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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.]
There's probably a pithy comment here about being a stubborn child-of-an-engineer and not letting one bad experience with something put me off of trying it again, but I think the reason I got pulled back into trying Linux again was because it was free (as in beer), had robust software availability (also free as in beer), and that I knew I would soon (in a couple years) lose my ability to purchase software incredibly inexpensively when I graduated into the Real World, and so if I could eliminate the expenses of keeping a Windows install maintained and not having to keep paying for new versions of Microsoft Office or the other paid software that would be useful for a Windows machine, then that would be a feather in my budgetary cap. And, perhaps, that might restore some of that True Nerdery cred to be running a not-Windows machine well.
That said, watch the goalposts gallop as soon as it looks like I might be closer to something that other people think of as cool and technical and True Nerdery. Keep in mind that my comparisons are always to people who are more advanced than me and never to look backwards at how far I've come and go "Huh. That's pretty cool, isn't it?" There are times where I do a thing that seems easily within my abilities and don't think much about it, only for other people to stare in disbelief that I not only found what the problem was, I went straight to the solution and fixed it with a few clicks. Or that I made deliberate decisions about what hardware I put in a computer so I could take advantage of a specific piece of software I knew about. Or I stared at a poorly documented library and example code, went "Maybe this will work?" and it absolutely did. Chalk mark: $1. Knowing exactly where to put it: $4,999.
It's also interesting that at this point in my computing journey, improvements in clock speed are about to start plateauing on their obvious benefits. At about the 2 GHz line, unless you're trying to play the very latest games, extra clock speed doesn't produce any clear improvement. Additional RAM helps make things go a bit faster, and more video memory helps with multimedia rendering, but brute improvements in CPU clock speed aren't necessarily rendering obvious and immediate improvements in all applications.
This time around, I also made a good decision on what distribution to install. Looking at the actual timeline of releases, I realize that I decided to try this very new, supposedly user friendly distribution fairly early on in its existence. I chose Kubuntu, the Ubuntu base with the K Desktop Environment on top because KDE 3 looked the closest to Windows XP and I figured that if the environment looked familiar, there would be less of a learning curve for getting it. At the time, Ubuntu, the main distribution, was patterned on Mac OS 9. It would eventually jump up to being styled on OS X, with a different distribution springing up to keep that OS 9 style desktop intact (as well as expressing their disappointment with the changes that were happening in the distribution itself.) Having a second hard drive in the machine also made it easier to keep the two spaces separated and feel more confident in experimenting without having to worry about bringing down the entire computer if things went sideways.
Unlike the last time, after installation, audio detected perfectly in the kernel, and there was an easy tool to install the proprietary graphics drivers into the system as well. And it came with a pretty useful suite of software installed by default, so I could browse the web, create documents, and watch media on the computer. (Well, almost. If I wanted to be able to watch DRM-protected content, or DVDs, I had to enable the non-free repositories. Which didn't take all that many clicks, as I recall, and I think it was doable entirely from the GUI, even if it would have been easier to open the relevant file in a text editor, do the change, and then save the file again.) I'd also added, in my space-saving wisdom, a TV Tuner card that would give me access to the basic channels of cable and a hookup for my PlayStation 2 so that I could use the monitor that I had already in place for the computer to display television content. I found there was a relevant program in the Kubuntu repository called, appropriately, "tvtime" that could take the input from the tuner card and display it in a window. It made multitasking that much easier, browsing while listening to programs as they aired, or using the TV as noise to screen out while I tried to concentrate on assignments and actual work of being a graduate student. (There would be some issues with differing levels of brightness between different uses of TVTime, which I would discover most hilariously when playing Kingdom Hearts II on it. Most of the time, the game was sufficiently dark that I had to turn the brightness and contrast all the way up. In the Timeless River world based on Steamboat Willie, however, everything was extremely bright white, such that I had to turn the brightness and contrast down nearly to zero to be able to see, instead.)
