The Bad and the Good, ARM Netbook will be WORSE wrt Open source

A debate has been going on in the Linux community wrt Intel, GMA500 (Poulsbo, PowerVR) and the pathetic support for the same. Some felt (or may feel) that the potential ARM based netbooks could solve their Problem, NOW truth couldn’t be more contrasting than this, so I posted a response on a related and good article requesting Intel to come to their senses on Linux Journal. I am publishing my response to “that article and the comments it generated“, here

**** My comment FROM Linux Journal site ****

On December 6th, 2009 hanishkvc (not verified) says:

Hi All,

To summarise things as it stand today wrt Netbooks/UMPC/MID market and TRUE Open source and Intel Vs ARM.

a) Processor

—————-

* Arm is Good at Power consumption but bit low on Performance

* Intel is good at performance but bit low on Power compared to Arm levels

But given the tradeoffs, it is to be expected. Intel Atom is slowly moving towards the Arm territory with respect to Power AND Arm is slowly moving towards the Intel territory wrt Performance wrt the Cortex AX cores relative to Mobile platforms like Netbooks.

BUT coming to FREE AVAILIBILITY of DOCUMENTATION of their Chips and its associated peripherals, Intel is slightly better than ARM Inc (Where is the up to date ARMARM document ARM Inc wrt latest Arm versions ???, SO TRUE OpenSource People PLEASE DONT ASSUME that Arm is better and one should switch from Intel to Arm (what a person mentioned above), you cann’t be more wrong, wrt what we want ultimately.

b) Core Chipset (All IO in General)

————————————

Keeping power consumption in mind, today Arm based SOCs are better integrated and flexible wrt all io modules be it ram, graphics, video, 3d, audio, expansion (serial,parallel buses), core support logics (Timers, IntCntr), storage cards AND finally additional integrated coprocessors.

Intel was stuck with bad companion chipset combinations for such low power requirement products like Netbook (i.e provided you want Netbook to be full day computing) so they had to come out with a low power companion chipset for Atom (Be it N series or Z series) AND the FIRST step in that direction from Intel is what US15 (Poulsbo) is and that in turn uses GMA500 (PowerVR). They have still bit more distance to travel to match ARM SOCs here, but atleast it is a start.

Hopefull either

* they will be able to get support for GMA500 added to Mainstream linux thro either a regularly updated binary driver or better a open source driver or best case being open up the documentation for it.

* OR replace PowerVR 3D+Video core with their own in the future generation of the Atom companion chipsets or the Integrated CPU+GPU soc (the current one is still PowerVR).

DONT FORGET THAT Majority of the ARM SOCs out their use the PowerVR 3D + Proprietry (Dependent on who makes the SOC) Video accelerators. So A ARM based Netbook will be AS BAD OR WORSE THAN the current Intel Netbook platform AS FAR AS TRUE OPEN SOURCE people are concerned.

OR LUCKY for all, Imagination Opens up the documentation or releases a Open source driver for 2D, 3D and Video logic of their logic.

**** END of my comment from Linux Journal site ****

Update: Rather I forgot one more important related point while posting at LJ, it is -> If we go further and look at free documentation for the Arm based SOC, then things will turn out to be much worse in general (there are exceptions – where certain SOC vendors have provided good documentation for the basic SOC part, but even they leave out the powerful features of their SOC from documenting freely) so we still have some distance to go before we can say Open source and ARM based Netbooks in the same breadth.

BeYOND stupidity SONY, do LOOK = Come to your senses, allow Indian PS3 Owners access to Playstation Store +++, Link India PS site from global

Hi Sony / Sony India if you are listening.

1. At first you charge us a lot for your PS3 (among the highest rates in the world for PS3)[I mind(50-50), luckily I got it when coming from US],
2. next you give us a very small set of Games for PS3 [I mind it very much, its bad],
3. On top you don’t allow us access to Playstation Store[I mind it very very much, its daytime robbery],

WHAT LOGIC ?e?IS THIS.

Please look BeYOND your foolish/senseless/stupid attitude and logic and correct these mistakes. Atleast if you can’t fix <1>(cost of PS3) above, then atleast because Indians are paying you a lot more compared to many other regions atleast fix <2> (game library) and <3> (PSN store++) above.

Similarly in future once Playstation HOME debuts don’t repeat the same mistakes. Let Indians participate in it from Day one.

Also I am also a Sony PSP owner in India and even Sonys’ own stores don’t have good library of games for it also.

Last but not the least why DON’T we have a link to India PS3/PS2/PSP site from playstion.com / asia.playstation.com.

Come on wake up and be a good CE company and be good to your customers.

