I don’t make a lot of super techie posts (at least not about computers — I do plenty of that with games), but Lee wanted to know how my experience with Ubuntu Linux went, so I’m going to try to sum it up below. I’ll try to keep it from being too techie, while getting to the meat of things.
So… I don’t have Windows Vista. Good lord willin’, I never will have it on anything but work machines or in dusty, rarely used partitions on my hard drive. It costs too much, the Digital Rights Management (which I already find irritating and insulting in Windows XP) is enough to make me actually angry in Vista.
So lately, I’ve been looking really hard at computing alternatives. While I was in Chicago for Forge Midwest, my roommate had a Mac Powerbook that was several different kinds of hot and sexy, and Kate has commented a number of times about how her friend MJ has a Mac PowerBook that “sure can do some neat stuff with iLife.”
I agree, and I’m more than a little interested — I actually expect that either Kate or I will have a Mac in the next couple years — but Powerbooks aren’t cheap (by which I mean they cost as much as any other new laptop), and we’ve got a wedding to get ready for, so if I really want to move away from Windows right now, I need a cheaper alternative.
So there’s Linux — the third player in the home computer market — which is cheap.
By which I mean free.
Why have you (maybe) never heard of Linux? Mainly because it’s not (at it’s heart) a product of a for-profit company (or even companies), and because, as a kind of garage-moonshine-hippie-ninja-commune-operation, it’s not historically been ‘friendly’ to users who aren’t that tech savvy and want a new computer, but has been very open to ‘fellow geeks’.
Why should you know about Linux? You can put it on pretty much every piece of computer hardware out there — yes, even on Macs.
Assuming you can get it running, right? That’s the punchline.
So… I’m fairly tech savvy… and I’ve used flavors of Linux here and there, every since college, and I’ve even installed different flavors of Linux on different machines — I know how to build my own boxxen, but not write my own programs. I may not know how to do something, but I can take the time to figure it out.
In short, I should be able to do this, right? And hopefully I can do with Linux pretty much everything I can do in Windows?
Lets find out.
So I grabbed my two year old Dell Inspiron laptop (2.8 GHz Pentium 4, 40 gig harddrive, and 500 megs of RAM), hooked it up to a LAN cable so that I didn’t have to worry about losing my Wireless connection in mid-install (smart move, that), and started a download of Ubuntu Linux.
Ubuntu: Ancient African for “I Can’t Install RedHat”
There’s lots of different versions of Linux, all customized and modular, which means you’ll probably never see anyone with the exact same Linux setup. (Think of the way Firefox looks different on everyone’s machine — it’s like that.) I wanted to try Ubuntu because it’s what everyone’s talking about — the (current) Linux version voted Most Likely to be Easiest to Use for the Home User (Dell has just started offering Ubuntu on it’s regular laptops and desktops as an option).
The previous holders of that ‘easy’ title were SuSE, Mandrake, and RedHat (in reverse order) — I’ve installed two of those before.
Ubuntu, by comparison, makes those previous ‘easy installs’ look like bending steel with your teeth. Ubuntu comes on a LiveCD, which means you can download the Ubuntu install, burn it to a CD, and RUN THE ACTUAL OS from the disk, WITHOUT INSTALLING FIRST. You don’t have to reformat your system (or install a new partition) — you can just ‘pretend’ run it, and see what it’s like — up to and including checking out how your hardware’s running and so forth.
((Side note: what’s a partition? Think of your hard drive as a big house. It’s all one partition. All of the stuff in that ‘house’ needs to use the same OS. Putting a partition on your hard drive is like converting your regular house into a duplex in which you take turns living in either side. This halves your available space in each partition (obviously), but you can put a different OS in each partition — it’s something you might want to do if you need to use both Windows AND Linux — I’ll come back to that later.))
Anyway, one of the huge advantages of the LiveCD is that it is a good indicator of how much work you’re going to have to do to get your hardware working. Granted, some stuff may not work right off in Linux, but CAN work with some massaging that you can’t do while running straight from the LiveCD — but even if some things don’t work right away, knowing how much configuration you’ll have to do is a good way to make the decision for or against installing.
