(Free) Software

As most of you know, I use FreeBSD as my main Desktop-OS. But I also keep a ArchLinux around that I use (almost exclusively) for gaming. After being disappointed with the way it is headed since a while already, I am now completely fed up with it and am desperately seeking an alternative.

[rant]ArchLinux claims to keep it simple, but over the last year or two it has accumulated an increasing about of bloatware, especially all the stuff that Lennart Poettering is spewing out. Yes, I am conservative in a lot of techie ways, I am a little biased, as I heard lots of bad things about the software before actually using it, but I did give all the stuff a fair try and it just failed epicly. For PulseAudio I was at least able to replace it with OSSv4, which had proper support on ArchLinux at the time. Not really proper, as some programs stopped producing audio (e.g. Chromium), but at least all the gaming stuff worked. Then came systemd and it really is worse then everything I heard about it. Upgrading to systemd severely broke my system (I would never have switched, had I not been forced to by Arch), it took me a countless number of hours to make it boot again. But it is still really broken, and not broken, in the “I need to find the right config”-way, but in the “Let’s roll the dice”-Windows way were everything is unpredictable. First of all one in three boots fails, because systemd messes up the order of the nfs-mounts. OSS now has some weirdness as well, where it sometimes just doesn’t work and restarting the computer makes it work again. Shutting down the system actually never works, because on shutting down, it again messes up the order of nfs unmounts and never manages to stop OSS (the things actually spawns jobs to stop other processes, see the irony?!). But the biggest issues is that after a random amount of minutes systemd or logind or whatever is responsible for logins just crashes, throwing me unto a console, which asks me to enter my root password or press Ctrl-D to continue and where my keyboard doesn’t work anymore (apparently that is handled by the same stuff). Wild button-pressing sometimes retuns me back to X, which then seems to just keep on working, with the exception of an ocasional flicker. And of course – thanks to systemd – there is nothing logged anywhere in any form that I can read… Really, most sysadmins I know warned me about the unreliability of systemd, but I didn’t expect it to be that bad. And all of it just to boot one second faster. The GNU/Linux desktop has really fallen far IMHO and I seriously doubt that the whole concept of making everything more integrated and removing modularity and other core unix concepts will help the Free Software movement in the end. Where we win people with some eye-candy and a faster boot, we will alienate more because the software becomes unstable, unreliable and unpredictable. Rebooting should never be the fix to a problem! [/rant]

I thought I’d cover how I got to my current dual-boot on my Transformer. The main difference to other setups is, that my Transformer’s data partition is encrypted, which makes some steps more difficult.

The Goal

After following these instructions you will have a regular dual-boot on the transformer, like on any notebook or desktop, i.e. when booting the device you get to select which OS to start. The Android experience is in no way diminished, everything works as before. The Ubuntu experience is just like you would have on a notebook, with RAM being the only limiting factor and some rough edges. Wifi and (proprietary) 3d- and video-acceleration work. Unity works, although I use awesome wm, as everywhere else. The rough edges are missing suspend support, some rendering glitches here and there, no VTs… for more info, see the XDA-thread of the port. This is also the place, in case anything described here doesn’t work.

This is a pretty serious one: there are no proper E-Mail apps for Android tablets. Yes, I know there is K9, but K9 is only good for phones. Seeing that the K9 people also develop the proprietary (and for-money) Kaitan Mail, which is for tablet and high-resolution phones, I have little hope of seeing K9 being upgraded any time soon to being usable on tablets.

The only alternative I have seen so far is the stock Jelly-Bean(and after) Mail program, which looks decent on my screen and which I use right now. But it also lacks so many crucial features, that I am not happy with it at all. Just to name a few:

Next weekend we are going to have a small hackathon in Berlin to port/fix/implement disk encryption on various Android devices.

Android has full disk encryption since 4.0, but it only works when using regular filesystems, e.g. ext. If you have a device that doesn’t offer proper block devices, because the hardware doesn’t do wear-leveling et cetera, you will probably have YAFFS2 as a file system or something similar that does this on software side. Unfortunately this prevents standard encryption (luks, dm-crypt…) from working. But there is some outdated code floating around that is supposed to implement this, which we will try to update and integrate with current CyanogenMod. More details on the issue can be found here, here and here (in parts).

Ok, so you know that I am using Android, and that I am not too happy with the situation. Ultimately Android is a JAVA-based operating system for phones, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that trying to replace a FreeBSD (or proper GNU/Linux) laptop with it, will cause some grief.

But, than Android does have some cool things (which I might elaborate on in another post), and the availibility just forces us as political Free Software users to take the OS seriously and care about its users.