That work, to my well-timed interest, involved doing things like coding! One of my graduate school courses was a crash course on building a database-backed website, and it turns out, it's way easier to install Ruby and Rails and keep it updated if you're doing it in a Linux environment instead of a Windows one. If they'd taught us git, too, that would have been pretty helpful, but for the most part, I was able to avoid version control problems even as I shuttled my project back and forth between the home machine and school machines (almost always the Macs) on a prodigiously large 4GB flash drive. This is the era of learning about and using PortableApps to keep my own environment going on computers I didn't directly control, as well, but that part isn't important to the story, except that I had wished there was such a version that would run on all three types of machine. Actually figuring out how to install and get a local Rails server running from a flash drive wouldn't happen until I got employed, and it would be one of the indirect causes of my incompetent boss trying to get me fired from my job early on in my career.
In addition to the coding, I did most of my graduate homework and paper writing on this Kubuntu box, getting to know the project currently known as LibreOffice, even if I did generally jet up to a computer lab and open everything in Microsoft Office to check for compatibility and to fix the inevitable errors that occurred in translating between the two programs' idea of what a document format looked like before submitting. (It's way better now than it was in those days.) About the only thing I've had real trouble with is the way that Impress and PowerPoint seem to be actively hostile to each other, instead of mostly compatible but for a few tweaks that may be needed. That might also be better now than it was then.
Having Kubuntu also meant I had disc-burning software at my disposal, and with a DVD burner drive installed, I took advantage of that, as well, shuffling files to disc when they threatened to take up too much space on my hard drive, but also to share with other people, to bring with me places, and to ensure a certain amount of continuity of availability between seasons. Unsurprisingly, almost all of the media I made from that time is of lower quality and resolution than what is available now in the higher-definition rereleases, which made it good for knowing what to get again in the better quality. Also unsurprisingly, some of the material on those discs is difficult to recover, as the thing that made a disc writable degrades with time. We're just about to the point where flash media is going to get cheap and expansive, and very large capacity hard drives will be available for supplemental storage, but it's not quite to that spot yet. Which is why I have to be thoughtful about what goes in the flash media devices I do have - I can only carry 8 GB on my music player, after all. (More annoyingly, I keep generating enough of a static charge that I occasionally shock myself on my headphone cord. Enough of those incidents and the headphones only start working consistently in one ear, and then they stop working altogether.)
In terms of successfully fielding a Linux box and using it for everyday tasks, I was succeeding. My knowledge hadn't really changed in the intervening time, but the distributions themselves had matured to make things much more It Just Works and to have some of the things that would be needed for fully working only a few clicks away. There's still a fair amount of console work needed to make things work exactly the way I want them to, but I felt at the time like there had been some very solid progress in moving Linux and the Desktop Environments in directions where someone who wanted to switch away from Windows or Mac OS X would be able to find most of the things they wanted to do available to them. However, my position was that of a child of DOS, and therefore critical skills that I would have thought obvious, like file and directory organization, or using the command line when necessary, might not be present in a newcomer, and worse, Linux systems have Opinions about the correct way to do things. (Read that thread the whole way down about how some ways of learning the right way to do things messes with your ability to teach people who are truly beginners.)
There are more flavors of Linux yet to come in this story, based on what other devices come into my possession, but getting this system up and running meant that I would be able to continue on that journey that I had initially started upon with the failed Mandrake experiment. At this point, though, I'm pretty happy that Ubuntu and its derivatives release on a six month update schedule (minus critical updates) so that I can plan when I'm going to need to pay a little more attention to the computer as it updates all the packages my decisions depends on. It means not having to be subjected to when Microsoft decides everybody gets patches and restarts, and it also means that I can be reasonably assured that if the software is being developed, then updates will continue to be available for it so that it stays useable and patched against vulnerabilities or bugs in the code. (Of course, the downside might be that someone stops maintaining their software and that cool thing that I was using now needs a maintained alternative.) It's looking pretty good that if I ever decide to abandon Windows, I'll be okay.
For everything except gaming, that is.
