It’s that time of the year again kids.. For some reason, I didn’t do this last year.  Here we go, my 10 predictions for technology in 2010.

1. Netbooks – huge.

You thought 2009 was the year of the netbook?  You ain’t seen nothing yet, kid. 2010 will bring a whole new crop of them, this time with the Nvidia ION chipset, allowing you to watch HD content on your little netbook.  We’ve already started seeing better screen resolutions like 1366×768 (instead of the older 1024×600), giving you greater than 720p on the display.  This will continue, though I don’t think you’ll see 10″ screens grow much more in resolution.  Apple’s rumored to release something early in 2010, possibly called iSlate, which will be a hybrid netbook/tablet device.

2. Home Virtualization

In 2009, with VMware ESXi being free, geeks started doing bare-metal virtualization more and more, dumping host-os solutions like VMware Server in favor of better performance.  This trend will accelerate in 2010, and we’ll see someone introduce a virtualization product targeted at the so-called “pro-sumer”.  It will be interesting to see if it’s specifically marketed as such.  What’s it for?  Aggregation of lots of different home network services onto a single hardware platform.  Maybe it’s all a dream for us geeks, but I think something will pop in 2010.  Remember, everyone said the same thing about NAS, and now those are everywhere too.

3. Gigabit Ethernet for everyone

People will stop buying routers and switches for the home that are only 10/100 devices.  The driving forces?  NAS and 802.11n.  As people replace old computers with new, they come with shiny stuff like 802.11n wifi cards instead of crusty old 802.11g.  This means a jump from 54 Mbps to 300 Mbps.  Obviously, 300 Mbps > 100 Mbps, and nobody wants to have access to their data on the NAS to be that slow.

4. Android Cleans House

I admit it.  I like Google.  I love the idea of a common-source OS that’s open for mobile devices.  I’ve got serious technolust for something running Android right now.  I’m doing my best to be patient though.  I want to see the latest batch of devices, hopefully with 1 Ghz Snapdragon processors and Android 2.1 first.  After that, if it’s got AT&T 3G bands and wifi, I’m in.  I predict that people will finally start falling out of iLove with their iPhones, though certainly not in droves, and move to a more capable platform that does “more.”

5. Another new iPhone

As it’s older siblings before it, it will be buzzword compliant, but probably only with stuff that isn’t cutting edge.  You’ll get your 5MP camera (that I had on a phone 2 years ago), you’ll get HSPA – but won’t be able to use it.  What’s the big prediction here?  New headphones that use Bluetooth, sort of like the ones that Nokia sells.  They’ll be optional, and work with the 3GS, but I’d bet they won’t work with the 3G and certainly not the original iPhone.  Nothing earth shattering, but they’ll be Apple-branded, and tightly integrated with the device, so you’ll see stuff like song titles and caller id info on an OLED display, possibly color, using buddy icons from your address book.

6. Another iPod Shuffle down-size

Because they’re not small enough, right?  This time, it will be a single piece of hardware, integrated into the headphones.  It will also see a price cut to $49 for a 4GB model.  Just an incremental change in the end.

7. More gigantic technological misnomers

Like LED TVs.  I had a discussion with someone not long ago who insisted that these were not LCD TVs, and were in fact LED TVs.  He just couldn’t get past the idea that the display technology is largely the same, possibly some incremental changes, but the real change is in the backlight.  LCD TVs that were purchased a couple of years ago were certainly backlit using fluorescent bulbs.  These “LED” TVs use LED bulbs for the backlight.  That’s the limit of the changes.  These are not self-illuminating screens like OLED or AMOLED.  Now an AMOLED screen – that would be HUGE.  What will the misnomer be about?  Who knows?  It’s coming though.

8. A “major” newspaper will fail to make it to 2011

We’ve been talking for years about the impending death of the newspaper, in favor of Internet-based news channels.  I think back to our experience with the local paper earlier this year.  We subscribed purely for the reason of getting coupons.  We subscribed to the weekend package (so Friday – Sunday).  Total cost was about $10 a month.  The problem?  We only netted about $5-6 worth of coupons per month.  After 2 months, we canceled the subscription.  Ad revenues are already in the toilet for newspapers, and will only continue to decline.  Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee, Mr. Newspaper Man.

