Author: Martin

Every now and then it would be great to have a full operating system on a tablet rather than Android or another mobile optimized and castrated replacement that is just too inflexible for my taste. From some reports I've seen over time I was aware that Ubuntu has some sort of touch screen and on-screen keyboard integration but little is written about it. Recently, I came across the Lenovo Yoga 3 – 11" that has a 360 degrees rotatable keyboard and a touch screen. It can be used as a Laptop, as a screen only with the keyboard as a stand and in a full "tablet" like mode with the screen rotated 360 degrees so it rests on the backside of the keyboard. That sounded interesting and it's price tag of €599 fit my idea of what I would pay for such a device. But would it run Linux in a way that the device is usable in a non-keyboard mode? I tried hard to find more information on the net but came up pretty much empty handed. So I decided to give it a try myself as some of the stuff that I found at least indicated that it could work. After about a week I'm ready to give you an account of how it went from me, so here we go. It's going to be one of those long blog entries so if you only care for the summary, jump right to the end the post. Otherwise just read on for the nitty-gritty details of my adventure.

The Hardware

Let's have a look at the hardware first. Apart from it's 360 degrees rotatable keyboard the Yoga 3 – 11 has a screen resolution of 1900×1080 pixels. On an 11 inch display that almost looks "Retina" like. Further, my device came with 4GB of RAM, 128 GB SSD, 1 USB 3 port and 2 USB 2 ports of which one doubles for charging with a special connector. Other configurations with more RAM and a bigger SSD are available as well. To make it light and fanless (!) Lenovo uses an up to date Intel Broadwell dual core multi threading "Core M-5Y10c" that runs at 0.8 GHz with bursts up to 2+ GHz. For further details have a look at this detailed review over at notebookcheck.com.

Installing Ubuntu 15.04

As the processor and the device in general is pretty new and even the review linked to above is only from April 2015 I decided not to install the current Ubuntu LTS (14.04) but take the latest version of Ubuntu, which currently is 15.04, with the latest supported Kernel of that version, which is Linux 3.19. Before installing, I booted Clonezilla from a USB stick after disabling secure boot in the BIOS to make a backup of the existing and entirely unused and not even booted once Windows installation on the SSD, just in case. The Yoga 3 has a small key on the side of the device that needs to be pressed with a pen to start the BIOS settings when the device is off. It's a little bit unusual but I can see the advantages of the approach over frantically searching for the right function key to press to enter the BIOS settings after having switched-on the device.

While the backup was running I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu 15.04 and put it on a really fast USB 3 Flash memory stick. I then booted Ubuntu 15.04 from the memory stick and as it's a fast stick it booted to the desktop in just a couple of seconds. I had a quick check of the suspend and resume functionality since this is a critical thing for me and it was working. However that's just a first indication that guarantees nothing as we shall see later. One thing that wouldn't work out of the box is the on-board Wi-Fi but I was already aware of this and was reasonably certain I could make that work later on. Consequently I used an Ethernet to USB adapter so 3rd party add-ons and OS updates would be downloaded automatically during the installation process. Absolutely breathtaking, a full Ubuntu 15.04 installation from the fast USB Flash stick including the download of several hundred megabytes of 3rd party add-ons and patches took less than 10 minutes. Yes, 10 minutes!

First Steps in Ubuntu 15.04

Booting Ubuntu on the Yoga 3 with it's SSD takes around 10 seconds. I didn't time it but it's just as fast as on my other SSD based devices. Next I had a closer look at the Wi-Fi card and quickly found a driver that can be downloaded and installed with a couple of commands. DKMS makes sure it's automatically included when a kernel update is done during a normal update process. Thanks to Adam Lee who seems to work for the Ubuntu/Canonical hardware enablement team for the terrific work!

