Geeky Baldisms

Greetings. An intro is in order.

I'm Ron Enderland, professional geek. I work for a Fortune 500 company doing web development on intranet apps. I also do network stuff (I'm a CCNA) and even a day of help desk per week. We're a small shop.

I got my first PC in 1993, and it came with, of course, Windows. Ten years later, I was a Windows troubleshooting machine. Troubleshooting Windows means making lots of guesses and trying lots of things that may not seem to make any sense. Such it is in the world of closed-source software.

That was one of the things that made it tough to switch to Linux. Troubleshooting Linux issues involves logic. Windows problems rely more on stabs in the dark. When a DLL is overwritten, finding it can be impossible. Many times, a reinstall of the operating system is the only answer.

When you're used to solving problems based on hunches, switching to logical troubleshooting can be difficult.

Twenty Reasons Why You Should Try Ubuntu

1. It makes Steve Ballmer very, very mad.
2. The proponents of Ubuntu aren't in it for the money.
3. If you're a Baby Boomer, picture Microsoft as The Man.
4. It has the most newbie-friendly forum out there. Seriously, the moderators have the patience of Job.
5. It just feels good to run open-source, free software.
6. Kiss DRM insanity goodbye. Your recorded media belongs to YOU.
7. Want new software? Install/uninstall completely FREE killer apps through Synaptics Package Manager.
8. The live CD is the ultimate "try before you buy." Except you're not buying anything.
9. Looking at a basic Vista computer purchase? You'll need at least a gig of RAM and a dual-core to make it run decently fast. Oh, and embedded DRM, which provides you zero benefit but is there at the insistence of the recording and movie industries, is a big reason why it's such a hardware hog. Ubuntu runs all day long on 512 MB of RAM and three-year old processors.
10. You can plead ignorance when friends and family ask your for Vista troubleshooting help.
11. Steve Ballmer hates Linux badly enough that he's making comical unsubstantiated claims about its alleged infringement of M$ code. Ubuntu REALLY doesn't want or need any M$ code, thank you.
12. Want to spend over $300 on an office suite? No? Then how about a free one included with the OS?
13. Compare troubleshooting a software issue with Ubuntu to chasing one down for a Windows app. I think you'll find a tremendous amount of difference in the number of Google returns.
14. Defrag? What's that?
15. Get used to your desktop, and it won't turn into some bizarrely different looking thing every few years. Changes to Linux desktops are gradual, not sudden.
16. When you run Windows, you're running the result of the efforts of hundreds of thousands of highly-paid programmers. When you run Ubuntu, you're running the result of the efforts of mere thousands of volunteer programmers who simply want you to have a better product.
17. Adding to Windows' overhead is spyware prevention, virus protection, and Windows Firewall, designed to keep intruders out. While Ubuntu may someday become a target of attacks, right now you can run free of bug killers and bad-guy-blockers.
18. The lack of WGA or its equivalent. The very idea of M$ running a program without your consent designed SOLELY to make certain you're not a thief is simply lousy, lousy customer service.
19. Your software will be updated and upgraded from now on for FREE.
20. Oh, one last thing. The only thing Steve Ballmer hates worse than Linux is Google!

Want to learn from my mistakes? Here we go.

First of all, resist the urge to import your Windows machine into VMWare. Unless it's chock full of software you've paid for and that needs to phone home to work, instead I recommend you simply start from scratch.

Case in point: I imported my XP Media Edition machine. Footprint was 70 gigs! And it refused to compact via VMWare tools. It would peg my dual-core AMD machine after running for an hour or so.

I finally blew it away and started over.

I now run XP Pro and my processor usage remains minimal. The machine's footprint, with Dreamweaver MX, Quicken 2006, Paint Shop Pro 7, and Open Office is 4.4 gigs.

Don't have a serial number? All I can say is use your imagination. I did, and worked around it legally, though Microsoft might quibble over the details. Let's just say that if a machine that was licensed for XP Pro NEVER USED it, my conscience is just as clean as it would be in importing a physical machine into VMWare that will no longer have Windows as its OS.

However, don't overlook another easy solution: Windows 2000.

VMWare is an esential part of my migration to Ubuntu, but it's not perfect out of the box.

For example, USB support is not enabled by default for your virtual machines.

There's an easy fix.

Either precede the following commands with sudo, or open a root terminal.

