Having my primary working Computer, a Lenovo Thinkpad, going into repair at the end of December I finally got up to ordering on of those TouchBook ARM based netbooks I was looking at for some time. After some processing time it finally got shipped in April and arrived here last Monday, time to write up my first impressions.

Some words about the Hardware. The TouchBook ships with a so called "Beagle Board" featuring a OMAP3 Processor, ARM Cortex A8 running at 600MHz, 512MiB of RAM and a 8GiB SD Card for storage. It has a 8.9" touch screen and comes with USB and Bluetooth Sticks for wireless connectivity. The Display part contains all the needed Hardware and is detachable from the bottom that is just a keyboard sitting on the secondary Battery. You can open the Top to get at 4 intern USBs (3 USB-A and one Mini-USB) where 2 of these spots are occupied already for wireless networking and Bluetooth.

First experience

The TouchBook comes with an US Power Adaptor only so when I got the device I was running for some tiny Adaptor to get the plug into a normal EU Power Outlet (it's incredibly hard to get one for this Direction while it's easy to get some travelling stuff to plug EU Hardware into various different Outlets!).

When I finally booted it the first thing you'll notice is the touch interface for the bootloader. That's quite a difference to all-text-based old grub! The shipped SD Card offers 3 Operating Systems, one custom Linux that might well be interesting to the average User, a Ubuntu Karmic that really OK for a Debianoid Hacker- both running a XFCE Desktop - and a Android that is really slow and doesn't seem to be good at anything. Needless to say I sticked with the Ubuntu for now.

What to not expect

Well this is a 600MHz CPU with half a Gig of RAM running of a SD Card. So don't expect it to be good at anything that can profit from today's High-End Hardware.

The good Points

First of all, I have to admit that the touch screen is a neat interface, way superior to the Touchpad Area you'll normally find on a Notebook - at least if you use the stylus. It's quite different from the inside-the-keyboard trackball the thinkpads have of course.

The Website claims 10h of Battery life and while I've emptied the battery much faster under certain workloads (e.g. Playing cards) it does hold that promise with emacs fired up in org-mode, IRCing on a server over SSH and the mandatory wireless working. Same for a always-on on campus day which just works.

Again putting the screen on the keyboard the wrong way 'round will give you a touchscreen tablet with the keyboard out of your way, an ideal configuration for playing. And I have to admit playing games like gtkballs or aisle riot real fun. So much fun actually I'm currently thinking on whether it would be feasible to get openpandora working on it.

What I'm really missing

There are two Properties that are really lacking from the device which would make it (in my personal opinion at least) a whole lot better: A simple Ethernet controller I could use to go online when sitting in the server room doing some maintenance without taking my WRT with me and some slot to store the stylus when not using it where it's easy to get out (currently I'm having it in my wallet).

Then there's something (maybe a Kernel Bug): The Wireless is unable to find any new Access Point after disconnecting from some and walking out of reach from that. Force-unloading the kernel module and waiting 30 minutes worked for me multiple times but that's purely inacceptable.

Finally there are some minor glitches. The shiny red cover just gets dirty every time you touch the thing and the Keyboard is really small (what a surprise on a 9" device) and has some of the special Keys (like the Home key) located at unusual spots (Page-Up/Down only available through the FN modifier). Shift and End at the right side are also labeled opposite from their actual function (at least on Ubuntu).

The last ugliness is the top part battery only charging when the device is running, which means you"ll have the TouchBook running all night to get the battery charged and the Battery Monitor not working at all (at least in the current version of the operating systems).

Where to go now

I've not yet come around to really play with the operating system (apart from installing wicd, urxvt-unicode and awesome getting the most needed of my working environment). As I'm a Debian Developer I'll definitely need a Debian running on it (although I was told it'll be slow with software compiled for armv4te) and, as it needs to be running all night anyway, I'll try out gentoo pending another SD Card for experiments.

Secondly there's currently no useable conforming Common Lisp Implementation in Debian for armel as far as I can tell. As arm was already working it shouldn't be that hard, let's see if I can change that but feel free to join me!

Final Notes

I was thinking of some mobile-ish note-taking device and remote ssh terminal for University which the device clearly can do even for 10h away from any power plug while being some non-standard non-x86 device to toy on (It's actually my second armel next to the sheeva plug mounted on my window board.

As a final Remark: This blogpost was written on the TouchBook hacking some markdown into emacs while traveling by train to Erlangen where I study on Sunday Night after having read some chapters of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother on my E-Slick E-Book reader and finished later in my Room.

Maybe I'll find some time to write a review for this device as well one day!

I'm all for security and really like encryption (my Notebook's harddrive is encrypted, I've recently got a GPG Smartcard, ...) but sometimes you see big failes where security is atemted but doesn't actually secure anything but only hinders the legitimate user.

