December Days 2021 #14: Tussling With Tux
Dec. 14th, 2021 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
Despite this being the computer I took to university with me, I don't remember a lot of the exact specifications for it, except it was definitely a Socket A CPU, and the OS pair that was on it for a brief time, and there was a decent amount of hard disk drive storage on it. That, and for the first time, we had broadband connections in our dorm room, so our skills at sharing files were about to level up significantly, as were the sizes of the files in question. The DVD specification meant 4.77 GB of space, although at this time, writable drives for DVDs were not widely available and inexpensive, although CD writable drives were. (Flash memory has not yet become ubiquitous at this point, either.) I can be a little fuzzy on the details of this specific computer, however, because the story to be told about that machine is that it's my first dual-boot system, with two completely unrelated operating systems on the same drive.
I have had a dislike for companies dictating what we can and can't do with our software and hardware from a very early age, and while I'm not old enough to have gone through the antitrust action against IBM, I am old enough to have had some big grumbles about Windows and Microsoft as monopolists and I will have similar grumbles about Apple, Google, and others with their walled garden later on in the series. So, through Internet research and looking around in various places, I learned about the history and development of Linux, a freely available operating system with programs maintained and made available to run on that system. Linux also comes out of the desire not to let monopolists dictate what can be done with computers, since Unix itself was developed as proprietary software out of American Telephone and Telegraph and then licensed to other entities, first for free, then, when Bell Labs was severed from AT&T, for a cost. The combination of GNU software and the Linux kernel produced a Unix-like environment that was free as in freedom and that would have the source code available to be distributed to anyone who wanted it, usually but but exclusively for free as in beer. Not having to pay for an exorbitant Windows license and further licenses for further Windows software seemed like a good idea (even though, as a student, I could get those software licenses for far less expensively than the general public), and if I could play games well enough on that system, that would be even better.
So, for university, I put a partition on my hard drive and installed what was supposed to be the easiest to use and friendliest to new people distribution of Linux, the now discontinued Mandrake Linux. The criteria for friendliness that I use was based primarily on whether I could accomplish all of the things I needed to do in Linux without leaving the GUI, so every time I had to drop into a terminal to achieve anything, it's less friendly. I realize that Linux was and is built on top of terminal commands, configuration files are usually plain text and can be opened by any text editor, and window managers and desktop environments are on top of that, but Windows and macOS were both successfully able to do just about everything without having to drop to the command prompt and enter commands, so if anyone wanted to switch, they would need to have a similar ease of operation, even if the specific program or menu names were different than what they had seen on the other operating system, and configuring programs should be similarly easy and graphical. (By that standard, Android is the friendliest Linux distribution by far in a lot of years, although other distributions will score a lot better in the intervening years between now and when I was first dipping my toe into Linux. iOS and macOS X are BSD-based, if I recall correctly, which makes them POSIX-compatible but not Linux, I think, or they would also rank very high on user friendliness.)
It didn't go well at all. First and foremost, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) system was not exactly that advanced, in my experience. It did not detect my sound card correctly, so I would either have no sound or a high pitched drone coming out of my speakers. Even with my new broadband connection and trying many of the command snippets that were supposed to help get my card in line through loading or unloading specific kernel modules, nothing seemed to help that situation. So sound was a bust. Second, to achieve anything like good video card performance for games that weren't, say, Tetris level of complexity, I'd need to download and install proprietary graphics drivers (which I was fine with), but those also came with problems of trying to wrangle compatibility with the current kernel and setup, and trying to do that directly generally caused the machine to lock up and need to be restarted. So, sound and video were a bust for game playing, and not working all that great for office or school work, either.
It was possible, in theory, to play DOS games on Linux with an appropriate DOS emulator, and it was also theoretically possible to play Windows games on Linux through the use of the Windows Compatibility Layer called Wine, but you can see from their own about page, it would still be about six years from this point in time before they felt confident in doing a 1.0 stable release for the program. Even so Wine (then styled WINE for WINE Is Not an Emulator in the same way that GNU means GNU's Not Unix) is an essential backbone on which the possibility of playing Windows games on Linux is built. Valve Software, makers of Steam, use a highly customized version of Wine called Proton to provide Linux compatibility for games that were never released for Linux systems that will be the backbone of their handheld Steam device called the Steam Deck, for example.