Type the following commands:

I have upgraded a couple of computers to Hardy Heron this last week. My desktop machine at work (Dell 620) went nearly flawlessly. The only hitch was weird screen resolution on one of my two monitors. That was fixed with a manual edit of my xorg.conf file.

Things didn't go quite so smoothly on my home machine (HP 1483w). The Nvidia video was fubarred, I unistalled and reinstalled the proprietary drivers, and finally got over the hump by running the nvidia-glx-new package (version 169.12+2.6.24.12-16.34) AND the nvidia-settings package. That provided me with a tool that I could use to notify my system that I had a widescreen 19" monitor. Once I did that, I finally obtained 1440x920 resolution.

More weirdness: Open Office didn't like the Java that was installed. Uninstalling/reinstalling the Java didn't help. I finally removed OO through Synaptics and downloaded the install straight from Sun. Even then I had to point it to the JRE.

Finally, I had a hard time getting VMWare back in business. It didn't survive the upgrade, and when I went to reinstall, I got compile errors.

Then I found this forum. I untarred the update (located here) and ran the script that came with it. VMWare was back!

However, my brother still has compile errors on his system (not sure what it is). He's going to wait until VMWare releases a version specifically for Hardy.

Another bit of strangeness: My second hard drive had exactly the same files on it as the first! This was resolved by editing /etc/fstab and changing it from /dev/hda to /dev/sdb1. Strange, but easy to spot and fix. Note: I was informed of a better solution, using the actual UUID of the drive. Now, its wandering is a thing of the past. Typical fstab listing: UUID=f13f7091-63a3-4d4e-b4b7-a8e7945f683f /home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 2

I woke up feeling funny yesterday morning.

The sun was shining brightly through the window, but it was the same window that the setting sun uses to illuminate my bedroom! Strange...

I went to the sink to shave. Being slightly OCD, I tend to notice small things. Thus, I noted that the water was swirling counterclockwise down the drain. I live several thousand miles north of the equator, this made no sense at all.

So I thought I would log on and check out the news. But when I moved the mouse to wake up my sleeping system, it looked...different.

The start button was gone, replaced by a little orange circle.

My brand-new machine that I had brought home from Best Buy two days earlier had come with Windows Vista. This didn't look anything at all like Vista.

I pressed the little orange circle. The menu popped up, but again, it looked...different. It was leaner, I guess. It was more to the point. But I missed all of the cool visual stuff that Vista would do.

Where was my Vista? What had happened? I looked for Internet Explorer but couldn't find it. But the Start button had a menu choice called “Internet,” and there was something called Firefox Web Browser there. I opened it, and sure enough, there was my Google home page. Thank goodness not EVERYTHING had changed. I went to cnn.com to try to find out why things were so weird all of a sudden.

The headlines looked pretty much the same, wars, typhoons, outrage over gas hitting $2.00 a gallon...HUH? It was nearing $4.00 when I filled up last Monday!

Again, strange, but by now my slightly OCD eye had been caught by an ad for TigerDirect.com: Get a loaded PC for $199! Wow, that sounded cheap. So I clicked on it.

The TigerDirect site gave the details: Intel dual-core E2200, 1 gig of RAM, 200G hard drive, speakers, multimedia reader, DVD burner, and Ubuntu 8.02.

I was familiar with everything but this Ubuntu. What was that? I typed Ubuntu into Google and was directed to their website. The site was pretty cool, actually, until I started reading about this Ubuntu thing. Then, I became puzzled.

Ubuntu was an operating system. That rang a bell. I had heard the techies at work refer to Windows XP as an operating system, and how much better it was than Vista. It seemed like I had even heard them mention Ubuntu, as well, in those breakroom conversations that they had that I had eavesdropped on and found nearly impossible to keep up with.

I looked the site over for Vista machines. I didn't find any! There were Macs, bare-bones systems with no operating systems, and others with operating systems like Fedora, PCLinux, and SUSE. But no Vista, XP, or Windows anything.

Well, my mama didn't raise no fool. That 200 buck computer must be missing some pretty important features to be that cheap. So I read the fine print.

This article by Computerworld's Cyber-Cynic, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, says that MS has fubarred their desktop scenario so badly by dropping XP (despite customer pleadings to the contrary) and pushing Vista that the door is wide open for Linux and Macs to take over a significant chunk of the desktop market.

I agree to a point.

