Apple - Exploring the innards of a Mac Mini

I have always been allured by Apple products - more for their aesthetic beauty than for their function - be it iPhone, iMac,  iPod, iNano et al. Yes, Apple products usually cost the bomb to buy compared to similar products from contenders and we ordinary users may as well stay away from them if we do not want to splurge on gadgets. However, all things said and done, Apple products do appeal to most people's sense of beauty and they are getting popular as days go by.


One Apple product which has especially caught my fancy is the Apple Mini. It is small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, is compact, has almost all interfaces you might expect in a full blown PC, can be connected to non-Apple hardware peripherals such as keyboard, mice, monitor etc, and more importantly - it is priced in the same range as a PC which makes it quite affordable.

If you are curious what a Mac Mini looks within its Aluminium casing, your wish has been granted. Macminicolo.net who provide Mac Mini servers for hire have put together a photo op of the unveiling of the Apple Mac Mini. They unwrap the Apple Mac Mini from its package and then in a step by step manner, show you the hardware that powers this aesthetic beauty. Check out the article.

Now if you are wondering whether you can install Linux on an Apple Mac Mini, yes you can. Find out how you can install Linux on a Mac Mini.

However, anytime you ask me, I will opt for a PC over an Apple Mac for sure. But that is just me saying it.

I will leave you pondering over the following picture of a server farm run entirely using Apple Mac Minis'. (Image courtesy: Macminicolo.net)

Internet is fault tolerant .... Not !

Internet has become a part and parcel of most of our lives. But I did not realize the extent to which I personally was dependent on the Internet till two days back when due to a major underwater cable breakdown in the Mediterranean sea, the Internet slowed to a crawl - well you can say it almost stopped. News reports say 60% of India was affected and over 70% of Egypt.

In India for instance, the three main service providers namely TATA owned VSNL, Reliance and Bharti Airtel Ltd were affected. The repair of the sea cables is expected to take a minimum of 10 days even when conducted on a war footing. According to news reports, the cable snag occurred near Alexandria, off the coast of Egypt on Wednesday affecting ILD and Internet traffic to Europe and the US.

Checking email which we all took for granted was a big chore with opening a single email taking close to an hour. Most sites were not accessible. It did not help that over 90% of the popular sites on the Internet are hosted on a server based in the United states with no cross continental mirroring plan to meet such a scenario.

An exception was Google search which did not see any slowdown because it has data centers in every part of the world and is prepared to meet such emergencies.

This makes me wonder if it is wise to be more and more dependent on the Internet for carrying out even the most mundane but critical tasks like banking, paying bills and booking tickets. Now a days, more and more people are working from the safe confines of their home. As days go by we are getting more and more enmeshed in the online world and acquiring alternate identities. And keeping the Internet fault tolerant is turning out to be a very important factor in our personal wellbeing.

Is there a correlation between Socialism and Free Software ?

The word Socialism is a broad term. There are different streams of socialism. On one end of the spectrum, there is the extreme form of socialism known as communism infamous for its stringent following of its ideology, which was practiced by countries such as the erstwhile USSR (present Russia) and currently by China and Cuba. And at the other end, there is the more humane form of socialism as practiced by countries such as India and Sweden. That is right, India is a sovereign socialist democratic republic nation as stated in the constitution of India.

And before any of you point at the problems faced by India, let me tell you most of those problems are due to its burgeoning population and should not be attributed to its socialist aspect. And as far as Sweden is concerned, it is ranked as the 4th least corrupt nation in the world. A clue that it's people lead contented lives. And Sweden enjoys an ultra low unemployment rate of around 4% which is the least in the European Union.

Simply put, socialism is a process of control of resources by a community or state in varying degrees. So the big question is does the Free Software movement enjoy any relation with socialist ideology ?

If you go by the definition of Socialism, I would say yes. The source code is open and is controlled by the Free software community at large. And it is the community which largely decides and dictates the direction of a software's progress. Each decision is taken through consensus and by interacting with its users. Though at times there is bound to be a lot of bickering and clash of egos, for the large part, the job gets done splendidly. And socialism works in the software realm when it is a massive failure when implemented in an extreme form (read communism) in real life is because unlike the resources in real life, software is a replenish-able resource. You can literally make millions of copies of your source code and distribute it to others free of cost and still you will be left holding the original copy of the source code.

