Rant of the pwned n00b

I've always considered myself to a be an electronic gamer. Every since my dad got me an Atari 2600 way back when I was a kid and we had A TV channel, I was hooked on electronics games. The Atari came with a game call Combat. In retrospect it sucked. Blocky characters, 2 colours and not much of a game play but it was all we had so it was the BOMB. Other games came alone that were better but not by much. I was a kid and didn't know better and so was captivated by it. Pretty soon new consoles came out but my ole man would have no part of it. Why? Because he dropped a wad of cash on a killer personal computer. I was stuck. Craving games that my friends had, I had to suffice with being able to type documents and do trivial calculations in a spreadsheet. As time went on, my dependence on a computer grew. PC hardware was getting cheaper and offered more in the way of colour and processing powers. Then one Christmas day, we got a new computer. Not that there was anything wrong with the old one, which was 5 years old by now, it was just that I monopolized the time on it and nobody else got a chance to use it. Poking around with it, I was amazed at the advances features it had. It was colour. Yes folk, 16 colours and could show in resolution up to 800 x 600. Not only that. It had a Graphical User Interface (GIU). No longer did I have to type in those (in my ole man words) Cryptic commands to do anything. Just point and click. Well, almost. An interesting thing about this computer. It came with a game. Golden Axe! I had seen this game in the local arcades but never had money to play. But now I could stay home and play all day. This was the birth of a new era for me. I could play games on my computer. Not only that, more and more games for computers were being released. Pretty soon I was the envy of my friends. My computer games looked better and were more interactive. This equated to more fun. FYI I was a little pirate back then. Any games I wanted, I just copied. That was so because of ignorance and not because of greed. Few years later we got another computer. This one was now the BOMB. I could do 256 colours and (get ready for it) had sound! Man, gaming took on a whole new dimension there. Consoles were play catch up at this point. My joy-stick, keyboard and mouse totally pawned game pad. The games were 10x better than what a console could offer. I consider myself a god among gamers for what I had. Fast forward a few years and I’m at university (get this) doing a bachelors in Computer programming. My room mate had a PC. We hooked up via a serial cable and tada, head to head combat. Years (literally) were wasted behind gaming. As networking hardware became cheaper (around 1997) we invested and BAM, 4 of use were running around a simulated grid try to blow the hell out of each other. Later on, a small event became popular among us gamers. The LAN (Local Area Network) party. It's where you would pack up your (heavy assed)computer and CRT made of lead, carry it over to someone else's house, spend 2 hours trying to get them to communicate, order KFC and play games all night. This was huge! You couldn’t have more fun with a bottle of Viagra and brothel. I was one of the better players in first person shooter games. In fact, I was DAMD GOOD! But, as in the Garden of Eden, all good things must come to an end. Why? Age! My reflexes gave way, motion sickness kicked in and any other age related handicap you can think off. This little thing call the internet had caught on by then and mad it possible to play games online. There, this little local server I connect to regularly that’s a launch point for a particular game. It was my chance to get back into gaming. So I go waste a few hours a day playing. What struck me as odd is how competitive gaming has gotten. Back in my days, if I won a game, Whoppie ding! Time to start a next game. These kids are the total opposite. They only play to win. To them it’s like a life or death scenario. Some don’t join a game unless it’s a sure victory. Just to pacify myself I googled the word game. Here’s the best answer I got. :

“an amusement or pastime”

There you go. Games are basically an activity for amusement, not to have a heart attack over. Now, I play regardless of my team skill set. I don’t care if my team is the shit snakes or oppressors. I’m just in there to have a little R’n’R . It amazing the length those folks go to, to validate their position. Needless to say I’m often on the receiving end of these games. That’s okay though. When I do win, its comical.

Format c: .. the lesser known parts of installing Windows

Well i never actually used the command "format" but read on you see why I didn't.Over the years I’ve come to realise that many people, even close friends in the IT industry simply don't know how to install the Windows (98, 200, XP...) or have some serious misconceptions about it. Windows after all is said and done is the most popular operating system in the world and has come a long way since it original inception. This isn’t to say that its doesn’t have its faults of which there is a very long serious list but if you were to compare Windows to other alternative, the economic and productivity factors would quickly bring you back to Mr Microsoft. Before I begin, I’d like to dispel several common myths about Windows with regards to its installation.

