Ubuntucat

This is a kind of follow-up piece to Lukas Mathis’s Virtual Keyboards on iPhone and Android from a year ago, comparing the virtual keyboards on the iPhone 3GS and the HTC Magic. I bought the Magic (in America called the MyTouch 3G) around that time and everything Mathis said about the keyboard was absolutely true then.

I’m now running Froyo (Android 2.2) on my MyTouch 3G, and it’s pretty neat to see how Google has improved the keyboard a bit in the past year.

On the surface, of course, it doesn’t look as though much has changed:

You’ve got the regular keyboard (same size as it was in 2.1, 2.0, 1.6, and 1.5).

One thing that has changed is the replacement of the comma with a microphone symbol, allowing you to speak in text instead of typing it. At first, I was annoyed by this change, since I often use commas in text messages or emails (and I rarely use speech-to-text). As I’ll explain later, though, Google makes up for that replacement in a different way.

You have it in all caps.

(By the way, something Mathis doesn’t mention—generally speaking, I think he has an even-handed approach to the comparison, but this is where his iPhone bias comes out—is the fact that the Android keyboard makes it visually apparent with each letter on the keyboard whether you are typing in capital or lowercase letters. On the iPhone, the letters appear uppercase even if you are typing in lowercase.) Whoops! Thanks for the correction, Mr. Mathis. I somehow missed that mention in the footnote of your post.

Then you have the caps lock.

The numbers and punctuation.

And the weird alternate symbols.

As Mathis rightly points out, the major strength of the Android keyboard is the autocomplete, as it makes multiple suggestions as you type.

I actually don’t know if this feature was in earlier versions of Android, but in 2.2 if you type im without the apostrophe, one of the first suggestions will be I’m, and if you type simply i and then put in a space afterwards (indicating it’s only one word), your I will automatically be capitalized.

What’s even better, though—and I’m pretty sure this is a recent change in Android—is how the autocomplete recognizes the limitations of the Android keyboard size-wise and makes suggestions accordingly.

The Android keyboard (at least in portrait mode) is definitely smaller than the iPhone keyboard. It is harder to press the right key unless you are concentrating really hard on a particular key or unless you have really tiny fingertips.

Here you can see an example. The g and h keys are quite close together and easy to accidentally hit if you’re trying to type the other key. So here I have begun typing the word going, but instead of hitting goi I actually typed hoi, and Android is smart enough to suggest going.

This is quite huge, actually.

When typing on a physical keyboard, the user’s focus is on the actual text that appears on the screen, not on the keyboard. There is no need to look at the keyboard. The keys don’t move, and the physical features of the keyboard ensure that her hands stay in place, too. The same is not true for virtual keyboards.

Obviously, there is still nothing to anchor your hand to, but after doing quite a bit of typing on Android 2.2, I have to say Google has gotten me quite close to the physical keyboard approach. I don’t look as much at the letters I’m typing as I look at the autocomplete. I usually start typing only one to three letters (and not even carefully) and then select the autocomplete that has the word I was intending to type.

So, yes, as I mentioned before, I was saddened by the comma disappearing from the bottom of the keyboard. Google has made up for it a little by having punctuation autocompletes for every time you finish a word. So you have the option to keep typing another word… or to put in a comma or exclamation point (or something else).

And even though autocomplete of a word will automatically put a space after the word, if you select a punctuation autocomplete right afterwards, Android will delete the space, put in the punctuation mark, and then add a space afterwards.

This kind of “smart” keyboard makes it so I can type almost about half as fast on my Android keyboard as I would on a regular keyboard (which isn’t bad for a touchscreen keyboard).

The unfortunate thing about this implementation, though, is that it isn’t at all intuitive. A lot of this new functionality I discovered by accident. Nothing in the keyboard advertises the fact that if you type a word incorrectly Android will be smart enough to guess what you were typing. Nothing indicates that Android will automatically delete extraneous spaces before inserting your requested punctuation. I actually, for quite a while, would type i, hit the ?123 button to get the apostrophe, and then hit ABC to get back to letters in order to type I’m, not realizing that if I simply typed im, Android would suggest I’m to me as an autocomplete. Very handy, extremely smart—not at all intuitive, though.