Keyboard and Touchpad

Concerning usability, the keyboard's size is pretty standard so 10 finger typing works well. Due to the limited height of the device, however, the key-lift is quite small and typing is not as comfortable as on a more standard keyboard. The Yoga 3 shares this disadvantages which other devices in its class. As I'm German, my device came with a German keyboard layout and unfortunately, the ' key has been moved away from its normal place to somewhere above the enter key. While for German text this is not a problem, it's a bit of a hassle when typing English text. Also inconvenient is the missing key at the top right to jump to the beginning of the current line, something I use quite often. And yet another inconvenience for me is that by default the overlays of the function keys to adjust sound volume, brightness etc. are reachable without a modification key. This can be changed in the setup but if done, the functions are not usable anymore in Ubuntu. So I have to chose between two evils. I chose to give up the F-keys, which work in combination with the ALT-modification key but I don't think I can get used to pressing ALT on this keyboard while not pressing ALT on others. And while we are on the input side, the touchpad works fine, also for 2-finger multi-touch do drag web pages and other things up and down the screen without the clicking on the slider on the right side of windows. Also, as a Thinkpad user I would prefer the touchpad keys at the top close to the keys rather than at the edge. Again, a personal preference.

Processor Speed and Video Playback

While the Yoga 3 11", and I keep pointing out the 11 inch as there are other variants available as well, especially the Yoga 3 Pro, which is a completely different device, feels very snappy overall the Core M processor is actually quite slow. The SunSpider 1.1 test takes 630 ms to complete, which is three times longer than what my 2 year old i3 based Thinkpad takes to execute the performance test. But I didn't notice this at all in day to day usage at all as other components, especially the GPU help a lot to make web browsing, word processing and other non-processing intensive activities very smooth. Full screen HD content on Youtube plays smoothly but I had some problems with Netflix in the Google Chrome browser which often showed shear when the camera moved sideways. Strangely enough, video quality was absolutely o.k. when the video played in a window, even if the window was extended to the full screen size except for Ubuntu's and Chromes status and window bars.

Touch Screen, Multi-touch and Rotation

One of the main questions I had before running this experiment was if and how well Ubuntu supports touch screens and devices without physical keyboards, i.e. with the Yoga 3 in video or tablet configuration when the hardware keyboard is of little use and even deactivated in full tablet mode to prevent unintended key presses. It turned out that Ubuntu 15.04 supported the touch screen very well and the on screen keyboard functionality is quite intelligent as well as it can be configured only to show the keyboard when text input is expected. Once enter is pressed the keyboard fades away until the user again taps on a window that waits for keyboard input. Also the on screen keyboard recognizes when the hardware keyboard is used again and doesn't pop-up automatically anymore. And finally, the on-screen keyboard can be resized and moved and even moves by itself when input is expected by a window the user clicks on that would be under the keyboard. Well done!

One thing that doesn't work is automatic rotation of the screen when the user flips the Yoga 3 in tablet mode from landscape to portrait mode. Shell commands launched via icons can do the trick, however. It's a bit of a kludge but something I can live with. Ubuntu also recognizes 2 finger multi-touch on the screen but it depends on programs what they do with it. By default Firefox doesn't do anything with it but there's a nice add-on that adds the functionality. After that, scrolling up and down on a web page works like one expects on a tablet.

Built in Camera and Video Telephony

Another important application for me is video telephony. Ubuntu supports the camera out of the box and Skype uses the camera without any further configuration. Video calls are smooth and the image on both sides is good, nothing there to complain about. The audio connector works as well but I only tried with headset without a microphone so I'm not sure if that's supported as well. There are volume hardware keys on the side of the Yoga 3 11" as well which work as they are supposed to and are probably most useful in tablet mode.

Suspend/Resume

So far, so good. Next I gave the suspend and resume functionality a closer look. Unfortunately I noticed that every now and then, a resume would end up with broken fonts being displayed and used thereafter until a reboot. I tried if installing 4.0 and 4.1 kernels would fix the issue but unfortunately it didn't. It seems to happen quite randomly as sometimes I would be able to suspend/resume 20 times before I saw it happening while after some reboots it would appear already after the third or fourth time. Also, the screen remained black sometimes while I could still switch to the text consoles via the function keys or the system froze completely while resuming. That's real deal breaker so I invested a lot of time to see if anything can be done about it. I search forums up and down and even installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to see if the issue would go away. It didn't and after a couple of days I had to admit defeat on that front.

