Thursday – Call for Volunteers – Free Computer!

In the very near future, Toronto Free-Net will be making available very low cost computers packaged with TFN Internet connections and pre-configured for dial-up with a commercial version of Xandros.com Linux.

We have a lot of computers!

We need some volunteers to help to prepare to move about 20 heavy skids of computers, currently stored near Laird and Eglinton (central northeast Toronto.) If you are interested, we will need you from 9:30 am to 2pm on Thursday, Oct 19th. Lunch and transit tickets will be supplied.

Once we have these computers refurbished, each volunteer will receive one.

To volunteer, please apply by emailing execdir@torfree.net using the same subject as this message, stating any relevant experience.

Ken McCracken

Executive Director

Toronto Free-Net

As someone who’s in the preliminary throes of the exact same switch I sat back with a designer mug-full of Fair Trade coffee and watched with great interest as Pilgrim’s post was dissected, defended and finally contextualized in the broader realm of what uber-blogger (and possibly middle-aged guy) Nicolas Carr refers to as The PC Elite.

PC Elite, eh? Hmm… I resemble that. And to you, Mr. Carr may I say that I’m flattered and almost a hundred percent in agreement with you, except for one little detail—We longtime Mac folks aren’t so much elite as we are self-loathing masochists.

(Brilliant. Thought-provoking. Genius. I don’t get it…)

Come on, admit it; deep down inside we hard-core Mac users secretly love to be left out in the cold. Back in days of old we’d gather and boast about the text adventure games we created in HyperCard, while secretly lamenting that we couldn’t open Excel spreadsheets with either Claris or AppleWorks. We’d justify this with the proclamation that Mac was the one and only choice for bohemian creative-types like us, while knowing that Windows versions of Photoshop and the like were pretty much identical was eating us up inside.

Later, we’d collectively duck for cover behind our under-performing G4 and G5 chips, as Apple would momentarily confuse our Intel enemies with some arcane floating-point processor comparison. Deep down we knew it didn’t matter, but it helped ease our buyers’ remorse from that expensive new Mac tower with the cooling fans that wouldn’t shut up.

Sadly, those days are no more. With Apple’s latest and greatest now sporting Intel chips and this whole Web 2.0 deal the harsh reality of 21st-century personal computing is now staring us square in the face—that computers are a commodity item, and most of the stuff you use them for can be done on the web, nowadays.

So what’s a self-hating computer snob to do? Enter Ubuntu. It’s promise is Linux for Human Beings, failing to realize that most human beings are too busy working, raising kids or otherwise living out their busy lives to learn the ins and outs of a brand-new operating system that doesn’t ultimately have much to offer beyond what Mac and Windows have already got.

Yet this matters not; for while the rest of you PC peons busy yourselves with your pedestrian communications and productivity, we the Linux elite will gather in darkened corners to boast of how we got our laptop’s wireless card to work with NdisWrapper, while secretly lamenting that we can’t reliably open Excel spreadsheets with Gnumeric.

(Wait a minute, you people aren’t the elite… You’re just people!)

And with this, we turn our backs on Apple. A real Mac-head couldn’t bear to spend even a few minutes in a shiny, new Apple store anyway; who are all these people, and don’t they know that the Intel MacBooks they’re lining up to buy can only run Photoshop under emulation? And if they do know, why don’t they care more about it?!

We Mac refugees must carry an additional burden—with the great unwashed switching to Mac in ever-higher numbers we’re going to get hit up a lot more for casual tech support. And while I would gladly share my custom export settings for Final Cut Pro with those who I deem worthy, I most certainly do not want to be the go-to guy when you can’t export your crap iMovie to your damn .Mac page to show off to your friends—I mean, my grad-school film theory professor would surely recoil in horror if he saw your blatant over-use of the Ken Burns effect!

Nope, the only way we can truly protect ourselves from the non-elite is to hide behind the shroud of mystery that is Linux—that way, when you ask us how to burn your iTunes music to a CD we can scare you off by suggesting you open up a Terminal window and execute a couple of command-line prompts from there!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to re-compiling my custom Linux printer driver. I’ve been working on it for over a week, and I’m due for a breakthrough anytime now…

“Ladies and gentlemen… In this corner we have the pride of America, the ugly as all get out Dell Inspiron 1300… And in this corner, the ‘holy cow!’ from the land of Mao, the Lenovo 3000 C100!”

So a funny thing happened the day after I ordered my Dell laptop. I guess I was in such a hurry to secure the discounted price that I missed one of the digits on my credit card. As a result, the order has not yet been processed.

