Ubuntucat

I take the bus almost every single day, and I don’t usually smile on the bus. The bus, on a good day, is a time when I can be alone and have some quiet time with a good morning radio show or with the latest Keane album. Unless my wife is with me, I don’t want to be making chit-chat or interacting with people. In fact, random strangers trying to chat me up on the bus really annoys me.

But I saw something yesterday that made me smile.

A woman came on the bus. She looked tired (this was at about 5:30 PM). Her face was drawn down. She had a bit of a shuffle more than a walk. As she was shuffling down the length of the bus heading toward its rear, a seated passenger reached out and grabbed her by the waist without saying anything. For a split second, she looked extremely distressed. I imagined, based on that quick glimpse of her facial expression, that she was thinking, “Oh, my God. I’m being accosted by some crazy person. I just want to be left alone.” But then she turned to look at the person grabbing her, and clearly it was someone she knew. She quickly turned her horrified face into a widened smile and sat next to this guy and began talking to him.

I couldn’t hear anything they were saying. Nevertheless, they were so happy to see each other that I couldn’t help a wide smile myself. I knew nothing about these people. They didn’t appear to be dating. They clearly liked each other and either are or had been emotionally close at one point. Maybe they hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Maybe this guy was visiting the area from far away. Imagine that they happened to be on the same bus at the same time by accident. I loved that moment. I still have no idea who these people are, and they somehow managed to brighten my day at the end of my evening commute.

If you’ve been following my blog at all the past year, you know I’ve been obsessed with finding the right Linux distro for my Eee PC. It came with an Asus-customized version of Xandros that works perfectly with the hardware but suffers in many ways on the software and user-interface side. I’ve since tried vanilla Ubuntu, eeeXubuntu, Mandriva, Debian, Puppeee, and various other distros that are supposed to be good for the Eee PC.

It’s been a tough search to find a good combination of usable and compatible. I just want something that will let me use all the hardware on the Eee and more or less let me use Ubuntu and its repositories. Why is that so difficult to find? Well, I think I may have found the holy grail of the Eee PC—Ubuntu Eee. Yes, I’d heard about it for a while now but never gave it a try, because I’d had a disappointing experience with eeeXubuntu. I’m very impressed with Ubuntu Eee, though, despite running into a few problems that were easily fixed.

Here were the problems I ran into:

• The netbook remix it came with wouldn’t let me quit. I’d click the Quit button, and it’d look as if it were going to fire up the logout dialogue, but nothing would come up. And the way the netbook remix Gnome panel is set up, it was impossible for me to add anything to the panel (like the logout applet). So to shut down the computer, I had to use a virtual terminal and the sudo shutdown -h now command.
• The netbook remix interface was also extremely unresponsive. I think it was designed with the Intel Atom processor in mind and not my poor little Eee PC 701′s Intel Celeron processor. So one of the first things I did was remove the remix and automaximize applications through Synaptic.
• Wireless, as the Ubuntu Eee website indicates, is a little buggy with MadWifi on the 701 (and I’ve experienced this with other distros too), so I blacklisted the Atheros modules and installed and used ndisgtk, and that problem was solved.
• There was a minor volume applet adjustment I had to make to get the front microphone working.
• Ubuntu Eee comes with a lot of stuff installed by default (normal Ubuntu stuff and then a lot extra), so I spent a good hour in Synaptic Package Manager trimming out the fat.

The webcam, microphone, hotkeys, and sound all work great. They even have the little on-screen displays from Xandros when you press the hotkeys. I do get some weird message about the scanner group being unknown when I boot up, but the boot time isn’t too bad (still not as speedy as Xandros, of course). I think I’ll be sticking with Ubuntu Eee for a while. And now that it’s based on the 8.04.1 release of Ubuntu, I know it’ll be supported for the next two and a half years also.

P.S. There is one minor annoyance, which seems to pop up every now and then with Ubuntu releases. In Gnome, the volume manager will automatically mount my Lacie external drive’s FAT32 partition but not the Ext3 partition. With Thunar’s volume manager, neither will mount automatically. When the automatic mounting doesn’t happen, I get some message about not being able to mount the partitions since I’m not the superuser. So I’m mounting them from the command-line right now. I don’t mind doing that, so I’m on the whole pleased with Ubuntu Eee, but it’d be great if there were an easy fix for it.

Since I’m a regular on the Ubuntu Forums and, like some other forum members, I have an Asus Eee PC and decided to install Ubuntu on it, I do every so often get asked the question, “What is so bad about the Eee PC Xandros anyway?” I recently did a reinstall of Xandros, so after playing around with Xandros for a while again, it’s fresh enough in my mind that I can talk more specifically about the pros and cons of Xandros.

Xandros Pros

• Hardware support. Yes, many distros have come pretty close to full hardware support or there exist some tweaks to get everything working, but Asus customized Xandros to work exactly with the hardware in the Eee.
• Fast boot time. Likewise, there are some hacks to make Ubuntu or other distros boot a little more quickly (maybe 45 seconds instead of 90 seconds), but Xandros boots in 12-30 seconds, and that just can’t be beat. I understand some people have done some experimental fast-booting projects for other distros, but all of them have huge disclaimers about them being experimental for a reason.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. I can think of absolutely no other advantages to Xandros over other Linux distributions.

