Open Source: The future

Have you recently seen James Cameron’s Avatar? Have you always wanted to make a 3d movie? Has the costs of proprietary 3d animation suites always hindered your creationism?

Blender provides a free and open source solution to all of these problems. If you have been wanting to jump into the realm of 3d animation without really investing a big load of money, blender is what you are looking for.

As with any great open source project, Blender supports a lot of platforms, which includes Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, Linux x86, MAC OSX, Solaris and Irix. It requires Python to work.

Developed initially by a Dutch animation studio, Blender wasn’t always in the open source domain. In mid 2002, the developers agreed to release blender under the gnu general public license for a one time payment of 100,000 Euros, after which it was then made open source.

Blender has however, proved itself harder to use in the long run, as compared to other 3d animation suites. After it became open source, there has been a lot of effort to make the user interface easier to use, by adding more menus. But for the dedicated enthusiast, blender still remains good enough.

Since its release, blender has been used in quite a few open movies, as well as in some commercial movies (partly though). At the time of this writing, Sintel (Project durian) is the open source movie, in which blender is being used.

Concept art from project durian

These images are from a few movies made with Blender.

These movies come in DVDs which can be purchased on their sites and also, are downloadable freely. The DVDs not only consist of the HD movies, but also their making and tutorials. The movies are in the open source domain, thereby making the whole experience one of a kind.

Elephants dream a.k.a. Project Orange

Many books and tutorials have been written to make learning blender easier for the newbies. If you’re thinking of learning blender, you should opt for the blender wiki.

Are you tired of downloading your latest podcast episodes and opening them again after the download to see/listen to them? Have you been looking for an integrated torrent client and movie player for your torrent movies? Is high definition your choice? Tired of rewinding youtube videos while waiting for them to stream? Well fellas, we have a cool solution now!

Here comes Miro! It’s an integrated solution to all your Internet audio/video needs. It takes care of download management as well as audio/video playback. With the capability of playing most audio and video formats, it is the most reliable Internet audio and video solution (even more than commercial ones!).

Miro is developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, which is a non profit organization, whose primary motive is the development of a free and open source Internet TV solution (Miro), which was previously called democracy player.

Miro is licensed under our very favourite GNU General Public License v2. The source is available in Python, and uses GTK library for the front end.

One more kick ass fact about miro is that it is a web browser as well. So, if one has to download a torrent movie, he will just have to browse to that page where the download link is provided, and click it so that Miro can automatically start downloading that. Your favorite Video/Audio podcasts can as well be subscribed to in Miro, just by browsing to their podcast site and subscribing to their rss feed. This is what makes it even easier to use.

As most of the cool open source softwares, Miro is cross-platform. Currently, binaries are available for Linux, Windows and MAC OS X. For other platforms (which are mostly Unix variants), source code is available on their site.

If you are using Ubuntu, you can just grab it from the repository. Open the terminal and type in the following:

sudo apt-get install miro

Thankfully, it’s so much more easier to work on Ubuntu.

At the time of this post, Miro comes packed with some default podcasts, which include the National Geographic channel’s wildlife podcast and the American life podcast, and link to legal torrents website, wherein one can download torrent files and download them through Miro.

Miro has gained quite some popularity in the community of peers. For example, if we take the world’s biggest bittorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, they recommend Miro (other than Mozilla Firefox) for downloading their torrents.

I think Miro has completed downloading Steal this film II, so I’m off watching that. If you start using Miro after reading this post, lemme know your views about it. And a happy new year to you!

We all have every now and then, wanted to have a home theater. But the increasingly high costs of setting up one has been a real pain. In this post, I will write about an open source solution to setting up a home theater PC (HTPC). Note however, that this one concentrates on the software. For the hardware, any PC will do (in this case, provided that the processor is Intel based or PowerPC Macintosh based).

Geexbox is not just an HTPC software. It is a complete Linux distribution.

Geexbox runs on a Linux kernel. When one starts up the computer, it boots up and displays a menu, wherein one can select a video or audio to view/listen. All kinds of codecs are supported in Geexbox. And best of all, all of them are shipped along with the iso.

