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Graphical user interfaces have been around for a while now. In the last thirty years the available resolutions to the developers has gotten greater and this inevitably has spawned prettier and cleaner themes, however there is very little in the way of innovation Whilst looking into GUIs, the same tried and tested methods are there. They focus on chiefly on static, menu driven systems and desktops that vary in implementations and design, but rarely innovate.

The Early Years, between 1980 and 1990s was the .com boom for GUI interfaces. For us now its a fascinating time because its strange to think of Microsoft has being anything other than a massive monopolistic corporation that is shoving Vista down our throats. Sure we compute in a world safe in the knowledge that the 'cool' guys use Macs and that Linux is that sexy broad thats always just out of reach of the ordinary guy. But it was not always like this, in the very early years of command line interfaces and dodgy shells the GUI really started in earnest with the Apple Lisa Project. It featured drop down menus and desktop icon spaces and was definitely ahead of its time.

From 1984- 1988 the Operating system market was very healthy, with no fewer than 5 different Operating Systems being released and updated. In the few years since then, several contenders have battled it out trying to assert dominance over the Operating System scene. Some emerged 'victorious' (e.g. Apple, Linux, Microsoft) and others faded into distant memory (e.g. Geoworks, Amiga, IBM's OS/2, QNX, BeOS, Acorn, NeXT and others.) It is not until the early 1990s that things started to get interesting, Windows 3.0/3.1 and NT 3.1 were all released within a few years of each other adding a much need update to the old DOS mode graphics.

Throughout all of this, the basic way in which a workspace environment is structured had not changed, no new interface ideas come forth during this era. The operating systems were very different on a code and design level, but the basic menu / desktop point and click interface was well and truly established by this stage. Recently hardware 3D rendering has taken center stage and is most commonly seen with Vista's Aero Glass effects. Linux is the platform on which the greatest innovation is taking place and this of course is as a result of the openness of the platform - the ability to code / implement anything. Whilst the main two desktop managers (Gnome and KDE) are most widely known and recognized there are many fringe desktop mangers from minimalist (e.g. XFCE, flux/busybox) to the specialist (e.g. enlightenment). Whilst providing a great degree of flexibility and variety, they do not really innovate. An exciting project on Linux, originally started by Novel, forked in 2003 and in March remerged back into Compiz Fusion. This was the Linux answer to 3D rendering and whilst the variety and flexibility of Compiz / Beryl (now Compiz Fusion) are astounding, they still offer very little in the way of innovation, just a LOT of eye candy.

And now, finally, I get to the point of this article - desktop managers and the future (check back in five years for a laugh) of desktop interaction. There are three projects which potentially offer new ways to interact with the desktop are Bumptop's physics enabled desktop, Microsoft's Photosynth and Sun's Project Looking Glass.

Physics - on a desktop?!? Madness?

Bumptop is primarily a desktop icon manager, but its main selling point is that every icon (or groups of icons) can be moved / rotated / thrown around the desktop like a chip on a poker table. An obsessively neat person? No problem, stack your icons by file size, document type or by content.

Having a stressful day a the office? Throw your desktop clutter around until you feel better!

The flexibility of this manager is astounding, but whether it will need a new level of human-machine interaction before it takes off remains to be seen. If you have not yet seen their demo on youtube you definitely should.

Photosynth - Surprisingly innovative

Whilst not normally one to be particularly impressed by Microsoft and their 'technology', I am fascinated by Photosynth. The ability to create 3D objects from a series of photos is definitely an interesting concept, but its the way Photosynth presents the documents that could revolutionise the way we store and view documents in the future. To me, this is what I had in mind when Microsoft were talking about a journalised database filesystem back in the days of longhorn. Whilst this is the main focus of the technology, I was simply stunned at the way in which this project groups media. Regardless the size / dimension or media type, a 3D rendered wall is created of all your documents at the same time. Opening one is as simple as zooming into the image or pdf document. Of particular note was the ability to render books in their entirety and zoom from the outset into a single chapter.

