Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

In many office environments today it is common for mid and upper level employees to have their own corporate laptop that they carry with them everywhere they go and attach it to a dock station either at their desk at work or at home, which allows quick connection of the laptop to a traditional keyboard, mouse and monitor.  With the advances in CPU technology as of late and predictions of many new smart phones this year being equiped with quad-core processors, it has gotten some who use such laptops in office environments wondering if they still need to carry big old clunky laptops around just for the sake of processing power.  Well if you are such a person you’ll be in for a treat this year as the smart phone as we know it today is about to make many laptops obsolete.

Canonical has just announced their intentions of releasing Ubuntu for mobile smart phones this year, targeting business as well as consumer markets and allowing many current Android phone users the ability to install Ubuntu on their phone as an alternative in the coming months for free.  Quad-core processing power in smart phones seen this year will  approach the kind of processing speed you normally see on entry to moderate level PCs today (think Intel i3), which is more than necessary for a lot that people do on their desktop or on their phone for that matter.  The mobile version of the Ubuntu OS will be available for many Android users for free in the coming months and for those with the latest and greatest phones to hit market they’ll be able to use the phone as a complete desktop replacement via a dock much in the same way many laptops currently do.  It’s very exciting news!  I’m not going to ramble on here about how or why this is going to happen as head of Canonical Mark Shuttleworth has already done so in this proposal video where he speaks about the immediate goals for Ubuntu.

For those of you who don’t know, Steam is an online game store and distribution platform that is a product of a gaming developer called Valve.  Valve has been know for creating several very popular gaming franchises such as the Half Life series, Left 4 Dead, Portal and Team Fortress among a couple of others.  Steam is their online store/software client that gives consumers ability to purchase and install over 1,500 games from other developers alongside their own games.  The key features of Steam are ease of use and the ability to keep games you’ve purchased linked with your user account, so games you’ve bought are yours forever and will carry along with your User ID for years and years without any need to keep track of installation CDs or key codes to install the game, not to mention automatically download and install updates for every game you have automatically and cloud sync save-game data between different computers (if supported by the game itself, and many games do). Oh, and they have a tendency to throw incredible sales campaigns from time to time that will net you some of the most popular games on the market for next to nothing.

Recently, Valve made an announcement that it will be porting Steam to Linux (with official support for Ubuntu Linux in particular) and is entering the Beta Testing phase as I write this.  This has a lot of buzz going on in the Linux community of course and there is a lot of speculation about why Valve is deciding to do this.  After all, there are a lot of software development companies out there right now with major product lines (games and productivity software) that could have ported their products over to Linux (or even Mac for that matter) but very often decide against doing so because in most cases it wouldn’t be worth the effort.  Linux is the third most popular operating system in the world and it’s a far distant third at that.  Putting money towards developing native ports of their complex programs probably wouldn’t pay off because the user base (and the number of paying customers in those markets) is small, introducing risk with doing something like deciding to invest in Linux as an officially supported platform.

In a likeness to the way Steam works, Microsoft’s Windows 8 is going to have its own integrated “app store” built into the OS, just like an app store is on any smart phone or iMac (or Ubuntu, for that matter).  However, I don’t think it will necessarily prove to be something that will lure  current Steam users away. In the future there might be a group of new users who associate such an app store as being the best place to shop for things like games and other software and come to believe that competing app-stores (if they’re even aware of them) are inferior, but I don’t think that is Valve’s primary concern.  Sure, it will be great to see Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions) having Steam running naively and for its games to outperform Windows-based systems (which has already been demonstrated by Valve in benchmark tests when comparing the two OSs), but I don’t think Valve is looking to diversify Steam on to Linux simply because they think more people are going to outright switch over to Ubuntu on their PCs because they’re looking for an alternative to Windows 8 or because users are looking for a small boost in performance.  There are a lot of benefits to using Linux instead of Windows, like not having to worry about getting a virus on your system or a majority of the software being completely free (because it’s open source).  While all of that is attractive I have another theory that goes beyond users simply adopting Linux, one that has very little to do with Linux on the surface.

