Wednesday 18 January 2006

Pic of the day: "Chicks dig Linux." Actually, I could not photograph the machine as it might give away my workplace.

Ubuntu and delays

The other day I stopped for half a minute at North Corporation, a shop that sells computers here in Kristiansand. I have been quite critical of them in the past, after their abysmal service a few years ago. Back then I had bought a computer from them, and it worked well enough except that the modem disconnected when I ran games or other processor-heavy applications. This became an urgent problem when I tried to play an online multiplayer game, in which I necessarily had to combine the two things. I brought the machine back to the shop (which necessitated a taxi since I don't have a car) and they looked at it and tested it and said it was perfectly fine, it must be my phone line. Well, I had had other computers before and actually still had one that worked fine with the same phone line. The modems, one internal and one external I tried, worked fine elsewhere too. I got rather angry at their plain refusal that there could be anything wrong with their machine. It took years before I considered trading with them again.

In this case, however, I did not have much choice. There are very few computer shops in the city that actually are competent enough to build their own computers. Most are just chain outlets which get their computers in large cardboard boxes with Windows installed and everything. And I did not want Windows. I knew that the competitors would react like "You cannot have a computer without Windows! It is what makes it run!" which is true enough as far as it goes. Except you can replace Windows with a free and more efficient operating system, such as Ubuntu Linux.

***

There are many Linuxes in the world, and they are all free as in free speech, but not all are free as in free beer. Those that are tend to be, naturally, less professional. After some research I found Ubuntu to deliver the best compromise, though I may be wrong. Now that I actually have a computer running it, I still don't know that I am wrong, but I will easily admit it if I learn so in the future. Operating systems don't hold the place in my heart otherwise reserved for religion, as sometimes seems to happen with computer geeks. In this computer geek, however, that place is actually occupied by religion. So I have a fairly pragmatic approach here, I think.

Ubuntu Linux comes in two degrees of commitment, so to speak. One is a CD which you can boot from when you want to run Linux, and then take it out and go back to Windows. The other is an install CD that transforms your machine. It can still co-exist with Windows if you partition the hard disk (or have two hard disks) and keep Windows separate from Linux, but you have to set aside some disk space and then you have a permanent installation. Both of these CDs can either be ordered for free or you can download a CD image and burn it, as I did.

I downloaded the operating system overnight to a portable machine at work, then today I picked up the new machine at North Corporation. I had ordered it about a month ago (Dec 14), and at the time the deal was that it would be ready before New Year. He seemed pretty confident of that, but as you may have guessed, these people are more confident than they are competent. In all fairness, as also mentioned, they are more competent than their neighbors, it is just that (much like me when younger) they meet their limits too rarely to recognize them. In this case, they were half a month late. In fact, it seems they had forgotten the whole thing until I stopped by and grinned politely at them on Monday. (They called me Tuesday morning, but it rained too much on Tuesday to pick it up, not to mention that I did not yet have the install disk.) As a compensation for breaking our deal, I demanded a 10- pack of CDs. ^_^ I am sure they count themselves very happy, or at least ought to, to get away with just that. Little do they know that I am hanging them to dry for the whole World Wide Web to see, until they google for their company name at least.

Be that as it may, the machine was quite cheap. This was not just because I didn't have to pay tribute to Microsoft, although that helps too. But I also intentionally picked underpowered components by today's standards. Intel Celeron D 336 2.8 Ghz. 512 MB RAM, 80 GB hard disk (but 7200 RPM). Floppy disk and a CD-ROM with no burning or DVD capabilities. (I already have a free-standing DVD burner that is not in use, as I have DVD burner in both of my current home machines and a CD burner in one of the laptops.) Having a native CD-ROM drive at all was necessary to install the OS.

