I’ve been meaning to write about this upgrade for almost two months now. Right after Ubuntu 8.04 was released I upgraded two of my laptops from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. I know, I know, never download software on the release date, wait for a couple of months before all major bugs are fixed and it starts working somehow. But anyway…

On Lenovo T61 everything went mostly fine. After upgrade crash report tool complained about nautilus crash. Then more serious issues started popping up:

• Parallels stopped working. I use this tool quite a lot to debug web pages in different browsers in different operating systems. Apparently there was no support for Ubuntu 8.10 Hardy Heron from Parallels team yet, and the older version that worked in Ubuntu 7.10 didn’t work anymore because of compatibility issues in newer 2.6.24 kernel.A temporary solution (Parallels build 2.2.2226) was provided at a time, and now a new official compatible Parallels release is available for Ubuntu 8.04.

• Samsung SCX-4521F printer refused to work even after proprietory drivers reinstallation. Fortunately solution to this problem was quickly found by one of Ubuntu community members.

On Sony Vaio there were more troubles.

• Since kernel version changed after upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10, I had to download and reinstall proprietory drivers for Nvidia 8400M graphics card. Kernel changed a couple of times after that as a part of standard package update procedure in 8.10, and each time after that I have to reinstall drivers from NVidia site.

• Vaio integrated camera driver is not included in Ubuntu distribution, but Patrick Niklaus built a package for 2.6.24-16-generic kernel.

• Network Manager applet (nm-applett) tries to access keyring all the time to connect to wireless network with WPA

• keyboard layouts switching is not working after autologin (there is a workaround though)

• sleep/hibernate on Vaio still doesn’t work

Now to the good things:

• No more proprietory drivers for Intel wireless card (iwl3945 driver)

• Firefox 3. My first reaction - it is a beauty. (Although after using it for a couple of months, I experienced all beauties of a beta version - random crashes, some sites are not rendered properly, etc.)

• CPU scaling is finally working out of the box and Sony Vaio laptop is not overheating anymore

As I already said, my initial feeling after upgrading to 8.10 was “Ubuntu sucks… get a Mac”. A major upgrade to the next long-term support version was not exactly what I expected. Small, but very annoying bugs in basic functionality undermined success of otherwise very good release. Recently Nokia started supporting Ubuntu for work computers and I immediately changed RedHat on my work laptop to Ubuntu. However I decided to go for Ubuntu 7.10, not 8.04. It works perfectly, even if OpenOffice version is just v2.3 and Firefox - 2.0.

As Tyler put it “[...] get a Mac. Why? Because for the most part, shit works when you plug it in“. I couldn’t agree more. I still stay with Ubuntu, but this last release made me think about moving to Mac again.

When Sampo launched the new system this Easter, they took into use Java-based authentication system. Of course it didn’t work in my Ubuntu 7.10, but after removing Open JDK and installing latest Sun JDK it started functioning again - at least log in worked. This Java solution raised a lot of concerns in internet community.

After upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 that has Firefox 3.0b5 as default browser, Sampo web-bank Java login stopped working again. This time installing latest JRE didn’t help. Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) contains JRE 1.6.0_06-b02 and it fails on the second security code request during login process. (Remarkably, Sun itself offers only 1.6.0_05 version for Linux). Solutions proposed in Finnish Ubuntu discussion forum (tweaking plugins) didn’t work for me either.

What worked was replacing JRE 1.6 with an older version 1.5:

$sudo apt-get remove sun-java6-bin sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib

$sudo apt-get install sun-java5-bin sun-java5-fonts sun-java5-jre sun-java5-plugin

Then I ran

$sudo update-alternatives --config java

command to make sure correct JRE was selected as default.

While struggling with this issue I tried to check Sampo’s technical support pages. There was a nice “Check your computer page” that kindly informed me that my operating system is Linux and “You may be able to run eBanking, but your operating system is not supported by Customer Support.”