As smart as Google has improved Android’s keyboard to be, it’s still got a ways to go. For example, as you can see in this screenshot, not every text entry box has that smart autocomplete. You can enable the Google search suggestions, but even that won’t account for misspellings. You’d have to actually search for the misspelled search, have Google say Did you mean…? and then click the proper search link.

The multi-touch still isn’t implemented the way it is on the iPhone (whereby you can hold down shift and then the letter to capitalize one letter, instead of pressing shift, letting go, and then pressing the letter). You also cannot hold down the switch-to-second-keyboard button and then drag your finger to the number or punctuation mark while basically staying on the main keyboard. And there are some times when the trackball is handy, but it’s just inelegant compared to the magnifying glass on the iPhone to get between letters.

Of course, you could argue that you will make fewer typing mistakes and have to go back edit if the autocomplete is as smart as Android’s is now. Same deal for punctuation marks (since they are now part of the autocomplete and not requiring a switch to the secondary keyboard most of the time).

Just as a random aside, if you’re not in a loud area, and you’re able to speak clearly, the speech-to-text function does work quite well most of the time (if only it could do so for Google Voice transcriptions, too, but that’s another story).

So the bottom line on the Android keyboard is that it’s really smart in a completely counterintuitive way. Once you figure out how to use it, though, it’s golden.

If you have forgotten your administrator password for Windows, you can use a Ubuntu Linux live CD or live USB to reset the password. This tutorial will show you how to do that, step by step.

There are many ways to get Ubuntu Linux. You can find more details about that here.

If you run into any problems or have any questions, the folks at the Ubuntu Forums are very helpful and friendly.
I will not be answering any support questions posted as comments here.

Step 1: Boot up Ubuntu

With the Ubuntu CD in your optical drive or with the Ubuntu USB plugged into your computer, make sure your BIOS is set to boot from CD or USB before your hard drive. You can usually enter your BIOS settings by pressing F1, F2, F9, F10, F12, Esc, or Del during bootup, depending on the kind of computer you have.

After Ubuntu boots up, you’ll be asked if you want to try Ubuntu or install it. You definitely want to just try it at this point.

Step 2: Install the password reset software

Installing software on Ubuntu is a bit different from installing software on Windows. Instead of going to a website to download setup files, you just tell the software package manager what you want installed, and it fetches it for you off some servers. It’s a lot like the iTunes App Store or Android Market.

This does assume that you have a working internet connection (wired preferred, but wireless can work, too). If, for some reason, your internet connection isn’t working on the computer you want to reset the password for, you can also download the chntpw .deb using another computer, transfer it over via USB, and then double-click it to install it.

First we want to make sure we have the proper software sources enabled to install chntpw.

Go to System > Administration > Software Sources

Make sure both the Universe and Multiverse repositories are checked (or “ticked,” if you’re not American). Click Close and then, when prompted, click Reload.

Wait for the information about available software to reload.

Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager

(Note: to those of you who have installed software in Ubuntu before, you actually do—at least as of Ubuntu 10.04—have to go to Synaptic to install chntpw. You can’t install it through Ubuntu Software Center).

Press Control-F or click on the Search button to get the search dialogue up. Then search for chntpw.

(Note: you may be tempted to type chntpw into the search filter but it won’t show up there, since Synaptic hasn’t had time to rebuild the search index for quick filtering.)

Once chntpw pops up in the search results, right-click it and select Mark for Installation.

Click Apply, and then, when prompted, click Apply again.

Wait for the Synaptic to download and install chntpw.

Step 3: Mount your Windows drive

In order for you to reset your Windows password, you have to make the Ubuntu live session know that your Windows drive is available for use. This process is called “mounting.”

To mount Windows, just click on Places and then select your drive. It will be listed by the size of the drive (in this example, 80 GB).

Step 4: Reset your password

chntpw is a terminal-based (not point-and-click) application, so to use it, we’ll have to open up a command-line terminal. Don’t be intimidated. I’ll walk you through the process.

