On most Linux file systems the story is different. They typically do not require defrag, since they don’t suffer from fragmentation in the first place. In fact, ext based systems will intentionally scatter files so there is room for them to grow without splitting up. For a great and easy to understand explanation, see the OneAndOneIs2 blog.

For a comparison between file systems, see the Ubuntu forms, and Wikipedia for notes on defrag approaches and tools.

As for staring at those fancy looking progress and status screens of the defrag tools, it seems it’s a thing of the past across all OSes. It was a nice way to kill time; a bit like watching the washing machine tumble the clothes, I guess. Well, there’s always Bittorrent chunks. They actually look a bit similar when only part of the torrent is downloaded.

The Tizen OS is a merger between the LiMo OS (from the LiMo Foundation) and Intel’s (and previously Nokia’s) MeeGo, the later itself a merge between Maemo and Moblin. Their release announcement is sparse on details, but the front page for the source code section has more interesting details.

Here’s a few highlights from the list:

• Peer to Peer connection with Wi-Fi Direct device.
• Window system based on the X11 open source project
• Composite window manager based on EFL open source project
• Multimedia framework based on the GStreamer open source project
• Audio decoder: AAC, MP3, WMA 7/8, WAV, Vorbis, AMR-NB / AMR-WB
• Audio encoder: Vorbis, AMR-NB
• Video decoder: MPEG-1, MPEG-4, H.263, H.264, On2 VP3, Theora
• W3C/HTML5 specifications support

By including established FOSS projects and technologies like X11, GStreamer, OGG Vorbis, Theora, it is from the get-go a much stronger open source offering than Android ever was. Furthermore, in basing much of their core components on standard GNU/Linux projects, one would hope they follow the design of its predecessors and stricture around package repositories. Meego had a RPM repository, and it would be great to have the same upgrade mechanism on a phone, rather than the limited functionality of an “app market”.

The source code is on Git, and they have a bit of developer documentation. Guess it’s time to download and try.

Murariu laments that we will never see prices as low as pre-flood, however, that would of course go against more than half a century in improved technology and value for money. After all, storage capacity has seen extreme growth and its own “Moore’s law”, but at a much more rapid phase than the transistor density. We already have Hitachi’s 4 TB Deskstar and Seagate’s 4 TB GoFlex Desk from last year. The later uses 5 platters of 800 GB, but the former is already at 1 TB / platter, which means that a 5 TB disk is already feasible if they wanted to. However, four platters usually makes for more stable and reliable disks, as they have less components, so that’s usually what the follow-up drives are made up from.

Looking at the current prices, they’ve come down a bit since right after the flood, but still have further to go before getting back to June 2011 levels. For example, the external 3 TB WD disk was ~140 Euros last year, went up to 203 Euros, and is now at 165 Euros (but with the faster USB 3 interface), or still 18% higher. Not a disaster for your wallet, but still a bump in the ever decreasing prices per byte.

Other than that, the relative ranking remains the same. The 2 TB disk still gives most bytes for money, optical disks don’t change much at all, SSD is coming down, but is still a lot more expensive than spinning disks, and CompactFlash is the most expensive medium around (but with increasing read/write speeds for ever larger sensors and pictures).

Exchange rate: 1 Euro = 1.201378 CHF.

Over at Digital Photography Insights, Rob Galbraith already has very extensive tests with different cards. Currently, only the EOS 5D Mark III list is covering most relevant CF cards, but tests with the Canon 50D is also planned. Looking forward to it. Also of interest from his page is the various card readers. This led me to the Addonics ADSACF which connects the CF reader directly to the internal SATA bus, and achieves read speeds of more than 90 MB/s. At ~$30, it looks like a very good buy.

Before digging into the SanDisk cards, a bit of background and relevant documents. The CF specification is guarded by the CompactFlash Association, and you have to buy the detailed docs, however they’ve started applying some cute icons to each of the more recent versions. Still, it does not tell you a lot about the read/write speed; e.g. the CF 5.0 and 6.0 specifications carry the same icon. Wikipedia has a bit more detail on the older CF specifications. It mentions that the first CF revisions were using PIO (Programmed input/output); PIO mode 2 since the beginning in 1995, and mode 4 in 2003, with DMA 33 in 2004. According to Rob Galbraith, several of the cards implement dual protocols, i.e. both PIO and UDMA. I’ve not been able to verify this anywhere else, but it seems to make sense, for backwards compatibility. Of course, when operating in PIO mode, one will not be able to take advantage of the speed the newer cards are rated for.