This is really frustrating. 14% of the readers of this blog use Linux. On regular sites that I maintain this figure is from 7% to 10%. Sampo caused a lot of grief to its customers, me including, with this software system upgrade. Even after they promised to waive four months’ worth of service charges I’m still not sure it is going to be enough to keep all their customers.

I’ve experienced quite a lot of problems by far - non-\0-terminated strings in UI, transactions with no explanations that I don’t remember authorising, transactions in our web shop that were reported as failed, although money were withdrawn from customer’s accounts, simple web-bank downtimes with HTTP 503 and the latest one is my credit card - Sampo claims that I don’t owe them anything - probably it is one of the Monopoly’s famous “Bank error in your favour, collect $200″ cases.

Beta culture seems to be spreading from internet startups to bank systems (although in this case I would be more inclined to say that this was a huge screw up on Danske Bank IT department’s part). I’m not sure I like it. Gmail beta, Flickr beta, but Sampo Bank beta? It’s definitely fun to participate in debugging of the new web service, but not when it deals with your real money.

This case bring interesting thoughts on how much we trust online services and what is the pain level when we say “that’s enough, I’m leaving”. Is it the same for data banking as for traditional banking. Would you trust your bank to keep your family photo archive or your computer backups? Is it any safer than Flickr/Google Documents? And the other way around - if you trust your data to Google or Yahoo, would you trust them with your money?

But that was more than 10 years ago. Now I noticed that something is wrong when I started recieving a lot of comment spam from this blog. Captcha plugin was doing an excellent job before, so I decided to check what’s going on. Somehow all plugins were disabled. Re-enabling them solved the problem with comment spam, but then Goolge started generating weird excerpts for ivankuznetsov.com search results. That’s when I started digging deeper and discovered that a hidden div with advertisments was inserted into WordPress PHP scripts.

Dreamhost support was kind enough to point me to the description of the attack that was used to break my blog. This particular problem, as well as some other security issues have been fixed in the latest Word Press release - 2.5.1. Lesson learned - update software on time and make backups.

If you are using WordPress older than 2.5.1 I would recommend you to upgrade ASAP.

Without installing additional hard drive (which would be impractical for laptop user anyway) the only source for extra space was Vista partition. Vista comes preinstalled with most modern laptops, but there’s no need for it to exist taking up to 40Gb of hard drive space, when Ubuntu is the primary OS.

WARNING: Before executing any of the belowmentioned steps, it is highly recommended to make a full backup of your data.

1. Check how much space you will need

It is good to check how much space you will need for your /home partition. Use “Scan Home” in Disk Usage Analyzer (Applications->Accessories->Disk Usage Analyzer) to check how much space do you use now. This tool will give you excellent perspective on how you use your disk space - and where you can possibly save a few gigabytes. Add some gigabytes on top of the current usage figure for future use and now you now what should be the size of your new /home.

2. Create new partition/filesystem

In Ubuntu there's an excellent tool for manipulating partitions - GParted (System->Administration->Partition Editor).

If the estimated size of your home partition is smaller than the size of Vista partition (or any other partition you’re prepared to re-allocate), then the task is really simple - you just convert Vista’s ntfs partition into ext3. In my case all my data in /home folder didn’t fit into 40Gb, so I had to resize the root / partition. This is not possible while the system is running, so I had to burn Ubuntu Live CD, boot from the CD with “try Ubuntu without affecting you current system” option, and run GParted from there.

Note, that resizing and moving partitions is a time-consuming process - it may take hours, depending on the size of your partitions, so reserve enough time for this operation.

3. Mount the new filesystem

$sudo mkdir /mnt/newhome
$sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/??? /mnt/newhome


4. Copy all files to new home

$cd /home
$sudo cp -ax * /mnt/newhome

That is a copy with “preserve links, preserve mode, ownership, timestamps, copy directories recursively, stay on this file system” parameters.