Installation
So I copied all my documents and music files from my laptop to my PC, and started up the Ubuntu LiveCD — just booting from the CD.
(I pretty much use my laptop for writing, browsing the internet, email, watching DVDs, and keeping gaming documents at hand during games — it also has/had a ‘backup’ install of World of Warcraft and City of Heroes that I rarely use. That list of stuff is what I wanted to at least try to get working in Linux.)
My First Mistake
I liked the look and feel of Ubuntu running from the CD, so I started up the install. Now, if I’d been THINKING, I would have converted my hard drive from the NTFS to something like FAT32 ahead of time. (What’s NTFS and FAT32? Think of them as the… umm… let’s say the voltages that our imaginary house is wired for. NTFS pretty much just works for Windows, and it’s what I had on the Laptop. Linux can read files on an NTFS drive all right, but they can’t (without some extra plug-ins) write to them. That ended up being a problem at this point — I left the drive set up for NTFS, told Ubuntu to install, and Ubuntu cleared the boot sector of the drive, hit the NTFS partition, and the install failed.
What did that do? Well, to stick with my house analogy — it destroyed the steps up to the front door… before it managed to get inside.
Which also meant I couldn’t get into the house either, even “through the Windows.” Oops.
To fix this, I had to boot to my Windows XP install disk, format the drive to something Linux could read, then start up the install again. Not a big deal, and mostly my fault, but it might have been a problem for a complete tyro.
To say that installation was easy after that point would be an understatement. Using LiveCD means you’re already using the OS while you install it on your hard drive — what I mean to say is that you can sit there and play Solitaire or Frozen Bubbles (GREAT game!) while the install runs.
First “Real” Boot
After installation and reboot, the PC comes up into the first ‘real’ run of the default UI — called Gnome, which utilizes a window manager called Metacity. Gnome is typically referred to as the simpler of the two big user interfaces for Linux.
Gnome’s default interface feels like “Mac layout, with a Windows taskbar.” The desktop is fully customizable; you can pretty much tweak the location, look, and performance of every element on the desktop to make it more Windows, more Mac, or something else entirely, and add applications like a weather report, battery monitor for notebooks, etc. (the one that I wanted right off was the system monitor).
Example: In Windows, I keep Metapad (a slightly more robust Notepad program) in my taskbar for quick and dirty writing/editing and as a copy-paste holding pen. In Linux, check out the applications list for “Text Editor.” Doesn’t get much more obvious than that. “Text Editor” is actually Gedit - a notepad like program with spell-check and find-and-replace. Handy. I right-clicked on the “Text Editor” button and hey look: there’s an option to add it to the top bar just like that - convenient.
Now I was ready to move ahead with installing my applications.
But first, System Update
As soon as it got running, Ubuntu notified me of updates. I clicked, and it brought up the software updates application and installed everything (including stuff that didn’t have anything to do with Ubuntu.
After the updates, I reboot. I really, really, REALLY have to remind myself to do that when it says to.
Right. So… on to installation of “stuff”.
Finding Solutions
There are many ‘redundant’ applications which do the same things in Linux (because of the ‘built my own version in my backyard’ Linux community) so you can keep trying different solutions until you find one that does what you want. You can start with the Ubuntu defaults, then move further and further afield to find what you like (if necessary).
Easier and easier
Linux programs have traditionally been a pain to install. At first, they had to be compiled by hand — I did a lot of those “make” commands back in my days as a PennMUSH admin in the early nineties — it wasn’t fun. Plus, the programs usually had package dependencies — other programs you have to install before you install the program you actually want — and many of those package dependencies were either undocumented (!!), hard to find, impossible to install, or available in multiple versions. Keeping track of it all was an absolute nightmare and is one of the reasons Linux has this lasting rep as being user-unfriendly.
That was then. This is now.
In Ubuntu, there is an “add-remove programs” menu item. It’s a massive list of programs, including descriptions, and all sorted by usage — all of which can be installed by just checking the programs I want and hitting the install button. Forget how much this improved Linux; this is also much better than Windows, and includes a PILE of ‘third party’ options, because EVERYTHING IS FREE.