To open the terminal, go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal

I’m going to be offering a lot of explanation for those who aren’t experienced with the terminal and commands, but if you want to just skip over all that stuff, feel free to just pay attention to the terminal commands and ignore the explanations.

First, you’re going to cd (change directories) to the right Windows directory.

Start typing cd /media/ and then hit the Tab key, and it’ll autocomplete with the address of your mounted Windows drive.
Then type W and hit Tab again to get to either Windows (Windows 7) or WINDOWS (Windows XP). Yes, the terminal is case-sensitive, so upper- and lower-case matters!
Type S or s and hit Tab again to get System32 or system32 (again depending on whether it’s Windows 7 or Windows XP—I forget which it is for Windows Vista).
And do the same for config.

Tab completion makes things a lot simpler, so you don’t have to type every single word out. It also avoids the whole typo issue, in case you aren’t a good typist.

Once you’ve gotten to cd /media/name-of-your-windows-drive/Windows/System32/config or cd /media/name-of-your-windows-drive/WINDOWS/system32/config, hit Enter.

You should then type in sudo chntpw -u username SAM, where username is your actual username. For example, if your username is susan, it should be sudo chntpw -u susan SAM

After you type that in, hit Enter, and you’ll see a whole bunch of terminal output, most of which you can ignore:

This part is important, though:

I would highly recommend typing 1 to blank the password instead of editing the password. After you type that, hit Enter, and you should see

Type y and hit Enter to confirm the change. Once you see

then you’re done.

Now you can reboot, and you can log into your admin account with a blank password. Once you’re logged in, you can go to the Control Panel to change your password to something else—something you can remember.

If you’re curious, you can see an older version of this page.

I love my Android phone. It’s a lot of fun, and I think Google has done a lot of good things with the Android platform. There are still some major usability issues, though, that I hope Google will iron out in Android 3.0 (Gingerbread).

Here’s one, for example:
Issue 1664: Gmail should allow choosing the From: address on an account that has multiple addresses
Send As Feature in Gmail

For years, I’ve been using Thunderbird as my email client. I used it on Windows. Then I used it on Ubuntu. Then I used it on Mac OS X. Recently, inspired by my move to an Android phone, I decided to go as Google as possible. Google Voice. Google Docs. Google Maps. Google Reader. Gmail. There were some things that took adjusting to in Gmail (conversations instead of messages, anyone?), but I didn’t miss Thunderbird as much as I thought I would. Google gives you nigh-unlimited email storage (I don’t see meeting the 7 GB limit any time soon the way my emails are going), and the interface is simple and quick, and easy to use. More importantly, I can aggregate with Gmail a bunch of email accounts into one, just as I would with a traditional desktop email client (like Thunderbird, Mail, Eudora, or Outlook).

In the regular Gmail web interface, you can choose which of these accounts is the default email address (meaning if you compose a new message, that message will have the from: address be that email address unless you choose otherwise), and you can also choose to have all replies sent from the email the original message was sent to. That means if someone sends an email to my church account and I hit Reply, the reply will appear to come from my church account; and if someone sends an email to my home account and I hit Reply, the reply will appear to come from my home account.

Pretty nifty feature to have. Too bad it’s missing from Android’s Gmail app. In the Android Gmail app, if you compose a new message, it will always come from your Gmail email address, regardless of what your setting is on the web client. And if you reply to a message, it will also come from your Gmail address. That makes it pretty much useless to me in terms of writing emails, seeing as how I use my Gmail account to aggregrate other email accounts, and I basically never want emails to appear to come from my Gmail account.

Fortunately, there’s a workaround, but it’s not pretty. The workaround is not to use the Gmail app. Just use the Gmail web interface in your favorite Android browser (Browser, Opera, xScope, Dolphin, etc.). If you use the mobile version (which is the default) of the web client, you won’t actually get to see your from: address, but it’ll still operate the way it’s supposed to (I tested it on both a reply and a new email). You can switch to the desktop (or “classic”) mode of the web client if you actually want to see the from: address.