 

The presentation is ten minutes long and there is no excuse for not watching it! :)

Project Looking Glass - Beware on a Sun-ny day.

I came across this project today and was quite taken with it. Initially it looks like a series of snazzy extension to Compiz, however when you dig a bit deeper you find that there are a handful of rather cool features. Rather than windows minimising to a taskbar, they rotate and stick in a 3D fashion to the sides of the screen.

This gives you not only a stack of windows occupying the minimum of desktop real estate, but a preview of each window at the same time making it the ultimate cross between Alt-Tab and the 'live' preview that hovering over the window gives you in Windows Vista and Compiz Fusion. Whilst the taskbar is used as a window dock, rather than being docked as tabs, widgets with window previews are used to further add to the experience.

Also demonstrated is a media player that allows track / album selection through a slew of rotating CDs with cover art. This looks a really clean way of quickly and easily selecting your music rather than searching through a long list.

Another interesting feature is wallpaper that is different on each desktop space (but part of the same overall picture). In the youtube video, the default deskspace is in the center, when you look at the left or right screens, you see the left or right part of the panoramic wallpaper, a very neat feature.

Credit: Some images from http://toastytech.com/guis/

I previously wrote a brief article about gOS - the new cheap FOSS pc that brings Google Apps combined with Linux to the masses. Interestingly today I came across the 'dev kit' version, for $60 you can buy the motherboard and processor out of this PC which normally retails for > $200. This is a hackers dream as the main criticism with the initial gOS was the fact that it came in a shockingly large ugly case for the size of the internal components. I was sorely tempted to buy it in order to harvest the internals and build it into a slim client. This dev kit would make it a lot easier (and cheaper) to do however its only available in the US at the moment.

In a refreshingly philanthropic move (especially historically when intellectual property has been involved) Will Wright has donated the original SimCity for the One Laptop Per Child project in the hope that it will inspire a generation of OOTB (out of the box) thinkers. This idea was born from the 'SimCity.edu' project by Don Hopkins, essentially making SimCity into a multiplayer game to help teach Civil and Environmental Engineering running on Linux/X11.

Also, while you are browsing, an old friend of mine told me about 'The Nites', an unsigned band that have some great music on their Myspace. I highly recommend listening!

... and to my regular visitors I promise, the next post will be original content rather than hotlinking. I humbly submit myself for your forgiveness.  

Woohoo! The eagerly awaited Daedalus R13 is here after a four month break between releases! Here is what StrmnNrmn had to say today:

Whilst StrmnNrmn has not been working on increasing compatibility, he has been working on optimising the dynarec stack which should allow for a 10-20% fps increase in exisiting games. I have downloaded it and will post feedback when I have had a chance to get to grips with this new release.

Download 1.0 , 1.5 source for R13.

RAM, all computers need it, and there are more types of it than you can shake a stick at (excuse the pun), and people often take it for granted, however faults with RAM are one of the quickest ways to screw up your computer, more so than almost any other component except perhaps a dodgy power supply (QTech anyone?). I have personally busted entire Operating System installs with bad ram overclocks- times like that you better pray you weren't stupid enough to leave your valuable documents ect on the same partition as Windows.

So RAM stability is the cornerstone of a reliable computer, and whether or not you overclock your components, knowing that you computer is stable is peace of mind that you can't put a price on, but how do you go about testing your system to see if all is running well, or if you have hidden faults waiting to surface and destroy your valuable data?

In fact with a little know-how you can do it totally free if you have a spare hour or two (mostly unattended), and this brings us to the topic of this brief(ish) article....... MemTest and Memtest86+, the only RAM testing software worth talking about.