Today one of these candidates ate way to much of my time again. I'm currently getting more and more used to GNU Emacs and currently experimenting with emacs-jabber. Therefore copying my jabber accounts over from psi. As with these passwords you never type in I couldn't remember some of my jabber passwords -- no problem psi has to store them so it should be easy to get them, right?

Well actually not. The configuration file (XML) had a password entry but all that was in it was just obviously hex-encoded numbers. These numbers turned out to be be 16bit packages of characters that are XOR-ed against the JID So now you have to read them in in junks of 16bit, XOR them against the JID and get the password.

Time to recapitulate what this security helped. I've written a hacky 10 lines C Program that can reliably retrieve passwords from any config file I might come across. Seems you can do the same in 2 lines of perl. Ergo no security at all was added.

Next question: What did it cost? Needed an hour or so of researching the encryption and trial&error out the right program fragment. For nothing gained at all. Fail.

This week I had to write a little tool that would collect input on different channels, via socket / netcat, via a http server, .... Calls for a parralel Design -- Maybe a good place to write something real in Erlang. While erlang itself was really nice to write -- I do like Prolog as well as the bunch of functional languages -- doing networking in erlang seems a bit special, the interfaces just aren't thin wrappers around the libc stuff.

Getting a Socket Text interface

What sounds like a easy challenge to accomplish was actually harder than expected. All I found was some way to pass binaries representing erlang code over a socket and evaluating it remotle. While it's nice that such things are as easy to do as they are it doesn't help me with my task of moving simple strings.

start() ->
    {ok, Listen} = gen_tcp:listen(51622, [binary, {packet, 0},
                                         {reuseaddr, true},
                                         {active, true}]),
    spawn(fun () -> accept_loop(Listen) end).

accept_loop(Listen) ->
    {ok, Socket} = gen_tcp:accept(Listen),
    accept_loop(Listen),
    handle(Socket)

handle(Socket) ->
    receive
        {tcp, Socket, Bin} ->
            io:format("~p~n", binary_to_list(Bin));
        {tcp_closed, Socket} ->
            Buffer
    end.

So the socket is now up and receives text as wanted. However, as we are already runnign a parralel program it would be nice to be hable to handle multiple socket connections in parralel right? For that we just need to add a spawn() at the right place. The right place is not the handle(Socket) but the accept_loop(Listen) because the process that called accept will receive all the tcp messages.

This last part was quite obvious after finding the documentation of the {active, _} properties for the socket. always here means that you'll receive all data from the socket as erlang Messages, once delivers one package and waits until it is activated again and false requires calling a method -- this would have been possible as well when forking handle(Socket).

The web server

Ok we also want a webserver. We do not want to run some webapplication inside appache or so, just do some post/get and simple pages. Erlang here provides a built-in httpd with some mod_esi that calls some function depending on the URL used. It doesn't do anything fancy like templating or DB backends or stuff, just taking strings and building the http answers.

Unfortunately there are no examples around and basically noone seems to be using this combination (apart from some hacks like mine probably). So as I needed to get some additional information into the handler function (a Pid to connect to some service), I, as a novice, just couldn't find a way. Asking on IRC the solution was rather simple: Just using erlang's process registry. For more complex stuf gproc might prove usefull here.

Result

I guess I've got a huge step farther in programming erlang now. The manpages are easily found by your search engine -- for python I have to either walk through the (well structured) online documentation or search for the right link in the search results, for erlang they're typically first. Also Joe Armstrong's Books as proven usefull. The most dificult part probably is getting around all the nice extras you can do (transfering functions over sockets et al) and find out how to do the thing you need.

There are many ways to run some commands simultaneously on multiple hosts like cssh or dsh. They come handy for example when you are installing software updates on a set of hosts.

dsh is a rather simple comandline tool allowing to execute a command over ssh on multiple hosts. However it doesn't allow any interactive input -- so you can't look at the potentially upgrading packages and press y to accept and you can't go through debconf promts or similar.

This is solved by cssh which opens a XTerm for every host and a input area that is broadcastet to all of them. this is working really well -- you can execute your update on all hosts and still do individual adjustments just as needed: switch focus from the broadcasted input to one of the terminal windows and anything you type just goes there.

Now cssh has a big disadvantage: it requires a running X server (and doesn't do too well with a fullscreen windowmanager). Requiring X is quite a blocker if you need to run that ssh multiplexer on a remote host, for example if the firewalling doesn't allow direct connections. Fortunately you can make tmux behave as we want -- in a simple terminal:

First you need a script spawning the ssh sessions in separate tmux panes and direct input to all of them -- here called ssh-everywhere.sh (you could also write a tmux config I guess):

#/bin/sh
# ssh-everywhere.sh
for i in $HOSTS
do
  tmux splitw "ssh $i"
  tmux select-layout tiled
done
tmux set-window-option synchronize-panes on

Now start the whole thing:

tmux new 'exec sh ssh-everywhere.sh'

And be done.

