PC Plus

Optimise Your Laptop's Battery Life With Linux

Alex Cox — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 +0000

All laptop users have something in common: we want our device’s batteries to last longer. Whether it’s for the daily commute or the flight home for Christmas, an extra 30 minutes of power means an extra 30 minutes of entertainment. If you’re running a Linux-based distribution on your netbook, there’s a lot you can do to squeeze every last negatively charged ion from your power source. Here we’re going to cover the best techniques that we’ve discovered. Don’t worry if you’re not a netbook user, as much of this information can be used on Linux laptops too. However, we’ve specifically tailored our advice for netbooks as these seldom include full-blown distros (and hence any easy way of compiling and installing new software). We’re going to focus on Intel’s Moblin and Canonical’s UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix), two of the most popular Linux distributions for netbooks, but there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t use a full-fat distribution on your device and make the same changes to its power management.

You deserve to be able to drag every last tiny drop of power out of your laptop's battery. It's only fair.

Netbook Linux is still in its infancy. This means that there’s still a great deal that can be done to make these devices more power efficient, and each release of distributions like Moblin or UNR gets better at it. But it also means that hardware compatibility and power saving is experimental for each distribution, especially when you’ve installed it yourself. Until netbook distributions are built for specific netbooks, though, there’s always something you can change in a generic installation to make it work better on your own machine. We’re not talking about massive improvements, but each incremental change may stretch your battery life by around five per cent. Even if just one or two of them work out, you’ll see some extra life from your machine. Like most things to do with Linux, it just takes a little trial and error.

The easy targets

Sometimes it’s the most predictable power saving options that can reap the biggest benefits. Wireless and Bluetooth are our first targets. Even when you’re not using these connections, the radio device tucked away within your machine is still expending energy, either keeping a connection in contention or looking for new networks and devices for you to connect to. Both Moblin and UNR allow you to disable these devices from the desktop, but these options won’t necessarily completely disable the radio. The best option is to use a hotkey combination that’s dedicated to your devices. These are usually labelled in blue across the laptop’s keyboard, and typically involve you having to press the [Fn] key in conjunction with a number. The number key will normally feature a somewhat ambiguous icon that you’ll need to decode in order to figure out which number is the correct one. If you’re lucky, you’ll also see an on-screen message updating you on any progress once you’ve pressed the key.

However, some netbooks don’t have function keys to disable the wireless or Bluetooth radios, and you can’t take any chances with the software disable function. Samsung’s popular NC10 is one example of a machine that doesn’t have a keypress option. In these cases, your only course of action is to change a setting in your netbook’s BIOS – a setting that will stay fixed until you restart your machine and manually undo the change.

It might sound obvious, but switching off your laptop's internal radios can give a significant boost to battery life.

Like many desktop machines, you can normally enter your netbook’s BIOS by quickly pressing [F2], although like the hotkeys, this is dependent on your manufacturer (as is what you can and can’t turn off within the BIOS). With the NC10, for instance, you can switch your wireless devices to ‘Always Off’ from the Boot menu within the BIOS. While you’re there, you might also want to disable the ‘Internal LAN’ setting in the Advanced menu, as the Ethernet port can steal power even while not being used. You should also make sure that any power saving modes for your device are enabled.

Screen brightness

Dimming the screen is a great way of saving some power, but this can sometimes be problematic with certain netbooks running a Linux distribution. This is because the hotkey combination may not work from the desktop, and the software isn’t always capable of changing brightness either. The Linux kernel needs to have support for your specific device. If it does, the distribution you use also needs to use the correct version of the kernel and provide a means of changing the brightness. If this isn’t the case, you might still be able to adjust the brightness of your screen from the command line.

The trick is to use a special kind of file that accesses your display hardware. As with most devices, this can be found by typing ls /sys/class/backlight/. If you’ve not encountered the ‘/sys’ series of directories before, it contains dozens of folders and files that refer to each of the devices on your system. Rather than representing the files and folders on a storage device, this structure is a portal for configuring any plug-and-play hardware discovered on your system, and that includes devices like your netbook’s screen, CPU and drive.

To change values in the /sys tree, you will need to switch to the administrator’s account on your machine. Ubuntu users won’t be able to use sudo in the way they might be used to because the command to change values is really two commands, one piping output to another. The sudo privileges will only apply to the first and won’t stretch to allow you to change the parameter in the second. You can get around this by launching a new bash session using sudo, which will start a pseudo-administrator mode where every subsequent command is executed with root privileges. Moblin users just need to type su followed by their root password to get the same thing.

The contents of ‘/sys/class/backlight/’ should look something like ‘acpi_video0’, but this is dependent on the kernel driver for your hardware. Beneath this directory, you’ll find a special type of file called ‘brightness’. If you probe the value of this file by typing cat acpi_video0/brightness, for instance, you’ll see the current brightness setting for your screen. This is usually within the range of 0 to 100, and may jump up in steps that are defined by your hardware’s capabilities. The converse of this probe operation is to pass a value to this special file, hopefully changing your screen brightness in the process. Typing echo 100 > acpi_video0/brightness, for example, will configure maximum brightness, while a value in the region of 15 should be close to your screen’s minimum.

CPU optimisation

We’re going to stick within the /sys subsystem to make a few changes to how the CPU is handled. This can be a rather experimental area to play around with, which may explain why many distributions choose not to enable some of the more optimal modes, but it can be worth the trial and error. It’s also dependent on the features embedded within your CPU. Recent models built around Intel’s newer Atom processors shouldn’t have any problems, but older models may not be so flexible. You should also make sure you’ve got a backup of any critical data on your netbook’s drive before trying things out.

The most important parameter can be discovered by typing cat /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode. If your machine returns a value of 0, then Laptop mode is currently disabled. You can enable it by typing echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode. When Laptop mode is enabled, the kernel takes special care only to shuttle data to your storage device when it needs to, saving your battery in the process. You can disable this by swapping the 1 for a 0 in the previous command.

You can get even deeper into how the processor handles tasks by changing how the scheduler works. This is only going to be beneficial if you’ve got a multicore machine, and it changes the way processes are loaded onto each core. Check the contents of the ‘/sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_savings’ location. If this is set to 0, your netbook is configured for optimal CPU performance – which is useful for mathematically intensive apps, but not so great if you’re only planning to read a couple of emails. Changing this value to 1 will ask the scheduler to use the threads and processes more efficiently before more are created, effectively saving your other CPU cores from being used and saving energy in the process.

Process pruning

The best thing about a netbook distro is that it is already pruned down to the bare minimum of applications and running processes. There should be very little you can do to improve things here, but there’s never any harm in taking a look. The quickest and easiest way of checking what processes are running is to run the ‘top’ command from the command line. It may look a little perfunctory, but it tells you everything you need to know. It’s called top because it shows you a list of the processes sorted by CPU time, with the highest at the top. This list changes dynamically, and the processes at the top usually include top itself, the Xorg X-Server (which is rendering the graphics on the screen) and maybe the gnome terminal (if this is how you’re running top). You can also remove processes and change their priority, but you need to be careful about this as you could seriously affect the performance of your netbook (and even lose some of your data). The safest option is to look for tasks that are running under your user account: you should be able to see your name in the second column for any tasks falling into that category.

