Moving My Computer from an Animal Farm to a Wild Jungle

As a computer consultant specializing in digital creativity and new media, I don’t use Microsoft Windows at all. Yes, it’s possible to meld creative freedom with true digital freedom. So, instead of MS Windows, I use what is known more simply as ‘Linux’ by ordinary folks, though GNU/Linux is more appropriate. I’ve been dabbling in GNU/Linux since circa 1997 and started using it as my regular workstation since circa 2001. Unlike Microsoft’s proprietary offerings, Linux comes in over 400 different flavours and counting. The most popular flavours of these are called Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, and Knoppix, to name a few. Impressively, some of these flavours are frequently upgraded within six to nine months, giving me a shining new feel and features with which to surge forward with my work every time. Blokes who just use Windows can’t appreciate the joy and thrill of this rejuvenating experience.

Multi-Boot System

To appreciate the diversity and capabilities of GNU/Linux, at any given time I’ve usually got about 7 to 10 different GNU/Linux flavours and versions installed on my computer, each usually resides in its own separate ‘partition’ on my hard-disk. Mine has 14 partitions. My favourite flavour so far is Ubuntu, which is extremely easy and intuitive for ordinary non-techie Desktop users. In fact, absolute newbies who’ve never used a computer before, take to Ubuntu like a duck to water. Yes, it’s much easier to use than MS Windows.

Normally, you could just buy yourself a laptop or desktop that comes pre-installed with Ubuntu or any other flavour of Linux, and just get down to your work without any anguish or steep learning curves. But I like to tweak and experiment. Ubuntu comes in various versions, updated every six months. I’ve got the following versions installed in different partitions of my hard-disk denoted as ‘hda’. Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn which was released in April 2007 (hence the shorthand: 7.04). It’s installed on hda2. UbuntuStudio, which is a special flavour for authoring sound, music, audio, video, and graphics, on hda3. I’ve used UbuntuStudio for composing, arranging, and producing music professionaly, as well as for graphic-design and video-editing for professional assignments. It’s installed on hda3.

I never hastily delete an old version of a Linux flavour and overwrite it with a new version. Instead, I leave the old version in one partition while installing a new version in another partition. This way, I can test and gradually migrate to the new version and fallback to the old one in case something doesn’t work properly. So, I’ve got Ubuntu Breezy Badger, from 2005, installed on another partition, RedHat 8 on another, Debian Sarge on hda 11, and another multimedia-authoring flavour called Agnula.

Gone but not forgotten from my hard-disk, are ancient versions of Knoppix, Mandrake, PCQLinux, and Fedora. I might just play with Knoppix and Fedora again, some sunny day. I badly wanted to go beyond using Fiesty Fawn to the latest version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron (8.04) as well as newer versions of Fedora and others.

Linux-Swap: How much is enough?

Alas, my existing desktop only had 256MB of RAM. The newer versions needed about 380MB+, with 512MB preferred. So I finally bought 1GB of RAM, to get a total of 1.256GB of total RAM. In case my system would need more, have configured it to masquerade 512MB of space from my hard-disk as RAM, or virtual RAM. This is called ‘linux-swap’. Most websites clalim you need to set double your RAM size, as your linux-swap size, but this is simply not true. It merely augments your existing RAM, so if you’ve got 2GB or 4GB of RAM, you could even just add 256MB of linux-swap space. I’ve added just 256MB of linux-swap, and have been monitoring the system’s use of swap. It hardly touches it. No wonder my machine appears to respond faster, since RAM is faster than hard-disk.

Now let’s get to the nitty-gritty. When my computer switches on, it presents me a simple menu, allowing me to choose which linux-flavour to boot into from all the choices available on my hard-disk partitions. The software that runs this magic is called GRUB, for Grand Unified Bootloader. Normally, GRUB installs in a special area in the computer, called the MBR, for Master Boot Record. I’ve stored my GRUB settings in hda7, this is where the GRUB on my machine stores the entries into its menu of choices.

Everytime I install a new flavour or version on any partition, I copy the menu-entries from the latest install’s GRUB-settings, into the actual GRUB that I use from hda7. It’s worked beautifully since 7 years, except last evening, when I installed Hardy Heron.

Problems with GRUB and the latest Ubuntu

On the hard-disk known as hda, I found I hadn’t booted into Debian Sarge for some time, so I could replace it with Hardy Heron. Debian was on hda11, the eleventh partition among fourteen on my hard-disk. I deleted the partition. All subsequent partitions moved one step ahead. So the existing hda12, became the new hda 11, the earlier hda13 became the new hda12, and so on. The hard-disk showed 8GB as free space. I selected this, set it to the filesystem of ‘ext3′, and marked it as Hardy Heron’s root space, denoted with a simple ‘/’.