1.  A separate partition on the same physical hard disk for the swap file disk improves performance. This could be true but would require you to create that “swap partition” as the very first partition on the hard disk and also require you to calculate how big that partition is suppose to be based on prior computer usage and the current memory configuration. Let’s face it, whatever microscopic performance delta (probably only noticeable by some benchmark software) you do gain is lost by that fact that now all you binaries (programs) are pushed the further ends of the hard disk, which would have an impact on load times.
2. You have adopted the *inx way thinking when setting up the virtual memory which has a major down fall. Even though Windows is not using all the swap space, it is locked for its use. Making matters worse is the fact that people often don’t put the swap partition as the first partition so there is only a negative impact on the overall performance. Fragmentation is a thing of the past as there are many 3rd party utilities that can defragment your swap file for free! Here’s an example of my personal favourite, http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html
3. Partitions are a good thing. For crying out loud, that’s what folder/directories are for. This has been propagated by the media for years and by people who should know better to boot. Typical justification for partitions are backing up data and to better organise you data. First off, any part of you hard disk has an equal chance of failing so the fact that you portioned of a section doesn’t make it any less likely that the data is safe on the same physical drive and since the host operating system has control over all the partitions, there is an equal chance of the partitions getting corrupted. As far as organising data goes, what’s the difference between looking at several folders and several partitions? NONE! In fact, there are some down sides that I can think of off the top of my head. These are, the small over head by the operating system to manage several partitions, the collected wasted space at the end of the partition (many a times I’ve seen people wanting to copy a file but no single partition had sufficient free space yet the collective free space was enough) and the performance degradation incurred by the hard disk heads jumping from partition to partition in an attempted to access files and keep the now separate filing information up-to-date. Basically if you want to have backups, buy a good DVD burner and use the software for periodical backups. It’s safe, cheap and recovery is pretty fast.
   
4. Placing you windows folder in a different partition or renaming helps security. Boss man, if someone can get that far into your computer, then they already know to check the environmental settings to find out where you hide it. It’s a simple command… SET Here is blog that dedicated to some myths : http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html.

You might have noticed that I repeated  swap file myths. I felt that enough can’t be said on it because some people are just hard headed. Now on to the meat! Do you know what you have? Many people want to install windows or reinstall windows on there computer but have no idea what parts make up their prised super charged over grown calculators. Needless to say this is a recipe for disaster. Typical components of a modern computer would be: • CPU/s • Mother board • Video card/s • RAM • Hard disk/s • NIC/s • Sound card/s • Optical drives • Modem/s • Keyboard • Mouse • Speakers Most if not all need to be identified by 1.brand and 2.model/partnumber. Why? One word…DRIVERS. Drivers are specialised software that gives you hardware functionality (aka make them work right). So before you get the hotts for installing Windows make sure you can correctly identify the hardware components and download the newest recommend drivers from their respective manufacture sites. From here on I will exclusively look at Windows XP since it’s pretty much the most common now but several of the steps apply to other windows versions. If windows is installed already, backup up you data on a discreet storage medium outside of you PC box. The reason for this is that whatever can go wrong will. We all know who said it. Now hit Windows key + Pause. This should bring up a System Properties window. Hit Hardware and the click Device managers. This should bring up list of the hardware so that you can now go driver hunting. Alternatively you can power down the PC (something I don’t ever like to do) pop open the case and look its contents for what you have. This would be a good time to clean it out as well. If you don’t know what your doing, don’t play hero-herolal. Backup up these drivers. Put the IDE drivers onto diskette. While you driver hunting you may notice that there are something called firmware and BIOS for several of you components. Get them! They are software that the hardware used to control the devices before windows drivers take control. Many work hand in hand with windows drivers. Make sure you also print a copy of the installation process for later reference. Also make note of what brand and type Hard disk you have. Many have specialised software to prepare your computer for the windows (or *inx) install. Almost forgot, Download the latest version of Autopatcher. Now that you have collected all the necessary stuff, it time to begin. Prepare the Hard disk software . 99% of the time it will require you to make a bootable floppy disk. If you one of those that gave up on floppies, here is a boot CD that should cover have the software already on it : http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ This ISO is an extremely powerful tool for use techies. Now proceed with the Firmware and BIOS updates. Remember the installation instruction I told you print out? I would go into this in detail but the process varies too much from brand, model and type of hardware. These would require several reboots. If this was done after windows was installed, you would notice windows detecting several new devices so that why I did it now to avoid the waste of time and possible performance hit. After you’re done updating the BIOS/firmware. Use the hard disk prep software or the ultimate boot CD to create a SINGLE large NTFS partition. Why use this software vs Widows? 2 reasons. I have seen Windows XP take a 250 GB drive and make it into a single 127 GB drive and for love of god, I didn’t know where the rest of space when. Secondly if Windows does recognise the hard disk properly, for some reason it always leaves 8MB space unused. It’s not much but WDF. I paid for that space and I want to use it. I purposely did not discuses RAID setup since only someone who know what their doing should handle this. Reboot the computer, boot from the XP CD and hit F6 when prompted to, pop in that IDE driver disk you made earlier, add that storage device and install windows on that good ole C: that the disk prep software created. Leave the files system intact. Complete the windows install. I usually use all the defaults except for the keyboard and advance text service. Now that windows is installed, it time install all those wonderful windows updates. Your thinking what shit I’m typing. Good! That means your paying attention. Typically people suggest that you install drivers here. This is where I disagree. Many windows driver require update before they work properly so that old school approach has to be thrown out the window. If Windows XP didn’t have SP2 slipstreamed into it, now is a good time to install SP2. Install the autopatcher after this. A quick read of the website should explain what it is but basically it’s a program that (thankfully) some dude put together that rolls all the post SP2 update into 1 simple patch. It’s not a service pack but its damd close. It also includes many third party utilities and tweaks that I a find useful. Don’t mess around with those unless you know what you’re doing but I can say the vast majority of them work well. Now that we got windows all patched up, its driver time. Install the drives in the following order : • Mother board/chipset • IDE/SCSI if separate from chipset • CPU • Video card/s • NIC/s • Sound card/s • Modem/s • Keyboard • Mouse Don’t ask questions just know that is the way to install it and yes some CPUs (AMD) require a driver to activate some power management features. That’s it! Finished….If you expecting more then that’s not installing windows.