So all of the component pieces for a good experience with Linux are there, but what's missing is a lot of the work that goes into finding good compatibility settings, improving the code so that it just works on more games, adding more possibilities to the database and figuring out how to make those kinds of things run, which in turn often lead to improvements in the code, and so forth. I'm not actually part of this loop in any way at the time, because I am an end user who just wants things to work, not a contributor to anything, and I believed at the time that since I didn't know any coding, I didn't have anything useful to contribute. I know better now that there are almost always non-code ways of contributing to projects, and that some projects will accept non-code contributions more graciously and appreciatively than others will, but at that time, the attitude I believed was that the only meaningful contribution to a project was code.
So, having failed at being a meaningful Linux system running, I wiped the partition and went back to Windows, and through my undergraduate, the computer in my house was generally a solely Windows box while I waited for the state of Linux to improve and become easier and friendlier for me to take up again. There was still plenty to intrigue me about safe file-sharing, about having a real network to be able to play Diablo II on with one of my roommates, about watching screener copies of The Matrix shared by others, and about the large amount of content that was arriving from Japan as the US truly woke up from their slumber of believing art and animation had to be suitable for children. And, y'know, five days of band rehearsal plus one performance in most Saturdays during football season, and one or two ensemble rehearsals plus occasional performances during non-football season.
The entry point into this world for me brings back feelings that I had for some time (and will continue to have even to this current day) about identity and what determines True Nerdery (which should be ready with the same attitude you have toward True Scotsmanism). Earlier in the series, I'd mentioned a certain amount of separation between myself and my two other nerdier friends, where I was staying in the end user, game playing spaces, instead of diving into more of the heavy programming and technical experiences of computers. Yes, even with having assembled a computer from components and doing things like creating boot disks, playing around in BASIC, programming a basic slot machine into a graphing calculator, and being sufficiently familiar to do most of the advanced optional things in the coursework of my high school's class to get us used to Windows and computers, using telnet (and then SSH) to connect to university servers and then run pine to read my email from a console when I was away from my primary email client, (and recognizing those servers were all banned after classic Atari games), and probably several other things that I would do without thinking that others might consider highly technical and advanced work compared to their own knowledge and experience. Everything is relative, and I tend to compare myself only to the people who are better than I am instead of noticing all the other people who are around. (Keep that thought in mind, it's going to come back again and again and again.)
So, for someone who was already a little unsure about their True Nerdery status, not being able to get a more nerdy (defined, I think, more by exclusivity as much as the amount of console hacking needed to make stuff work) operating system to work, and not being able to use my search skills (my non-professional skills) to find a working solution, and not being able to understand the problem well enough to even know what's going sideways, well, that wasn't necessarily great for that part of the identity I believed I had. Geeking out about fandom, for me, at this point, is more consuming rather than creating a whole lot of transformative work at that point, since the Web is in transition between everywhere having a forum of their own (lots of them based on phpBB) to certain sites becoming hubs for social activity, first with Myspace and Livejournal, and then eventually with Zuckerberg's Folly becoming the big player in the space. So I might be a geek about certain fandoms, but the nerd identity was starting to slip away from not participating in software and hardware hacking or other obvious nerd hobbies and not feeling smart enough or technical enough to maintain that piece of identity. This was unbalancing to my identity, but I wouldn't be able to articulate it well enough to anyone, and if you asked me about it, I probably wouldn't recognize it. I was concentrating on another aspect of my identity, leaning way too hard into it because it was surface-level and there seemed to be "obvious" ways of constructing self-worth from it.
- CPU: Advanced Micro Devices Athlon (Classic - Thunderbird, Socket A) @ 800 MHz)
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: ATI RADEON family (possibly the RADEON 7200, or something with the same chipset), 32 or 64 MB video RAM. I think this was in the AGP slot on the motherboard.
