Final reflections

Before closing the book on this blog, I thought I’d wrap things up with a few final thoughts.

This wasn’t my first experience with Linux.  At Christmas 2002, I picked up a copy of Yellow Dog Linux 2.3, a PPC distro, and installed it on my 500-MHz G3 iBook.  I actually used it throughout winter quarter at UCSB, and wrote my senior thesis in OpenOffice while running YDL as my main OS. I had fun configuring it, and only switched back to OS X because as a student, I needed to use suspend (“sleep” in Mac lingo) frequently, and it was quite well and truly broken in Linux.  When waking it up from sleep, it would randomly emit what can only be described as a high-pitched, ear-shattering shriek from the speakers, which attracted quite a bit of attention in a crowded lecture hall, as you might expect.  Unfortunately, there was no known cure for this malady. Lovely.

Fast-forward to 2006. Ubuntu Linux was making its mark, and I ordered a CD from Shipit.  It arrived a couple of months later, and I attempted to install Ubuntu 6.06 (“Dapper Drake”) on the still-existing Linux partition on my iBook. Unfortunately, it never successfully completed an installation, although it did succeed admirably in hosing the Linux partition and in destroying the bootloader. Oops.

So this year, I was feeling that it was time to replace my laptop (now OS X-only) after seven years of hard use, and I’d been reading about System76 and their line of laptops with Linux preinstalled.  I figured it was worth a try, especially if S76 succeeded in making stuff work out of the box. There would always be time for me to screw it up later, but at least I’d have a working computer at the beginning.  If you read the first few installments of this blog, you’ll see how that went.

So, what conclusions can be drawn from my latest foray into the world of Linux?

For one thing, Linux is improving. Six years ago, when I first installed Yellow Dog Linux on my iBook, fonts were uniformly terrible and the overall look of GNOME screamed "Windows 3.1."  Today, font smoothing works well, and GNOME's appearance is at least the equal of Windows XP, while KDE 4.x is just drop-dead gorgeous. Neither has yet achieved the mix of functionality and elegant design that characterizes Mac OS X or (to a lesser extent) Windows Vista, but that is bound to change.

What still needs work, at least in my opinion and experience, is usability.  Smooth fonts and Compiz Fusion graphics are all well and good, and I love the philosophy of the Ubuntu project, but if I can't connect to the Internet it's no good to me.  It's kind of like driving an Alfa Romeo with twin carburetors: you can tinker with it to your heart's content, it makes you feel good and look cool, and you have the satisfaction of knowing you've gone your own way, but you better know how to get under the hood and fix it, because it's likely to give you the opportunity to do so at the most inopportune moments. Sometimes, you just want to get to work, and at those times you'll be a whole lot happier in a Nissan 350Z, particularly if it's 34 degrees F and it's raining and you're running late. God bless the man who invented fuel injection.

It's this question of usability on the desktop that has dogged Linux for years, and I'm not sure there is a good answer. One of the reasons that Apple has succeeded so well in making their products "just work" is that they control both the hardware and the software, and need only support a very limited range of hardware configurations. It's the same reason that Windows has become such bloated spaghetti code: Microsoft has to worry about maintaining compatibility with a huge, almost limitless variety of hardware.  Linux, which has to contend with the same problem as Microsoft, has far fewer resources and less ability to keep track of the combinations, being an open-source project. Even Ubuntu, which has the resources of Canonical Ltd. behind it, can't come close to solving the problem.

As for System76, it's obvious that they care. They've gone to great effort to make the Ubuntu experience as painless as possible, writing their own "System76 Driver" to fill in the rough spots where Ubuntu's hardware support is lacking.  But they're a small operation, and while they only try to make the the S76 driver support the hardware that they sell, even that is a bit of a challenge, because of Canonical's (and therefore Ubuntu's) rigid every-six-months release schedule. That relentless biannual target is something that neither Apple nor Microsoft have ever tried to pull off, and I can't help but wonder if Canonical would be better off focusing on the Long Term Support releases such as Hardy Heron (8.04), and calling the other releases public betas. Since Canonical is unlikely to do this, S76 may want to reconsider their policy of using the latest release, since every OS update is likely to break something.  A better alternative might be to stick with Long Term Support (LTS) releases, with the latest release a customer option.  8.04 was the last LTS release, whereas mine came loaded with 8.10, which was the newest version. My impression from reading the S76 forum at ubuntuforums.com  is that 8.10 broke some things that worked fine in 8.04, and I for one would gladly trade cutting-edge bragging rights for greater stability.

When things do break, the fixes are often somewhat intimidating to new users--who, incidentally, are more likely to try Ubuntu than any other distro.  There's nothing particularly difficult about opening a terminal window and typing "sudo gedit xorg.conf,", but it looks like gibberish to the uninitiated and is likely to discourage those who are used to point-and-click in a GUI.  Of course, most Linux users are not fazed by this in the slightest.

