Urban Adventures & More

I own an 8 year-old Sony Vaio, PCG-SRX87 (I really cannot believe it’s that old.) It’s got 384 MB of RAM, and PIII 450 MHz processor, 20 GB HDD, wireless, USB 1.1, ethernet, video out, memory card reader, external CD-R/DVD drive (8x write speed!), and a modem. It came with Windows XP, and no small supply of craplets (as Walter Mossberg, Mac enthusiast calls them). Since then, I’ve installed various distros of Linux (Manrake, LFS, and ) on at least four other computers, generally with great success. However, my experience made it clear that most distros are pretty kludgey and don’t deal with hardware very well. It was my impression that laptops generally have proprietary hardware (how mistaken I was!) that wouldn’t be supported, and the system would be fairly unusable.

Since my knowledge of Linux distros is pretty sparse, and is mostly derived from my older brother, I moved from LFS to Gentoo on my desktop machines. I was well-aware that this wouldn’t fly with my laptop (all the compiling, oy!), I held off. Finally, when my girlfriend’s father decided to install Ubuntu on his laptop a couple weeks ago, I figured it was time. I had actually had a brief encounter with Ubuntu in college when a gentleman emailed the Linux list at my school (which generally receives a couple emails a year) about starting a LUG and he went on and on about how great Ubuntu is and how he wanted to support his “clients” and esteem God. That didn’t go over well with the socialists (me included: I was reading the “philosophy” pages on the OSS websites too much), he was flamed, and that was the end of that.

But Holy Cow, installing Ubuntu is probably the easiest thing I’ve ever done. The live CD is extraordinarily slow to use (since it is constantly spinning up the disk) and took more than 5 minutes to load, but you should be pretty well convinced that it’s a good substitute for windows once you get on there. Certainly having low expectations given my past experiences, I was impressed. Wireless works (better than in windows, I might add!), power management works, it’s got a control panel-like thing, and everything is plug-n-play. It’s uncanny how far these things have come. One caveat is that I got a black screen when I started up, because it detected my screen settings wrong. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Minus (where the minus is on the number pad, not next to Backspace) a few times to make it a visible size. Once you log in, go to System->Preferences->Screen Resolution to change it to the native resolution.

Installing was a breeze, although mysteriously I can’t make the boot screen appear when I boot, even though it works fine on the live CD. There are a few kinks, such as the Brightness software not working in the OS, but it works fine if I use the keyboard shortcuts (Fn-F5 and Fn-F6). Hardware acceleration is disabled by default because the video card can’t handle 24 bit color depth and acceleration on this system. I can go on and on about what works, what needs a little effort, and what doesn’t work, but pretty much right out of the box, maybe some assembly required, you have an excellent substitute for that average windows user. I’m also told that if you use their Verified Hardware, you won’t have any of the problems I experienced. (Do you think Windows works on your hardware because the Microsoft people are clever, or because the manufacturers all make sure it does? Until they give Linux attention, it’ll be hit-or-miss like this!)

My impression of the average windows user is that they browse the web, check email, use a word processor, and spreadsheet. In the browser, they have to be able to load flash and java programs, and view other videos. Playing music and connecting to the iPod is crucial for most. You can do those things 100%. (I happen to think Amarok is a better music player than anything you find on Windows, hands down.) Installing software is done by checking the program’s name in a menu. Uninstalling is similarly easy. There is software to do nearly everything, but it becomes iffy. My girlfriend does graphic design, and won’t touch either inkscape or the GIMP with a 10-foot pole, since they compare so unfavorably to the Adobe products they imitate (the former is quite fun to use, and the latter, particularly before version 2.0, was god-awful). Video editing, when I’ve tried it in the past, was quite finicky. There is, of course, Wine, which lets you run windows programs in Linux. I just made a post on that; you can supposedly play many games and run quite a variety of program in it. Just don’t expect 100% polish if they do run. (You can see which ones work by going to their AppDB: you might be pleasantly surprised.)

But if video editing is your thing, just wait a few years. When I started using Linux, firefox was version 0.5 or so. It didn’t load most pages, and it crashed regularly. A few years later, it was 1.0 and mostly usable (with a healthy does of add-ons). As I was describing above, hardware used to be very irritating. Now you have something like Ubuntu that makes hardware support a breeze. Similarly, the other core functions that I described are very, very solid. It’s the fringes that are now being worked on. Video and sound editing, graphic design, and games are just coming into their own. If you really need these things on Linux, you’re probably best advised to wait a few years until they’re mature. Either that, or participate in their development by testing the software, programming, or writing documentation.