Google has recently released Google Earth 5.2.  There are some really nice new features including visualization of tracks captured by GPS devices.

Installing under Fedora Linux can be a bit of a challenge if you have SELinux enabled. 

What is SELinux?

SELinux is feature which provides the ability to have access control policies which confines processes and users to the minimum required access level.  For example the httpd process can be confines to only have access to files under it’s document root.  Because of this confinement, there is a decreased risk if the httpd process were to become compromised and damage due to a security flaw is minimized.

Making Google Earth work with SELinux

The default install of Google Earth does not properly set the proper SELinux access controls and so if you have SELinux enabled, Google Earth will not start properly. One option with I’m sure that many people have done is to completely disable SELinux.  Although this approach will get Google Earth working, it eliminates the benefits of SELinux and makes your computer less secure than it could be.

Recent versions of SELinux have a tool which gives suggestions of how to fix problems when violations occur.  However on Fedora 13, the suggested command of ‘restorecon /usr/local/google-earth/googleearth-bin‘ didn’t fix the problem. I was still getting the error:

“./googleearth-bin: error while loading shared libraries: ./libcommon_webbrowser.so: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied”

The key was to allow text relocation for the lib files in the install directory so typing in:

“chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /usr/local/google-earth/lib*”

Now Google Earth runs beautifully under SELinux.

Created in 2006 as a way of bringing people with common interests together, Mugshot was designed by RedHat as an open source site. The intentions was to allow interaction between users using not only its own site but by plugging into other networking sites such as Facebook and del.icio.us. Mugshot included the ability to chat between users, share links, facebook updates and read RSS feeds.

Mugshot did have some innovative features such as a desktop client which allowed quick and easy access to network updates and to quickly post items or share links with your friends or interest groups.

Where did it go?

Despite some initial promise, in April of this year, the website went offline with a “Mugshot is currently not running.” message and as of earlier this May, the URLs for http://www.mugshot.org get redirected to http://www.redhat.com.
I have been unable to find any official confirmation that Mugshot has been killed and will not come back but it does not look promising.

Why did it fail?

Unfortunately Mugshot never seemed to get much traction outside of a small group of Linux (mainly RedHat) enthusiasts.  Whether it was a lack of marketing or a neglect of website and network can be debated but after its initial launch period, RedHat almost seemed to ignore Mugshot perhaps hoping that organic growth could occur with open source community updating and introducing new features.  Competition from Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook may have also helped put Mugshot on the chopping block.

Another part of the reasoning behind RedHat’s apparent neglect and eventual abandonment of Mugshot is that the social network concept never seemed to fit well into its strategy to be an enterprise Linux vendor.  Right from the introduction of Mugshot, there appeared to be confusion regarding why RedHat was pursuing this product.

Mugshot champions gone?

It also appears that a few of the Mugshot champions from within RedHat such as Christopher Blizzard who has moved on to the Mozilla Foundation and Havoc Pennington who is currently at litl.

In a March blog post, Havoc even mentions the validity of the concept despite the lack of success with Mugshot:

It’s gratifying that the new default home screen of Facebook looks a lot like Mugshot.org, a site some of us came up with at Red Hat. We coded Mugshot’s personal-lifestream-thingy before Facebook’s news feed came out and before FriendFeed came out. Not saying either site copied us, but it’s still nice to know at least our idea was good (even though there were lots of reasons we weren’t the ones to get anywhere with it).

What’s next for Mugshot?

As of today, the source code for Mugshot is still available at http://svn.mugshot.org/ and it appears that a fork of the Mugshot code will live on in project magnetism at: http://code.google.com/p/magnetism/.  There is no indication of that a free shared Mugshot type service (like RedHat was offering) will be made available. 

The release of Fedora 11 was recently pushed back by a week and then another week to June 9th due to some blocker bugs still being open.  The new release date however is still just around the corner so I’ve decided to look at what is coming in Fedora 11.