It’s only a rumor at this point (one that’s been floating around since March this year) but I believe Valve’s ultimate goal is to use Ubuntu as the basis for a new console system, similar to the Xbox, Nintendo Wii and Playstation, one that uses Linux as a transparent foundation where most people aren’t even aware of it’s presence.  Right now the beta testing is to simply get things up and running stable on PC hardware and demonstrate a proof-of-concept to prospective developers who might consider following their footsteps and start developing future titles with Linux in mind.  Once their flagship games have been ported over they may soon after decide to release their very own “Steambox” console, a multimedia systems that will dominate the living room entertainment center as we know it.  It will basically take all the best things about the PlayStation 3 and improve upon it, becoming a console system that isn’t just for gaming but a comprehensive entertainment system with features like access to on-demand video (Hulu, Netflix, etc.), the ability to DVR live television, the ability to browse the web with browsers like Firefox, run thousands of applications for word processing,  video editing, sync with your phone and really anything else the user might want to do; anything that Linux is already capable of or will be capable of in the near future (and it’s already got QUITE a lot to offer right out of the box, all completely for free).

I own a PS3 and a Nintendo Wii.  I barely use the Wii at all (it is, granted, dated hardware) but I have been very pleased and frankly surprised by how relevant my PS3 has remained, considering that the first model hit store shelves 6 years ago and it’s still a thriving platform.  You can watch Netflix on it in HD with surround sound, play Blu-Ray, play videos from your computer over the network, insert USB sticks and access the media on that, browse the web (sorta; the browser is atrocious) and you can purchase some games from their own PlayStation Store online and download them to the system from the comfort of your couch.  The only thing you can’t really do with it is… well, just about anything else.  You couldn’t install, say, Microsoft Word or Open Office, you can’t install Skype, you can’t install a LOT of things, primarily because the operating system that the PS3 runs is closed source and developers would have to spend money and time to create custom ports of their software for it.  The same goes for the Wii.  The next Xbox, however, is very likely going to have Windows 8 on it and will support Windows-based programs being installed on it (probably), but it’s yet to be seen if Windows 8 itself is going to catch on and whether or not people will enjoy using it in the first place; it’s interface borders on being “completely alien” to most users new and old and it has an uncomfortable learning curve.  Then again, it’s yet to be seen what kind of interface might be seen on a Steambox (it certainly wouldn’t have to be the default Unity interface that Ubuntu uses by default, but there’s no reasons it couldn’t be if you wanted it to be and that’s just one of the great things about the idea of a Linux-powered console).

Best of all, Linux is an open-source platform, which doesn’t usually mean much to the average consumer but does mean quite a lot to software developers/programmers.  At this point it feels similar to the speculation that was around with the Android Linux operating system was first released by Google for smartphones a few years back.  Nobody was sure if it was really going to be able to catch up to the innovative iPhone back then.  Yet here we are now, just a few short years later, and the iPhone is now actually being out-sold by Android phones and all the while perhaps 95% of Android users didn’t even know their phone is actually running Linux.

Imagine you had a computer small enough to fit in your pocket but had the ability to plug it into a computer monitor or HDTV?  Very soon you’ll be able to do just that.  Check this video out to see what I’m talking about.  All he does is take his phone which is running Ubuntu Linux and places it in a dock that’s connected to a LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse.  And like that, he’s got a fully functioning “desktop” PC running right from his phone.  Very cool.

I recently bumped into someone who is a big fan of Skype and uses it to save money at his businesses, as land-lines cost far more for businesses than they do residential customers. He’s seen real savings by using it and was wanting to migrate his company completely away from the local telephone services and go 100% Skype. One of the hitches here was the necessity to have a fax line that you could send and receive faxes on.

