... or "Linux feels the need for speed"

A recent post has introduced me to a term with which I was previously unfamiliar. 'Click-bait' was the epithet used by a US reader to describe the title of my blog and it both intrigued and disturbed me. It means self-evidently that the title is more attractive in a sensationalist sense than the article merits. The post below is hardly sensational, it's all about how Linux can speed up your computer hence the sub-title 'Linux feels the Need for Speed'.

However a brief whizz around the computing licencing at CERN (which is currently making headlines with the switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider) shows that the biggest computing development to emerge from there since the World Wide Web is the EU Grid which is released on an Open Source basis. Hence open source computing is arguably at the heart of the LHC and if so will play its part in the 'End of the World' if the more apocalyptic of our brethern are to be believed. And, since the LHC is all about really great speeds the conflation was too tempting. So apologies for the click-bait. What follows is really more prosaically about managing the end of a relationship.

Leaving XP

It's a simple question but difficult to answer: 'How do you get folk who are perfectly happy with Windows XP to change to something else?'.

In a previous post I suggested that to a whole generation, a Windows XP desktop was for them a finished work, the culmination of a succession of exciting upgrades of hardware and software.

In the Open Source world at one time, fairly recently actually, it was received wisdom that although technical superiority would win out in the server market getting ordinary users to change to unfamiliar desktops was a step too far.

I am happy  to say Microsoft has run square into the self same unfamiliarity  problem with Vista and Office 2007. They are a bit too different to the 'finished work' without offering any must-have extras.   It gets even harder for Microsoft when even official Governmental bodies like BECTA advise the public sector procurers not to change. Ironically this stricture appears not to apply to other Government organisations in education such as the QCA (Qualifications and  Curriculum Authority) who have clearly more money than sense.

Microsoft though has enough clout to follow alternative strategies for persuading its customers to change when they show signs of dragging their feet. The most obvious is by not allowing vendors to install XP on new machines and making sure lots of stuff, bit by bit, won't work on the old machines (allegedly). The Open Source world in contrast with its plethora of cool Linux distributions and manifest lack of clout (on the desktop) only has the 'hey that's a cool desktop - I must change' strategy to fall back on and that's a pretty weak opener in the desktop wars.

Why indeed would one now change desktops, why in the past were we so willing, eager even, to do just that and now are so reluctant?

Reasons to Upgrade

Readers of a certain vintage will remember the Intel hardware upgrades from the 286 to 386 to 486 to 586 Pentium processors, running parallel, Microsoft's OS went from Windows 3 to 3.2 to 95 to 98 and 2000 and Word went from Word 2 (very good it was too) through 6 to 97 and 2000. The amount of RAM fitted to a PC went up during this time from 16mb to 1gb.  We all handed over  our cash as soon as we could to experience the latest thing. 

Of course power consumption went through the roof at the same time but we did not care much back then... No, what we did care about was speed.  486 owners were lightning fast when running Word 2 when compared to lowly mortals who only had a 286. I really coveted the next upgrade, I really did.

Unfortunately but seemingly inevitably, what was also happening during this period was the emergence of 'bloat ware'. Software got more features and more code to take advantage of the new hardware power until things became  absurdly bloated.

The tale is told that even Microsoft's own engineers struggled mightily to upgrade the highly evolved XP to Vista's extra feature list but were defeated by the mighty code base and effectively started again using the simpler 2003 Server code. If true, this story provides an exemplar in what the Science Philosophers call 'paradigm elaboration'. Ultimately the accretion of ad-hoc modifications causes the edifice to collapse.

To cut a long tale short - as a result of bloated software, most computers are no longer fast, period. They are dog slow. MS Office 2007 is huge, so is Open Office (sorry guys). Running say Office 2007 or Open Office 2.4 on a budget laptop with Vista Home Premium is a dismally slow experience compared to the same machine running XPpro and Word 97/2000. Don't try this at home kids.

All good things come to an end however and this applies to this particular upgrade cycle. The emergence of new technologies may complement the status quo but sometimes they disrupt it. Those described below fall into the later category and have occurred at a time of hiatus in the prevailing paradigm.

Top 3 Disruptive technologies

1. The new Netbooks (so-called) low power (typically 6 watts) ultra cheap sub notebooks with 7-10" screens running a flavour of Linux (or at a push the undead Windows XP reincarnated by MS just for netbooks I wonder why?)
2. 'Lightweight' operating systems and applications which use far less code and system overhead than their bloated equivalents.
3. Google's Chrome browser (or is it an OS or merely very cool spyware?).