Xandros Cons

• Annoying simple mode. At first glance, simple mode (the one with the tabs and huge icons) looks good or at least easy to use for beginners. It’s not a well-thought-out interface, however. The difference between Network and Wireless Networks isn’t readily apparent (Network is for frequently used connections you want remembered; Wireless Networks is for ad hoc connections). There’s also no easy way to make the Favorites tab the default, which would make the most sense. If my most-used applications are on two separate tabs, that’s kind of annoying. And if I have to click to a separate tab every time I want to see my favorites, that’s also annoying.
• Too much QT dependence. If you’re a Gnome fan or generally favor GTK applications, there’s only so much you can strip down the KDE libraries and QT dependencies in the Eee Xandros. The essential-to-functionality programs all depend on KDM and KDE libraries. I don’t have a huge problem with mixing QT and GTK, but when my hard drive is only 4 GB, having double the libraries takes up almost double the space.
• Limited repositories. When you load up Xandros, you’ll notice that the software available for installation is pretty much what comes on the Eee PC by default and little else. And some of the software updates actually take away functionality (for example, the update to the usb storage applet makes it so you can’t turn off the device dialog when you plug in a USB device). It is possible to add repositories, but there aren’t extensive repositories that can be used without adding potential conflicts. There are some small community-maintained repositories you can add. Or you can add Debian ones and make sure to pin versions of applications so that the Debian versions don’t replace the Xandros versions.
• Mounting like Windows. When you plug in a USB device, instead of appearing as a normal drive name, you get all the weird D:\ and E:\ stuff as you would in Windows.
• You can’t add a password to sudo. I’ve done extensive research on this at the Eee User Forums, and no one has successfully been able to add a password to sudo, so for almost all intents and purposes, you are running as root all the time. I can understand if this were only the default, but if you edit the /etc/sudoers file so as to require a password for sudo commands, you render the Eee unbootable.
• No Quicktime. Yes, it’s great that Xandros comes with MP3 playback and Flash installed by default. But you’d think they would also give you the codecs you need to play Apple Trailers. No dice. The workaround is that you add Debian repositories and force and lock a downgrade to the slightly older version of MPlayer that apparently has the proper codecs.
• Old versions of software. People often complain about Ubuntu updating its software versions only every six months with a new release. Xandros doesn’t do even that. There are some really old versions of applications that I don’t think have been updated since last year.
• The username is always user. So in a regular distro if you say your full name is Carol J. Clover, the distro will make your username carol, as would make sense. In Xandros, no matter what your full name is, you’ll always be called user and your home directory will always be /home/user.

I think that pretty much sums it up. So the next time someone asks what’s so bad about Xandros, I’ll just point them to this blog post.

A while ago, I read Full Frontal Feminism, and then I just recently finished He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. There are some things I dislike about Valenti (sometimes she does seem to be trying too hard to be hip and humorous, for example), but she’s genuinely a refreshing feminist voice that is able to articulate well what we all know and often can’t express properly.

The book does get a little tedious by the end (she lays it out as 50 “different” double standards, even though most of them are different facets of the same double standard, just so her publisher can boast a long list as opposed to three really long chapters, I guess). Still, Valenti is able to point out many sexist phenomena without sounding like a whining perpetual victim. She’s also able to get across well how sexism against women is actually harmful to men, too, which is really important to progress. We can’t, if we want to live in an egalitarian society, keep thinking of problems between groups and oppressions as us vs. them. “They” may appear to have privilege and benefits, but even those privileges and benefits come at a cost of freedom for all groups.

For example, the expectation that women will either take their husbands’ surnames or consider it while men always keep their names clearly puts men in a position of privilege (his name is important but hers isn’t). Nevertheless, men are often like Princess Jasmine from Aladdin. If they want to get out of the “royal treatment,” they face many obstacles. I thought it was just social pressures (my parents raised a huge stink about me wanting to take my wife’s last name), but apparently in many states a man cannot even take his wife’s name if he wants to, and in the states he’s allowed to change his name in the procedure is far more costly and involved than the woman-taking-her-husband’s-name procedure is.

Of course, there are also some supposed double standards that she exaggerates. For example, she makes it sound as if women are considered selfish if they don’t want to have kids, whereas men are not considered selfish if they don’t want to have kids. That hasn’t been my experience at all. The extent to which the double standard does apply, I think it has to do with single people thinking about the future, as opposed to married couples talking about the present. In other words, if a single man says, “Yeah, I don’t want to have kids,” instead of thinking he’s selfish, people just won’t believe him. They’ll think, “He just says that now. When he gets married, though, some woman will turn him around. I bet he’d make a great father.” If, however, a single woman says, “Yeah, I don’t want to have kids,” the selfish police will come out in droves.

When married couples talk about not having kids, though, the selfish label isn’t gender-specific. My wife and I definitely don’t want to have kids, and I think we’ve heard the selfish line about equally. No one has said, “Your wife is selfish.” They definitely think both of us are.

She’s no Susan Brownmiller, but Jessica Valenti’s got some good points to make, and she is now my… almost-hero.

Every now and then I try out Debian because of its reputation of being rock solid and stable. There are many things I like about Debian, especially its release cycle. But I still end up coming back to Ubuntu.

My most recent expedition was on my Eee PC 701. I tried the specialized version of Debian that’s supposed to be fully Eee-compatible (it comes with wireless drivers and hotkeys working, etc.). The only problem is I’ve never had good luck with madwifi drivers, even though that’s supposedly the “correct” way to go. In Debian, I ran into that same problem. Oddly enough, the minimalist installer was able to retrieve and install packages over my wireless connection, but when I had actually installed Debian, I couldn’t get wireless to work, even though the madwifi drivers were installed.

So I tried, as had worked in Ubuntu, to use ndisgtk instead, but I got some fatal error about the module not being loaded. Even though Debian’s Gnome was a lot snappier than Ubuntu’s (not sure why), I just went back to what’s tried and true (if not as responsive an interface). Back on Intrepid again.