Strange LibreOffice Behavior

Another think that kept me puzzled over many hours was LibreOffice's behavior. While I was editing a spreachsheet that had lots of cells with a lot of formatted text inside, Calc would either crash on me entierly after a while or it would suddenly become very slow when moving to a cell with a lot of text with the cursor keys. When looking at memory consumption in 'htop' I noticed that when this happened, Calc started using enormous amounts of memory each time I went into such a cell. At some point when calc became almost unresponsive it had accumulated almost 2 GB of RAM. I save the file and tried on another Ubuntu 15.04 installation with the same LibreOffice version but I could neither replicate the crashes nor the memory consumption there. Again I spent several hours going after this and could finally fix it by installing the brand new LibreOffice 5.0. But I could never find out why Libreoffice 4.4 behaved so strangely on this machine while it was just working fine on another.

Swap Partition always gone in Ubuntu 14.04

And while we are talking about the things that just don't make sense, I couldn't get the encrypted swap partition working when I installed Ubuntu 14.04. After every reboot the swap partition was no longer recognized. I could recreate it manually in 'gparted' and adapt the 'fstab' and 'crypttab' files but after a reboot it was again not recognized. Again something I've never experienced on any other PC I've installed Ubuntu on and it have been quite a few.

Summary

Despite the less then ideal hardware keyboard and touchpad, which are the only negative points for me on the hardware side, I really fell in love with this machine. I found Ubuntu very usable in tablet and video stand mode, the on-screen keyboard and touch-screen support is great. Apart from the strange Libreoffice issues that I could fix by installing version 5.0, all programs I use on a daily basis ran well despite the slow Core M processor and I did not notice a speed difference compared to using them on my i3 based Lenovo E330 laptop. The deal breaker unfortunately were the issues around suspend/resume. I don't like defeat but after dedicating several evenings to the problem I decided it was not worth further effort. As it doesn't happen too often I decided to live with it and hope that things will be fixed in a future kernel version.

After coming back from vacation and having had some time before my next trip I decided it was a good time to upgrade my Samsung Galaxy S4 from CyanogenMod Android 4.4.4 (Kitkat) to 5.1.1 (Lollipop) mostly because of the Stagefright security issues discovered in the weeks before. While that fixed the security issues I was actually positively surprised about a number of new and different things on Lollipop (i.e. CyanogenMod 12.1). Read on for the details.

First of all, the eye candy has gotten slicker again. Things roll in and out of the screen into different directions and animations are much smoother. Despite the added animation complexity there's a noticeable improvement of the calendar entries being presented in a widget on the start screen. Instead of taking 15 second they appear immediately.

Also, program startup times have been much reduced and, what I've been asking for a long time, apps are no longer terminated in the background after some time of non-use or when bigger apps such as Osmand are started in the foreground. Also, switching between running apps with the new task switching functionality that shows running apps like they were in a Rolodex is much better than on Kitkat. Another thing that has gotten attention was the startup time of the camera app. While it usually took several seconds before, it's now almost instantaneous.

Speaking about Osmand, the GUI of the current version that was released independently of my OS upgrade has become much slicker. It took a bit of time to get accustomed to where I find different functions as they look a bit different now but overall I like the user interface changes.

Further on the positive list, a '#' sign is now shown in the status bar if an app is running with root rights. Speaking of the status bar, I like the new icon design and notification handling both in locked and unlocked state and the ability to completely block notifications of apps that I don't want or only ban them from the lock screen.

And last but not least, my network blocking scripts to remove obnoxious advertisement in web pages and the ability to disable GSM for LTE/UMTS only access still work. Excellent, both are must-have features for me.

Unfortunately there are a number of major issues with the CM 12.1 nightly development stream as well: Nightlies distributed in the middle of August for the S4 had a major problem with the GPS chip and my device couldn't get a fix at all or took several minutes. This seems to have been fixed in late August but the current nightlies keep soft resetting the GUI several times a day on my device. I tried an S5 for comparison and had the same experience with soft resets. I guess some more work needs to go into CM 12.1 before it can be declared reasonably stable and usable. A bit of a pity, I'd really like to use it now 🙂

The second issue I have noticed is power consumption. I can't yet put my finger on it but it seems that while power consumption is the same as before when the phone is locked, significantly more power is required with CM 12.1 while the device is used.