Yes, Vista is crap, for many reason, not the least of which is found here. Yes, for every Vista apologist on comment boards, I would estimate that there are at least five detractors, probably ten. Yes, it's finally the dream OS as far as the RIAA and the MPAA are concerned.

But what is going to have to happen is that PC manufacturers get fed up enough to tell MS to shove their pre-install policy where the sun's rays fail to penetrate.

Do you really think people would go out and buy Vista to run their computers if it wasn't already installed? Take a look at Vista's store shelf sales to see the answer.

Microsoft, which was nailed by the DOJ way back in 1994 for "monopolistic" practices that strongly discouraged PC manufacturers from offering any operating system but theirs, has apparently complied with the letter of the law, as far as the government is concerned.

Computerworld columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols recently posted this article on his blog.

In it, he showed how a serious economic downturn may be good news for the open-source movement.

He outlined five specific programs that can be replaced by FOSS alternatives.

The five are MS Office, Outlook, Quicken, Sharepoint, and Windows itself.

The FOSS replacements are Open Office, Thunderbird, GnuCash, Alfresco, and, of course, Linux.

V-N is an open-source advocate, and we need more of 'em. He doesn't like Windows. That is generally what happens to someone who gets into the world of FOSS.

That is off-putting to many who have been happily running Windows for years. But you have to understand that once you have been exposed to something that is vastly superior to what you have long been used to, the natural reaction is anger at whatever it was that had earlier led you to believe that it was as good as things got.

This is particularly the case with Windows, which has proven itself to be adequate at best, criminally underhanded at worst in its long-term ride at the top of the O/S market.

I just got off the phone with my best friend, for whom I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on his laptop.

I installed it two weeks ago. His main concern with Vista was that it wouldn't play ball with his office network. It couldn't see the shared backup folder that i had set up for him years earlier, and also couldn't see his shared office printer.

I told him I didn't work on Vista, and he said that he wanted to hire me to get RID of it and install Ubuntu.

I did so, and his wireless worked out of the box (it was a new Gateway laptop, i don't recall the model). He also had good high-resolution video that played nicely with an additional plugged-in monitor. And his son had a DVD handy, so I got the codecs installed to read it.

And, of course, he can also see his shared folder and print to his shared printer ;-)

However, he called me up this morning feeling frustrated. His computer wouldn't connect to his home wireless network, and it also bombed on any DVD's he tried to play.

I consider the problems to be my fault, and I am making a mental note to make sure and do a more thorough job on my next Linux-converted laptop. Here are five steps you need to follow to make certain that you have a happy customer yourself:

I recently switched from AT&T DSL to Cox Internet. My download speed went from about 900k to speeds which vary from 3 meg (when usage is high) to nearly 20 meg (early in the morning). However, surfing didn't speed up much, if any at all.

The issue was that I would spend much time looking at "Looking up google.com" in the bottom bar of Firefox. In a word, Cox's DNS servers here in NW Arkansas are horrible.

The fix to that was to set up other DNS servers in my Belkin router. However, for some reason, the router wouldn't propagate the changes to my /etc/resolv.conf file. It continued to list the three slow Cox DNS servers and nothing else.

My fix could have been as simple as editing the file. However, I decided to dial things up a notch by installing dnsmasq. It's a local DNS cache that will greatly speed up name lookups.

Here's how to do it the GUI way:

Install dnsmasq with Synaptic Package Manager.

Now sudo gedit /etc/resolv.conf.

Here's what mine looks like:

domain Belkin
search Belkin
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 4.2.2.1
nameserver 4.2.2.2
nameserver 208.267.222.222
nameserver 208.267.220.220
nameserver 192.168.2.1
nameserver 68.105.28.11
nameserver 68.105.29.11
nameserver 68.105.28.12

I recently made this post in reply to a Windows user (a reasonable one) at Computerworld:

Here's the "profound" truth that I finally learned about Linux:

You can fix stuff.

One of the most maddening things about Windows (including XP) is that if something goes awry in the system, as is bound to happen sooner or later with ANY OS, the fix is usually reinstalling.

Office pukes? IE gets squirrely? Cut-and-paste not working consistently? Back up your data as best you can, and let the reformatting begin. Or, if you're REALLY lucky, a system restore. But don't hold your breath.

If something breaks in Linux, you go online and quickly find a solution. Or, with a little experience, you learn to edit the bogus config file, or reinstall a specific library, or sometimes simply do a ctrl+alt+backspace to restart your X server.