Archive for the ‘software’ Category

I was baffled during my review of the Acer Aspire One [Portal page] at the apparent lack of power management software that should have been included with the netbook. Aside from some hardware toggles, there were no settings beyond the default Windows power options to help get the most from your battery. I reported a while back on a nice utility that allowed users to control their Aspire One’s fan, but there wasn’t much more in the way of power management.

Luckily there are people out that who are passionate enough about their technology to spend time making good software for them. Take a look at a small freeware utility called a1ctl. For its tiny size, this utility has a lot of features:

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Following through behind the ARM / Ubuntu announcement last week is another shot in the direction of Intel’s MIDs. Adobe’s Flash 10, probably the most commonly used multimedia plug-in in the Web world and a significant part of the full web experience, is coming to the ARM architecture. Not only will you be seeing full Flash 10 support on the next generation of evolved smartphones and mobile Internet devices based on the ARM Cortex core which are starting to trickle in now via specialist devices such as the Archos 5, Open Pandora and the next generation Nokia Internet Tablet but existing ARM11 architectures will also see a port. In addition to the Flash 10 announcement, Adobe have announced that AIR will be available so applications like twhirl and the ebay app could end up in your hand within the next year.

The press release talks about being able to ‘remove the barriers to publish content and applications seamlessly across screens.’ and points towards the website - Openscreenproject - that was announced earlier this year.

“Adobe Flash is the leading video format on the Web today, and this collaboration with ARM is another important step towards bringing the complete Web experience to mobile devices worldwide,” said Gary Kovacs, general manager and vice president, Mobile and Devices at Adobe.

Read: TGDaily

Read: ARM Press

Smaller memory footprint, faster boot, better UI and longer battery life. Windows 7 is not only going to be interesting for the laptop and desktop, it’s shaping up well for Netbooks and UMPCs too. Vista always offered better touch and natural input mechanisms but it was a struggle to run it on Ghz-class devices. The reports coming back from Windows 7 pre-beta testers point towards a much more usable system on these devices.

I’ve put a few links to some early reports below but the one I wanted to concentrate on and the one that raised my eyebrows even higher than last weekends ‘TWiT podcast was a post from Ian Dixon at TheDigitalLifeStyle.com. Ian’s website focuses on media centre and related topics but he’s had a Q1P for a while and when he got hold of Windows 7, he went ahead and installed Windows 7 on the Q1P with some really positive results…

[Audio recording below...]

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Fennec, the small-screen version of Firefox, is important for ultra mobile fans. Not just because its a small-screen, finger-optimised browser but because it has been chosen as one of the browser options (the other being Firefox 3) for Moblin 2, the latest version of the Intel-led core operating system for MIDs planned for first release in Spring 2009.

Fennec has support for add-ons but unfortunately, it doesn’t support the mainstream add-ons that are available for the Daddy of the pack, Firefox 3. Thank goodness people are starting to jump on board then because add-ons help a lot with individual tailoring, an important part of the ‘personal’ part of the UMPC equation. ReadWriteWeb reports that the URL Fixer add-on is now ready.

Exactly what the add-on does isn’t really as important as the signal it sends out to developers and adopters. Fennec is starting to gain traction and awareness amongst developers.

For more about the browser choices on Moblin check out this part of the Moblin website. While you’re there, don’t miss the clutter user interface demo video. Clutter is the new 3D-capable UI architecture that will replace Hildon. The demo looks fantastic. Oh, one more thing I noticed. It looks like they are working on open source hardware-driven video decoding based on libva APIs. In fact the whole Moblin project is looking far more organised than it was 6 months ago and there’s quite a few exciting things to check out on the site if you’re interested in Atom-based MIDs.

Remember though, Moblin 2 is for OEMs to brand and enhance.  Its not an end-users distro.

SUSE-Moblin for MIDs and Netbooks?

Another Linux software distributor has announced that they will contribute towards the Moblin stack. Novell, who has the SUSE Linux brand, made an announcement yesterday (although I can’t find anything on the Novell press pages.)

Novell announced today that it will participate in and contribute to the Moblin open source project. Novell will start immediately contributing to Moblin’s specific sub-projects, such as its desktop compositing manager and multimedia abstraction layer. As a result of Novell’s participation, Moblin will be able to leverage Novell’s large community of contributors and many existing open source projects. Novell will promote Moblin within these projects and continue its role in ensuring future innovations for all Linux* desktops, including Mobile and Connected Devices.

We now have Canonical, Xandros, Linpus, gOS, Wind River and Novell in the Moblin space. You could say that it’s great news and that it will make developing software for millions of MIDs and Netbooks easier but from what I’ve seen so far, every distributor, every OEM and every carrier appears to want it their own way so they can develop solutions at their own speed and put their own control on it. You could say that too many cooks are going to spoil the broth!