What’s New in Fedora 11

• Gnome 2.26
• Firefox 3.5 (currently at beta 4) which introduces HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags an a Private Browsing Mode (aka Porn Browsing Mode)
• ext4 is now the default filesystem when installing a new Fedora 11 install
• Improved fingerprint reader experience with a improved detection and a GUI configuration tool (authconfig)
• gcc 4.4
• faster boot up times with the goal being a 20 second startup
• upgraded rpm to 4.7 for performance improvements
• OpenChange introduce for native Microsoft Exchange integration
• Xserver 1.6 which brings with it improved performance, stability and RANDR 1.3 support
• improved graphical drivers including

• kernel modeseting in Intel drivers for graphical bootup sequence
• new default NVidia drivers (nouveau) which supports more cards, has performance improvements over the current nv drivers and supports RANDR 1.2
• improved ATI/AMD Radeon drivers allowing r100/r200 based cards to work with modesetting and DRI2

Try it out

I decided to install a Fedora 11 Preview copy in a VMWare Workstation virtual machine to see first hand what changes were in store.  After booting off of the Live CD and clicking on Install to Hard Drive, the install process went very smoothly.  Installation seems faster than previous versions as well though I did select more packages on my previous Fedora 10 install.
Here is a screenshot of F11 in action:

Screenshot of Fedora 11

More info and reviews

For additional information there are podcasts including an interview with Fedora’s release manager Jesse Keating and Spot Callaway discussing the upcoming Fedora 11 features available at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F11_release_podcasts.  Another interview with Richard Hughes on the improvements to PackageKit are available at : http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1637

If you would rather see than hear about Fedora 11, there is also a screenshot tour of Fedora 11 available at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Screenshot_Tour.

Google’s Android Developer Challenge

With the introduction of its Android mobile platform, Google announced the Android Developers Challenge which has $10 million in prizes for great mobile applications built for Android.

Phase 1 Round 1 winners

The first phase of the challenge which was just completed, resulted in 50 applications being shortlisted, the developers receiving $25000 and the chance to go on to the next round where up to $275000 will be up for grabs to the best applications.

It appears that Google has already received its money’s worth. Before even a single phone or handset is built, Google managed to get a nice little roster of applications created. The winning 50 applications are shown here (PDF – 4 MB). Although I can’t attest to the quality of the submissions, there appears to be some really interesting ideas in the list. Silicon Alley Insider narrowed it down to their favourite 5.

One application that I was impressed with was AndoidScan which can recognized bar codes from books, CDs or DVDs and will fetch reviews and perform a pricing comparison with a dozen online stores. If it works as advertised, it could end up being a really handy application. As expected, a few applications are mobile social applications and few deal with sharing routes or quickly sharing pictures and other data while on the go. All appear to have some potential.

Android vs. iPhone vs. Blackberry

Google is obviously trying to attack the chicken and egg problem of handsets and applications. By providing a lineup of useful apps, handset providers will be more likely to make the plunge and create new Android or Open Handset Alliance based handsets. Applications will also be the key battlefield in the competition between the Android platform and the iPhone and Blackberry. Google is hoping that by building a strong SDK and attracting developers to the relatively open platform that great applications will emerge which will raise the profile and popularity of Android.

Gotta love competition….

Fedora 9 is nearing completion. The final freeze of the code has taken place and the code is almost ready to ship. The 29th of April is the expected release date for this cutting edge Linux distribution.

There is even a preview of the release notes which lets us see what nice features the upgrade has in store for us.

New and improved features

Some of the new and improved features are:

• installer now has the ability to resize ext2, ext3 and ntfs partitions as well as encrypted partition support
• Gnome 2.22 which include the Cheese webcam application and improved networked filesystem support
• NetworkManager 0.7 which adds support for GSM and CDMA cellular connections, multiple devices and ad-hoc networking
• OpenOffice 2.4 which has some nice new features as seen in this review on OOONinja.com
• Firefox 3 beta 5 with its improved performance, refined user interface and improved security management
• PackageKit has become the newest default package management application
• /sbin/init has been replaced by Upstart which in addition to starting and stopping services can supervise running services for failures and restart them
  

There are some nice upcoming features. It appears that the move from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 is once again an incremental evolution and maturing of the Fedora platform. There doesn’t appear to be any breakthrough revolutionary changes in the Linux distro but the constant and incremental improvements will continue to be welcomed by Fedora users.

A few days after I pointed out that there is a QT4 port for Nokia’s Maemo platform, Nokia has announced that it is buying Trolltech the makers of the QT framework.