Unfortunately there is no good way to send a fax from your computer using Skype. The audio compression that takes place when sound is transmitted from one side to the other undergoes a great deal of detail loss, and this results in error correction protocols taking over and throttling the speed of the fax modem down to a crawl. So in theory, you could use Skype somehow to send a fax but it would literally take forever.

Enter in online faxing services. These are companies that allow you to send and receive faxes over the Internet. In doing some research to find one that performed well and at a modest price I stumbled across someone recommending a company called PamFax.  It was not long after first trying their service that I was pretty sure I could close the book on this egg hunt.

PamFax is delivered to you as a small program you install on your system and use to create your account.  They offer a free membership program which allows you to send three pages for free to see if you like their product or not.  I decided to sign up for the free account and then used a nearby fax machine where I work to send a fax to my new PamFax number.  The instant the fax was sent my PamFax account page auto-updated itself to tell me I had received a new fax.  Faxes are put into an inbox, just like emails, and each fax is downloadable in PDF format.

Sending a fax is also very easy.  You can either use the PamFax program to upload files you want to send or use the virtual PamFax printer device to send your documents to PamFax when you press Print in any application.  Here’s a video that demonstrates how easy it is to send a Fax:

Of course there will be times when you need to fax a physical document that’s already on paper.  The best way to do that is use a flatbed scanner to scan the documents into a PDF file.  You can do this very quickly with any number of Scanner-to-PDF style programs and any scanner.  A free one I’ve found to work well is aptly called Scan to PDF by Ironfist Software.  It is a free utility that you can use to scan multiple pages and then save all of them as one PDF file, which you’d then upload to PamFax for faxing to one or multiple recipients.

The cost for sending a fax varies based on whether or not you want to pay a monthly fee.  If you don’t pay a monthly fee it will cost you 13 cents per page sent and you will not be able to receive faxes.  If you step it up to the “Basic” package you will be able to receive unlimited faxes at a monthly rate of $5.84 plus 13 cents per page sent.  The professional package costs $8.80 a month, includes 20 free page out per month (9 cents per page after that), allows you to keep your received faxes online forever, and gives you the ability to administrate employee access to the account and regulate their limitations.  So there’s something for everybody.

In the end I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to install and use PamFax.  What’s even more impressive to me is their support for Linux. It’s rare that I have to send a fax but the next time I need to I know exactly what I’m going to use.  Good bye Kinko’s!

I’ve recorded a new screencast introducing Ubuntu 10.10. This video gives beginner Ubuntu users a brief tour of the operating system, and covers installing updates, proprietary drivers, customizing appearance, and installing software via the Ubuntu Software Center as well as with downloaded *.deb files, all in less than 10 minutes.  Enjoy!

Back to regular font land now, I just wanted to add instructions for Windows and Ubuntu users on how to install this font.

If you are a Windows user, all you have to do is copy the TTF file into your c:\windows\fonts folder and that should be it.

If you use Ubuntu, save the file to your desktop.  Then right-click on it and click “Open With Font Viewer”.  This will pop up:

Unlike my window, yours will have a “Install” button in the lower right corner for you to click on.  Just click Install and you’re all done.

gksu nautilus /usr/share/fonts/truetype

This tutorial will show you how to share a folder in Ubuntu with a Windows virtual machine running inside Virtualbox. Make the video full-screen to enjoy it in HD quality.

I was just browsing Ubuntu Forums recently and someone wanted to get a second opinion to see if it were indeed true that Linux doesn’t need anti-virus software.  I humbly obliged them with my own answer on the matter:

You don’t need anti-virus for Linux. Others in here will do a better job at explaining why this is, but in short, the OS has a big advantage here due to it being open source. The operating system is a product of crowd-sourcing, much in the same way as Wikipedia has been since it first showed up several years ago. And much like the highly-moderated articles of Wikipedia that require membership and an approval process for changes made to locked articles, so to is a strict moderation that goes on with the source code for Linux before it’s allowed to become part of the official distribution. Everybody is out to identify possible flaws or weaknesses or bugs in the source code and it’s much easier for any single person to make a contribution because the OS and much of the software that runs on it is open-source.

