A beta release of Webconverger 3.3 mini which features the long awaited hard drive installer has been painstakingly uploaded on a slow British Internet connection.

Simply boot the Webconverger Live 3.3 CD, select “Install Webconverger” from the boot menu and in a few minutes you should have turned your computer into a Web kiosk.

The usual “ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY” waiver of liability applies. This is not yet for complete novices as you can accidentally wipe the contents of your disk. So for testing I do recommend something like VMware. This installer preview does not quite work as designed especially as there is no upgrade path!

Many thanks to Chris, Daniel and the guys who pushed Debian Live 1.0 out, on which Webconverger is based.

Spread the word and please purchase Webconverger for your business as others already have. Enjoy!

Google could not have started in the UK

In order to be a successful ‘dot COM’ business a good Internet connection is a basic requirement. No, you can’t “work from anywhere”. You must have a fast & reliable Internet connection.

Most Web developers in the UK host their applications in the USA where the costs are much lower. Any company I’ve heard that co-locates or rents space in the UK is paying about a two fold premium to do so. However it’s about 20% cheaper in Germany compared to the UK, with 3x increased latencies.

Now if you are an innovative IT company you really need your machines and services close by for fast development iterations.

Google could never have started in the UK. How on earth would they have had the right IT environment to grow when bandwidth is so incredibly expensive in the UK? JANET don’t have a clear policy WRT commercial “research” connectivity services. From past experience of JANET network administrators if you wanted them to host an enterprise like Google they would have responded with their typical “can’t do” attitude.

google.ja.net? You’re dreaming.

Bamboozled

Typically a demanding UK business could be connected by LAN Extension aka ‘leased line’ aka LES100 (mbit) or WES (wholesale). This high end Internet market in the UK is full of meaningless service level agreements, mis-leading acronyms and terminology. The sales people will ease you into a false sense of confusion. Bonded, expresstream, dedicated, scalable 2M-10M and other sort of bollocks. Dedicated “tail circuits” to their point of presences (PoP) typically start at 2500GBP for installation and similar upkeep costs per month.

If you ask a reasonable question like: “Will my upload channel be faster than the 100 kB/sec I currently get from my Virgin XL connection?”, the sales people won’t know. They’ll sprout bullshit about how their contention is better or that they can handle more parallel connections. Actually I just want to serve (upload) as fast as possible. 100 kB/sec (1M) upload is too slow. Good domestic broadband can currently suck down at 1000kB/sec (10M) to give you some perspective.

Most business UK leased lines barely compete with cabled domestic connections. Especially since high quality broadband ADSL connections are no more than 30GBP a month. Ideally there should be no distiction between domestic and business connections, though the UK sales boys don’t miss a trick.

If your company is based in London, perhaps you can actually connect straight up to fibre to an exchange like LONAP. This typically will cost your premises at least 20kGBP to get hooked up. Plus all sorts of equipment rental and bandwidth costs. If I was budgeting, I would say 50k GBP was needed just to get started. Combined with your London rental rates, why not pile your venture capital in a mound and just set fire to it?

Non-Wired West

The irony is in Cornwall, Praze Farm, my family home is adjacent to fibre optic cable running along the A30 motorway. Probably the fastest Internet connections in the world are the transatlantic links between Cornwall and New York. However neither Global Crossing or EasyNet, would consider a splice into either of their cables that run along the A30.

If you believed the “connected” hype from government and schemes derived from Objective One such as:

• Actnow Cornwall
• Wired West
• Beacon technology park

You could be fooled into thinking that EU money was going into improving the IT infrastructure in the South West of England. The truth is very different.

There are no “point of presence” (PoP) hubs in Cornwall as far as I’m aware, so you can not get a costly high end leased line even if you wanted to. In the Cornish countryside a typical broadband connection is about 1M down and 0.5M up. So a symmetrical leased line to 2M~10M would be a massive improvement, at great expense. Anyway there is no such (WES) option offered by British Telecom (BT) in Cornwall.

The fastest connections in Cornwall are probably at Penwith College (Penzance), University College Falmouth & Truro College, all connected by the JANET offshoot SWERN. However they have no links near me in Bodmin, I’ve checked.

The highways agency

Webconverger isn’t the only company that could do with a fast Internet connection. After calling EnterpriseMoucel who manage the A30 from Exeter to Penzance, they were interested too about getting connected to fibre. They need fast Internet for their cameras to stream data to their control centre. Currently they use an obscenely expensive microwave link between Mount and Looe supplied by BT.

Compared to copper

Imagine your business could only have one telephone line. That’s what good domestic broadband or ‘entry level’ leased line gives your business. The ability to serve just one customer at a time. Your business would not be able to grow. This is the poisonous state of the current IT infrastructure in Britain.