The Misery of Windows

Almost all of us know, Windows is a pain in the arse. It gets blotted, slow and corrupted after some time. Utilities do little other than just keeping the bare minimum functioning. So what can we do? Honestly, nothing other than be extremely careful of what software we install. How practical is that? If I see a piece of software that gives my computer some extra functionality, wouldn’t I want to at least try it to see if its a piece of junk or not? Here lies the curse of Windows. Once something gets in, it hard if not impossible to get it out. Spy ware and virus thrive on Microsoft platforms as a result. I can here the Penguins cheering now. There are a million other web sites dedicated to preserving and protecting you windows install so I won’t go into that. My opinion; they are all a bag of rubbish! Nothing could beat the cold, clean, crisp feel of a “format c: /u”. Living in the confines of a protected Windows environment is like living in jail. Why should this be? Is it that Microsoft, with all its resources, can’t build a simple and reliable OS? I think not. I would have to believe it’s a game. The game of making us buy out next OS when it comes out to fix the old one’s problems.

I got a PC way back when 16 colours was “the bomb” and sound was not even herd of (get it)! My 5 MB HARD DISK (you read correctly) was enough to hold my office suite (text editor and spread sheet), OS (DOS) and games (think Nokia 5120)! Installing something was as simple as

“c:>md xxx

c:>copy a:\*.* c:\xxx\”

Uninstalling was as simple!

“C:\>del xxx\*.*

C:\>rd xxx”

Tada! No registry entries, orphan files or bad shortcuts. Just pure nirvana. Windows eventually came out but was buggy and I couldn’t get a copy to try for an extened period of time. Years past and eventually I got a new computer which came with DOS 5. Wow. It had a cool GUI file manage program. It reminded me of “X-tree Gold” but without the extra functions and better interface. I could select multiple files individually and copy/move/delete. The new computer had to 4 MB of ram too. HAHA…I could run disk cache, virtual drive and Windows now. Not only that, with my enormous 40 MB hard disk and “386” processor, I could utilise virtual memory! By this time Windows was up to version 3.11 but had to be started manually (c:\windows\win.com /386). That was cool by me since 50% of the software wouldn’t work in windows. Windows had a clean GUI, shortcuts and program groups. Here was the big kicker; programs that crashed could be isolated. The infamous Ctrl+Alt+Del didn’t reboot the machine but instead brought up a task manager where I could close off the badly behaving application. Sweet! Back then it never occurred to me that I never crashed a single program in DOS but yet I was amazed that I could trap any delinquent process with those magic keys. It also passed me over that my 4 Mb RAM was an over kill a DOS programs yet it was barely enough for Windows. At least everything was still somewhat “clean.” Programs were still self-contained except for two small text files, “system.ini” and “win.ini”, which were easy to understand and modify. How could I have been so blind? I should have known this was the beginning of the end.

