I haven’t tried it out myself as I watch all my videos on my desktop, which is more than capable of handling HD H.264 videos, even with inefficient decoding. Someone give it a go and let me know if it works!

Whilst I’m all for diversity in Linux distros I would prefer if people actually had something to show, or at least had a semi-original idea, before submitting their distro on Digg and trying to build hype. I mean, really, why on Earth would anyone want to use PyroLinux? To save themselves the 5 minutes it would take to install AWN?

One of the more interesting things is that applications are developed in Java with the Android SDK and use Android API calls to access device functions such as Bluetooth, cameras, touch screen, etc. Apparently you can use C as well but it’s far more complicated to get everything going so it’s probably not worth your time. I do wonder if other programming languages could be supported via the JVM used. For example, would Jython work?

The documentation for the SDK “preview” is rather extensive for a product that hasn’t been released yet. It takes you through the basics of creating an application, testing apps and explains what the various parts of the SDK are for. From my brief look through everything it appears as though writing applications for Android is pretty damn simple (assuming you know how to program Java).

It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. Despite having been out only a short time, the platform is generating a lot of buzz and with so much major backing here’s hoping it can start a revolution in the mobile world so that mobile application development can be made a whole lot easier.

Update: you might also like to check out this article on Linux Devices.

Two that I’ve found are TimeVault and the newer FlyBack, which makes no excuse about being a lame Time Machine clone … without the actual clone part since it’s not nearly as nice looking.

Of course, if you don’t go in for all this pretentious GUI crap, you can also use tools which do the same thing but are designed to run as simple daemons. Some popular ones are Dirvish and rsnapshot. If you want to get really fancy and space efficient you can even go for something like rdiff-backup, which only stores the change deltas of older versions of files.

Personally I store all my important work in a Subversion repository since I normally do development work with it anyway. It’s not very space efficient but a lot more powerful.

What backup system do you use? If you’re a Linux user, did I miss any good ones?

So far, the supported features are: authentication with username/password, viewing of the queue, uploading new torrents (from a local file or a URL), auto-refresh and pausing/resuming downloading. This enough for basic administration but one rather essential feature that is missing is the ability to change the queue position of torrents, such as to move something up or down. There are also no settings available so it relies on you having the system set up beforehand and not wanting to change anything.

Another key problem with running WebUI on Deluge is that the program itself requires a full desktop to be running as it requires GTK+. This means that you can’t run it on a server that has been set up to run a minimal set of software daemons from the shell. There’s no real reason why a torrent program needs a graphical interface so maybe a “headless” mode will be enabled on Deluge in future versions.

One interesting design decision made is that images and stylesheets are in a different directory to the templates. From the sounds of the directory they’re in (static) the intention is to have the unchanging components served from a different directory which could theoretically be on a completely different server. This is good practice for high traffic sites and is a common way of optimising a web site but I have to wonder why it was employed here. I assume that a personal interface to your BitTorrent client would not qualify as a high traffic site and the templating system is extraordinarily handicapped by having stylesheets and images in a different directory that is not related to the template in any way.

I would like to take a look at the plugin further and see if some improvements can be made, such as allowing full AJAX operations. I think using AJAX refreshes would be particularly beneficial as full page refreshes are terribly wasteful in terms of bandwidth and not very nice from a usability point of view. Other improvements should just be a matter of changing the template – for example, making the layout fluid rather than fixed width.

The WebUI plugin for Deluge does look promising and could eventually replace Azureus as my BitTorrent client but there are some important problems that would need to be addressed first.

Case: Antec Sonata III (including 500W PSU)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Motherboard: Gigabyte P35-DS3R
RAM: 2 x A-DATA DDR2-800 2GB Kit
HDD: 2 x Seagate 750GB
DVD: 2 x Pioneer 212BK

Not bad for $1585!

For the astute members of the audience I am only missing a graphics card to have an operational system. Which is really aggravating, let me tell you: I want to take my baby out for a spin and see what a quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM can do!

My plan for the video card is a Leadtek 8800GTS with 640MB RAM, which should have enough grunt for playing some recent games. However, I do have the problem of whether to go with NVIDIA or ATI for the graphics card: I like to take Linux compatibility into account and I plan on dual-booting Windows XP and a 64-bit Linux distro (any suggestions?). In the past this would mean an automatic slam-dunk for NVIDIA seeing as they’re the only one that seemed to take Linux seriously and provide decent drivers. Recent events have forced me to reconsider this though since AMD/ATI have released hardware specs for their GPUs so we should soon be seeing open source Linux drivers that are kept up-to-date by the community and integrated fully into the kernel or X.org. This makes ATI a very tempting option. At the end of the day though I think NVIDIA are still releasing slightly superior hardware and their Linux drivers work now, not in a year’s time, so I’ll probably go with the 8800GTS.