This gives me the opportunity to consider another cheap notebook computer from Lenovo (the Chinese company that bought out IBM’s PC business last year), currently on sale at an honest to goodness brick and mortar store. I checked it out yesterday and it does look considerably less hideous then the Dell, especially around the keyboard area. Feature-wise the two are very similar, and though the Dell has a widescreen display, dual-layer DVD burner and the all-important free carrying case, the Lenovo has S-Video out, FireWire in and a free multifunction printer thrown in for free to sweeten the deal. Or, I can forgo the hassle of mail-in rebates and buy it direct from the Lenovo Canada website.

And if I do that I can also get a matching Lenovo carrying case, just not for free.

Dude, am I gettin’ a Dell?

I’ve been boasting to anyone who will listen that I’m willing to buy the first laptop that I can find on sale for $500 CAD or less. The ugly beast above isn’t quite that cheap, but for $649 I can get some pretty decent upgrades for free, including the all-important leather carrying case!

I only have until the end of today to decide, so feel free to send any of your wisdom my way. And in case you’re wondering…

1. What’s wrong with that other Dell you’ve been mucking around with?

The mighty Inspiron 7500, you mean? Considering it’s age, it’s more than lived up to my expectations. I currently have it running pretty smoothly under Xubuntu, a lightweight Linux distro optimized for older machines. But it has neither a battery or sound card, so is ultimately of limited use.

2. You giving up on Mac or something?!

Certainly not yet. All the video stuff I do requires it. But for basic internet and office tasks I not only think that the Mac is overkill, but that their software in this category is pretty crappy, especially when compared to free Linux alternatives. Consider also that for the price of one new MacBook I could get almost three of these Dell machines—and I don’t have to pay a premium for a modem or the colour black!

So while I’ve been testing out Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu here and there, I won’t know for sure if I can live with Linux full-time until I actually try it. And try it I might…

Believe it or not, you’re looking at the result of about a week’s worth of work!

Getting Linux to connect to the other Macs on my home network has been a real brain-buster, but I finally got it up and running… I think. Kubuntu doesn’t recognize Apple’s AFP protocol (known to people who speak regular English as “sharing”), so I had to install a Samba server on my Dell notebook. That part was actually easier than it sounds; it was all the mucking around with passwords and workgroup domains that really frustrated me.

I still don’t think I have it configured properly—the “Inspiron” seen the screen grab above is my Linux machine, so why is its address “mshome”?!—nonetheless, now the real test of Linux can begin, as I can transfer over all the docs, pics and more from my Mac and see how Kubuntu handles them…

(Detail of Adept, the KDE package manager. Click here or on the image above to see the entire window…)

Upon my first successful install of Ubuntu my first task was to get the Flash Player working in Firefox—those YouTube videos don’t play themselves, ya know!

I was a little dismayed to find the following instructions at UbuntuGuide.org:

sudo apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla

My biggest fear of Linux was staring me right in the face—that I wouldn’t be able to do much without hammering out a bunch of command-line instructions in a terminal window. How could this be, when everything else on my KDE Desktop seemed so user-friendly?

Thankfully, a little poking around revealed a program called Adept. This “package manager” performs three critical tasks for a Linux installation:

1. It keeps track of all the software installed on your system;
2. It connects directly to repositories of downloadable applications and upgrades;
3. It will install those apps and upgrades keeping in mind the stuff you’ve already got.

I used Adept to get my system software up to date and to install the default Kubuntu games package. It’s not quite as convenient as a Mac or Windows automatic software updater, but it does give the user more control over the process.

Now you can still go out into the wild and download whatever you like off the web, but unlike Mac or Windows it is most certainly not a drag and drop affair. As an example I tried to install the new Linux version of Google’s Picasa. I downloaded a package with a clickable Debian installer, but opening it brought up an error that a critical system component was missing.

My only other choice was to go back to the command-line, as per Google’s instructions:

If that doesn’t work, save the file in the /tmp directory, then open a terminal window and install with a command like

$ sudo dpkg -i /tmp/picasa_2.2.2820-5_i386.deb

or

$ su

1. dpkg -i /tmp/picasa_2.2.2820-5_i386.deb

1. exit

… And that didn’t work either.

(The KDE Desktop, as seen from the Konqueror start page…)

For anyone playing along at home, here’s a quick recap of my Linux adventures this past week…

The overwhelming brown-ness of Ubuntu started to get to me after only a few days. I know that Ubuntu is billed as “Linux for Humans” and all, but all those earth-tones seemed a bit out of place on the virtual desktop of a computer screen.

A little Googling informed me that Ubuntu uses what’s called the Gnome desktop environment, which works fine and well, but for a design snob like myself is a little sparse in its implementation. Lo and behold, there is another desktop evironment for Linux (actually there are several) called KDE—chock-full of beautiful on-screen fonts, bouncing icons and flashy window effects. So it was with great anticipation that I once again wiped clean the hard drive of my mighty Inspiron and loaded up Kubuntu, or Ubuntu with the KDE desktop.