Aside from the frustrating UK business banking service to deal with, I can’t help but think if a serious IT firm wanted to innovate it would have to be based elsewhere. Trouble is, there aren’t many fertile grounds in the world. I can only think of:

• USA, especially Silicon Valley
• Japan
• Korea
• Bangalore, India

It’s a shame Britain can’t seem to get its act together with respect to wired fibre optic Internet links when we are such a small country. Attitudes must change. Fibre optics must come above ground. Britain must become better wired for new IT based economies to grow. Government should make this a national issue and nationalise the fibre optic network.

As I mentioned on the previous blog titled Roadmap, Brendan Sleight is helping out the project by running a Webconverger ISO through qemu and recording it to a video. Awesome eh?

Now I need to figure out how to link deeper into a video, after a certain amount of seconds just before X starts, splashy prematurely quits. That’s a bug.

I’ve also come across the astonishing Simple Light Incredible Temporary Autonomus Zone project. A rival Live distro that weighs in at just 25M. Webconverger is 10x the size and provides embarrassingly less functionality. I’ve signed up to their mailing list and I am investigating their miracle diet for Webconverger.

I am pushing up Webc 3.2 mini now (100kB/sec upload is the best I can get with Virgin fibre optic XL). This returns the pdf viewing feature I mistakenly left out the 3.1 mini package list. This happened because the Webconverger and WebKit release I made at that time did not support inline xpdf.

The next big todos as ever is to get:

• the hard drive installer working
• include wireless networking
• get maxi updated
• autobuilds and some better QA from bmsleight

The hard drive installer milestone is a bit too complicated for me and I am dependent on Daniel to look at this again on my behalf. Tbh I have been a little hesitant to roll out this feature as I feared I would get “Webc installer destroyed all the contents of my hard disk” type emails. Webconverger as a Live CD is about protecting people from (over) writing any data. To the astute previous work described in Debian Web Kiosk paves the way for a hard drive installer in any case, so the installer is coming along… very slowly.

As for wireless networking, I have my own little solutions, however they work for me and my particular hardware and wireless setup. Wireless hardware and wireless setups are awfully complex. I am quite envious of Apple’s slick Iphone wireless interface. Writing something like that with wpasupplicant might be possible. So far my efforts could be described in a linux haters blog rant.

The good news in ‘wireless networking’ is that 3G USB dongles in the UK or EVDO as seems to be referred to in the states looks like an excellent achievable new feature for Webconverger.

I personally dial into 3G internet via bluetooth via my Nokia and it works quite well. USB dongles are usually simple serial line modems that simply need a ppp dial up script and some polish. However I still need to get “borrow” one of these dongles to implement support. I will contact Vodafone or perhaps trial with T-online.

I can’t quite decide whether to move from boot /proc/cmdline options and run a local httpd like thttpd and run a “control panel” Web application to configure elements of Webconverger.

Thanks to Mike Hommey’s webkit packages, Alp Toker’s Gtk/Webkit commit of Rodney Dawes Flash support and countless others we have serious competition for Firefox.

I’ve added a webkit directory for developing Webconverger with WebKit. There are two ways to play with WebKit. A basic library wrapper called:

/usr/lib/webkit-1.0/libexec/GtkLauncher

from libwebkit-1.0-1. Or the Debian epiphany-webkit package actually uses that library to provide the Epiphany Web browser.

Epiphany is very annoying as it seems to bring in a lot of Gnome cruft. Also I hate dbus dependencies. Still need to get Webconverger on a diet!

PDF viewing does not work atm and Epiphany also needs its chrome seriously hacked to disable bookmarking amongst many other elements, to make it kiosk grade. Anyway, the simple GtkLauncher is almost OK really. So have a look at webc-webkit-r33561.* in the mini download directory. [Alt]+[F4] or [Shift]+[Alt]+[c] to close the window in this instance btw.

Put a hard hat on and feel free to peruse my “work-in-progress” webconverger webkit screenshots.

Update: My post to the epiphany-list

I’m venting my opinion about (mobile) user interfaces in light of Aza Raskin’s concept post.

For me there are (broadly speaking) two categories of computing user interfaces:

1. Non-overlapping tiles
2. Overlapping (floating) windows aka the WIMP paradigm

Microsoft Windows (post 1.0) made err… the floating (overlapping) windows style interface familiar to millions of people, though I think there are problems with floating windows:

• Different sized windows aren’t useful, esp. very small ones.
• Dragging items between windows usage paradigm is not that common (copy&paste is easier)
• Managing different windows is hard, esp. when they overlap. Clutter!
• Popup windows suck
• Hidden / obscured / dragged off screen windows suck

So if I am right, why aren’t we seeing tiled user interfaces?