Note: I am a really frustrated Sony Customer in India with a Sony Camera, PSP, PS3. So when it came the time to buy a HDTV for my PS3 I went with Samsung. Hint Hint …..

Note: Only reason I went with PS3 instead of XBox360 inspite of all your stupidities was your support for Linux and Cell, but that doesn’t mean you can take me for a_ride/granted for ever.
Note: I am posting it in some not directly related categories also, so that hopefully I get the message across to Sony. Sorry for that.

Short and simple commandline Bluetooth in any new Linux distros

Yesterday I had to transfer some files/S60 Opensource programs to my Nokia 6630 mobile and so picked up my usb bluetooth dongle (after ages) and connected to my Linux PC to achieve the same. I had forgotten the things which I had done long time back to get it working (Also one of these days I have to find out where I had noted those steps down).

Either way I started by remembering that I have to try and use obex logic to put those files on the mobile (now come on remembering that isn’t that difficult;-). Soon I remembered most of the things to do through aptitude search/show bluetooth/bluetooth packages, dpkg -L <bluetooth related packages>, some trail_N_error and net searching (googling).

But to my horror what ever I do the connection wouldn’t establish has the bluetooth stack on the PC wasn’t pickup the PIN which I just configured on the PC. After some more rtfm and dpkg -L bluez-utils and cross verification on the bluez website I realised that the way the PIN to be used is specified to the bluetooth stack has changed on the PC and now instead of the pin_handler it uses a dbus based passkey handler. So I compiled the given passkey_agent.c and resolved it. And thus could achieve the file transfer without going into windows thou with some deficit of sleep

So here are the commands one could use to work with bluetooth devices in a linux based pc =>

hciconfig
- Gives info about the bluetooth hci on your pc
- Ensure the device is up and running and has required scan modes
- hcitool dev should also give some of this info

hcitool inq and hcitool scan
- Gives info about or rather identifies nearby bluetooth devices

hcitool info <BTAddr>
- Get info about remote bluetooth device

l2ping <BTAddr>
- One way to see if we can communicate with a remote bluetooth device

sdptool browse <BTAddr> or sdptool records <BTAddr>
- Gives info about the services provided by a remote bluetooth device

obexftp –nopath –noconn –uuid none –bluetooth <BTAddr> –channel <OPUSHChann
elNo> –put <FileToPut>
- Allows one to send file without specifying the pin on the remote device side
- The OPush channel number for device is got from sdptool above

passkey-agent –default <Pin>
- Pin specified here is what the remote BT device should provide
or its user enter on that device when requested.

obexftp -b <BTAddr> -v -p <FileToPut>
- Allows one to put a file onto the specified BT device
- obexftp could also be used to get or list the files on the BT device
- also allows one to identify a nearby BT device by just giving -b option

obexpushd
- Allows one to recieve files sent from a bluetooth device.
- Depending on who started it, the recieved files will be stored in the corresponding home directory

Note: The old style pin_handler doesn’t work with latest bluez, you require a
dbus based passkey handler and there is one provided by default by bluez-utils
called passkey-agent
Hope this helps anyone who is trying to use bluetooth devices from the commandline on a new linux distro, as well as it would help me to remember for the future for my own use.

Finally Got my PS3, runs in india and runs linux but no mp2 and no timed poweroff. Also allow Indians to register on PSN

As I had thought sometime back i.e I might buy a PS3 when it comes out in India for both its gaming features as well as its Media center kind of capabilities (especially for my family, i.e easy to use) and more importantly for me its Computing capabilities.

Lucky me that I had to go to US for a short trip last month and in the process while coming back picked up a PS3 premium edition from atlanta (Just for Sony to know, I found 3 to 4 PS3s’ available at EBgames shop with the shop guy telling that its been there for some time and it is not moving, so can I look at getting around $3K or so wasn’t it what sony us president had told he would give people who find PS3 in stock for a long time). Thus I am saved from having to pay additional premium in India when it releases (when ever it is, no info from Sony about it still, this is bad) and also even thou sony doesn’t mention it IT DOES HAVE A UNIVERSAL POWER SUPPLY (ATLEAST the JAN2007 model which I brought), I took a chance (calculated) and it did run without requiring any stepdown transformers.

I will be able to experiment with its PSP interfacing capabilities, rather once I find time to upgrade my PSP to 3.x firmware obviously the non native way (i.e not direct upgrade because I love homebrew).