Pretty soon Windows NT and 95 came out. NT was (and still is) extremely expensive so when I bought a new computer I took Windows 95. It was a strange new world. I hated the start button, the menu system seemed strange and what was this device manage thing? My answers came with my first internet experience. The first thing I searched for was Windows 95. The next thing I did was try to get the machine to run faster. All my ole DOS tweaks had a minimal impact. Thats when the whole drives thing became important. Drivers impacted performance! The latest drivers were downloaded and installed whenever possible. I did a lot of downloading for that matter. I would download everything from Tucows and try them out. After 2 months the machine began to move sluggish, freeze up and thrash the hard disk for the simplest tasks. The cause? I didn’t know. I figured it had to be a hardware issue, so I backed up my data (onto floppy disks using PKzip), ran a hard disk diagnostic which also low level formatted the hard disk, checked the ram with a ram checking utility, entered the BIOS, removed my tweaks and set the most conservative setting. Everything seemed to be functioning as it should. Finally I re-installed the OS, updated the drivers, installed all the software I had before and copied back my documents. For some strange reason the machine was back up to speed. A few months down the road, the same thing happened. This time I took the machine back to the store I purchased it from. They checked it and said everything was okay but it still seemed relatively slow to me. I reformatted and re-installed. Surprise, surprise, it’s fast again. I was now convinced Windows 95 was a bag of arse. All things now point to something called the “registry”. This was taken from Microsoft site:

The Microsoft Computer Dictionary, Fifth Edition, defines the registry as:

A central hierarchical database used in Microsoft Windows 9x, Windows CE, Windows NT, and Windows 2000 used to store information necessary to configure the system for one or more users, applications and hardware devices.

The Registry contains information that Windows continually references during operation, such as profiles for each user, the applications installed on the computer and the types of documents that each can create, property sheet settings for folders and application icons, what hardware exists on the system, and the ports that are being used.

The Registry replaces most of the text-based .ini files used in Windows 3.x and MS-DOS configuration files, such as the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. Although the Registry is common to several Windows operating systems, there are some differences among them.

Registry data is stored in binary files.

Apparently, the registry would get oversized and cluttered over time with useless entries. Registry repair and optimization software did little to help me out, so I borrowed an external CD-RW drive and made an image of the boot partition after a fresh install of the OS to speed up my restores. The restores became a 2 month cycle.

A little way down the road Windows 98 came out. Mr Bill gate was a little embarrassed when it crashed during the demo but I was willing to give anything a try to over come this restore hassle. “Borrowed” a copy and updated to Windows 98. This slowed things down. Way down. But the machine no longer suffered for freezes. Thinking it was the upgrade that was causing the slow downs, I wiped my boot partition and re-installed 98 from scratch. It worked. 98 wasn’t as fast as 95 but was a significant improvement over 95 in terms of multitasking and game play (not to mention it had the newest drivers for most of my hardware). Things worked okay for a few months but then the nasty slow downs and freezing came back. No utility could fix my Windows to keep its working smooth and peppy. Good thing I didn’t buy 98. So Back to Windows 95. 98 SE came onto the scene but suffered from the same problem but had features I wanted such as internet sharing. Made the swap and was rocking with 98SE. A few web sites suggested that my VIA mother board chipset might have been the source of the problem but then why would it work for a few moths if that was the case? Never the less I continued with my daily reboots, weekly defrags, monthly cleanups and 3 month restore

Eventually the computer hardware began to fail. By this time I was fair familiar with the internal working of a computer, so I ordered the parts for a dual processor system to build myself. This would rock but 98 only used 1 processor. My choicesfor an OS were limited to BeOS, Linux or NT4. I went with Linux because I really couldn’t afford NT and BeOS was still and infant OS. Got a copy from a system administrator in UWI and went ahead. That didn’t last to long. Linux was fast, stable and had a tone of programs but required constant research on the web to get anything done. On a side note, unless you have fast internet connection, don’t use Linux. Everything about Linux revolves around the internet (trouble shooting, installing software, even getting the Os). After saving up some cash NT4 Workstation was purchased and installed. Where did my p’n’p go. To hell, that’s where. Luckily I had experience in manually assigning interrupts, memory address and DMAs for hardware else I would have been dead. I could see a noobie screwing up an NT install and not even knowing it. Hurray! This OS worked! Smooth and fast, just the way I like it but NT still suffered for the slowing down after some time problem. Lucky, the with the task manager I was able to narrow down on which application, if any, was causing a problem. There were a few surprises here and there but nothing that would account for what I experiencing. Having a faster machine with multiple processors and much more RAM helped lengthen the time between a complete OS re-installs.