9. Compressed hydrogen will start moving.

Sure, Honda’s got their prototype Accord going in California.  But, we’re going to start seeing a real compressed hydrogen delivery network being built.  Hydrogen is arguably one of the most abundantly available elements on Earth.  The vehicles emit water vapor as their exhaust.  Not so bad, eh?  Please, don’t confuse me with a climate change fruit loop.  I don’t subscribe to cooking the books in order to support my points, as is the case in the climate change circle these days.  But surely a car that emits water vapor can only be a good thing, when compared to a gas or diesel vehicle.

10. A usable water-based fuel cell

This thing is the big dream.  You fill it up with water, and the hydrogen is used to power the device.  It’s completely sustainable, and free to “recharge.”

I took the plunge.  I did a clean installation of the Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 beta on my eeePC 1000.

So far, it’s pretty smooth.  Adamm’s even got a new kernel spun for Intrepid.  This time, I skipped over using the very good UNetbootin, in favor of connecting a USB DVD drive.  Mind you, my eee 1000 is no longer in a stock configuration, having changed out the wifi card in favor of an Intel Wifi Link 5300, so I don’t have to worry about the rt2860 driver.  That said, someone’s already created a package that uses dkms to install the driver on Intrepid.  For me, the driver is now in the box.  No more downloading snapshots of drivers and building them myself. Yay.

So, what’s working?  Everything.  No, really, at least hardware-wise.  In truth, I didn’t try the microphone, but I’d bet it works, since Adam knocked that one out in a previous kernel release for Hardy.  What’s not working?  Hotkeys.  Newer ACPI drivers, so different interface (no longer under /proc), so scripts && utilities need to be rebuilt/adjusted a bit.  That’s bound to happen over the next few weeks, as this release heads out the door.  I’ve hacked a bit on the scripts I was using for my Hardy install (courtesy of elmurato), and I’ve got CPU scaling and control of the webcam working with the hotkeys.  More to come later on that.

What’s new & cool?

Network Manager 0.7 – Now your 3G devices should work automatically.  At least mine (Pantech UM175) does.

Xorg 7.4 – Hotplug support for pretty much everything you’d want to throw at it.  Most users can run without an xorg.conf with this release.  Speaking as someone who’s spent years hacking away on XF86Config and xorg.conf files, that’s mighty cool.

DKMS – This one’s a monster.  So, you’ve got some kind of special bit of hardware that requires a special driver of some sort.  In Hardy & earlier, you’d have to install new packages for the driver each time, or rebuild it every time you installed a new kernel.  With DKMS, the modules are automagically recompiled for each new kernel version.

GNOME 2.24 – The latest & greatest.

So far, Intrepid’s behaving pretty well for me.  By the time it rolls at the end of the month, it should be pretty solid.  I do wish that the Ubuntu gang would swap out Usplash for Splashy though..  Oh well, I’ll wind up doing that myself in the end, I suppose..

My latest project with the eee 1000 was to get some better wifi range, possibly saving some battery life in the process.  My first thought was to go for a replacement antenna.  I ordered one on eBay, and was prepared to do a bit of mod work to get it done.  Just then, the seller didn’t send me my antenna parts, but instead sent me an Intel Wifi Link 5300 MiniPCIe card.  We agreed to just call it even at that point.  I bought a different antenna at that point.  You’ll see why.

Conventional wisdom calls for (as many others have done previously) an Intel 4965 MiniPCIe card. The 5300 seems to be the successor to the 4965, boasting up to 450 Mbps of 802.11n performance.  Not having any 802.11n APs, I wouldn’t know about that just yet.  We’ll see.  Unfortunately, this card doesn’t have drivers in the mainline Linux kernel until version 2.6.27.  As I’m running Ubuntu Hardy (until Intrepid Ibex rolls out), and on kernel 2.6.24, no drivers exist, outside of the backported ones from compat-wireless guys.  Well, since the drivers exist, I decided to give it a go.

First up, grab the firmware and the drivers package.  Unpack the firmware and drop it in /lib/firmware.  Next, you’ll need to install the “build-essential” package, as well as the linux-headers packages appropriate for your kernel.  Unpack the drivers, check the config.mk file.  You should probably (as I did) uncomment the lines that enable support for the RFKILL code.  This is what gives you the ability to toggle the wifi on & off.  Do a make & make install (as root) to load the drivers up.  It will not overwrite existing mac80211 modules, and that’s a good thing.  Halt your machine and do the card swap.