For the media playing, Geexbox relies on Mplayer. Mplayer is a complete solution to media playing, about which I will write in a later post.

As of the time of writing, Geexbox supports 720p High Definition video. That means, it will play HD videos without you having to face any difficulties.

As from the hardware support point of view, Geexbox supports most modern hardwares. The drivers for all peripheral devices are built in this, so that you don’t have to install them separately. It supports most wireless cards, wireless keyboards and mice, projectors and even remote controllers, thereby making the viewing process a smooth and enjoyable one. Users do not have to worry about having a hard disk in the HTPC (although having one would be much better). Geexbox can play videos from network sharing. That is, all you’d have to do is share videos from your PC, and you can play them on Geexbox, provided you have a wired/wireless network in place. For the booting process, again a hard disk is not required, because Geexbox can boot from your CDROM drive, which it will not need after it has booted, because then it resides inside the RAM. Alternatively, one can boot it from a flash drive or pen drive, which would need a USB drive, which is essentially a part of modern computer hardware.

About licensing, since Geexbox is a Linux distribution, it has many programs shipped alongwith. All these have their own separate licenses. Geexbox, however, which would comprise of all its own code i.e. initialization files, configuration files and the likes are licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The CDROM iso for the latest version can be downloaded from the website here. You can burn it up on a CD or write it in a pen drive. For the latter, you’d get a ton of tutorials just by Googling.

If you are thinking up of setting up an HTPC, that is the hardware, here’s one cool tutorial.

If you are a Linux user and are looking for a media player where you can index all songs on your hard disk, your radio stations and synchronize your portable media player, Rhythmbox is your solution. In this post, I will introduce you to Rhythmbox, which also happens to be my favourite media player.

Rhythmbox is a free and open source media management suite, which was originally inspired by Apple iTunes. It was designed to work under the GNOME desktop environment for Linux platforms.

Features:

• You can index all your local media from the File->Import menu option. All your audio files can be indexed in Rhythmbox with this.
• Uses the very powerful Gstreamer media framework for Linux.
• Music browser, which lets you easily find your preferred song or artist or even the album.
• A search box, which will let you find your song, artist or album depending upon what you search for.
• You can synchronize music with your iPod, USB mass storage MP3 player or your smartphone.
• You can even automatically get the album art as well as the lyrics downloaded from the internet when the song starts playing. Just Right Click->Properties->lyrics for the lyrics to be downloaded automatically.
• Easy access to several radio stations. You can even add your favourite radio stations to rhythmbox, thereby not having to open up your browser everytime you want to tune in to your radio station.
• Easy access to Jamendo and Magnatune. These have inbuilt support in Rhythmbox and the catalog will automatically be downloaded when you click their options. After you have the catalog, you can listen to and download albums from these.
• There are audio visualizations if you are fond of seeing those nifty and cute designs changing shapes while your music plays.
• If you want to rip your music from an audio CD/MP3 you just bought, rhythmbox has support for that as well. It will automatically play songs from an Audio CD when you insert it in.

Best of all, rhythmbox is an open source media player. That means nothing is hidden. You have full access to the source code so that you can see what is going on when you click something in it.

It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. However there are a few Gstreamer plugins which are under the GNU Lesser General Public License, and that’s the only exception in the licensing. There are many plugins, which will add many functionalities and features in it. You can get them here.

If you are using any Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Open Suse, Fedora etc, Rhythmbox should be available in the Add/Remove programs. In case of Ubuntu, Rhythmbox is pre-installed when you install it in your computer, so that you don’t have to worry about installing it separately. It just comes along.

For the average home user like me, who is fond of his Linux system and wants to have the features as in many media players that he used to use in Windows, Rhythmbox is the ultimate media player solution.

When it comes to privacy in the sphere of instant messaging, we have very little options. In almost all instant messaging programs, all the IMs are sent in plain text. The result? Well, anyone sitting between you and the other person you’re chatting with can listen to what you are talking. Simple plain text instant messaging is a threat to your privacy. As a matter of fact, yahoo logs your messages, when you’re chatting in a chat room, and does notifty you of that.