I tried installing Linux (the YDL version) and it does work. I have a problem with the mouse (rather a ps2 mouse through a USB to PS2 converter device) which I have to fix later. Otherwise it does run fine. Sometime later I would rather come out with a fully ramdisk (initrd) based small linux distro for it with some key utilities which I use. With it using kboot as its otheros bootloader, it shouldn’t be that difficult. Also as I already have native compiler of PowerPC running on PS3 I don’t have to mess with cross compilers also (not that I don’t like it or any such thing, just lazy these days).

If anyone is interested the kboot customisation for PS3 or rather the ps3 linux devkit full cd is available for kernel.org (as well from dl.qj.net, but qj.net had download issues, as it is not simple wget for qj.net links, and power was failing every time I was trying to download here, so making it hard for me to continue a partial download).

I tried Resistance and RR7, I liked both overall. However I did find that PS3 doesn’t support mp2 (not layer3 (i.e mp3) but layer2) decoding while a $50 (Rs2000) dvd player supports it. Also one more thing I wanted was a timed poweroff feature so that I could let it play some songs or so and after a given time it poweroff itself, I didn’t find this feature in PS3. It would be usefull if sony could add these features to PS3.

Also if sony could release direct dev tools for PS3 i.e not for Linux environment but for their native PS3 os, like MS then it would be even more fun. Either way I do appriciate Sony PS3 allowing linux to be installed i.e one of the reasons I bought PS3.

SONY ALSO Please do allow us indians to register on your playstation network with our indian address if you can. I legally brought a product from US on my own (also brought 2 game cds along with it, I think better than what most US and Japan customers have done on a average till now), but I will be using it in India, cann’t I register it with my Indian address (which you don’t allow for now in ur website).

Running Mupen64 in Fedora Core 6

Being a emulation/simulation fan, I recently moved my interest from nes and snes(zsnes and snes9x) to n64 (nintendo 64). On searching the net I found that the only relatively active open source project currently for n64 emulation is mupen64 released sometime last year.

I downloaded the source and binary versions. Initially trying it on FC6, I found issues with both the mupen64 which I compiled and later also with the binary version directly downloaded. After some breaking the head and some trial and error, this is what I had to do to get Mupen64 running on FC6 using a ATI 3D acceleration driver (i.e the ATI’s drivers and not the one from Xorg). Also what I noticed is that the Mupen64 works BETTER | PROPERLY once I use the ATI s driver instead of the XOrg s driver.

1. **Fixing the SELinux issue with plugin**
   chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /pathto/mupen64-0.5/plugins/*so
2. **Fixing AIGLX and Composite issue with ATI driver(Cas I use ATI drivers)**
   Current ATI accelerator drivers don’t support AIGLX/Composite along with DRI. So One is
   required to disable AIGLX and Composite features in X Server, if one wants to get OpenGL
   acceleration in Mupen64 graphics plugins. This is _essential_ if one wants good speed
   during emulation.
   #** Put the following into your /etc/X11/xorg.conf **
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AIGLX" "off"
EndSection
Section "DRI"
Group 0
Mode 0666
EndSection
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "off"
EndSection

3. ** Make Mupen64 use ATI (Your 3D H/W based) libGL instead of MesaGL s **
   The ati h/w based libGL doesn’t install into /usr/lib/, but rather installs into /usr/lib/ati-fglrx.
   This creates problem because the MesaGL’s libGL is under /usr/lib and by default any
   program will pick this up instead of your h/w accelerated libGL. I THINK FC6 (livna guys)
   should fix this at the package level. However On trying to fix it by forcing mupen64 to use
   the proper libGL using /etc/ld.so.conf.d/prgname logic, it failed. I didn’t try breaking my
   head as it was already 3 or 4 am in the morning and I still had games to try. So I worked
   around this by creating a symbollic link to hw based libGL in the mupen64 directory and
   using LD_LIBRARY_PATH to force the use of proper libGL as shown below.
   • cd /pathto/mupen64
   • ln -s /usr/lib/ati-fglrx/libGL.so.1.2 libGL.so.1
   • export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.
   • ./mupen64 (NOTE: Now you should be happily running mupen64 in FC6 with acceleration)

If you have taken care of the 3 issues mentioned above, Now you should be able to happily enjoy running Mupen64 on FC6 with 3D acceleration for graphics. Enjoy.

My NEXT PC might be a PS3

From sometime now I have been thinking of upgrading my computer (interms of CPU and GPU) and or buying a laptop. However because of various reasons I haven’t been able to do both.

