Get Up 8
We just returned from our trip to South
Carolina. It was the first time in several years that all three
Wilson girls were back in Columbia. It was a largely domestic
trip, with lots of time spent being familial and stuff. We celebrated
Roland's birthday at Robin's house with lentil soup (96 calories/cup),
ate an early Thanksgiving meal, drank lots of coffee, and cut into one
of Barbara's raw milk camemberts.
assert(visiting_family == eating);
I downloaded Gutsy
Gibbon while we were there, intending to play a prank on a
Windows user involving the live CD. To my dismay, it Gnome would not
start cleanly on the system, leaving me with a blank X display, no
toolbars, no menus, and no way to start a terminal (without resorting to
one of the virtual consoles). This was not a state I wanted to leave the
computer in, even as a prank, because the point was to demonstrate the
usablity of Ubuntu to a Windows user who had earlier in the weekend
claimed that he might be persuaded to change to Linux if only he were a
computer nerd. Disappointing.
We also went out to visit Village at
Sandhill, an example of the lifestyle center
retail shopping concept. Interesting to see in action, it's a mixed-use
development heavily weighted toward shopping—like a cross between
new urbanism, a traditional mall, and Disney World. The Disney
World
feel comes from a sense of artifice and manufacture. I'd
like to go back in a few years and see how they're doing, not because I
think it's doomed to fail, but because I think it might need some time
to become lived-in before it starts to feel like a neighborhood, which
is, I think, what the developer intends.
I should have blogged all these things separately, but I was mostly
cut off from my
exocortextthe net the whole time, save a trip to the
bookstore, where I mostly tried to gather research materials for later
reading. Is it bad that I often think of vacations in terms of time
to work on projects
?
Trying to solve some network stupid network problems, I upgraded one
of our laptops from dapper to edgy. It came off without a hitch, and
seemed to fix the problem: the machine would forget which /etc/hosts
file it was supposed to be using on reboot.
It went so well, in fact, that I decided to move our other laptop,
the one I use primarily to feisty. This was a little more
troublesome.
The packages downloaded and installed, no problem, but when it came
time to reboot, the boot procedure would hang, complaining that
/dev/hda6, the boot partition, could not be found. I dug around a
little, and discovered that, when booting kernel 2.6.20 (only, not
previous kernels as demonstrated when I picked 2.6.17 at bootup), the
hard disk in the machine was being recognized as scsi, and given a scsi
designation (/dev/sda, instead of /dev/hda). I scratched my head and
grumbled for a while, went off, had a cup of coffee, surfed fruitlessly
for an answer to why it was doing this, and ultimately decided I was
going to have to figure it out on my own.
Coming back to the machine, the first thing I did was look at the
boot parameters. At the appropriate state of the bootstrap procedure, I
pressed ESC to get to the grub prompt, Picked the line for booting
2.6.20-16, and 'e' to edit it.
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.20-16-386 root=/dev/hda6 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.20-16-386
quiet
savedefault
Well, there's a problem. It's looking on the non-existent /dev/hda6
partition for the root directory. I changed it to sda6 and booted.
Bingo. That was easy
.
To make the change stick, I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst to reflect the
change I made at the grub command editor.
I installed Beryl on a
laptop yesterday, and I've been enjoying the experience overall. When I
first heard of it, I turned my nose up at it as a favoring of style over
substance. At PyCon, though, I saw some people using it and had the
opportunity in the meantime to use a Mac and experience things like
Exposé and the dashboard, and my interest was piqued.
Desktop switching becomes freefall.
Things I like:
- Scale/Window Picker may change the way I work.
- Thumbnails during Application/Window Switching make changing tasks
much quicker.
- A few of the provided animations enhance the user experience.