Installing the card was pretty easy.  Pull the battery and unplug first.  After all, you don’t want to short things out, right? Ok, now remove the two screws that hold down the existing Ralink wifi card and pop the two antenna leads off.  Now install the Intel card and put the screws back.  Connect the white wire to terminal 1, and the black to terminal 2.  Terminal 3 is where you’ll need to connect the extra antenna.  I opted for a small antenna, typically used for a bluetooth radio, but since it’s a 2.4 Ghz antenna, it also works fine here. I snaked the wire through one of the small gaps in the plastic housing adjacent to the wifi card, and used the adhesive backing on the antenna to stick it in the hole where the hard drive goes on a 1000h.  Not sure where you’d want to put the antenna on a 1000h, but then again, that’s not my chief concern, as I’m working on a 1000.  Put back all the screws and you’re done.

Boot the system, and you should be all done.  The card should be automagically detected and have the iwlagn module loaded.  You’ll likely want to gently massage your /etc/acpi/eeepc-wifi-toggle.sh script to work with the proper modules.  Removing the module and echoing a 0 into /proc/acpi/asus/wlan (to power down the card) results in the card going into “deep sleep”.  My last bit is to figure out how to wake it from deep sleep, other than a reboot.

Netbook Remix is an alternative Linux UI targetted at small screen devices, or the so-called Netbooks like the eeePC.  I just loaded it up tonight, and so far, I’m very impressed.  All I can say is go try it out for yourself.  If you find you hate it, backing it out is as easy as removing a couple of startup items and panel widget, followed by a logout/login.

Details on the installation procedure are here..  Relatively simple stuff.  Add a repo, install 4 packages, add 1 to your gnome session, massage panel widgets, done.

It’s really quite a nice setup.  Check it out…

1. Get Ubuntu Installed.

To get the ball rolling, you’re going to need a way to install Ubuntu on your shiny new eeePC.  If you don’t have a USB CD/DVD drive laying around, all is not lost.  You’ll first want to download the Ubuntu Hardy Desktop x86 iso, either from the Ubuntu Website, or a torrent, or whatever.  In the end, you want to have an ISO to work from.

Next, hit the UNetbootin site and download the latest UNetbootin.  Get a USB flash drive formatted with the FAT32 filesystem, at least a 1GB drive please.  The Ubuntu install unpacks onto the drive to the tune of about 700MB.  Fire up UNetbootin, point it at the ISO you downloaded, tell it which USB drive to write the image to and wait.  Go get a cup of tea, or something.  Come back in 5-10 minutes.

Plug that thumb drive into your eeePC and turn the system on.  Tap gently on the ESC key several times, until presented with a boot menu.  Select USB: from the list and boot away into the Ubuntu livecd installer.  Now just do what comes naturally.  Read a bit about your particular system’s setup first, to make your life easier down the road.  For example, my eeePC 1000 ships with 2 SSDs inside, an 8GB and a 32GB.

I left the /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda4 partitions alone (the BIOS loader partition and an EFI loader partition, respectively), and created a single /dev/sda1 partition with what space was available after removing partitions 1 & 2.  This is mounted on /, as fs type ext2.  I’ve got the larger SSD split into a 30GB /dev/sdb1, mounted on /home as ext2 and left the remainder unpartitioned (for the moment).

Let’s stop and talk filesystems for a minute.  Why ext2 and not ext3, xfs or jfs?  As much as I’d like to use a journaling filesystem, those cause more write operations than a non-journaled fstype, such as ext2.  And as we all know, flash devices have a finite lifespan for write operations.

2. Kernels, Drivers and Flash Drives, oh my..

If you’re on an eeePC 901 or 1000 model, after you reboot, there will be no working network for you.  This is easily remedied, thanks to Adam M.  Hit his site, get the kernel and modules debs, toss them on a flash drive, connect the drive to the eeePC, install & reboot into that new kernel.  Voila, now your onboard Ethernet (Attansic) works, as does your Wifi (Ralink).  Log in and get that stuff all setup, per Adam’s docs.

