Linux - Direct2Dell

Last week, Google released ChromiumOS to the open source community at http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os.  ChromiumOS is a small, optimized OS whose purpose is to make it extremely simple and easy to browse the web.  Without a network connection, ChromiumOS is not very interesting. With a network connection, ChromiumOS shines.  The Chromium browser is extremely fast and makes for a great web-centric browsing experience.  Boot time appears quick too - about 12 seconds from hitting the power button.

Me and some other Dell folks noticed that Engadget recently got the Chrome OS running on a Vostro A860 netbook. I've been doing some timkering over the lat few days working to get our Dell Mini 10v up and running with ChromiumOS. As of late yesterday, I can report success.   

I have released an USB key image file to: http://linux.dell.com/files/cto. The file name is: "ChromiumOS_Mini10v_Nov25.img."  It contains a functioning image of my USB key loaded with ChromiumOS.  In addition, I have made a best effort attempt to get the Broadcom Wi-Fi adapter working in this image.  It's definitely not perfect (read: highly experimental, untested, unstable, yada yada...) but it does appear to function.

Here are the caveats:

• It will take more than 5-10 *minutes* for the ChromiumOS network connection manager to "see" the access points and allow you to select and connect - be patient.
• Wired connections appear to work fine and appear quick to connect.
• There are currently issues with both the connection manager as well as the underlying components (wpa_supplicant) that can easily break or get hung. When in doubt, reboot and give it another try.
• Use this image at your own risk - it comes to you totally unsupported and very minimally tested.

Speaking of which, to "reboot" the image, you have to press the "power" key on the Mini 10v - there is no "reboot/shutdown" menu option to do this.

To copy onto an USB key (8GB minimum), find another Linux machine and utilize the "dd" command to put the image onto the USB key.

Example: dd if=ChromiumOS_Mini10v_Nov25.img of=/dev/sdb  

In this example, /dev/sdb is my entire USB key... use "fdisk -l" to see how your USB key is named for your particular environment. Be careful to select your USB device (again, use fdisk -l to double verify and confirm the correct device filename) and not another device... 

Some additional notes for the released image:

• The user name to login is "dell". The desktop login window will complete the user name by adding "@gmail.com" to the end
• The user password is "dell"
• The root password is set to "dell"
• I've included a script in /etc called "mount_rw.sh" to allow root (or sudo) to remount the root partition for updates/changes/whatever you like.

Obviously, this image comes with absolutely no support of any kind and is to be considered highly experimental and completely unstable. 

There are some good developer forums at http://www.chromium.org for more information - for the chromium-os-development forum, I've posted a summary of what I had to do to get the wifi to the current working state. Much more needs to be done, but, for now, it's a start.

Enjoy!

I'd like to announce that Dell Linux Engineers will hit the road to Dallas, TX to participate in the upcoming Ubuntu Developers Summit for Lucid Lynx (UDS-L) from December 16 - 20 Correction: November 16 - 20.

Lucid Lynx is the code name for the upcoming release of Ubuntu, versioned 10.04. This is a significant release for Canonical and Dell as this it will be an LTS (Long Term Support) meaning it will be supported by Canonical for three years on the Desktop and five years on the Servers. UDS is the forum where the Ubuntu Linux Community Developers and System Integrators (like Dell) come together to discuss and hash out the feature roadmap for the next release of Ubuntu Linux. Issues that need fixing, features that need developing are all spec'd out, prioritized and based in this week-long marathon of discussions and brainstorms. At the end of the summit, the final Blueprints are published. These Blueprints are reflective of what to expect in the next release of Ubuntu Linux. This sort of "transparent" planning is what differentiates the open-source projects such as Ubuntu Linux from their "closed-source" counterparts.

Mario Limonciello will be hitting the road with me. We both work in the core Ubuntu Linux engineering team at Dell responsible for delivering Ubuntu Linux on various desktops, notebooks and netbooks globally. Making guest appearances on random days of the summit will be Doug Anson who works for the Office of the CTO responsible for architecture of Client Linux across Dell as well as John Hull who is the Engineering Manager for the Linux team at Dell.

I will be leading a plenary on "Preloading Ubuntu" on the second day of the summit right after lunch hour. In addition, we will all be participating in many different sessions that span across several different tracks such as Desktop, Kernel, QA, Community etc. So, come out and join us or remotely participate.

Hi Everyone,

Today I'd like to announce some new features that have been introduced to the dell-recovery tool that we are shipping with Ubuntu machines.  As you might have been aware, the dell-recovery tool takes the content of a Linux Dell recovery partition and builds it into a bootable ISO image that can be burned using usb-creator or CD image burning software.  When booted up, this image emulates a run through the open source portions of the Dell factory process.

This new enhancement is an optional image builder mode.  The image builder mode allows you to build recovery media with these same customizations, but with content that is not necessarilly shipping from Dell factories.
This means that even if you didn't purchase a machine with Ubuntu, you can still build an image that is representative of the (open source) content you get from a Dell factory install of such a machine.