TradingMarkets.com

Gameloft, the French company that develops for mobile platforms, has announced that they will be taking on the Moblin software stack and will be porting some of their games to it. The press release (not currently on the Gameloft website) states "We see the use of MIDs as a perfect platform to allow consumers to enjoy the attributes of Gameloft games to the fullest," said Alexandre Tan, Gameloft’s Business Development Director. "Intel Atom processor based MIDs offer the rich gaming experience our customers expect when on the go. Being X86 based makes it even easier and faster to port our games." Gameloft already develops for most mobile platforms including iPhone and Android.

Intel scored 3 wins for Moblin earlier this year when Linpus, Canonical and Xandros announced that they would all move to Intels, Atom-optimised Moblin core. Then, just a month later, Intel decided to make big changes to Moblin by changing the build architecture and moving to an RPM-based software packaging system. I’m sure that didn’t please Xandros and Canonical (who both run deb-based distributions) and can’t have helped anyone because since then, the only thing I’ve heard about Moblin (V2) is that changes will feed in until the full release in Spring next year. I also heard from one Linux vendor that the process would be very slow. With OEMs wanting fast response on solid, user-friendly OEM builds for, potentially, millions of machines, its not difficult to imagine that moving to a new core build is not their top priority.

Maybe that will change soon though as gOS are announcing that they are going to have a Moblin-based build by the end of the year and that they are partnering with a ‘major’ OEM. Whether that means we’ll see Moblin on a netbook by the end of the year is open to question. A press release from Good OS states that David Liu, the founder  "will announce details of a new partnership with a major OEM using Moblin for Intel® Atom™ Processor-based NetBooks. David will be speaking from 10:20-11AM in Room 201B at the Taipei International Convention Center, and will provide more details about a gOS based on Moblin that will be available at the end of this year."

gOS aren’t new to the netbook space as earlier this year they shipped their distribution with the Everex Cloudbook. It didn’t appear to go down to well. Since then they launched gOS Space which was received well at Laptop magazine in May.

Keep an eye out for the gOS announcements tomorrow.

gOS website.

Update: gOS will be working with Mitac.

For those of you who love OSX, but also love low cost netbooks, it might be your lucky day. Liliputing is linking to a very handy guide for putting OSX on a Dell Mini 9. Over at TUAW, Steven Sande has put together a nice guide compilation that shows everything you need to get Leopard running on the recently released Dell Mini 9 netbook. Sande calls it the "Little Leopard Laptop", which could made the funny acronym of LLL to compete with the EEE.

If creating a Frankenstein’s monster of PC and OSX components scares you, patience may provide useful as Sande says he is "…sure that Apple will announce a low-cost netbook soon", though in all probability that is just speculation.

Coming off of the Acer Aspire One review, I was baffled at the inability to control many of the hardware components in the interest of power-saving. Maybe a remedy to a small part of that is the Aspire One fan control utility, which is a freeware application written by Ralf Neumüller.

Just download the tiny file (right around 700kb), unzip, run the installer file, then launch using the AA1 Fan Control icon within the same folder. Once you run the installer, you can put the icon anywhere for easy to reach access. You’ll need to do a restart after the installer runs. Once you boot back up you can launch the fan control utility and you will be greeted with a clean little bar that pops out of the task bar and will allow you to change the temp threshold for when the fan turns on/off. You can also see the current temperature of the CPU.

A quick install on the Aspire One that is heading out soon and I was able to confirm that it works on XP as well as Vista (judging by the image on the AA1 Fan Control download page). It looks like it has also been recently updated to work with all Aspire One BIOS. Just make sure you know what you are doing when changing the fan thresholds so you don’t end up frying your Aspire One!

[Liliputing]

Update: I’m currently live on UMPCPortal.com/live testing this out if you fancy seeing it in action.

Update: Live session summary below.

Today, One of the Canonical mobile team members released details of a new distribution based on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) aimed at ‘MIDs’ with screen sizes from 7-9″

After a simple download and copy to a flash drive the Q1 Ultra booted straight into a live linux session running in RAM and everything seems to work out of the box. Touch, brightness, wifi, BT and more. This is exciting. There’s a full software suite withthe Moblin browser (Firefox + grab and drag), on screen keyboard, Open Office, Pidgin, Thunderbird and of course, through the package manager, a whole lot more. [Video after the break]

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It seems great that you could go out and pick up a tiny netbook capable of browsing the web for around $300 today, however many of these inexpensive new netbooks offer only a small amount of storage. For instance, the new Inspiron Mini 9 can only be equipped (from the factory) with up to 16GB of storage. With such little space available to us, it is important to keep data organized and make the most of the space you have.

I have personally been using a VAIO UX180 UMPC as my primary computer for the last two years. Of the total 30GB that are actually contained with the HDD, only 21GB is available to me (because of the recovery partition), I occasionally do a fresh wipe of the UMPC to keep it running optimally, but right now I’m bumping up against the wall at the end of my storage space.

Enter WinDirStat: a wonderful little program that will help you to visualize the data distribution of different files and folders on your drive(s). Using WinDirStat over the last week, I was able to browse around all the folders on my computer and see what was really taking up all my space. I was surprised at some of the things I found, and I quickly realized that there was quite a bit of data that I could delete to make room for more important things. I wanted to share this program with you readers because those of you following this site are likely to have a mobile device such as a UMPC or netbook that has limited storage. This powerful and free application can be a very useful tool for any computer.