A new hope; Windows 2000 made its début in 1999 (a little early, don’t you think). I grabbed the first pirate copy I could get my hands on to give it a test run. Yahoo! Plug and Pray is back with a bang with functional ACPI. It rocked. Driver support was a little rocky as with all new OSes but it worked. I used that OS for over a year before the slowdowns started happening. The thing is Service packs began coming out for 2000 which corrected these little issues. I believe I only re-installed the Windows 2000 OS once because Service Pack 3 was crap and it screwed my computer over. It’s not that the slow-down problem didn’t happen. It’s that it was bearable. At that pint I realise I had not bought the OS. How long before Uncle Bill comes knocking on my door asking for his $1500tt. All this time Windows XP, the final DOS killer, splashed onto the scene. So again I borrowed the OS and gave it a swing. It was slow but the interface looked like something straight out of a WB Loony Toon cartoon (a plus in my opinion). XP came with additional functions such as a firewall, system restore points or desktop sharing. This alone made it worth the investment for me. I was kind of hoping they would have fixed the time related sluggishness. Well after about 3 yrs, 2 service packs and 140 MB of patches and updates, guess what prompted me to write this post!

Why Microsoft should be glad Linux exists.

Some might be confused by my title but read on. My adventures into Linux encouraged me to become a more active participant in the Trinidad & Tobago Computer Society (TTCS) and Trinidad & Tobago Linux User Group. Realistically, both groups are the same set of people. TTLUG hosted a meeting this past Saturday. A couple of my friends and I went. The topic: Live CDs of Linux. The first 5 minutes was a little history of Linux Live CDs (which was a little inaccurate but we’re all human), the rest was practically an inefficient slide show. The host simply demonstrated multiple distributions and commented about their possible uses. He was probably doing his best but when I looked around, everyone seemed to be proficient computer users who already knew everything that was beingdemonstrated. Because of this the meeting was pointless.

Any how, on our way to the meeting we were invited (more like nagged) to a sweat but we had a problem. Our laptops were running Linux. We (at least me) had not gotten WinX to work. By extension, the only game that was being played at the sweat would not be able to run. So we decided not to go. Why? It didn’t make sense to wipe out my Linux [that I worked so hard to install]…well that was what I kept telling myself.

The meeting came and went and guess what? I really didn’t want to spend the whole of Saturday night fighting with Linux, especially after that not so hot Linux meeting. So “bye-bye Linux and off to the sweat!” I didn’t like the distribution anyway. Hopped over to the sweat and re-installed Windows XP. That was it. I knew where to get drivers; the game installed without any hitch and the networking was as simple as plug and play. It took about 30 minutes collectively for the entire operation. It may be argued that I was accustomed to Windows. Well it’s true. I am! Sue me. It’s not that I haven’t given Linux a fair chance. I think I have. In fact, everyday I fight with new problems hoping to encounter the reason why thousands or even millions of other people use it.

Anyway, Linux is a mixed can of nuts. It has a very wide selection of software, installs on almost every platform and has wide selection of distributions to choose from. Here lies Mr Linus Torvalds brain child’s problem. Everyone can modify (pervert) his creation as they see fit. There are so many versions that it is hard for any one person to get a handle on everything “Linux”. The best anyone can do is to learn the common stuff and pick a distribution or two to stick with. What a fine pickle I got myself into. I only had a few distributions to work with. All had their good points and many bad ones. The lack of standardization has really screwed Linux over.

A similar comparison would be PC architecture. Practically anyone can build a PC once it runs x86 code. This has lead to PCs being synonymous with unreliability. I attribute this instability to the mixing of good and bad (or all bad) hardware. Most people with a serious computer related task typically use another platform. Firms like Sun, Apple and IBM build proprietary Workstations and Servers which enterprise sized company use. Why? These firms have absolute control of how the computer systems are built. That is, from growing the silicon, to etching the circuit board, to housing the components and finally, developing the operating system with stability and performance being their foremost concerns. They know exactly what needs to be done and how to go about doing it. Linux is like a PC and (dare I make this analogy) Microsoft Windows is like an Apple PC. Anyone can take the Linux core and do as they please once it adheres to the GLP License. With Windows, Microsoft has the first and last say, well, maybe not in Europe but hopefully you see my point.

Microsoft details how to go about developing programs and drivers for their operating systems. They also handle migrations and patches. The only edge Linux really has is the hordes of techs and programmers that contribute to its development. This diversity is working against them as well. So from a cost of ownership point, only an enterprise class business has the ability to run Linux. Why? They can spend money to investigate various distributions of Linux, train support staff and implement the OS. With Windows, Uncle Bill has done the ground work for us and manufactures have bought into it. From the certification of administrators, to testing drivers, to software development, Windows has almost everything covered. Where Windows falls short is their platform dependence on x86 architecture. We see signs of this changing but not anytime soon. So where does this leave the common man who thinks about buying a computer? With Windows! Why? Because when he buys a computer, it must work! If he wants some software to do something, it should be simple to install and work. He doesn’t want to recompile his kernel because, the last kernel had a security flaw or he bought a new video card. If his PC doesn’t work, he wants to know that he can call a tech to fix it. All these things and more, pave the way for Windows.