Things I don't like:
- Some keyboard shortcuts I setup for Gnome/Metacity have continued to
work, e.g., ctrl-n for the browser and ctrl-m for mail. Others, like
ctrl-t for a terminal window, don't. I haven't figured out why this is,
though I did add ctrl-t throught the Beryl Settings Manager. I haven't
determined if I can hook the "windows" key (Super_L) back up to the
Gnome panel menu; I particularly miss that setting.
- There's a dearth of documentation. It's hard to know what a
particular setting is even for, unless it's self-explanatory, which many
of them are, fortunately. Of course, this is a great opportunity to
contribute to the project.
- Some features have no discernable effect. I followed the directions from the Beryl FAQ to apply transparency to
menus, just to check it out, and nothing changed. I've seen this on a
few features. For some, it could just be that I don't know what change
I've actually made in some cases.
- Too many configurables!
As Chris and Jeff predicted, the biggest
annoyances stem from moving from a mature desktop environment/window
manager to something newer, with different commands and interactions, as
well as niggling problems that might be bugs or might just be my lack of
experience with the system, though some would say if don't grasp the
workings of the system, that in itself is a bug.
Lest I sound down on it though, these are only initial impressions
after a few hours of use, some of which were spent fiddling with the
configuration and focusing on Beryl rather than just working within its
environment. It's neat, bringing an underused piece of hardware, the 3D
display card, into the workflow.
Experts, like security guru Bruce Schneier, are telling
us the
DRM systems included in Windows Vista is harmful to
users. It consumes system resources, causing slowdowns, and destabilizes
the system, causing, one assumes, crashes and hangs.
This software exists for one reason: to let someone else control what
you can and can't do with your own computer. To some extent all software
does this, but DRM software is unique in that it's purpose is to
reduce the functionality of the system.
Regardless of what you might think of the motivation for this, who do
you think ought to be able to control what is shown on your monitor, or
what sounds come from your speakers, or what data is moved from one disk
to another? Do you think they will get it right, and you'll never have a
problem, or wrong, and you'll find yourself unable to make a copy of
some file? What do you think the collateral damage will be? Does it
bother you that some corporations have decided you're untrustworthy?
If an automobile had a system installed that let the automaker
disable the steering by remote control, would you buy it?
Schneier suggests consumers not upgrade to Vista
.
Unfortunately, I find that an unlikely scenario, and offer as
evidence people paying more than $200/month for
unsatisfactory service, and writing comments on the newspaper website,
rather than making a meaningful change. Soon, all OEMs will be shipping
only machines with Vista installed, and in general we'll take it lying
down because the latest version of MSWord, won't run without it. Or new
displays won't. Or speakers won't.
We'll let Microsoft use us as pawns in a game to control the delivery
of content, forcing on us an OS which limits our control of our own
systems, and forcing their proprietary formats on the providers. (The
providers don't actually care that much about format, I suspect, as long
as you pay your $0.99 per track for your music, and can only access it
from one device. They'll deliver it in the format that will net them the
most ninety-nine centses.) Like a commodity, we'll be sold to the
entertainment industry. It's not because we're lazy or stupid; it's
just that many of us don't even realize we have a choice.
But we do. There are several concrete steps that would make those
that want to take control of our computers and networks from us sit up
and take notice.
Switch
browsers.
This is the easiest step to take, and aside from openness and keeping
your computer your own, there are good reasons to make
the change.
Break the reliance on MSOffice. Try something free, as in Freedom.
OpenOffice is full-featured, and has an open
file format so your documents aren't locked away by a software
vendor, forcing unwanted
upgrades on you. It provides compatibility to make the transition easier.
Finally, take back your system completely with a free operating system.
Ubuntu comes with both Firefox and OpenOffice ready to go, as well as
just about everything you might
want your computer to do. Photo editing? Chat? Media player? Simple
software updates? Community and professional support? It's all in
there.
Ubuntu's Live CD lets you try it all with no risk or commitment.
Update: Support free and open software by
joining the Free Software
Foundation. Support free networks and digital rights by joining Electronic Frontier
Foundation.
Don't take it lying down.