MemTest is a tiny windows exe that allows you to input the amount of memory that you wish to test, and then chuggs away happily testing it, telling you its progress by a % of the RAM you have assigned it, while you do other things (though beware it will use up a substantial amount of CPU power as well), leave if running for a hour or two, and if it has any errors then your RAM is unstable. There are fundamental limits on the reliability of this though, as the amount of RAM being tested by a single occurrence of the program is 1184MB (this can be circumvented by running two versions at once however), and also as the program obviously cannot access RAM being used by the Operating System, or by the user, you may miss "Bad" sectors of your RAM by the fact that they are being used!

Memtest86+ is the bigger brother of MemTest, and treats the testing with a rather more serious approach. Rather than a Windows program, you have a bootable CD, or a USB/Floppy EXE for use from DOS. This more rigorous approach allows you to test the entire RAM (bar the few kb in takes up), rather than the small amount you assign MemTest to use, as there is no Operating System or other programs running. Memtest86+ also has a series of different "Tests" that it runs, of differing complexities, in each "Pass". To make life even easier, many Linux CD's carry a copy of Memtest86+ accessible from the boot menu, so there really is no reason why you shouldn't have a copy close to hand. If you don't have a linux live/install CD handy then you can obtain via a small download a version to run from a floppy or USB key from the official site.

 

RAM that produces ANY errors on Memtest86+ is faulty and should be removed from the system ASAP, and preferably returned for replacement. Leaving it in the system can cause problems varying from occasional program freezes and crashes, through to corruption of files and total Operating Systems. Most RAM has an extensive if not lifetime warranty, so there is no reason to run the risk of running faulty RAM.

I personally use both the programs, MemTest for quick testing while I have other things to do, often when i am trying to initially test the stability of an overclock, and then Memtest86+ when i am either trying to analyse for long term stability, or trying to identify RAM with an inherent fault. The pictures you see above come from recent tests of my own system, analysing my 4 RAM sticks for errors, 2 of which you can see have been diagnosed as faulty and need replacing and has since been removed from my system.

So whether you are an overclocker looking to squeze that extra bit out of your system without compromising on stability, or just someone that wants a computer they can depend on, MemTest and Memtest86+ are great tools that will allow you to rely on your computer with certainty.

News broke this week of a new sub $200 system being sold in American stores running a 'gOS' distribution of Linux. As it turns out the 'g' is indeed for our overlords Google as the system comes with several Google Apps installed as per default. In the obligatory attached screenshots I noticed a slightly unusual desktop environment running and decided to do some digging. It turns out that the window manager used is the minimalist Enlightenment with a number of tweaks and customisations. gOS is available as a LiveCD which I have now downloaded but not had a chance to try. Seeing some quite impressive screenshots of Enlightenment DR17 in action I decided to take the plunge and try to install it onto my Ubuntu 7.04 laptop. This took about an hour because it has to compile and a lot of the material you find is out of date.

The last official built (E16) was released in 2000/2001 and as a result its horribly out of date. The most recent unstable release is DR17. Unfortunately with this release, it has to be built from CVS although there is a script written by Morlenxus which greatly simplifies the process. Annoyingly, since the last unofficial release was a good few months ago, the default dependencies have either changed, been superseded or have broken. As a result it might take a few attempts before the script completes. I opted for the minimal installation + extra modules.

The first thing I needed to do was add the appropriate sources to my sources.lst. This can be gone either from the GUI or via:

sudo [insert your favorite text editor here e.g. gedit] /etc/apt/sources.list

and add these lines...

deb http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17

deb-src http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17

Save and close. Next you need to download the gpg key for this repository to check the digital signatures of the code downloaded.

wget http://lut1n.ifrance.com/repo_key.asc

sudo apt-key add repo_key.asc

You can now delete this armored key file. Next you will have to update your lists.

sudo apt-get update

SIDE NOTE: According to ubuntugeek, all that is now required is the command 'sudo apt-get install e17' however this is not how I did it so I can not attest to this working.