The 150 million dollar buyout has taken some by surprise as Nokia’s Maemo platform itself is closely aligned with the QT alternative GTK+ and Gnome. It appears however that QT can play a role in the evolution of the Symbian platform on which Nokia has built most of its phones.  There is some speculation that Nokia could use QT as a migration path for developers from Symbian to a Linux based phone operating system.  There is also speculation that buying Trolltech could also fit with a strategy to develop and release an open phone OS to compete with Google led Open Handset Alliance (OHA) and its Android platform.

Perhaps the acquisition will have no effect on the future of the Maemo platform.  Then again, perhaps the QT4 for Maemo project will become a key technology for the N810 and N800 intenet tablets.

Regardless of the future implications of the acquisition, I am happy to see investment in open source and companies using and promoting open source.  Nokia has the ability to put financial resources to work for QT and open source in general in order to make it more successful.  They have shown that they understand open source with the Maemo platform and I’m very intrigued to see what the future holds.

VMWare’s upcoming VMWare Workstation 6.5 will likely include one of the most demanded features from its Mac Fusion product. Specifically, it appears that VMWare Workstation 6.5 will allow virtualized applications within a VM to be “detached” from the VM showing up as a seperate window on the native host OS.  You could therefore have an Windows Photoshop window beside your GIMP or other native Linux application windows.

To see how it looks on a Mac look at this screenshot.

Using this new feature you will be able to seamlessly mix and match best of breed applications on whatever platform you prefer while VMWare keeps the underlying OS under the covers and hidden out of sight.  If done right it certainly would solve a lot of people’s platform compatibility woes.  By having the guest OS applications use the host OS window manager, the applications behave a lot more like native apps which makes the context switch caused by jumping from hosted to native application much easier.

I certainly am looking forward to Workstation 6.5 coming out though there doesn’t currently appear to be any estimated release dates floating around so it may still be awhile.

See the original post for more details: ChipLog » Blog Archive » Working outside the box with Unity

Fedora 8 was released a on November 8th. As previously mentioned, unlike Microsoft’s Vista, this looks to be a nice upgrade.

It took a while for me to get my primary system upgraded but I finally got around to it on Friday.

Installation issues

I performed an upgrade in place of my Fedora 7 Dell D620 laptop. I had upgraded to the latest F7 updates and backed up my important data before beginning the upgrade. Booting off of the Fedora 8 DVD, I quickly ran into a problem with the install process crashing when it was probing my system. After updating the BIOS to the latest version “just to be sure”, I read the common bugs for F8 and found that there is a problem with the boot.iso on some Dell laptops. By adding nohz=off nolapic to the GRUB boot entry, I was off to the races.

As an aside, why the heck does Fedora prompt you to scan the media? Are media errors THAT common. Seriously, what percentage of people actually scan their media before installing it? Please move it to an option in the GRUB menu or make it a command line boot parameter and remove one useless (and potential scary) prompt for the new user.

The remainder of the upgrade proceeded as expected with Anaconda not having changed too much between version 7 and 8. One thing that I noticed was that the upgrade seem to take quite a bit more time than I expected. Perhaps the 5400 rpm drive in the notebook was slower than I was used to or perhaps it was the fact that I was performing an in place upgrade as opposed to my usual clean install that made the install seem slow.

Post install issues

After an install, my usual practice is to run a yum update to get any releases which fix problems that crop up at release time. For some reason, Yum updates didn’t seem to want to resolve to a mirror so I ended up hardcoding one of mirror URLs in order to get updates. Perhaps the mirror resolution was temporarily down or something.

I also noticed that my font settings appeared to have changed in Fedora 8. Though they appear to be sharper and more pleasing to look at, all of the fonts appear to be larger than they were under Fedora 7. Apparently I’m not the only one having this issue. I have tweaked the Gnome font DPI in the ‘System->Preferences->Look and Feel->Appearance’ section but I can’t seem to get it back to the normal Fedora 7 font size. Perhaps I will simply get used the new font sizes as time goes on.

When trying to run a program using my installed Sun Java JVM, I received the error: xcb_xlib.c:50: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion `c->xlib.lock' failed. Luckily, the problem and workaround are well documented in Bugzilla. A quick sed -i 's/XINERAMA/FAKEEXTN/g'
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.00/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so fixed things up.