Linux is Microsoft’s main competitor, seconded by BSD (a distant uncle of Linux) and both thus far have proven to be a major pain in the ass for most users and even some techs such as myself. There are the exceptions to the rules. People willing to give up some functionality or are UNIX savvy, can and do thrive in such environments. For the rest of us, Microsoft Windows is the best solution. Its easy to use, has great driver support and the greatest software selection as far as I know. Even the open source community develops software for Windows. Ever since the release of Windows 2000 (followed but its over weight brother Windows XP), Microsoft has had a stable OS that could go head to head with the rest of OS’ out their. It maybe pricey but it works and works well. I’ve seen newbies try Linux and run away crying with cash in their hands for Windows (that was a dramatization but not an exaggeration). For that reason Microsoft should be glad Linux exists. What better marketing could you have?! Think about it. The only OS to come close to an easy to use interface and (at the time) easily implemented driver support was BeOS but it went the way of the Dodo bird (Palm)! For Linux to have a fighting chance, its got to get the Apple interface.

Linux and Me

Two week ago my dad told me he was getting a laptop as a retirement gift. He asked me to pick one and so did. While doing so, 2 things struck me. First was he was not an expert computer user by any stretch of the imagination and two, wouldn’t have as much cash as before to spend on software. Being a computer programmer and technician, I began thinking of solutions for him with regards to its use and cost of ownership.
After thinking about how he used his computer in the office, I realised that he wasn’t a fluent windows user. In fact he could barely use the internet. This was a guy that open Microsoft Outlook and left it open because he (initially) could remember how to check start the program again. So my dilemma was, to get a laptop for him, which he could use for daily work (type documents, check mail, surf the inter net,…), work with his specialised software and have a ready supply of cheap software that he could buy to upgrade the laptop’s functionality but reliable enough so as to minimise my intervention for support.
The (initial) solution, get the fastest laptop possible (since it was going to be free) and replace the operating system with Linux. The hardware selected is a Dell Inspiron 9300 with the following specifications.