In Windows, the users don’t have the luxury of being able to dig through the source code to look for flaws. All they can do is report symptoms of problems to Microsoft, and the limited number of paid programmers that do have access to the source code then have to decide what flaws are the most important and which ones don’t merit their attention. So with Windows, a bug that affects only 500 people won’t be as important as a bug that affects 500,000 and probably won’t be fixed at all. But if it were Linux and if just one or two of those 500 people were a programmer who had access to the source code and figured out how to fix the problem on their own, the other 498 would actually stand to benefit from a patch that ends up being released thanks to the work of that one developer who had some spare time on his hands and decided to do something about a bug simply because he could.

So throughout the long life of Linux there has been this much more diversified, seasoned, multi-cultured source for development feedback that has helped to make it a much stronger, more “mature” operating system, especially in terms of the way security was designed. If there was ever a person out there who found a way to circumvent that security, there is at least one other who knows exactly how to repair the flaw. The reason viruses are able to best Windows is because their developers can only patch so many holes, and the ones they don’t have time to get around to end up being exploited the most. Third-party software developers that make Anti-Virus software make a killing because Microsoft is unable to handle this responsibility all by themselves, and even still, the best anti-virus software isn’t perfect.

The reason anti-virus software isn’t necessary in Linux is simply because the OS and its updates that patch vulnerabilities do the exact job anti-virus software in Windows is meant for: Prevent unwanted, malicious software or network activity from compromising the system. If there were a flaw in Linux found that allowed something like that, it wouldn’t be the job of some third-party software to safeguard the user against but the job of the OS itself. The reason anti-virus software even exists is simply because Microsoft is unable to handle the immense work load of patching their own source code as well as a crowd of Linux geeks can.

Am I saying Linux is perfect and invincible to viruses? Might it become more susceptible to viruses in the future if it were to ever become as popular as Windows is today? I would think that with an increase in the number of users would also come a complimentary increase in the number of clever developers that would only help to increase the number of eyes available to find flaws and fix them. Saying that Linux would get a lot of viruses down the road because more people are going to use it is like saying Wikipedia will become rife with widespread, uncontrollable vandalism because more people visit it. It hasn’t happened yet, and very likely never will happen because of the way it is designed, moderated and improved upon by the hive mind.

EDIT to add: As mentioned in the first comments below, I failed to acknowledge that while Linux is more robust in the area of security, nothing can compensate for the weakest link in this arrangement:  The User.  A novice user could easily be enticed by a sinister website  that tells them to download a deb file which might contain malicious code and absentmindedly install it or execute a destructive command from the terminal window because they didn’t know any better (like rm -rf ~/*).  Fortunately for novice users there is little if any need to actually venture out into uncharted territory like a terminal window or strange websites to get software, thanks to the official repositories that contain a HUGE collection of software which continues to grow.  I’ve even heard you will soon be able to purchase proprietary Linux-based software through it.  Unfortunately, little can really be done to compensate for user negligence, and trying to compensate for all possibilities would likely result in too many annoying alerts and prompts for the average user (like when Windows Vista sprang the UAC on its users).

There are only a couple of circumstances that I believe anti-virus software on a Linux platform would might be worth having which involve helping to protect other Windows systems.  Say you got an email from someone that contained a virus but you never knew it was there and forwarded it onto someone else who uses Windows, resulting in their day being ruined and you being blamed.  So that’s one scenario.  You might also have a Linux server administrating a network of Windows based workstations which you have read/write access to and use the server to conduct scans of these machines over the network, but at the expense of finite network bandwidth and CPU cycles on the server.

All good things come to an end…  Fortunately, Virtual Dave isn’t one of them.  I’ve recently made the decision to drop my own remote assistance software in favor of using a new open-source VNC launcher called Gitso.  This launcher has a few benefits over the previous iterations of my older “Virtual Dave” software:

• Lightweight:  It’s written in Python and loads very fast.
• Simple:  Sometimes losing a couple “bells and whistles” is a good thing.
• Multiple platforms:  Gitso works on Windows, Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X.
• Active Development Pipeline:  A feature request I submitted was approved for the next version less than a half hour after I submitted it.
• Open-Source:  Free as in freedom.