3. More Flash Life Prolonging…

What writes to the drive constantly without mercy?  Syslog.  You want syslog to stop doing that.  Don’t worry, it’s pretty painless..  Open your /etc/fstab, as root (use sudo or gksudo along with the text editor of your choice) and add these 4 lines:

tmpfs        /tmp         tmpfs    defaults    0    0
tmpfs        /var/tmp     tmpfs    defaults    0    0
tmpfs        /var/log     tmpfs    defaults    0    0

After saving, reboot.  You’ll now occasionally see errors about files in /var/log missing, or something like that, but are you really that interested in reading the log files on your netbook?  If you need to really capture log data from it, either add a small SD card mounted on /var/log, or send your syslogs to a syslog server over the network.

4. Hotkeys

On the eeeuser forum, there’s a great thread, started by elmurato, which is all about getting the various hotkey combinations working on your eeePC.  I used his “new” scripts on my eeePC 1000 and it all worked fllawlessly.  There’s really not much to say here on this.

5. Disk Encryption

I tried using full disk encryption on my /home, but personally found it far too slow for everyday use on a machine this small.  If you want to go this route, be warned, performance delays will come along for the ride.  You’ve been warned.

Log out, and drop to the console, login as root (if you haven’t set a root password yet, do a sudo passwd root before trying to log in).  Do a ps -fu <yourusername> and make sure you’ve killed all remaining processes belonging to that user that hung on after you logged out.  Now, in order:

cd /home
tar -cvf /root/<yourname>.tar yourname/
cd /root
umount /home
modprobe aes-i586
modprobe sha256
modprobe dm-mod
modprobe dm-crypt
luksformat -t ext2 /dev/sdb1
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 home
mount /dev/mapper/home /home
cd /home
tar -xpvf /root/<yourname>.tar

Next, update your /etc/fstab to mount from the correct spot.  You’ll change from mounting /home from /dev/mapper/home, rather than the UUID=…. entry.  Next, you’ll also need an entry in /etc/crypttab like:

home    /dev/sdb1     none     luks

This entry creates a /dev/mapper/home that uses the physical volume of /dev/sdb1 at boot time.  During the boot process, you’ll get prompted for the passphrase that you set way back when you did the luksformat.  Lastly, don’t forget to add the aes-i586, sha256, dm-mod and dm-crypt modules to your /etc/modules file.  Since you don’t boot from /home, no need to worry about re-creating the initrd with the right files in it.

A new toy found its way onto my desk this week.  An Asus eeePC 1000 came my way the other day..  I’d long been eyeing up the eeePC line, since they first came out.

The eeePC line is one of a new generation of the so-called Netbooks.  An amazingly small, yet powerful line of sub-notebooks that have lots of built-in networkability.

The 1000 model builds on prior models, adding upgrades like Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and 802.11n, to complete the package.  The 1000 also kicks it up a notch in screen size, now up to 10″, driven by an Intel i915 chipset at a resolution of 1024×600.

Storage-wise, the 1000 has 40GB of SSD (Solid State Drive), split over 2 drives, one 8GB, the other 32GB, as well as a built-in SD slot that’s SDHC capable.  The system shipped standard with a variant of Xandros Linux installed, though if Windows is your thing, you can get a similar unit with Windows XP Home Edition loaded on it.  I spent the better part of an hour looking at the pre-installed Xandros setup, until I dumped it in favor of Ubuntu Hardy.  Installing Ubuntu on the system is a breeze, thanks to UNetbootin. It chews up an Ubuntu (or a ton of other distributions for that matter) install CD and turns a FAT32 formatted USB thumbdrive into a USB installer.  For the Hardy desktop version, you need a 1GB drive, as the installer files take about 700MB on the drive.

Once you’ve got Hardy installed, the fun just gets started.  Now you’ve got a machine that boots fine, but has no networking, be it wired or wifi.  Fortunately, others have already gone boldly and taken care of this.  Head over to Adam’s site and pick up the kernel and modules, reboot, setup the repository and you’re off to the races..  There are some scripts out there to setup hotkeys, etc., but I didn’t really care for those, preferring to do it myself.  Check the wiki over at eeeuser.com and read all about it.

Bottom line?  It’s a great little machine.  About the only thing I haven’t done yet is setup my 3G card, because I haven’t gotten around to switching out my Verizon ExpressCard for a USB model, but stay tuned..