Actually I took the opportunity of a clean install to first try out OpenSUSE, the most popular Linux distro with KDE. But after 5 CDs I couldn’t get the damn OS to properly configure my WiFi card, so Kubuntu it was.

At the heart of KDE is Konqueror a combination file and web browser much like Internet Explorer, but without the nasty ActiveX. The Mac OS would do well to learn from these hybrid browsers; the “Finder” is a mere file browser after all—why not just build Safari into that? Then you could go “on Safari” for that lost Word document or email attachment someone sent you months ago and now you can’t find ‘er—oh, now I get it.

Anyway, now that I’ve settled on a distro I can get down to work and see what the latest Linux can really do. Stay tuned…

(No, that’s not the new black MacBook… It’s the mighty Dell Inspiron 7500 kindly donated for my adventures in Linux.)

It’s only now, after my second install of Ubuntu, that I can appreciate what a user-friendly Linux distro it is. I had installed for the first time without a WiFi card present, and—big surprise—when I slapped the card in the next day I found that my networking options were, as the kids say, ”borked”.

For the record, the message I was getting was ”SIOCGIFFLAGS error: No such device”. I have no idea either… And after patiently waiting for help on UbuntuForums.org I realized that I could probably fix things myself if I just reinstalled with the WiFi card present.

Of course, wiping a hard drive clean and starting anew presented an opportunity to try out some other Linux distros as well. Some casual Googling informed me that Slackware was supposedly a great choice for older machines, so on my Mac I downloaded burned the four install CDs via BitTorrent. But the install process proved so daunting that I instead turned to the most popular Linux distro, Fedora.

After more than two hours of installing and configuring I was all ready to boot up into Fedora when I got the same networking error that I had in my previous install of Ubuntu, so I slid in my single Ubuntu installer CD and half an hour later was back up and running with no apparent networking issues. The computer successfully synched with the Ubuntu clock server, and upon log-in I was immediately presented with a list of software that needed updating. I hit “OK”, and after a quick reboot had an optimized Linux OS ready to go!

It’s an interesting coincidence that this Dell laptop has roughly the same specs as my old iMac. also in the above photo. In my usage thus far, Ubuntu seems just a tick faster than Mac OS X Jaguar on that machine…

You’re looking at a screen grab from the Ubuntu filesystem. Yeah, I can’t make heads or tails of it, either…

I’m trying to make good on a New Year’s resolution to have a go at Linux, and an ancient Dell laptop kindly donated by Kathleen Howell and fiance Terry Irwin kind of forced the issue.

The initial install went fine, but without internet access I was left to play Solitaire and the like until a refurbished WiFi PC card arrived from Future Shop. I got that up and running and I’m actually posting this via Linux, but beyond my web browser there is so much that I don’t understand. Stay tuned…

(Read this Wikipedia entry or load up this very long FARK.com page if you are confused by the above…)

Just like last December I’ve had to get a new hard drive for my PowerBook, and its battery—which currently holds about a 7-minute charge—is probably due for a replacement as well. Anybody who knows me has had to endure my Macintosh zealotry on at least one occasion, yet if you peruse the Mac-related posts on this humble site you’ll see that I’ve had more than my share of issues with the platform.

In my decade of Mac experience the software has gotten better and better, but the hardware has gotten steadily worse.

Consider my recent history with Mac computers:

• October, 1999 – iMac DVSE: FireWire not working out of the box.
• January, 2001 – Power Mac G4: Unable to sleep out of the box.
• May, 2001 – iBook: Built-in speakers busted out of the box.
• December, 2003 – Powerbook: Dead pixels out of the box.
• April, 2004 – Power Mac G5: Logic board not working out of the box.

Not a great track record if you ask me…

And yet, my few shares of Apple stock are still skyrocketing while folks everywhere are touting the touting the superiority of the Mac platform.

My dream come true would be a release of Mac OS X that I could run on any machine I want. Sadly, even though Apple is switching to the Intel chip-set, we’ll likely not see a generic OS release until Steve Jobs finally decides to retire on a big bed of money from faithful fan-boys like myself.

I’m waiting to see what gets announced at the MacWorld keynote in January. If it’s not a generic release of OS X for Intel or at least an iBook that can run Windows, I’m buying me a notebook with XP Pro. Give me some time with it, and I’ll be able to say with at least some certainty which platform, if any, is ultimately better, and for what. Oh, and if I have enough hard drive space left over I may even install Linux on a separate partition, just for kicks!