I have a UX31A and my experience is like yours with Ubuntu 14.04.
Only quirk I have with the touchpad is that on Windows, with 1 finger idle on the touchpad and another finger moving the cursor would still move with the moving finger. On Ubuntu, the cursor remains stationary any time there are two fingers on it. I probably would not have noticed it if I weren't already so used to the Windows functionality so it isn't a big deal at all.
So I'll prefix this by saying that I haven't used systemd for anything important yet, but have it running in a VM to see what the impact will be when the distro's force us to switch.
It seems that for the "normal" use cases (i.e. laptop running gnome+vi, server running postgres) systemd will be simpler.
For embedded / single purpose applications, it seems that it will require a chunk more work. I have use cases like a) Only power the 3G module and bring up ppp when I am within certain GPS coordinates. b) switch the wifi between hostapd and wpa_supplicant depending on the state of a GPIO.
The fact there is no general purpose programming language in the .service files makes them simpler, but for anything out of the ordinary you will be writing bash/python anyway. And then it feels like systemd is just getting in the way.
The replacement daemons also seem a bit weak, compare timesyncd with chrony for example.
Sometimes all you need PID 1 to do is run the equivalent of rc.local and get out of the way (almost like slackware's rc.M)
So I guess my point is that not everybody is in the love/hate systemd camp, some of us are just careful and still sceptical.
For a relatively accurate guess to go from miles->kilometres you can use the fibonacci series. If the current number is in miles, the next one will be the same distance in kilometres. Works from 2 onwards.
So from 2 3 5 8 13 21 ... you can see that 3 miles is 5 kilometres, 8 miles is 13 kilometres etc.
I can't really speak for anything north of the equator, but I have travelled fairly extensively in the southern half of Africa.
The impression I get as a visitor to many of these countries is that except for a few big cities it is just too difficult to guarantee power and telecoms access to bet your job on it.
Most people will find a job locally doing "boring" software since there is less risk. Working remotely for a company in the US/Europe requires them to understand your (african) problems which is always difficult.
If I am at the office and we have no power, my boss understands; If I am remote-working, will my "American/European" boss understand why I just lost a day?
The advantage of staying here (in SA) means that even if you are doing boring software, your salary is probably good enough to give you spectacular buying power compared to 99% of the planet.
As you move to more remote places, the salaries just keep increasing. I was recently looking at a job in Tete (Northern Mozambique) which paid around USD450k p.a.
So, I guess that doesn't really answer your question, but I think Africa is quiet mostly because the "boring" jobs pay disproportionately well --- the incentive to be an entrepreneur is mostly gone. (I say this as someone working at a startup of sorts)
I'm extremely interested in working somewhere remote/strange in Africa/other underdeveloped areas of the world (not even looking for anything notably well paying). I've tried a couple of times to search for relevant job boards and the like but haven't been able to find anything halfway decent. If you could go into a bit more detail about where one would look for that sort of thing/what the typical process is in that part of the world or shoot me an email at public at disastero.us, I would be tremendously grateful.
Thanks!
Edit: The bigger the shithole the better, really. I've been trying to find a method for searching for jobs in adverse environments for a while, but haven't been in any way successful.
So if you want to move somewhere off the beaten track your job choices are going to be:
1) Mining
2) Power/Electricity
3) Support for the above.
Most companies don't hire in the countries they operate in, since the skills just don't exist. Most sites are populated by a mix of European/South African/Indian expats who are there for a limited period (typically < 5 years)
The way to get into these types of jobs is to get hired by the European or South African companies that operate in these areas, and then ask for placement at your shithole of choice. The current rule of thumb is to ask for your SA salary * 4 or * 5 depending on how bad the place actually is.
At the moment there is is a lot of activity in Northen Zambia (copper) with companies like Yokogawa/Siemens/ABB looking for people.
Northern Mozambique is pretty active (coal/gas) with Vale/Jindal being the major mining houses and ABB/Siemens etc. providing the tech.
On the power generation side - South Africa has quite a lot of activity on the renewable side with Spanish and Danish companies taking the lead (Abengoa for solar esp.)
