http://rhett.weatherlight.com

Thanks!

Suffice it to say, I love a good tool, and this could be one of the best I’ve seen in a long time…AVRSH, a command line and shell that directly exposes the features of an AVR.  Register manipulation, pin configs, fuses…it’s all in there, and you can interact with them using a very familiar interactive shell.  This is useful for two major reasons.  The first is for those times when you need to poke around and scope out how a chip feature really works.  Traditionally, I attack this by making a “dummy load” program and either single-stepping through it with debugger or watching the fireworks through JTAG.  If neither are available, I make the program have some long timing in it and I start attaching an oscope or LEDs to watch the state of lines.  This works, but it’s a crude process that’s infinitely improved by letting me more freely interact with the chip’s features myself.

The other way AVRSH is awesome is in general proptyping of a concept.  Because the only way to know if your program works is to build it, program your board with it, and watch the results, there’s an endless treadmill involved in early prototyping.  An interactive shell greatly improves this scenario, especially if you’re engaged in HW/SW co-design and need to watch how changes at one level impact another.

This is, effectively, the difference between exploring a cave by throwing wireless cameras in random directions and watching the video produced…and exploring a cave by picking up a flashlight and going for a stroll.

Make this a great scripting environment and basic embedded systems programming just became a first-class part of the Linux apps programming world.  With AVRs making such great controllers for robotic activities, how long before “Begone or I’ll replace you with 10 lines of Perl” really becomes true?

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Something that it somewhat misses on, however, is how people perceive a “cheap and simple” product versus its more full-featured counterparts.  Specifically, the tendency is to treat the product as a bit more disposable.  Perhaps it’s not seen as truly disposable, but it certainly doesn’t get treated with the same care and people are more willing to carry and use a small, simple, and cheap device.  Consider this– I have three video cameras, but only my Flip Mino HD is within arm’s reach at all times.  I keep it in my purse so that I’m sure to be able to record anything, anywhere, any time.  My other cameras are too large, too delicate, too complicated, and too expensive.  Someone walks with my purse?  I won’t miss my Flip.  Someone walks with my camera bag?  I’ll be drowning my sorrows.

Consider the difference Wired mentions between a fighter jet and a Predator drone.  You can send drones out on suicide missions, and for the most part, nobody will be worried when they don’t come back.

It’s the same with my netbook.  I have no fear about my netbook being stolen.  It’s not expensive, I don’t carry important data on it, and if I did decide to put important data on it, I’d back it up on the cloud.  Newer netbooks with automatic cloud backup will make worries about theift, loss, and breakage even smaller.  I don’t currently own a full-sized laptop, but when I finally do, I’m not very likely to pack it on my bike and take it on a long trip.  All that rattling around?  Noooo.  I’ll let my netbook take that kind of abuse.  Besides, it’s lighter on my bike.  My netbook will always be my front-line computer, willing to take my abuses.

What does this have to do with Linux?  I’m getting to that.

Last Friday, I sat down and played with Moblin 2.0 and I can confirm that it is a VERY attractive software platform.  It’s got all sorts of wonderful at-a-glance information in its launcher, it’s got some attractive stuff in its toolbar/dashboard system…and then it quickly begins to fade.  Why?  Because the moment I went to set the current time, I was slapped in the face with a prompt for my root password.  Ugh.  NO!  Not acceptable!  Asking me for a password like that is pretty much never acceptable on a netbook.

And this, along with Jolicloud, my love/hate netbook OS at the moment, is a demonstration of a continuing problem.  Netbooks are hot and they appear to be here to stay.  There’s a lot of buzz about the role Linux can play on them, and I happen to agree it can play a good role.  The problem, however, is choosing “how much Linux” you put in a netbook OS.  Both Moblin and Jolicloud are essentially pulling in major components from existing distributions and then skinning their way into the feature set they want.  With Jolicloud, it’s achieved through their apps ecosystem; with Moblin, it’s achieved through a mixture of exploiting the Intel Atom and the Clutter widget set.  The problem, however, is that this approach is still fundamentally dragging concepts of device use from the 1990s based on a system design largely unchanged from decades earlier.  It’s being done under the guise of security, too, but that itself is the source of the problem.

Go back a few paragraphs and think about this some more.  The netbook is the kamikaze laptop.  It’s the one you give to the kids to pound on, the one you buy for your motorcycle or bike bag, the one you take hiking or walking through busy streets.  Why?  Because it’s the most portable and it’s the one you’ll miss the least if it’s lost or stolen.  Again, it’s the abuse taker.  That also applies to security.  It’s the abuse taker on security, too.  The focus on a netbook is on quick use…one button, one gesture, one tap on the touchpad…that should get you to the next thing you need to do.  That doesn’t leave room for entering your password even for system management.

And, frankly, that’s the way it should be.  How many times are you challenged for the root password when you change your phone’s settings?  For that matter, how many users out there would know who “root” is?  This is why there are few, tightly controlled passwords for a phone, and you have to phone up customer support to get them.  Everything else exists in a case of do-what-you-want.  Consumers don’t tolerate this on their phone.  For that matter, they don’t tolerate it on their desktops, either, which is why people complain about Windows Vista so much.  They will certainly not tolerate it on their netbooks.  Typing on a netbook is hard.

Yet, for people who are placing a thin veneer over an existing Linux distro (often either Ubuntu Netbook Remix or Xandros), they don’t have a choice.  They’re not significantly circumventing this superficial “security” “feature,” which would require deeper digging to create.  It would also require having to think about security, because someone in the lab will ask what happened to the root password.  A netbook OS needs to think about security in a different way, limiting the potential for abuse of a compromised device in other ways.  The user has already accepted a loss in processing power and storage for a gain in portability and convenience; taking some of that convenience away is flirting with failure in product design.

And this is why Linux has stumbling blocks where netbooks are concerned.  Jolicloud begs me for my keyring password on every boot and asks me for another password when I update the system.  Moblin wanted a password from me for everything, like a student who keeps begging for a hall pass.  Meanwhile, my PSP has a gorgeous online shop and is pretty much permanently logged in to it.  Guess which of my personal devices I’m currently the most pleased with?  Yep, the PSP, because it’s doing what it ought to be doing — getting me games and videos when I want them and looking good while it does it.  There’s always an air of annoyance from my netbook.

So, how do you do a good Linux netbook OS without prompting the user for passwords galore?  Glad you asked, Bobby, but I’ll be answering that in my next post.