On Being Open

In my most recent post over at TalkBMC, "The Secret Linux Agenda", I spent a fair amount of time trying to think out loud about some of the disconnects in the world of Open Source. I am given a pretty hard time at BMC about the fact that I write long posts, so I worked hard to keep the "Agenda" post as short as I could, but still touch on at least a few examples of some of the disconnects people have when they talk about being open. Or Open. Or open source. or Open Source. I also mentioned the negative image some of this "open" stuff has because of the behaviors of some people in the various communities.

I wrote that post before I went to my first ever Austin Social Media Club meeting. Whurley was the speaker at the event, and he made a metric ton of terrific points about this during his talk.

Open Confusion

There was one particularly ticklish question from the room at the Austin Social Media Club meeting (Anne Gentle and I there) that I think really boiled all of this down. That comment / question was:

If people are doing "Open Source", why aren't they more Open?

It was a great question and really underlined the confusion about what the term "Open" means. Given the amount of audible agreement in the room with that question, for many in a social media club, "Open" in "Open Source" had connotations of "Accessible", "Easy to get along with", and "Willing to have civil conversations".

The Rainbow of Open Source

Spend any time in an Open Source product forum, and you can easily see what the folks in the social media club were talking about. Someone asks a question. Usually it is an innocent question being made by someone that does not know anything about the product. They, for their part, feel that they are doing the right thing. They are showing interest, and willingness to learn. They are being "open".

You know what happens next: In an un-moderated forum, some will actually try to help, and answer the question. At the very least, they will tell them where the first-timer documents are located, and some might even point out how to use the search facility to find every other time that question was asked, and the answers that they got then. All of those things are classifies as what we call "signal". Useful information.

The middle ground response happens when a response is given, but the person who asked the question has no way to parse the answer. That breaks down further as:

• The answer was given in a way that assumed the person to have knowledge they did not.
  
• The answer was given in such a way as to question whether the person is actually responding in the same language as the questioner.

Either of these examples are about communications styles, and whether or not the person who is doing the technical work can enter the requisite frame of mind (empathy, if you will) to have conversations with those less technical than themselves.

I had this experience growing up when I was talking to my Dad about math. He is a EE at NASA. A real rocket scientist. They exist! He knows so much math (some of it pretty esoteric and useful largely in his speciality of antenna design), and has for so long, that my simple frustrations with things like Freshman Algebra were in some ways a mystery to him. In one particularly memorable conversation, I asked why something worked in a particular way, and after a bit of time he said that once I knew a certain higher level of math this would become obvious. I was temporarily stuck: I would never *see* the next level of math till I grokked this one!

And Then Came Maude....

Sooner or later, intolerance strikes. Someone will post a response to the new person that contains anything from mild abuse to questioning their patriotism in a time of war. Something like:

"Are you NUTS!!! Why the H*LL are you posting such stupid dumb*** question. Why do you hate our troops? Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries (From the Monty Python Phrasebook: "Useful things to tell customers when they are calling and bothering you")".

It may be more ... err... sophisticated:

"We do not tolerate fools lightly in this forum. Please remove yourself to other places, so that you do not annoy us in the future, and so that we may concentrate on real issues."

This new, trying to do the right thing, be "open" person is now deeply confused and hurt. Is this not Open source. Is this not a public forum? Even if they don't know anything about this tool or product, they still need help on it.

In a forum for a paid product, no support professional would post such a response. If they did, their career would be at an end in short order. A company would not tolerate paying customers being abused by people from their company.

There are a lot of reasons why the maladaptive response to the newbie question is occurring in the Open Source forum:

• I am doing this "for free"
• This is not my day job
• I answered that same question endlessly already
• I only have so many hours in the day. I can spent them repeating myself, or being productive
• PUUUULEASE!!!! They asked me why this didn't work the same as Windows!!!! AS-IF!!!!!
  
• I am out of caffeine, and I have no money to get fresh. I hate being poor and brilliant
• I have not been on a date in a decade
• Combinations of several or all of the above

The reason does not matter. In a customer support situation, if someone was thinking about trying the new "Open" thing, and gets that response, the damage is done.

Smug and Arrogant?