What is so disruptive? Read on and then add them together and it will become clearer.

Quick Web

Just how disruptive these three will be will depend on a range of factors but I think the biggest driver will be as it was before, speed.  Google seem to think so too. The open source browser application Chrome, out in beta for Windows, is a really really fast browser. Yes, it has a range of  cool new features that will emerge as powerful incentives to use Chrome and yes, it may be the worlds most effective spyware , but the first encounter the user has with the browser produces that great feeling, raw speed.

Chrome on Windows XP now not only speeds up browsing but  its 'Add Application' feature makes using on-line applications (eg Google docs) simpler and much faster. One more reason then not to upgrade your PC but to speed it up with software choice. When its out for Linux frankly  I can't see why I would use any other browser given that I have already sold my soul to Googleplex's logging computers.

Quick Boot

The netbooks such as the now well known Linux Xandros Asus EeePC which a year ago pioneered their introduction and proved to the world that there was a huge demand for such devices (thank you Asus) are not in themselves as supplied that quick. They after all have modest hardware specifications (and tiny power consumptions) but thanks to their embedded operating systems, boy to they do boot up quickly. Not quite instantly-on but only a dozen or so seconds.

Several mainboard manufacturers (New ASUS mainboard has 5-second bootup) for conventional  desktop and laptop computers have cottoned on to the agonizingly slow boot ups endured by users and are increasingly offering 'fast boot 'options: yes you have guessed how, they use light embedded Linux distributions on board which offer the basic applications of word processing, browsing and so on.  After a few weeks of no-wait computing, how many of you are going to opt for the 'agonizingly slow boot option' so that you can use Office 2007 to type that memo? A quick boot though is no good if the subsequent experience is slow.

Fortunately thanks to a few 'mad' developers who in the true Open Source tradition, ploughed their own furrow even when their project was not fashionable, we now have software which is truly non-bloat, let's call it 'quickware'.

Quick Software

In recent years a few developers dedicated themselves to stripping down full Linux distributions to produce lightweight distributions capable of running quickly on older computers or very fast on later models. Notable amongst this dedicated group are Puppy Linux and DSL Linux (Damm Small Linux). The entire distributions including applications were under 100mb and ran as so called live distributions. Essentially this meant booting from CD or USB Memory stick and running in RAM space.

These distributions are, or have been to say the least, for the minority... oddball Linuxistas. I confess to be  a Puppy fan and have received my unfair share of derision in the Office for my visionary abilities but trust me one day quickware will rule the world.

How many of us Linux users are more productive with Compiz et al and every package under the sun installed as default? Linux has shown it can match and beat the eye candy of Vista Ultimate and MacOSx. Maybe now the thrust will be to make the desktop as fast as stable and as well engineered as our server products.

The following distributions have weighed in and show a very active rate of development:

• wattOS :  an ultra light weight, Ubuntu-based Linux distro.
• XFCE : Ubuntu's official light distro
• LXDE: Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment
• Breezy : Puppy Linux tweaked for EeePC works on EeePC = super fast compared to Xandros, boot from flash card. Breezy is nearly as quick as LDXE!

Below are yet more ultra light  Linux distributions optimised capable of running on computer with as little as 128mb RAM and booting from USB drives

• Feather Linux
• DeLi
• Pendrivelinux
• Portable SUSE USB Flash Drive installation via the Live CD
• Wolvix Cub
• Mandriva Spring-Gdium

I think the point made by this non exhaustive list is the day of the speedy distro is nearly nigh.

Take any of the above and boot it from USB onto a bare metal computer sporting a pentium class processor and half a gig of ram and it will fly; all we need now are some speedy applications to help it on its way. In the Open Source 'Office'  portfolio let me suggest AbiWord as a replacement for Open Office or MS Word. It'll do all you want and will open in a twinkle of an eye; ditto Gnumeric instead of OO Spreadsheet or Excel. Don't believe me? Download them and see for yourself. Then there are Inkscape, Scribus....

It's all out there.

Conclusion

There is now the possibility that sanity may be coming to the PC's desktop. In many ways the XP generation with whom I opened this post have a point. XP  circa 2001 does all they need it to do. Any improvement (for them) would be  merely to do it all faster.