5. Change homes

Unmount new home partition from temporary mount point

$sudo umount /mnt/newhome

Move old home to a temporary folder oldhome (note that this works only when you are moving /home to own partition from root partition, if you had /home on its own partition already and just moving it to the new place, you’ll need to unmount old /home partition instead of moving it to a temporary folder oldhome)

$sudo mv /home /oldhome

Create a mount point for new home partition

$sudo mkdir /home

Mount new home partition to /home

$sudo mount /dev/??? /home

6. Compare the results

You don’t really have to do that, but if you want to be extra sure that everything is ok and are prepared to wait a bit longer, then type:

$sudo diff -rq /home /oldhome

7. Make changes permanent

Add a line to the “/etc/fstab” file that looks like the following:

/dev/??? /home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 2

8. Remove old home

Now that everything is ok, you can remove the old home folder (same note as in step 5 - if you had old home on its own partition already - then use GParted to reallocate old partition for new needs)

$sudo rm -r /oldhome

Voila! Now your /home is on its very own partition.

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A thought of reinstalling all modules and reconfiguring Joomla from scratch was simply too depressive, so I decided to try another CMS. As a Ruby on Rails convert and a strong believer in open-source ideology I decided to go for Radiant - open-source CMS written in RoR. It is still in beta (latest release is 0.6.4), but it is surprisingly stable and powerful. Take a look at the footer of www.ruby-lang.org - official Ruby programming language web site - it is powered by Radiant

Installation of Radiant was rather easy - thanks to this guide and my prior experience with RoR applications deployment on Dreamhost. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to actually create sites with Radiant - there are not that many tutorials available yet, so it is pretty much  “make by example”. Split into pages, snippets and layouts makes a lot of sense onse you get your head around it.

From my experience Joomla is an overkill for most of the small sites, and despite being WYSIWYG, it still requires a professional or at least a tech savvy to configure it. After Radiant is set up and configured it is no more difficult to add content there than to edit a wiki page because of its Textile support. But it is so much simpler and easier to use than Joomla.

I managed to restore the ruined site in a day’s time - fetched most of the lost content from Google cache, converted Joomla template into Radiant’s layouts and recreated the pages (well, it was a small site after all). First time I dealt with Joomla - I spent several days trying to figure out where are the settings that I actually need in the endless menus.

Radiant is clearly following “less is better” principle. If you want to try Radiant - there’s a live demo where you can do whatever you want with the content.

Unfortunately when I bought it in February there was no option to get it without Vista preinstalled, so the first thing I had to do was to install the proper OS. Now Lenovo offers an option to get T-series laptops with SUSE Linux preinstalled.

Ubuntu 7.10 installation worked as a dream - I didn’t have to hack anything at all - everything worked out of the box. Of course I had to configure the system to my needs, but user interface was sufficient for that.

Looking forward to Ubuntu 8.04 release now:

To quote Nseries web site: “Nokia Photos is a PC application designed to let you do more with your images. Just download the application to your compatible PC and you’re ready to edit, back-up, organize, print, convert, and share all the pictures and videos from your compatible PC to your device, as well as your favorite online photofeeds. And you can stop worrying about formats, codecs, resizing, or the other headaches of photo and video management. It’s easy to use, works with all Nokia Nseries devices, and is completely free to download - both as an individual application and as part of the Nokia Nseries PC Suite 2.0.”

After all I wrote about Lifeblog I really wanted to try the new release, so I dug out a computer with WinXP to install Nokia Photos 1.0.232.0.

Downloading a 48.5Mb installable was rather quick. First request from the installer was to install “Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package”. Nice one, but I’d say - too much information. If it is required - itstall it, don’t ask me if I want to install it. Clicking ok. Next thing that installer told me was “Dot net 3.0 cannot be found. Please install it from this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=70848. Installation was aborted.

Ok, going to Microsoft web site to download another 50Mb worth of stuff. I wouldn’t like to be on dial-up for this installation. After installing .NET framework I restarted Nokia Photos installation and this time it went smooth.

One huge improvement compared to beta version - this release does not uninstall Nokia Lifeblog, if it is installed on the same computer. The two seem to peacefully coexist.