All in all, your conversations are not secure and anyone can get to know what you’re sending or receiving. But some pidgin developers have come up with a great solution for this. They have enabled encryption for the outgoing and incoming messages through pidgin, provided that both parties agree to do so and enable their Off The Record plugin in pidgin.

This plugin was designed by some developers at cypherpunks.ca. Currently, this plugin is maintained by four developers - Ian Goldberg, Willy Lew, Lisa Du and Md. Muhaimeen Ashraf. The plugin is licenced under the GNU GPL version 2.

Starting to chat with your friend privately is now very easy. Provided that both use pidgin, the following are the steps which should be taken to start chatting privately:

1. Enable the plugin at both sides. Start pidgin and click Tools->Plugins. The plugins window will come up. From there, check the Off-the-Record messaging plugin and close the window.
2. Now double click the buddy you want to privately chat with. The in the chat window, click OTR->Start Private Conversation. A private conversation request will be sent to the other person. He should then do the same, and then pidgin will generate your private and public keys.
3. Now when you send your messages to the other person, they will be encrypted by the person’s public key, and he will decrypt it with his private key (which is done automatically because of the plugin).

If you’re using google chat, you can verify this by signing in to gmail and then sending messages through pidgin. You’d see your chats in the gmail chat window, which will be garbage text, which is actually the cypher generated by your pidgin plugin.

Many of my friends often ask me, “How do you mount your usb flash drive into your Ubuntu from the command line?” I explain this to them, but that’s a slow process. I decided to write about this today. As of yet, many Linux users do not know much about this, but this article should help.

Linux has this hierarchical file structure. Everything in Linux is a file. When a flash drive is mounted in Linux, it is mounted as a file. Flash drives are normally mounted in the /mnt or /media directory, depending on your Linux flavor.

I have been using Ubuntu and so, this article will primarily target Ubuntu users. Nevertheless, I shall also include directions for other Linux distributions. I will write this as a step by step howto.

1. First, you need to decide where to mount the flash drive. That ‘where’ will be a location in your file hierarchy. I’d take the location to be /media/flashdrive. But in order to make a directory there, we need root permissions. So, I’d use the sudo command.
   

   xtreme@k0r0pt:~$ sudo mkdir /media/flashdrive
[sudo] password for xtreme:
xtreme@k0r0pt:~$

   The sudo password that is being asked is the user’s password (if it is Ubuntu). In case of other Linux distros, this may be the root password. The best way would be to use su if you’re not using Ubuntu, and then use all the commands given here without the sudo. Note however, that Linux will not echo the length of the password, so that when you type the password, nothing is written at all. Do not be confused about whether or not the password is being input at this time.

2. Once the mount point is set, insert the flash drive in the usb socket of your computer. After you have done this, it should be available at /dev/sdb1. Now, you just have to mount this device descriptor at your mount point. For this purpose, we’d use the following command:
   

   xtreme@k0r0pt:~$ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/flashdrive

3. This should mount your pen drive in the mount point /media/flashdrive. Now you can simply use this mount point and copy and/or paste files to/from it. After you are done, you might prefer to unmount the pen drive before physically removing it. Type in the following command:
   

   xtreme@k0r0pt:~$ sudo umount /media/flashdrive

This was my small howto regarding manually mounting your flash drive in Linux. Feel free to comment if you find this tutorial helpful.

Nokia N900

Nokia has finally released their first Linux based mobile handset - The Nokia N900. The world’s largest mobile handset manufacturer has been releasing handset running their Symbian OS till now. This is for the first time in the history of Nokia, that they have released a phone based on open source software.

Although companies like Motorola and Samsung have been releasing phones based on the Linux kernel, Nokia has never been into releasing Linux based mobile handsets. In all, this is just a breakthrough.

Some time ago, Nokia had introduced their platform for Linux based mobiles - Maemo. This platform was made with Internet as the prime feature. N900 uses this platform.

The handset comes with cutting edge modern day hardware, featuring ARM processors running at 6 MHz, 1 GB memory, 3d graphics accelerator, fully integrated qwerty keyboard, 32 GB of internal memory, 5 megapixel camera with dual LED flash, and most importantly, 3.5G and Wireless LAN support, so that the user can be connected to the Internet all the time.

