I admit that I’m not the most prolific of bloggers as I tend to enjoy constructing class’s more than paragraphs, but the last six weeks have been a poor show by even my own questionable standards. In all fairness though I have been extremely busy, as some of you know the turnkey web mapping software named Mango that the Aruna team and myself have been working on for what seems like a lifetime now was finally launched at the Map Asia 2007 conference in Kuala Lumpur last week.

The conference was amazing in many ways and our slightly ramshackle trade stand attracted far more attention than even the most optimistic members of our party were hoping for. Not only did we get to stand shoulder to shoulder with the big boys – Google, ESRI and Autodesk to name but a few, but we actually held our own and often had larger crowds for our demo’s than our fortune 500 neighbours, I’m not sure if it was the software or the free sliced Mango we were handing out, but whatever it was it clearly worked. 

I learned a lot of things at the conference on the marketing front, but the thing that really struck me was people’s response to finding out we were a Cambodian company. Before we attended the conference and were having Cade Creative do the branding and print materials for us, we had decided to brand Mango separately from Aruna and although we weren’t in anyway hiding where we were based, we were also not shouting it from the roof tops. But as it turns out being from Cambodia was far from being a hindrance and actually appeared to be a distinct advantage.

If you like to toy with different operating systems as much as I do then you have no doubt encountered the problem of running out of space on a disk which started out as 'test' install. Here's the scenario, you hear about some new flavour of Linux and decide to give it a try, you dig some old 20GB hard drive out from the cupboard, you hook it up as a slave and run the install so you can dual boot and begin to have a play.

Over the course of the next few weeks you figure out all of the hardware and software niggles by installing packages and performing some configuration until you've got everything just right. Then one day down the line, you decide that you now prefer this operating system to whatever you're using right now and want to make a complete switch, but the problem is that the operating system along with all of your packages and fine tuning are sat on a 20GB hard drive which can't even hold your music collection, never mind the other 80GB of data you wish to move over.

A month after installing Ubuntu and my series of slightly boring ‘do this then do that’ articles, I thought it was time to give some feedback on using Ubuntu now that the dust has had time to settle.

For me there are four crucial elements to any operating system, there are performance, support, stability and but not least the element that is often neglected in other Linux distro’s; simplicity. In my humble opinion Ubuntu excels in all four areas and I will address each one individually.

Performance
We all know that XP is a dog when in comes to performance, although I hear the new Vista is a lot quicker out of the blocks than its younger brother we’ll cross that bridge in a year or two when it’s proven to be stable (once bitten, twice shy). Ubuntu like most Linux distro’s is quick, even with various services set to load on boot, I can get to the password screen in less than 30 seconds. Comparing that to XP where I press the power button then pop off to make a coffee, there is no comparison. Once up and running there is no notable difference in running speed between XP and Ubuntu except in heavy Java applications such as Eclipse or Limewire where Ubuntu seems to use far less resources (I’m using Sun Java not GIJ).

Support
I have only one complaint of the level of support in terms of forums, mailing lists and wiki’s for Ubuntu and that is simply that there are so many it makes it difficult to decide which one to choose when looking at hundreds of relevant results being returned in Google. After a while though you soon realize that all the best info is on the Ubuntu website and nine times out of ten you need look no further.

One of the biggest challenges living someplace like Cambodia (which I do) is finding all of the cool tech toys that my geek genes tell me I need. Finding software is similarly difficult, at least when it comes to legal copies of software. I can go down the block to my local market and find almost any software program, music CD, or DVD my little heart could desire, for somewhere around $2 per disc. Finding a legitimate copy of, say, Microsoft Office, is much more of a challenge.

So how does this impact the security scene here? Well, for one thing, those pirated copies at the local markets almost certainly contain what they advertise (whether it be Office, Oracle, or Myst). Many of them also almost certainly contain a little bit more (insert name of your favorite virus/trojan/spambot here). Uh oh.

Now, Cambodia is small, remote, and extremely unconnected. Very few people here can afford a PC, let alone the monthly Internet access. I pay over $100 each month for my 128-kbit/s ADSL link. In a country where $60 a month is a good salary, there are clearly few people even thinking about home network access, let alone spending hundreds of dollars on software, or even $4 on pirated software.