First start of the Photos application took about a minute - with just logo hanging in the middle of the screen. After that I was asked if I would like to import data from Lifeblog into Nokia Photos.

I decided not to import old data just yet, since I was warned by the application that it might take some time. After that application froze for about 20 seconds - as it became clear later it was detecting my phone connected to the PC via bluetooth. After phone was successfully detected Nokia Photos asked if I would like to set up automatic item copying.

After playing with the application settings for a while I decided to import my old Lifeblog data, but couldn’t find how to do it from the menu. Fortunately I have chosen to be reminded to import old items on next Photos start - otherwise I wouldn’t know how to get my data into Photos.

Importing 26.000 items from old database took more than 15,5 hours. No time estimate was given for this operation, just percentage gauge and “X of Y items converted” message that was updated for each 25 items. Somewhere around 60% my thoughts were “waiting that long? it better be good”.

Importing reported a few errors in the end: “Some items could not be imported since there was an error or the file format is not supported by Nokia Photos.”. I couldn’t copy a list of failed items, so now I don’t know how to check which items I lost.

Unfortunately after dismissing import failed dialog Nokia Photos crashed with “Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation”. Restarting the application and restarting the computer didn’t help - now Photos crash on application start. All my data is still accessible in Lifeblog 2.5, but I couldn’t complete this Nokia Photos review.

Waiting for feedback from the development team - I’ll update this blogpost as soon as the problem is fixed. Hopefully the problem concerns only import of large databases.

Update 16 Jan 2008: allmighty Photos development team did some magic with my database and the application started to work. A fix for this particular case will be available in the next version of Photos application.

But now to the new features in Nokia Photos 1.0.

• “Organise” view

The biggest change is that timeline view with all context information is now just secondary view. The main view is Picasa-like folder/albums based “Organise” view that contains only images and videos. After Lifeblog data is imported there are several albums created “Lifeblog 2001″, “Lifeblog 2002″, etc. Search is almost as powerful as in Timeline view - calendar entries, automatic location tags, etc. are taken into account. The only thing missing is proximity searching - when a related sms can be found next to the picture that you are actually looking for.

• Synchronisation

Now synchronisation with the mobile start automatically when it appears in PC vicinity. Synchronisation also runs in the background, so it is possible to continue using application while it is downloading latest pictures and messages from the mobile.

Synchronisation with my N81 via bluetooth was a bit problematic - I had to restart Photos and N81 several times before it actually started. Same phone and same computer synced just fine with Lifeblog 2.5.

To copy data from PC to the phone items now have to be placed into a special album called “Sync Tray”. I find it more confusing than special “To Phone” view in Lifeblog 2.5. Generalisation is good only until it becomes counter-intuitive. Yes, “To Phone” is technically just another album, but at the same time it is used for something totally different. It is the same story as with the Favourites in Lifeblog 2.5 - “favourite” is technically just another tag, but it is not a good enough reason to put it into the tag manager.

• Favourites

Favourites view is back (was replaced in Lifeblog 2.5 with special tag). Now there’s an album called Favourites where user is able to see all items marked as favourite. On the downside - it is not possible to mark item favourit by selecting “Make favourite” from context menu - you need to drag and drop it to Favourites album or select Add to Album->Favourites.

• Tags

Tag manager in Lifeblog 2.5 was awful. In Photos it became a tag cloud. It looks really good, and is easy to use. For some reason help files refer to Tools->Open Tag Manager and to the icon in toolbar, while in reality it is in View->Open Tag Manager and is the icon is on the right side of the window.

• Show/Hide

Show/Hide is back (was mutilated in Lifeblog 2.5 where it became a part of tag manager functionality and had a negative logic - you had to deselect item time to make it visible) - now it is easy again to select which content types to display.

• “Flip item”

This eye-candy feature (activated by Ctrl+M) flips an item and shows location and content tags on its back .

• “Make movee”

This feature allows to edit videos - similar to what can be done on Nseries mobiles with Movee. I’m sure fans of home-made videos will love this feature.