Version 0.5.5 was released a couple days ago so I got to try out the older version and the latest one before I write this. The new version doesn’t seem to have all that much different and there’s no nice changelog to be found on the website – if you want one check out the forum announcement post. One thing that is very noticeable is the new configuration wizard, which runs through the basic settings needed to get up and running.

The actual client itself is quite basic. The ability to download torrents is there, along with basic statistics on downloads and some settings. More functionality is provided via plugins and the default distribution contains quite a few that do add some more advanced features, such as lists of files inside torrents, display of the individual pieces of a torrent, statistics on connected peers, blocklists, notifications for torrents and many others. Interestingly, I noticed a feature that was in the core client in the last version – moving completed torrents to a different directory – is now provided as a plugin. I was initially upset when I found this missing in the preferences so it would have been nice if they’d make the changelog more visible as the change was announced there.

With a bunch of plugins enabled the functionality of Deluge is pretty close to Azureus and other torrent programs like uTorrent. A few areas are lacking but these are slightly more “out of the ordinary”. One feature that is noticeably missing is a web interface, which seems to be all the rage these days and would allow me to replace Azureus on my server. Again, a plugin could probably add this and just needs someone to write it up.

The core program is written in a combination of Python and C++ and libtorrent library (which in turn uses some of the Boost libraries), as well as the usual Glade stuff for the GTK+ interface. I find it interesting that the developers specify being “lightweight” as one of their primary goals yet they utilise Python as their primary development language – I would have thought C/C++ would be the more obvious choice for sheer performance. From the looks of things Python is used as an embedded interpreter so there is no reliance on any system Python interpreters and the C++ libraries can be included more easily, although there appears to be developer discussion about using the Python-native libtorrent bindings in future versions.

One thing that is of zero relevance but that I think is amusing is a comment I found inside the source code:

// Tell Boost that we are on *NIX, so bloody '.'s are ok inside a directory name!


In terms of performance Deluge isn’t bad. The program is responsive and I found that it consistently uses around 20MB of RAM. Most of this, I’m sure, comes from the Python code as I’ve seen other Python apps using around this amount of memory for even the smallest program. While 20MB isn’t that crazy I’m again surprised that a program apparently intended for light memory usage would use that much. I guess that’s the price you pay for speedier development times using a simpler language. The use of Python also makes writing plugins a bit easier as well so they might be trying to encourage external development.

My only real complaint is that a lot of the interface areas are not very nice to look at, especially in the plugins. One thing I liked about Azureus is that you can get access to some simple graphs to show things like the pieces completed in a torrent or the network traffic and peer information. The most impressive thing Deluge has is the progress bars on the torrents, which aren’t even present for the completion of individual files or pieces. Being a GTK+ application, Deluge does integrate nicely into my GNOME desktop though.

Overall, Deluge is quite a good torrent client but it needs some work on the interface and possibly the inclusion of a web interface. If a web interface plugin was created I might even switch from Azureus. If you’re looking for a bittorrent app for Unix-like systems then I recommended giving Deluge a go.

Whilst I don’t have the zeitgeist for the entire Linux community I’m willing to bet that this is not true. I think that this “myth” is something that Windows users would think because all the software that Linux users use is provided free of charge (free as in beer). Contrast this to Windows where Microsoft makes quite a lot of money selling something as basic as an office suite. Linux users would turn this around and ask why Windows users automatically assume you have to pay for things like this.

This is also not factoring in the fact that plenty of people pirate Windows software and so aren’t paying for it even when they should. So Windows users are meant to pay for something but often don’t and this is better than Linux users who never have to pay for their software but sometimes donate anyway? There’s something wrong about there.

I guess one issue is that there are many Linux users who use the platform because they’re free software advocates and would never use proprietary software. Does this mean they’re not willing to pay for software? This I can’t really answer but I’d hazard a guess and say that they might pay for free software but it’s quite difficult to create a traditional software business that just sells free software.

The simple fact of the matter is that people are only willing to pay for something if it’s worth the cost. On Linux this is often not the case as software to accomplish most tasks reasonably well already exists and is free in all senses of the word. Why would someone hand over $30 for an email client when Thunderbird or Evolution does almost everything you want? You would if there were features in the commercial client that the others didn’t have.