Current CF cards are based on PATA mode, so the UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) modes apply. I’ve lifted he relevant table from the current Wikipedia article, as shown below. Of some relevance is also the speed rating used for SD cards. Here the “x” rating is based on the CD-ROM transfer speeds, e.g. 6x means 6 * 150 kB/s, or 900 kB/s. Some of the Lexar, Kingston, and other CF also use this in the name of the cards, but not SanDisk.

Back to the SanDisk cards, though. SanDisk itself is not very good at keeping old product pages around, so a lot of the references I found was at Digital Photography Review; they keep their articles around. The story starts in 1994, with SanDisk defining the CompactFlash standard, batteling it out with other companies and cards like Miniature Card, SmartMedia, and later MMC/SD, various Memory Stick formats, and xD-Picture Card.

The first article I can find on dpreview, is an updated product range of “larger capacity CF cards of 64MB, 80MB and 96MB”. No mention of speed, but another article from the same date talks about 1.4 MB/s as high-speed. Later on, the different product lines have been overlapping, upgraded, and renamed, and thus adding a lot of confusion. Add to that strange “marketing” products like the 2007 “Ducati Edition” (4 and 8 GB cards at 45 MB/s), and the terrain starts to get difficult to navigate. Also note, the “Extreme” line has two incarnations, its inital series from 2003, which was just called “SanDisk Extreme”, and the newer UDMA versions; not sure which year they were introduced. The same is the case for the initial “Ultra” line.

Below I’ve listed the SanDisk CF product lines I could find, with best effort searches for largest size, and guesses at standard / IO mode. The model prefixes where partly from Amazon, with hints from the Nikon approved cards page. Feel free to get in touch if you have further information.

Disable the “fancy” stuff. These settings can be reached from the special about:config page. I disable these

• browser.tabs.animate
• browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent

Then some plug-ins, some of them just to fix stuff as well

• Switch to Tab no more
• Status-4-Evar
  
• Firebug
• TrackMeNot

What is a bit confusing in the Android world, are all the obscure and redundant code names from everything from hardware, models, OS, firmware, versions, regions. The Google Nexus binary pages gives some hints, as does the Android build instructions. For the Nexus S, it is crucial to know that the alternative codename is “crespo”. Furthermore, it is useful know that it has a “HDPI” display, and comes in three variations: “GT-I9020 (Super AMOLED) and GT-I9023 (Super Clear LCD), each aimed at different markets. The SPH-D720 is the newer 4G version of the phone available in the US.” (Wikipedia). Also, the radio binaries have different codes, e.g. “XXKB3″. This then forms the “baseband version” code on the form “I9023xxkd1″, which can be found under Settings -> About phone.

CyanogenMod is just a layer on top of the Android OS, thus it’s tracking the Android versions. Here we are talking about “Gingerbread” for the 2.3.x series, and “Ice Cream Sandwich” (aka. ICS) for the 4.x versions. (Who comes up with all these useless names??) Although Google pushed Android 4 to certain Nexus S devices in December 2011, and CM 9 (which based on Android 4) have nightly builds for the “crespo”, their stable CM 7 is still at Android 2.3.7. In addition to the basic OS, you might also want the Google Apps, although, some of them might have to be downloaded from the Market (now renamed to “Play”) anyway.

So, with that out of the way, and assuming the basic tools adb and fastboot in place (possibly from a previous build session), the upgrade can be summarized as this (with specific versions and URLs bound to change):

Download:
wget http://download.clockworkmod.com/recoveries/recovery-clockwork-5.0.2.0-crespo.img
wget http://download.cyanogenmod.com/get/update-cm-7.1.0.1-NS-signed.zip
wget http://cmw.22aaf3.com/gapps/gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip


Flash the recovery image:
adb reboot-bootloader
sudo fastboot flash recovery recovery-clockwork-5.0.2.0-crespo.img
sudo fastboot reboot

Copy the CM files to the “sdcard” of the phone:
adb push update-cm-7.1.0.1-NS-signed.zip /sdcard/update.zip
adb push gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip /sdcard/gapps.zip
adb reboot-bootloader

Follow the install instructions from CM for the rest. I was surprissed to learn that the data on the SD card was not wiped as well (I thought “Wipe data/factory reset” would take care of this). However, maybe I missed a step.