- CPU: AMD Semperon (Thoroughbred) @ 1.8 GHz
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: nVidia GeForce 2 Pro, 64MB onboard RAM, effective resolution 1024x768
- Sound: Onboard sound system (on motherboard), attached to 2.1 speakers, ports for 3.5" microphone and headphone jacks
- Inputs/Peripherals: Keyboard (Wireless PS/2), Mouse (Wireless PS/2), 100MB Ethernet, HP printer (USB 2.0)
- Storage: 120 GB hard disk drive (Secondary), 250 GB Hard Disk Drive (Primary), DVD±RW Optical Media Drive, DVD-ROM Optical Media Drive
- OS: Windows XP, Kubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger"
There's probably a pithy comment here about being a stubborn child-of-an-engineer and not letting one bad experience with something put me off of trying it again, but I think the reason I got pulled back into trying Linux again was because it was free (as in beer), had robust software availability (also free as in beer), and that I knew I would soon (in a couple years) lose my ability to purchase software incredibly inexpensively when I graduated into the Real World, and so if I could eliminate the expenses of keeping a Windows install maintained and not having to keep paying for new versions of Microsoft Office or the other paid software that would be useful for a Windows machine, then that would be a feather in my budgetary cap. And, perhaps, that might restore some of that True Nerdery cred to be running a not-Windows machine well.
That said, watch the goalposts gallop as soon as it looks like I might be closer to something that other people think of as cool and technical and True Nerdery. Keep in mind that my comparisons are always to people who are more advanced than me and never to look backwards at how far I've come and go "Huh. That's pretty cool, isn't it?" There are times where I do a thing that seems easily within my abilities and don't think much about it, only for other people to stare in disbelief that I not only found what the problem was, I went straight to the solution and fixed it with a few clicks. Or that I made deliberate decisions about what hardware I put in a computer so I could take advantage of a specific piece of software I knew about. Or I stared at a poorly documented library and example code, went "Maybe this will work?" and it absolutely did. Chalk mark: $1. Knowing exactly where to put it: $4,999.
It's also interesting that at this point in my computing journey, improvements in clock speed are about to start plateauing on their obvious benefits. At about the 2 GHz line, unless you're trying to play the very latest games, extra clock speed doesn't produce any clear improvement. Additional RAM helps make things go a bit faster, and more video memory helps with multimedia rendering, but brute improvements in CPU clock speed aren't necessarily rendering obvious and immediate improvements in all applications.
This time around, I also made a good decision on what distribution to install. Looking at the actual timeline of releases, I realize that I decided to try this very new, supposedly user friendly distribution fairly early on in its existence. I chose Kubuntu, the Ubuntu base with the K Desktop Environment on top because KDE 3 looked the closest to Windows XP and I figured that if the environment looked familiar, there would be less of a learning curve for getting it. At the time, Ubuntu, the main distribution, was patterned on Mac OS 9. It would eventually jump up to being styled on OS X, with a different distribution springing up to keep that OS 9 style desktop intact (as well as expressing their disappointment with the changes that were happening in the distribution itself.) Having a second hard drive in the machine also made it easier to keep the two spaces separated and feel more confident in experimenting without having to worry about bringing down the entire computer if things went sideways.
Unlike the last time, after installation, audio detected perfectly in the kernel, and there was an easy tool to install the proprietary graphics drivers into the system as well. And it came with a pretty useful suite of software installed by default, so I could browse the web, create documents, and watch media on the computer. (Well, almost. If I wanted to be able to watch DRM-protected content, or DVDs, I had to enable the non-free repositories. Which didn't take all that many clicks, as I recall, and I think it was doable entirely from the GUI, even if it would have been easier to open the relevant file in a text editor, do the change, and then save the file again.) I'd also added, in my space-saving wisdom, a TV Tuner card that would give me access to the basic channels of cable and a hookup for my PlayStation 2 so that I could use the monitor that I had already in place for the computer to display television content. I found there was a relevant program in the Kubuntu repository called, appropriately, "tvtime" that could take the input from the tuner card and display it in a window. It made multitasking that much easier, browsing while listening to programs as they aired, or using the TV as noise to screen out while I tried to concentrate on assignments and actual work of being a graduate student. (There would be some issues with differing levels of brightness between different uses of TVTime, which I would discover most hilariously when playing Kingdom Hearts II on it. Most of the time, the game was sufficiently dark that I had to turn the brightness and contrast all the way up. In the Timeless River world based on Steamboat Willie, however, everything was extremely bright white, such that I had to turn the brightness and contrast down nearly to zero to be able to see, instead.)
