The Android Market and the Open Software

As we all know, android is a completely open operating system. It is also free, so when you by an android phone, you do not pay for the operating system.
This, of course is fine!
However, when someone looks for applications in the android market, he hardly finds free and good applications. You are gonna say know, what are you talking about, I have the best applications for free! Ha! You think so.
The concept of a free aplication, is that you can use it as you want and share it! In additions you do not need to see all those silly ads (which unfortunately we have also in the blogspot, but this is something temporary, and a site is completely different from an app!) which you will never intend to click on them, but sometimes you click one by accident.
Furthermore, android maybe is an open source OS but it lost that purpose! Take for example any Linux distribution! Have you ever looked for a professional level application and you didn't find it? Not me.
An operating system is not considered free if basic applications are not free! Why do I have to pay for a good task manager? Even in windows you find a free one! Why do I have to pay for password managers, talking simulators and stuff? Most applications that are not free have a poor level, and they have been programmed by stupid programmers!
Android has is based on a linux core. In linux I can find a good anti-virus and a firewall for free.

All developers have the right to sell their work! It's ok with me if the application is indeed a worth one! I would pay for a good game or a really good anti-virus! (I was paying for anti-virus for years)! But searching in the android market I have found only a couple of applications that worth money.
In conclusion Android Market is now a mess! For example compare Ubuntu software center with android market!
Where did the linux spirit go? Where did open source power go? Basic applications have to be free! And free means also free of ads!

How to download all haiku source files in 5 minutes

Many of you emailed us to ask how to download haiku source files, since they are too many to click every one of them. The answer is quite simple though and it also shows the power of the bash again!
Use the script below

link="http://haiku-files.org/files/releases/r1alpha2/sources/"
links=`less index.html | grep "href=*" | tr "=;<>" "\n" | tr -d '"' | grep ".xz"`
for lnk in $links; do 
wget "$link$lnk" 
done

And wait until all downloads are finished!!!

Haiku

Well, we installed haiku on a virtual machine. We have tried it a bit and we present it to you!

At first we needed a virtual machine. So we installed virtual box and executed it:
#download virtual box
wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.0.4/virtualbox-4.0_4.0.4-70112~Ubuntu~maverick_i386.deb
#install the package (if your linux distro is not debian this might be slightly different)
sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-4.0_4.0.4-70112~Ubuntu~maverick_i386.deb
#now execute it
virtualbox

 In addition the iso image file of haiku is needed.
#get haiku iso, you can visit http://haiku-os.org/get-haiku to choose a server
#the below is the server of the University of Crete
wget http://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/haiku/releases/r1alpha2/haiku-r1alpha2-iso.zip

Then using Virtual Box wizard specify the allocated ram and hard disk sizes. Unzip the haiku iso and load it to the virtual machine. 

After you load haiku image it loads the OS live CD desktop, so you can try it out. Since it's on a virtual machine now, you can install it without affecting the rest of your system and try it later.
To install it simply choose install option. Then you should create a "partition" which is virtual, that will be used by the virtual machine to install haiku.
The installation progress is very easy.

 

After installation you have to restart it(not your pc, haiku that is on virtual machine, remember that you should not close the virtual machine) 

You can restart it with a terminal command or bu pressing the feather and choosing shutdown->Restart System

You can open the terminal with right click->Add-ons->Open Terminal

And then type the restart command:
shutdown -r

Or simply press shutdown:

Here are the rest of the photos after installation:

Haiku operating system

Haiku is an open source operating system currently in development that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the Be Operating System, Haiku aims to become a fast, efficient, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful system for computer users of all levels.

The key highlights that distinguish Haiku from other operating systems include:

• Specific focus on personal computing
• Custom kernel designed for responsiveness
• Fully threaded design for great efficiency with multi-processor/core CPUs
• Rich OO API for faster development
• Database-like file system (OpenBFS) with support for indexed metadata
• Unified, cohesive interface

The above information is from the official web-site of haiku!
Of course it is still in its alpha release but:

The best thing is that is open source of course, so now that haiku is on its birth, it's good for any programmer put his lines on it. There are many things that haiku still doesn't support, like
wireless WPA.
You can find its source code on: http://haiku-files.org/files/releases/r1alpha2/sources/

The power of the bash

I am going to show you a script that was found useful to me for testing a piece of code I wrote for a particular job.
Actually, that job, takes some data and outputs a single result. It is not necessary for you to know what the program does, because it doesn't affect what I am going to show you.
In addition this article shows the power of the command 'grep'! You can find about grep by typing 'man grep' on your terminal.

Well, the piece of code I wrote it was nothing new. It actually exists on linux. So to test it I should get some data, give it to the linux program and to my program and compare the results. The data might be numbers, characters or whatever. So I need a program from linux that each time is called it outputs different data. That program is actually a game and is called 'fortune'.

The code I wanted to test was written in java so the bash script I wrote was:

0:   #!/bin/bash
1:   for ((i=1;i<=10;i++)); do
2:   data=`fortune`
3:   myprogram=`echo "$data" | java myJavaProgram`
4:   linuxprogram=`echo "$data" | name-of-linux-program`
5:   similarity=`echo "$linuxprogram" | tr [:space:] \n | grep "$myprogram"`
6:   if [ -z "$similarity" ]; then
7:    echo "Program is wrong"
8:   else echo "Program is right"
9:   fi
10: echo $myprogram   $linuxprogram
11: done

*lines was put for discription only
Line 0: defining that the code will be executed with bash
Line 1: a for loop which will be executed 10 times because this is the number of times I
want to test my program.
Line 2: the variable 'data' will curry the output of fortune
Line 3: the variable 'myprogram' will curry the data of my programs output which will process the data from variable 'data'
Line 4: the same with line 3 but this time with the finished linux program
Line 5: 'linuxprogram' data is split with tr, and then grep is looking if my program result  matches linux program result. Remember, pipe ('|') sends the result of a program to the next as its input.

Line 6-9: the if that checks if there is a similarity. if -z $similarity is true, it means that the similarity is empty, so my program's output is different than the linux one's
Line 10: outputs the result of both programs, just to be sure that the script does the right thing

I could add a couple lines of code and have a summarise of my results: i.e. In the end it would tell me program errors: 3, or no error found. 
That would need a variable initialised to zero, and every time it finds an error it will be increased.
And the script should be like that:
#!/bin/bash
errors=0
for ((i=1;i<=10;i++)); do
data=`fortune`
myprogram=`echo "$data" | java myJavaProgram`
linuxprogram=`echo "$data" | name-of-linux-program`
similarity=`echo "$linuxprogram" | tr [:space:] \n | grep "$myprogram"`
if [ -z "$similarity" ]; then
 echo "Program is wrong"
 let errors+=1
else echo "Program is right"
fi
echo $myprogram   $linuxprogram
done
if [ $errors -eq 0 ]; then
 echo "No errors found"
else
 echo "Found $errors errors"
fi

Vaslabs press announcement

We have noticed in many android related sites that they have descriptions of our products and a profile description for Vaslabs. We may note that the correct profile of Vaslabs is:

Vaslabs corporation is a mini software business created to offer freeware utilities. Here(in our blogspot) you can view all our news, release products for Android phones, linux or Windows and information about their updates and bugs.

In addition some information about our products may be wrong, like the released version. Opap games 1.0 does not exist, the version now available is 2.3

For official information, help, feedback and whatever you may contact vaslabs


Vaslabs Press office