Archive for May, 2008

Indiana First Impressions

31/05/2008 at 10:05 · Filed under Uncategorized

I had been putting off installing it after getting the LiveCD a few days ago, but the brand new OpenSolaris 2008.05 (Indiana) finally installed on my laptop, using old hard drive that was lying around.

First impression: it is quite pretty. It uses GNOME, so it just looks like your typical Linux distribution, with an attractive theme (compiz sucks here, though). But very few applications available for typical users. I miss Tomboy for example. From the web I have read the promoted features, which are geared to developers. Which was not much use to me, honestly. But I am thinking to dabble in programming these days, so I might find OpenSolaris to be attractive yet.

For now I am still just a hack who covers IT, and the main tool for me is a simple word processor, which is not bundled with OpenSolaris installation. I tried to find Abiword in the package manager, to no avail. Oh well. Grumbling, I am off to install openoffice package.

It also seems the multimedia support are rather lacking. I will report how it goes later.

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Zyrex Ubud a.k.a. VIA Nanobook

29/05/2008 at 04:51 · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

I have been trying out Zyrex Ubud, a subnotebook which is based on VIA Nanobook design. It is VIA’s answer to Asus EeePC machines. There are some differences, but they are similar in build and size.

The unit I am testing right now uses Windows Vista Starter Edition. Vista sounds horrible for machines of this class. And it shows. For example, boot time of this notebook is about 1 minutes and 30 seconds. I measured it from pushing the power button until Windows taskbar and wallpaper came. If I waited until all startup programs were loaded it was much longer, about 3 minutes.

For comparison I timed the boot time of another machine which also used Vista, Acer Travelmate 6262. I got about 50 seconds starting up time. Meanwhile, EeePC stated boot times for newer models is about 30 seconds for Linux versions and 50 seconds for XP. It is easy to blame Vista for this, but I suspect the culprit was the hard disk. Using hard drive as storage means Zyrex Ubud has a lot more space compared to EeePC or Classmate machines, but the boot time suffers.

But after the booting Vista with Ubud is actually quite usable. The speed is adequate for browsing and simple word processing (which is the most probable scenario for journalists). Still, I wish Zyrex would choose another operating systems for this machine. The menu is too large for the screen, for starters. And talking about starters, Vista Starter Edition is a crippled operating system. It is even worse than Home Basic, which at least let you run applications as many as you want.

Vista can handle the 800 x 480 resolution, but it is very clear that Visa, (or XP in that respect) is not designed for this kind of machine. The dialog box sometimes too large and the buttons were hidden.

The keyboard are nice. Sure, it is rather small and make the user prone to typing mistakes. But it is much more comfortable than EeePC keyboards. The same cannot be said for the pointing device. The touchpad, is very, very small for proper pointing gestures. Sure, Zyrex (or, perhaps more appropriately, VIA) has to work around the size constrain. But why not use trackpoints, which also can save space as well, and in my opinion, much more usable?

VIA processors have bad reputation, but I cannot report any dissatisfactions with the performance. Yet.

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Some thoughts on private Internet communication

07/05/2008 at 17:07 · Filed under Uncategorized

Reading the news recently I am getting slight paranoia communicating by Internet. I am still thinking I am nobody, and no one in the right mind would be interested with what I am writing to my friends. Still, the realisation that several governments in the world are monitoring and eavesdropping my e-mails doesn’t exactly make me comfortable. This motivated me to look into the technology to secure private Internet communications, which in my case means e-mails and instant messages. E-mail encryption sounded like the stuff of spy stories though, and I expected some difficulties.

The software for e-mail encryption is actually easily obtainable, as long as you know what to look. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is already quite old in Internet time. I even found reference to it in Saman, a famous Indonesian novel written by Ayu Utami. There is also another alternative: S/MIME. I have already experimented creating PGP key for use with my e-mail client in Fedora 8. Unfortunately, I don’t find anybody interested to (or, I think, understand) the concept of private e-mail yet. I am also looking into using S/MIME encryption. It is said much easier to use, and the support is already integrated to every e-mail client I have used.

Admittedly I haven’t known email encryption long enough to be able to reach any conclusion. But these are my quick impression: setting it up properly is a hassle. To use PGP (or GPG, the free implementation of it) you should install additional software other than your operating system or e-mail client. GNU/Linux systems usually already have it built-in, but it is still hard for ordinary users to set up.

It is said S/MIME is somewhat better. But, after messing around with it, I don’t agree. The support to it is built in to popular e-mail clients, but you need certificate to use it, and generally you need to obtain it from certificate authorities such as Verisign or Thawte. The latter offers free certificate, but I found the process for acquiring it rather lengthy, and can make impatient people quit before completing.

I think I prefer PGP/GPG. But to get more use I think it’d better get more exposure in popular e-mail clients. I know that Linux clients already support PGP/GPG, but they should have tighter integration. For example, when creating new accounts they should detect whether the user already have the key associated with the e-mail address. When they cannot find it they should offer to create new one (if there isn’t any key created yet), or add the e-mail address to the existing one. Users will be better exposed to encryption features in e-mail, and maybe they will be encouraged to use it.

Similar process can be created for instant messaging clients such as Pidgin. And because much of my internet communications nowadays are conducted by instant messaging, I will be very interested to use encryption for it. More than e-mails.

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