Pricy PCs  (well in a way):

Well wrt CPUs now that Core 2 Duo is out the technology advance issue is resolved now however prices being bit high here in India, I am waiting out for the prices to drop. Now coming to GPUs with the availability of Unified Shader logic (rather more generically the flexible pipeline and flexible programmable nature) in the newly released and to be released GPUs, the technology advance I have been waiting for will be finally resolved, but then again the pricey nature of GPUs (rather more severe in case of GPUs when compared to CPUs in India) makes it hard to buy them.

Consoles to the rescue:

So assembling the PC hit by pricey nature of new CPUs and GPUs, the other alternative I can look at is buying consoles (I mean Game consoles).

The price issue becomes less of a issue as the vendors normally try to sell the console at a less cost or atleast less margin of profit from a h/w perspective and then try to make money on the games that are sold.

Coming to technology, Well at a technical level a game console is also a computing device with similar capabilities to a PC. However over the last few generations of the Game console the vendors have been aiming them as pure gaming devices and not letting the users utilize the full power hidden in these products. But things are changing.

XBox360 is a good console with 3 core PowerPC asic (with each core supporting 2 threads) and a unified shader based gpu from ati. It has support for storage (HDD), networking (ethernet and wlan) and external expansion(USB, Bluetooth) . And it has sufficient Memory (512MB). However the problem here is that Microsoft (i.e the developer/vendor) doesn’t want XBox to be used for anything other than Gaming in principle. There is some hope to circumvent it legally to some extent by using the XNA Express developer framework however this can only be at the application level and here to only interms of managed code.

PS3 from Sony on the other hand has the Cell processor (a PowerPC core + 8 Specialised Processing elements (mini cpus))(having architected embedded products which use multicore ASICs involving a General purpose CPU and or DSP and Specialised Processing elements from other Chip vendors, I am pretty happy and looking forward to all the possibilities in these specialized ASICs with seemingly limited resources)  and a GPU from NVidia (hoping against hope that it will have a surprise interms of unified/flexible shaders, even otherwise to some extent it is still ok) . It also has storage (HDD, Flash cards), networking (WLan (and ethernet???)), expansion (USB, Bluetooth, Flash card interfaces (SD/…)) and Memory (512MB). And TO TOP IT UP Sony is WILLING to let Users UTILIZE the Computing Power of their Console for what ever the User fancies. And inturn they will DO IT IN STYLE by USING /EXTENDING OPEN TECHNOLOGIES like Linux, OpenGL, OpenXYZ, GCC, open source applications (belonging to many/any domain).

So PS3 presents itself to be a good Gaming Console as well as a good General/Special (thanks to Cell) Computing device. Even thou it might be pricy in India at the begining (only sometime around 2007 mid, if I may fancy) still I would consider it a better pricy thing to buy rather than a pricy pc(which inturns I have to keep upgrading atleast every ~1.5 years if I want to play the latest and greatest game in its full glory).

One more reason for tilting towards a Game Console (PS3 in this case) being that Games will be specifically optimized to utilize the the full power of the console to give the best results. Also games will be available for the console for atleast 4-5 year period without requiring to upgrade(rather change) the console, which is not the case in PCs (i.e if you want to fully see what the game developer wants you to see).

Consoles which I may use for similar purpose but not happy fully:

Nintendo Wii: Again uses a simple PowerPC core  and a simple GPU. Other than only haveing simple CPU and GPU, it has a proprietry DVD format if I am not wrong. Again native availability of a flexible computing enviornment with option to add ones own modules/applications is questionable at this stage. One could always hack these to get these capabilities and there will surely be communities on the internet to help allow that, but then it is a different story altogether.

Last generation – PS2 and XBox: At this point in time the Computing power/capabilities of these products will fall below what a average user/developer might expect. Again among these PS2 would be the one I would pick if I have to because (a) it has official support to experiment with linux and (b) it is the non standard platform design (which is what I like and would love to experiment with) compared to Xbox (a PC at a basic level).

My bit old but true thoughts on WinVista – Nothing radical compared to other OSs around, just SP3plusplus stuff

Sometime back in June2006, there was a blog post belonging to WinFS team trying to say that WinFS is not dead but just transformed into a better and richer form by moving many of its logic to SQLServer and some other support libraries. Again even thou WinFS would have used some form of database and intelligence above it to achieve what it aimed to achieve, Lack of that intelligence in Win Vista can no way be justified as good And many people did rigthly point it out to MS. I had posted my feedback to WinFS team then asking them not to abonden the concept of WinFS. Here it follows now:

Hi WinFS team,

I use and experiment on many OSs.Even thou I have been using Linux as my main OS for a long time; becuase of my interests I also have windows and do keep track of it. I have tried winVista, agreed it is fancy looking (but bit slow, but at same time its still beta, so hope speed increases by final release) but currently don’t see it adding much value than a better access check mechanism for operations and a updated Graphics driver model which I believe is more XP SP3 material rather than the radical change that WinFS would have been.