Base System Intel Pentium M 760 Processor Operating System Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional, English
Display 17 inch UltraSharp Wide Screen UXGA Display Memory 2GB SDRAM DDR a 266MHz
Hard Drive 100GB Hard Drive Warranty 3 year warranty plus CompleteCare accidental damage protection for drops and liquid spills Primary Battery 80 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery Additional Battery 80 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Additional BatteryDiskette Drive External Floppy Drive Wireless Networking Card Intel PRO/Wireless 2915 Internal Wireless (802.11 a/b/g, 54Mbps) Software Microsoft® Works 7.0, English Video Card 256MB NVIDA GeForce Go 6800 Optical Device Special Offer! 8X CD/DVD BURNER (DVD+RW,+/-R) at the price of 24X CD-RW/DVD Bluetooth Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth Internal (2.0 + Enhanced Data Rate) Carrying Case Large Backpack Laptop Carrying Case (BACKPACK) Additional Software Norton Internet Security 2005, 90 day trial
Monitor Dell Ultrasharp™ 20" (20.0" viewable) Digital Flat Panel Display
Mouse Dell 2Btn Scroll USB Optical (OM) AC Adaptor AC adapter (Power Cord) - 90watts Cable Inspiron S-Video Cable Speakers Dell A425 Speakers w/Subwoofer (A425) Network Adapter Integrated Network Card and Modem Memory Key 256 MB Dell USB Memory Key 2.0 (256UMB)
Dell was chosen because they have (in my opinion) the best client support in Trinidad. As a technician working for company with close to 5000 computers, I know how important that support can be, especially when dealing with a product as proprietary as a laptop. Why Linux? Fist is it free. Even though the laptop came with a licences copy of Windows XP, there would have been addition cost of buy software. Most distributions of Linux come with comparable productivity suites that would have been an additional cost to my father even though he's getting a free laptop. Secondly, Linux is more secure. Many argue and have demonstrated that this is not true, but a fact stand out in my head. A computer with just a basic install of windows XP can be compromised in a matter of hours on the internet while it could take months for do the same on a Linux box. This steams from the fact that most attacks are targeted at Window systems because of its popularity. I’ll get to a third reason later.
So moving on, the laptop (which will take just over 3 week to ship) was ordered. I am a relatively confident person behind a windows machine, having been using DOS since 1982 and probably have used every major Operating system release from Brother Bill ever since. But Linux?! In 1999, Red Hat (version 6.2 I believe) was circulating around the Office, so my adventure began. This left a bitter sweet taste in my mouth. This was a very serious server OS but it was a piss poor desktop OS. To do the simplest thing was complex and cryptic but was rock solid stable (no BSOD here baby). Getting the modem to work was like have a tooth extracted and configuring X (the GUI for UNIX system) was like arguing with a feminist with PMS. Dropped Linux like a hot potato and went back to my trusty Windows. In any case Windows 2000 was making it début and promised stable operation and while maintaining it easy of use (hurray for plug’n’pray and a familiar GUI). W2K delivered for the most part. Round two at mastering Linux came in 2001. I obtained copy of SUSE 7.2 under the advice of a co-work who had tried it. Now this was shocker. SUSE detected my hardware, could be configured to boot straight into the GUI and had several tools to easily configure of the peripherals. SUSE consumed me for several days. It was a slow on booting but was very snappy once the desktop was loaded and had a slew of applications, which didn’t require post OS installation. Things were good but then Linux began to rear it ugly head. NIC was configured by the DHCP. This was a bad idea. Later that week, a network engineer complained that my computer was pink spraying. Not knowing what this was at the time but knowing it was bad, the machine was removed from the network. This abruptly ended my second dive into Linux at work. I continued playing with it at home but the lack of accelerated 3D drivers for my video card, lack of games that would run on Linux and the poorly rendered web pages in the available browsers forced me to switch back to Windows after a year or so. Around this time also Brother Bill released Windows XP. It was nothing more than Windows 2000 with a Warner Bothers theme pack but it continued with tradition of Microsoft Operating Systems, which was comforting and disturbing at the same time.
Fast-forward to a year ago, I began getting tired of the high price of software and the pirating nature of Trinidadians. I started looking at alternative free software. I knew it existed but was surprised to discover there was so much. The limiting factor was, Windows. Most of the software was for Linux based systems. This brings me to my third reason for picking Linux as the OS of choice for pops. Linux had a vast array of free, professional quality software for download off the Internet. After a while, my curiosity (fasness as we Trinis call it) good me back into looking at Linux. This time with some Internet bandwidth at my disposal I started researching different distributions of Linux. Apparently Linux had made great strides in user friendliness and configurability. Being busy at work and school stopped from making the dive back into Linux. You might be thinking that I could have dual booted my computer or even use one of many old computers as a test machine. The fact of the matter is, I probably would have ignored the machine after a few days. I did use a Linux to set-up a small Internet proxy and gateway.
Anyway, the ole man is getting a laptop and for him a Linux desktop isn’t going to be that much different from Windows. He’s going to require some initial support and training to get up and running. This gave me my motivation to install/learn Linux once more. This time it’s different. I have a real purpose for installing the Operating System other than my own personal gratification. Several reviews pointed me in two general directions. Xandro Linux and Mepis Linux. Both claimed to be a easy switch from Windows. A friend just so happened to have downloaded the latest version of Mepis so this simplified my decision. Grabbing my trust laptop, which was mostly used play games with at LAN-parties, I booted up with the live CD, ran the install. This was an amazingly pain-less install. Partitioning the hard drive was a breeze and the installer properly detected every single piece of hardware. WOW. This was a great step forward as far as Linux goes. It even detected my software modem (PCTel) and installed 3D accelerated drivers for the graphics card.
