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Only an utter moron would choose to play chess against the computer. It’s dead boring and if you had not already acquired a taste for it through over the board play, you might even erroneously conclude that it is the game that is boring. There is second reason too; it’s well nigh impossible to beat a modern computer at chess. A super GM might be able to beat another one in OTB play but that same player would struggle to beat a chess engine that plays at 2500 strength. That’s because half the game is across outside the board. It’s gamesmanship and psychological tactics. You can stifle a yawn or snigger at the computer to make it feel that it made a blunder.

Chess software has it’s uses to too. Gone are the days when players swore by print copies of the ECO or the BCO (here in Sri Lanka, we never had them anyway). They have been replaced by openings databases. You no longer need to subscribe to the Šahovski Informator to keep your openings knowledge upto date. Nowadays you can download a pgn file from the The Week in Chess

The other useful purpose served by chess software is in Post Mortem analysis. You no longer have to go begging to a strong player to have a complicated game analyzed. Even then the analysis may not be perfect (unless your friend is a GM). On the other hand, a chess engine given sufficient time to ponder rarely makes any mistakes. So a Chess Engine plus an Openings database (sometimes you need a client software too) are essential tools for anyone who takes chess seriously. Well, I take chess very seriously but I haven’t had an engine installed on my computer for nine years! That’s because I retired from the game in 2000 however I started playing online at yahoo chess the day Bobby Fischer died (what a sad day that was). Many players on yahoo chess are said to use chess engines for cheating. So I switched to chess.com early this year and started playing seriously again about the middle of the year.

I have slowly begun to find my touch and my ratings are going up slowly in fits and starts. I have been using chess.com ’s post mortem analysis engine to analyze my games but i’ve become fed up with it of late because the analysis is woefully inaccurate. I suspect the reason for this is because it analyzes hundreds if not thousands of games each day and thus allocates limited CPU for each game. The analysis is so bad, I have even see it miss mates, not once but twice. So the time has come to finally install an engine. While there are hundreds of engines for Windows, there are precious few for linux. I am planning to go through them and find something suitable tomorrow. So tune in again

Having successfully persuaded one of my friends to buy an Ezy SlimTop, which is an Intel Atom based computer that runs with Linux, I recommended it to another friend. When she tried to buy one they were out of stock. This was less than a week after the product was launched so we can safely assume that it has been selling like hot cakes. A couple of days later my friend did get hold of one.

After successfully copying her old files the first thing she tried was to start Thunderbird to check mail. Where the heck is Thunderbird on this thing? Well it’s not there. Ezy Slim Top ships with a customized version of Ubuntu. I have never been a fan of Ubuntu but surely the Thunderbird package is included in the Ubuntu DVD? why couldn’t those Moron’s install it? I told my friend all she needed to do was to download the tarball, expand it, look for a file called thunderbird or mozilla-thunderbird or something similar and just click on it, it will run. No dice. She says nothing happens! She was adamant that she did everything right. I was getting rather irritated with her but finally asked her to send it over for me to have a look. What happens when I click on the thunderbird binary? nothing!

Thunderbired fails silently but when your run it from the command line a set of errors about missing stdc++ libraries show up. The obvious thing to do is to install Thunderbird with apt-get. That will result in all the dependencies being installed. But for that you need the root password. Or do you? Well on Ubuntu you can do without the root password. They encourage using sudo instead of a root login. Sudo will prompt you for a password but what you need to enter is your own password. Right so what is the default user’s password? no one knows!

This Slim Top is configured to login automatically with the default user account (named ezy) and that default user’s password is not included anywhere you cannot look it up from the website cause they don’t have a website. The day the product was launched, their site just said ‘coming soon…’ and that’s all you can still find on the it more than a month later.

Any password can be reset by booting up in single user mode. When I tried it, I was sent a weird recovery console with an even weirder keyboard mapping. So rebooted giving bash as the init script (of course you can use any other shell too (append init=/bin/bash in the grub bootup line)). I reset the password for both the accounts and rebooted. Yet, no matter how I try, it refuses to accept the passwords that I just chose!

I rebooted again and reset the passwords again, still sudo and su both refuse my password. I tried for a third time, This time, I checked the /etc/shadow file before and after the reset to make sure that the changes have taken place. They haven’t, the hash is exactly the same. It was then that it occurred to me that the file system might be mounted in read only mode. It is. So I remounted in R/W mode and reset the passwords one more time. This time it worked but why didn’t the passwd program produce an error when the file system was mounted in read only mode? All this hassle could have been avoided if they had included the password in the booklet (well handbill more likely) that comes with the computer.

The next day, I returned the computer to the owner but only to receive another complaint; the printer doesn’t work. Shouldn’t they be complaining to the vendor? well the vendor doesn’t have a clue. Wearily I asked her to send it back (by this time, I had forgotten the password so had to go through the reset process one more time). The printer is an HP 1020, it has a driver for linux (name foo2zjs). On their site, they say in bold letters: “DON’T USE the foo2zjs package from: Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandrake/Manrivia, Debian, RedHat, …”. Now if easy Slim Top ships with a customized version of Ubuntu, why can’t they replace the bad driver from the install DVD and replace it with the direct download from the site?

These are two issues that any ordinary user will not be able to solve on their own. Others encountering these sort of problems probably format the machine and install XP or Vista on it. Vista would crawl and XP wouldn’t be much better and it would most likely be a pirate copy of windows as well. So by this half baked approach to linux, Browns is harming both linux and themselves.

About a month ago, a friend of mine, a first time computer buyer bought a budget computer with an Intel Atom chip and Linux on my recommendation. I haven’t heard from him since, either he doesn’t have any complaints and is deliriously happy or he is not talking to me anymore.

Recently, one of Sri Lanka’s best established companies (Browns PLC) started selling Intel Atom based PCs powered by Linux. The very first day they started operations, a friend of mine from one of the most remote and backward parts of Sri Lanka (yes I do have such friends) bought one of those machines (the Ezy Slim Top). The other alternatives were to buy a branded box with a dual core chip or to get one from Unity Plaza. Most of the vendors in Unity Plaza are not to be trusted (sure there are a few good ones but it’s darned hard to tell the difference). To make matters to make a warranty claim you need to bring your computer to Colombo (not very easy when you are living in the middle of no where and don’t have your own car) and argue with them till the cows come home. What convinced him was seeing a girl who was about 12 years old, lugging her computer into one of the shops to get it repaired.

The other option is just pay a lot of extra money for a powerful CPU which you will never utilize to the full (just check now how much of your processor you are using, bet it’s less than 10%). The second problem is that most of the branded machines ship with Vista or XP, I simply cannot understand why people pay so much money for garbage. Since money was at a premium it wasn’t hard to convince him on this point either.

Having read so far, you might wonder what all this has to do with the topic of the post ; ‘how not to sell computers running linux’, well the trouble started the second time I recommended this same computer to a friend. This time it’s someone who’s been using one for years to do word processing. I can see you roll your eyes in your head but I got such friends too. But this is enough today, check back tomorrow for the next episode

Tried to load a page with an applet in FF for the first time since upgrading from Tiger to Snow Leopard and this dialog pops up.

I don’t quite see the need to convert the applets in the applet cache in this manner. What the heck is the conversion anyway? any applet compiled with java 1.4+ will run on Java 6 (though the reverse is not true).