Technology

Immutable Atomic Linux Distirbutions

Of late, I’ve been hearing a lot of (good) things about Immutable Linux Distributions, from friends, colleagues and mentors. It has been something on my plate for some time, to explore. But given the nature of the subject, it has been delayed for a while. Reasons are simple; I can only really judge this product if I use it for some time; and it has to be on my primary daily driver machine.

Finally, TIL, what can all be the reason for systemd services to hang indefinitely. The internet is flooded with numerous reports on this topic but no clear answers. So no more uselessly marked workarounds like: systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl-daemon-reexec for this scenario.

The scene would be something along the lines of:

rrs         6467  0.0  0.0  23088 15852 pts/1    Ss   12:53   0:00  |   |   \_ /bin/bash
rrs        11512  0.0  0.0  14876  4608 pts/1    S+   13:18   0:00  |   |   |   \_ systemctl restart snapper-timeline.timer
rrs        11513  0.0  0.0  14984  3076 pts/1    S+   13:18   0:00  |   |   |       \_ /bin/systemd-tty-ask-password-agent --watch
rrs        11514  0.0  0.0 234756  6752 pts/1    Sl+  13:18   0:00  |   |   |       \_ /usr/bin/pkttyagent --notify-fd 5 --fallback

The snapper-timeline service is important to me and it not running for months is a complete failure. Disappointingly, commands like systemctl --failed do not report of this oddity. The overall system status is reported to be fine, which is completely incorrect.

In my ongoing quest to get Tablet-Mode working on my Hybrid machine, here’s how I’ve been living with it so far. My intent is to continue using Free Software for both use cases. My wishful thought is to use the same software under both use cases.

• Browser: On the browser front, things are pretty decent. Chromium has good support for Touchscreen input. Most of the Touchscreen use cases work well with Chromium. On the Firefox side, after a huge delay, finally, Firefox seems to be catching up. Hopefully, with Firefox 51/52, we’ll have a much more usable Touchscreen browser.
• Desktop Shell: One of the reason of migrating to GNOME was its touch support. From what I’ve explored so far, GNOME is the only desktop shell that has touch support natively done. The feature isn’t complete yet, but is fairly well usable.
  • Given that GNOME has touchscreen support native, it is obvious to be using GNOME equivalent of tools for common use cases. Most of these tools inherit the touchscreen capabilities from the underneath GNOME libraries.
  • File Manager: Nautilus has decent support for touch, as a file manager. The only annoying bit is a right-click equivalent. Or in touch input sense, a long-press.
  • Movie Player: There’s a decent movie player, based on GNOME libs; GNOME MPV. In my limited use so far, this interface seems to have good support. Other contenders are:
    • SMPlayer is based on Qt libs. So initial expectation would be that Qt based apps would have better Touch support. But I’m yet to see any serious Qt application with Touch input support. Back to SMPlayer, the dev is pragmatic enough to recognize tablet-mode users and as such has provided a so called “Tablet Mode” view for SMPlayer (The tooltip did not get captured in the screenshot).
    • MPV doesn’t come with a UI but has basic management with OSD. And in my limited usage, the OSD implementation does seem capable to take touch input.
• Books / Documents: GNOME Documents/Books is very basic in what it has to offer, to the point that it is not much useful. But since it is based on the same GNOME libraries, it enjoys native touch input support. Calibre , on the other hand, is feature rich. But it is based on (Py)Qt. Touch input is told to work for Windows. For Linux, there’s no support yet. The good thing about Calibre is that it has its own UI, which is pretty decent in a Tablet-Mode Touch workflow.
• Photo Management: With compact digital devices commonly available, digital content (Both Photos and Videos) is on the rise. The most obvious names that come to mind are Digikam and Shotwell.
  • Shotwell saw its reincarnation in the recent past. From what I recollect, it does have touch support but was lacking quite a bit in terms of features, as compared to Digikam.
  • Digikam is an impressive tool for digital content management. While Digikam is a KDE project, thankfully it does a great job in keeping its KDE dependencies to a bare minimum. But given that Digikam builds on KDE/Qt libs, I haven’t had any much success in getting a good touch input solution for Tablet Mode. To make it barely usable in Table-Mode, one could choose a theme preference with bigger toolbars, labels and scrollbars. This helps in making a touch input workaround use case. As you can see, I’ve configured the Digikam UI with Text alongside Icons for easy touch input.
• Email : The most common use case. With Gmail and friends, many believe standalone email clients are no more a need. But there always are users like us who prefer emails offline, encrypted emails and prefer theis own email domains. Many of these are still doable with free services like Gmail, but still.
  • Thunderbird shows its age at times. And given the state of Firefox in getting touch support (and GTK3 port), I see nothing happening with TB.
  • KMail was something I discontinued while still being on KDE. The debacle that KDEPIM was, is something I’d always avoid, in the future. Complete waste of time/resource in building, testing, reporting and follow-ups.
  • Geary is another email client that recently saw its reincarnation. I recently had explored Geary. It enjoys similar benefits like the rest applications using GNOME libraries. There was one touch input bug I found, but otherwise Geary’s featureset was limited in comparison to Evolution.
  • Migration to Evolution , when migrating to GNOME, was not easy. GNOME’s philosophy is to keep things simple and limited. In doing that, they restrict possible flexibilities that users may find obvious. This design philosophy is easily visible across all applications of the GNOME family. Evolution is no different. Hence, coming from TB to E was a small unlearning + newLearning curve. And since Evolution is using the same GNOME libraries, it enjoys similar benefits. Touch input support in Evolution is fairly good. The missing bit is the new Toolbar and Menu structure that many have noticed in the newer GNOME applications (Photos, Documents, Nautilus etc). If only Evolution (and the GNOME family) had the option of customization beyond the developer/project’s view, there wouldn’t be any wishful thoughts.
    • Above is a screenshot of 2 windows of Evoluiton. In its current form too, Evolution is a gem at times. For my RSS feeds, they are stored in a VFolder in Evolution, so that I can read them when offline. RSS feeds are something I read up in Tablet-mode. On the right is an Evolution window with larger fonts, while on the left, Evoltuion still retains its default font size. This current behavior helps me get Table-Mode Touch working to an extent. In my wishful thoughts, I wish if Evolution provided flexibility to change Toolbar icon sizes. That’d really help easily touch the delete button when in Tablet Mode. A simple button, Tablet Mode , like what SMPlayer has done, would keep users sticky with Evolution.