On the first reboot, I was pleasantly surprised with a graphical login. I expected to have to manually configure that. Logging in as root, I proceeded to configure everything to my needs. First task, raise the resolution to 1400 x 1050. This proved to be my first challenge. Gurrr. The graphics card and display were accurately detected but the desktop manager didn’t have the resolutions I wanted. A quick hop onto the internet suggested that a new Video driver was required. This couldn’t be right. The installation already had the newest driver. I ignored that for a while began to play with the rest of the OS. Setting up Samba was a breeze in Mepis. My main Windows XP box could easily access the laptop over the network. Likewise, the Linux machine could easily access shares on the Windows machine. The internet worked, the office package operated just as it did on my windows box. Life was good until power went. Time to use the laptop modem. I fired up Kppp to dialup the internet. I queried the modem and it responded. My hopes were high now. I always knew software modems were a problem under Linux but this time, things showed promise. I closed the configuration tool and proceed to dial the Internet. The modem initialised and began to dial.
What’s worse than having your Windows machine crash? How about having your Linux box crash? As an experience computer technician, this was a blow to my ego, especial after hearing and experiencing how “stable” Linux is! I couldn’t understand why it failed. Stock install! Stock drivers! Stock every thing! Hard rebooted the laptop, lit a cigarette and tried again with the same results. Dammit! So I was stuck. After waiting an hour or so for power to return, I popped onto the gold old www and looked for solutions. Again everything pointed to drivers but again the Mepis disto had already installed the latest driver. My thinking was that I might have done something wrong with the installation. This time, I low-level formatted the hard disk and re-installed the Operating system. During this install I noticed I had the option to boot the live CD at the higher resolution I wanted in the first place. Shabang! On the post OS install reboot I had access to all the resolutions I wanted. Sweeeeet. Now back to the modem. Try as I might, every time I try to use a modem, the laptop would crash and burn. I decided to tackle a few other issues. Since it is a laptop, I want the power management feature working. What good is a laptop if its battery died in 1 hour? This was easier than expected. It was as simple as turning on ACPI modules. Next step, getting my games to run. A quick scan of my game titles reviled that only Quake 3 had a native port for Linux. So I installed that first. Worked like a charm. Played it for a little while just to compare it to the windows experience. Quake ran noticeably smother which allowed me to up the graphics details a little higher. As always thing were getting to good. After a while I was thrown out of the game to a text screen with a message that resembled, “unable to handle ACPI event”, then I was trust back into the game. At least it didn’t crash but the power management wasn’t working properly. The next step was to install WineX / Cedaga to simulate a Windows environment to allow applications to run. This is where I got really pissed off. There were as many different ways to install WineX as there are versions of WineX multiplied by the number of distribution of Linux multiplied by the number of different kernel versions. Let’s make a long story short. After 60MB of updates (I’m a dial-up internet user btw) it didn’t work. WTF! I need a break. Time to look at a DVD. Expecting to find a DVD player, I started up each media application, one by one, to see which one would work. Guess what folks, not one worked. Hopped on to the Internet again to look for one and found two. Ogle and Mplayer. About this time I discovered the greatest little applications. “apt-get”. It will download the application and resolve all decency issues. “apt-get install ogle-mmx" and I fired Ogle up. Yet another disappointment. It refuses to open the DVD. So I tried it from the command line. At least I know why it didn’t run. It could initialise the sound sub system. I knew the sound was working so I move on to Mplayer. Using apt-get yet again, Mplayer was installed. This application refused to open the DVD. So much for “apt-get”. Apparently there must be a /dev/dvd entry for the Mplayer to work. This didn’t existed, so I add a line to the fstab to automount the DVD-ROM drive. This also failed to resolve the issues.
Coincidently another friend of mine also decided to make the Linux switch. He had applied for and received a free copy of SUSE 9.1. Having used SUSE before I was curious as to how his experience would have been on his laptop. Anyway he had a software modem as well but SUSE configured it properly! He applied some of SUSE configurations to my modem and we began to make progress. Instead of crashing the entire OS, Kppp would simply terminate. While he was working, I played with his laptop. SUSE looked similar to Mepis with only a few minor cosmetic differences. SUSE also came with many more programs. I was tempted to grab his DVD and switch distors but SUSE had it flaws as well. It also lacked a DVD player, was horrific at browsing a Microsoft network and used customised packages. These were the shortcomings I found and that was only after 10 minutes of playing with it. So SUSE was not an option. The laptop also had a sluggish feel to it. That was his primary problem with SUSE so he switched to Slackware. The Install of Slackware is slightly more involved but anyone with common sense can get it up and running. On the first boot into Slackware, we were presented with the all to familiar text prompt. Not a real problem. “startx” fired up X and we were at the desktop. This distribution was noticeably faster. I’ll check him later to so how his migration attempts is going. If every thing works for him with Slackware, I'll give it a try.
So what now? I could be a secretary or play Quake on Mepis Linux. This wasn’t very promising. This distribution has proven to be practically worthless. I suspect that there is something wrong with KDE. A new version of KDE has been release so I’ll take a last crack Mepis later today in a last attempt to get it working. The desktop wasn’t stable or particularly snappy, programs that should have run didn’t and the OS crashed even more than Windows ME on hardware that I know to be working. My pervious experience with Linux before convinced me of two things thing. It was the as stable as a vegetable on Prozac but as hard to use as a Japanese condom. This distribution proved to be the exact opposite. When I get a next distribution, I’ll continue my quest but until then… back to Brother Bill, The ole man will have to settle with windows for the time being.