Now, Google, how difficult would it really be to fix this problem?

If you read recent press coverage of Google’s Nexus One, it all seems to make sense. Phones weren’t going to sell well being sold only online without a chance for people to try them in person in a brick-and-mortar store. There wasn’t an advertising campaign for it. Very few articles or blogs about the end of Nexus One seem to think there was a problem at all with the phone itself. No one says the phone wasn’t ready for consumers or that it was too difficult to use.

Yet two years ago when Asus was just starting to be successful with the Eee PC netbook (which came preinstalled with a version of Linux, which Microsoft had to stop right away by resurrecting XP for the first of many times to come), that’s what a lot of the press coverage assumed. Geez. I mean, a lack of advertising campaign or in-person models to try out in the store couldn’t have anything to do with Linux netbooks not selling. It must be that Linux is too hard to use. It must be that Linux isn’t ready for consumers. It must really be that consumers just prefer Windows when given the choice.

Well, there is some truth to that in that the Linux distro Asus chose to put on the Eee PC was essentially crippled (not at all like Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Debian, OpenSuSE, or any of the other popular distros of the time). It wasn’t even vanilla Xandros. It was a custom Xandros that could be customized only through pasting cryptic commands in the terminal.

Nevertheless, if they’d marketed it correctly, Linux could have been a success. The problem with Linux on “the desktop” (or the laptop or netbook) is the myth of meritocracy. You don’t win by being the best. You win by marketing.

Think about it.

When the iPad was announced, critics focused on the features it didn’t have (no webcam, no Flash, no USB ports), but Apple with its clever marketing department convinced the hoards that the device was magic, so the hoards bought it. If a Linux tablet had been released without Flash, people would have just laughed and said “This is the reason Linux will never succeed—they need to realize the masses use Flash.” But Apple releases a tablet and all of a sudden people are actually saying Flash isn’t necessary. HTML5 is suddenly the wave of the future. Apps for websites are suddenly better than just going to the websites themselves.

I also see a lot of Linux poo-pooers claim Linux doesn’t have any apps, and that Windows users have certain killer apps they need, and that’s why Linux won’t succeed. Well, when Android first started, it had very few apps. In fact, for the end of 2008 and all through 2009, iPhone fanatics kept pointing out how many hundreds of thousands of apps the iTunes App Store had compared to the few thousand Android had. Well, Android now has almost 100,000 apps. If this pace continues, the iTunes App Store and Android Market will probably have the same number of apps by this time next year. The Linux desktop (as opposed to server or embedded) has been around since… the late 90s? Android has been around since 2008. The Linux desktop isn’t mainstream but Android is.

What should we learn from all this? Marketing matters. Being able to test a physical product out yourself matters. Dell selling badly marketed (or even anti-marketed) Ubuntu models on its website isn’t going to sell Ubuntu preinstalled in great numbers, nor are relatively obscure vendors like System76 or ZaReason without a proper store front or brand name recognition.

I would love it if all the bugs in Ubuntu (or some other popular Linux distro) could be fixed. I would love it if some more attention would be paid to ease of use or to making more applications available in the software repositories. I would love that. But that won’t fix Bug #1. If Linux wants to make a dent in the desktop/laptop/netbook world, it needs to give up the idea of being good enough and start embracing the idea of crafting, shipping, and marketing a product—yes, one people can try out in a brick-and-mortar store. In other words, what I said two years ago is still true.

I’m not abandoning Mac OS X, but you knew it had to happen—I have installed Ubuntu on the Macbook Pro as a dual-boot. It hasn’t been easy, mind you. Previously, I had done a few dual-boot setups with Ubuntu and Windows or Ubuntu and some other Linux distro or even Ubuntu and an older version of Ubuntu. Ubuntu on a Macbook Pro is a totally different experience.