I was somewhat surprised when I tried to log into my VPN only to find that my VPN settings had vanished.  Not a big deal but annoying nonetheless.

One outstanding issue that I am still experiencing with Fedora 8 is with the wireless connectivity.  Apparently there are still issues connecting over wireless to a WPA2 Enterprise (EAP/TLS) network.  There doesn’t appear to be a work around (unless you call plugging in using a network cable a work around) but hopefully one will be available soon.

Besides these fairly minor (and well documented) issues, I must say that I am pleased with Fedora 8. The interface appears to be smoother and program updates add some nice functionality to some of my favourite programs.

I look forward to digging around some more and finding new functionality and programs.

As detailed on CNet, the Nokia N810 firmware has been leaked and people have been trying it out on the N800.

Some of the major features of the new OS:

• Upgrade the processor speed from 320 MHz to 400 MHz
• Now uses Mozilla browser instead of Opera
• Improved Flash (and hence YouTube)
• Linux kernel upgraded from 2.6.18 to 2.6.21
• New mapping application to go with the integrated GPS built into the N810

I have seen a mention of video support in Skype as I had predicted but I couldn’t find any reference which confirms video support.

Speaking of the Nokia N800 series, Access has released a Garnet (Palm OS) VM for Nokia N series internet tablets.

Cool….

Quick on the release of Skype for Linux version 1.4, EBay / Skype has released their latest Linux beta, version 2.0.0.13.

The big news is that this beta version finally includes support for VIDEO!

I tested it out with a colleague of mine (my install was Fedora his Ubuntu) and it seemed to work quite well.  The video appeared to be clear, clean and fairly responsive.

Now my big question (ok, two questions) is when this version of Skype will trickle down to the Nokia N800 / N810?  Also, is version 2.0 of Skype for Linux going to be included in Google’s Android project?  After all, eBay is a partner in the OpenHandsetAlliance.

Instantiations have released version 6.5.0 of WindowBuilder Pro their Eclipse based Java GUI builder. The new & noteworthy page describes some of the improvements available in this new version.

WindowBuilder Pro supports not only standard Swing GUIs but Eclipse’s Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) and Google’s Web Toolkit (GWT).

One of my favourite features of WindowBuilder’s Swing toolkit is support for GroupLayout a la Netbeans Matisse.  WindowBuilder manages to do it without annoying proprietary .form files and is quite capable at reverse engineering existing GUIs for full round trip (bi-directional) capabilities meaning you can either edit the GUI in the graphical layout or in the code. Trying to jump back and forth between Netbeans and Eclipse with Matisse built GUIs is a pain as not only must the associated .form files be migrated back and forth but care must be taken not to edit the generated GUI code as it can get the code and .form out of synch. Also because of the reverse engineering of existing GUI code and support for all of the standard layouts, existing projects can be viewed and manipulated graphically regardless of layout or coding style.

Another cool feature (not mentioned in the New and Noteworthy) that I discovered playing with the product is that version 6.5 now has support for JSR 296 also known as the Swing Application Framework. Although it does not appear to come with a JAR to support it, a quick download (and build) is all it takes to start building Swing applications based on the new application framework. As far as I know this is the first non-beta product which support this new JSR.

The downside of WindowBuilder Pro is its cost. At $329 for a commercial license it certainly isn’t free like Matisse or the Eclipse Visual Editor but if you are designing GUIs with any regularity, the cost will quickly recuperated in time and frustration saved. Instantiations also offers a free trimmed down version of Window Builder as well as having discounts for academic and non-commercial uses.

Update: Instantiations has released WindowBuilder Pro 6.7.0

The last beta release of Fedora 8, Test 3 or version 7.92 was released on Thursday the 4th. This release includes a few new features to the Fedora 8 release including “Online Desktop” preview via BigBoard, inclusion of Codec Buddy which is intended to help people find audio and video codecs which cannot be shipped with Fedora due to legal issues, power management as well as performance improvements.

IcedTea which is the unemcumbered fully GPL version of OpenJDK has also been included into the default F8T3 install. As previously mentioned, IcedTea is a fully GPL unencumbered version of OpenJDK. At this time, sound, javascript and snmp do not work [1]. Sun is presently working on a free open source version of Java’s sound libraries and so that deficiency should be solved shortly. I’m not certain what the plans are to address the other gaps but I imagine that it won’t be long until they too are addressed.