On Moblin 2.0, for instance, we’ve noticed that the Nautilus file manager is used to manage external storage such as USB sticks. Occasionally, especially when you remove a USB stick without first unmounting it, Nautilus is left running, taking up precious CPU cycles. You’ll even be able to see that it’s the process connected to the USB device because this path follows the name of the process. You can remove tasks by pressing [K] to enter Kill mode and then entering the process number. This is listed in the top output below the top line. If you’re running a standard Linux installation, then there are a great number of processes you might want to consider removing. These could include indexing routines, compositing managers, background servers and log file generation. Further information can be found by looking at how the ‘initd’ process works and working out how to disable these services at bootup.

Monitor process power consumption

One of the best tools for monitoring and tweaking your system’s power efficiency is called PowerTop. It’s the electrical power consumption equivalent to the ‘top’ command we used to measure CPU usage, and it should be available through your distribution’s package manager. Moblin users can find it by searching for ‘Power consumption monitor’ in the Add/Remove Software panel. It needs to be run from the command line with system administrator privileges, which means typing sudo powertop for Ubuntu users or su followed by powertop for Moblin.

PowerTop can give you a very accurate indication of how long your netbook will last with its current power usage.

It will take five seconds for the tool to initially monitor your current system, after which it will list the various offending tasks running on your system sorted according to the amount of power they consume. The top section of the tool displays the percentage of time your CPU spends running at a specific speed. More CPU-intensive tasks will switch to a faster power state, which will in turn take more electricity. Ideally, you should expect to spend most of your time in the C4 state (the slowest), with occasional bursts of activity in the fastest state, C1.

PowerTop was originally designed to show which tasks were preventing laptops from entering a sleep state, and it’s still useful for this kind of bug fixing (though hopefully your distro builder has already solved the most serious offenders). This is why you still see the processes listed as ‘Top causes for wakeup’, as these are the events that are interrupting the system.

Unlike nearly every other tool we can think of, PowerTop also displays some useful information that can help you stretch out your netbook’s battery life. If it detects anything that it knows will help, a suggestion will pop up at the bottom of the window. Your adjustment will last for the duration of the current session only, but the tips that PowerTop displays often include instructions on how to make each change more permanent.

Proper sleep function

Suspending your machine by closing the lid and then opening it again seldom has the desired effect with Linux. It’s often easier to just turn the machine off and on again. Things are a lot better than they were, but hibernation is one area of the kernel that remains problematic. The difficulty is that each piece of hardware within your system needs to respond predictably to the sleep call, and this requires well-behaved drivers that have a good understanding of their hardware capabilities.

Unfortunately, this can’t be said for many Linux device drivers – in particular those for graphics cards. The only exception is hardware developed by Intel. Intel has made a big investment in Linux, and it continues to make massive improvements to the drivers for its own hardware. The Moblin distribution is the pinnacle of this work, and you should find that sleep works well with most Atom-based machines, as well as those that use other kinds of Intel processors. If you need to cater for hardware from other manufacturers, the best piece of advice we can give you is to make sure that your kernel is as up to date as possible. Things are changing all the time in the Linux world, and you may find that any problems have already been fixed with a kernel update.

Opinion: I don't get HDMI

Alex Cox — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:09:05 +0000

I read this report on BBC's Newsbeat site with interest. Particularly the last few paragraphs, where my distant Future colleague Chris Jenkins, a man whose opinion I trust not simply because of our shared employer, explains that you do indeed need to invest in a good cable to get good results.

He argues that more expensive cables do make a difference, especially in more complex home cinema setups and over cable runs of longer than one metre.

"As you connect more and more items together, say an HD box and games console, or multi channel amplifier, you will need better and better quality cables to maintain the quality of the signal.

"£120 cable for your first purchase? No. But certainly don't try to get away with a £1.99 cable"

Chris' advice is to budget around 10% of a system's price for HDMI cables.

This absurd reliance on expensive cables is a huge shame. I utterly resent paying £Stupid for a poxy cable.

Here's my problem. HDMI was invented relatively recently. It crams a million signals into a tiny thin cable with a puny connector. This is a glaring flaw considering the ever-present threat of signal cross-talk, which anyone who's ever waved an unshielded VGA cable near a kettle lead will know all about.

It's as if HDMI's inventors - blasted audiophiles, no doubt, with solid unobtainium speaker cables surrounded by signal-blocking moats, each maintained by a private cable-butler to dust off every speck of signal-reducing muck and ward off filthy interference-laden plebs - decided to produce the most awkward cable possible just to mess with us normal people. "You want it? Fine! But my stereo is more expensive than both my houses. I expect similar investment from you!"

Yes, HDMI is svelte, but why? Who cares? Was there anyone specifically asking for a small connector that would require a month's wages to work properly? SCART is massive. It has pretty much served its purpose in its current guise but a new version, using cheap existing tech to make a new product, would have worked just fine and slid in way under HDMI's extortionate budget.

It's too late to moan about this, I know. And hey, my assertions are probably way off the mark. But it would be sad if we all started worrying more about our cables than the bits of kit attached to either end of them.

Build A Linux Distro Online

Alex Cox — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:28:30 +0000

Update: Don't feel left out if you're a Windows user. Check out our tutorial about how to build your own Windows. And if you're a die hard Linux fan, check out our guides to cluster computing in Linux and booting into Linux over a network, Or if you want a different flavour of distro, check out our comprehensive guide to using Fedora's Revisor tool.

SUSE Studio is clever. Very clever. It’s the result of two years’ work by a team at Novell to provide its enterprise customers with a convenient launch pad for building virtual appliances and customised distributions. It’s also been a massive success, boasting over half a million downloads and over 40,000 users. But don’t let the word ‘enterprise’ put you off: customised distributions like these are incredibly useful, whether you use them yourself, make them for someone else, or deploy them across your IT infrastructure. They represent what’s great about Linux: its ability to be repackaged, copied and redistributed with complete freedom. Building your own distribution is also rather cool.

Fancy a pretty desktop like this one? You don't even have to close your web browser to create one thanks to SUSE Studio.

In serving its high-end customers, Novell has created the most powerful and most intuitive distribution design tool the low-end Linux community has ever seen. And it manages to do all this through a web browser. It makes hunting for the perfect distribution a little like online shopping. Point your cursor at a feature and it’s added to your distribution. You can add as many or as few items as you wish, and when your virtual basket is full, the checkout process will let you preview your order before presenting you with a variety of delivery options.

You could download an ISO file for optical media, for example, or a pre-formatted virtual machine configuration that you could run from VMware Player, VirtualBox or Xen. There’s even an option to build a Flash version of your distribution that can be written to a USB thumb drive. All of this is accomplished online through a web browser. The building process and your distribution are hosted on Novell’s servers until you’re ready to download the fruits of your labours. Moreover, unlike nearly every other distribution building tool, you don’t need any specialist knowledge in order to create exactly what you want.