Got to be careful here. The new partition now appears at the end, as hda14. Within 25 minutes, I had Hardy Heron installed on my machine. Now the tricky part. I delberately wrote GRUB into hda14. Later, I booted into Fiesty, and copied the menu entries from here into my venerable GRUB in hda7. Bad idea! It did not work. I spent about 4 hours researching into what could have gone wrong, until some tech-forums pointed to the solution.

The version of GRUB installed on hda7 was 0.42. The latest versions of all Linux flavours, can only work with GRUB version 0.47 or later. So I backed up the menu-configurations of the old GRUB on hda7, and installed the latest GRUB 0.47 straight to the MBR. Cleverly enough, this new version of GRUB sniffed through all my partitions, pulled out all the linux-flavours and versions installed, and automatically populated its own menu of choices for use when the machine switched on. Brilliant.

However, it turned out to be quite unusable. I could only boot into Hardy Heron. Trying to boot into anything else would lead to an initial burst of text-info on the screen, a long wait, and then the terse: “Alert! /dev/sda2 does not exist. Dropping to a shell.” Elsewhere on the screen “Check root=bootarg cat /proc/cmdline or missing modules, devices. cat /proc/modules ls /dev”

Eh!

Took me another several hours before it finally dawned on me what’s gone wrong. The earlier GRUB version 0.42 denoted hard-disk partitions as hda12, hda 13, etc., where the ‘h’ stands for hard-disk. The new GRUB version 0.47 denotes partitions as sda12, sda13, etc., where the ’s’ stands for SCSI or perhaps ’storage’. So, I opened the menu-entries to GRUB, stored in a file called menu.lst, and manually changed the erroneously marked ’sda’ to ‘hda’ for all other entries. Also add ‘ro quiet splash’ to each kernel entry, so I could get the much nicer graphical screen with a simple scroll-bar while booting, rather than a blizzard of text outputs.

Whew! Everything works. Have finally got my old and new Linux flavours working together again. Next step: have to get into Hardy Heron and fix it’s screen resolution from 640×480 to a much-higher resolution. Have found some tech-forums and read several pages on how to do this. So far, nothing’s worked, but will eventually find a solution. Will then install several of my favourite applications and software, and further tweak the system. Until it’s time again for the new Linux flavour, and a newer version.

Lennon Inspires. Even Today.

The word ‘Apple’ means many things to Steve Jobs. It evokes Newton and science; knowledge and the forbidden fruit; it is rumoured to pay homage to Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer age who committed suicide by consuming a cyanide-laced apple; and finally, it symbolizes one of the greatest influences and inspirations for Steve Jobs: The Beatles, especially John Lennon.

The Beatles formed their own company, based on a phonetic pun, called ‘Apple Corps’ with the Corps pronounced as ‘Core’. Steve Jobs was deeply inspired by the vision and humanistic attitude of Apple Corps, and sought permission from the Beatles to label his company as Apple as well. At that time, neither party could have foreseen Apple Computers’ eventual foray into digital media, music, films, and entertainment.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he launched the ‘Think Different’ campaign, saluting the heroes of his life whose visions he hoped, would inspire the new Apple. One of the ads featured John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with the Apple logo and the slogan ‘Think Different’ on the top-right. A few years later, when Apple launched dedicated Apple stores, they were simply called ‘Imagine.’ You can spot an ‘Imagine’ store in Delhi’s Ansal Plaza mall near South Extension as well.

Somewhere along the way, and despite those ‘Think Different’ ads, Steve seems to have lost sight of his vision of humanity, of playing prometheus across the digital divide, of hurling a sledge-hammer in an act of defiance against Big Brother. Currently, all Steve seems to be interested in, is creating increasingly snobbish products, in a rather autocratic manner, with increasingly snobbish and overpriced tags. Not good especially during a global financial meltdown. It is almost shocking to see Steve completely switched off from the revolutionary world of ‘muft and mukt’ digital culture. Steve has also lost the plot on the Netbook revolution, ultra-affordable and small-sized laptops, sweeping across the industry.

It seems to take Nicholas Negroponte from MIT Media Labs to really ‘Think Different’. He launched the netbook revolution in the world, with his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, which he insists, is not about a laptop, but about education for poor children across the world. To promote his OLPC, the project has just launched a new ad, with a digital re-incarnation of John Lennon. Okay, it’s a bit cheesy, the voice and accent are quite fake, but the message is strong and somewhat inspiring.

For good or bad, John Lennon as the new unsung hero of the computer revolution merits a thought. And hope some day, Steve does consider publishing an ad with Negroponte’s photo for his ‘Think Different’ campaign. While you watch the video-ad of OLPC and John Lennon here, I leave you asking yourself the question: “Can Steve Jobs think of making a difference in the world with computers and technology that touches the lives of ordinary and even poor people, finally making a real dent in the universe?