• aCal
• APV PDF Viewer
• Barcode Scanner
• ConnectBot
• Hacker’s Keyboard
• httpmon
• Firefox
• K-9
• Mathdroid
• Reddit client
• Scandinavian keyboard

And from the Android / Google Play Market

• aCurrency
• ARDrone
• ASTRO File Manager
• BlueInput Demo
• Dropbox
• Fring
• My Data Manager Free
• Network Discovery
• Opera Mini and Mobile.
• PCM Recorder Lite
• Twitter client
• Wifi Analyzer

Finally, there’s a few which can, or have to, be downloaded from the creator’s web site:

• android-scripting – Remember both SL4A package, and language specific (e.g Python) package.
• Opera Mini 6.5 and Mobile 12.

• Use Cyanogenmod.
• Install applications from the alternative FOSS market F-Droid. All of the applications below are available directly from F-Droid.
• Set up a network firewall with Droidwall.
• Use Firefox, with NoScript and AdBlockPlus add-ons.
• Set application permissions with Permissions (aka. Permission Denied).
• Send encrypted SMS with TextSecure.
• Encrypt your files with Android Privacy Guard (AGP).
• Send e-mails with K-9, which also supports PGP.
• Encrypt folders with LUKSManager (not on F-Droid?).

Currently, Replicant is only supported by a few phones, including HTC Dream, Nexus One and Nexus S. The last one is probably interesting, as it is still a reasonably modern phone, can run Android 4.0, and have “factory binaries” available so you can start from scratch if you get stuck.

However, as pointed out in the Slashdot comment above, this project will always trail Google’s releases. And as we’ve seen previously, the source codes does not always follow the release of the OS. Furthermore, Android in itself is not the most exciting OS around. The MeeGo (and presumably Tizen) initiatives are more standard GNU/Linux distributions from the get-go. Including features we’ve taken for granted over the last ten years or more: dependency resolving, updates over repositories, GNU applications. Of course, these will struggle with exactly the same problem: the proprietary drivers.

Desktop controls:
Zoom in: double click
Zoom out: right click
Move: Hold and drag

Mobile controls:
Zoom in: double click (can be a bit tricky)
Zoom out: hold without moving for more than 2-3 seconds
Move: Hold and drag

Licenses: The JavaScript and HTML coded for the viewer is licenses under GPL3. The copyright of the panorama images are retained by the author.

For RetroShare, there are pre-compiled installs for several OSes and GNU/Linux distributions, however not for Fedora. So I downloaded the source, and tried to compile with a bit of help from this page. First, some dependencies:

yum install qt-devel gpgme-devel libgpg-error-devel libupnp-devel libssl-devel libgnome-keyring-devel openssl-devel glib2-devel libXScrnSaver-devel

It turns out there is an old, widly published bug in the glib-2.0 include path dependencies. To work around it, edit the file libretroshare/src/libretroshare.pro, find these lines, and add the third line, marked in blue:

# These two lines fixe compilation on ubuntu natty. Probably a ubuntu packaging error.
INCLUDEPATH *= /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/include/
INCLUDEPATH *= /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/include/
INCLUDEPATH *= /usr/lib64/glib-2.0/include


Furthermore, there are a couple of missing library dependencies:

Edit retroshare-gui/src/RetroShare.pro, find the “## Linux ##” section, and add the last three libraries marked in blue:

LIBS += ../../libretroshare/src/lib/libretroshare.a
LIBS += -lssl -lgpgme -lupnp -lixml -lXss -lgnome-keyring -lcrypto -ldl -lX11

Then the make steps should work fine:

cd libbitdht/src
qmake-qt4 && make
cd libretroshare/src
qmake-qt4 && make
cd retroshare-gui/src
qmake-qt4 && make

And to start up:
retroshare-gui/src/RetroShare

“UltraViolet (UV) is a digital rights authentication and cloud-based licensing system that allows consumers [...] to stream and download purchased content to multiple platforms and devices.