• “Order Prints”

Allows to print photos using selected service providers in some countries. Interesting that this feature appeared in Nokia product when people started to prefer to keep their pictures in digital form.

• Performance

Nokia Photos is considerably slower than Lifeblog 2.5 - from application startup, to scrolling through thumbnails to opening full screen images. It is painfully slow. Sometimes it just freezes for 20-30 seconds without any indication of what it is actually doing.

• Organise/Timeline

Organise and Timeline views in one application created a Frankenstein monster. These are two completely different approaches to data organisation, and that kind of mix is really confusing. I believe that applciation developers should give their vision to the user, rather than overwhelm with features and customisation possibilites and force him/her to make choices.

Conclusion

Nokia Photos is an interesting experiment, but I would wait at least until next release before considering it as a primary application for content organisation. Bad performance kills the cumulative positive effect of the new design, eye-candies and new features.

Personally, I think this is great news. An open mobile platform is something that was long due to stir up the world of RIM-Windows-Symbian.

Android managed to get many things right from the very beginning, things that took several years for S60. While S60 initially took Microsoft-style approach to development community - with multi-level support, exclusive club membership with access to the source code, signing and licensing, Android is quite open and democratic.

When Google announced Android SDK - my first thoughts were - it’s a smart move to release SDK before devices are available. Google’s name alone would be enough to attract developers and hackers to this new platform, so they can create a developer community by the time devices are shipping. Then Google announced developer challenge with $10mln in awards.

Who wouldn’t like to try? And we didn’t have to wait long for examples. Moscow-based startup company Sadko announced Android application CallFreq - a smart dialer application.

Ukranian software house OreDale offers to implement your ideas for Android developer challenge for a reasonable compensation.

Android freeware directory already features 21 application.

What is it that I liked so much about Android? Mostly things that I complained about in Symbian/S60.

• SDK

On November 12th, 2007 when first Android SDK release appeared on the web I downloaded and installed it on my Linux machine. Size of the SDK was more that reasonable - 54Mb. Emulator startup was fast. There were plenty of sample applications illustrating APIs. Installing Android plugin for Eclipse was simple. Debugging and tracing tools were also in the pack.

Unfortunately developing for S60 in Linux is still not an easy ride. S60 v3 FP1 SDK for Windows is 354Mb, which still might be a problem if you don’t have fast internet.

• Developer support

Google got Android developer support under control from the very beginning - forums, blogs, online SDK documentation, API examples, application examples, video tutorials, - all on http://code.google.com/android.

• Software development - learning curve

If you ever developed for Symbian OS, you know that you have to learn a lot of new stuff - what are the basic types in C++, how to work with strings, how to implement multithreading, how client/server works, how Symbian database management system works, etc. Unfortunately entry barrier for Symbian development is high.

Android, even though it is a Linux based OS, has chosen Java as the main programming language and Sqlite as DBMS solution. If you know Java, you can start coding for Android already today.

I wrote about issues related to software development on S60 platform in “Do we really have a mobile development platform?“.

Nokia has taken several steps in order to make development for S60 easier and lower the entry barrier - such as Open C and Python.

But as Michael Mace writes in his “Google, the OS company blogpost about Android impact on Symbain“It’s not fun competing against a free product that’s been subsidized by one of the richest companies in the world (just ask Netscape).”

• Security and openness

I wrote about S60/Symbian platform security issues in “Symbian OS Platform Security - good or evil?“.

Android’s approach to security is along the lines - let the user decide. Application defines which permissions it requires - and user grants these permissions when the application is installed on the device.

Let’s see what it turns out to be in the real world - in “At application install time, permissions requested by the application are granted to it by the package installer, based on checks with trusted authorities and interaction with the user.” statement “trusted authorities” is a subject for concern.

• Developer perspective

I can recommend an excellent artile by John Lombardo “A developer’s perspective on Google’s Android” that describes first-time user (developer) experience with Android.

