Community Matters

I’m the proud owner of a Google Voice account. Awesome. I love the voice mail transcript / email feature. But there’s still room for improvement. This is the transcript of a Spanish phonecall I got today

or leave me a more the best of the stuff i can’t okay hi take care of motel me more i guess

Maybe this wasn’t fair…

Usually I like to post solutions to problems here – but this one I haven’t been able to figure out… maybe someone else has an idea? Please comment.

When connecting the Kindle 2 to a MacBook Pro via USB the connection is basically unusable. I get no where near the 480Mbit/s that USB2 would promise (and I checked in the System Profiler – the Kindle does show up as a USB2 device). I appear to be getting a few kbit/s – transferring a 3MB file takes 15+ minutes.

Doing some googling points to SpotLight as a potential problem. Since the Kinde 2 shows up as a FAT partition many of the usual ways of preventing SpotLight from indexing it don’t appear to work. Certainly disabling Spotlight for the Kindle through the Preferences tab failed for me (with the always helpful “an error occurred” message). What does seem to work is to create a file named .metadata_never_index in the root directory of the Kindle (something like

touch /Volumes/Kindle/.metadata_never_index

in a terminal window.

But even after doing that (and verifying that SpotLight is no longer trying to index the drive) transfer performance over USB is still abysmal.

Help?

I’ve been fighting to get TweetDeck to work on my Linux system for a while. There simply is no comparable native client under Linux. I’ve used Gwibber which is ok, but no comparison to TweetDeck.

There are a couple of problems to solve: first, you need to get Adobe Air to work. And with all due respect to Adobe – they clearly haven’t figured out the kinks to making their software actually install easily on the various Linux distributions. A quick Google search seems to make that painfully clear.

Forget 64bit Linux. Yes, allegedly it works for a few people with various 32bit libraries installed, but after six weeks of trying to get this to work I came to the conclusion that this was a lost cause.

And even with 32bit Fedora-11 there still are a number of problems to solve. First you need to make sure that you have all the dependencies installed – even though it would be easy to have rpm do that for you, Adobe clearly hasn’t figured out how to do that… so you have to do this manually:

sudo yum -y install gnome-keyring rpm-build nss

Then (thanks to erik jacobs) you appear to need to manually create another link for librpmbuild:

sudo ln -s librpmbuild.so.0.0.0 /usr/lib/librpmbuild-4.7.so

Now you are ready to run the installer:

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
sudo AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

But this still doesn’t solve the problem of installing AIR applications. Adobe wants to install them into /opt by default (which a regular user can’t write to) – and even after changing that to do writeable by my user things still failed with cryptic (and useless) error messages. So I finally figured out that I needed to manually download the AIR installer packages (like TweetDeck_x_yz.air) and then run the AIR application installer from hand (again as root):

sudo Adobe\ AIR\ Application\ Installer

and then pick the .air file in the file select box; the installer is too dumb to allow you to pass a .air file on the command line. Come on guys…

With all these steps I got it to work – but frankly I think this is an embarrassing sign for how much further AIR has to go to be really useful on Linux. 2 out of 10 points, Adobe…

The clash of the titans. War! Fight! It’s fun to read what has been written about the GoogleOS. Clearly this is getting the juices flowing. Nothing sells newspaper (or online ads, I guess) like a good old conflict. And who better to pit against each other than the Evil Monster Microsoft (seriously?) against the “do no evil” Google.

But of course that’s missing the point. Google isn’t writing a new OS. They didn’t do that with Android, either. They are using the existing Linux kernel. They are using tons of existing user space code that the open source community has worked on for 20+ years and that the Linux vendors have perfected over the last 15 years (and that Ubuntu has taken a free ride on for… wait, I digress).

So what Google really is doing is that it is putting its well proven brand and marketing muscle behind something that mostly exists. And then it’s using its not-quite-so-proven productization muscle (hey, Gmail is no longer in beta after umpteen years) to shape the very flexible Linux OS to its liking.

More focus on web. Less focus on native apps. More focus on binding the user to a monopoly (sounds familiar?), less focus on freedom and choice. We’ve seen this play out. Many times.

What is interesting is that with Moblin (and all the Linux OSVs who have announced Moblin compliant versions of their Linux OS) there is a pretty interesting contender just about to go product – about a year ahead of Google’s Chrome OS. So is Google actually hurting Linux here with its “quick – don’t look – we’ll do something even better!” announcement? I wonder. The timing is sure odd. Long before they have anything to show for, just making sure that no other standard emerges?

Well, time will tell. Moblin needs to succeed on its own merit – and it has plenty of time to do so. And a year from now we’ll know more about Google’s ability to create a production quality OS for a broad set of hardware platforms. In the mean time I’m excited about all the opportunities.

Oh, you may have noticed that I didn’t talk about Microsoft Windows 7 and Apple OS X in this post. That’s right – those target different markets (I know, MS dreams of Windows 7 for Netbooks – but at a 20% price premium compared to a free OS… that will be a tough sell). I don’t think that Google Chrome OS (or Moblin, for that matter) will have a chance against W7 and OSX on full fledged notebooks, desktops and workstations. And I don’t think that either is trying to do that. On the other hand I think that there’s plenty of space for a free OS on limited capability. And that’s where Google’s Chrome OS is indeed competing with Moblin, Google’s Android and other Linux based offerings.