So first I went to the Ubuntu wiki to find out if it was worth my time. According to the Macbook Pro 3,1 page, everything works pretty much out of the box with Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). That was encouraging. Then I read up the generic Apple Intel installation instructions. They didn’t sound too complicated. Install rEFIt, repartition the hard drive, install Ubuntu in the new partitioned space. Easy, right? Well, not so easy. Here are a few bumps I encountered along the way:

• rEFIt didn’t install correctly. After you install it, you should reboot and see the rEFIt menu. No menu. So I had to do some digging and found out there is a script you can run in the terminal to sort of reinstall rEFIt.
• I couldn’t resize my hard drive through Disk Utility or BootCamp. Both failed, claiming there wasn’t enough free space, even though there was plenty (at least 70 GB after I backed up my files to an external hard drive and deleted them, planning to copy them back later). So, believe it or not, I took the hours to completely reinstall Mac OS X from scratch and then repartition the drive.
• Since Ubuntu can’t reliably write to HFS+, I put my music, pictures, etc. on a shared FAT32 partition. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t really dig that. If I try to skip to the next song, I get about five seconds of the rainbow circle of death before the next song will actually play. The symlinks from the FAT32 partition also broke at first, too, because initially it was mounted as /Volumes/Storage but then it suddenly became /Volumes/STORAGE. After fixing everything to point to the upper-case mount point, the links appear to be working again.
• Ubuntu would not install the first five times I tried. That’s right. I tried five times. It kept failing in the middle of the installation, claiming the CD was bad or the CD drive was bad or the laptop was too hot. All of those things could have been true to some degree. The CD had a little bit of dirt on it, which I tried to clean off but couldn’t get completely clean. The CD drive was definitely bad. In OS X it was pretty good at reading commercially produced CDs and DVDs but would sometimes reject homebrews (it would spin and try to read for a minute or two and then just spit the disc out). Also, unlike my wife’s new Macbook Pro, this old MBP overheats like nobody’s business. You could probably fry an egg on it. Eventually, I did something that worked, and I’m not sure which part of it did it. I turned the computer off for the night (let it cool down completely). Then I immediately booted it up and while Ubuntu was installing, I never left it alone. I played gBrainy. I looked in the file browser. I changed various settings. I didn’t let the CD rest and give up. So I don’t know if it was having it cool or constantly engaging the live CD session, but eventually Ubuntu did get installed.
• I installed the Nvidia driver, but then Hardware Drivers instructed me to use a more recent driver. After that, suspend didn’t resume. But then I removed the old driver and rebooted, and resume from suspend worked fine, as did Compiz.
• The touchpad works extremely well for two-finger scrolling, but the touch sensitivity is a bit much (and can’t be adjusted, as far as I can tell), so I have to be careful not to tap the touchpad accidentally when trying to scroll; otherwise, I end up clicking. If I turn off tapping to click, then I can’t right-click by tapping down two fingers. A bit annoying.
• Control is a rather small key on the Mac keyboard, but for most navigation it’s used more often than the Cmd key (the Super key, for all intents and purposes). The key placement is a bit odd when you’re used to coming from Mac OS X or even from a regular Windows keyboard. Takes a bit of getting used to.
• I thought Skype was broken, but it wasn’t. I set my account to offline instead of invisible, and apparently if you’re offline you can’t do the Skype test call (it just fails immediately). I didn’t know that, so I was trying all these crazy fixes like uninstalling PulseAudio or whatever. Turns out it just works fine if you’re invisible or online.
• The Picasa from the Google repositories is broken with the latest Lucid kernel. If you download the .deb straight from Google, though, it works just fine.
• I had a 32-bit Ubuntu CD already, so I didn’t really want to bother downloading 64-bit Ubuntu to take advantage of all 4 GB of RAM (and waste another blank CD, since Macs can’t boot from USB). I guess that would have been interesting to try, but 32-bit works quite snappily with only a bit more than 3 GB of RAM being recognized.

Overall, I have to say Ubuntu works quite well on a Mac. I think it even runs a bit cooler, too (still very hot but maybe not hot enough to fry an egg on). My plan is to keep playing around with both (sometimes boot into OS X, sometimes boot into Ubuntu). With a FAT32 partition for files, I have that luxury, except that I will have to be in OS X to import into iTunes and iPhoto—Rhythmbox and Picasa on Ubuntu will automatically watch folders for new files.