July 2006 Archives
On Spreeblick I found the link to the video streams of this years TED conference. So far I have watched the available presentations of Lary Brilliant, Al Gore, Sir Ken Robinson, and David Pogue.
They were all very interesting and often given in a quite entertaining style (even the one about smallpox and bird flue by Larry Brilliant) and I really recommend watching them or to listen to the audio only versions. Larry Brilliant's talk was pretty important as well and I hope his vision of INSTEDD becomes real.
And I do agree very much with what David Pogue and Sir Ken Robinson talked about. While the complexity of computer interfaces and the problem of creating easy understandable ones is a daily experience (in usuage as well in my own projects mainly at work), I wasn't aware of what Robinson talked about: the loss of creativity caused by our current educational systems. And looking at my "career" it seems to fit well. Arts, or being creative at all, isn't very important at school and university (l just begin to explore my creativity in photography now). But learning fixed rules is important for a very long time.
Later you learn, that many of these rules art not so fixed at all and that it is good to be creative and think in unconventional ways often. Unfortunately many students will have lost quite a bit of their potential because of the education which taught them to “unlearn” this…
But is this going to change (soon)? I don't think so. The surveys of the recent years (PISA studies) just make this worse and focus on sciences and fixed rules may even become more important (though I have to admit that it might be very hard to teach the uncertainties in science to pupils in schools, e.g. in physics). It is important to teach sciences and all these other things (foreign languages esp.) but I more and more think that the basic system of learning and teaching at school has to be changed to keep and develop creativity! Maybe some of he alternative school models are better at this…
Sorry that this is more or less a stub of random thoughts caused by looking these videos, but: If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original at all.
First: no, I don't use Linux to write this article, but basically I could...
Introduction
A while ago I bought a Samsung Q1 and I'm really pleased with this device (though I hope for some enhancements in future devices, but his is not the topic of this article). As I'm a Linux user at home (at work I do use Windows, so I do know both systems for everyday work), I tried to install Linux very soon and did fail using Suse 10.1…
But as I miss some of my favourite application, which are not ported to Windows yet (that sounds weird, doesn't it?) and miss the nice consistent look of the Gnome desktop, I didn't stop trying and installed Ubuntu 6.06 on it.
Basic Installation
Some preparations
You'll need a keyboard and a mouse! The Samsung keyboard with the integrated touch stick will work fine, though (and the integrated touch stick is recognized as mouse without any further work).
And it's good to search the net a bit, e.g. for support of your hardware (go to the vendors them self, sometimes even to the basic chip vendors). A good starting point is tuxmobil even if you don't find your hardware there (and some information may be outdated).
Ubuntu wants at least 2 GB space for installation and you'll need a swap partition. That means using the AV station partition isn't enough (or how is this program called?). Defrag your C drive (it's good if you don't have too many things installed yet and there's still some space left).
In the Ubuntu installer I resized the Windows XP partition and changed the AV station (or what it is called) partition into a partition for root. Further I added a swap and a home partition using the free space I got from resizing C:. The swap partition can be used in Windows XP as there's a swapfs driver for Windows available — a perfect place for the swap file!
As I might access my home drive from Windows XP, I used EXT3 there, but for the root partition I used XFS (to be on the safe site I added a boot partition using EXT3 as well as I'm not sure if grub will boot from XFS). Resizing the NTFS drive worked well.
Just be cautious not to change the partition numbering up to the C drive! Else you would have to change boot.ini for Windows XP to boot correctly!
The Installation Itself
There's nothing to report, but that it works. The things that have to be adjusted later, will be discussed now…
Getting all to Work
Wireless LAN
Actually this was the first I worked on because without WiFi working I wouldn't like using this device anyway.
The hardware of the Samsung Q1 is an Atheros 5006EX. The EX seems to be important (it indicates a PCI Express device). Looking at MadWifi this chip should work, but I couldn't get it to work using MadWifi neither using the package supplied by Ubuntu nor a recent snapshot. Finally I used ndiswrapper with the Windows XP driver you can download from Samsung's homepage. This works fine but the Gnome netapplet doesn't show signal strength (though wifi radar does).