Well, I guess you can't have it all, but the broken GPS functionality and regular GUI resets are a showstopper for me at the moment. Fortunately the Galaxy S4 CM maintainer has now issued CM 11 nightlies with the Stagefright fix as well. So let's see, hopefully that's more stable.

Not so easy I'm afraid…

Every now and then I flash CyanogenMod on an Android device and as there are usually weeks or months between two sessions I frequently have to look up the instructions again. To complicate matters, the procedure for flashing an alternative Android on a device also depends on the device manufacturer. Altogether a very confusing procedure if you don't do it all the time. But things get much simpler once one has understood what lies at the core of the different procedures and all the steps required.

The Recovery Partition

No matter how different the procedures are, the core is always the same: When Android starts, the bootloader on any device has several choices it can make. Usually, the bootloader just boots Android. Some manufacturers have included a proprietary flashing software that the bootloader can run instead of starting Android when the user presses a certain key combination during power up. This is proprietary, however, and is not directly related to Android. And finally, the bootloader can also start the software in Android's recovery partition. And this recovery partition is what is used on all devices to install an alternative ROM from a zip file that contains the complete Android installation.

Software For The Recovery Partition

So the first trick is to get an alternative recovery software on the recovery partition. A well known alternative recovery software is Clockworkmod (CWM).  This is the key in all flashing procedures I have come across so far. Exactly how this is can be achieved depends on the device and manufacturer and procedures vary wildly. I'll give a couple of examples below. For now, the key thing to remember is that an alternative recovery software such as CWM has to end up in the recovery partition in some way.

Getting The Alternative Android Software On The Device

Once the recovery software is on the recovery partition it can then be used to flash the alternative Android system into the system partition. Before that is done the device has to be wiped with the recovery software as configuration settings of the 'old' Android system might not be compatible with the new system. The second big task in flashing a new Android system is to get the zip file that contains the new Android system into the device so the recovery software can flash it. The easiest variant is to put it on a removable memory card. Another variant some devices support is to upload the ZIP file to the data partition of the device over USB while it is in recovery mode. One way or another, once the Android system ZIP file is on the device the alternative recovery software (e.g. CWM) is then used to install it. In the case of CyanogenMod I usually also transfer a second ZIP file to the device that contains a part of the Google software to be able to access the Play store. Transferring and flashing the second ZIP file works the same way as for the main Android system ZIP file.

So Why Are The Procedures Different For Different Device Manufacturers?

So far so good. In practice, however, different manufacturers have chosen different ways to configure the different Android storage partitions and startup procedures. Also, some companies such as Sony, for example, lock the bootloader and won't allow an alternative software on the recovery partition before the bootloader is unlocked. This is done via a code that can be obtained from their unlock website. The Samsung devices I have flashed so far do not require this step, their boot loaders are open. However, there seem to be some US network operators that have the bootloader of their device variants locked. On Sony devices the recovery software has to be sideloaded via Android debug tools. On Samsung devices, Samsung specific tools are required. And, not to forget, the key combinations to make the phone boot into the flashing software in Samsung's case or the recovery partition are also different on a device and manufacturer basis. Just like the keys to enter a PC's BIOS settings…

But in the end, all these different procedures have one goal: To get an alternative recovery software on Android's recovery partition. Keeping that in mind and the confusing multistage instructions of how to do that might seem a little bit less confusing.

 

Wow, I'm flabbergasted, did you know that the BIOS can contain Windows executables that are run at every Windows system startup that the user can't delete and that even won't go away when you re-install Windows unless the feature is deactivated in the BIOS before re-installing?

I didn't until I read this article in Ars security about a well known company that misused the 'feature' that is supposed to help with wipe-after-theft and other security features to deploy un-deletable crapware to buyers of their machines. Another one of those 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' features that was hijacked. Am I glad that I'm running a Linux OS on all my machines whose developer's would never even dream of supporting such a dangerous BIOS behavior.

