I took a little break today from the C++ and Lua stuff I've been doing to have a look at Google's new phone platform. I followed the installation instructions and had some demos up and running pretty quickly. I also grabbed the source and poked around to see whose shoulders they stand on.

Background

I'm trying to move forward with the plan I outlined the other day. In short I want to use LDAP to simplify my home network of five computers and six users. I haven't got as far as setting up a login yet but I have got the LDAP server running on one of the computers (named copper) that's running OpenSuse 10.2.

Today I just want to talk about the steps I've taken to experiment at getting something going. I'm learning this as I go and these are just notes to help remember how I got to where I am. If they help you too then that's great.

The conference went really well considering there was no electricity until 3pm. It wasn't their fault - the power was out in that whole part of the city apparently. Candace went ahead without the PowerPoint Slides she worked so hard to make and gave a great talk on Collaboration Nation. She gave an intro to a bunch of the different ways people collaborate and work together online. It can be a tough topic to approach when you're already using blogs, wikis and every Web 2.0 social site effortlessly. You have to go back to the spot you came in from and try to draw your audience in. I think Candace did a great job of it in the half hour she had. It sounds like U Windsor's got the Open Source bug. The new software they're deploying campus-wide is an open source Learning Management System called Sakai. The executive director of the Sakai foundation, Dr. Chuck, gave the keynote. It sounds like they follow a model a lot like Apache Foundation, in that there's a non-profit foundation which guides the project and a bunch of developers volunteering their time to get the actual work done.

I can think of three things I really want from my email: it should be easy to use, fast, and private. SquirrelMail gets me pretty close to those goals. It just got better today with the release of version 1.4.10. Somewhere between the last version I last installed and this one they've added support for multiple identities - that is to say that you can have more than one return address.

I listened to a talk John Ostrem gave at the 2006 Emerging Telephony Conference. I got the podcast from ITConversations. His talk is about LiPS, the Linux Phone Standards Forum. The talk went well enough and I learned a little bit but I was left wanting to know more. I guess that's a good side-effect for a standards group. LiPS seems to be interested in the middle layers of software on a mobile phone. They're not in the kernel stuff, that's something that OSDL is working on. They're not at the top layer, that's up to application developers and left for various handset and service providers to differentiate themselves. LiPS sounds like it's there to work with the in-between parts. The window management and some of the UI mechanics - not UI details like layout or design but maybe widgets or something under there.

A while ago I started thinking about running World of Warcraft on Linux, and someone even left me a note about a petition for a Linux-native client a month or two ago too. I'd love to see a native client for WoW in Linux, but that's not here today. So I turned to Wine for the first time in years.

I tried Wine way back when I first installed Debian Linux in 1998. Things were different then. I'd wanted to try out Linux before then but I was help up by lack of support for exotic things like IDE hard drives. Yes, it was a different time. I was tied to a lot more closed-source Windows apps, like the brilliant IRC client mIRC. So my experience with Wine was trying to get mIRC running without really understanding Winsock, sockets, or any of that stuff. The program would start but never connected. Let's just say I was left wanting.

While I've been off doing my own thing, the Wine team has been hard at work and they've done some amazing things. Amazing things like working without an installed copy of MS Windows on your machine, supporting some DirectX stuff and generally taking a lot of the pain out of running Windows applications on Linux. My new desktop is a single-boot machine so far. I might try out MS Windows Vista some day, but I'm not in any hurry.

So the other day I started thinking about how fast my AMD 64 X2 4200+ computer is compared to my year-old Compaq R3000z laptop that I've been running WoW on. I read about some very positive experiences with WoW on Wine under other Linux distros.

I criticize them for locking it up, so I have to give props to Google when they talk about letting users take their own data. I realize it's only a speech and nothing specific about their own plans, but the fact that the people at the top are talking about giving data back is great. Vendor lock-in sucks. I realize more and more just how much different things could be every time I pick up a new Open Source project. From Linux to Firefox to Asterisk, every one has opened my eyes to what can be done when people are free to choose. And talk like this makes me believe there's room left before this whole Internet boat sails on over that crapwave. So thanks for the sentiment Mr. Schmidt, I look forward to seeing how you follow through on it.

Let me start out with a warning, in case you don't know me, I'm really good with computers and pretty good with Linux. I'm a first-rate amateur with the telephony side of things, so my terminology may be off and there may be some concepts that I just don't get yet. Before you agree to pay for anything, my advice is to get an idea of the rough costs of the service. I asked about my plans on the Toronto Asterisk Users Group mailing list and received some great pointers. The latest version of Asterisk at the time I'm writing this is 1.2.13. I had some success experimenting with VoIP on FC4, so I want to install Asterisk on my current SuSE 10.1 and see if I can get any further with it. Unfortuanately the package offered to me is 1.2.5. I wouldn't normally care about being a few minor versions behind but the last update was for a security fix for a pretty popular device - there could be modules I'd be running that would be vulnerable.

From Trolltech's announcement:

Greenphone will be offered as part of a complete software development kit (SDK) and includes Trolltech’s Qtopia Phone Edition, a comprehensive application platform and user interface for Linux-based mobile phone. Although not intended as a commercial mobile phone, Greenphone has many of the communication functions and features found in today’s sophisticated smartphones. Developers can exploit these features and functions in developing their own unique applications.

Pretty exciting stuff. Personally, I'd love to see phone built on Open Source software (all the way down to the drivers) become available. I know I'd pay extra to actually be able to get my code running on it. I've bought programming cables for a Motorola J2ME phone in the past and was wildly disappointed. I mean it seems as though manufacturers go to every effort to make sure I can't fully use the hardware I bought - from the unnecessarily complex SIM cards to the proprietary (and ever-changing) connectors on the bottom. Is it really that existing consumer formats for flash devices and USB ports don't meet the requirements of the phone or is it that they'd rather I didn't see what was going on in there? The software that ships on my midlevel phone is a joke. If programming it were as simple as connecting the USB port on it and installing an SDK then there'd be a whole lot better software out there and more people using it. As much as I hope this advances Open Source for mobile phones, I have a hard time being optimistic about it. Generally to do the really good stuff you have to have access to the carrier's network and they have complete control over who gets on and what they do. For some reason it's insanely restricted compared to Internet access that the average application can do on a personal computer with unconsious effort.

A couple weeks ago I wanted to try out TrixBox (the new name for Asterisk@Home). As far as I understand it's supposed to be a BDI for Asterisk. I still don't like their installer - the instructions on their site don't match the instructions you get when you boot from the disc. When the disc boots, it looks just like the normal installer for Fedora Core or CentOS. The screen says you can pass parameters to the kernel at boot. I usually use the line "linux ide=nodma" to avoid some issue with my hard drive controller or drives that slows things down. So I did the same thing here. And I got a familiar Anaconda Installer. This is the same path I went down with Asterisk@Home and never got anywhere. That's because there are packages listed on the installer screens that can't be installed.