A post came out recently about Apple users being "Smug and Arrogant", and when I looked at it there was a poll. 2/3's or those who had read the post agreed that Applen were guilty as charged. You could take that post and change all the Apple references to Linux or other Open Source projects, and I think the poll would be about the same. And it is because of the same reasons. Well... maybe not the Apple advertising campaign part. But as smug as those ads may be, I like 'em. I think they kind of actually miss a point criticising the ads saying that John Hodgeman plays "PC" as bumbling. John Hodgeman gets all the good lines! In many ways, he is the more likable of the two. I have in fact often viewed the ads as being sort of a misstep for Apple because "PC" is more endearing in his own, can't stop blue-screening, kind of way. Maybe it's just me though...

Fedora and Ubuntu

Now I want to circle around to part of what I was trying to get at with my recent posts both here and at TalkBMC about Fedora and Ubuntu. Another aspect of "open", "closed", and the new users experience.

Fedora is a great Distro, if you already know what you are doing. Fedora, like OpenSUSE, lives in the middle of the road. It is not as challenging to install as MS Vista or rolling your own Linux distro starting with a download from Kernel.org. Fedora is easier and faster than installing GenToo. It is not as easy as Ubuntu or Linspire or Xandros. Yes: I know Xandros is in bed with Microsoft these days. See the bit above about arrogant and smug though: I know why the Xandros/MS deal is not optimal, but does the average person that just wants this stuff to work?

Fedora has an admirable stance on why they do not include any software in the Distro that is not really Open Source. My example in the other posts was Wifi cards like Intel and Atheros where even though the vendor has supplied driver code, they hold back the code to the cards driver loadable firmware and only provide a binary. With Fedora, you will have to work hard to get that card going, and their point in acting closed to closed source is to incent card manufacturers to be more open.

I love it. I think card manufacturers are wrong to think their microcode is all that splendidly different in a commodity market like Wifi, and that being more open and easier to install would be an advantage in the marketplace!

However....

Being hard to install for the right reasons means by default you are NOT after the casual installer. The person just trying to use the computer as a tool to get something or the other done. The person who heard that Linux was really cool and was willing to try it to see what it is all about.

The Spectrum

On one end we have the Xandros / Microsoft lashup. Xandros is licensing closed protocols from Microsoft that will allow them among other things to create programs to access content on MS Exchange. They call this mash "Mixed Source". If I sound a bit leery, it is because I used to run BMC's email system, back when we used HP's OpenMail, and I watched HP make a similar deal, and then not to long after that, see OpenMail sold to Samsung, where it later died. The problem from my point of view was that having the protocols was only half the battle. Someone still had to write all the programs to use them. MS has spent years layering all this stuff together, RPC's and Protocols like MAPI and CIFS so that it is no trivial thing to create programs that use them. Ask the folks at Samba.org. There is a reason MS Vista took seven years and billions of dollars in R&D, and came out looking like a gussied up version of XP with compatibility issues.

Middle ground is Ubuntu/Mint. Closed source, binary only bits are not only allowed but supplied. A message is sent to the person at boot that "Restricted Source" is in use, and if you click on it, a display of all the restricted source bits that the OS had to load to run on this hardware is displayed. You know who is playing nice, and who still keeps their cards close to their chest, source code wise.

Then there is the completely open. And Open. Supporting only that which is fully Open, and fully unencumbered, projects like Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE reward openness by inclusion. Open is a wide world of things, where you can build whatever you need, as long as you know what you are doing and have the time.

Support

Stretched across the span of closed to open is another dimension. Support. Whurley likes to say that "people" (and these people include companies) have one of two things: Time or Money. I would add to that "Expertise", which came at least in part with time, and now costs money.

If you are paying for support, you probably have money, and you also expect that you will *never* have the conversation I outlined in the "Maude" section above. You are paying for the right to have a throat to choke. You can also spend money on a person who is your local expert, and whose throat you'll being squeezing. Or both.

Novell,RedHat and Ubuntu walks between all these worlds with their commercial Linuxii. Novell, like Xandros, has some sort of deal in place with Microsoft although I am not sure it is quite as "deep" as Xandros's. You can buy a Dell with Ubuntu on it, and it will be supported by Canonical. Etc. Etc.

But Its My First Time

I have been saying for a long while now that Linux is ready to take on the personal and corporate desktop. I base that on personal experience, not only of being a user personally and professionally, but in helping others to do the same thing. I watched my brother (who is not a computer person) look at an Ubuntu PC for the first time and say in some wonder "This is Linux?", clearly thinking it was going to be something much more mysterious than what it was.

If you are Open Source / Computer savvy, I'll wager someone someplace has asked you at least once: "What is the best version of Linux for me to run?". As technical people, we as a group like to answer such questions correctly, even if two minutes later their eyes are glazing over, and, like one of my blog posts, we are just warming up.