Having stated my views about this topic, I came across this lengthy article which talked about the inherent link between Free software and socialism. What held my attention was the insidious way in which they had portrayed the 'X' in Linux with a hammer and sickle - the trademark of communist movement. If anything, Free software movement is far removed from the mess that is communism.

Is brand name Ubuntu over hyped ?

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution which is famed for its ease of use and has built up an image of being a newbie friendly Linux distribution. Ubuntu has arguably the largest community following compared to all other Linux distributions. And it has enhanced its cause many times by following the policy of shipping free CDs of Ubuntu to anyone willing to try this Linux distribution.

Nowadays if you visit any tech blog or site, you seldom fail to notice at least one article espousing the cause of Ubuntu Linux. In fact, even the media pundits have jumped on to the bandwagon and have started tomtoming the virtues of this very popular Linux distribution (see here, here and many other places).

But recently when I reverentially downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), burned it to a CD and booted into it, guess what? it failed to load.

Fig: Error encountered while booting Feisty Fawn LiveCD

The picture of my monitor above gives an idea of what I was faced with while booting Ubuntu 7.04 from the CD. It was showing an error on the lines that the ata2 port on my machine failed to respond. And I was put into an initramfs built-in shell.

The machine I tried to boot Ubuntu is a moderately recent Pentium 4 machine with 631 MB memory - more than twice the recommended minimum memory needed to load Ubuntu. The machine doesn't have any extra features like bluetooth, WiFi or out of the ordinary peripheral devices. And Debian Etch has been running quite flawlessly on this machine.

I am not an Ubuntu critic. Not even by a long short. In fact, if you search this blog, you will find numerous articles related to Ubuntu where I have talked favorably about it. I was really impressed with Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) and its 6 step install method.

But a regular reader of this blog will find that I have been unusually quiet about the next release version which is Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10). It is not because I hadn't downloaded and installed it. But I did not find anything worth talking about that particular version. In all fairness to Edgy Eft, it at least booted to a complete desktop on my machine. But the latest version of Ubuntu 7.04 - Feasty Fawn, refuses to even boot and gives me the message as seen in the picture above. In all certainty it is a problem related to the Linux kernel bundled with Fiesty Fawn. Then the question arises as to why the Ubuntu team decided to use that particular version of the kernel. Perhaps that is a price you pay when you adopt experimental features without proper testing. I would really like the Ubuntu team to bring out succeeding versions at par with ver 6.06 in terms of quality.

Considering my experience with Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn against the eulogies in the media, I am forced to ask if the brand name Ubuntu is over hyped - most probably the residual effect of an over-zealous community behind it. No Linux distribution is perfect. Each has its pros and cons. I for one would like to see a balanced discussion about the pros and cons of a distribution without delving into unnecessary fanboy-ism.

Update (22 May 2007): It seems this problem is the result of a bug in Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn. Two days back, I received the CD I ordered through shipit. And even this CD refused to boot properly on my machine. A bug report has been filed at launchpad.net which you can read here. And Bheesh has provided a work around to this problem on his site, which I concede I haven't tried out yet as I do not have the patience to go through the whole ruckus just to boot into a Desktop. So as long as Ubuntu team sleeps over this undecided bug, it is sayonara from me to Ubuntu.

KDE 4.0 the holy grail of Desktops ?

A couple of weeks back, I was greeted by the news of a very interesting project having been moved to KDE base. The project in question is a file manager named Dolphin. What is unique about this file manager is that it is light weight, is simple to navigate without overwhelming the Computer neophytes but at the same time does not sacrifice much functionality.

In fact, I installed Dolphin on my machine which has only one window manager namely Xfce. I do not have KDE on this machine. And normally, my experience is that while running KDE applications in non-KDE window managers, the applications suffer some latency at the time of start up. But I was surprised to see that Dolphin started as quickly as any other application. I would so much as say it was even quicker to start up than its equivalent Gnome file manager Nautilus in Gnome. I do not want to start anything by comparing one file manager with another. But let me say this, Dolphin is as easy and simple to use as the Gnome file manager.

Fig: Dolphin file manager with three different file views including split panes.