Lennon ad for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)
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The Distant Thunder of Freedom Shall Liberate You From Flash

Do you watch videos on the web and stream them to your mobilephone? Are you addicted to YouTube, and love playing Flash-games on your mobilephone? Or like me, are you fascinated and work in the bleeding-edge discipline of Graphic User Interface (GUI) design of web-applications, or any other user-interface?

Time for you to taste the thunder. Discover JavaFX, the new and highly-sophisticated Flash-killer from Sun Microsystems. This will change the look-and-feel of everything on desktops, the web, and the mobile, ushering in a hopefully beautiful, rich, internet experience. This is going to be the future of New Media.

Check out the galleries of what it may do, here:
javafx.com/samples/index.html

So far, their kits are available for Mac and Win, though a Linux version may just come in anytime soon. I did manage to view the samples above in my firefox running Ubuntu Linux. Will write more about this soon. Stay tuned.

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GISS.tv will transform India’s tv broadcasting and media. Forever.

Sarai is the perfect place for a kiss. Behind all the non-stop chatter and noise of television stations, I experienced a quiet revolution on a lazy, saturday afternoon in an almost-empty seminar room in Delhi’s leafy north campus. A revolution, that will eventually impact more than 500 million TV viewers in India, and reach out to the global population of the world far-ahead of conventional twentieth-century television. A revolution that will kiss your TV goodbye. Click on the photos below to discover more from the captions.

The Hidden Dragon

The soft-spoken and unassuming Yves Degoyon, dressed in an old tee-shirt, bleary-eyed from his travels in India, commanded the stage. He walked the dozen participants in the room through his impressive giss.tv project. For ordinary mortals, giss.tv allows anyone, anywhere, armed with nothing more than a commodity laptop, to broadcast live video on their own internet-tv channel, and reach a global audience instantly. All for free, as in both free-of-cost, and more importantly, with freedom. Similarly, giss.tv also allows anyone anywhere to launch their own audio broadcasts instantly for the world.

The live broadcast is streamed into the web-browser of any viewer who tunes in, and does not require any proprietary plug-in like Adobe’s Flash, to run. The underlying technology is Java, which means it can run on any browser, on any device, smartphones, and who knows, you may soon have special devices that could tune-in as well.

This changes everything. In the spirit of freedom, all the software required to author, produce, capture live video and audio, and broadcast are also free and with-freedom, i.e. muft and mukt. Indeed, the impressive suite of software mimics everything that you may expect from professional tv production suites.

You can ticker-tape text at the bottom or anywhere on the screen, at any angle and direction. You can also record your final broadcasts concurrently to hard-disk for archives and for re-purposing. It can mix live video-broadcasts with pre-recorded segments. This is ideal for, say, a live TV news program that has to show video-footage on-cue. It can take multiple video-streams, fade and mix from one to the other, quite suitable for stringing in stories from correspondents or live-video from any geographical location. Yves does recommend it is easier to use a hardware video-mixer to spare current laptops and software the burden of processing, but still, it is a proof-of-concept that will soon become mainstream.

The Bliss of GISS
There are a few things that giss.tv can do, which I have not yet seen on any platform. For instance, unlike youtube or other video-sites, it works with live video, and uses absolutely no proprietary software or plug-in. That means, as stated earlier, everything is muft and mukt. GISS.tv also gives you, the author, complete copyright and ownership of your video, and encourages you to publish and broadcast using a copyleft or a creativecommons license. The server-space and all services are provided free. You can also design your own tv station and channel on the web-browser, and let viewers log-in and subscribe to your video-broadcasts. Unlike TV, giss.tv is also more interactive. Viewers can comment, blog, discuss, and interact, as they watch the video.You can also track viewers, and as each viewer tunes-in, you can lookup his or her location on a map, and the software and platform details of their machines.

Static Noise

What GISS.tv lacks currently, is a slick user-interface design and a bling-bling website. Indeed, it suffers from the looks of a typical, grown-at-home geeky project. Yves works almost effortlessly with his tools, but even the best nerds would quail at the sight of those intimidating software and tools that fill the screen. What the project needs acutely at this moment, is a complete re-do of their user-interface design, and a much more streamlined learning curve.

Nevertheless, I am so impressed with this project, that I have just authored an article in my FreedomYug column for the November 2008 of LinuxForYou magazine. Will publish a hyperlink to it once it gets published. [Update]: Here is the link: My TV Station.

Whether giss.tv eventually becomes successful, or whether it paves the way for a grander and significant paradigm-shift remains to be seen. No one can deny the time has come for twentieth-century broadcast-television, and especially the low-standards of news and tv-journalism we’re currently dished out, to be revamped. On this count, Yves hits the nail on the head. Read his raison d’etre for launching this project, his motivations for giss.tv.

To say it more simply: I am too sexy for TV.

So don’t talk, just giss….