February 8, 2006
Playing with Linux
As I mentioned yesterday, blogging has been light. I’ve been struggling with my little home project. I’m turning an unused PC in the house into a DVR, and on Eric’s urging (and because I’m a glutton for punishment), I decided to make it a Linux project. I need to become more familiar with Linux for work, so it sounded like a good idea.
Well, I’ve learned a lot more than I ever intended, and a great deal of it was considerably harder than I expected. It started with the hell of enabling TV-out on the free ATI video card that I acquired. 1 week of the project was spent arguing with this, and eventually I scrapped the idea and simply moved to a newer version of Linux. Two days later, I got the TV-out working, after spending a day learning how to completely recompile a patched version of X. While trying to get everything else up (including my Hauppauge TV capture card), I suddenly lost my graphical interface completely, which took most of tonight to recover. Now, I’m nearly there, but still need to figure out LIRC for my remote…
Here is the current look… I think I’m getting close!
What have I really learned so far? Linux is the best operating system in the world, if you’re a power user. If not, it’s not quite ready for prime time. Now, I know Eric is going to take me to task for this, and in some ways, I understand where he’s coming from. After all, neither Eric nor I wants to use a computer like Microsoft wants us to. As he says, we want to be grown-up computer users.
But I’m in the minority. I home-brew beer. Am I unhappy with the beer I buy at the store? Of course not! I’ve tasted some absolutely wonderful beers, that I may never come close to equalling. But I like the idea of brewing my own beer simply because I can make beer the way I want my beer to be made. It’s the same way with a computer. Even on a Windows PC, I like things to be set up certain ways, because I know the ins and outs of a PC and can configure it to make it meet my needs, and to make me more productive.
But most people are perfectly content to use their computer the way Microsoft intended. They don’t even think about doing it differently, because they’re not interested in making choices. Just as I don’t do anything to “personalize” my car, or spend obscene amounts of time building my wardrobe, they don’t want to spend time changing their computing environment. They’re completely comfortable with Windows, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Office. Why? Because Microsoft (like Apple) has gone to obscene levels to make sure that things fit together well and don’t require a lot of knowledge to use.
Linux is perfect for power users who are willing to put in the time and effort to configure a computing experience tailored to their own needs. For example, Eric talked about the idea of upgrading software. Debian, the linux distribution I’m using for this project, makes it very simple to upgrade software. Two commands from a prompt, or a few mouse clicks, will upgrade every software package on your entire machine. But the conundrum for normal users is that they don’t upgrade software! If their software is broken and tells them they need an upgrade, they click on the link and let it do the work. They wouldn’t even do security updates if Microsoft XP didn’t have “automatic updates” enabled.
Linux could work just fine for an office environment, where an IT professional could configure individual user’s PC’s for what they needed to be doing. It works just fine for individual geeks like myself, who are willing and able to get deep into a system to try to understand what’s going on. But it’s not ready for the casual home user.
In fact, after playing with this, I thought about tossing it on the very old laptop I bought for my wife to surf the net. After all, it’s a Pentum II processor with 64 MB RAM, currently running Windows 2000. This thing is slower than molasses in January. I think a bare-bones Linux installation with something like Icewm instead of memory-intensive packages like KDE or Gnome could dramatically speed this PC up. But a quick attempt at convincing the wife to use Firefox taught me that it’s probably not worth it. So I’ll let her have the slow Windows laptop, because I don’t bother using it anyway. She’d rather have a comfortable known entity than speed, and as long as it doesn’t impact my own computer use, that’s fine with me.
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Harry Chapin wrote a song about a young boy in school who was a free spirit, something which went against the grain; “Flowers are Red and Green Leaves are Green”.
What convinced my wife to use Firefox and Thunderbird was all of the spyware that she accumulated using IE and Outlook Express. So, she moved over. After a couple of days she happily admitted they were much better products and just as easy to use, just different. Then we slowly tried her out on Fedora Core, which I consider the most Windows friendly of the mainstream Linux distro’s.
Next up, my son will be using Linux as his main O/S with a Windows virtual machine for his games. And then I will have a completely Microsoft free computing environment at home, except that one virtual machine. Neither my wife nor my son are “power users” and I base much of my opinion on the viability of Linux on their experience.
Debian doesn’t prompt you to upgrade software packages, but both Fedora and SuSE do. They both have a small taskbar applet, in a similar fashion to what Mac and Windows do. The difference is, of course, that you can also dig into the guts yourself, if you want to. Try doing a command line update of only the core, stable software packages in Windows, but excluding all the rest.
Eric,
But would they be able to handle it without you in the house? Probably not… But I do have to give you credit… You’re putting your son on the right footing to understand all this in the future…
I can say that I wouldn’t have nearly as complete an understanding of computers as I do without the years and years of working with DOS, Win3.1, OS/2, etc before I got involved in the current Windows world. Your son will be worlds ahead of his peers in a few years, when it comes to computing knowledge…
I would say that neither of them would want to install and configure Linux without me around. But, once installed, they would be able to maintain it just fine. Since the same is true for Windows, I don’t really see the issue. That is, the average end user does not install Windows themself. They don’t want to either. And, the truth is, the Windows install routine is more difficult and esoteric than Fedora or SuSE’s.
Bear in mind, you are working with Debian, which is not known for being particularly user friendly. And you are trying to do things that my son, for example, would never do.
Consider this. If you bought a PC at the store and it had a Linux distro known for ease of use, let’s say Fedora Core, pre-installed and configured, just as Windows is. Would it be easier, or more difficult, for the typical user? What if the user had to start at bare metal and install their own OS? Speaking as an IT professional, I have to say that the Windows install routine really sucks. Even Slackware’s is comparable to Windows.
I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. You are assuming that Windows is easier because everything is pre-built when you buy it, and then if you want Linux you have to install it yourself. But that is not an apples to apples comparison.
Set up two machines that are exactly the same side by side. With the same peripherals. An HP inkjet printer and a Kodak digital camera, for example. Both are bare metal machines. Now, install Windows XP Professional on one and openSuSE 10.0 on the other. Which one will be easier for the end user? Which one will be installed quicker? Which one will be secured at the end of the install routine with ALL needed office productivity software installed? Which one won’t?
Sheesh, I just gave myself an idea for another post. But I need two computers!
By the way, congrats on getting this far with Debian and MythTV. With very little Linux experience, you are definitely pushing the envelope of use.
Thanks… I’m a learn-by-doing kind of guy… I could read 20 books on linux, but I’ve learned so much more from just setting up a goal and trying to figure it out as I go along… But as I said, I’ve been working with PC’s since the old days, starting with a Commodore 64 when I was 5, and an IBM XT when I was 7. I took over the sole computer administration by the time I was 13, was running my own BBS by about 16. Then I went to college for Electrical Engineering, which included C programming on Unix systems (exposing me to gcc/etc), Perl scripting, etc. One of my work projects at my old company was an in-depth Tcl script… And now I’m an Applications Engineer for a computer hardware manufacturer. So I have a few legs up on most folks
I started trying to work with Debian packages for my LIRC remote, and it just didn’t go well. Now I’m really starting to get of the mindset that I should be downloading source and compiling modules myself for certain things if I really want to get them working properly
I think, for what you are doing, your best bet is to download the source and compile it yourself.
I’m a CpE, which is essentially a hybrid of EE and CS. So, everything from Assembly on a 68K to C in Unix and various chip level programming like VLSI.
My computer experience started with a TRS-80 color computer at home and a DEC mini at my dad’s office. I learned BASIC on a Honeywell “portable” running CP/M.