Next I downloaded and installed some required dependancies to make sure they were all present on my system.

sudo apt-get install gcc-3.4 g++-3.4 libx11-dev libpng12-dev libtiff4-dev libfreetype6-dev

libssl-dev zlib1g-dev xlibmesa-dev xlibmesa-gl-dev libxine-dev libtag1-dev libxml2-dev

automake autogen libsqlite3-dev libtagc0-dev

Now I downloaded the rather good script by Morlenxus using the following command. Make sure you are in your home directory for this. (If you are not sure use the command pwd)

wget http://omicron.homeip.net/projects/easy_e17/easy_e17.sh

Now make the script executable.

chmod +x easy_e17.sh

According to the official instructions, the next command entered should be './easy_e17.sh -i' this would by default install E17 with all the modules and dependencies This did not work for me for the reasons described above so instead I used the following command.

./easy_e17.sh -i --skip=imlib2,edb,emotion,entrance,eclair,evfs,edje_viewer,edje_editor,elicit,evolve,elitaire,

emphasis,empower,engycad,scrot,entrance_edit_gui,entropy,ephoto,estickies,exhibit,expedite,extrackt,

engage,enthrall,rage,emu,flame,moon,rain,screenshot,snow,language,mixer

This will omit the troublesome packages. If you still have problems then you can try installing just E17.

./easy_e17.sh -i --skip=imlib2,edb,emotion,entrance,eclair,evfs,edje_viewer,edje_editor,elicit,evolve,e_dbus,

elitaire,emphasis,empower,engycad,entrance_edit_gui,entropy,scrot,ephoto,estickies,exhibit,expedite,

extrackt,engage,enthrall,rage,scrot,alarm,bling,cpu,deskshow,emu,flame,forecasts,language,mail,

mem,mixer,moon,net,news,photo,rain,screenshot,slideshow,screenshot,snow,taskbar,tclock,uptime,

weather,winselector,wlan,mixer

You can always install packages later. Once the installation has completed, you need to add the path to your opt/environment file.

sudo [insert your favourite text editor here e.g. gedit] -w /etc/environment

Append the following to the PATH line:

PATH="(whatever was here before):/opt/e17/bin"

Mine looks like this:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/ bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/opt/e17/bin"

Save and exit. With the skip script above, Entrance, the default login manager for E17 has been left out as it can sometimes cause problems according to several threads. As such your existing login manager will be used. A guide how to install Entrance with E17 can be found here and basically involves removing entrance from the --skip.

We now need to add an entry for Enlightenment so that it is can be loaded after login.

sudo [insert your favorite text editor here e.g. gedit] /usr/share/xsessions/enlightenment.desktop

And add the following:

[Desktop Entry]

Encoding=UTF-8

Name=Enlightenment

Comment=Enlightenment Window Manager - www.enlightenment.org

Type=XSession

Exec=/usr/bin/enlightenment_start

TryExec=/usr/bin/enlightenment

Please note the _start in bold. This is important and not on any of the forums link to from this article. If you do not add this then Enlightenment will not start properly. It crashed on loading and recovering via F1 didnt fix the problem so appending this will save you some headaches.

That will give you a fairly minimal E17 to customise. You will however want to change from the default theme fairly quickly and Get-E.org is a great source for themes. As a side note, if you want to update E17, use the following command :

sudo ./easy_e17.sh -u

Enlightenment also supports animated backgrounds, however I have not tested this feature and all the example videos I have seen show it to be horribly stuttery.

For more information or support I would encourage you to visit the following places : old & updated ubuntu installation guide, Enlightenment page.

As a whole, I rather like E17 but I have not had enough time to really play with it. When I have I will post some more on the subject.

I have known about the openbios / linuxbios project for a little while now, but today I discovered a video demonstrating an early build running on a standard 2Mb flash EEPROM. Not only does it completely replace the standard Award BIOS but it boots to a graphical (if lightweight) X11 server in just a few seconds. Although this project is still fairly new (shown by limited compatibility) the concept of having a unified, free bios that allows fast prebooting into a graphical environment is appealing. I believe Macs do something similar, they boot into a very stripped down GUI giving graphical boot options. This idea is not new and ASUS demonstrated a couple of weeks back a motherboard that has an embedded linux distribution ready to boot before windows. The technology is called Splashtop and allows access to email, skype and the web from a stripped down linux environment.