Create an account

The first step to creating your own distribution is to create a personal account at www.susestudio.com. The only fly in the ointment is that you’ll then need to wait for an invitation to arrive at your registered email account. This delay is necessary for Novell to ensure a decent quality of service for all its users, and how long you have to wait is dependent on demand. We found that it can vary between half an hour and a few days. When you do get an invitation, a single click is all you need to activate the distro building features.

When your account is activated and you log in, you’ll be presented with a page that allows you to choose a base template for your distribution. Each one is built around either Novell’s community-supported OpenSUSE 11.1 distro or its business-friendly SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution (versions 10 and 11). If you’re looking at deploying your distro in a critical environment then the enterprise distributions offer better professional support and long-term stability, but you’ll probably find that OpenSUSE is more interesting.

You also need to select a suitable package template for the distribution base. There are the standard Gnome- and KDE 4-based distributions, for instance, as well as a minimal X installation and a package designed for servers. There’s also an option labelled ‘Just enough OS (JEOS)’, which features the bare minimum of packages required for a working installation and is the closest option to a blank canvas. The basic JEOS image requires just 270MB of space, for example, whereas the default KDE 4 install requires a little over 1GB to be available.

Select some software

Our first distribution is going to require a desktop environment. For that reason, we plumped for the KDE 4 desktop option in the OpenSUSE 11.1 category. Next, scroll down the page and give your creation a name before clicking on the ‘Create appliance’ button. The following page can be quickly skipped over and you’ll then find yourself at the Software Sources page. This is where you augment your base installation with essential packages. Your new distribution will still be able to download and install packages, but including them at this point will avoid the need to go through that process for every machine.

Just pick the components you want to include from this handy list.

Click on the ‘Recommended’ button to get a good idea of which packages make the most sense to include. Top of the list is Firefox, followed by Flash-player for Adobe Flash support. This is closely followed by OpenOffice.org, GIMP, DVD-writing tools and Ntfs-3g for reading Windows partitions on the same machine. Adding each of these packages is a sensible choice. Click on the ‘+add’ button to the left of each package to drop them into your proto-distribution. The only other packages we added were Kde3, which turned our distribution into the ultimate KDE package, and Yast2-live-installer, which enables a Live DVD to be installed. As you add packages, you’ll see a running tally in the left-hand border of the page. This will update with the current amount of space that your distribution is taking up, both as a compressed archive and as the final object. This is something to keep a close eye on if you need your distro to fit onto either a 4.7GB DVD or a 700MB CD.

If your requirements aren’t met by the default package list, you can add further package repositories by clicking on the blue ‘+’ symbol at the top of the page. There are several pages of different sources, including Apache, Compiz and even a repository for emulators. If you have your own packages to include, you can upload them to your custom distribution by clicking on ‘Upload RPMs’, but you’ll need a SUSE-formatted RPM package for this to work.

Configure the distro

Now switch to the Configuration tab at the top of the page. This is where you answer all the questions you’re typically asked when installing a distribution. The first page, for example, requests your location, time zone and keyboard layout. You should leave DHCP enabled for the network. Disable HTTP in the firewall configuration unless you’re going to run a web server from each machine with this distribution. Below these questions you can create a default list of users. You might want to add a generic guest account, and an administrator account too.

The second page allows you to personalise your distribution with your own graphics. Upload your own logo and background, and these will be displayed while your distribution is booting. We made the background blue to reflect our choice of desktop environment.

The third page lists the start-up options and allows you to enter your own end user license agreement (EULA). You should keep the start-up option at its default value, but editing the EULA may be useful if you’ve added your own packages. The following Server page will let you configure any server package you’ve installed, while the Desktop page lets you specify a user for auto-login and any applications you want running from the desktop. You could choose to launch Firefox (mozilla-firefox) if you were building a web kiosk installation, for instance.

The final two pages of the configuration state deal with virtual machine specifics and any custom scripts you want to run. For a large deployment, you may want a script that sets up email accounts, for example.

Build the distro

Overlay files are a way of accomplishing a custom configuration without using a script. For example, you could configure your Evolution mail client locally and upload just the configuration file during the Overlay Files stage. This would create a default configuration for each distribution.

Finally, when everything is configured correctly, switch to the Build tab and select the format for your distro from the dropdown list. Click on ‘Build’ and Novell’s servers will start to cook your distribution. How long this takes is dependent on how many packages you’ve included. Our 1.5GB ‘super KDE’ distro took 14 minutes to create, and the end result was a 477MB compressed file.

But before you download your custom distribution, SUSE Studio has one last trick up its sleeve. There’s a preview mode in SUSE Studio that will let you run your distribution from the remote server. When the build process has finished, look for the ‘Testdrive’ button beneath the status text. Clicking on this will open a new window, in which you’ll see your distribution start to boot. You can even SSH into your virtual server by enabling networking and then following the on-screen instructions – and if you installed a web server then that will be running too.

SUSE's Testdrive option lets you test the distro, again without leaving your browser.

The Testdrive facility gives you an hour to try the server before ending the session. When you’re happy with the results, just go back to the Build page and download your distribution. Note that a default account provides 15GB of storage and you can access any of your prebuilt distributions by clicking the ‘Home’ icon. SUSE Studio will delete your build from its server after seven days, but it keeps the building information so that you can rebuild the image again.

Run the distro

After downloading your distribution, it’s time to run it on some hardware. How you do this depends on the format you’ve chosen. VMware images can be loaded into your virtual machine application directly, while USB sticks or hard disk images can be written to their final media using the ‘dd’ command. It’s not difficult, but you need to ensure you get the correct destination, since dd won’t ask if you’re sure and can quite easily just overwrite your data. If you’ve gone for an optical disc image, this simply needs to be burnt to a disc using a tool such as Brasero or K3b.

With your optical media in hand, it’s then just a simple case of booting your machine with your distro’s disc in the drive and installing it. Within a few moments you’ll be dropped into your very own Linux distribution, ready to go and complete with all the packages you’ve selected.

Offline alternatives

The main problem with SUSE Studio is that it relies on both Novell’s servers and its goodwill. There may come a time when Novell wants to charge for the service. Alternatively, if you need to build your own distribution and the internet isn’t working, you’re going to be stuck. Hopefully, Novell will release the application code to Studio, or make it part of one of its distributions one day, and you’ll be able to take advantage of its functionality from your own machine. But until then, it’s worth finding an alternative.

Outside SUSE Studio, building your own distribution can be a tricky business. You normally need to know a lot about Linux and how it all hangs together. The Gentoo distribution is a viable alternative to putting everything together yourself. Gentoo still gives you complete control over every package that’s installed, but it’s a well-trodden path that offers plenty of community support and a step-by-step installation procedure.

However, you won’t be able to share the distribution you’ve created with other Linux users unless you’re prepared to go through a lengthy build process. Currently, the best alternative to SUSE Studio is Fedora’s Revisor tool, which we covered in PC Plus 279. It’s a point-and-click interface for building your own Fedora-based Live distribution, which means that you can boot and run it off either a USB stick or an optical drive. You can select the packages to include and create a custom configuration that fits your specifications exactly. It’s often used to rebrand the default Fedora distro, but it’s capable of more than simple makeovers.