These days I just answer that question with "Mint" or "Ubuntu". If they asked me that question, they are not ready to hack device support in Fedora just yet. They may never want to. As good as Fedoras reasons are for being Open, and only Open, this rules them out for a beginner at least in my estimation.

As I was lamenting in "Agenda", that is too bad. Fedora has a ton of great stuff in it. By ceding the entry level Linux to Ubuntu, they are also ceding mind and market share. Since under the covers, Linux is Linux, Ubuntu can grow with the user. When it comes time to install their first Linux server, Ubuntu has one of those now too.

At the end of the day, it looks like to me that the way one goes about being open (or Open) is to be inclusive.

Fedora 7 on the IBM X30 versus Mint on the Dell C400

In my last post over at TalkBMC, called "Minty Dell(icious)", I talked about a new Linux Mint 3.0 install on an old Dell C400 I had in the trashpile. At the end of it all I wondered just how long Dell had been getting ready for Linux, since the C400 is, like the D620 of my previous TalkBMC post, positively Linux compatible to the point of seeming like it was designed for it.

The trades have also recently noted that Lenovo, the owner of the laptops that used to be called "IBM Thinkpads" has started shipping Novell Linux pre-installed on some models. I decided it was probably worth noting again here my IBM X30 Thinkpad running Fedora 7. I posted about this unit a few back here in "On Being Open", so I won't re-cover that ground.

What I found interesting this time around was the similarities between the Dell C400 and the IBM X30. Both were meant as expensive, lightweight, extremely portable laptops (actually, I think the category was called the "Sub-Notebook"). My two copies were both circa 2002. They both have nice bright 1024x768 panels, and cramped keyboards. Both have 1GB of RAM, and 1.2 Ghz Pentium Mobile processors. Both spec out at the same 2393 bogomips. Of course, they both run Linux extremely well. Both enable and run Beryl for 3D desktop without issue. Both laptops even have cracked cases, although the X30's is cracked on the lower left where the plastic is extremely thin due to the way the PCMCIA card slot, firewire, and IRDA module intersects that corner, and the stress that the feet that lift the back of the unit focuses into that area. In fact, when I was building the X30 with parts off ebay, all the X30's I bought were cracked in this location. Clearly a design flaw. The Dell C400 looks like its cracks, near the inverted T of the cursor keys, may be impact damage from being dropped.

Each unit has things about it I really like, and things that make me wish of the other unit. The Dell has the lovely TrueMobile 1150 Wifi card inside, in the MiniPCI slot. It's embedded-in-the-case antenna pulls in WiFi points from across the city! Easily the best laptop I have in this regard, and I include the Apples in this. The chipset on the TrueMobile is Orinoco, which Linux supports extremely well. This would be a good Fedora system, because unlike most Wifi cards, Fedora deals correctly with the Orinoco chipset "out of the box".

The X30 has the fabulous Thinkpad keyboard. The best laptop keyboard I know of short of the Apple MacBook Pro. Even downsized to sub-notebook size, it is pretty usable, and it far more usable than the Dell C400's. There is also a keyboard light, an LED at the top of the screen that shines down on the keyboard, making it usable in totally dark rooms. My copy of the X30 does not have a MiniPCI Wifi card though. And here is where IBM really gets up my nose: they will not accept any Wifi cards other than those they have sourced (short of some major hacking). I may get around to doing this someday because I am getting tired of the Atheros based PCMCIA card hanging out of the side of the X30. There is an in-case antenna in there: I looked. I just have to burn one of my BroadCom cards that came out of my old eMachines 5312's to have a device ID that IBM will accept with their stupid BIOS whitelist.

A moment to rail about BIOS Whitelists

I have complained at length over at TalkBMC about the laptop BIOS whitelists of IBM and HP. I mentioned the issue in my current article about picking Linux Laptops in the 3/2007 issue of Linux+ Magazine. For all that, this is an easy issue to miss, and it is somewhat subtle.

Short version: IBM and HP place into their BIOS a list of device ids that they will accept in the Mini-PCI slot. If you put something they did not re-label (and internally re-address. Neither of them really make Wifi cards) the laptop will not boot. Finito. End of story. Dead solid stopped till you take it out. Really annoying since I have four Broadcom, supported by Linux, B/G Wifi cards that fit perfectly.

