Over the past year Linux OS distributions have been going through rapid changes in how network connectivity has been managed. This in part is due to the boom Linux seen in Netbooks. All of a sudden it became important to get connected with Linux. In general much of my effort has been to help out in this area. Unfortunately we have seen a number of problems crop up however due to how successful open source software has become. Open Source normally works like a meritocracy - best software wins! Unlike proprietary software where a dominant player can block other potentially innovative solutions. But in this instance, a change made for a perfectly good and technical reason effected all users of the betavine mobile connect software running on the Ubuntu Linux distribution. In simple terms, applications requiring network connectivity would query a Network Manager about the network state. This would make it easy and lightweight for an app to discover connectivity. On Ubunutu this was a design decision made by the cool Network Manager team. The downside however was that even if the betavine software successfully creates a data connection with a 3G USB modem - the rest of the applications running on a Ubunutu Linux OS would be unaware of that connection. From a user perspective it's a failed app, a failed connection and an un-happy user. The OS community have since implemented a Modem Manager API. Which we are helping with and built our app to that 'modem manager' interface. But the issue has never been far from my mind.... I was alerted by a friend from Warp about a potential solution by Alexander Sack called Ntrack . He has written a small lightweight and easy to use library for application developers which reports on network connectivity by looking for changes to the network route reported by the OS. Brilliant idea! Meaning that app's can easily find out network connectivity state. Leaving the job of connecting to what ever app is delivering that service to you - be it Network Manager or even a specific proprietary solution. I have to say we at betavine have started experimenting with the application. If it's adopted by the community it would play a perfect role in allowing a far more open and free playing field for native applications written by third parties to provide that type of service. In my mind that's what open source is all about - giving choice back to the user. Regards, Nicholas Herriot.

Well it looks like we are rather late with this software package but we finally got round to creating a build unique for Moblin 2.1. The package was actually ready in early January, but as ever, something else that's deemed business critical pops up. So the JFDI card get's played! OK so what's new with this? It's a re-spin of version 2 which has been packaged with two dependencies not available on the Moblin repository. It's got support for some of the new datacards being shipped in Vodafone world wide. It's got some minor fixes that happen on deployment with certain Linux permissions. This was actually reported with some users of the Fedora Linux distro but nobody could ever reproduce the bug... Now we can.... And it's fixed! So thanks to our Open Source community for reporting, testing and helping with the user groups problem on our forums. OK this time we have built a small shell script to do the install. We are going live with a few pages on Moblin and how to use the app. This will have a manual setup page for the die-hard amongst you (from my experience it seems to be the debian guys who just love to get back to basics!). We have also taken the liberty of chatting with our Moblin/Intel friends to make sure this package goes onto their app-store. So downloading and installing should be even easier for newbies! Now that's good news for a Linux advocates! OK, so how to you get it now while we build the pages! If you have 'wget' on your moblin device, which was on our 2.1 test machines just cut'n'past the following line on your terminal window. wget http://www.betavine.net/repo/packages/moblin/vmc_moblin2_install.sh -q -O /tmp/vmc_moblin2_install.sh && /bin/bash /tmp/vmc_moblin2_install.sh Ensure you input your password when the script executes. That's it! To run the app, restart your machine, insert your datacard with a valid SIM, then go to your 'applications' icon. From your applications icon go to the internet tab and click on the Vodafone logo. Die-Hard Please Make it Difficult And now the hard way for the die-hard! You can get the package file here. You will need to untar the package... >mkdir /betavine >tar -zxvf /tmp/Packages2_20.tar.gz -C ~/betavine/ Install dependencies with YUM >sudo yum install gnome-python2-libegg moblin-lsb ppp python-twisted lockdev Install the packages within your betavine directory that you just created: >cd betavine >sudo rpm -ivh usb_modeswitch*.rpm >sudo rpm -ivh ozerocdoff*.rpm >sudo rpm -ivh pytz-2008i-6.moblin.noarch.rpm >sudo rpm -ivh pyserial-2.4-1.moblin.noarch.rpm >sudo rpm -ivh libwvstreams-4.5.1-6.fc11.i586.rpm >sudo rpm -ivh wvdial-1.60-8.fc11.i586.rpm >sudo rpm -ivh vodafone-mobile-connect-2.20.01-1.noarch.rpm You will also need to give your user some new group privileges on this particular flavour of Linux. So add 'lock' and 'dialout' to your user by doing: >sudo /usr/sbin/usermod -a -G lock <your user name> >sudo /usr/sbin/usermod -a -G dialout <your user name> Finally, either login as yourself again or restart your machine. Once the machine is restarted place your datacard into the USB port and start the app which should have an icon inside your applications menu -> internet tab. It would be good to know how people find this release since it's still only using version 2.x technology. Nevertheless, if you want 50+ datacard support this gives you it. Kind regards, Nicholas Herriot.

Anyone following the rapid rate of change for the Linux Kernal version 2.6.32 I think will agree it is truly astounding. The work that is going into this single piece of software is nothing short of 'incredible'. Not only to it's rate of change, but it's inclusion of features, complexity and hardware support. Before I get the the meat of my blog I'll summaries what is current and hip in the kernel at the minute: 1) Intel engineers are talking about changing the way pre-fetching works to increase performance by as much as 8%. In other words compiling not for space as previously but for speed. 2) Kroah-Hartman is looking at how to tag patches to increase work flow. 3) There is some talk about including legacy LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) into the mainstream kernel. This was traditional provided by external drivers. 4) Those clever guys at DELL have proposed a new character device interface. Thus no more problems with device naming being inconsistent (e.g. on one machine a PCIA Ethernet card being named 'eth0' while another named 'eth1'. 5) Fast symbol resolution by some great work from Alan Jenkins. Thus a faster booting machine. And I thought it was fast already... 6) Para-visualization improvements for kernel-based virtual machines -KVM -Of which I won't go into details. 7) A fix for Linx Out Of Memory killer. This could take a blog in itself, but the fix basically changes where the Null page is stored in memory. Hence stopping a NULL pointer exception calling malicious software being called if referenced. But all this great work seems to come at a price. It seems that the current 'big issue' facing the kernel is 'speed'. The performance of the kernel compared to previous 2.6 versions is down by 5-10% depending on what bench mark you use. It seems to be part of a trend that has a few people worried. To address this and help to get a handle on the issue the Kernel hackers have included in the /tools directory new benchmarking capabilities called 'pref bench'. I guess the worry is that with Linux starting to go on to smarbooks, mobiles and netbooks nobody wants to see this issue have a negative impact on how Linux runs on small low powered devices. For more info on all this have a look at kernelpodcast.org.