Take a look at this screenshot below (click to view full size). WinDirStat takes a moment to analyze your drive, then breaks down every file and folder on the computer. It even color codes different files so you can see which types are clustered together. Highlighting a folder in the file hierarchy list will outline the contents of that folder in the visual area. Expand that folder and highlight individual files and watch them be located within the file group. Its actually rather neat to see, and you can even zoom in to see those super small files. (the blue files that represent the majority of the space in the screenshot below are all part of my music library).

Find WinDirStat here.

Last week I listed 10 important ISVs that are working with Intel on Moblin-based software. Gypsii, Move Networks, Fring and a bunch of others. Today, you can add two more to the list; FancyPants and Orb.

FancyPants is a GUI development system. Announced in a press release that I missed last week you’ll see that they (that’s FST - Fluffy Spider Technologies) develop an API and software suite for implementing graphics and media-rich GUI solutions. Up until now, OEMS have had to employ the services of software houses to ‘finish’ the existing Moblin, Ubunti and Asianux stacks but this could help them turn around nice designs at lower cost and with a shorter time to market.  They’ve also produced a demonstrator running on the Compal JAX10 (Gigabyte M528, Aigo MID) which you have to take a look at here. Its smooth! I certainly wouldn’t mind having a bit of fun with this on my MID! [Article continues...]

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In the open mic session, companies presented software solutions that are being developed for MIDs. Nice to see that the high-layers are being worked on. Its important!!

• One Voice technologies - Adam Finch.  Voice recognition software. They want to enable a voice activated MID. IM, Media etc.
• Gypsii - Jeff Lyn. Mobile, GPS-enabled social networking. Share user-created POI’s. MID-optimised UI.
• ThunderSoft - ‘One stop software solution in MIDs.’ OS customisation, localisation etc. A software development company.
• Fring. Mobile Instant messaging. Multi-protocol. Includes SIP support. Connectivity to common IM networks. Integration into Web2.0 networks e.g. twitter. Open API.
• Move networks. Player for mobile devices. Apparently will be shown in keynotes tomorrow.
• Mediacast. Delivery of non real-time media and software
• Livecast,. Simple real-time broadcast from mobile devices.
• Movial - Software service provider. White-label applications for re-branding. Internet browsers, media players.
• Comverse -  Billing, messaging and voip. White label service for service providers.
• Wind River - Operating System vendor. Creating a commercial grade Moblin/Linux OS for MIDs. Includes applications.

This is just a selection of the presentation given. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to catch the whole session due to an important showcase session that I’ll report on later.

I’m still tracking as much as I can in the Mobile Linux world to try and bring myself up to a point where I can report with a respectable level of knowledge. Everyone I talk to though, seems to have differing opinions. Its an incredibly fragmented sector and I completely understand those that are simply ignoring all the fuss going on at the core level and focusing on the high-level, OS-agnostic application development environments.

Over the next three days we all have a good opportunity to learn more through the Mobile Linux Conference that is taking place within the Linux World Expo. That’s assuming that people are going to report from it but with all the hype going on about Android, Apple and others, I’m sure there’s going to be some serious focus on it. You can track Exhibitor announcements through this page where you’ll already see some news. I’ll be tracking it continuously over the next three days so if anything significant crops up, i’ll make sure I relay onto the front page here.

LinuxDevices.com have pulled out the important info about the keynote speakers and sessions which include one from Ram Peddibholta, the Director of Open Source Technology Center, Intel who will specifically talk about Moblin and Atom. I wonder how that will be received among the attendees, most of whom will be be coming from the smartphone world. Intel is a new player here and it’s going to be a tough sell for them.

Source:LinuxDevices.

Thoughtfix brings us the news (from The Register) that Moblin will be moving to a Fedora-based distribution. Thats quite a core change in architecture that is bound to upset Canonical and Xandros who have been working on Atom-optimised distributions and have also committed to make a Moblin-based version for netbooks. I suspect that Moblin will run the two builds side-by-side for a while. Dirk Hondel told The Register that "there was no falling out with Ubuntu, but the move to Fedora was a technical decision based on the desire to adopt RPM for package management."

Here’s a list of some of the current distributions running on Atom netbooks.

• Suse on MSI Wind and HP Mininote - RPM based
• Xandros on Eee PC - DEB based.
• Canonical base system (Ubuntu Mobile) for MID development - DEB based
• Linpus Lite on the Acer Aspire - RPM Fedora Based (Acer)
• Asianux / MIDinux base system for MID development - RPM based

Only Ubuntu Mobile and Asianux are running the Moblin core so far but I’m sure we’ll hear news at IDF next month. I wonder if SuSE will make an announcement.

If support moves towards Moblin, what happens to the VIA and AMD-based devices? Can VIA and AMD contribute drivers for inclusion? Apparently Moblin supports non-Intel platforms so I guess that’s a possibility and seeing as some of VIA’s linux drivers are already open, there’s nothing stopping a Moblin distributor from dropping them in.