Test your distro in a VM

One of the build options for SUSE Studio is ‘VMware/Virtual Box’. When you select this from the dropdown list and click on the ‘Build’ button, SUSE Studio will construct your distribution and insert the installation into a VMware hard drive image.

Virtualbox is the best way to realistically test your distro outside of your browser.

This can then be loaded directly into VMware and run without any further configuration. VMware is normally expensive, but there’s a free version called VMware Player that’s compatible with the same image and features the same excellent performance as the full-price version.

The best option for Linux users, however, is Virtual Box. This is a free, open-source competitor to VMware, and most distributions include Virtual Box packages that can be installed through a package manager. From Ubuntu’s Synaptic, for example, search for and install the Virtualbox-ose package.

When you download the virtual machine from SUSE Studio, it’s delivered as a ‘vmx.tar.gz’ file. VMX is the virtual machine format, while ‘tar.gz’ is the most common archiving format on Linux. You can normally double-click on a file to decompress it, or type tar xvf on the command line followed by the name of the file to do it manually. You then need to launch VirtualBox. Click on ‘New’, select Linux as the operating system and OpenSUSE as the version, and then click on ‘Next’ twice. When you get to the virtual hard disk page, click on ‘Existing’ and ‘Add’, then point the file requester at your downloaded ‘vmdk’ file. You can then run your virtual machine and play with your new distribution.

Tutorial: Build Your Own Linux Distro

Alex Cox — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:51:00 +0000

We're used to thinking of Linux distributions being set in stone. They're either KDE or Gnome, use a certain kernel and bundle certain applications. But this doesn't have to be the case. If you find yourself making the same adjustments each time you install a new distribution, it's worth creating your own customised version. Revisor is a tool that lets you do just this, and in this tutorial, we'll show you how...

Update: And don't feel left out if you're a Windows user. Check out our tutorial about how to build your own Windows. And if you're a die hard Linux fan, check out our guides to cluster computing in Linux and booting into Linux over a network, Finally, if you want an even flashier way to put together a distro, why not use SUSE's tools and build it online?

1. Install Fedora

The Revisor tool has been a part of the Fedora distribution for the last few releases. This means you can use any of these versions to create your own Linux distribution, although we'd recommend using the latest – Fedora 10. Installation is very straightforward, and shouldn't be a problem if you've installed any other version of Linux from the last two years.

After installing the operating system, the only other prerequisite is the Revisor application itself. This can be installed by clicking on the Administration menu, selecting 'Add/Remove software' and searching for a package called revisor. Click ‘Apply’ and accept the additional packages that need to be installed.

However, there is one step that is vital to success, and that's updating Fedora to include the very latest patches. You can do this using the Update tool in the Administration menu. This is required because the version of Revisor that was bundled with Fedora 10 was broken, and this won't create a workable Live CD. You need to either use an older version, or update your 10 installation to use the fixed version of Revisor.

2. Disable security

After installation, Revisor can be found in the Applications | System Tools menu. Click on the icon and enter your root password. If you see an SELinux error, you will need to change a security setting for your system. SELinux is an ultra-tight Linux security system that keeps a close eye on what certain application can and can't do. Revisor falls out of its remit, so you need to change its level of protection to Permissive.

To do this, load the SELinux Management application from the System | Administration menu and change the Current Enforcing mode to Permissive. When you launch Revisor again, the error will have disappeared.

3. Getting started

From the Revisor main window, click 'Get Started'. You now have to decide how your new distribution will be booted. You can choose between the standard installation and Live media. The first option is a good choice if you're planning to install your own version of Fedora on many different machines, for example, in an office. The DVD or CD you create will let you install your own distribution, complete with your own set of applications, without any prompting. If you want to create your own distribution for personal use, then the chances are you'll find the Live media types more useful.

This creates either a Live CD/DVD or a USB stick installation of your distribution, and you'll be able to boot into your desktop from either of these installations by simply inserting the media into your PC. As with any Live media, you'll be able to work on your desktop and use the applications you choose, but your distribution won't touch the host machine's hard drive. This is a great solution for Internet cafes or college PCs. We've opted for the Optical media type installation, as we find this is the most flexible.

4. Repository information

Click on the ‘Forward’ button to bring up the package repository configuration page. This lists the sources for the packages that are going to be installable for your distribution, as well as the packages for a specific hardware type. These are decided by the option to the right of Configuration Section to Use, and by default this is set to the most generic option – f10-i386. If you want to build your Linux distribution for a different platform, such as Intel 64-bit or PowerPC, then you will need to use a version of Fedora running on that hardware. You can't build a distribution for an architecture different from the one which Revisor is running on.

Other than system architecture, another option you might want to change is the Destination Directory. This is where the final image for your distribution will be built. Beneath this option, you will see a list of the repositories that are going to be used for pulling the packages you want to include in your distribution. We disabled all but the simple Fedora repository.

5. Package management

Skip the page titled Load Kickstart Data. The step after this is the most important because it's where you get to choose the packages that are going to be installed on your own distribution. Not only will this selection define what can and can't be done with your distribution without any further modification, it will also define exactly how big your distribution is going to be. That's important if you want to fit everything onto CD.

If you do need to keep package size to a minimum, then we'd recommend opting for the XFCE desktop environment, rather than the fatter Gnome or KDE options. These are ideal choices if you want a more powerful environment, but you'll need a DVD's worth of capacity to make the distribution useful. You should also install everything listed in the base category, as these packages are needed to create a functional environment. By default, the Package Selection screen only displays groups of packages, rather than individual selections. If you want to install GIMP, for example, you need to switch to the Search view and type 'gimp' into the find field. You can then select the package from the results list. You should consider installing a web browser (Firefox), a word processor (OpenOffice.org), a music player (Amarok or Rhythmbox) and a video player (totem).

6. Distro configuration

You now have the opportunity to fine-tune your distribution to your liking. The first page is the most important, as this lets you define your language and keyboard layout, as well as the root password for your Live system. You can ignore the kernel parameters and the authentication page, although you should also add a single default network device on the following page and leave the firewall enabled for safety. You may also want to create a default user account.

When you're happy with your customisations, click on the ‘Forward’ button. Revisor will calculate dependencies (those packages that are required to make your selection work), and tell you how much space your distribution is going to use. If this is too much for your install medium, you will need to click 'Back' and remove some of the packages you've selected.

7. Composition

A basic installation of XFCE and GIMP took up around 700MB in our example. Clicking 'Forward' one more time will start the compilation process. This consists of 11 separate steps.

Packages are downloaded
The file system is created
Packages are installed
The system is configured
Networking is configured
The RAM file system is created
The system is relabelled
The bootloader menu is installed
File systems are unmounted
The kernel image is compressed
The ISO image is created

The speed with which all of this is accomplished is obviously dependent on the number of packages you've chosen, the speed of your Internet connection and the capabilities of your machine. But to give you a ballpark figure, our Intel Core 2 Duo 6400@2.13GHz machine took around 90 minutes to build a 700MB-sized distribution.