Announcing Fedora 8 Test 3 (7.92)!

Finally Skype 1.4 (1.4.0.118) for Linux has been released. There doesn’t appear to be many changes from the latest beta release (1.4.0.99) from early August.

Now that 1.4 has been released hopefully we can start seeing version 2.x beta releases that will hopefully introduce video chat into Skype. Hopefully……

It certainly would be nice to use video chat on Skype on a Nokia N800 internet tablet.

Although the 2.x steam from java-gnome has been abandoned and deprecated for a year now and yet Fedora which is supposed to be on on cutting edge with respect to distribution of new packages has yet to upgrade to the latest java-gnome stream; namely 4.0.4. There has been a bug filled (Bug 242335: RFE: Please update glib-java to version 0.4.2 or switch to java-gnome 4.0) concerning the problem but even after 4 months the bug is still marked NEW and there has been no activity on it.

I imagine that it is too late to get the update included into the development branch (rawhide) in time for Fedora 8’s release in early November.

A new release of java-gnome was released on September 26th. As you can see in the release NEWS file the major improvements with this latest version is improved documentation, an increased API coverage and internal refactoring. In particular there has been an increase in the coverage of the Menus, Toolbars and Actions. Preliminary coverage of some container related GTK widgets have also been added.

It appears that the java-gnome project is really staring to ramp up and catch some steam. Hopefully we will soon see full API coverage.

It appears that we are on the verge of seeing a new Internet Tablet device from Nokia according to recent FCC filling.

Thoughtfix who broke the story has a little bit more info as well. With an FCC confidentialily of 45 days, we should soon find out more information on this interesting development. Currently most are thinking a minor revision of the N800 with built-in GPS. Nokia had previously announced its intentions to add WiMax to the N800 but according to the details in the FCC testing, this doesn’t appear to be that unit.

I guess that we will see what develops. I imagine that the new device’s release will coincide with the release of the updated Maemo 4.0 Chinook OS update which update GTK+ from 2.6 to 2.10 and will also contain many other changes.

This could make an interesting Xmas present….

Gnome 2.20 the latest version of the popular Linux desktop environment was released today.

GNOME 2.20 Release Notes

Although there is nothing in particular in this release that cries out to me to upgrade immediately, there are definitely some nice improvements such as improvement to gnome-keyring, evince offering interactive PDF forms, performance improvements and improved power management capabilities. There are also a raft of improvements in Evolution and Epiphany but since I use Thunderbird and Firefox, they won’t affect my day to day Gnome usage.

One interesting feature that I did notice was the capability of the screensaver to allow others to leave notes for you when your machine is locked. When you return to your computer GNOME will display any messages that were entered while you were gone. Certainly beats posting sticky notes on somebody’s monitor. Well done.

Congrats to the GNOME team on what looks like a solid release. Now I just need to wait for Fedora 8 to get to play with the new features.

Last Thursday Fedora 8 Test 2  (aka F8T2 aka 7.91) was released.

Included in the test is the defaulting of PulseAudio as the sound system as well as disabling X Font Service (xfs) by default.

Fedora 8 which is scheduled to be released in early November is slated to include Gnome 2.20, Eclipse 3.3, rsyslog as a new logging daemon, an updated firewall configuration utility and  Codec Buddy which is designed to help users find available audio and video codecs which cannot be included with Fedora for legal reasons.  Work is also ongoing to make F8 a lot more usable on laptop devices.

In addition, Redhat’s version of OpenJDK called IcedTea will also be shipped with Fedora 8.  IcedTea is a version of OpenJDK which uses parts of the GNU Classpath project to overcome the need to have binary “non-free” code to compile and ship a JDK.  The intention is to merge changes made to OpenJDK for the IcedTea project back into the OpenJDK project.

I haven’t had a chance to install Test 2 yet but overall it looks like Fedora 8 will shape up to be a nice release.

Word has it that a new email client is being developed by Nokia for the maemo platform which is used on the N800 and 770 Internet tablets. According to Murray Cummin, the new client will use Tinymail under the covers which itself uses a modified version of Camel which is the library that Evolution uses for mail access. This is great since it is building on a mature and tested library instead of starting from scratch.