I think a prime example is the GIMP. Now, this software is good enough for a lot of tasks and I’m not debating that it’s not suitable for professional graphics work but most people agree that it’s missing several critical features and the interface is complete shit. A professional artist would have no problems justifying the $2000 or so for the Adobe Production Suite and a copy of Windows. Hell, these people actually spend the money to get Apple hardware and software, which is anything but cheap and really only does the same thing as the cheaper PC stuff. If you’re getting your money’s worth then why wouldn’t you do it? If there was a version of Photoshop available for Linux then I’d seriously consider buying it since it would end up saving me so much time and effort in my web design work.

As to the original spark that set off this post, Zoom Player is far ahead of every single Linux video player in terms of usability. It also has the legal authority to be able to include restricted media formats (they can pay for the licensing fees) so I, for one, would not mind in the slightest if I had to pay $40 for a Linux version. I’m sure a lot of people would feel the same way too: pay a small amount of money for a great video player and the ability to play every format under the Sun without hassle? There must be thousands of people who’d hand over the cash without a second thought.

So, I don’t think it’s a case that Linux users are cheap bastards who refuse to pay for software, rather that they’re immersed in a world where most software just happens to be free of charge and works well for most things you’d need. Gone are the days when people expect to pay money for any software they want to use. If companies want to sell commercial software then they just have to make it better than what’s already there!

I think the simplest thing to say about it is that it’s Google Desktop. It’s roughly the same as it is for Windows, so if you were expecting something dramatically different then you’re not going to get it. So if you’re not a fan of the software as it runs on Windows then there’s a high probability that you’re not going to be a fan of it on Linux either. Similarly, if you regularly use it on Windows and like it then you’ll probably like it on Linux as well.

Now, for people who haven’t used Google Desktop before it is, at it’s most basic, a search engine for your files. Linux systems of course have this built-in from day one with locate (or slocate) on the command-line and Ubuntu (and others) come with Beagle for desktop searching. Both of these systems have their shortfalls though and the Google name is a powerful one in the arena of search so it’s interesting to compare them all.

In terms of installation, Google have made it very easy to get their software running on Ubuntu at the last. They provide a .deb that can be quickly installed and will create a menu for Google Desktop, as well as adding it to the programs to be enabled on start up. You might need to start it manually after you’ve installed it if you don’t want to reboot. One thing I don’t like about the installation is that it creates an entirely separate menu called Google Desktop. I don’t think the program is really “worthy” of occupying a complete menu in itself but I can’t think of where it would be better suited. Perhaps in the Places menu along with Search for Files… but this might be non-standard.

Once running it will live in the notification area of the GNOME desktop and it can be brought up by double-clicking the icon or simply hitting the Ctrl key twice. The latter is extremely convenient and works the same way as hitting F12 does for Beagle. When run for the first time Desktop will start a once-off indexing of all your existing files. This took a good 14 hours or so for me with around 80GB of data to index and a 5400RPM laptop hard drive. I did like that the indexing used almost none of my laptop’s resources. I think it reached 20MB of memory and 2% of my CPU (I have a 1.8GHz Core Duo) which is a hell of a lot less than Beagle uses when it’s indexing things – I’ve seen it get up to 60% CPU and 800MB of memory! After the initial indexing Desktop will keep itself up to date with new and edited files.

In terms of searching it’s similar to Beagle – you bring it up with the shortcut key and start typing in what you want to find. Search is performed “live” (you don’t need to hit a search button) and results come up almost instantaneously once you stop typing. Desktop also has an alternate searching method that will bring up a web page, similar to the Google home page, that you can use to search. This page can be brought up by right-clicking on the notification area icon and selecting Show Home Page. The results appear similar to Google’s web search as well so most people would be instantly familiar with it.

I found the search results to be adequate for most purposes. Results are not grouped in any way but different types can be filtered in the browser search. The actual types of files indexed are not exhaustive but most of the things you’d want are covered: OpenOffice documents, Thunderbird mail, PDFs, MP3s and even man pages. Other file types aren’t supported or don’t contain information to index (like most videos) so they are only searchable by their filename. I must say that the ability to search man and info pages is extremely useful for me as bringing up information about a command is really fast now. Really, I can’t say that I have any particular problems with the searching, my only gripe is that there aren’t many results returned initially and you might have to look through multiple pages in your browser.

Overall, Google Desktop is pretty good as a desktop search engine. It doesn’t use up many system resources (which is the reason I got rid of Beagle) and has a nice and simple user interface. It’s not open source so that might turn away some Linux fanatics but for most of us will be an excellent addition to our desktops.