8. Burn the disc

After the generation of the file has completed, you will find the final ISO located in a '/srv/revisor' subdirectory (as long as you didn't change that earlier). Our file was hidden in the Live folder, and called Fedora-10-Live-i386.iso. You need to burn this file to a blank CD, and you can do this from within Fedora by right-clicking on the ISO file and selecting 'Write to disc'. You have to be careful with ISO images, as you don't want to mistakenly write them as a single file to a new disc. You need to make sure they're used as an image to copy the contents from the ISO file onto the disc.

9. Give it a spin

When the burning process has finished, you're ready to launch your freshly squeezed Linux distribution. Insert the disc into the optical drive of your machine and reboot. You will also need to make sure that your system is configured to boot from the optical drive, either through your system BIOS or by a boot-time device selection menu.

This article originally appeared in Issue 279 of PC Plus.

Column: The 3DTV Gimmick

Richard Cobbett — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 08:00:00 +0000

According to the industry, 3D is the next big thing. TV manufacturers are chomping at the bit to sell us new monitors. Sky is planning a huge 3D blitz this year, including the launch of a dedicated 3D TV channel. Games are an obvious contender for the 3D treatment, thanks to the fact that they have all the data they need to produce an effective world already built in. Verily, the planet is on the cusp of an incredible 3D revolution and we should all be excited!

But I’m not. To hell with 3D. If I could change one thing about the cinema-going experience – other than shooting bloody Pearl & Dean into the sun – it would be to watch every blockbuster in IMAX. That would be a genuine improvement. 3D is just another gimmick, right down there with Smell-O-Vision, electric shocks coming through the seat, vibrating cinema chairs and, of course, the last 17 times that the industry has tried to make 3D into the Next Big Thing. And we still don’t need it.

I’ve never, ever seen a 3D movie that so much as breathed softly on my socks, never mind blew them off. Realistically, the technology offers exactly two tricks of note. There’s the annoying one, as demonstrated in Monsters vs Aliens, which opens with a guy batting a ball at the screen just to go, ‘Ooooh! 3D in your face!’ If I never see that one again, it’ll be too soon. The other one, which is largely pushing the 3D revolution, is all about adding depth to scenes. This can work, I’ll admit, and it can also be effective. You definitely notice it – especially in a film such as Avatar – but, more importantly, you can actively not notice it and still get some benefit, which is what really matters.

At least, in theory.

The problem is that, for all the potential benefits, 3D just seems to be Hollywood’s most expensive way to give me a headache, even including the Bourne movies and the continued acting career of Shia LaBeouf. Yes, this is probably just a question of my rubbish eyes, all maggoty with astigmatism and myopia as they are, but I don’t care. By the end of Avatar’s seven-hour running time, my whole face felt as though someone had just opened the Ark of the Covenant over on the next row. My eyes oozed blood and gooey eyeball juice into my popcorn. Still, at least it stopped anyone else from stealing any.

Even before that point, though, Avatar only gave me about five minutes of genuine 3D ‘Oooh!’ before the effect faded, as any effect inevitably does. From that point on, the glasses, the popping tricks and the background shimmer – in fact, all the pieces of technology that were meant to be immersing me in the action – served only as a constant lingering reminder that I wasn’t in fact on a distant jungle planet with lots of sexy blue people, but in a cinema and in need of some aspirin. The trade-off simply wasn’t worth it, especially when coupled with the dark tint that the obnoxious 3D glasses put over all the film’s beautiful bright colours. Also, the film was a bit rubbish.

Even watching great 3D movies, such as Pixar’s Up, I’ve never been able to settle in and just enjoy the film or get completely lost in the action, not with every background shimmering away like a desert mirage and each character popping into the screen. I quite often lift up the glasses just to compare the two images and every time it’s the same: any power that the 3D version of the film has ultimately comes from the 2D version being exquisitely made. I’ve never wanted for that extra half a dimension as much as I craved the brighter colours and a lack of intense eye-trauma after leaving the cinema.

Of course, it’s no wonder that the industry desperately wants 3D technology to be a big deal. Right now, it’s the only real benefit cinemas can offer over home theatre systems, aside from ever-more obnoxious advertising and snot-smeared pick ’n’ mix. Looking ahead, hardware companies see it as the next big reason to make us all upgrade our kit. And good for them. It’s still not an upgrade I can see myself rushing out to make, or can imagine recommending anyone else to go and do likewise.

When we finally get TVs that can add that illusion of depth without needing glasses, we’ll have a genuine step forward. Until then, it’s just a gimmick – an effect we’ll all get accustomed to and subsequently bored of in a couple of weeks. If anything, the best thing for 3D would be for it to stay as popular as it is now – an occasional treat for people who like it, something that’s to be savoured and allowed to maintain what power it has. Taking it mainstream can only ruin the effect in ways that my astigmatism and quick-drying contact lenses can only dream of – and you can bet that losing the magic won’t come cheap.

Make Windows 7 Flawless

Simon Holland — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Windows 7 has certainly won many plaudits since its release, but nothing in this world is perfect.

We’re loving Windows 7: it looks great, performs well and is packed with so many small improvements that we’ll soon forget Vista ever existed. But at the same time, it’s important not to get carried away by the hype. Windows 7 isn’t perfect. In fact, it’s not even close. Look closely and you’ll find it has security problems, interface issues and gaps in functionality, as well as faithfully reproducing common Windows annoyances that have been around for a long time.

Of course, every operating system has its irritations, and you shouldn’t let Windows 7’s selection put you off upgrading. The key is to understand them. And that’s why we’ve spent weeks with the Windows 7 release candidate, not only uncovering the problems it still contains, but also finding out exactly how to resolve each one. The results will help enhance any Windows 7 installation – so make sure you follow our guide before you do anything else.

Installation issues

Your first problem with Windows 7 will appear before you’ve even installed it, especially if you’re trying to upgrade a version of the Windows 7 beta. Microsoft won’t allow this by default, apparently to ensure that the set-up process runs smoothly and no dubious beta code is left behind afterwards. If you’re willing to take a risk, though, there is an easy solution that works well for most people.

Take your installation DVD and copy its contents to a folder on your hard drive, or perhaps a bootable flash drive. Open the file ‘Sources\cversion.ini’ in Notepad and you’ll see the line ‘MinClient=7100’. This defines the lowest build number that will be accepted for the upgrade. Change this to the build number for your Windows 7 installation – MinClient=7000, say – and then save the file. Now, when you start the setup for your installation, it should work fine.

A couple of tweaks can make it easier to install the version you need

Unfortunately, you may immediately run into another problem: Windows 7 no longer displays a list of the editions that you can install. So if you currently have the Professional edition, there’s no way to switch to anything else during the upgrade – unless you try another tweak, that is.

Return to your custom installation folders, browse to the Sources folder and this time look for the file ‘ei.cfg’. Rename this to 'ei.cfg.old', or edit it and change the [EditionID] value to the version you’d like to install, and the upgrade will run accordingly (see for more information).

That’s the theory, anyway, although some have reported that this doesn’t work for them. And of course you will still need a legitimate product key for your version to be able to activate it.

Customising the interface

Now Windows 7 is installed and loading for the first time. Unimpressed by the log-in screen? Then try something else. It’s fairly easy once you know how. Launch Regedit, and browse to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background’. Double-click the dword key called ‘OEM Background’ (not there? Just create it) and set its value to 1.