- Sound: Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16, possibly a Sound Blaster Pro, connected to 3.5" jack with 2.1 speakers (hell yeah, subwoofer!), 3.5" jack microphone
- Inputs/Peripherals: Keyboard (PS/2), Mouse (PS/2), HP Inkjet Printer (USB 2.0), 100MBit Ethernet (RJ45, CAT-5 cable)
- Storage: 500 GB internal Hard Disk Drive, DVD-ROM Optical Media Drive, CD-RW Optical Media Drive
- Operating System: Mandrake Linux 9.0, Windows XP
Despite this being the computer I took to university with me, I don't remember a lot of the exact specifications for it, except it was definitely a Socket A CPU, and the OS pair that was on it for a brief time, and there was a decent amount of hard disk drive storage on it. That, and for the first time, we had broadband connections in our dorm room, so our skills at sharing files were about to level up significantly, as were the sizes of the files in question. The DVD specification meant 4.77 GB of space, although at this time, writable drives for DVDs were not widely available and inexpensive, although CD writable drives were. (Flash memory has not yet become ubiquitous at this point, either.) I can be a little fuzzy on the details of this specific computer, however, because the story to be told about that machine is that it's my first dual-boot system, with two completely unrelated operating systems on the same drive.
I have had a dislike for companies dictating what we can and can't do with our software and hardware from a very early age, and while I'm not old enough to have gone through the antitrust action against IBM, I am old enough to have had some big grumbles about Windows and Microsoft as monopolists and I will have similar grumbles about Apple, Google, and others with their walled garden later on in the series. So, through Internet research and looking around in various places, I learned about the history and development of Linux, a freely available operating system with programs maintained and made available to run on that system. Linux also comes out of the desire not to let monopolists dictate what can be done with computers, since Unix itself was developed as proprietary software out of American Telephone and Telegraph and then licensed to other entities, first for free, then, when Bell Labs was severed from AT&T, for a cost. The combination of GNU software and the Linux kernel produced a Unix-like environment that was free as in freedom and that would have the source code available to be distributed to anyone who wanted it, usually but but exclusively for free as in beer. Not having to pay for an exorbitant Windows license and further licenses for further Windows software seemed like a good idea (even though, as a student, I could get those software licenses for far less expensively than the general public), and if I could play games well enough on that system, that would be even better.
So, for university, I put a partition on my hard drive and installed what was supposed to be the easiest to use and friendliest to new people distribution of Linux, the now discontinued Mandrake Linux. The criteria for friendliness that I use was based primarily on whether I could accomplish all of the things I needed to do in Linux without leaving the GUI, so every time I had to drop into a terminal to achieve anything, it's less friendly. I realize that Linux was and is built on top of terminal commands, configuration files are usually plain text and can be opened by any text editor, and window managers and desktop environments are on top of that, but Windows and macOS were both successfully able to do just about everything without having to drop to the command prompt and enter commands, so if anyone wanted to switch, they would need to have a similar ease of operation, even if the specific program or menu names were different than what they had seen on the other operating system, and configuring programs should be similarly easy and graphical. (By that standard, Android is the friendliest Linux distribution by far in a lot of years, although other distributions will score a lot better in the intervening years between now and when I was first dipping my toe into Linux. iOS and macOS X are BSD-based, if I recall correctly, which makes them POSIX-compatible but not Linux, I think, or they would also rank very high on user friendliness.)
It didn't go well at all. First and foremost, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) system was not exactly that advanced, in my experience. It did not detect my sound card correctly, so I would either have no sound or a high pitched drone coming out of my speakers. Even with my new broadband connection and trying many of the command snippets that were supposed to help get my card in line through loading or unloading specific kernel modules, nothing seemed to help that situation. So sound was a bust. Second, to achieve anything like good video card performance for games that weren't, say, Tetris level of complexity, I'd need to download and install proprietary graphics drivers (which I was fine with), but those also came with problems of trying to wrangle compatibility with the current kernel and setup, and trying to do that directly generally caused the machine to lock up and need to be restarted. So, sound and video were a bust for game playing, and not working all that great for office or school work, either.
It was possible, in theory, to play DOS games on Linux with an appropriate DOS emulator, and it was also theoretically possible to play Windows games on Linux through the use of the Windows Compatibility Layer called Wine, but you can see from their own about page, it would still be about six years from this point in time before they felt confident in doing a 1.0 stable release for the program. Even so Wine (then styled WINE for WINE Is Not an Emulator in the same way that GNU means GNU's Not Unix) is an essential backbone on which the possibility of playing Windows games on Linux is built. Valve Software, makers of Steam, use a highly customized version of Wine called Proton to provide Linux compatibility for games that were never released for Linux systems that will be the backbone of their handheld Steam device called the Steam Deck, for example.