There is currently also a bit of a power generation boom in Ghana and Benin, but I don't know anyone directly involved.
Most of the work is in hardware, project management, or process control though. It is going to be much harder to find software only work.
EDIT: I forgot to mention - there might be more opportunity for software only work in banking. I know Barclays is currently busy with a big push up into Africa, but I am not very familiar with that industry.
- If you live in a western country, try to get a remote job. Spend a few months in your remote position and see how you like it. If you like it, you can talk to your manager and ask if moving to wherever you like is feasible. Make sure you get good enough internet when you go, and learn enough about batteries and inverters to buy a power supply system (solar 12V batteries and a chinese power inverter will set you back 200USD and last for a good year at least).
- Send you resume to NGOs. Forget the startup crowd for a bit. Most people applying to NGOs are people with social/education/medical backgrounds, and IT skills are in very high demand, because nobody with IT skills ever applies to be sent to a remote place. I'm pretty sure almost any NGO will hire you if you can teach IT-related topics (programming, networks, systems...). Pay isn't great in general, but the experience makes up for it (also, the countries you'll visit are, by definition, not expensive to live in).
If you need contacts, I can give you some in Tanzania and Senegal even if my network here is a little more limited (finding my contact info is left as an exercise to the reader).
I used to work in the UK for a company founded by Mo Ibrahim[1]. I got to travel to SA a few times and to Tanzania as well as Egypt and various middle eastern countries, as well as Europe and further afield. Part of that company still exists under a different name[2]. There aren't a lot of jobs in telecoms in Africa, but the ones that do exist are interesting and will get you around a lot.
Thanks for this kabouseng. As a white South African whose ancestors arrived ~300 years ago, I was wondering how much longer before I was allowed to identify as "African".
"Since systemd is very tightly welded with the Linux kernel API, this also makes different systemd versions incompatible with different kernel versions."
I was pretty meh about the whole systemd thing, but having to change userspace when swopping out kernels is a spectacular disadvantage. Imagine having to downgrade your distro whenever you need to test against older kernels --- madness.
This is especially bad with ARM/embedded stuff where one often runs a modern userspace with an older kernel.
In my experiece, upgrading the kernel to a newer one is not a problem. What can happen, though, is that an upgrade of userspace will suddenly require a kernel-feature not present, if you run an ancient board-support-package with a 3.0-kernel or so in 2014! (happened to me with a BSP for a Freescale i.MX6).
So, if you have archlinux tracking the latest and greatest systemd, uptrading userland can make your machine no longer bring up everything (completely). But in my case the kernel is from 2011...
Upgrading the kernel to a newer one isn't generally a problem, but the changes to cgroups that the systemd and kernel devs are planning to make in the future are not going to be backwards compatible with old userland code.
After putting a current arch-linux rootfs[1] on the box[2], it seems to come up, just network and console seems to be misconfigured, but this, I think, I had to fix the last time also. So: indeed the current systemd seems to work on a iMX6 running a 3.0 kernel.
Recent systemd doesn't seem to realize that ethernet and the serial console device are actually there, it's waiting for dev-ttymxc3.device and sys-subsystem-net-devices-eth0.device ... but both are statically compiled in. So there is some issue with kernel 3.0.x.
Wow - this is pretty awesome - I just ran a sample BOM and it worked very well. How do you plan to monetize this?
Some feature requests (I m sure you have heard these before):
1) Don't require exact part numbers for common passives (100nF 0603 25V X7R 20%) should get me to say the 10 cheapest results across suppliers.
2) Better information if part numbers are out of stock (Digikey and Mouser both allow you to see projected ship dates) - This also allows for another optimization slider, "Lead time"
You are attacking the man and not his statement. Would you care to elaborate on why you think he is spewing BS?
For the record, I don't think he is very clued up either, but I do think there is some truth in his statement that google search is hurting. In fact more and more of my non-geek friends are getting into the mindset that internet==facebook. (Yes, this is anecdotal, unfortunately this is all I have --- maybe the head of Google SA has seen some actual data that confirms this?)
Also, I get 7.5 hours on the battery, I wonder what went wrong between the UX31E and the UX31A?