On concerns shared by the power users who have grown to love the present default file manager in KDE namely Konquorer, this is what Aaron.J.Seigo - the lead developer of KDE project had to say - and I quote :

So, what is the point of dolphin? First, I think it's obvious to everyone that konqueror kicks some pretty serious ass. The downside is that it's really tuned for a particular category of power users. Our plan is therefore to introduce a file manager that is aimed at the rest of the masses and tuned specifically for file management. Where does this leave konqueror? As a power user's app and generally useful multi-function tool. i expect we will continue to ship konqueror in its current form, modulo kde4 improvements to the ui and guts.

From the above statement, I have inferred two things namely :

1. The KDE users who have the mind set of Linus Torvalds need not worry as the new KDE (4.0) will still have all the features that make it the favorite of power users. And more importantly ...
2. The KDE team is making a pitched effort to rein in rest of the people which includes the grandmas and grandpas of this world by providing them an alternate file manager which doesn't overwhelm them.
   

I am sure you will agree with me that a file manager forms one of the most frequently used application in any desktop. You can't think of a OS or desktop devoid of a file manager. And by integrating the light weight file manager Dolphin into the KDE base, the KDE team is sending out a strong signal that it aims to be a Desktop fit for all kinds of people namely the power users and the grandma kinds alike.

Indeed if this trend is duplicated across other KDE applications, KDE 4.0 could very well end up as the holy grail of Desktops.

25 Shortcomings of Microsoft Vista OS - A good reason to choose GNU/Linux ...

As a continuation of the previous post, here are 25 shortcomings found by Frank J. Ohlhorst when he reviewed the yet to be formally released Microsoft Vista OS. I have added my views which are enclosed in parentesis, alongside the Vista shortcomings.

• Vista introduces a new variant of the SMB protocol - (I wonder what is the future of Samba now...)
• Need significant hardware upgrades
• No anti-virus bundled with Vista
• Many third party applications still not supported
• Your machine better have a truck load of Memory - somewhere around 2 GB. (Linux works flawlessly with just 128 MB... even less).
• Too many Vista editions.
• Need product activation. (Now that is something you will never see in Linux).
• Vista OS will take over 10 GB of hard disk space. (With Linux you have a lot of flexibility with respect to the size of the distribution.).
• Backing up the desktop will take up a lot of space. (Not so in Linux)
• No must have reasons to buy Vista. (The fact that Linux is Free is reason enough to opt for it)
• Is significantly different from Windows XP and so there is a learning curve. (Switching to Linux also involves some learning curve but then it is worth it as it doesn't cost you much and in the long run, you have a lot to gain).
• You'd better come to terms with the cost of Vista - it is really exorbitant running to over $300. (In price, Vista can't beat Linux which is free as in beer and Freedom).
• Hardware vendors are taking their own time to provide support for Vista.(Now a days, more and more hardware vendors are providing support for Linux).
• Vista's backup application is more limited than Windows XP's. (Linux has a rich set of backup options and every one of them is free).
• No VoIP or other communication applications built in. (Skype, Ekiga... the list goes on in Linux).
• Lacks intelligence and forces users to approve the use of many native applications, such as a task scheduler or disk defragmenter. (Linux is flexible to a fault).
• Buried controls - requiring a half a dozen mouse clicks. (Some window managers in Linux also have this problem but then here too, you have a variety of choice to suit your tastes).
• Installation can take hours, upgrades even more. (Barring upgrades, installation of Linux will take atmost 45 minutes. Upgrades will take a little longer).
• Little information support for Hybrid hard drives.
• 50 Million lines of code - equates to countless undiscovered bugs. (True, true... It is high time you switch to Linux).
• New volume-licensing technology limits installations or requires dedicated key-management servers to keep systems activated. (Linux users do not have this headache I believe).
• Promises have remained just that - mere promises. A case to the point being WinFS, Virtual folders and so on. - (Clever marketing my friend, to keep you interested in their product).
• Does not have support for IPX, Gopher, WebDAV, NetDDE and AppleTalk. (Linux has better support for many protocols which Windows do not support).
• Wordpad's ability to open .doc files have been removed. (Now that is what I call extinguishing with style. OpenOffice.org which is bundled with most Linux distributions can open, read and write DOC files).
  