The end result is that you can install every program you could want simply by checking off the programs in the list, then downloading and installing them in the background. It’s like moving from carving in stone to have a psychic personal assistant do all your writing for you.
So I went down the list of programs I want - each one comes with a name, icon, and detailed description. If I need more information, I can click on the project homepage link provided in the description.
So in one shot, I select:
* AbiWord, a word processor,
* Frozen-Bubble, a nifty little Bejeweled/Tetris/Blockout mutant love-child.
* Gstreamer plugins (to play, among others, MP3 files and UNencrypted DVDs) — I also get Automatix, which installs the codecs I need to play Encrypted (ie: commercially purchased “movie”) DVDs.
* Gstreamer ffmpeg video plugin (to play Divx and other video files)
* Kino (Digital video editor)
* VLC Media Player (which pretty much plays every bloody video format on the planet)
I hit “OK”. It gives me a final look at what I chose to install. I hit apply, and wait for the laptop to burst into flame. The laptop is fine. I browse the internet with Firefox (which I haven’t mentioned to this point because it’s automatically a part of Ubuntu) and pick up some Firefox plugins while the install runs. There is no lag.
Web Browsing & Flash
Firefox 2.0.0.3 comes installed from the get-go, with Flash, and everything works just fine. I installed the same addons that I use on my other machines, and all THAT worked fine also. I’m doing this whole post from the laptop.
Afterward the install, I play a few MP3s and non-DVD videos, just to see if I can. Everything works fine, even though I haven’t done any kind of configuration for any hardware.
E-Mail
I use Gmail for everything at home, but just to check it out, I set up Evolution, which is an Outlook-workalike and Ubuntu’s default mail client. I also installed and set up and ran Thunderbird for awhile — it’s still nice, but I just don’t need it. Because I have Gmail, I also installed CheckGmail which puts an e-mail notifier in my system tray.
Peripherals & Hardware
Flash Drives: I plugged in a couple USB flash sticks just to see if Linux would find them. Worked like gangbusters — even pops up with an icon, automatically mounted.
Printer: I installed my HP LaserJet 1200 as a network printer (shared via my Windows XP desktop) — it took about… as long as it does on any other machine. A minute? Piece of cake. More interesting will be putting my Canon color printer directly onto the laptop via USB, then sharing it to the rest of the network — haven’t done that yet.
CD Burner: Gnome offers many, many, many ways to burn a disc. I had no problem burning disks, either data disks, ISOs, or music disks. I don’t have a DVD burner, but I’ll tell you what: this OS makes me want to have one.
WiFi:
This… wasn’t fun.
The bottom line is this — Linux had the driver for my WiFi card, but it can’t put the WHOLE thing inside the OS, because the OS itself is free, and the manufacturer of this particular WiFi card (Broadcom, which is the chip Dell uses for their WiFi) want some of the drivers to somehow be attached to the spending of money. Or something. There’s politics surrounding the whole thing that make me nauseous when I think about it too much.
It took me a long, long, long time to figure out what all that meant — in short, you have to download a program for Linux that extracts the ‘rest’ of the WiFi drivers right out of the chip’s firmware itself, sort of to prove that you bought the card, I guess.
It took me HOURS to figure that out, during which I did other stuff while I poked at it. Ironically, once I figured that out, I got it working in a few minutes.
DVDs
Philosophically, the problem I had with playing DVD Movies was the same thing — since Ubuntu is free, no one wants to package their DVD codecs (read: translation files) with Ubuntu. Somehow, using an OS that you paid for gives you the ‘right’ (in their mind) to play DVDs… which you ALSO (and ALREADY) paid for.
Right. So Ubuntu is nice and law abiding… they don’t package that stuff, so DVDs don’t work. Then you get Automatix running, select all the codecs you need, read the big red warning that tells you you’re a bad person for wanting to watch your own DVD movies on a dirty hippie operating system, and install the stuff anyway.
And movies work just fine. I even got the Kino video editor running and stitched together two short movies into one longer one — that’s pretty cool, though it took a long time to convert them into a kino-friend format, edit them, then save them back the other way — I’ve never done anything like that in Windows, because every software package that lets me do stuff like that costs WAY too much money. Functionality like that is one of the reasons I’ve been looking at Macs and their iLife package so closely.