There are two ways to deal with this other than giving in and buying a card the vendor supplies at their price (or getting it off eBay):

1. Flash the cards device ID to something that the laptop has on the whitelist.


2. Hack the BIOS Whitelist to have the cards deviceID
   

Option two above opens the chance that a typo will brick the whole laptop. I love that term: Brick. So descriptive.

This is another point in the Dells favor by the way: I have never read of Dell having a BIOS whitelist. Humm... you know... I may try on of those Broadcom cards and see if that is true! I'll get back on that....

Other experiments...

What is clear from messing around with these two systems is that, from a personal-use-of-Linux point of view, Mint 3.0 is a far better option than Fedora 7. This last weekend I decided I wanted to update Fedora 7. Fastest way to turn a weekend to a Geekend. In Mint that is almost always painless: Click update manager, load updates. Done. In Fedora it was hours of pain and hacking, and again, almost all of it revolved around the Atheros chipped Wifi card. I do hope next time it will not hurt this bad though. Here is why.

A while back on TalkBMC I was chattering about Fedora 7 as an office Linux, and I mentioned there some of the issues I was having with the Atheros card and Fedora. Fred Finster wrote in to that post with a nice, complete tutorial about getting Atheros cards going under Fedora, and I was flipping through some of his links and I came across a reference to something in the Livna tutorial. It said I should only ever use Livna, and not mix the repositories, or my mileage would vary, or words to that effect.

I pondered that for a bit, and lights started to go on. I had ATrpms, FreshRPMS, and Livna all enabled in Yum. The problems I was having all looked exactly like pre-req and co-reqs of things I have on not being correctly processed: it would try to put on a new Kernel, then cough up a hairball because that would wreck some package or another, including MadWifi and Ndiswrapper. I very carefully unwound the config and used RPM -e to do point-assassinations on various package sets. I pulled out the Atheros chipped Dlink and inserted the Orinoco chipped Linksys V3. Updates and deletions continued until everyone cheered up, including one point where I had deleted *all* the Linux kernels installed so I could load up a different one from Livna that matched their MadWifi package set. After that, a reboot, and I was up on the new 2.6.22 kernel with MadWifi and the Atheros Dlink!

Now I have a new problem. my IBM BIOS stuff is broken. IBM-ACPI is included in the kernel, and drives things like access by LM-Sensors to temperature and fan speed info. That was all working pre-upgrade, but is now broke. Even the Gnome panel brightness applet quit working. But I am not sure I will chase this further because...

It is clear that the Dell C400 has more Fedora-compatible hardware, if for no other reason than having the TrueMobile 1150 Wifi card in it. Mint works on both, but I want to have at least one Fedora system around for other reasons. I may switch the hard drives between the C400 and the X30. That would make the X30 Mint 3.0, and the C400 would become Fedora 7. I think they would both benefit. Or ... at the very least, break like crazy and give me new things to think about. :)

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Fedora 7 as Home PC Linux

I am sure that if you are Linux or computer savvy that you are likely the tech support person for the folks that know you. It is the technical version of owning a pickup. Linux folks of course are often asked by those interested in getting started "What is the best version of Linux to install on my PC?". What they do not want is an answer like "It depends...". But technical people have a hard time not answering questions accurately. One of the great communication gulfs of our time.

One of the things that I hope to simplify by having two blogs is an easier time creating the conversational schism between what works and what is needed for an office desktop, or data center version of Linux, and what one wants for their home version. If it is a conversation about the former, then more than likely I'll be talking about it over at http://talk.bmc.com. The latter I'll cover here.

Criteria

Here are the things I think a home Linux does and does not need:

Does need:

• Easy to install
• Easy to upgrade
• Easy to install new applications
• Consistent look and feel and application behaviors
• Little knowledge of Linux required to run basic things like word processing, web browsing, and email.
• Leading edge hardware detection and automatic setup

Does Not Need:

• Central management capabilities
• Central calendar / mail application like Evolution
• Latest and greatest kernel features, except where such features are needed for leading edge hardware support.

Fedora 7's home hardware

I have Fedora 7 installed on my personal IBM X30 laptop. This machine is often referenced in my BMC weblog, but as a level set:

• 1.2 Ghz Pentium "Mobile" (1 idle speed of 600 Mhz)
• 512 MB RAM
• 80 GB Samsung hard drive
• Wireless via PCMCIA card with Atheros chipset (Dlink DWL-650)
• Low speed USB
• Docking blade contained boot CD/DVD
• Spare external battery for long (5 hour+) undocked time.

