Review: Ford Fusion with Microsoft SYNC

I just got back from a week-long road trip to Montana.  We rented a car, and got a nice change from the usual Chevy that Enterprise seems to rent non-stop: a Ford Fusion.  We had asked for a car with an auxiliary input to the stereo so that we could listen to our iPhones while driving, and so they gave us the Fusion.  However, we were in for a surprise as the fusion has Microsoft’s new foray into car stereo equipment: Microsoft Sync.

Sync is essentially a microcomputer running a custom version of Windows CE.  The idea is that you can play almost any portable music device through a built-in USB port, and Auxiliary line-in port or via Bluetooth Audio.  There is no display, rather the Sync system uses the built-in standard 1 line stereo LCD display.

The upside of using the Sync system versus a standard auxiliary port is that you can control the playback functions from the controls on the steering wheel, as well see the track names and artist information on the display.  The USB port is also powered, so you can charge your device while its plugged in.  Our iPhones were on the list of approved devices that work well with the system (surprising for Microsoft), so we were in business.

I was also excited because new to the iPhone OS 3.0 supports the AD2P stereo bluetooth protocol for streaming sound, as well as a partial implementation of the AVRCP protocol for controlling playback.  So, I paired the phone with the stereo using the fairly straightforward instructions.  Note: the system will only let you do this if the car isn’t moving, which is really frustrating if you are a passenger and trying to set up the system.  Soon enough, I had my iPhone playing music on the car stereo via bluetooth.  There were a few pretty sweet features that showed some forethought into the implementation.  First, whenever the key was removed from the ignition and the phone was playing music, the system would pause the music.  Then, when you turned the car on again, it would automatically resume the song where you left off when you exited the car.  Pretty slick!  And the whole time I didn’t have to take the iPhone out of my pocket.

There were also a couple of drawbacks to the bluetooth side of things.  First, no song information was transfered or displayed on the dashboard display.  Second, Apple only partially implemented the AVRCP protocol, so the Sync system can only send play/pause signals – no skipping forward or back between songs.  Given that this is a pretty big disadvantage, especially on a road trip when you are listening to music for hours on end, we decided to try the USB route.

Plugging the iPhone into the USB port (which is hidden inside the center console) brings up the Sync system.  It starts by trying to index all the songs on the device – not sure why really.  After about 5 minutes of a progress bar, the car announces (via a built in voice synthesizer) that indexing could not retrieve all the songs, and that I’d have to enter track metadata manually into the system.  Yeah right!  Nice idea, but no one in their right mind would try to do this without a keyboard, and especially not with a one line display and turn nobs to select all the letters.  Anyway, we hit cancel and were good to go.  We selected the playlist we wanted, and it the Sync system started playing the song and displaying the track information on the stereo’s display.  Great!

We were cruising along for about 5 hours this way, then stopped at a gas station.  We had to turn off the car, but when we turned it back on to get going again, the stereo froze.  No sound, but it was displaying the track information for the last song we played.  After a few minutes, the display unlocked and gave us an error ‘USB Empty’.  Hmmm.  The iPhone was definitely plugged in, but was no longer getting any power from the port.  We tried restarting the car, unplugging the cable – basically everything we could think of, but we kept getting the same error.

After a little sluething online – thank god for iPhone’s internet connection – we discovered that this was a fairly common problem with the Sync system, and exposed a major design flaw.  There was no way to do a hard reset of the system!  Apparently, the Windows version used in the system had a buggy USB driver which would shut down under certain circumstances.  The only solution was to reboot everything, however there was no way to reboot the Sync system from the controls.  We tried to do a soft reset through the menu system, but no such luck.  The computer even kept drawing power when the car was off.  After more sleuthing, we found a forum post that suggested removing the fuse from under the steering wheel that controlled the power to the dash (For those of you wondering, it was fuse #13 – use the provided tool on the inside of the cover, and remove the fuse for about 30 seconds.  Your trunk may pop open.)  Once we reinserted the fuse and started the car up again, everything worked fine!

That turned out to be the only major hiccup we ran into.  Overall, I think the system works great, and it is definitely nice to see some serious integration between cars and the devices we use all the time.  The system would be improved by a better display, and of course by a hard reset option that is more accessible than popping out a fuse.

Kubuntu 9.04 Review: 2 Steps Back

So I’ve now had a couple of weeks of use with Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty).  I did a standard update from 8.10, which thankfully went very smoothly.  However, I must say that generally I think this version is a step down (well, two very big steps in fact) in functionality and usability.  Here are the main areas I’ve run into trouble:

Bluetooth
If bluetooth was troublesome before, it is now practically unusable.  I’ve got a Microsoft bluetooth mouse and keyboard, both of which worked fine under 8.10 Intrepid, and which now work none only some of the time.  The mouse has a success rate of about 70% connecting to my computer and staying connected.  My keyboard has a 0% success rate.  The built-in KDE bluetooth manager is now completely useless, and does nothing as far as I can tell.  The default Gnome bluetooth-wizard works some of the time, but I can’t get my keyboard to keep a constant connection even when I’m using it.

Word on the street is that this is all due to the upgraded Bluez stack.  But, I can’t understand how functionality that existed and worked really well in the previous version has totally tanked in the current version.  I’ve basically given up using my bluetooth peripherals until a fix comes out (hopefully soon!).