Performance has always characterised the server market and consequently I assert accounts for the  superb growth of Open Source server deployments. The desktop has in contrast, especially recently, been characterised by 'features' to the detriment of performance. Computers have grown ever more powerful to take advantage of ever more irrelevant interfaces, or is that vice versa? 

Now thanks maybe to an economic downturn or global warming or the imminent destruction of the universe by minitiure black holes or whatever, many users have had enough.

The solution is to break the upgrade cycle; just use free speedy software and become more productive!  Open Source will love you, Google will love you, your boss will love you but I can't guarantee that Intel and Microsoft will feel the same.

For me, my next computer will be a GDium 10" notebook booting LDXE from an 64gb USB stick and with a Chrome browser. I can feel your envy.

The simple answer is 'yes' we could do it now and we will save the taxpayer millions of pounds.

In previous posts I have documented the exponential rise in school ICT costs over the past 20 years. The articles focussed on costing ICT fully. This meant summing the costs of software purchase, software licensing, hardware replacement cycle, support costs and for the first time, electricity costs. The latter now make up 20% of the total ICT spend of a secondary school's £100,000-£200,000 annual total.
 
Missing from the earlier work, for which I apologise, were peripherals such as printers and photocopiers.

My motivation for revisiting the topic  came from finding out that laser printer and photocopiers use identical  technologies and typically draw 1.5 kw when active and 200 watts on standby. As I happen to be working with a secondary school at the moment I was able to investigate further. 
 
The school's electricity cost accruing from printing and photocopying was under £1000 per year at current prices: I confess to a being a little disappointed I had imagined it was more and it did not amount to more than an extra few PCs.
 
The shock came, though, when the total  number of sheets of A4 that passed through plain paper faxes, photocopiers and laser printers were calculated. It came to 4,450,000 per year. Or, in this school, 8,000 copies per child and one copy every 2 secs per year with a total cost of just below £100,000! The entire T5 airport terminal project only produced 8,000,000 copies per year and they ran 24/7.
 
The question was instantly begged 'is this normal for schools?'. It turns out it is.
 
Chosen at random, a City Academy and a few 'bog standard comps' (not my choice of phrase) produce similar numbers of prints as does my test school and have similar bills. To be fair, my  school had 700 students and the others more like 1400, so they are more 'economical'.
 
Simple sums produce scale-up figures for the UK schools, these are: 20 billion prints at 500 million pounds per annum.
 
Let's take a step back. The last 20 years has seen the massive development of ICT in schools from a standing start to a ratio of one computer for every four students. The same period saw the first photocopier in schools and the first laser printer ( I remember carrying our one in ). 

It would seem that the paperless office does not extend to the paperless school. In fact it appears quite the opposite. As ICT costs have grown so have paper related costs. Neither yet show any signs of abating.
 
It does not have to be like this.

Back at the office, (where I work as an ICT consultant) I cannot, hand-on-heart, claim that it is 'paperless'. But truly it is an event when the printer has to be run and usually associated with some cursing. Also, being an Open Source company, we get all of our software as downloads so not much is copied to disc either.
 
Obviously, everyone has a computer (laptops have replaced desktops by choice) and interestingly a notebook and pencil/pen at the ready. We have a library of well thumbed reference books too.  Like us UK secondary schools all have networks and Internet access, but obviously they do not have a computer each.
 
Solution: give everyone one of the new open source netbooks and fully wirelessly connect the campus.  Stop handing out work sheets, printing homeworks and e-mails etc etc, look at a flat screen screen instead.
 
To give every child in the country a new Linux notebook,  would cost less than the annual printout bill.  Within a school the old PC's and all but the web server would wither and die from lack of use (except for specialised applications) thus saving further millions.  No more digital divide, no need for paper and no need for text books (they would all be on the server).
 
Thinking 'is this how it has to be?'  is what really defines Open Source thinking.  The new low cost, low energy computers came out of  possibilities created by Open Source software development. Open Source software itself appeared as if from thin air as a result of thinking 'is this how it has to be, lets change it' 
 
Schools are very conservative, they like to keep on doing what they have always done, and no one likes to think they got it wrong, but does anyone feel in a position to defend school ICT as it is, on a benefit-cost quotient? 

ICT spending in UK schools is unsustainable but it could be cut by 90% with the help of Open Source software and the latest innovations in personal computing dubbed NetBooks.

ARM wars?

The latest salvo in the new chip war gives some indication of what is to come and just how soon it will happen. NVidia’s release this week of their ARM-based Tegra CPU uses an astonishingly meagre 1 watt of power and rivals Intel’s new 2 watt Atom chip.