And… here it is in Linux. Free. Not perhaps as full-featured or friendly as iLife, but… again… free.
Getting Stuff Done
Word Processing: As I mentioned, I installed AbiWord. Ubuntu comes prepackaged with OpenOffice (which is a total work-alike for Microsoft Office’s Word, Excel, and Powerpoint that I’ve been using on some of my Windows boxes for ages), it’s overkill for someone who just needs a good word processor. Abiword is just that: a good word processor. It does Word-like spellchecking-as-you-type and all the good stuff I use RoughDraft for on Windows.
Image Editing: The GIMP has been the main Linux image editing gorilla for many years. Comparison? Photoshop has a better UI, more features, and you can do just about anything you want with it — faster. It costs 600 dollars. The GIMP has most of the features regular people would use in Photoshop, and it’s free.
Gaming
Hmm… Yeah. Read “the Bad” down below.
The Good
OS Installation from the LiveCD is incredibly easy and problem free - and you can use the OS before and during the installation, in order to “test before installing.”
Ubuntu’s resource management is great. I managed to max out the CPU load to 100% only once during 12 hours of messing around on the machine (during a massive install of DVD-player-related packages), but while the system slowed down, it didn’t crash, or freeze. You just don’t get a slow and unresponsive system that takes forever to start new processes or even to stop them, just because one program is being a resource hog.
The Add/Remove programs tool (and the related tools Synaptic and Automatix) is fantastic. Forget about the improvement to the old way you had to install things on Linux — it makes installing programs on Linux much easier than doing so on Windows.
Linux is a good platform for productivity, with free apps which are compatible with Office documents. Everything I’ve used for writing and such just worked, and I didn’t have to think about it — there’s very little else I’m interested in but that.
The Bad
You’re not going to do much of your computer gaming on Linux. The problem is, companies aren’t making games that work on the Linux platform. (In some ways, this makes it a great OS for Work environments — it’s just plain harder to screw around on these machines.) The best solution is to operate a dual-boot system — there’s a very good chance I’ll do that on my desktop machine sometime in the future because the fact is this except for gaming, the Ubuntu Linux OS gives me more of what I want from my computers — I’m already finding myself annoyed that I don’t have some of this functionality on my main machine.
Linux installation/configuration is not nearly as difficult as it used to be, but I did have some frustrations. It was a pain to get the WiFi card running properly, and the fix involved typing a lot of arcane commands into a terminal window to sort it out and only hoping that this time it’ll work. Getting DVDs to play was also a terminal-command pain, but I understood the stuff better by that point.
On the upside, I finally get all those sudo jokes out there. They’re actually damn funny.
The Ugly
As has always been the case, newer hardware, like cutting edge video or network cards, often take a bit of time before it’s usable in Linux because the manufacturers typically don’t worry about Linux drivers, and the community has to develop drivers on their own. Having a big company like Dell producing Linux boxes could do wonders for this situation.
So?
This isn’t a solution for the easily frustrated. However, sticking with it, I found the payoff very very satisfying. Linux has gaps, but it also has some capability that you can’t get elsewhere without spending a LOT of money.
There are some things (big-name games like WoW or CoH) I just can’t have in Linux right now. However, there are some great things I *can* do in Linux that I can’t in Windows (or can’t without a lot of cash).
I’d recommend Ubuntu’s desktop edition (the 32-bit version — the 64-bit one sounds… a bit raw, which is something developers have got to fix if they want to stay abreast of their competition) to at least try out. I mean, it’s free; why not? Find out what you’re getting into before you take the full plunge to Linux as a primary OS, thought. I think it’s worth it (provided you keep a Windows installation around somewhere to blow up aliens with).
I expect that within the next few months I’ll put an Ubuntu partition on my desktop machine… or maybe just get another harddrive for the box, just for that purpose — I can totally see most of my day-to-day activities taking place in Linux, and that hasn’t been the case before now.
It doesn’t do everything, but what it does do, it does really damn well.
And it’s free.