However, this "a little bit more" situation is what's happening in the rest of the developing world, including countries like, say, China, which are much more populous and connected. Think about half a billion people using pirated software, with perhaps 64k connections for each. Add in a few thousand Internet cafes. Even if only 1 percent of the pirated software is infected with some sort of malware (and my hunch is that this is an underestimate), this is clearly a non-trivial problem.

Suddenly all that spam that has been making it through my two layers of filters is not so surprising. All of a sudden we have a large portion of the developing world essentially acting as open relays for spammers. We also have half the world available for a very, very big DDOS attack. This is not good.

After months of work myself and the guys at Aruna have finally got the Cambodia Atlas online, the pre launch was held on Thursday at the Cambodiana, where the atlas received some very positive feedback. The Cambodia Atlas is a DANIDA commissioned project which basically contains most of the GIS data collected in Cambodia over the last decade.

The system was built using Mango which is a web mapping server and client software package produced here in Cambodia by my team and I. The software has been in development for close to two years now and is starting to reach a level of maturity in terms of functionality and scalability. Mango will be officially launched at this years Map Asia conference in Kuala Lumpur on August 14^th.

For part three of my Linux installation adventures I will be covering the advanced installation, this will be similar to the requirements of the previous article except this time the programs needed are for work use and therefore I can't substitute then with suitable replacements as it would throw me out of sync with the rest of the office. For this installation to be deemed a success I will need to install the following programs:

• Eclipse IDE with the PHPEclipse and Aptana plugins

• ESRI Arc Map

• Opera and Internet Explorer (I'm a web developer!)

• Macromedia Fireworks and Flash

This is not going to be as simple an exercise as the previous install and the reason for this is that two of the programs on my list namely ArcMap and Internet Explorer are proprietary software that have no native support for Linux. The other programs also may have some issues which I will explain as I go along. For this part of this series of articles were going to have to start using the command line to install some things and make some changes to system files, this article is supposed to be an overview of my experiences in making the transition to Linux rather than a tutorial on how you can do it yourself, if there is anything that you don't follow or understand then Google is you friend, there you will find all the answers that you require.

For part three of my Linux installation adventures I will be covering the basic installation. As stated in my previous article for the basic installation to be considered a success I will need to install or find suitable replacements for the following:

• Microsoft Office

• Skype

• Outlook

• Firefox

• AVG

I have also decided to go with Ubuntu mostly to see if it lived up the major hype its been getting in the press. So first we will kick off with the installation of Ubuntu.

Firstly I download Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) from www.ubuntu.com and burned it to DVD as a data file. The download was quite large at 715MB. For those of you who don't have an unlimited internet connection and would like a copy the DVD, just send a PM to me and I should be able to get a copy to you, if you ask nicely.

As I said in a previous article I have often toyed with the idea of making a full move across to Linux for my work and personal machines. There are many reasons I would like to make this switch, with the primary one being my resentment of Microsoft.

Although my dislike of Microsoft is great, I am still not the type of person who will cut off my nose to spite my face, by which I mean I will only make the full switch to Linux if as a result of that switch my productivity is increased, or at the very minimum remains the same.

So I set myself the challenge to try and install all of the software which I use on a daily basis on some flavour of Linux on my personal laptop. If I am successful in this, then I will also move across my work machines.

With the release of the Khmer Unicode installer, installing Khmer Unicode has never been easier. Despite the now simple install, many users become frustrated after using the installer finding that Unicode doesn’t render properly in Firefox or Internet Explorer 7, this is not a Unicode problem but in fact a system problem. Before the installer we had to manually overwrite the Unicode Script Processor (usp10.dll) located in the windows/system32 folder. As the file is always in use, in order to modify/delete it Windows had to be started in Safe Mode then the usp10.dll renamed then the new usp10.dll pasted in, this slightly complex process put off or confused many novice computer users. The difficulty in replacing this file was probably the reason an installer wasn’t available previously.

With the installer it appears the guys at Khmeros.info found a way around this problem by dropping the usp10.dll in program files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/Office11 instead of replacing the file in windows/system32. Although I don’t know for sure (maybe someone can fill us in) it is my guess that the usp10.dll put in this folder overrides the usp10.dll in windows/system32 for all programs that use this folder, the name Office11 would suggest that those programs are all from Microsoft Office. This means that non-Office programs such as Firefox will still be using the windows/system32/ usp10.dll and therefore not rendering Khmer Unicode correctly, although once again this is pure guess work.