Modest is intended to be small, trim and fast. One item of note that I particularly like is the preconfigured presets for popular mail services such as Yahoo and Gmail. Any attempt to reduce typing is much appreciated.

Another plus for Modest is the UI design decision to not require a stylus to use. I fully endorse this decision and I wish more apps would be designed with this possibility in mind. If I can select something or perform a task without having to use a stylus, then I am a much happier camper. Using a stylus (especially being a lefty) is a pain though I do appreciate that it has its advantages.

See the Modest homepage and Dirk-Jan-Binnema’s slides for more info.

When Sun released OpenJDK, I thought that I would give it a spin to try it out.  I ended up getting frustrated with all of the dependencies and tweaks that were required to get it to build properly especially on my Fedora system.  That was on build 12 I believe.

I remember reading that the requirements for motif which isn’t easily available for  Fedora was changed to allow the GPL motif replacement freetif. I recall saying to myself that I would have to try to build OpenJDK again.  That was a couple of months ago.

Well this weekend I finally got the latest version of OpenJDK and the binary bundle and attempted to build it.  I ran into a few dependency and path issues but nothing serious.  It finally compiled!!!

Yeah!  I will try to get a new Fedora image installed in VMWare and do a build from scratch and document it.  It is very nice to see that the project has been smoothing out some of the rough edges and is becoming easier to access and build.

There is a new Linux Skype beta available. Actually there are two since a hotfix (1.4.0.99) was released a week after the initial update.

The nicest feature from my point of view is the automatic adjustment of sound level adjustment and minimized startup. A full changelist is available here.

I haven’t had much time to test this new release yet but hopefully I will be able to play with it over the next few days.

I will have to test if there are any compatability issues with the N800 version of Skype.

Hopefully a 2.0 version is in the pipeline which will support video….

1) Install java-gnome

On a Fedora 7 system : run “yum install libgnome-java” which will bring in glib-java, libgtk-java and perhaps cairo-java packages.

2) In Eclipse create a new Java project.

3) Add the java-gnome jar files to the project (on Fedora 7 these are gtk2.8.jar, glib0.2.jar and gnome2.12.jar in the /usr/share/java directory). Note that in this example, the gnome2.12 jar file is not actually required.

4) Enter this code:

package net.damours.danny;

import org.gnu.gtk.Button;
import org.gnu.gtk.Gtk;
import org.gnu.gtk.Window;
import org.gnu.gtk.WindowType;

public class GWTExample {

public static void main(String[] args) {

// Initialize the GTK subsystem
Gtk.init(args);

// Create a Top Level Window
Window w = new Window(WindowType.TOPLEVEL);
w.setDefaultSize(100, 100);

// Create a button and add it to the window
Button b = new Button(“Hello”);
w.add(b);
// Show the window and all subcomponents
w.showAll();

// Run Gtk main thread
Gtk.main();
}
}

5) Click on the run button.

Hopefully you will see something like the following:

Even though there is no functionality behind the window and button, you now have a GTK application written in Java which can be built upon. Since the java-gnome jar files rely on the underlying GTK libraries being available, I don’t believe that this will work on any platform but Linux but I would love to be proved wrong.

The next step will be to add functionality and exploit some more advanced features of the java-gnome bindings.

Yesterday Nokia released a new Nokia N800 firmware. As previously discussed, this update includes Skype (voice only). It also includes Flash version 9 which opens up a lot of websites to viewing including YouTube.

I’ve tried out the echo service with Skype and it seems to work pretty well. We will see how it works under different wireless conditions. I’m curious about how long it might take to get video support into this version of Skype. Since the N800 is effectively running Linux, I am guessing that we will see video support in the Linux version first. As for the Linux version of Skype, the new beta version is working pretty well for me on my Fedora 7 laptop. Hopefully integration of video won’t be too far down the line.

Now there’s a question of getting more of my friends on Skype…..

Thought UDP and TCP was whole story in the world of IP transport protocols???

I just came across mention of UDP-Lite in the release notes of Linux kernel 2.6.20. UDP-Lite it turns out is a modified version of UDP which will attempt to deliver partial or mangled packets instead of simply dropping them as in regular UDP. This can prove useful for media or other uses where partial packets can still be useful. The protocol specifically states that this partial packet delivery is especially useful in error prone environments such as wireless.

There is always something new to learn…