Wireless
Again, the Kubuntu developers have delivered a downgrade in functionality and preformance with wifi in 9.04.  What used to be a manageable, if not quite elegant, solution in KNetworkManager has been replaced by a completely useless KDE 4 native plasma widget.  It looks pretty but is mostly broken.  First off, the new network manager has no way to connect to an unbroadcast SSID.  Second, it rarely remembers to reconnect to existing networks, usually prompting you to enter the password about 3 times before giving up in a confused befuddlement.  Third, the graphical elements are all fucked up.  The list of available networks in the panel is usually cut off so you can only see the first 1.5 entries.  You have to drag it off the menu and onto the desktop for the full list to display.  The proximity display view is even worse – all the networks are just overlayed on top of each other so as to make it illegible.

Both of these may seem like small issues, but they concern the two biggest uses of a computer: typing and using the internet.  What’s all the more disappointing is that the release has been out for over a month, and there have been no patches to address bluetooth, which is barely functional, or the network manager, which is in little better shape.

Upsides
There are a few upsides to this release.  First, KDE looks generally more polished with each release.  There has been a fix to font rendering so that now the font size doesn’t get all screwed up if you use a second monitor.  The fonts in previous versions of KDE 4.x were much too large and bold faced.  Kde 4.2 seems to have fixed this.  And FINALLY the display bugs in Firefox seem to be fixed.

Summary
In summary, there are some new features to make this release worthwhile, but overall there is clear lack of polish in key areas.  I’m still stumped as to how the Kubuntu developers thought it a good idea to issue release with a non functioning bluetooth stack and a really, really crappy network manager.  And I’m even more baffled that its been over a month since this release and there are still no bug fixes to address the display issues in the network manager (not to mention the crippling lack of features) or the non-functioning bluetooth stack.

VirtualBox vs. VMWare Server on Linux

For the last year I’ve been trying to get virtualization of a Windows Partition working on Linux.  The goal is to be able to use Linux as my primary desktop OS, while still having Windows available for the MS Apps I need for work (read Outlook).  The two main desktop apps that are freely available for this setup are VirtualBox, an open source solution by Sun, and VMware Server.  I tested both of these on a Core2 Duo 2 GHz system with 3 GB of RAM and an 80 GB hard disk divided into 3 partitions.  Windows XP Pro was installed on the first partition and Ubuntu running KDE 4.2 was installed on the other two.

VirtualBox
VirtualBox is now at version 2.1.2 and is a very solid app.  Sun provides an open source version and a freely available closed source binary for Windows, OS X and Linux.  The GUI is very solid and integrates well with KDE, due to the QT interface implementation.  The closed source binary has some features that are not available in the open source version, though they are getting migrated as the codebase grows (running a virtual machine from a physical partition, called rawdisk mode, used to only be available in the closed source version).

Setting up virtual box is relatively easy as most distributions have package available from the VirtualBox download page.  To get VirtualBox running with an installed version of windows, I found this pretty excellent guide.  The only problem I had was with the windows bootloader: I couldn’t get the open source iso to work, so I had to download a copy from a windows XP cd, as I didn’t have one handy.

Impressions
Using virtual box is very straightforward.  Setting up the machine and all the settings was straightforward.  There are very useful hints at the bottom of each tab in the settings pane which makes choosing options to enable particularly easy.  Once I had the machine booting into Windows, I installed the guest additions and rebooted.  The VirtualBox Guest Additions are a set of drivers and apps that make integration with the host OS seamless – i.e. you can move your mouse between the client and the host desktops.

Once I started using the virtualized OS, I ran into problems.  First, Windows was really slow.  To the point of being unusable.  Startup took about 10 minutes from boot to fully loaded, and opening an app was a time consuming task.  I turned off all the eye candy, which helped opening menus and such, but the overall speed and responsiveness was lacking.  Part of the appeal of VirtualBox is the ability to go into ‘Seamless Mode’ a la Parallels on the Mac.  Unfortunately, this never worked for me (but I also didn’t wait around for 20 minutes to see if it would work eventually).

I like VirtualBox, I really do, but its just too slow to be a functional, every day virtualization solution.  Combine that with some obvious inadequecies, like supporting only one processor and very rudimentary 3D acceleration support, and it doesn’t seem ready for prime time to me.  But, I plan on tracking the progress the Sun team is able to make and am definitely willing to give it another shot in the future.

VMware Server
VMware Server is a desktop/server virtualization solution from VMware.  The current version is 2.0, however this review will look at version 1.0.8 because the 2.0 version does not support rawdisk mode any longer.  Getting the older version working was a little bit of a challenge, given my kernel is newer (2.6.27-11) than the last one supported by the 1.0.8 release.  I followed this guide for getting the older version working on Ubuntu 8.10.  This guide will help to set up VMware to work with a physical disk and existing windows install.

Following the instructions was very simple, and I had everything up and running in about an hour, including download/install time.  The options for setting up a rawdisk VMDK in VMware were much more powerful than in VB, for example one could choose the number of processors to emulate on the client.

Impressions
Overall, VMware server is definitely not as pretty as VirtualBox – definitely not built as a desktop centered application.  However, the app is rock solid and wickedly fast.  Boot time was about half what VB was, and applications were reasonably responsive.

The guest additions were easy to install and gave the same basic features as VirtualBox, except the seamless mode.  I did run into a problem with the client software clock getting way out of sync with the hardware clock, either going to fast or two slow.  An easy fix was turning on the option to keep the two automatically synchronized in the guest additions control panel.

Conclusions
VMware came out ahead for my particular setup, which admittidly is not one most users will have.  As I wasn’t testing the traditional VM setup (having a completely ’soft’ install rather than running an OS of an existing partition), its hard to draw any broad conclusions, but for this use case, VMware is definitely the choice to go with.

Update: Check out my post here on how to get VMWare server 1.0x working on Ubuntu 9.0.