I've been in Austria again this summer for a couple of weeks and thanks to Drei.at's unlimited data bundle for 18 Euros a month on a prepaid SIM I didn't have to artificially limit my data use. Last year, I ran through 16 GB of data during my 3 weeks stay and slightly topped it this time around with 18 GB because I was in the country for a couple of days longer.

I suspect it would have been much more as I mostly streamed HD content this time around if it wasn't for the fact that unlike last year the sun was shining a lot and thus there was less time to use bandwidth intensive applications, read, streaming videos. While LTE is now ramping in Austria as well, my prepaid SIM was still limited to their 3G network but there was no congestion and the network felt snappy with sustained data rates usually well beyond the 10 Mbit/s mark.

Like last year, I had a Raspberry Pi with me, this time a Pi 2, to serve as a Wi-Fi access point and VPN client gateway to tunnel the data traffic of all my devices via tethering to a Samsung Galaxy Express smartphone to a VPN server first before releasing it to the Internet. Yes, I like my privacy and I don't want to be DPI'd. Unlike last year, however, I didn't use my VPN server at home in Germany that is limited to a throughput of 5 Mbit/s due to my VDSL line's uplink speed limitation. Instead, I used my VPN server in Paris that is connected to a fiber line to be able to make full use of the available 3G bandwidth.

For streaming videos to a tablet instead of to a PC like last year, I had a second Raspberry Pi with me so I could run another Wi-Fi network and VPN tunnel to another destination to cater for regional content limitation, i.e. geoblocking. I could of course have changed the VPN endpoint on the main Pi as necessary and I have scripts to do that on the fly, but a Pi is light and small enough to fit into the suitcase so why limit myself?

The usage graph screenshot on the left is quite interesting. Unlike last year where the curve was pretty much a straight line, the curve this year is a bit different. During the first week I was traveling through the country a lot and the curve is quite flat, i.e. little video consumption. The pattern changes quite a bit about a third into the trip and one can plainly see the difference of Internet use with and without online video viewing.

I very much enjoyed the trip and wished there were more network operators like Drei in Austria that are a bit more generous with the mobile data buckets than just a couple of GBs per month.

In the past 10 years I guess I wasn't the only observing that lots of European and US tech companies and network equipment vendors where laying off people and selling off parts of their technology and wondering how the story would continue. In many cases, Chinese companies picked up the parts and at least in Europe, quite a lot of people in the tech business are now working for Chinese companies. In many cases, companies regarded as 'Asian upstarts' by man in the industry only 10 years ago have become quite successful, often being on the market these days with new features well before the incumbent competition, especially in the LTE domain.

So far, this was a continuing trend. But I'm wondering if we are perhaps about to run into saturation here as well!? Today, I've seen the first article I can remember on a big Chinese tech company, Lenovo in this case, having had a massive dip in earnings and thus announcing that they will fire 3200 people or about 5% of their employees as a result. You can of course read this in many ways or perhaps it's only an isolated case but I wonder if the tech honeymoon in China is about to end as well?

Museums probably have to walk a tight line. Give too little information about exhibits and people are not happy, give too much information and people are annoyed as well. Usually, I fall into the first category as I usually go to museums with a specific topic in mind I want to immerse in, such as computing history for example. But even specialized museums on the topic such as the Computer History Museum in California or the Heinz Nixdorf Forum in Germany with their wonderful exhibits offer little in this regard. But as long as there's cellular or Wi-Fi network coverage in the museum, things are far from hopeless.

With a bit of background research one can usually find a ton of information on exhibits on Youtube and Wikipedia, most of it not from the museum itself but from other people. Case in point: When I was recently in Vienna I visited the technical museum because I wanted to take a closer look at the "Mailüfterl", a transistor based computer of the 1950's that was built at the local university. The last sentence is about as much information as the museum said about the exhibit. Quite disappointing but not only did Wikipedia come to the rescue, there are great videos on Youtube with a lot of background information, including this great video tribute made by Google. Wonderful!