I did that after lunch, installed the OS. It was amazingly simple. (Well, once I stopped putting the mouse plug in the keyboard connector and the other way around. Until then it was quite frustrating, and it didn't help that the monitor stood on the other side of a wall from the actual machine.) The screen came alive with a text message that let me choose between a limited server install, a normal desktop / laptop install, or a custom install. I pressed enter and it installed the standard desktop. It stopped and asked for language, so I picked Nynorsk (New Norwegian, the native language of the Norwegian west coast where I grew up). For the most part it stuck to that ever since, although there were some few messages in Bokmål (Book Language, the urban and eastern version of Norwegian) and even a very few in English. But for the most part the translation seems to have been quite well done. A bit later, the program helped me create a standard user with username and password. (Ubuntu does not have a root account by default, nor does it give the standard user root privileges. You activate root privileges temporarily on the rare occasions when you need them, for instance to install new programs.)

After the install was completed, it spit out the CD and asked me to make sure it really was out before rebooting. As close to idiot proof as I can imagine. Not that I need that, of course. I mean, anyone might accidentally mistake the mouse connector for a keyboard connector when they are exactly the same color and the symbols are too small to see clearly. Anyway! Foolproof. You couldn't get it easier with Windows XP home edition. (I know, because I have three or four machines with it. Make that four or five. How did that happen?? But it is not likely to increase anytime soon. No, seriously.)

The machine started pretty quickly and soon came up with the Gnome desktop. I am not sure why Linux – and Unix – people feel the need to assign weird names to everything. At least this is pronounceable, and a word I've heard repeatedly before. But I fail to see any point of contact between a gnome and a computer workspace. Oh well. The short of it is, it is functionally equivalent to the Windows desktop (and the Mac desktop, and the GEM desktop and the one I have forgotten but which started it all and which the rest of them copied. You know the Smalltalk guys. Palo Alto? I cannot remember and I am several miles from Google. Several miles and almost two weeks. More about that presently.)

The Gnome desktop has the applications startup center in the upper left corner rather than the lower left. I am sure it is movable, as it also is in Windows. But it should be enough to discourage the very casual user from trying to start other programs, as I secretly observed them doing with the portable I had brought with me to work. Not that I am supposed to write about work, but anyway it wasn't my coworkers who were trying to explore my hard disk. (Not entirely successfully, as I had made a separate and limited user even there.)

Firefox web browser comes pre-installed, and works well enough. I need a way to limit the user to only a few web sites, like you can in Internet Explorer. It would surprise me if this is not possible to achieve in Firefox, although you never know. It is kinda less corporate image than IE, I guess.

***

I came home late. In fact, I realized that I would not be able to get to my new apartment till 20 (8PM) which is when my ISP's almost-free helpline closes. So I had to call from my mobile phone, which I hate because it costs more. When I do something I don't like, such as making a call or seeing the dentist, I try to at least not pay too much for it, if I can choose. But sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do. In this case, I felt that a man had to ask why nothing had happened since I called them on the morning one week ago. At that point I had called them about moving my DSL to the new address where my telephone number had moved, since it seemed that the DSL line had not followed automatically. I'm not sure why not, since it is probably the same main central, as seen by the fact that I kept the same number. (And by the fact that it is only a 20 minutes walk away.) Anyway, they told me that they would send me a letter with the exact date of the DSL move. I had seen no such letter during this week. The guy I talked to was surprised to learn that. He could however tell me that my DSL would be moved on January 31st. I thanked him politely, since it is probably not his fault.

More than a month without Internet access. That's a new record for the last 8 or 9 years. (Yes, I was a fairly early adopter, although I am not sure anymore when I got Net access. I know that when I started my daily diary in late spring or early summer 1998, I already had a homepage, though it didn't have much content. Homepage was not nearly the first thing on my mind when I got Net access, either. So I've probably had it since Christmas 1997, if not Christmas 1996. It was one of those, I think. Probably not 1995, since the WWW was invented in 1992 if I remember correctly, and did not gain much ground outside the universities for the first couple years, and then first in the USA.

Anyway, I think more than half a month is pretty slow to move a DSL when not even the number is changed. But such tardiness, while not appreciated, is hardly unforgivable. At least as long as I remember that I had planned to be out of here before Christmas, and made statements to that effect repeatedly...