By 2007 standards it is a low end computer, and this one is made a bit worse for having started life as many other X30's bought off eBay and combined to create one unit. The hard drive started out as a replacement unit for one in my eMachines 5312, and when that computer died it's final death, migrated about to a Compaq M300 and then to the X30. Linux always booted, but the MS XP Home partition was useless once it left the eMachines, and I have left the space there until I finally get around to re-organizing the disk. I should also note: this is not my main home Linux computer. That is an Acer 5610 running Linux Mint 3.0 right now.

Fedora 7

Finally we are to the main point of this post: Is Fedora 7 a good version of Linux to use on a home PC, especially a laptop?

If you accept my criteria above as valid for your home situation, then I would have to say "No". I am not unfamiliar with installing Linux. I have been using it since the mid 1990's, and it has been my primary office desktop OS since 2000. It has been my primary home OS even longer.

When I installed F7 on the X30 it took hours. I admit that part of that was that I was installing in old, slow laptop that has been assembled from a scrap pile. But this does not excuse everything: Ubuntu 7.04 or Mint 3.0 install on the same exact computer in 20 minutes.

I recently installed MS XP on another computer of similar specification, and while the time to install was about the same, I found the screens of Fedora easier and more intuitive than the ones XP presented. That is largely familiarity with Linux on my part. I have not installed MS XP for a long while. I just had forgotten that I did not miss it's install program.

One of the problems for a home install: Fedora assumes you know what packages you want installed using the traditional installer A usable default set is selected, you are still asked if you want to install more or change the defaults, and if you have never done this before, you have no idea.

If you use the LiveCD version of the installer, you are in better shape because only so much stuff fits on the CD, and that it what is installed if you click the install icon. If you are using hardware that is utterly supported with all open source, Fedora version-ed drivers, you are probably OK at this point. If you are not, then your Odyssey is just beginning.

Who needs that stinking wireless anyway?

That would be me. The X30 is a real frankencomputer. It's major problem is that the built-in Ethernet does not work. I have to put it in the docking blade to get a working ethernet. This is a real PITA with Fedora. The first time I installed it I spent hours hacking it till I had it set up the way I wanted. Then I undocked the blade, plugged in the extra battery (which plugs into the docking port on the X30) and I was good to go. The wireless card I like to use, a Dlink B/G unit with an Atheros chipset inside, does not work by default on Fedora. It does Ubuntu and Mint, but not Fedora.

I accept that once.

I put FreshRPMS and Livna and everything into the "yum" repositories so that the MadWifi stuff is picked up the first time. The card is working now. My little X30 is a cute little machine with portability, long undocked time, etc. The perfect blogging platform.

If the first sentence of the last paragraph made no sense to you at all (at least till you followed the links), then that is part of why I think this is not a good home Linux. It is fun for hacking, but you have to know how to add repositories to the maintenance tool and then know the name of the project that adds the Wifi support to the particular chipset you have before you can get on the air.

Who needs updates?

Then I ran update. I admit it: I am a hacker at these types of things. I want to know how the new kernel works, and how the new Gnome and KDE appears, etc. Not a typical home user at all. A home user probably wants what is working to just stay working.

After update had downloaded and installed 227 packages, I rebooted. Wireless was busted again. Two commands told me why:

uname -a
rpm -qa | grep -i madwifi

The update had not loaded the version of MadWifi that matched the new kernel.... Sigh. Detach battery. Attach Blade. Config wired network to come up. checked FreshRPMS: there are new packages. They just are not set up to come down as a co-req it would appear. Manually install them. Wifi card working again. Config down wired network. Detach docking blade. Attach external battery.

Really: If you are not a Linux hacker, would any of this have been any fun at all? Sure, I was having a blast. I was learning new things. However: this is my job.

For a home user, I think Ubuntu or Mint are far better than Fedora these days. Even the LiveCD version of Fedora. In Linux-space, things move rapidly. It will be interesting to see if Fedora leverages their LiveCD install over time to make that less true.

They only will if they also "byte" the bullet and do something like Ubuntu's restricted source manager though.

Just to be clear here...

We use Fedora at the office for all sorts of things. Fedora is a very good distro of Linux. As a way to see where RedHat is going, it is terrific. As a way to access lovely new data center features early, like NFS Version 4 support, or the tickless kernel, it is great.

Fedora is hackers paradise. Fedora in not a home Linux. There is a reason Dell went with Ubuntu.