Elroyjetson

Archive for June, 2013

Ubuntu Touch – Developer Preview

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Ubuntu TouchI haven’t been excited about a mobile OS since Android 4 (which later dissappointed me, but that is another story). But I have to say that I am excited about Ubuntu Touch.

Ubuntu Touch excites me for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is simply how open it is. Under the touch optimized UI, it is basically Ubuntu. This makes the device very powerful as more than the word mobile has come to imply.

The UI is very impressive. It is remincent of WebOS in a lot of ways, and I hope they incorporate more of the gesture based interaction.

I spent some time over the last week with Ubuntu Touch on my Nexus 7. The focus of development right now if on the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 devices, but the Nexus 7 was remarkably quick and fairly complete for being an early developer preview.

Installation of Ubuntu Touch is remarkably simple from an Ubuntu desktop system. It is remarkably well documented on the Ubuntu website. Basically it consists of dumping a few development apps on you desktop system, root the device, and push the OS onto the device. From start to finish it took about 20 minutes.

Want to go back to Android on the device? No problem, they give you instructions on doing that too.

2013-06-28 16.01.18The OS is a developer preview and as such there are a number of things not fully functional and the edges are still a little rough. That being said, updates come out daily and are equally as simple to install. And the pace of development is a bit stunning.

I recorded a podcast with Jono Bacon today (goes live next Wednesday on the BDConf site), and he said that they are shooting for a beta release in October. Based on the pace of improvements I don’t see this date being missed.

Ubuntu Touch definitely has some legs as carriers and manufactures are looking for options other than iOS and Android. Ubuntu has setup an Carrier Advisory Board for carriers to provide early input and they have a fairly representative group of carriers on board already. In typical fashion, however, their are no U.S. Carriers that have commited yet. (Update: Mark Shuttleworth just announced that a U.S. carrier will be joining the advisory group as I am about to publish this.)

This is definitely a project I will be watching closely.

Installing tmux on CentOS 6.2

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If you haven’t used tmux, you should probably give it a try.  It is an elegant and full featured terminal multiplexer similar to GNU Screen.

If life were easy you would simply fire up yum and install the program.

$sudo yum install tmux

But if we wanted life to be easy we would be running Ubuntu.

Installing tmux on CentOS 6.2, however, is a bit tricky, but not exceptionally hard.

tmux has a library dependency on libevent which, of course, isn’t installed by default.  So you might think that you can install it using yum, again, that would be too easy.  It turns out that the libevent package you can install with yum is slightly out of date for tmux, but that is okay, we will do things the old fashioned way and install it from a tarball.


wget https://github.com/downloads/libevent/libevent/libevent-2.0.21-stable.tar.gz
tar xzvf libevent-2.0.21-stable.tar.gz
cd libevent-2.0.21-stable
./configure && make
sudo make install

Once libevent is installed there are several ways you can install tmux. I am going to pull the most recent source right from the git repo, but you can visit the tmux website and choose a different method if you like.


git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/tmux/tmux-code tmux
cd tmux
sh autogen.sh
./configure && make
sudo make install

That should do it, you are all set to start using tmux.

A good introduction to using tmux can be found in the video: An introduction to tmux, by Jack Franklin

There Is No Google Reader Replacement, Only Alternatives – well according to Techcrunch

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There Is No Google Reader Replacement, Only Alternatives

In typical Techcrunch fashion, they have a sensational headline, a thesis I agree with, in general, but total rubbish for article content.

One of the sub points in this article is that only Feedly and Digg are viable alternatives.

I cannot tell if it is pure lazy research by the author, or some other nefarious reason, but a large number of great alternatives other than Feedly and Digg exist. Digg’s product hasn’t even been released as of this writing. How can you claim a product is one of two only viable alternatives when it hasn’t been released yet?

Coincidentally, I dismissed both Feedly and Digg from my alternatives list because neither service have a viable monetization model, which would leave me right back at square one a year from now.

If you subscribe to the Indie Web model, which I am starting to come around to, you might want to consider a self hosted option like Fever from Shaun Inman. I have been running this since the Google Reader announcement and it runs well with the exception of on mobile which right now can be handled on the iPhone with Reeder.

Looking for a product that lacks a little on salesmanship, but makes up for in features check out Feed Wrangler. This product has inclusion and exclusion word filtering on feeds.

Both of these products have a visible and viable revenue model so I can be reasonable sure that I will not have to find a new product in a year.

If you want a deeper dive into what is out there for Google Reader alternatives as well as help in determining what your true RSS needs are I highly recommend the Mac Power Users Podcast. They do a great job and it is suitable for anyone not just Mac users.

Don’t follow that stampeding herd of ship toward that cliff. Make a more informed RSS Reader decision.