Next, locate the log-in background image you’d like to use. It must be a JPG file that’s less than 245kB in size, and it should ideally match the aspect ratio of your screen, or it’ll be stretched to fit.

Give your PC a fresh new look with a custom Windows 7 theme from deviant art.

Alternatively, use a free tweaking utility to do all the hard work for you. Logon Changer will resize a copy of your chosen image to ensure it fits, then display a preview so you can see how it looks without restarting. The Logon Screen Rotator lets you choose multiple images, and will display a different one each time the log-in screen is displayed.

Once you’ve finished customising the log-in screen, address your display by downloading a fresh Windows theme. DeviantArt, I Think Different and Windows 7 Themes and have some excellent examples to help you get started.

Tweaking the taskbar

Start playing with Windows 7 and you’ll quickly notice an issue with the new taskbar: it’s not always easy to tell at a glance whether an icon represents a running application or a shortcut that’s been pinned to the taskbar. If you prefer the more traditional Windows approach to taskbar buttons, right-click the taskbar, select ‘Properties’ and set taskbar buttons to ‘Combine when taskbar is full’. Running programs will now be much easier to spot.

One problem with this approach is that the buttons will include text labels, which wastes valuable screen real estate. For a cleaner approach, launch Regedit, move to ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics’, add a string called MinWidth and set it to '54'. On rebooting your system you’ll have icon-only taskbar buttons with no text at all.

You can also use the taskbar to pin shortcuts for frequently used programs by right-clicking an application and selecting ‘Pin To Taskbar’, but this approach is frustratingly inconsistent. You might want to have the Recycle Bin on your taskbar, for instance, but there’s no ‘Pin’ option on its right-click context menu. The solution here is to find the internal Windows shortcut for the Recycle Bin or whatever other resource you’d like to pin. It can be a tricky process, but Seven Forums has a tutorial to talk you through the process.

Some have decided they prefer the old Quick Launch toolbar, and while that’s not present by default it can be easily restored. Right-click an empty part of the taskbar and click ‘Toolbars | New Toolbar’. Next, type '%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch' in the folder box and click ‘Select Folder’. The Quick Launch toolbar should now appear on your taskbar.

By default the toolbar will use the minimum amount of space, so you’ll have to click the arrows to its right to see any icons it contains. To fix this, first right-click the taskbar and select ‘Unlock the taskbar’. Dotted lines will appear to its left; these can then be dragged to the left to extend it. Right-click an empty part of the Quick Launch toolbar and clear the ‘Show Title’ and ‘Show Text’ options to save a bit of space.

Finally, take a moment to focus on the new look for the system tray, which is over on the right-hand side. Windows 7 has an annoying habit of hiding icons these now, but by way of compensation you can at least rearrange and reorder them. You can even move important icons outside of the tray for a while and then move them back when you no longer need to keep an eye on them.

Adding applets

With interface issues resolved you’ll want to take a closer look at Windows 7’s applets, a task made harder by the fact that many of them are no longer installed by default. (Bear this in mind before you get too impressed by the reduced hard drive footprint.)

Mail, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery and others are now only available as a part of Windows Live Essentials. The installer will then download and set up the programs you’ve selected. Unfortunately it’ll also install components that many people will find unnecessary, but a little extra work will soon clear up your hard drive.

If you left the default ‘Set your search provider’ option selected, for instance, then Windows Live will install Choice Guard, a tool that sets your browser homepage and search engine and prevents other programs from changing them. If it later gets in the way or you decide that you just don’t need it, you can uninstall it by clicking Start, typing 'msiexec /x {F0E12BBA-AD66-4022-A453-A1C8A0C4D570}' and pressing [Enter].

You’ll also get an ActiveX control to assist in uploading your files to Windows Live SkyDrive, as well as the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant, which makes it easier to switch between multiple Windows Live accounts and synchronises with tools like Live Messenger to ensure it’s properly up to date. But if you’re sure you’ll never want to use these, both can be removed through the Control Panel’s Uninstall a Program applet.

If you install Photo Gallery or Movie Maker then Windows Live will also install SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition to manage their databases. If you later remove Photo Gallery and Movie Maker then this can probably go too, but you may break other programs that are using it. If the worst happens, then Jonathan Kay’s Messenger Geek blog post showing where the various Live components can be downloaded individually will come in handy.

Changing Explorer

The Windows 7 incarnation of Explorer looks a little different, and some of its behaviour seems odd too. Double-click on the Computer folder, for instance, and you’ll find that the left-hand pane no longer displays system folders like Control Panel or Recycle Bin. And if you’re double-clicking your way down through folders in the right-hand pane, the left-hand tree won’t always expand to follow what you’re doing. This can leave you in the odd position of being unable to see the full folder structure in either pane without expanding it manually, which seems like a step backward to us. Fortunately both problems are easily solved: click ‘Organize | Folder and Search Options’, check both the ‘Show all folders’ and the ‘Automatically expand to current folder’ tickboxes and click ‘OK’.

The drive display may also prove a little disconcerting, as by default Windows 7 now hides drives that are empty (including CD, DVD, floppy and memory card), so you can no longer rely on a drive’s position in the list to tell what it is. You can turn this feature off by clicking ‘Tools | Folder Options | View’ and clearing the ‘Hide empty drives in the Computer folder’ box. If you prefer not to display empty drives, then keep in mind that the setting is overridden by the ‘Show all folders’ option we’ve mentioned. If that option is enabled then your empty memory card drive will be displayed however you’ve configured the view settings.

Once you’ve got Explorer set up the way you’d like then there are some interesting new options, though they are a little hidden. If you hold down [Shift] when right-clicking a file, for example, then you’ll find that the Send To menu now lists all the main user folders: Contacts, Downloads, Documents, Music and more. Choose any of these and your file will be moved there immediately.

And if you’re going to be working on a folder regularly, open it in the right-hand pane, right-click ‘Favourites’ over on the left and select ‘Add to Favourites’. It’ll then appear at the bottom of the current list, making it very easy to access the folder later on.

The free Xplorer² lite takes the look of the XP's Explorer, then adds many interesting features.

If all this seems too much like just tinkering around the edges without really solving anything, you might prefer to replace Explorer entirely. In this case, Xplorer2 lite is the perfect candidate. It has the familiar look of older versions of Explorer, yet it also includes a dual-pane view, tabs, a bulk file-renaming tool, the ability to select files using filters (c*.jpg, a*.png, for example), full shell integration and a whole lot more. It works well on Windows 7, and is free for personal use. It’s well worth a look if the Windows 7 (or Vista, or XP) Explorer doesn’t suit your needs.

Optimising power plans

The new, greener Windows 7 is generally a good thing, especially for laptops where you should see an improvement in battery life. However, it does come with some issues that you really need to know about.

The default power plan ‘Balanced’, for instance, includes some new settings that you can use to either optimise performance or power use. To take a look, click Start, type 'Power Options' and click the ‘Power Options’ link, then click ‘Change Plan Settings’ for your current plan and select ‘Change Advanced Settings’. If you expand Multimedia Settings, say, you’ll see a new ‘Playing video’ option that can be set either to optimise performance or save power. Have a look through the list to find out what other settings are on offer.

