Ubuntu

It’s easy, it works, and the software is free

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/ubuntu1.htm
8/19/08

Off and on over the years, I’ve played around with various types of Linux. I still have a memento of my first effort, a book called “The Complete Red Hat Linux 5.2 Installation Guide.” The fact that it needed a book an inch thick packed with dense text just to INSTALL the Linux should have been fair warning to me. After three hours of increasing frustration, all I had to show for it was a blank screen and a dead hard drive. Guess I should have read the manual first. Fortunately, it was an expendable hard drive. I’ve learned how anxious the little buggers are to die.

Subsequent encounters with Linux got better (they could hardly have gotten worse), but after years of MS-Dos and before that, Dos 3.0, I kept tripping over the arcana of trying to remember which drive was sda, and which was sdb, and why it was important to keep certain files out of the root directory.

The main problem was that I just didn’t have time to learn the command-line structure of a new operating system. That, and the XP Pro version of Windows really wasn’t all that bad.

Then I got a new computer, and it had Windows Vista on it. That was a nightmare, and I even tried to reformat to XP, and discovered that Hewlett Packard had thoughtfully not bothered to provide XP drivers for the DVDR, or the flash card readers. I was stuck with Vista, and Vista was a piece of shit. By way of example, when I went to reinstall it on my dual-core 5300 Mhz machine, it took THREE HOURS.

So I decided it was a good time to look at Linux again. I went surfing, and came across Ubuntu. This version (Ubuntu 6.06, Dapper Drake) offered something intriguing: you could run it from the CD, without interfering with the contents of the hard drive. The version nomenclature for Ubuntu is idiosyncratic: instead of versions C, D, E, F and so on, we’ve had Hoary Hedgehog, and then there was ripple in the chrono-temporal infundibulatorium or something, and we went to Breezy Badger, Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, Feisty Fawn, Gutsy Gibbon, and presently, Hardy Heron. The next version, Intrepid Ibex, is due out in about ten weeks.

I put Ubuntu in the player and fired it up. I was expecting to have to deal with command line, if only to set up account and clock and so on, but instead, it simply took me to the desktop. I noticed that I got to the desktop in about 1/5th the time it took Vista to get me there, and that was while loading from the relatively slow DVD player. Not too shabby.

The desktop, a primarily golden-brown theme, was pleasant to work with. The icons were nice and sharp, and programs came up with startling speed. Two programs in particular gladdened my heart: Firefox, the Mozilla Project web browser, and Open Office, a Word-suite compatible program that allows you to do all the things you do with Word, Excel, or Power Point without having to spend $500. In fact, it’s free.

All the software in Ubuntu – all of it – is free. Some ask for donations and/or volunteer troubleshooters and bug reports, but there are no charges. Ubuntu, a voluntary collaborative project, is free. (According to Wikipedia, “Ubuntu is currently funded by Canonical Ltd. On July 8, 2005, Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd announced the creation of the Ubuntu Foundation and provided an initial funding of US$10 million. The purpose of the foundation is to ensure the support and development for all future versions of Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth describes the foundation as an emergency fund in case Canonical's involvement ends.” Shuttleworth, long a champion of open software and non-proprietary computing, is the guardian angel.)

I spent a few days playing around with the CD-resident Ubuntu. The drivers on the CD wouldn’t run either of my Canon printers, and my scanner wasn’t responding, either. There were drivers on line that promised to do the job, but to check them required me to actually install Ubuntu so I could write to disk.

I got about halfway through the install (which was easy-peasy) when it occurred to me that maybe I should have asked Vista’s opinion on sharing harddrive space. Maybe I should have used Vista to partition the drive instead of Ubuntu, or something. I fired up the computer after the install, and Ubuntu ran beautifully, blindingly fast, using the 64 bit architecture and the dual-core processors of my machine.

But Vista was sulking. Vista does not work and play well with others, and refused to run with an alien on its turf. So format, reinstall, three hours shot to hell, and this time, I had Windows partition out 30 gigs for Ubuntu to play on. For someone who supposedly knows computers, I really have this marvelous talent for blowing myself up when playing with Linux. Fortunately, I do things like keep all my data both backed up and on a separate disk (and, mindful of the time I absent-mindedly destroyed a hard drive while playing with Red Hat, I unplugged the data drive in case I forgot which was sda and which was sdb again, but it turned out I didn’t need to worry about that).

So, with trepidation, I installed into the empty partition. Ubuntu went in easier than most software installations, with four really difficult questions along the lines of “What is your name?” “What time is it there?” and “What do you want for a password?” and “Install now?”. Installation took about 8 minutes. Compared to three hours for an operating system that can’t even really handle 64-bit dual core architecture.

Now mind you, this was all back in the Dark Ages. 2007. EARLY 2007. Two versions of Ubuntu ago. Much has changed.

Now, if you have Vista already on your system, you don’t need to ask permission to install Ubuntu, or partition the hard drive. You pop the CD in, and tell it you want to install it under Windows. It proceeds to do so, and the next time you boot, you get a screen asking if you want Ubuntu or Windows. (If you decide later you don’t want it on your system, you just tell it to uninstall from Windows, and it’s gone).

As for computer knowledge, if you can get around in Windows, then you can get around in Ubuntu. The desktop (created by GNOME) has the same mouse menu commands as Windows, and while the keyboard commands aren’t identical, they’re close enough that figuring it out isn’t a big problem.

There are only two reasons you shouldn’t try Ubuntu. (Well, three if you’re mentally ill and like Vista’s blue screens of death or shelling out hundreds for software that doesn’t work right). First, if you are using a dial-up modem to connect to the Internet, you’ll find that Ubuntu doesn’t talk to it. The reason for this is that nearly all modems made for Intel machines since 1995 have the Windows AT command set, the language the computer needs to talk to the modem. Those commands are proprietary, and Microsoft has forbidden the use of them by Linux. You can find what’s called a “dumb modem” that uses the old non-Windows commands, but it’s a bit of work. Ubuntu works fine with ethernet or wireless connections, however. And for reasons I’ll get into in my next piece, being able to access the Internet with Ubuntu is a must.

Second, if you really need Windows compatibility, for programs such as AI, most games, and peripherals, you’ll probably want to have at least dual boot capacity. You can run Windows under Ubuntu, but that tends to be slow, and while there are Windows emulators and a program called “WINE” (which means “Windows is not emulated”) that can run some of the Windows software, I haven’t found any really reliable, or even satisfactory versions yet.

So why am I recommending an operating system on which I’ve blown myself up several times and which won’t talk to the internet in rural areas or run Civilization 4 or Corel Draw X3?

Because it is far superior to Windows in nearly every way imaginable.

More on that in my next piece.