Selasa, 07 Agustus 2012

Bodhi's ARM Branch Moves to ARMHF

After doing some research and testing for the last week I have arrived at the conclusion that Bodhi's ARM branch will best serve our users by moving our core from Debian Wheezy ARMEL to utilize Debian Wheezy ARMHF. I'm not going to get into the technical difference between the two platforms here - just know that in general ARMHF is faster.

With this change however, there are some slight changes to our ARM repo details. If you have Debian Wheezy ARMHF installed on a device and wish to add the Bodhi repo to your sources the line you want to add is:

deb http://packages.bodhilinux.com/bodhi/ debian stable

Then you just install our bodhi-desktop package as before.

With regards to our officially supported ARM devices, you can find download links to our brand new ARMHF images for the RaspBerry Pi and Genesi Smartbook on our ARM downloads page. Our RaspBerry Pi build is built directly on top of Raspbian and incorporates all of their changes and improvements.




~Jeff Hoogland

Senin, 06 Agustus 2012

That Good Old Linux FUD

Who doesn't love a good Monday morning rant?

I caught this article on the news feed of my favorite Linux news site this morning and I must say it upsets me a lot. The too long/didn't read version of this guy's article is that Android is "usable" for most users, while he finds desktop Linux lacking in the usability department. He cites a number of reasons why the distribution he selected (Fedora) isn't "usable" compared to Android. Honestly all of them are your normal anti-desktop Linux FUD and I am tired of it.

Oh man - all your hardware doesn't work with the distribution you are using, but your Android device works great? Let me guess - you bought a device with Android preinstalled. Your "Linux computer" on the other hand you installed yourself. You also didn't research the hardware. You just expected Linux to work with every piece of hardware that exists. I'm not sure who told you Linux worked with 100% of hardware, but guess what? They lied. Linux works with a great deal of hardware, but not all of it. If you bought your own copy of Windows or OSX and tried to install it on non-supported hardware you better believe their parent companies would tell you to get supported hardware. Why are you treating Linux differently?

Next he goes onto to complain about the difficulties you have to go through when setting up a Linux PC.

Oh man - you downloaded an operating system that has free software principles and you expected it to utilize closed source tools by default? This surprises you? In under an hour on distrowatch you can easily find a distribution that comes with such tools by default. Instead this guy choose the wrong tool for the job he wanted to do and then opted to complain when it didn't work properly.

Next he moves on to complaining about bugs in the operating system.

Oh man - the giant piece of complex software (that you got for free mind you) isn't perfect? Not only that, but instead of having to pay of updates like some operating systems these bugs can often be resolved automatically via the package manager after reporting them? Windows and OSX aren't bug free either. Why are you expecting Linux to be?

Finally he complains about the release cycle of the distribution he is using.

Oh man - you selected a distribution with a six month release cycle, but you don't like updating/reinstalling every six months? I am simply going to make a distrowatch reference again here. There are easily dozens of active projects that this won't happen with. Sadly, you can only lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink.

In closing today I would like to share one last thought of my own regarding desktop Linux. We have not yet gotten to a software world where everyone is ready to install and configure their own operating system. Expecting this to be true is a folly. I would be willing to bet that almost every user that has issues installing Linux (on Linux friendly hardware) would also have issues installing Windows or OSX.

Installing an operating system requires a user to make at least some technical decisions - it is the nature of the beast. Expecting desktop Linux to transcend this is just foolish.

Finally - no matter how good a given piece of software is you can never account for all the carbon based issues that are bound to occur. You know what they say - every time you make something idiot proof they go and make a better idiot!

~Jeff Hoogland

Jumat, 03 Agustus 2012

HOWTO: Launch OMXPlayer via a GUI

I'm going to be on an ARM kick for the next two weeks before my fall classes start up. In addition to porting Bodhi to the Pi one of my goals is also to replace my media PC with a Pi. Even though the processor in the Pi is fairly weak, it can decode HD video using it's GPU chip if you use the proper media player. This means that your old favorites like VLC and mPlayer will not work, so we must turn to a tool designed just for the Pi: OMXPlayer.

Now because OMXPlayer is still very new, it is still very basic. So basic in fact it's key bindings (for play/pause/stop/quit) only function if the program is launched via the CLI. Knowing my Fiance and friends who often use the media PC would give me no end of grief if they had to open a terminal to play movies - I set about finding a solution. Today I'd like to share that fairly simple solution with you!