So all of the component pieces for a good experience with Linux are there, but what's missing is a lot of the work that goes into finding good compatibility settings, improving the code so that it just works on more games, adding more possibilities to the database and figuring out how to make those kinds of things run, which in turn often lead to improvements in the code, and so forth. I'm not actually part of this loop in any way at the time, because I am an end user who just wants things to work, not a contributor to anything, and I believed at the time that since I didn't know any coding, I didn't have anything useful to contribute. I know better now that there are almost always non-code ways of contributing to projects, and that some projects will accept non-code contributions more graciously and appreciatively than others will, but at that time, the attitude I believed was that the only meaningful contribution to a project was code.
So, having failed at being a meaningful Linux system running, I wiped the partition and went back to Windows, and through my undergraduate, the computer in my house was generally a solely Windows box while I waited for the state of Linux to improve and become easier and friendlier for me to take up again. There was still plenty to intrigue me about safe file-sharing, about having a real network to be able to play Diablo II on with one of my roommates, about watching screener copies of The Matrix shared by others, and about the large amount of content that was arriving from Japan as the US truly woke up from their slumber of believing art and animation had to be suitable for children. And, y'know, five days of band rehearsal plus one performance in most Saturdays during football season, and one or two ensemble rehearsals plus occasional performances during non-football season.
The entry point into this world for me brings back feelings that I had for some time (and will continue to have even to this current day) about identity and what determines True Nerdery (which should be ready with the same attitude you have toward True Scotsmanism). Earlier in the series, I'd mentioned a certain amount of separation between myself and my two other nerdier friends, where I was staying in the end user, game playing spaces, instead of diving into more of the heavy programming and technical experiences of computers. Yes, even with having assembled a computer from components and doing things like creating boot disks, playing around in BASIC, programming a basic slot machine into a graphing calculator, and being sufficiently familiar to do most of the advanced optional things in the coursework of my high school's class to get us used to Windows and computers, using telnet (and then SSH) to connect to university servers and then run pine to read my email from a console when I was away from my primary email client, (and recognizing those servers were all banned after classic Atari games), and probably several other things that I would do without thinking that others might consider highly technical and advanced work compared to their own knowledge and experience. Everything is relative, and I tend to compare myself only to the people who are better than I am instead of noticing all the other people who are around. (Keep that thought in mind, it's going to come back again and again and again.)
So, for someone who was already a little unsure about their True Nerdery status, not being able to get a more nerdy (defined, I think, more by exclusivity as much as the amount of console hacking needed to make stuff work) operating system to work, and not being able to use my search skills (my non-professional skills) to find a working solution, and not being able to understand the problem well enough to even know what's going sideways, well, that wasn't necessarily great for that part of the identity I believed I had. Geeking out about fandom, for me, at this point, is more consuming rather than creating a whole lot of transformative work at that point, since the Web is in transition between everywhere having a forum of their own (lots of them based on phpBB) to certain sites becoming hubs for social activity, first with Myspace and Livejournal, and then eventually with Zuckerberg's Folly becoming the big player in the space. So I might be a geek about certain fandoms, but the nerd identity was starting to slip away from not participating in software and hardware hacking or other obvious nerd hobbies and not feeling smart enough or technical enough to maintain that piece of identity. This was unbalancing to my identity, but I wouldn't be able to articulate it well enough to anyone, and if you asked me about it, I probably wouldn't recognize it. I was concentrating on another aspect of my identity, leaning way too hard into it because it was surface-level and there seemed to be "obvious" ways of constructing self-worth from it.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-16 12:32 am (UTC)I think in the end you may have struck on a better balance, even if at the time it didn't feel like what you wanted. I know I've really enjoyed your writing over the years. :-)
no subject
Date: 2021-12-16 04:19 am (UTC)The balance may be better, but it took a lot of time and other things to get there.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-16 11:11 am (UTC)Title of your shifter romance?
no subject
Date: 2021-12-16 03:03 pm (UTC)