Well I believe most people nowadays know tiled user interfaces simply as tabs. And we hopefully agree that browsers have made the tabs UI paradigm pretty mainstream.

Safari on the Iphone is also basically a tabbed user interface too and I like it. Apple’s fixed maximised tab is right for browsing on mobile devices.

In my experience ‘designers’ don’t really understand scalable / resizable user interfaces. Traditional designers know A4 and exploit such print dimensions to showcase their work. So again forcing designers to think at fixed intervals of screen sizes like 480×320 in the case of the Iphone works. (resizable or overlapping) windows doesn’t.

If you’re a Linux user (Ubuntu maybe?) and you want to try the tiled UI paradigm for more than just your browser (Firefox), give the excellent dwm window manager a try. It’s what Webconverger uses.

Update: The image above could be a little misleading, as Windows mobile does not actually use floating (overlapping) windows on their platform. Proof that Mozilla should really steer clear of this path in it’s UI design for mobile environs!

Those people who make those Webtops like this one are impressive. Though I still think the overlapping windows in a browser window is broken and stupid.

Since Firefox 3 is now official, I’ve made Webconverger 3 official. Try the latest 3.x webc-mini release.

So burn webc-3.0.mini.iso to a CD to effectively try Firefox or rather the brand-free Iceweasel 3 in a safe live environment.

I actually prefer the LiveUSB version. Download webc-3.0.mini.img and checkout the instructions for putting Webconverger on your USB stick. Boots in a minute on my Thinkpad X40!

There probably will be some bugs so please report them to the mailing list / forum or directly to me if you so wish. For the more technically inclined, see Iceweasel bugs and Mozilla’s BTS.

Enjoy and congratulations to Mozilla on the historic bit of PR which is download day.

A webconverger user pointed out that one could download and run files in webc3beta2.

This may be true, as Firefox 3 has a new Download Manager which is also very difficult to disable.

After a few hours of frustrating hacking and a lot of help from #extdev on irc.mozilla.org, I have hopefully disabled the chance of a jail break via the downloadManager. This (more) “locked down” behaviour should be better than what it was in Webconverger 2.

webc-3.0b3.mini contains these improvements to the kiosk extension. However, I have noticed that on my test machine (Thinkpad X40) ALSA sound playback does not seem to work with these new images. Does sound playback work for you on YouTube? Please let me know.

Two steps forward, one step back.

Recently I noticed some people trying to get around Webconverger’s customisation business model by building Webconverger themselves with the developer instructions.

A treacherous path to follow instead of enslaving me to do the build. Building Webconverger is not easy.

In case you still want to try build Webconverger, do take look at the recent changes to the wiki and see the todo list.

Who said you had to be ruthless to do business?

But seriously, I do (selectively) try help people actually build Webconverger as I would like more people to contribute. I can’t do everything. Just running the Webconverger company takes more time than development time.

New feature I just implemented is no screen blanking in webconverger-base. No time for re-freshing the builds currently. Be patient… Firefox 3 is almost upon us!

So you’re a super smart Debian/Ubuntu geek.

Here’s a chance to impress when you have friends over. Hopefully your friends like computers too via the familiar Firefox Web browser.

To save some blushes when your ‘personal’ Web history might be exposed whilst showing your friends some cool new Web application…

Use Webconverger!

Add:

deb http://debian.webconverger.com/ lenny/

To your ‘/etc/apt/sources.list’

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install webconverger-base iceweasel-webconverger

You should then be prompted to install two packages:

iceweasel-webconverger - the firefox extension to lock down the browser
webconverger-base - the bits that create a private browser using webc

Install them. Now the geeky part:

1. [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[F6] and login into tty6 with your usual username.
2. sudo su - webc
3. startx -- :1

Here we launch a seperate X session in the webc’s user sandboxed space.

• [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[F7] should get you back to your normal X :0
• [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[F8] switches you to your second webc X :1

To quit and clean up, on your second X :1 [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Backspace] and logout from the webc user and finally:

sudo apt-get remove webconverger-base iceweasel-webconverger

iceweasel-webconverger atm will lock down any user’s browser on your system. So you might want to uninstall it once you’re done.

Webconverger aims to uphold your privacy with this Internet Appliance aka Web Kiosk standalone mode for your Debian/Ubuntu system. This is an initial release, so my clever brethren, if you spot any security bugs in webconverger-base, do tell.

P.S. If you have no friends this Webconverger mode is good for porn.