OpenWRT: Very Impressive

Just a quick post to tell my two readers about the OpenWRT project. This is a Linux-based community driven project that provides an alternative Operating System for some routers. Wikipedia offers a pretty good overview of what the project is about.

Since you rarely interact with your router, except to configure it, you might not see a point to installing a new OS (firmware as it is frequently referred to) on it. But a router doesn't have to be as boring and feature limited as it comes from the manufacturer. By installing OpenWRT you can expand the capabilities of your router immensely.

Even if you don't care about adding any new features to your router, OpenWRT can simply provide you with a much nicer Web-based administrative interface. And since installation is so painless there really isn't a downside. I installed the version of OpenWRT provided by the X-WRT project. This project's goal is to make the OpenWRT firmware simple to install and more accessible to end users. They have achieved this rather nicely.

Upgrading the firmware on my Linksys WRT54G was as easy as downloading "openwrt-wrt54g-squashfs.bin" to my desktop, going to my routers existing web-based firmware upgrade page, and uploading this file to the router for installation. This went super smoothly and actually maintained my routers previous settings and passwords so my wireless access point was up and running in minutes. Make sure your computer has a physical connection to your router and be patient as the "success page" will display before your router is up and running.

Next time I have to buy a router, I will definitely make sure that it is supported by the OpenWRT project.

P.S. Yes, I'm procrastinating on painting my kitchen ceiling.

Picnik For Linux Users

Much of the blogosphere has been talking about Flickr finally adding more advanced some photo editing features through a partnership with Picnik. Advanced photo editing features have been on my Flickr wish list for a long time, so I was excited to take it for a test spin and see how well it works.

Having tried Picnik in the past, I was less than impressed as a Linux user. On my first attempt to upload an image I came across a Linux specific bug that prevented me from seeing any of my image files in their file picker. A month or so after reporting the bug I heard back from Picnik and the bug had been fixed (a bad regex was to blame). Great, now I can try Picnik again, or so I thought. Although I could select files, every attempt to upload failed (badly - taking Firefox down with it). So I reported the bug and promptly forgot about Picnik after being told it was due to a bug in Adobe's Linux Flash player and that I should take it up with Adobe.

Fast forward to today and Picnik is available through Flickr - and working much better on Linux (this is probably due to the fact that I don't have to use Picnik's file uploader since files are already on Flickr).

How is Picnik from a Linux users point of view? Awesome because it brings photo editing tools into the work flow of uploading and organizing photos in Flickr. Picnik also does a good job of making image editing tools more understandable than PhotoShop or the GIMP and increasing the chance that I will actually use them.

Picnik still leaves room for improvement however. The application (flash-based) took a long time to load (a full 60 seconds). For now, I'm attributing the slow load to poor Picnik server performance after the Flickr launch. This will be a show stopper if it doesn't improve though. Also, some of the image editing tools performed quite well while other tools made the application unresponsive and hard to work with. Perhaps these are rough edges in the Linux Flash Player or just problems with Picnik itself.

Overall, Picnik is a nice option to have integrated into Flickr. As I get more time to play with the tools, I'll post tips and tricks that might be useful.

CNR for Ubuntu (and many other distros) could be huge for Linux

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while but kept getting side tracked by other distractions. And judging by the frequency of my posts, I seem to have a lot :)

As most Ubuntu users have heard, Ubuntu and Linspire announced some sort of technology pact. Linspire would base their distro on (K)Ubuntu and then Linspire would make CNR (Click and Run) available to Ubuntu users. According to the new multi-distro CNR site, this service will be launching vaguely in the 2nd quarter of 2007.

Personally, I am pretty excited about what this could mean for Linux in general. Why? A common reason that commercial desktop software is not created for Linux is that the Linux desktop market share is too small. Fair enough, businesses should put their money where it makes most sense. But even if a company decides to pursue the Linux market they are faced with the decision of choosing one or more distros to support. I imagine this is quite daunting and presents another obstacle to releasing software for Linux. CNR has the potential to solve this problem and could become the single Linux "platform" a commercial software application would need to support.

The above statement is probably not 100% true, but perhaps true enough to make it easier for a company to support may Linux distros at once. If Linspire plays their cards right, CNR could become an expert in packaging software for all the various distros and become a very important link in the software delivery chain. Not only would they be important to the company distributing the software, but also to users as CNR could offer some assurance that software in CNR is malware and spyware free.

If you compare this to the typical Windows method of downloading and installing software from random websites, it would seem that CNR is not only improving the ease of installation on Linux but actually surpassing the experience that most Windows users have. And by actually making the experience of using a computer better than it currently is, people will have a reason to try and switch to Linux.