• Consumer perspective

From a consumer perspective Android appears to be a well designed platform that can be easily extended. At the moment it has less default applications than S60 platform, but firstly, that will be compensated by 3rd party developers (especially since “all applications are equal” idea is core to Android ideology), and secondly, Android provides a powerful browser based on Apple’s WebKit browser engine (same as used in iPhone and newer S60 phones), which would allow users take advantage of all internet services offered by Google.

• Open Handset Alliance

Open Handset Alliance established by Google caused a mixed reaction from Nokia.

Helsingin Sanomat wrote that: ” Nokia feels that Android, a mobile telephony alliance announced on Monday by Google, is unnecessary because Nokia has already been doing nearly everything that the alliance is just talking about. Nokia says that its S60 platform, which is based on its own Symbian operating system, is the best and most workable foundation for Internet services of mobile telephones”.

On the other hand Kari Tuutti, spokesman for Nokia Multimedia, said that Nokia joining Open andset Alliance is not ruled out at all.

Conclusion:

Android is a new guy on the block, and it is not all roses. It still has to survive the harsh reality of hardware products manufactuing world and maintaining API compatibility between versions and devices in order to establish itself as a real platform. Because of the Apache license used for Android SDK “applications designed to be compatible with Google’s platform could be made incompatible with a particular device, by a handset vendor who removes core Android APIs and replaces them with their own closed source alternative“.

Integration with the real hardware can bring more surprises than anticipated by a company with software background. So I wouldn’t count on seeing first Android devices earlier than Christmas 08.

Google got many things right and made a very good start. Android looks quite promising, and Google seems to be quite serious about making it world leading mobile platform. At the same time Nokia has an established platform, a huge base of S60 devices already on the market and talented S60 R&D team.

Year 2008 promises to be very interesting.

Some of the problems that I had with previous releases still were present, namely

• volume control didn’t control the volume (set the correct preference for my keys in the System/Preferences/Sound menu fixed it as described here)

• WLAN didn’t work (fixed by installing ndiswrapper as described here)

• mouse speed control didn’t work for touchpad (fixed by editing xorg.conf as described here)

One new issue with ATI Radeon graphics card:

• Advanced desktop effects didn’t work after installing ATI proprietary drivers (fixed as described here)

Otherwise installation was simple and the final result is just amazing. Advanced desktop effects are marvelous. Coupled with desktop search it clearly indicates that creators of Ubuntu are determined to bring Linux usability up to the level of MacOS.

I installed Ubuntu 7.10 also on my wife’s new laptop - Sony Vaio VGN-FZ11SR instead of Windows Vista that came preinstalled. (On a side track - first impression after booting up Vista installation was scary - it flooded me with requests to purchase antivirus software that was soon expiring, upgrade MS Office version to full version and pay for that, register and pay for CD burning software, allow Vista to send data to Microsoft, etc.).

Installation on this Sony laptop went without a single hick-up. All hardware was autodetected and autoconfigured. All necessary codecs and plugins were installed automatically - system just prompted for a confirmation to install non-free components. Default software package was more that sufficient to start working immediately without any additional installations.

So if you haven’t tried it yet - try to burn a live CD and boot Ubuntu, even if without installing it…

(Via: Gábor Török and Antony Pranata)

Well, hacked - sort of. Apparenlty it is possible to obtain AllFiles capability for your applications by changing a few lines in Nokia Software Update files and flashing your phone, as described here.

For developers that means that with certain amount of effort they will be able to make their life a bit easier and explore previously hidden features of SymbianOS.

For hackers that means that they can access data cages of all applications on a stolen phone (e.g. with Y-Browser with AllFiles capability) and extract passwords from configuration files (e.g. e-mail, IM client, browser, virtually all applications that access internet services and store passwords on the mobile without encryption)

This is the first publicly available evidence of a possibility for 3rd parties to obtain AllFiles and other capabilities available only to phone manufacturers. Symbian Platform Security was considered to be “unbreakable” by far, and technically it still is - the blunder is really on NSU part.