Equally, I enjoyed background information about quite a number of other exhibits such as a Univac II tube based computer, a PDP11/40 with integrated circuits, a Powerbook G3 (with a nice 7 minute video of Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller showing how their new product annihilates the competition), etc. etc. etc. And what about that Saba video game console I've never heard about!? The museum doesn't tell me anything about why it is significant but Wikipedia immediately tells me that it's been a re-branded Fairchild Channel F game console that even predates the Atari 2600. What happened to Saba, a brand I know from other electronic products of the 1980s? The museum has no answer, Wikipedia has. Great to find out all these things while looking at the real thing. That's how I like a museum visit to be, go there see the real thing, immerse myself in the details and learn.

Perhaps museums should consider to provide Wi-Fi Internet access and make their visitors particularly aware of it so they can use their own devices (i.e. smartphones and tablets) to get the background information about exhibits they would like to have instead of awkwardly trying to find the right balance between too much and too little, which is impossible to find anyway due to the diverse interests of their visitors.

For the third time in a row I ran into major difficulties when upgrading Owncloud. I really love this project and I can't overstate it's importance to me, but in its current state it won't be attractive to a lot of non-technical people for whom a robust upgrade process is essential because they can't fix things when they break without them being at fault. So instead of just helping to fix the individual issues as I've done in the past, I've decided to describe my latest upgrade experience to an open audience in the hope that some people working on Owncloud realize the state the project is in and finally take some real counter measures.

I run a pretty much standard and small Owncloud instance on an standard Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server installation on an Intel platform. Nothing fancy, just a few users, only the minimal number of apps installed such as calendar and contacts. Also, I have some of the built in apps enabled such as the PDF viewer, gallery and the 'inside document' search. That's it. So I would expect that when my Owncloud instance informs me with a nice yellow banner at the top that an update is available and that I should just press the update button everything works smoothly. Boy was I in for a surprise.

When upgrading from Owncloud 8.0.4 to 8.1.1 as suggested by the updater the upgrade failed with an error message. A look at the issues list on Github revealed a mile long thread of other people who have also gotten the message. Eventually I figured that I just need to reload the update page and the update would run through again and this time it succeed…

Next, all external apps such as calendar and contacts are disabled and you have to re-enable them. A 'nice' feature that Owncloud picked up along the way after version 6.0 and that nobody understands from a user point of view. From what I've seen there have been quite a number of people voicing their concerns over this and it's on the top of the wish list of things to change for an upcoming version.

Unfortunately the calendar and contacts apps were not longer in the list of apps that can be activated. What!? After a lot of research I found out that this is related to an error message in the admin screen that Owncloud doesn't have access to the Internet. How so, I wondered, Internet access is working fine. Again, I had a look at the Owncloud core issue list on Github and found a mile long thread from other people who had the same issue. Somewhere in the middle of the thread I read that putting an SSL certificates file one can download from the web into the Owncloud config directory fixes the issue. Unbelievable but true, it fixed this issue, no more complaints about no Internet connectivity and the calendar and contacts apps were showing up again in the list of apps that can be activated.

The next challenge I met was that when activating the calendar in the app menu I got an update error message. Now what, again no further advice!? Clicking somewhere in the web interface popped up the system updater page again which informs me that the calendar is now updated. Unfortunately that fails again with a strange error message. Again, the issue list on Github tells me I'm not the only one and rinse, wash, repeat will fix the issue. I saw the updater page again when activating a number of other apps, this time fortunately without further issues after the initial error message.

I also had trouble getting the Lucence search app updated. When doing that via the "updater button" on the web interface, Owncloud completely fell over and wouldn't even show anything in the web browser anymore. Again, the issues list on Github told me I'm not the only victim and that deleting the Lucene app directory on the server and re-installing the app fixes the issue. And indeed it did.

After that, Owncloud was finally working again for me. But I can't believe that a simple update results in such chaos!? Really, dear Owncloud community, of which I feel I'm being a (frustrated) part of, you have to get your act together and fix the update process, IT MUST NOT FAIL UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES if you want this project to thrive in the future. Forget new features, forget slick UI changes, FIX THE UPDATE PROCESS…

And fix it to a point where an update via 'apt-get update' from the command interface does everything, including re-activation and updates of any Owncloud apps. While this is not working I won't even bother anymore recommending to and installing Owncloud instances for my less technical friends.