Saturday 25 February 2006

Pic of the day: Ubuntu is a South African word meaning, according to this young lady in Atlas Park, fellowship with all humanity regardless or race, gender and divisions of faith. It is an ideology that stresses the ties that bind people together. It is also the name of a Linux implementation with ties to South Africa.

Another Ubuntu machine

Today I formatted my multimedia laptop, changing it from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux 5.10. The sad truth is that it was not of much use to me at any time before either. It did not have the raw power to play City of Heroes at more than slideshow speed, and the same with Sims2 after I upgraded to NightLife. It was acceptable before, with small enough families. Nor did it run Civ4. So it wasn't much use for gaming, as I had originally thought. Now I intend to use it as an anime server, running Azureus under Linux.

According to LOS, my Internet Service Provider, I will get DSL at home again on the 27th, two months to the day after I lost it in December. I plan to download fansubbed anime again, although I am not sure when I would find time to watch it. My other interests have of course expanded to fill all available time and then some. But I expect I will think of something. Sleeping less, perhaps.

The choice of Linux is pretty obvious since file sharing requires the computer to be rather wide open to the Internet. With the frequent worm attacks, using Windows would be quite risky. But nobody makes worms for Linux. That's because Linux is not very common, and not very standardized. Even if you wrote a worm that would work on one Linux, it would not work on the 10 others, and probably not on the next version of the same product. Linux is in a state of flux. Application programs use documented features, which exist in one form or another on each installation. But worms and viruses usually work on a very low level, close to the hardware, using undocumented flaws in the operating system. It's not much fun to write a worm for 500 computers when you could reach 50 000 000.

Unfortunately, even Ubuntu Linux – one of the better, probably the second easiest to use after Linspire – is about as user friendly as making dinner by hunting your own animals and growing your own vegetables. Oh, I can immediately surf the Internet and write text, since I've used both Firefox browser and OpenOffice.org office suite under Windows. They are after all free there too, though I personally prefer Opera over Firefox. But once I try to install a program that isn't already there, it is all fog and darkness. And I'm not doing idiotic things like downloading a Windows version. But even when I choose the LJ client for Gnome (the actual desktop part of the operating system) I cannot open it afterwards or make the system guess what it is meant to be.

[Edit: I found by poking around that Drivel, the LJ client for Gnome, is actually in the Ubuntu "universe", meaning I can install it by simply choosing it from a list, at which point it is automatically downloaded and installed. Yay!]

What worried me more was that Drivel – the blog client – is made at Sourceforge, the same place where Azureus is being developed. Azureus is the program I actually need for file sharing over BitTorrent. It is one of the best, and probably the best of them all when dealing with a really large number of files. It will intelligently change what files are being uploaded, depending on the rules I have set for it. A very nice tool.

Much like Windows XP, Ubuntu will show a small icon when there are updates to itself or its supported programs. I am not sure if it does for programs you've installed that did not come pre-installed. By installing Ubuntu while at my workplace, I could be connected to the Internet and get these downloads automatically as part of the install procedure. (A procedure that takes a couple hours, by the way, so don't start it if you are in a hurry. Not that I expect any of you to ever do a thing like this.)

At least I know how to set the screensavers. Ubuntu 5.10 comes with a lot of them, some of which are better than a lava lamp. High praise indeed coming from me! ^_^