Update

If you want to type in just one pane (on one host) you can do that as well: C-b : set-window-option synchronize-panes off and moving to the right pane (C-b + Arrow keys)

From the java point of view

Recently I had to get some Scala Tool working correctly. Unfortunately there are basically no packages in the Debian Archive at all so I had to use maven to install these (or download + install manually). Being a highly paranoid person downloading and executing code from the internet without any cryptographic verification at all one after the other practically drove me nuts. Looking a bit deeper I noticed that some of the software in maven's repository have some signatures next to them -- signed by the author or release manager of this specific project.

Why secure sources matters

With my experience in mind I got some Input from other people. One of the things I was told is that some scala tools just aren't security critical -- they're only installed and used as the current user. In my opinion this is, for my desktop system, totally wrong. The important things on my private Computers are my GPG and SSH keys as well as my private data. For messing with these no super user access is needed at all.

Comparing to the Common Lisp situation

Being a Common Lisp fan of course I noticed basically the same problem for installing Common Lisp libraries. Here the situation in Debian is quite a bit better -- and I'm working in the pkg-common-lisp Team to improve this even more. Common Lisp has some maven-alike tool for downloading and installing dependency trees called quicklisp -- without any cryptographic verification as well. However there's light at the end of this tunnel: There are plans to add GPG verification of the package lists really soon.

Comparing the maven and the quicklisp model

So there are basically two different approaches to be seen here. In maven the software author confirms with his signature the integrity of his software while in quicklisp the distributor confirms all users get the same software that he downloaded. Now the quicklisp author can't and won't check all the software that is downloadable using quicklisp. This won't be doable anyway as there's way to much software or a single person to check.

Now in some kind of perfect World the maven way would be vastly superior as there's a End-To-End verification and verification of the full way the software takes. However there's a big problem: I don't know any of these Authors personally and there's no reason I should just trust any of them.

Now comparing this to the Distribution / quicklisp model. Here I would just have to trust one person or group -- here the quicklisp team -- to benefit from the crypto which might be possible based on karma inside the using community. However here I don't gain the possibility that the software is integer.

However idealized if some of these pieces of software was forged between upstream and the quicklisp team and attacker would also intercept me downloading the software from the same address so I get the source from upstream matching the checksum from quicklisp -- assuming the quicklisp team does indeed know the correct website. Additionally I get the confirmation that all other quicklisp users get the same source (if the quicklisp guys are fine of course) so no-one inside the community complaining is a good indication the software is fine. For this to work there's of course a relevant user-base of the distributor (quicklisp) necessary.

Relevance for Debian

So how do conventional Linux Distributions like Debian fit in here. Ideally we would have maintainers understanding and checking the software and confirming the integrity using their private key or at least know their upstreams and having at least a secured way getting the software from upstream and a trust relationship with them. Of course that's just illusionary thinking of complex and important software (think libreoffice, gcc or firefox for example). Maintainers won't fully understand a lot simpler pieces of software. And loads of upstream projects don't provide a verified way of getting the correct source code though that's a bit better on the real high-impact projects where checksums signed by the Release Manager are more common than in small projects.

A misguided thought at the end

As I'm a heavy emacs user I like to have snapshots from current emacs development available. Fortunately binary packages with this are available from a Debian guy I tend to trust who is also involved upstream so adding the key from his repository to the keyring apt trusts. Now my first thoughts were along the lines "It would be really nice if I could pin that key to only the emacs snapshot packages" so this guy can't just put libc packages in his repository and my apt would trust them. Now thinking of it again a bogus upload of the emacs snapshot package could just as well put some binary or library on the system at some place in front of the real on in the system path which would be rather similar bad.

What is Unknown Horizons?

Unknown Horizons is a Free Strategy game I have written about from time to time about and do from time to time contribute. I also build Packages for Debianoids. Unknown Horizons is not a new thing, it has been there for some years now. It currently gets boosted by 3 very active GSoC Students and evolving steadily.

Preparing for 2011.2

Unknown Horizons is Preparing for another Release, 2011.2. As part of the effort I have updated the official Unknown Horizons Debian and Ubuntu weekly archives with new rc builds to get some more testing before the release happens. Please test!

Why isn't it in Debian main yet?

Unknown Horizons hasn't been uploaded to Debian yet. This is mostly due to 2 factors: The game engine Unknown Horizons build upon, FIFE isn't in Debian, evolving fast and not providing much of a stable interface and therefor Unknown Horizons has traditionally had a strict dependency to some VCS state of approximately the same age. Not good for a Debian package obviously. And second, Unknown Horizons got rid of some content that was not free (as in "main") just recently.

Personally I'm hoping we can have some packages soon as the freeness stuff is sorted out now and I haven't seen any troubling breakages with regard to the engine recently.

I'm coming as well! Really looking forward to meet the people from Debconf9 again. Also people from the Games Team and the buildd and kfreebsd folks. And ideally there will be some more people interested in (Common) Lisp as well, we'll see