There are a lot of features in the coming versions of this software I have been looking for in a VNC tool for a long time.  And who knows, I might learn a thing or two about programming in Python with this little tool.

DISCLAIMER:  Something’s broke with the latest version of Ubuntu (11.10) and adjusting these settings as shown below don’t seem to work like they’re supposed to, and I’ve not yet found a work around.  So this guide may not work at all for you.  I will update it as news emerges about this.

——

VNC is the default remote-desktop protocol for Ubuntu Linux and it can be used by anyone to access their home PC while they are away from home.  Anyone who has used VNC and also has a router are likely familiar with setting up a port-forward rule in their router so that all inbound traffic destined for port number 5900 is sent to the correct/desired PC.  But what if you wanted to be able to do this with multiple PCs on a home network and not have to relay through one PC in order to access another one?

You can do this by setting Ubuntu’s default VNC server (vino) to listen on an alternative port number.  Up until recently, changing this port number was as easy as clicking on an Advanced tab in your Remote Desktop preferences window.  For some reason, this new panel was removed after a more recent update so changing this port number became a bit of a mystery.

I’ve not done any hard digging to find out why this panel was removed, but my guess is they actually rolled the version of vino back to something older to temporarily avoid a known bug encountered with vino on servers that had Compiz enabled.  I’m sure they’ll get it fixed eventually.

In the mean time, this setting is still easy to change if you know where to go.   Here’s what you need to do:

1. Open your Gnome Configuration Editor.  You can do this quickly by pressing Alt-F2, then typing gconf-editor into the box and pressing Enter.
2. In the editor, click Desktop>Gnome>Remote Access.

Once you get to this point, you’ll notice several VNC related settings on the right half of the Gnome Configuration Editor window.  Edit the mentioned values as follows:

alternative_port: In the line that says “Alternative Port” near the top double-click the 5900 to edit and change it to the desired port number you’d like to use.  After you’ve changed this,  right-click on this value again to make a pop-out menu appear and then click “Set As Default”.

authentication_methods:  This value should say (or mention) “[vnc]“.  It might say [none] and that’s okay, but you still need to add “vnc”, so double-click on the value to bring up an edit window and click the Add button.  It will ask you to supply a name/value, so just type in “vnc” (no quotes) and press enter.   You’ll end up with a value of [none,vnc].  I don’t know if it matters or not, but at this point I edited the values further so that vnc was listed above none, so it ended up looking like [vnc,none] in the end.  My thinking behind this has to do with the way some blacklists (TCP/IP for example) delimit their endings.  That’s a whole other blog post…

enabled: There is a solitary check box by this parameter.  Make sure its box has a check-mark inside of it.

use_alternative_port:  Also make sure this parameter has a check mark in it’s box as well.  Also, right-click on this value and then click “Set as Default” for it as well.

Now close Gnome Configuration Editor.

That’s it!  Restart the computer to get the settings to take effect.

You should also do one or more of the following:

• Use Firestarter to add a rule allowing inbound traffic on the new port number you specified above so that your host firewall doesn’t block it.  (Click Applications>Add/Remove and search for Firestarter to install it if you don’t have it already).
• Set a new port-forwarding filter up in your router to direct inbound traffic on that new port towards the PC you just modified (duh!)

To connect to a VNC server on an alternative port, you just add a colon and the new port number to the end of the host address.  Lets pretend the new number if 5901 instead of 5900.  You would type the host address like this:

• 192.168.1.10:5901
• dyndnshostname.homeip.net:5901
• ubuntu.local:5901
• I’ve also used a 1 instead of 5901 and it works.  For 5902 you could probably use just the number 2 by itself, and so on.

And that’s all there is to it!