’t expect to ever need it, and I didn’t test the second one because the docking station is not here yet.

Real problems

The only real problem I encountered with this machine was the installation - I struggled with it for quite some time until I found a decent way.

First I tried to boot the system using the normal Fedora 8 install DVD - that “failed” while attempting to load /sbin/loader: it just showed a message informing me that it loads the loader, nothing more. The boot up didn’t continue. However, the system didn’t really freeze because I could still restart it with Alt+Ctrl+Del. I’m not sure what the cause is/was.
The second try was an old Ubuntu 7.04 Live CD I still had somewhere - while I didn’t plan to start using Ubuntu for a longer time it would have been an option if Fedora wouldn’t have worked. But that CD failed to load as well.
The third try was an OpenSuse 10.2 Live DVD - that one worked pretty well. And since I already have a long OpenSuse past and since I am pretty used to their system it was really tempting to switch with this laptop. But then I also tried another recent Ubuntu Live DVD - and it worked as well. So I decided to also try a Fedora 8 Live CD - and indeed, the Fedora 8 KDE Live CD worked.

I must admit that I am surprised that there were so many problems. The Dell D630 is a quite old model and out there for quite some time, and I wonder how others have managed to install Linux on it in the past, as it looks to me that only new distributions successfully booth the machine.