Another complication is that Windows 7 makes it even more difficult to turn off hibernation, which is annoying if you never use Sleep as the hibernation file will permanently occupy a chunk of your hard drive. To free this up, launch Regedit, browse to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power’ and set both ‘HibernateEnabled’ and ‘HiberFileSizePerfect’ to 0.

If you do use Sleep then you should pay attention to the ‘HiberFileSizePercent’ value, which tells Windows 7 how large you’d like the hibernation file to be as a proportion of your total RAM. The default value is 75 per cent. This means that if you’re lucky enough to have a 64-bit PC with 16GB of RAM, you’ll be using up 12GB. Reducing the HyberFileSize Percent value should give you two benefits: you’ll save hard disk space, and Windows should go to sleep and wake up more quickly.

This seems a risky strategy, though. If the HiberFileSizePercent value is lower than Windows needs then we found that our PC would display a blue-screen error whenever we tried to hibernate. To be safe, set HiberFileSizePercent to '100' (decimal) and leave it there.

There are some suggestions that Windows 7 isn’t as kind as expected to laptop battery life, though. If you have problems, open an elevated command prompt and type 'POWERCFG -ENERGY' to get a report that may explain why.

Tweaking error handling

There are two schools of thought on the dump files left behind by blue-screen Windows crashes. A few people like to keep as many files as possible so that they can analyse the cause of crashes later with a debugger, while the rest of the world couldn’t care less about crash dump files.

The Windows 7 development team knew this, but somehow they still managed to choose default settings that will annoy both groups. There’s no way to fix the problem in the interface, either, so you’ll need to launch Regedit to get Windows working as you’d expect.

If you like to analyse dump files, you might be puzzled why the last ‘memory.dmp’ file doesn’t always appear on your system. What’s going on? It turns out Windows won’t store the dump file for PCs not on a domain if they have less than 25GB of free hard drive space. To fix this, browse to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl’, create a new dword value called 'AlwaysKeep MemoryDump' and set it to '1'. The file will now always be saved.

If you’re in the much larger group that thinks crash dump files are a waste of your hard drive space, you’ll be unimpressed to learn that Windows 7 now keeps the last 50 minidumps by default. Again, browse to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Current ControlSet\Control\CrashControl’ in Regedit, set ‘MiniDumpsCount’ to 1 (not 0 – there’s always the chance that you’ll need to look at the last error) and you’ll free up a little drive space.

Missing Control Panel's Classic View? Click 'View by | Large Icons' to get it back.

It’s not all bad news, though – the new Control Panel applet Troubleshooting is the start of a technology that will make it much easier to track down and fix any problems. If your installation is misbehaving then give it a try and see what you can uncover.

Replacing XP Mode

Windows 7 contains a compatibility mode in case your installation won’t run older software, just as with XP and Vista. Right-click the application shortcut, click ‘Properties | Compatibility’, check ‘Run this program in Compatibility mode’ and choose a version of the operating system where the application should work. If that doesn’t help, then you could try XP Mode, which is an installation of XP that will run in a window on the Windows 7 desktop. However, this is only included with Ultimate, Professional and Enterprise, and your CPU must support hardware virtualisation (AMD-V or Intel VT).

The second issue is proving a major concern for owners of certain laptop models, who’ve discovered that hardware virtualisation has been disabled on their system. Sony has said that it removed the option from Vaio systems over security concerns (we’ve no idea what), and owners of Acer laptops have also reported problems.

One potential solution has appeared, but it’s for the brave only, as you’ll need to manually tweak your laptop firmware, and if this goes wrong then it may never boot again.

A better idea might be to simply use another virtualisation package instead. VirtualBox and VMware Server are the best free offerings, and neither insist on explicit BIOS support. This won’t get you a licensed version of XP, but if you don’t have one then check Ebay – you should be able to pick one up for around £30.

Tuning performance

With your Windows 7 installation now mostly whipped into shape, you can finish things off by applying a few more familiar performance tweaks. Windows 7 services are well optimised, but there are still a few things you can do. Launch ‘services.msc’, and set the start-up type of services you don’t need to ‘Disabled’. The Distributed Link Tracking Client and Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service are two obvious candidates, assuming you don’t require either. Look also for non-critical third-party services like Apple Mobile Device and set them to ‘Delayed Start’ to help improve your boot time. (Just don’t try that with something important like an antivirus service.)

It’s even more important to keep track of other software that’s launched when your PC boots. Unfortunately, Windows 7 has made that more difficult by removing the Software Explorer element of Windows Defender. Download and run a copy of AutoRuns instead and it’ll let you know exactly what things are running on your system.

Windows 7 is supposed to have sorted out the TCP autotuning issues that occasionally crippled Vista’s internet and networking performance, but early reports say that they can still crop up. To disable autotuning, click Start, type 'cmd.exe', right-click the ‘cmd.exe’ link and select ‘Run as Administrator’. Next, enter the command 'netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled' and press [Enter], then reboot and try again. If it makes no difference then use 'netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal' to restore default settings.

Keep in mind, though, that many problems to do with both reliability and performance will be due to you running generic or very early drivers. New versions for Windows 7 should be appearing quickly and often, so check your manufacturer’s support sites regularly for advice. Better still, install a dedicated tool like DriverMax to do it for you automatically: the program is free and fast, and using it to uncover and install the latest drivers should quickly have your Windows 7 installation running at its best.

Webjunk: Ashen's Tech Dump

Richard Cobbett — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:05:22 +0000

Column: Graze vs. Shovel

Richard Cobbett — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Without warning, they invaded. The Graze packs. Little boxes of nuts, dried fruit and other healthy snacks, designed to be delivered to a busy office desk for a quick mid-morning snack.

First there was one, sent to Production Editor Caity as a reward for topping up her mobile phone. Inside was a number - a special promo code offering a pound off another box if someone else signed up for a freebie. Two days later, there were three. The next week, another round of snacks landed in the post.

And so it began.

As marketing strategies go, it's a winner. Over the last couple of weeks, our office has been inundated with free and cut-price boxes, each holding a few handfuls of olives, chilli crackers and such, and every time, at least one person has come over, gone 'Ooh!' and walked off with a code.

If you've never heard of it, Graze is a subscription-based service, the idea being that you get a box of goodies on specific days, and while everyone claims they're going to cancel after their freebie, I can't help noticing the boxes still rolling in. Should we be worried? Yes. I'm no maths expert, but if things continue at their current rate, I calculate that Graze will have all the money in the world by 2017. The only thing that can possibly save us is our postroom getting sick of delivering them and demanding a cut. That's not much protection against global financial annihilation, especially if they're willing to take their share in dried morello cherries.

Even then, nature will find a way. I predict the current sleek boxes being replaced with something in an 'anonymous brown wrapper' style by the end of the year, or perhaps an impromptu underground railway being set up in our office basement. Or maybe everyone will just get bored and move on. Stranger things have happened.