Sun Microsystems - doing all it can to propagate its immense software wealth

A couple of weeks back, Sun Microsystems created a buzz in the tech world when it announced its decision to release their flag ship language Java under a GPL license albeit GPL v2. But even though it could have surprised and gladdened the Free Software fans the world over, it is clear that it was a well calculated, deeply thought out decision which was aimed at the survival and further propagation of the Java language.

It is true that at its core, Sun is a hardware company with the bulk of its revenue being generated from selling high end servers, workstations and storage solutions. But it has also invested heavily in developing robust software. And what is amusing is that it does not charge anything for most of the software it has developed and has been providing it free of cost. OpenOffice.org, Netbeans, Java and Solaris being a case to the point.

At one time, Solaris was the most popular Unix operating system enjoying a huge market share, greater than even IBM AIX and HP-UX combined. Then Linux arrived at the horizon and slowly started chipping away at the market share of all the Unixes including Solaris. With Linux gaining demi god status, it was inevitable that Sun take a deep look at itself. It realized that if it did not re-structure its thinking, it will be reduced to a mere hardware company like Dell selling boxes, from its present status as an IP creator. And it has shown enough foresight to change with changing times. Instead of fighting Linux, it started bundling Linux - more specifically Red Hat Linux with its servers along side its own operating system Solaris. And over an year back, it released the Solaris code under an open license and named it OpenSolaris.

Now Sun is going even further by hinting that it is seriously considering releasing Solaris under a GPL license. A few years back, the PCs that were sold did not meet the minimum requirements for running Solaris which made it a difficult proposition to run it as a desktop. But with rapid advances made in the hardware field, a drastic drop in hardware prices and partly thanks to Microsoft for upping the ante with regard to minimum memory requirements for running Vista, it has suddenly become possible to look at Solaris as a viable desktop OS alternative as it works smoothly with just 512 MB RAM.

Fig: Get a Free DVD consisting of Solaris 10 and Sun Studio software

Taking all these events into consideration, Sun is doing everything in its power to ensure that the fruits of its hard work lives on and gains in popularity. A few days back when I visited Sun's website, I was surprised to see a link offering to send a free DVD media kit consisting of the latest build of Solaris 10 and Sun Studio 11 software to the address of ones choice. I have always believed that one of the reasons for Ubuntu to gain so much popularity was because of its decision to ship free CDs of its OS. Perhaps taking a leaf from Ubuntu, Sun has also started shipping free DVDs of Solaris 10 OS to anybody who want a copy of the same - a sure way of expanding its community.

In the long run, the logical thing for Sun to do will be to release Solaris under GPL. By doing so, Sun would gain the immense good will of the Free Software fans the world over and ensure a permanent place in the history of computing. Unlike GNU/Linux which is a loose amalgamation of scores of individual software pieces around the Linux kernel, Solaris is a whole product whose tools are tightly integrated with its kernel. So even if Solaris is released under GPL, it may not see as many distributions as we see in Linux. And who is better qualified to provide services and support for Solaris other than Sun itself?

Mac OSX - Should it use the Linux Kernel ?

A couple of days back, in a news article titled - Monolithic Kernel vs Micro kernel - published on this blog, I had described the intense debate on this between two school of thoughts fueled by Linus Torvalds and professor Andrew.S.Tanenbaum. One of the examples Andy had given as proof of the stability of micro kernel architecture was the popular Mac OSX itself which (according to Andy) runs on top of the Mach kernel which follows the micro-kernel architecture.

Now it is well known that the Mach micro-kernel, from its inception has been ridden with problems both design wise as well as in performance. So there are many people who wonder why Apple still uses the mach kernel with all its design flaws. In fact there is a group in the Apple community who favor transferring OSX to run on top of the Linux kernel instead which by the way is a monolithic kernel.

Daniel Eran has written an interesting article debunking the popular belief that Mac OSX is based on a micro-kernel architecture and goes on to explain that Apple's kernel named XNU kernel is not implemented as a micro-kernel. In fact, he is of the opinion that the original Mach kernel on which OSX is based on is a fat kernel and it was the Mach micro-kernel project which was a failure.

My Opinion

We are not short of robust kernels be it the BSD kernel, Linux or any other. In fact the beauty of the POSIX environment is that one can switch one kernel for the other and with a little effort still build a stable and secure OS which is what makes this OS design of separating the OS kernel from the userland tools such an exciting proposition.