More and more I am seeing a trend towards 'at-an-arms-length' computing and I have mixed feelings about it. Whilst linuxbios would allow better / more efficient booting into a Linux (or other OS) distribution, having a stripped down environment where you could then VNC or telnet into another more powerful system is an interesting idea with lots of potential applications. Imagine a media center PC that was fast (as in instant) to boot and silent due to all the processing being done on another machine on the network, it would be an ideal mediacenter environment. Similarly there is a low murmuring that has been increasing in volume for the last few years concerning a complete shake up of the traditional computing environment. It essentially started with web '2.0' i.e. applications as a service. The whole idea of being able to log into a personalised environment in a web browser is an appealing one, be it a web operating system like eyeOS or just a social networking environment like Facebook. Not only can you have access to your personal space/files/environment remotely, but instead of buying a powerful machine and maintaining its software and hardware, buying a thin client and computing entirely online. Many people simply do not have the technical expertise or the time to properly maintain their home computers. Simple tasks such as regular defragmentations or temporary file cleanup and data archiving often are not done regularly. Many computers I see do not even have basic security programs running. A secure thin client running on a whitelist basis would not need such constant attention and any security would be handled remotely by the application provider. Potentially providers could offer really cheap, low power machines with a monthly payment, which would serve as a lease for an online operating system and storage space.

Although there are potentially a lot of benefits, there is something about relying entirely on a network that is outside your control, (the Internet) a service provider that could have a dubious privacy policy (look at AT&T) and a locked down client which does not appeal to me. I have very much bought into the F/OSS philosophy and the concept of being locked into a proprietary system does not appeal at all, let alone relying on a foreign (i.e. outside my home system) network - especially with my ISP's service record.

I must admit to being a huge Battlestar Galactica fan, so imagine my delight when I discovered a community project to make a space combat game from the same universe! It combines some of my favourite words - community and game but the best thing is that it's actually a hell of a lot of fun. The controls are complicated, as not only do you have traditional control over propulsion (e.g. thrust and 'flaps') but also manoeuvring thrusters as well. This means it takes quite a while to get adjusted and I can hear Starbuck berating me in the back of my head every time I muck up a turn. I am such a frakking nugget at the moment in this game at the moment. The Cylon raiders are every bit as dangerous as they are portrayed on TV, twisting, ducking diving making it very difficult to destroy, even in a one on one battle. There have been times when I have had an AI Cylon raider in my sights but the damn thing kept twisting and turning around asteroids making it extremely difficult to kill. There are a few issues with the game which are caused by the engine on which the game is based. Occationally there are graphical clipping errors on the asteroids but on the whole these are pretty small issues.

>

The only draw back is that you really need to use a game pad to play this game properly, preferably one with a lot of buttons although there is a lot of talk on the forums of people quite happily using a keyboard and mouse. The number of single player missions is currently a bit limited but that is mostly because only a short demo has been released. Multiplayer on the other hand is fully implemented thanks to it being based on an open source port of Freespace2 and is a lot of fun with several teams having cropped up.

This is definitely one to check out and bookmark, if their future release builds on the demo, it will rival several recent commercial games.

BtRL Videos:

Thanks to Simon for help proofing.

With many exciting releases either on the way (*buntu, MEPIS ) or already here (Mandriva) I find myself trying desperately to switch my primary OS to one of these flavors. The problem is, at the moment, I cannot run Linux as a standalone operating system without at least dual booting with windows XP. Whilst my hardware at the moment is (almost)completely supported by modern Linux my massive upgrade, which is just over the horizon, would likely prevent me from running a Linux OS with full hardware acceleration. I believe this is a problem that many gamers face and I can not see any solution presently. The problem lies in one of the main uses of my PC - gaming.

