Community Notebook Free Software Projects Projects on the Move Authors and editors can use EtherPad to edit a column online in real time. Then, anything they can’t handle in Beboy, Fotolia Beboy, writing, they can discuss in detail by launching Mumble. By Mela Eckenfels t the end of 2009, howls of protest resounded through the Internet when Google acquired the popular Ether- SandorJackal, Fotolia Pad [1] platform and announced its plans: The develop- Aers of EtherPad would be investing their know-how in Google Wave [2]. This sealed the fate of EtherPad and the switch was scheduled for March 2010. Google seemed to hope to convince former EtherPad users of the virtues of Google Wave. But sometimes even Google’s wishes are not fulfilled; instead, a wave of protest crashed against the Google fortress. Meanwhile, an EtherPad community gathered, and they were not prepared to abandon their EtherPad speedboat for the ponderous Google Wave battleship. Google gave in a couple of days later and released the EtherPad code under the Apache license. The first privately operated EtherPad clone was up and running just a few days later, and, in collaboration with providers of public EtherPad installations [3], the EtherPad Foundation [4] was founded to promote the ongoing development of the free code. Keep It Simple, Stupid What makes EtherPad so interesting that Google grabbed all of the company’s know-how? Why did such a huge community of fans sprout up in so short a time? The answer is, EtherPad is the software incarnation of the KISS principle [5] – all you need user-side is a JavaScript-capable browser. Surf to the homepage of a public EtherPad provider, such as TypeWith.me [6], press the Click to Create a New Docu- ment button, and you’re ready to create a new document. To collaborate, simply dis- tribute the link to the public document to invite other people to join in. The new pad has three panels (Figure 1). Changes show up immediately as you THE AUTHOR type in the editing section. The sidebar shows a list of collaborators and has a chat window for exchange of information. Mela Eckenfels is a freelance author and EtherPad assigns a separate color to each author, which makes it easy to see who trainer who previously worked as a Unix contributed what in the editor window. Also, you can change colors at run time by system administrator. She co-authored clicking the box next to your name; the pad will accommodate the changes. EtherPad Das Kochbuch für Geeks (Geek Cook- automatically stores your changes and keeps them available on a timeline. To remove book) with Petra Hildebrandt; the book, editing conflicts or vandalism, it is also a good idea to save any revisions manually. which was published by O’Reilly Ger- many, just goes to show that cooking has much in common with program- Launch, Work, Done? The intuitive user interface makes EtherPad the ideal tool for less technologically ming. minded people. A shared pad could help a school class plan an open day or help an 92 OCTOBER 2010 ISSUE 119 LINUX-MAGAZINE.COM | LINUXPROMAGAZINE.COM 092-094_projects.indd 92 19.08.2010 11:21:25 Uhr Community Notebook Free Software Projects amateur theater group rewrite the text of with hash tags (Figure 3). a play they are staging. With no complex The next milestone release user account configuration or cumber- will also include a Win- some access privileges, everybody can dows installer, add an get started right away. Emacs client, and integrate The disadvantage of a public pad is an XMPP gateway for Jab- fairly obvious, however: Anybody who ber [12]. knows the link address can change the pad and thus destroy your work. Secure Don’t Mumble EtherPads [7] can deal with this (Figure … Mumble! 2). Besides using a separate subdomain From collaborative editing (e.g., http://lpm.ietherpad.com/), they in real time, you can move let the administrator set up various areas on to talking in real time – to meet the team’s requirements. For ex- but don’t worry, in Mum- ample, you can assign staff to certain ble’s case, the name is pads and keep some areas public or pri- nothing to go by. Speech Figure 1: A pad in action: Editing this article in the pane on vate. Secure pads, which require you to quality is not an issue if you the left with a list of users and a chat box on the right. sign in, used to be commercial products use Mumble [13] instead of before EtherPad was sold to Google. a phone. The VoIP program They are now free on all the sites listed uses Celt [14] and Speex at the EtherPad Foundation [4]. [15] codecs and relies on their advanced audio com- Under the Hood pression to reduce band- It is far too early to dream of your own width