So hope you people keep WinFS going rather than abondening it.

Later I had one more post clarifying some thoughts above, it follows:
Just to clarify what I meant above when I told keep WinFS going. Agreed the possibilities around various applications of WinFS could be got by having a flexible attribute mechanism at the filesystem level and intelligent indexing and or storing of all datas (content data as well as all meta data).

At one level it requires the WinFS core services to be available at one end and at the other level significant effort requires to be put in the applications so that they are woven around this core. And the system wide effort is what can give the power of this to all.

So I hope microsoft moves towards this system wide coharence (implicitly or explicitly achived) in simplifying and powering up things for the end user, which most OS environments will move towards slowly.

Open sourcing Code (which should be ethically open) equally or more important than Hiring few open source developers or supporting opensource

In Aug2006 there was a blog entry about Google , the god father of opensource ? in linuxjournal. Which tried to justify Google not opensourcing their code by saying that they hire people who work on opensource products and that people won’t understand googles code contributions so why should they and so on. This really made me sad that people think in such ways and make bad things appear good. So I commented there my thoughts on why its not good. I am adding it here as part of consolidation of my thought. Here follows my comments then:

Hi,

It is good to know that google is hiring open source developers so that they can concentrate on their open source work rather than worrying about how to earn a living in parallel to working on open source projects.

However if google is not open sourcing some of its code which it should have open sourced from a pure ethical point of view (but not doing it by hiding behind some short comings in the existing GPL or other open source licenses – feel/guessing that it may be mostly related to web based servicing …) Then it is a bad thing that google is doing and it can no way be justified to be ok just because they hire few open source developers or support few open source projects moneyterily.

If someone tells that they don’t think that its worth opensourcing their code, because people may not understand the code or may not have any use for the code then they are talking garbage here. If all the initial developers of opensource code had worked with the same mentality as above then the open source movement wouldn’t have been the great movement to be reckoned with that it is today.

Yes there might be people who are mentored slowly into open source projects, but at the same time you will find a lot of people silently contributing or using opensource code/project with out having any mentor to guide them because they have some circumstances which they feel is best resolved using open source projects and then learning the abc’s of the project on their own based on the code available to them and by experimenting with that code.

NOTES: As I don’t keep track of events on the opensource front actively I don’t know if google is guilty or not. But if any company (google or otherwise) as a attitude that what ever code they are working on which in turn is directly or indirectly built on open source projects, is not worth opensourcing just because they feel others may not understand it or may not have use for it, then this is NOT a GOOD TREND NOR ATTITUDE and NOR IS IT ETHICAL. And no one should praise such a company and justify that a better thing for such a company to do is (a) to hire few open source developers to let them work on their open source projects, or (b) contribute moneyterily to open source projects or (c) mobilize people to work on opensource projects. What I mean is even though (a),(b) and (c) above are in itself good things it can in NO way justify the stealing (if I may use such harsh word) of efforts of other opensource developers however small it might be. Because it goes against the fundamentals of the open source movement, which are essential to keep the opensource movement alive.

Binary blobs and linux or other Open source programs – greedy people – Bad Bad

Some time back, Aug2006 to be precise, there was a blog in oreillynet.com about binary modules and Linux kernel. And many people inturn commenting about it. This was my thoughts around that then, which I had posted there. Now I am adding it here, so that my thoughts are consolidated here:

I find many people making the statement, that one uses the best thing for the job. Let me tell you that no one is telling that there aren’t good proprietrery software, if there is some proprietry software use it its your wish and right.

But then if you also agree that there is some good open source products that you use then it is there because it is open and it has allowed people to fix and enhance it to reach that level, which is possible because of its open source nature. If that open ness was not there, it wouldn’t have been possible to have all these great open source products. NOW if someone wants to be in this opensource market, then he should respect the wishes (i.e opensource licenses of these copyright owners) of these opensource developers as his work will not be of anyuse in this particular market (i.e that of the opensource products), which he wants to be in, if the underlying opensource product is not there in the first place.

Put differently as some great person had told centiuries ago humbly “I am a small person who appears like a gaint because I stand on the shoulders of many gaints”. If people who use the opensource market for their own profit realize this fundamental thing thats what would be great. And I would say if this statement of that great person is understood by everyone, then we wouldn’t have had to live in this purely money oriented world with all these patents (the way they are implemented in todays world, where almost anything is patentable irrespective of the lack of PATHBREAKing innovativeness in most of the ideas) and other stupidities.