Of course due to the nature of the tool and Ubuntu variants being so similar, you can even generate media for other remixes or derivatives of Ubuntu such as Kubuntu with a few small modifications.

I've set up a wiki page on the Dell Community wiki that explains the current usage of the tool.  Feel free to add comments to the comments section or make modifications to the page if you can improve to it.
The updated tool can be found at the dell-recovery product page on launchpad.  Feel free to raise any questions about the tool on the dell-recovery mailing list on launchpad.

Note from Lionel: It's been a while since I've talked about Linux on Direct2Dell. Shortly after Ubuntu 9.04 was released in April 2009, we had a request from IdeaStorm user Shannon VanWagner to start pre-loading 9.04. Though it's late, we're now offering Ubuntu 9.04 on a few more Dell machines to customers in the United States. Specifically the Studio XPS 13, Inspiron 15, and the Inspiron 537 desktop. The Mini 10 and the 10v are still running a customized version of the 8.04 version of the Ubuntu OS. And the Mini 10v can be ordered with Ubuntu Moblin Remix Developer Edition.

To see all the systems we're offering with Linux, go to www.dell.com/ubuntu.

With that context, I'll turn things over to John Hull so he can shed light on what to expect from Ubunu 9.04.

--Lionel

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I'd like to give a quick update on the technical details for what we have added with our 9.04 release. We have continued to build and improve upon on what we did for our previous Ubuntu offerings, and here are some of the highlights:

• We now provide Cyberlink's PowerDVD application for DVD playback (instead of LinDVD which we previously shipped). We also continue to provide Fluendo GStreamer codecs for mp3, wma, and wmv playback, which will work with your favorite Linux media player.
• We created and provided a new GUI tool for creating recovery/restore media for the OS
• We provide a new method to recover your Ubuntu preload from the hard drive
• We have chosen to use GRUB 2 bootloader instead of the Ubuntu default GRUB 1 (a.k.a. GRUB legacy) bootloader. We have been testing GRUB 2 for over a year now, and feel it is ready for general use. The Ubuntu community has decided to make GRUB 2 the default in Ubuntu 9.10, so our customers will already have that feature enabled.
• A common complaint we heard a few years ago was that there were no Linux drivers for Dell wireless cards. As of the date of this blog post, all currently-shipping Intel- and Dell-branded wireless cards (as well as most from the past several years) are now supported natively in Ubuntu 9.04. These drivers should also be included in most other newer Linux distributions as well.
• Our Ubuntu 9.04 offering is still the 32-bit version and not the 64-bit version ("amd64" architecture). We continue to evaluate when to make the transition, and the main sticking point continues to be solid, stable Adobe Flash support for 64-bit. There are currently options
  available in the community, including a beta of a native 64-bit Flash
  plugin. However, none of these have proven to be reliably stable, so we'll continue working with Adobe until a viable option is available.

For more information, our Dell wiki page for 9.04 can be found at the previous link.  If you would like to download and install 9.04 with our custom Ubuntu ISO, it can be downloaded here.

As always, please report any OS issues in Launchpad, or you can always ask any general questions to our linux-desktops mailing list..

Update: Fixed broken links

Latitude ON is a concept we've mentioned during the introduction of our Latitude E family of business laptops last year. You may have seen posts from sites like Engadget that discussed it in more detail. We figured the introduction of the Latitude Z was a good reason to start shipping the full hardware plus software version of Latitude ON.

Latitude ON is basically a system on a system. It's based on a dedicated low-voltage ARM processor (Texas Instrument's OMAP 3430 processor) that runs a slimmed-down version of a Linux OS. It allows a user to boot into the contained OS environment to give you always-on access to an Firefox-based Internet browser (without Flash support) and critical business information while using a fraction of the battery power your laptop uses when it's running a full OS. Essentially, you can quickly access all the information you're used to accessing on a smartphone using the larger screen and keyboard that your laptop provides.

To see what I mean by quick access, take a look at this boot comparison video:

Here's a more detailed look at the features:

• Instant access (about  2 seconds) to business information
  (E-mail, calendar, contacts, Internet browser & Citrix Receiver client)
• MS Exchange integration or POP e-mail Access
• Always on/connected - the module continues to run regardless of the state of the main OS
• Ability to view MS Office and .pdf document attachments
• Long battery life (about 17 hours on a 6-cell battery)
• Designed for the future with upgradable infrastructure (flash-based software updates)

Here's another StudioDell video which features a good overview about how the full version of Latitude ON works:

Latitude ON allows you to connect via Wi-Fi or embedded mobile broadband. I say embedded because in Latitude ON mode, the external ports aren't active. We've been shipping Latitude ON-ready Latitude E4200 and E4300 systems for a while now. Essentially, that means they can run the Latitude ON Reader software. In contrast to the full version, the Reader software resides on the main partition of the hard drive and provides access to e-mail, calendar and contacts from the last synched version of your Outlook data.

We will offer the hardware upgrade option to existing Latitude E4200 and E4300 customers via a customer kit for purchase. I'll update this post with more details about the kit when I have them. All Latitude Z systems will feature the full version of Latitude ON, complete with the processor hardware.