requirements. How- EtherPad installation in leased web ever, the developers are not Figure 2: Secure EtherPads add the Security tab to the space. EtherPad requires MySQL 5.1 happy to rest on their lau- menubar. along with Java 1.6.0, Scala 2.7.4, and rels. Voice is preprocessed the MySQL Java connector version 5.1.0 to remove irritating noise and improve – requirements that practically no web the sound quality noticeably. hosting package fulfills. Even if you Besides enabling voice transmissions, work around these obstacles, the instal- Mumble includes a text-based chat com- lation [8] needs a fair amount of manual ponent. Although this might sound re- attention, especially if you want to set dundant, the chat feature is very useful up the secure version or include the PDF for a simple exchange of links or other and OpenOffice export features [9]. The information. only distribution to offer a prebuilt pack- Strictly speaking, Mumble is just a col- age for EtherPad as of this writing is De- lection of voice-conferencing tools that bian, and the package comes courtesy of are available for any popular desktop op- an external repository [10]. Client-side, erating system. Installers are available EtherPad also turns out to be more fin- for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, and icky than its competitors. Memory be- FreeBSD users can at least read the how- comes scarce in most browsers if you to [16]. open four to six pads at the same time. If you Mumble, you also have to Mur- This known bug should be fixed in fu- mur. In other words, to ture versions. have a Mumble-based voice The first post-Google EtherPad devel- conference, you also need a opments have been restricted to cos- Murmur server. Although a metic changes. For example, the devel- number of public Murmur opers increased the maximum number servers are available on the of pad users and increased the colors web, your only choice will from 16 to 32. The next version of Ether- probably be to install your Pad, which is currently in testing, envis- own Murmur server for ages a plugin system to make EtherPad professional use [17]. more modular [11]. Additionally, the de- Murmur is built on the Qt velopers plan a wiki-style feature that library and prefers a com- will let users interlink pads and insert plete X Window System – hash tags that EtherPad converts into which is annoying for ad- Figure 3: The current beta version offers a sneak preview links. Clicking a link would launch a mins on servers without a of future EtherPad features, including links to other pads keyword-based search over other pads GUI. One possible work- and hash tag-based searches. LINUX-MAGAZINE.COM | LINUXPROMAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 119 OCTOBER 2010 93 092-094_projects.indd 93 19.08.2010 11:21:32 Uhr Community Notebook Free Software Projects around is uMurmur [18], which is writ- how to avoid the X components, al- ten in C and released under the BSD li- though they will still worry when they cense. To compile and run the server see Ghostscript asking for one library components, you additionally need to re- after another. These concerns are likely solve dependencies on OpenSSL, Polar- to grow because Ghostscript regularly SSL, Libconfig, and Protobuf-c. Having shows up in security advisories [21]. said that, uMurmur does not provide the An easier approach is available – at same performance as the original Mur- least if you have PHP in place. The PHP mur server. One failing is its IRC-style TCPDF [22] class by IT consultant Tec- chat channels, which are hard-coded in nick is licensed under the LGPL and the configuration so you can’t modify does not require any additional libraries them on the fly to reflect your user’s for its core functionality. Many projects INFO needs. already benefit from TCPDF. For exam- Although Mumble is fairly impressive ple, Joomla, Drupal, and Moodle all use [1] EtherPad: http:// www. etherpad. com already, it looks like the software is in PHP classes to generate PDF documents. [2] Google Wave: for a very exciting future – especially if TCPDF’s feature list is impressive: It is https:// wave. google. com the roadmapped video support really is the only PHP-PDF class that supports [3] Public EtherPads: http:// etherpad. implemented [19]. Also, the planned UTF-8 and right-to-left text orientation. org/ etherpadsites. html Mumble clients for smartphones should TCPDF also supports a full set of popular [4] EtherPad Foundation: take some of the complexity out of audio graphics formats and PDF properties http:// etherpad. org and video conferencing. such as footers, headers, or comments, [5] KISS principle: http:// en.