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.