…

UltraViolet content is downloaded (or streamed) in the Common File Format, using the Common Encryption (CENC) system.“

However, currently it seems UV is all cloud and streaming based, with no option to transfer locked contented off-line. Enter Western Digital. Presumably, they will provide special hard-drives which can store and restrict the content, and only allow read and copy operations under certain conditions. Possibly using TPM or similar technology, but embedded in the drive itself.

Further down in the Wikipedia article, this bit is interesting, and again, the storage aspect is the noticable missing piece:

“UltraViolet selected five DRM technologies allowing restrictions management on a broad range of devices: televisions, set-top-boxes, DVD & Blu-ray players, games consoles, PC, tablets and smartphones. The selected DRM technologies are:

• Google Widevine DRM, chosen for its strong position on set-top boxes
• Marlin DRM, chosen for its compatibility with many Connected TVs
• OMA CMLA-OMA v2, chosen for its strong position on mobile devices
• Microsoft PlayReady, chosen for its wide availability on PC and CE devices
• Adobe Flash Access 2.0, chosen for its wide availability on PC”

It’s also interesting to see the rest of the list of companies supporting this, in the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE LLC) is a consortium. Nothing too surprising there, I guess, except for Tesco. (What will happen if your veggies are digitally restricted?)

So, if you’re like me, and did not get a device this time around, you might want to join the support group over at Slashdot. There you will find people crying like kids who missed Santa. If it was kids, that would be one thing, but some of these crying guys actually have jobs. Amazing. Then there was one guy who had missed the weekly, or almost daily articles and didn’t know what this stampede was about. I guess he didn’t get one either.

Well, there will be more of these devices, and then some bugs might even be ironed out.

for i in {1..21}; do date -d "`date +%m`/$i/`date +%Y`"; sleep 1; done | pv -leps 21 > /dev/null

To install on Feodra:

yum install pv

“What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is, and that it is our duty to protect that freedom. We owe that to next generations, just as much as we owe to protect the environment.“

• Typing booster (which I thought would be launched for English a year ago) will now be available.
• Proving that Fedora is cutting edge, they’re ripping out the iptables, and putting in firewalld instead.
• GIMP 2.8 will be included, and, wait for it, it will include Single-Window Mode! To many, this was the last excuse not to use GIMP. It’s still cumbersome to draw line and boxes, but well, one thing at a time.
• Finally, Java 7 will now become the default installation, almost a year after its release.

“This calls for action. The internet must be cleaned up. All PC’s must be outfitted with a Breathalyzer to ensure nobody is intoxicated while driving the mouse. Also, social security cards should be required for every transaction. Congress must solve this complex problem by instituting a ‘no toddler left alone’ policy by putting friendly DHS staff at the desk of every workstation in every house in the nation. Think of the jobs created! And the children saved! RealID Internet ID Security+ Cards (TM) will now be mandatory for all plebeians. Network monitoring will be installed on every home workstation per mandatory Child-Safe-Cloud-Initiative protocols. The Congress will pass laws dictating internet rationing, and you will be given 1/30 internets everyday. If you go over your internets, you will be taxed over 9000 E-Points, which will be filed on your 1040IEEE-Z form. Fingerprint-Retinal-An*l probes will be given to ensure the AAA during each online transaction. I, senator [INSERT NAME HERE] propose this bill to save the chilrens and this great nation that is under continual attack by anonymous super hackers.“

The list of supported distros is impressive, from the most popular ones, to more obscure (here in random order): Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, openSUSE, Arch Linux, Damn Small Linux, SliTaz, Puppy Linux, gNewSense, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, Sabayon Linux, Gentoo, MEPIS, Zenwalk, Slax, Dreamlinux, Elive, CentOS, Mandriva, LinuxConsole, Frugalware Linux, xPUD, Foresight Linux, VectorLinux, Slackware, Smart Boot Manager (SBM), xPUD.

To get going in Fedora:

yum install unetbootin syslinux-extlinux

If you don’t run as root, you will be prompted for the root password:

unetbootin

Oh, only one word of advice: Make sure you go for the Intel option on the Wifi card. The default Realtek card is apparently poor hardware and drivers.

www.system76.com

www.emperorlinux.com

zareason.com

Then there are some list and general reviews:
www.linlap.com
www.linux-on-laptops.com
www.ubuntu.com/certification