And therein lies the problem. Linux, including Ubuntu, is by and large developed by geeks for other geeks, who really, really don't understand why anyone would possibly object to doing something at the command line from time to time. This is actually not an unreasonable attitude; surprisingly often, it really is the fastest, simplest way to get something done.

But most average users aren't going to care, because they don't speak Unix and aren't interested in learning it in order to check their Hotmail accounts. When something breaks, they're going to say, "Gee, I knew it was too good to be true" and buy the HP system at Best Buy that the guy next door told them about, because he Knows Something About Computers and said it was a good deal. Or they'll go to the Apple Store and pick up a MacBook Air because it looks really cool and works well with their iPod. And they'll never look at Linux again.

As for me, I've come to the conclusion that while I love open-source software, I need my operating system to be as reliable as it possibly can be. Although I've used Macs for the last eight years, I'm no Apple fanboy. I prefer Firefox to Safari. I eschew the iPod for a Cowon iAudio X5L that looks like an East German MP3 player would look had the GDR ever made such a thing.  I gave up iTunes for the open-source Play, and I'd rather use NeoOffice than Apple's iWork suite.  I rip CDs using Max, download podcasts with Juice, and watch video with VLC. I get my mail in Gmail using Mailplane rather than Apple Mail.  My backups are done with JungleDisk rather than Time Machine. I even disdain the Finder, preferring Path Finder. Perhaps you get the picture.

But for all the non-Apple, largely open-source software I use, I find that for me the underlying Mac OS is the best possible foundation on which to build.  It’s solid, it’s reliable, and it’s beautiful. Back in 2000, Apple introduced something that combined a rock-solid Unix foundation with the user-friendliness of the classic Mac OS, and after using it for eight years, with each version steadily improving upon the last, I still find it the most congenial environment in which to conduct my day-to-day computing.  “Better” is a subjective term, but I find it better than Windows, and better than Linux—even Ubuntu Linux.  Acolytes of Linus Torvalds will protest, but in many respects OS X is what Linux should be.

In the end, for me, Linux is like Esperanto.  It is somewhat exotic, has a dedicated core of slightly fanatical users, is built on noble principles, and there are many things I like about it.  I have no doubt that there will always be people who lernas la internacian lingvon, and the world undoubtedly will be a better place for it. But it is the same world where English is rapidly becoming the new lingua franca, and one must ask oneself whether or not learning an entirely new constructed language is worth the effort, except as a hobby.  The answer, sadly, is probably “no.”

And so it is, for me, with Ubuntu. In another five or six years, I may try my hand at whatever the flavor-of-the-month is in Linux distros. But I’ll do it on a spare machine, and install it myself.  It will be a very long time, if ever, before I try to use it as my main computing environment.  After three ultimately unsuccessful attempts at migrating to Linux, it is perhaps understandable that I’m a bit gun-shy.

And so ends this blog. My Linux experiment ended sooner than I anticipated, and since this blog was created to chronicle that experiment, it is time, as I said earlier, to close the book. 

Mi dankas vin pro legado!

First and last steps with Ubuntu

First, a note: I want to make it clear at the outset that my situation was unique, that if it wasn't, System76 would have gone out of business long ago, and the good people at System76, Tom in particular, were the soul of helpfulness.  What follows should also not take away from the fact that I had direct assistance from one person who knew my computer, knew my situation, and actually gave a damn. Try that with Dell.

So, what happened next?

OK. Not to go into unnecessary detail, I started exploring. I set up Evolution to handle my Google Apps mail account in IMAP, tried to find out how the camera worked, set up a new theme for GNOME, and played with the fingerprint reader. I set the time and weather for my local area. In short, I did the usual things one might do with a new toy--er, computer. Ahem.

Then I decided to see how suspend worked.  Bad move.

Networking problems began.  Kernel panics. Freezes that would only respond to a forced shutdown. All the godawful horror stories you've heard about Linux started coming true, and it wasn't fun. Sometimes it remembered my WPA2 password, sometimes it didn't.  Sometimes it got it wrong. Sometimes it didn't see any wireless networks at all.

I went on the System76 forum and asked for help. A few things were suggested, then Tom at System76 tech support suggested we take it private over email and get down to business. We did so.

Just about everything was tried.  Things were uninstalled and reinstalled, at the command line.  He had me take the back off the computer to reseat the hard drive and memory cards.  I ran Memtest86 for fifteen bloody hours, overnight. I booted from an Ubuntu live CD to see if the wireless would work any better.  Nothing helped. I reset the CMOS according to his instructions, after which the computer was completely dead--black screen, blinking cursor. Oh dear.

So, he emailed me a UPS mailing label to send it in for repair (this was Thanksgiving weekend). I mailed it on Monday, it arrived there on Tuesday, was mailed back Wednesday and I got it on Thursday. A new motherboard had been installed, and the BIOS updated.