The most interesting feature is that, Nokia has finally turned up with a Linux based phone, which is both good and exciting.

Windows has always been the number 1 software company, when it came to taking away the users’ freedom. Once again, comes the clear cut message from the Free Software Foundation, why Microsoft was and always will be the freedom snatcher. They have started this website against the same conspiracies. This news came out at this post.

If you are thinking, “What the hell is this guy talking about? Everybody likes Microsoft!”, then I’d suggest you look around. Take a newspaper or a magazine or something. Take a look at an advertisement of a computer. You’d see that all of them come with a version of Windows already installed. You do not have a choice. You cannot tell them to install you a Linux distro in the computer and not take the money for the Windows OS. You’d have to pay for the Windows anyway.

I’d take the example of a friend of mine. He happens to own an HP laptop which came with a Windows Vista installed. For a few months he used it, and one day he comes to me and says, “Hey man! My laptop is really slow. Can you install XP in this, because I’ve been using XP at my home desktop computer for some years. It has been comparatively much faster than this.” In reply, I obviously suggested him to use Linux. As I use Ubuntu and am much more comfortable with that, I told him about it, and showed him some cool visual stuffs using compiz. He sure was impressed. He got me to install Ubuntu in it. Then as days went by, he learnt more and more about the open source community and he did notice that his laptop was much faster with Ubuntu than a same model with XP, that another friend happens to own.

After about a seven months since then, his battery got messed up. Since the laptop was under warranty, he took it to the shop he bought it from. They sent it to the local HP servicing centre. They said they had to install Vista back in it because Microsoft said so. My friend was frustrated. He had all the data in it. He had to arrange for hard disk spaces in a few friend’s computers to back up his data. Then he gave it back to them, and it’s been three weeks since, and he has got no information about what all happened to his computer.

So, as a conclusion, I’d say, Microsoft is trying to maintain the monopoly it had started back when it had released Microsoft DOS, back in the 80s. You don’t have a choice when it comes to selecting an operating system of your choice when buying computers. Almost all personal computers in the market today, save the MACs come bundled with Microsoft Windows.

Now, take another aspect.

Come to the education field.

I am doing computer science engineering at a very reputed institute in my country. Except for Operating Systems, which gives you more bullshit theory and less insight into an OS kernel design, and Network programming, which concentrates more on Java socket programming and Winsock programming, and just a little on Unix socket programming, there is not a single subject which uses Unix. The laboratory has about some thirty to forty computers, some of which do not work (hardware problems), and the new ones are all bundled with Vista. The old ones with XP. They installed Linux flavors in them, which have not even the basic development libraries installed. When you try to do a final year project based on Linux, professors seem to have a problem, at least at the start. They’d teach programming, by using pirated versions of Microsoft compilers (Visual Studio), where you do not actually learn how to program.

Windows is taking over the education shpere as well. It is creating another monopoly, where students do not learn the least about how computers work, but about how to do certain things using Microsoft Windows.

Ironically, not many people realize this. They just close their eyes and go about the way Microsoft shows them. The company even messes with the Open Document Format.

When it comes to those updates (which Microsoft loves calling Automatic Updates), the OS installs the updates, without giving the user any option to flip back to a previous version, in case the new version is not compatible with their hardware, thereby making their hardware futile. That is complete wastage of the user’s money.

Biggest of all, you surf around the Internet, you’d see tons of viruses and trojans invading your computer. Microsoft never pays attention to those, and hardly does anything to patch up their existing programs, save some updates, which are done to tell the users that they are safe. Yet they leave out most user programs, which might get infected. And they do. I have seen my friends reinstalling their Windows OS every month or so, because a virus had really pissed them off to their limits.

How can you help?

You can help yourself by stopping the use of Microsoft products. Switch to Open Source and Free software. Install a GNU/Linux distribution. Save yourself. It does not ask you to keep things to yourself. It does not hide a single thing from you. It motivates you to share, and spread your knowledge. Most importantly, it gives you the same thing Microsoft takes away from you - Your freedom.

If you have used Linux and ever owned a device that has no driver written for Linux, and the manufacturers don’t supply a driver for Linux, you’d know what kind of pain it is to just own the device and see it not work, or just having to reboot to Windows just to use it.