Both chips are technical wonders (low enough in power to make photovoltaic devices a reality) and both signal a clear break away from Microsoft’s dominating influence in Desktop-PC-CPU specification.

New devices based on these chips will use Open Source applications and sport Linux operating systems. No one, surely, expects otherwise? Windows XP continuing to 2010 is hardly a solution to Microsoft’s empty OS larder for this new market sector.

So called NetBooks are being designed and launched by all major manufacturers. The new chips make last year’s 6 watt Asus EeePc seem rather greedy.

The coming of the NetBook will make the PC obsolete in schools except where specialist applications such as CAD are needed.

Education is the target market

The impact will be felt in education first. RM has lead the way in the UK with the amazingly successful Linux based EeePC. Other suppliers will follow.

As for the OLPC (One Laptop per Child Project) these new low cost, low power computers will be aimed at children and education where resistance to adoption is low and interest in innovation is high.

What is the ideal NetBook for schools?

• Think the Asus’ EeePC to get a feel for the size; make the screen fill one side of the clam shell and think along the lines of Amazon’s Kindle e-book for readability.
• Make the keyboard-side the same thickness as the screen side. Now fit a wireless interface, embed an OS and a few useful applications including a browser and a decent terminal server client. If you turn it on its side hinge vertical) it’s a e-book. When horizontal it’s a notebook PC.
• Let the screen flip (a la Apple), and give it 7 hours battery life.
• The NetBook is not only a PC-notebook but a thin-client and a universal text book.
• The Netbook will access content wirelessly from the School’s File Server, Intranet and Publishers electronic textbooks.

Maybe this machine will turn up this year, maybe next year, but turn up it will and soon: the new chips have made this a certainty.

ICT procurement

That ICT in schools will change radically is obvious but less obvious is the effect it will have on the procurement of ICT in schools.

Very recently schools have undergone a sea change in their attitude to ICT. E-learning credits have gone, ring-fenced ICT budgets have gone. They are now in stasis, unsure of which way to go, discouraged from entering the latest upgrade cycle by official Government advice and facing cuts in their budgets.

The love affair with network rooms full of expensive power hungry PCs running the latest bloated software is over. Shrinking budgets and steeply rising energy costs have seen to that.

Furthermore the pedagogical claims of proprietary ‘interactive learning software’ are dying away and anything that is remotely useful is on the Web.

With the emergence of Free Open Source Software and genuine low cost personal computing devices, schools can quite simply do the following:

1. Stop paying for software and software licences.
2. Stop buying any computer equipment that draws more than 30 watts when operational and extend the life cycle of existing computers.
3. Stop the printers and the photocopiers.

It is not really necessary to elaborate on the above. Previous posts have done so at length.

Possibly, paper addicts may wince at point 3 but in terms of cost these devices are the biggest single equipment/electricity/consumables technology in a school.

It doesn't take a fortune teller to predict that the above developments may mean many traditional ICT vendors will simply not exist in five years’ time.

Emerging business-models

In a previous post I described ‘the great VLE scam’. VLE or learning Platforms have been slow to get a grip of teachers’ enthusiasm. In most cases they are forced upon schools. The sticking point has always been content. The problem is solved by deals such as those made by the content publishing house Pearson.

Quite simply the VLE will be delivery device for a publisher’s e-text book market. Expect many other VLE-publisher exclusives in the near future.

Schools have to pay for text books even e-textbooks. A new gravy train is departing on the back of an ever diverse curriculum.

Schools and LA’s will have specific requirements for applications in education. The Open University provides a good example. The OU decided to use the VLE Moodle for part of its distance learning provision. Moodle, like all VLEs, did not do exactly what the OU needed. However because it's Open Source software the OU simply paid for it to be changed to meet their needs - an impossible notion for a major proprietary product.

It follows that the future vendors will be knowledge-based companies able to develop and customise products as required by the users. This means Open Source software. No user adapts proprietary software to their needs, you adapt to what it can do.

Summary

In five year’s time it is likely that:

1. There will be no proprietary software or hardware market in education capable of sustaining even a medium sized company.
2. Schools will have slashed their ICT expenditure.
3. Publishing houses will reclaim their pre-eminence in content provision through quickly updatable e-textbooks delivered through VLEs.
4. Specialist suppliers will adapt and develop Open Source software for a new emerging market.

How things change so quickly.