I took it out of the box and fired it up. It connected to my network, so I opened Firefox to check my email. I logged onto my Google Apps account, and...Firefox froze.  I closed the window, and opened a terminal to run top to see what processes were running. When I closed the terminal window, it (terminal) became a zombie process and I got a dialog box telling me I needed to quit the process or restart to get a new window. When I tried to restart, it hung at "shuttting down ALSA". Then it gave me this:

[773.587862] iwlagn: Microcode SW error detected.  Restarting 0x2000000.

Then it froze completely.  Another forced shutdown was necessary.

It was at this point that something snapped inside me. It had been thirteen days since I got the computer, and I had had maybe an hour of normal uptime, tops.  Having installed  (and used) Linux on an iBook several years ago, I was well aware that it wouldn't be a seamless Apple-type experience, but I did expect that certain basic things would work, like connecting to the Internet and using Gmail. I'm not doing video editing, and I'm not trying to network it to an antiquated Atari 800 or play World of Warcraft in emulation.  I just want to get on the web. This is basic stuff, and it needs to work. Particularly when it's right out of the box after being repaired.

System76 tech support had me try one more thing, but at this point my patience had ended. To their credit, when I told them I just wanted to call it a day and get my money refunded, they agreed to do so, and they waived the normal 15% restocking fee.  Tom emailed me another UPS label, and the very same afternoon I packed it up and shipped it to Colorado, where they would credit my credit card upon receipt of the machine.

But first, I went to the Apple Store online and ordered a nice refurbished 2.4-GHz MacBook Pro with a 200 GB hard drive, 2 GB of RAM, an LED-backlit screen and AppleCare, the only extended warranty on the planet that's worth the money. Prior to adding the AppleCare, it cost about the same as the one I just sent back. The specs aren't quite the same, but I'm sure it will do just fine. It arrived the very next day.

Next post: Final reflections

Unboxing the Pangolin Performance

So, I hear you ask, what happened? Did the laptop arrive? Did it get unboxed? Did everything just work? Read on, bucko...

Yes, the laptop arrived, although I think it was the last thing off the UPS truck before the driver stopped at the supermarket to pick up milk and bread for the wife on his way home. (Note to self: next time, ask for Next Day Air instead of Next Day Air Saver.)

In any case, it arrived. Here's what it looked like before the unboxing:



Pretty generic.  But then, even Apple ships its stuff in plain brown cardboard.

More unboxing photos:

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The inner container is equally exciting, and here's where you can see the difference between the System76 and a Mac laptop:



Next, inside the package. The laptop was well-secured with polystyrene, and the two cardboard inserts held the polystyrene in place in the larger box. The one above held the manual, ethernet cable, spare battery, and some papers; the one to the right held the power cords:






The manual is pretty generic, and was obviously written for the Clevo/Sager notebook that the Pangolin is based on, full of references to Windows functions.

Detail of one of the inserts:


The lid is gorgeous--glossy black, with a silver System76 logo:


Side views:




Fired up, and applying the latest updates. Note the white "Powered by Ubuntu" sticker in place of the usual Windows sticker:


Updated and ready to go:


Next post: what happened next. Oh, boy...

The Adventure Begins

This afternoon, UPS will be delivering my new laptop, and this time it's not a Mac. I've decided it's time to delve deeper into Linux, and how better to do that than with something Linux-only?

So, last week, after looking at Linux-based options from Dell and others,  I ordered a Pangolin Performance laptop from System76 (actually, it's an early birthday present from my wife--thanks, honey!).  They're a Colorado-based retailer of desktops, laptops and servers running Ubuntu Linux, and they've accumulated quite a reputation for service and for making stuff that Just Works.  What more could an Apple user ask for?

The Pangolin Performance is based on the Sager NP7680, and is nicely customizable. Why buy from System76 when I could save a few bucks by buying from Sager directly? Because System76 takes the time to make sure that everything is working properly, whereas I'd have to do the usual debugging if installing Ubuntu directly on a freshly formatted drive.  I'd like it to just work at the beginning. There'll be plenty of time for me to screw it up later. :-)

Anyway, here's how I configured it:
Operating System: Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) 64 Bit Linux
Display Resolution:  15.4" WSXGA+ Super Clear Glossy LCD (1680 x 1050)
Processor:  Core 2 Duo P8600 2.40 GHz 1066 MHz FSB 3 MB L2 (25 Watt)
Graphics: nVidia GeForce 9300M GS 256MB DDR2
Networking: Gigabit LAN (10/100/1000), WiFi
Memory: 4 GB - DDR2 800 MHz - 2 DIMMs
Hard Drive: 320 GB 5400 RPM SATA II
Optical Drive: CD-RW / DVD-RW
Wireless: 802.11 agn
Bluetooth
Extra 6 Cell Smart Li-ION Battery

The price out the door was at least $600 less than I would pay for a comparable Mac.  I could have spent even less, but I wanted something with powerful enough specs that I wouldn't have to update or replace it for quite a while.

Next post: the unboxing!