On principle, I've yet to sample anything from any of the multitude of boxes. If I'm going to have a snack at my desk, the last thing I want is for it to be "healthy". I'm not against the basic idea, though; just waiting for Graze's evil mirror universe equivalent, Shovel, to break through the dimensional barrier and offer a similar system built around pick and mix. Chocolate! Liquorice! Toffee! Jelly babies! That could work, but (Hi, Production Editor Caity here. Sorry for interrupting whatever it was that Richard was talking about, but I just wanted to say that to try a free box of Graze for yourself, head over to Graze HQ and use the code C2M149P. Join us! JOIN US! Ooh, and you've got to try the chilli and black pepper olives. Mmmm!) and I'm not sure that mail order toast will ever take off. Still, you never know. They're doing amazing things with lasers these days, and orphans are increasingly affordable.

SHOVEL! For MEN! Also WOMEN! And CHILDREN! But NOBODY ELSE!

The downside of services such as these is obvious: the lack of instant gratification. There's definitely something to be said for anticipation - waiting for a new game, a film, the latest issue of your favourite computer magazine - but when it comes to food, now is always going to be a better time to get it than next Tuesday.

What I'm really looking forward to is a world where we can order anything online - healthy, unhealthy, living, dead - and have it delivered to us the same day. It's already starting, although only on a small scale - for instance, Amazon now offers same-day evening delivery in both London and Birmingham, and in several cities in the US as well. Admittedly, it costs £15 per delivery, so it's probably not something you'll use for any old paperback. For the rest of us, the best we can get is Amazon Prime (which I've used for a couple of years). This gives a year of next-day deliveries for a one-off payment of £50. It works well, but who has time to wait a whole night for a delivery?

The logistics of same-day becoming the standard would be a complete nightmare for both stores and courier companies - but consider that we've gone from waiting weeks for the average purchase to having it show up the very next morning. We're not talking much more of a push, and the stores in particular have good reason to make it work. Imagine the impulse buying potential! How would anyone ever get anything done again?

Of course, even in a world of almost instant deliveries of anything we want, the good feelings won't last. Soon enough, we'll be bitching that things took a whole hour to arrive. In a world of transporter beams and replicators, failing to anticipate the demand would irk. When that problem's licked, we'll hate ourselves for being so predictable, and the shops for being so forward. It's a no-win situation, especially since, by this point, Graze will have had all our money for the last decade or so, so we won't actually be able to buy anything anyway.

Sigh. Hungry now. Wish I'd thought to order a Mars bar last Thursday.

Luckily, there are vending machines downstairs.

Column: Dual-Booting Woes

Mayank Sharma — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:00:00 +0000

The post-Christmas sales are a good excuse to expose yourself to bleeding-edge technology. Trawling the shelves looking for a laptop, I saw Acer’s multi-touch notebook available at a bargain price of £690. Just 48 hours later the Windows 7 preinstalled laptop has become the focus of this column – it’s a tale of repeated mistakes and missed opportunities.

This is my second Acer and my fourth laptop overall (I prefer the cheap horsepower of a desktop), but the first that came with a preinstalled operating system. Normally I would go for the version without an OS, or with a sorry excuse for an OS such as FreeDOS, then wipe it clean and install Ubuntu or Fedora. But this laptop saved me paying for a Windows 7 licence separately (I wouldn’t be a very good Linux commentator if I didn’t keep an eye on the other camp).

Still, I was disappointed that this laptop didn’t offer a Linux alternative. When Acer, rather boldly I might add, introduced the Aspire One netbook that dual-booted Windows and Android – which Google continues to maintain is meant only for mobile phones – I imagined it would start a new trend of offering multi-boot machines and other vendors would follow suite. Unfortunately, no such thing has happened. Laptops and their vendors continue to be biased towards a single OS.

How so? This laptop has a 320GB disk and the whole thing is one huge partition (or so it would appear) with Windows sitting pretty inside it. Rest assured, your average computer user would lack the skills and patience required to prepare this disk for receiving another OS.

In case you’ve run into this problem yourself, try the wonderful Gparted Live CD. It boots into a front end for the venerable GNU Parted program. So I popped in the CD and it revealed that there are actually three partitions on the disk, two of which don’t show up inside Windows. Maybe they’re for restoring the Windows install. I let them be and resized the huge Windows partition to make up 150-odd GB for Linux. There were lot of bits of data to move about and the process took a couple of hours.

When it’s done Windows failed to boot. The Windows boot loader complained that it couldn’t find the Windows installation. So I grab the boot manager, GAG, and hey presto – it finds and boots Windows without any issues.

It’s one thing not to put a laptop on the shelf that dual- boots Windows and Linux. But it’s completely ridiculous to make the process of installing a Linux distro, or any alternative operating system for that matter, this difficult. And my reward for all that hard graft? The Atheros wireless device that Acer loves so much continues to demonstrate its very poor support on Linux. Moreover, the multitouch screen doesn’t even work! This is pretty surprising because the multitouch support isn’t alien to the Linux kernel.

In fact, a group of researchers at the French ENAC Interactive Computer Laboratory have built on the multitouch support in the kernel and have a proof‑of‑ concept code that supports swipe, slip, rotate, and pinch-resize gestures – everything you can do with the screen inside Windows 7 and more. For a demo, take a look at their video on YouTube.

This is where it hurts. Since version 2.6.30, the Linux input system in the kernel has had an interface for multitouch events. Yet there are only a handful of kernel- space drivers for feeding the input system with multitouch.

The Acer touchscreen devices are made by Cando, which is a subsidiary of AU Optronics, the third-largest LCD maker in the world. Its multitouch device is the first to be certified for Windows 7. What’s stopping it from adopting the same level of support on Linux, considering that the hard work has already been done by the kernel developers? Forget the few thousand Acers. If you believe industry sources, Cando is currently receiving orders for these multitouch panels from both HP and Lenovo. Just think about it: put together, that’s a massive number of machines that wouldn’t offer the benefits of a multitouch touchscreen to Linux users.

I don’t expect HP or Lenovo to do anything about it, but maybe Acer still can. It’s the only company to put an operating system meant for a mobile phone onto a laptop and deliver an instant-on device when users were just fantasising about it. Soon we’ll be drooling over cheap multi-touch touch-screen displays. Will the vendors be able to look beyond their obsession with Windows and put in the extra effort required to bring this experience to Linux? Just for once it would be nice to have a vendor or two on our side.

iPad Revealed

Richard Cobbett — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:47:51 +0000

Yes, at heart it's a bigger iPhone. 10" screen, multitouch, Wireless N, with double-pixels for iPhone applications and full-resolution on offer for new ones. More impressively, it's only $499, which begs the obvious question: why the hell is the iPhone so expensive, Steve?

Oh, right. Because mobile phone pricing is a rip-off.

Still, no matter. As ever, it's a phenomenally cool looking piece of kit, with a keyboard dock so that you don't have to type on the screen, and support for 3G if you need internet access on the move. It looks like Apple's covered all the bases and created a seriously desirable iPhone companion.

More as it happens at TechRadar, including UK pricing information, how we'll be connecting with it, and when the damn thing will be in our hands.

Will you be buying one?