That work, to my well-timed interest, involved doing things like coding! One of my graduate school courses was a crash course on building a database-backed website, and it turns out, it's way easier to install Ruby and Rails and keep it updated if you're doing it in a Linux environment instead of a Windows one. If they'd taught us git, too, that would have been pretty helpful, but for the most part, I was able to avoid version control problems even as I shuttled my project back and forth between the home machine and school machines (almost always the Macs) on a prodigiously large 4GB flash drive. This is the era of learning about and using PortableApps to keep my own environment going on computers I didn't directly control, as well, but that part isn't important to the story, except that I had wished there was such a version that would run on all three types of machine. Actually figuring out how to install and get a local Rails server running from a flash drive wouldn't happen until I got employed, and it would be one of the indirect causes of my incompetent boss trying to get me fired from my job early on in my career.
In addition to the coding, I did most of my graduate homework and paper writing on this Kubuntu box, getting to know the project currently known as LibreOffice, even if I did generally jet up to a computer lab and open everything in Microsoft Office to check for compatibility and to fix the inevitable errors that occurred in translating between the two programs' idea of what a document format looked like before submitting. (It's way better now than it was in those days.) About the only thing I've had real trouble with is the way that Impress and PowerPoint seem to be actively hostile to each other, instead of mostly compatible but for a few tweaks that may be needed. That might also be better now than it was then.
Having Kubuntu also meant I had disc-burning software at my disposal, and with a DVD burner drive installed, I took advantage of that, as well, shuffling files to disc when they threatened to take up too much space on my hard drive, but also to share with other people, to bring with me places, and to ensure a certain amount of continuity of availability between seasons. Unsurprisingly, almost all of the media I made from that time is of lower quality and resolution than what is available now in the higher-definition rereleases, which made it good for knowing what to get again in the better quality. Also unsurprisingly, some of the material on those discs is difficult to recover, as the thing that made a disc writable degrades with time. We're just about to the point where flash media is going to get cheap and expansive, and very large capacity hard drives will be available for supplemental storage, but it's not quite to that spot yet. Which is why I have to be thoughtful about what goes in the flash media devices I do have - I can only carry 8 GB on my music player, after all. (More annoyingly, I keep generating enough of a static charge that I occasionally shock myself on my headphone cord. Enough of those incidents and the headphones only start working consistently in one ear, and then they stop working altogether.)
In terms of successfully fielding a Linux box and using it for everyday tasks, I was succeeding. My knowledge hadn't really changed in the intervening time, but the distributions themselves had matured to make things much more It Just Works and to have some of the things that would be needed for fully working only a few clicks away. There's still a fair amount of console work needed to make things work exactly the way I want them to, but I felt at the time like there had been some very solid progress in moving Linux and the Desktop Environments in directions where someone who wanted to switch away from Windows or Mac OS X would be able to find most of the things they wanted to do available to them. However, my position was that of a child of DOS, and therefore critical skills that I would have thought obvious, like file and directory organization, or using the command line when necessary, might not be present in a newcomer, and worse, Linux systems have Opinions about the correct way to do things. (Read that thread the whole way down about how some ways of learning the right way to do things messes with your ability to teach people who are truly beginners.)
There are more flavors of Linux yet to come in this story, based on what other devices come into my possession, but getting this system up and running meant that I would be able to continue on that journey that I had initially started upon with the failed Mandrake experiment. At this point, though, I'm pretty happy that Ubuntu and its derivatives release on a six month update schedule (minus critical updates) so that I can plan when I'm going to need to pay a little more attention to the computer as it updates all the packages my decisions depends on. It means not having to be subjected to when Microsoft decides everybody gets patches and restarts, and it also means that I can be reasonably assured that if the software is being developed, then updates will continue to be available for it so that it stays useable and patched against vulnerabilities or bugs in the code. (Of course, the downside might be that someone stops maintaining their software and that cool thing that I was using now needs a maintained alternative.) It's looking pretty good that if I ever decide to abandon Windows, I'll be okay.
For everything except gaming, that is.
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Date: 2021-12-18 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-19 12:11 am (UTC)