Graphical Interface
Graphical interface works out of the box — at 640×480.
Adding a mode line for 800×480 to xorg.conf doesn't help at all and searching the net I found that this seems to be a problem with the graphics card not reporting this mode. Fortunately there's 915resolution which you can use to overwrite a mode. So I now just call 915resolution 50 800 480 32 and overwrite the 640×480 mode. It's easy after you found the right solution, isn't it?
Last but not least: The Touchscreen
Now I wouldn't like using the keyboard all the time but I want to use the touchscreen!
eGalax is providing Linux drivers for this touch screen and even a special Ubuntu package! But unfortunately I couldn't get it to work…
Searching the net again I found that using evtouch and evdev should work. Just follow the descriptions there did help…
Calibration was a bit of a problem as the calibration program of evtouch segfaults. I had a look at the calibration values on Windows (you'll find them in a ini in the Touchkit directory) which were a good first guess. For the MinX and MinY values I had to subtract 100 and for the MaxX and MaxY I had to subtract 50, though.
The Show Stoppers or What do I need, to use Linux on this gadget as default?
So you might ask why I don't switch to Linux then? Well I'm missing the excellent ways of using the touch screen for input. The TIP in Windows XP Tablet Edition is very nice. Esp. the integration of the different input methods, using ink or an on-screen keyboard is superb and the handwriting recognition works very good as well. I didn't find any handwriting recognition software for Linux! For a working one which is nicely integrated into the desktop I'd even be willing to pay (just because I'm using Linux doesn't mean that I only use FOSS)!
I know that there is gok and dasher but somehow usage is much more hassling. The concept of dasher is interesting but it needs too much space. And in gok I'm missing the special keys like ALT, CTRL and so on which I do need sometimes even using an onscreen keyboard (not very often, but still). Space usage of gok isn't very good as well for such a small device…
I activated accessibility for GDM but somehow no virtual keyboard shows on login (how should I login without an USB keyboard then?) and if a su dialog box appears and looks the screen, gok can't be used as well — how bad!
Does the maemo platform have a (good) handwriting recognition or do they rely or an onscreen keyboard exclusively?
What I Didn't Do
As I did decide not to use Linux on this device for now anyway I did't work on all things. For one thing the sound isn't working (but I think it should) and I didn't try to get the special keys to work. The joystick does work out of the box though and the volume control as well. Brightness control does work too but the level is not indicated somehow on the screen.
I think there're some tools for Linux like magickeys available (but I'm not sure). It would be nice to be able to switch off WiFi easily (and Bluetooth, it's just wasting power if you don't need it).
The CF slot is recognized. In a first test the CF card was shown as disk but I couldn't access it and Linux crashed on removing (I can't remember the last time such a crash on my desktop system, but for Windows at work, where this happened on Thursday spontaneously loosing quite a bit of work). So I couldn't really test if the CF slot is maybe faster, i.e. usable for data transfer, on Linux…
The Future
I really think Linux has a future on such a device, but a good integration for on-screen input is needed. Not only a good on-screen keyboard, but a handwriting recognition software as well. And this has to be integrated into a “quite normal” distribution and not only into something like maemo!
And then there are the GUIs. GUI programmers have to take into account, that with these gadget becoming more widespread many people will use lower resolutions again (at least vertically). And even if the resolution of these devices increase, the physical screen size will be much smaller than that of a laptop or desktop. So think in pt and not in px! This accounts as well for Windows, perhaps even more so (on Linux using a mouse and a keyboard I can at least move any window easily to show hidden parts).
I would be glad to get some tips about solving the last problems…
Yes, I'm back from my short trip to Lucerne. There're still a few images to upload (but I think I'll upload ballooning pictures first)…
I'd liked to stay a bit longer, esp. for some hikes in the mountains.