I play a lot of games and as such, migrating away from an operating system like XP or Vista is a bad idea. Even though quite a few games (Doom 3, America's Army etc) have Linux builds, most games do not. Whilst API compatibility projects such as WINE are making excellent progress, it is generally not sufficient to play modern (i.e. newly released) games properly and with no performance hit. The major sticking point is graphics card drivers. Whilst these are reasonably mature for nVidia, ATi drivers (both binary and to an extent the fglx ones) are substandard. For years ATi has been promising new and improved drivers but at the moment this has not happened. Whilst I was going to have a rant about support of new graphics cards, I am pleasantly surprised to find much improved support in recently announced drivers.

An option of course, is to goto Linux and buy a Xbox 360 / PS3. Whilst I think the simplicity of putting a disc in and playing a game (just like that - no OS, no configuring graphics and tweaking for your hardware etc) is great and a breath of fresh air, the lack of openness in a console environment massively puts me off. I like being able to make my own maps / models etc for games I play. More to the point, some of the most enjoyable games I have played recently have been total conversion mods - something not accommodated for in a console environment like Beyond the red line - a BattleStar Galactica mod. You only have to see the difference a few user made mods make to Oblivion to want to play it all over again.

(image source)(title icon source)

So as any returning visitor will note, I have implemented a blog formating to this site. I did this because the majority of what I post will be in the form of topic news items / blog posts. As such it made no sense just taking on new entry after new entry and silently archiving old posts where noone would ever see them again. Whilst that still might happen with this system, at least it is easier to view previous posts by category / date. I will be transitioning everything over to the new blog format given a couple of days.

The software I am using is completely free and open source, as such I would like to say thank you to the developers by pointing it out to people who might be thinking about starting their own blog. Its called Thingamablog and it has a whole host of cool features and a good support forum. The only thing I dislike is the ping function, which alerts a blog resource (default is weblog.com) when a blog is updated. Whilst this is actually quite a nice idea, the site in question is being hammered by spammers which makes it completely defunct sadly.

I was a bit disappointed to discover the 7.10 release of ubuntu wont be officially out until the middle of the month. However the team are making solid progress with a lot of new features now implemented. It leaves me with mixed feelings, seeing the long list of new gadgets and fancy things the new release will have as per default. Whilst I love the idea of Beryl/Compiz window managers installed and ready to use on first bootup, along with several features like fast user switching and the search appbar, it makes me wonder what kind of performance hit we are going to see with the default installation compared to 7.04.

It all feels highly reminiscent of Vista and I really do hope that I am wrong in this prediction. I have been toying, not quite switching over, to ubuntu since 5.04 and overall I think the project is going from strength to strength, however the number of bugs and issues that were still present, even in 7.04 makes me wonder why these little bugs / gaps in the interface are not the primary focus of this new release. Whilst many of the improvements Gnome 2.20 adds to this release will be met with enthusiasm, I can't work out why a good portion of their development time is spent working on their PIMs (e.g. Evolution mail client and Epiphany web browser.) Not all the PIM programs are like this though, there are some that seem genuinely useful and important to have in a good window manager. Given the massive use of firefox and mozilla, in my opinion, some of these default programs seem more like wordpad, IE and Outlook Express (now Mail in Vista.) Sure they have some user base, but for a lot of people, they are the first programs to be replaced either by Microsoft or Mozilla offerings. Perhaps it would make sense for these programs to be spun off to allow the core dev team to work on the more pressing issues with Gnome. I am not, however, advocating removing these programs from official distributions of Gnome as this would leave a gap for end users who just want Ubuntu to work without hassle. Sadly I am not experienced (or Gutsy enough) with Linux to install a bleeding edge version (like 7.10 tribes 4) - I will have to be patent a little while longer and I guess if I don't like it I can just move my favoritism over to another distribution. I love Linux  

Today I added some software which helps in the indexing of large sites.Project page.

For those of you who dont know, Geexbox is a very good, space and resource efficient piece of Media Center software based on Linux.