Year: 2009

NetApplications’ hitslink.com just released their april market share stats and linux passed 1% for the first time ever.

Here is a plot of the linux market share for the past several years based on hitslinks’ stats:

1 in 100 desktops/laptops is now linux according to hitslink.  Hurray.  While this number may be a low estimate due to linux users visiting different sites or hiding their browser identity, the main thing to take away from this is the trend: up!  Over 300% in just a few years.

I have been out of town lately; so, not a whole lot has been accomplished on the BerkeleyLUG front in the last few weeks.  I hope to push things further along in the next few weeks.

I thought I’d kick things off a bit with a new post about an awesome (and fairly new) program/service for linux called Dropbox.

If you are like me, you have several computers that you use on a regular basis.  A desktop/server, a laptop, a netbook and a work computer.  It is annoying to have to manually sync files between them by email/flash-drive/ssh etc…  For example, I am often working on a paper at work and want to continue working on it home.  Or, I want my pictures to show up on all my computers when I get them off of my camera.  Same thing for my music, when I buy it (DRM free from AmazonMP3 or Emusic).  For the longest time, I was using rsync to satisfy my syncing needs.  Now, don’t get me wrong, rsync is awesome, but it is less than seemless.  At best I need to click an icon that launches a script to do the sync.  However, dropbox is seemless.  It comes as an extension to nautilus and creates a folder called “Dropbox” in your home directory.  Everything you put in that folder is automatically synced to your private webspace and your other computers.  It all happens in about 5 seconds.

For free, you can sync up to 2GB of of space, and, for a small monthly fee, (which I updated for after testing it for a few days) you can sync up to 50GB.  The program itself is opensource; you are paying for the webspace and bandwidth.

The way I use to sync most of my home director is to have most of my directories located in ~/Dropbox which I symlink to ~/ – the ones that aren’t symlinked are the ones I don’t want synced.  I recommend everyone check this out if you have multiple computers.  The program is awesome, the devs love linux/opensource and are open to suggestions and are extremely active.  A new test version hits the forums several times a week.

The Linux Nvidia driver is a contentious subject, I know.  Forgetting the fact that it is a proprietary binary blob, I think the 180.29 release of the driver release  was their best in years.  Not only did it greatly improve 2D performance on several of my machines and fix numerous bugs, but it added something called VDPAU.  What VDPAU does is offload video decoding/playing from the CPU to the GPU; so, video playback should be smoother and allow you to more easily run other tasks while HD video is playing.

I decided to try this out on the mythbox I built recently to capture the digital HD signal that is freely broadcast over the air these days.  I have an onboard Nvidia GeForce 8200 video card and am running Mythbuntu 8.10 with mythtv 0.21-fixes.  Jean-Yves Avenard backported the 0.22 vdpau elements and created a Mythbuntu repo to upgrade the default packages (it also contains the 180.29 driver).  A discussion of Mythbuntu itself is coming soon.

The results are simply amazing.  The CPU usage on 1080p/i HD video has dropped from ~70% to < 1%!  There isn’t much to say but wow!  It did solve several issues with stability of HD playback in mythv due to high CPU usage and generally gave much smoother transitions.  So, thumbs up to the NVidia Linux devs, the MythTV devs and the Mythbuntu team.  Try it out for yourself if you have a Mythbox and an NVidia card.

People (including myself) criticize NVidia for not open-sourcing their driver, but, at the end of the day, it still gives the best performance and end user experience if you ask me.  That may change in a year as the open-source ATI driver matures.  But, for now, NVidia is still king of Linux graphics.

We are still working out the details of the BerkeleyLUG meeting locations and times.  However, I thought I would also use this space to write regularly about new and interesting developments in desktop linux.

I’d like to start, by pointing peoples attention to two games I have been playing on my ubuntu-eee (now easy-peasy) based Eee 901. I’ll probably write a separate entry on easy-peasy itself sometime soon.

The first is a free and open-source game that has been around for quite awhile called, The Battle for Wesnoth.  It reminds me of a  Super Nintendo game I used to play a lot in middle school called Ogre Battle but with better characters, graphics and gameplay.  Basically, it is a turn based strategy game with a lot of RPG elements like attributes, a story, and awesome artwork.  You basically build up an army through completing ~ 1 hour long campaigns to take back the land of Wesnoth, of which you are the prince and rightful ruler of.  I think it is my new favorite FOSS game of all time (I know there are some good 1st person shooters out there as well: openarena, nexuiz etc..).  The developers have a trailer at the website above, but here are a few screenshots:

The next game I have been playing was just realesed for Linux on Friday: The World of Goo.  It is a really fun game that has existed for Windows/Mac and Wii for a few months.  The developer always emphasized the DRM freeness of the software, intrusting his users to do the right thing without encumbering their experience.  It seems a lot of Windows/Mac users didn’t respect this because it was estimated that 95% of the copies were obtained illegally.  He turned to Linux as an opportunity to increase sales.  This makes a lot of sense to me because Linux users are not known for pirating software – choosing free, open-source and DRM-free options instead of illegal ones.  The World of Goo is not open source, and costs $20, but it is definitely worth it.  It’d be worth it just to send the message to developers that they can make money on Linux apps if they treat users with respect, but the game itself is a blast and easily worth the money on its own.  The goo website also has a trailer that you should check out that does a better job describing the game than any screen caps could.