I have been owning this HP VGA camera for about 2 years now, and haven’t been able to make it work it under Linux.  I requested Linux kernel developers to write a driver for that. In fact they did. And as soon as they wrote it in the kernel, and version 2.6.29-1 of the Linux kernel was released in April this year, I was very excited that I’d see my camera finally work in Linux. But the excitement was short lived. After I compiled the new kernel and installed it in, I found out that the driver was for the HP 2.0 MegaPixel webcam, whose USB id matched with mine (USB id is the id of a USB device that identifies that device as the manufacturer ID and device ID). And once again, I was doomed.

After the semester was over, I finally decided to write the driver for the camera myself. Pissed off with the manufacturer, I started doing something I had very little idea about. Searching on the Internet and taking the help of Google, I embarked on the mission of writing the driver.

What I did find out was that Linux webcam drivers are rarely written by the manufacturers. Linux developers have been reverse engineering the Windows webcam drivers to use the information thus received and implement that in Linux. The inf file happens to be the most important part of the driver. It has this huge list of numbers (a matrix, talking in the programming context). I decided that writing the driver from scratch would be really cumbersome. One would have to know all the ins and outs of driver programming and how the USB system works in Linux. Although I did get manuals for the USB. But they were quite huge and I am not much of a patient guy to read all that. I decided to edit the gspca source. Specifically the vc032x.c file. I simply copied the matrix into that file and edited a few more lines to specify that this is what should be used when my camera is plugged in. My sensor was different so I had to change many things. I did not understand many things about the PO1200 which was added then. The most significant being “from win-trace”. I wondered what that meant. But it had something to do with Windows driver reverse engineering. Now after compiling the edited source, my camera started working with cheese.

But the story did not end here. The brigtness was so less, that the camera would work only if I pointed it towards the light bulb. That was really awful.

Finally, after months of searching, and not getting some proper reverse engineering tutorials, tired and frustrated, one day I hit upon the right keyword and got the thing I was looking for- the guide to reverse engineering USB webcam driver for Windows to create a Linux driver for the device. It was in the microdia webcam driver development website. This tutorial describes everything, starting from how to start to how to end. Although the tutorial is still not complete. But it has the most basic thing that is needed. It describes how to sniff the USB system in Windows in three separate parts and finally write code for the driver. Now although I read this article today and am about to implement it for my webcam, I do not any longer feel that I am walking the road to nowhere.

So if you are a Linux user and are looking forward to write your own device driver, you should really check this tutorial out.

The sole purpose of writing this article is because I found that the tutorial is not very popular and people suffer looking for that exact tihng.

Have a nice time writing your own driver!

If you have ever maintained a website or have been through the trouble of creating graphics for a huge print, you’d know how difficult it is to create an image big enough to be printed or produced on the website without making your computer sluggish when you draw it. There has long been an alternative to these high resolution memory killing raster graphics. Yes, it is the vector graphics.

For those that don’t know anything about vector graphics, it is unlike raster graphics, not about pixels but about equations. When we draw a line in vector graphics, it doesn’t make up pixels, but an equation. So, when we have to stretch it, it will simply replot the line according to the equation and there is no resolution problem. That is stretching can be done without losing any resolution data. But all the good vector graphics programs are commercial and need you to have a bunch of money. Where do you go now?

Inkscape comes to the rescue in this case. Inkscape comes without any price and is open source too. That’s two good things in one. It uses the World Wide Web standard svg format for files and supports advanced svg features.

Features:

• Native support to svg (Scalable Vector Graphics).
• Open Source Code
• Multiple Platform support

When talking about Multiple platform support, Inkscape already supports MAC OS, various Unices (which of course includes Linux distros) and Windows. The Linux version comes officially as a source package. Various distributions however release their own installation packages for Inkscape.

Talking about my personal experience with Inkscape, I drew my band logo in Inkscape:

The logo was built from scratch in Inkscape. And needless to say, Inkscape gave truly awesome result.

The current version of Inkscape is 0.46 and you can download it from this link. If you’re a webmaster or just another blogger or even a designer, then Inkscape is a must have for you.