My wishful thought is that people write (free) software, thinking more about usability across toolkits and desktop environments. Otherwise, the year of the Linux desktop , laptop , tablet; in my opinion, is yet to come. And please don’t rip apart tools, in porting them to newer versions of the toolkits. When you rip a tool, you also rip all its QA, Bug Reporting and Testing, that was done over the years.

Having moved to a new place, now at times, I also have to deal with power outages. As heat increases, the power outages will be much longer and more frequent. So much, that UPS and Power Inverters run out. Such are ideal times to measure idle power consumption for my laptop.

Here’s what my default (and idle) OS looks like. It should be standard to most “typical” users. Some minor odds could be apport, dnsmasq, and maybe, tor. Also, thanks to systemd, there are some native services which are now converted to socket activation based ones. There’s also Laptop Mode Tools for userspace power savings. But huge thanks to Intel’s work in making the kernel more power efficient. With things like Runtime PM and Intel P-State , we can now define, default and aggressive power-savings modes, helping conserve more power.

I very recently met someone, and we had a good productive discussion on the features and (long standing) bugs of the Linux kernel. No doubt, Linux is the most featureful kernel in the market. Is also a lot appealing given its breadth of platform support.

Of that discussion we had, it led about Linux’s behavior in tighter stressed scenarios where there is a lot of contention among the core subsystems. From the conversation, I got the feedback that perhaps the issue is no more valid. My conclusion was I must have missed out on the fix because I haven’t really spent any Engineering Lab time in recent past.

When I bought my [Lenovo Yoga 2 13](http://www.researchut.com/blog/lenovo- yoga-2-13-debian), I had great plans. I wanted a device, that I could use both, as a laptop, and also as a tablet. The path hasn’t been easy. But then, no path in Free Software against Freedom and Privacy has been easy. The choice is left to us, the users.

I had been a long time KDE User. With KDE’s decision to have different UIs for different form factors (plasma active, plasma netbook, plasma desktop), it was now time to try something different. I had 2 choices to explore: Unity and GNOME. But given that Unity is not feasible in Debian, the obvious first option to explore was GNOME. And I guess my timing was perfect. I started with 3.14 which showed great promises about touch support, followed by 3.16 and now 3.18. There ’s still a long way to go, but GNOME definitely is in the right direction and improves impressively with each release.

A couple of us DDs met here on the weekend. It is always a fun time, being part of these meetings. We talked briefly about the status of Cross Compilation in Debian, on the tools that simplify the process.

Next we touched upon licensing, discussing the benefits of particular licenses (BSD, Apache, GPL) from the point of view of the consumer. The consumer being an individual just wanting to use/improve software, to a consumer who’s building a (free / non-free) product on top of it. I think the overall conclusion was that there are 2 major licenses at a high level: Ones those allow you take the code and not give back, and the others which allow you to take code only if you are ready to share the enhancements back and forward.

For this year’s Google Summer of Code, I have been mentoring Yuru Roy Shao, on Integrating Apport with Debian. Yuru is a CS student studying at University of Michigan, USA completing his PhD.

For around 2+ years, Apport was packaged for Debian, but remained in Experimental. While we did have a separate (Debian BTS aware) crashdb, the general concerns (bug spam, too many duplicates etc) were the reason we held its inclusion.

I recently acquired a [Lenovo Yoga 2 13](http://www.cnet.com/products/lenovo- yoga-2-13-inch/). While, at the time, the Yoga 3 was available, I decided to go for Yoga 2 13. The Yoga 3 comes with the newer Core M Broadwell family, which, in my opinion, [doesn’t really bring any astounding benefits](http://www.digitalversus.com/laptop/lenovo-ideapad- yoga-2-13-3-p18512/test.html).

The Yoga 2 13 comes in mulitple variants worldwide. Infact these hardware variations have different effets when run under Linux.

My varaint of Yoga 2 13 is:

One of the great things about Debian is the wide range of kernels it supports can run. This gives the user the flexibility to not spend time on the common userland stuff. For example, most apps, package management and system admin tasks are common across all Debian platforms.

These platforms may not be optimal at par to Linux, but still, choice is good.

For long, I had used Debian GNU/Hurd, only on a KVM hypervisor. Recently being involved in VirtualBox maintenance, I’ve almost beeing using VirtualBox for all my virtualization tasks. So it was time to try out Hurd on VirtualBox.