To allow users to simply "double click" on a media file via the file manager and have it open in OMXPlayer you need to create a .desktop file for OMXPlayer. Open a terminal on your pi and run:

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/omxplayer.desktop

For it's contents paste:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=OMXPlayer
Categories=AudioVideo;Player;
Exec=omxplayer -o hdmi %f
Terminal=true
Icon=emblem-video

Save and close the file (ctrl+x in nano) and you should be good to go! When you double click on a media file in your file browser simply select Open With: OMXPlayer! Please note some users have reported this doesn't work with LXDE - I cannot confirm this though as I only use E17 and it works fine there :)

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland

Rabu, 01 Agustus 2012

HOWTO: Clone all Programs Installed via Apt

Today I would like to share a nifty trick for cloning your application selections installed via the apt-get package manager. It is as simple as running two commands. First on the system you wish to clone, open a terminal and run this command (which is on pastebin due to blogger formatting issues).

Next, simply copy the package-list to the system you wish to setup a copy on. Finally open a terminal and run:

xargs apt-get install -y < package-list

In the same directory you copied the package-list file too. Please note that this trick only works when your two systems in question have exactly the same sources/operating system version.

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland

Selasa, 31 Juli 2012

Bodhi Linux RaspBerry Pi Beta

Edit/Update: You can find the latest release here -> http://www.bodhilinux.com/downloads_mobile.php

A little over six weeks ago I posted a very early image of Bodhi for the RaspBerry Pi. Today I am happy to let everyone know that I have published what I consider to be a "beta" quality image:


The download comes in the form of a compressed .IMG file, which can be extracted and then written to an SD card (2GB minimum). The first thing worth noting in this release is that the default username/password are different:

Username: pi
Password: bodhilinux

As for changes, this release is now utilizing Terminology as it's default terminal emulator and PCManFM file browser has been replaced with the native EFM (Enlightenment File Manager). The issues our first image had with networking and flash drives should also be resolved with this release. Also worth noting is that the AppCenter is now configured to work by default in the Midori web browser - but the synaptic interface runs fairly slow on the Pi hardware.

Finally - if you have any issues with this image please open a support request in the RaspBerry Pi section of our user forums. That is a much better place to trouble shoot than the comments section on this post.


~Jeff Hoogland

HOWTO: Create and use .IMG files from the CLI

Now that Bodhi's second stable release for the desktop is settling down, I am going to be putting a bit of focus on our ARM releases for the next couple of weeks. ARM images typically are provided in the form of .IMG files. Using a downloaded .IMG file is fairly simple. You can write it to a drive of your choice with a single command:

sudo dd if=myfile.img of=/path/to/drive bs=1M

One thing worth noting though is that /path/to/drive should not include any partition number. An example path would be something like:

/dev/sdb

Note that writing large images can take a good deal of time depending on the speed of your drive and that this command will not give you any feedback until it finishes.

Now, perhaps you are like myself and have some interest in creating/distributing .IMG files of your own. Creating image files is also fairly easily and uses the same dd command. An example of how to create an image file is:

sudo dd if=/path/to/drive of=image.img

Note that this command copies the entire contents of the drive - meaning if your drive is large your .IMG file will be equally large! Now, what do you do if you only want to copy part of your drive? Simply add one argument to the above command of course! For example to only copy the first two gigs of data on a drive to a .IMG file use:

sudo dd if=/path/to/drive of=image.img bs=2048 count=1M

I am by no means an expert at using dd, but if you run into any issues feel free to drop a comment below and I'll do my best to help you out.

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland

Senin, 30 Juli 2012

Bodhi Linux 2.0.1 - Bug Fix Release

Some of you might be slightly confused by this posting since our 2.0.0 release was published just five days ago. No piece of software is perfect and our 2.0.0 release is no exception to this. Since we released last Thursday our 2.0.0 discs have received over 15,000 downloads - a number the Bodhi team and I are extremely happy with. With this large influx of users we have received a piles of user feedback and bug reports - some of which need to be dealt with right away (not two months from now when our next scheduled update release is set to come out).

With this in mind I would like to cut straight to the point and give you the disc downloads for 2.0.1 (as always torrent is fastest):



What was so pressing you ask that demanded we release bug fix ISO images now instead of waiting for our normal scheduled release? Well a few things:
  • Added a variety of firmware to the default install to greatly increase wireless support
  • Added support for booting the ISO image via grub2
  • Added some missing ACPI scripts so suspending works
  • Removed a few misc mentions of 10.04/1.4.0 left behind in documentation
Users that have already installed our 2.0.0 release (or alphas) and are keeping up to date with their software updates via the package manager will already be at our 2.0.1 release:


No need to reinstall for minor/bug fix releases - but I would encourage you to grab this latest ISO image for use with your live media.

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland