Ubuntucat

Just got back from a trip to Portland. Never had been there before. It’s a nice city. No Asian people… even in “Chinatown.” A lot of people smoking on street corners. A few ugly bridges over the beautiful water.

But some good food, a walkable downtown, charming parks everywhere, and… an excellent public transportation system.

My wife and I have been two years without a car in San Francisco, and it has been worth it overall. Nevertheless, every now and then you just have to curse MUNI and think, “Life would be so much easier right now if I had a car.”

Not so in Portland. Whether it’s lightrail trains, proper buses, or the streetcar line, in our almost-a-week there, we never waited more than 10 minutes for a bus (usually 2-3 minutes), we never had a bus driver who appeared to have aspirations to be in NASCAR or to be doing stunts for Michael Bay movies, there was virtually no graffiti, the fares were low (in most places, free even), and the time to get from place to place was minimal.

This difference between Portland’s public transit and the Bay Area’s wasn’t more apparent than when we finally went home.

We woke up at 4-something in the morning, walked half a mile from our hotel to the nearest lightrail stop, paid $2 for a ticket to the airport, waited three minutes for the on-time train to come, and then were at the airport within an hour… with a smooth ride to boot.

Coming back home from the San Francisco airport, we had to hop on a shuttle to get to the BART subway station. Then the BART train (which costs $4.70) we got on just randomly sat there for about fifteen minutes with no movement and no announcement from the conductor as to when the train would actually depart. The BART train was smelly and loud. From BART, we got on the MUNI bus home ($1.50, if we didn’t already have monthly passes), which was extremely crowded and full of permanent marker–graffiti. The bus driver drove like a maniac.

It is great to be home (and at least away from tobacco city), but is it really that difficult to get a decent public transit system here?

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows I’m a fan of Ubuntu Linux, a free operating system. While many of its users celebrate the freedom in licensing Ubuntu (as is typical of Linux distributions) comes with, a lot of folks just like the fact that it’s cost-free. Quite an online community has been built around this free product.

Yesterday, I saw a different kind of “community” building (and then disappearing) around something else free—music. My wife and I were on the way to dinner, and we saw a huge cardboard box on the side of the road next to an apartment building. We looked inside and saw hundreds of audio CDs. We looked all around it to see if there was some kind of sign. As far as we could tell, this was someone’s garbage, free for the taking. Just as we’d decided this, three men in their early 20s came around, and all five us dug around through the collection and picked what CDs we wanted, often politely ceding our initial choices to each other if we saw someone else who wanted that CD more. An older Russian woman came by and started remarking on how there were probably hundreds of dollars’ worth of CDs in there that someone amassed over years, and now it was just garbage, and how we do the same thing (accumulate and discard) with clothes sometimes. She eventually had a look inside, too.

It is kind of an interesting idea. The CD you used to wait months for and save up for, the CD you were so happy to get and listen to over and over for weeks—years later, that CD is just a toss-away for strangers to rummage through.

What impressed me most about the whole situation is how polite and friendly people were with each other, as they picked up CD after CD. Folks were making small talk and reminiscing back to their own first CD purchases as kids. Even though everyone at one point or another audibly toyed with the notion of taking the whole stash and selling it to Amoeba (a local used music store), no one actually did. We all just picked the CDs we wanted and then went on our way. It wasn’t a madhouse. It was civil.

At that moment, scrounging around for musical scraps, I felt a part of a community, even though I didn’t know these people, I didn’t know their names, I probably wouldn’t see them ever again, and if I did I probably wouldn’t recognize them (“Hey, it’s you! Remember that time we were looking through the same cardboard box of CDs back in 2009?”). It’s amazing how a “community” can form around free stuff. It can even form for only a matter of minutes and then quickly dissipate. Almost like a flash mob. But less organized.

It’s also kind of funny how people would make remarks about the CD collection’s owner. Is it a guy? Is it a girl? Why does the owner have such eclectic tastes? You try to imagine, based on a collection of CDs, what this person is like. Would you be friends with her or him? Who owns a Rick Astley album, let alone two? Berlin had more than one greatest hit?

If I ever do get rid of the rest of my CD collection, maybe instead of selling it, I’ll put it in a large cardboard box and install a hidden camera, so I can see what people say about me while they’re taking my music. It’d be an interesting experiment.

Now that I’ve had my HP Mini for a couple of weeks, here are a few more things I’ve noticed about it:

• When people said in their reviews that the touchpad buttons on the side meant you have to use two hands, I thought they meant the right hand index finger using the touchpad and the left hand index finger using the button. In fact, it’s better to rest the left hand in normal keyboard position and then pop the left hand thumb down to press the button as needed.
• The touchpad on/off button is stupid. Yes, I know I already said it in my initial review, but now I hate it even more, because it emits a very bright white light that is wholly unnecessary, impossible to turn off, and probably the reason the battery life on the HP Mini is so poor.
• The speaker sound, while loud, is still kind of tinny. I have yet to see a non-Apple laptop (or netbook) have the same full sound that a Macbook or Powerbook internal speaker has. Of course, this isn’t intended to be a multimedia machine, but I do occasionally listen to music on it, and it’d be nice to have it sound less tinny.
• The underside of the netbook gets very hot. Granted, it’s no hotter than the underside of my wife’s Macbook Pro, but it is considerably hotter than the Eee PC 701. Oddly enough, the heat is on the front part of the bottom (near the RAM) and nowhere near the back part of the bottom (near the battery).
• I pretty much never use the webcam. I did try it out, though, just to see what it’s like, and it’s terrible. You need some serious lighting in order to get it to work. I’d say there are probably no conditions under which you could have an ideal video chat with someone on the HP Mini 1120nr with the 10″ screen. If it’s too bright out, you will see mainly your reflection in the screen and not what’s displayed on the screen. If it’s too dark out, the person you’re talking to won’t be able to see you through your webcam. Way to go, HP.

All the positives are still the same. It’s still light. It’s still cute and sleek. The keyboard still feels huge to me. The bootup times are quick. Resume from suspend works. Vanilla Ubuntu 9.04 runs like a champ on it.

Just thought I’d share a few more annoyances, in case anyone’s curious.

I remember when Ubuntu Christian Edition first came on the scene (don’t look for it any more—the project has since been discontinued). There was an uproar in the Ubuntu Linux community. Why are people bringing religion into software? Free software should be bringing people together, not separating them. And, of course, the objection of Why even bother? Can’t you just create a metapackage? Aren’t all these things in the software repositories? Users can just install GnomeSword and DansGuardian themselves.

Religion aside, there seemed to be (and sometimes continues to be) an objection to the very notion that you might take a Linux distribution, change the default packages and artwork in it, and then re-release it as a modified distribution (or “remix” as the Ubuntu folks like to call it, as per their trademark policy). Even now I still see people on the forums asking “Why? Why would you bother? Why can’t you install those packages yourself?”

To answer this question, let’s imagine Ubuntu stopped distributing itself the way it does now. Right now, the default Ubuntu comes as a CD that has a live session that runs off RAM, and if you want to install it to your hard drive, you can do so. Both the live session and the fresh install give you a set of applications—a web browser, an email client, a bittorrent client, a word processor, an image editor, etc. What if Ubuntu stopped doing that? What if they said “Eh. People can just install applications themselves. Let’s just give them a command prompt after installation”?

Well, I actually know some Ubuntu users would be thrilled with that. There is a reason, though, why the mini.iso is less popular than the Desktop CD .iso, and it’s not just because the Desktop CD is the main download on the Ubuntu website.

Defaults matter.

I can’t tell you how many Windows users I see with the taskbar on the bottom and a green rolling hill with a blue sky for the desktop wallpaper. People use Internet Explorer because it is the default web browser in Windows. A lot of Ubuntu users like Gnome because it has two panels instead of one. Guess what, people—Gnome can easily have one panel. Just delete the bottom panel (or the top one).

Have you ever taken a default installation and tweaked it to be exactly the way you want it? For some people, that can be just a couple of minutes. For others, it can take hours. I’m not kidding.

What if you felt the default Ubuntu packages weren’t a good way to introduce Ubuntu to folks interested in trying Linux? Would you carry around a live CD with you and then say “Hold on. Hold on. I’m going to boot this up, but it’ll take me about forty-five minutes to make this interface presentable and install a bunch of packages… oh, which may not fit in your 512 MB of RAM”? Wouldn’t it be far more effective to have a live CD with Ubuntu exactly the way you want it?

I recently created my own Ubuntu remix called the Ubuntu HP Mini Remix. Yes, you can do all those things in Ubuntu after installation (fix sound, make sound settings stick, have wireless resume more quickly after suspend, consolidate panels to make room for more vertical real estate), but it involves editing configuration text files and doing a lot of annoying little tweaks.

And some folks with HP Minis haven’t been able to get those tweaks working. Maybe it’d be good if I just gave them an .iso they could use right away that had those tweaks in them?

More importantly, though, what’s the harm? You don’t have to use my remix. No one does. In fact, if I were the only person using my remix, I’d still consider it worth the effort. It doesn’t take anything away from Ubuntu. I’m not a developer or programmer. I’m not a graphics artist. The time and energy I put into my remix would not benefit vanilla Ubuntu, since the tweaks I’m making are specifically for the HP Mini 1120nr. Yes, there are some bugs that could be fixed, but I’m not fixing bugs. I’m employing workarounds for those bugs.

Remixes are a good way to make easily available to a niche population a set of default packages that its members can install on multiple systems or demonstrate as live sessions on multiple systems without them having to make an hour’s worth of tweaks to get going.

Defaults matter. That’s why remixes matter.

This is a follow-up to my previous post about Macs (trying to provide an unbiased view). The question of Mac v. PC (“PC” meaning “Windows PC,” unfortunately; Linux seems to get left out of the picture completely) often comes up for Windows users thinking about whether they should switch to Mac or not. So the natural flip side to that question is: should you stay with Windows? Is it even worth exploring alternatives like Mac or Linux?

Well, obviously if you like Windows and enjoy using it, you should stick with it. But it’s not usually those who enjoy Windows who ask about Mac or Linux. It’s usually the dissatisfied Windows users—the ones who imagine Mac or Linux offer a perfect world of trouble-free computing.

So, to you restless Windows users, I have a few questions for you (answer honestly):

• Is vast consumer hardware selection important to you, especially for base models (not as much peripherals)? Would the thought of researching hardware compatibility before a purchase make you shudder?
• Do you use any Windows-only software? (AutoCAD, OneNote)
• Do you own a Zune?
• Do you often like to play the latest commercial game on your computer (not on a gaming console)?
• Do you hate learning new ways of doing things?

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, I would highly recommend you stay with Windows. If you worry about Windows crashes and security issues, here is what you should do: back up everything, reinstall Windows, set up a limited user account you use all the time, set Windows updates to install automatically, use Firefox with the NoScript extension, educate yourself about social engineering, and stop pirating! Do all that, and you won’t have to deal with (useless) antivirus software, excessive crashing or slowness, and various security compromises.

Now, if you answered “No” to all of those questions, then you may actually be a prime candidate for a switch to Mac or Linux. Windows is not a bad product, despite all the bad-mouthing it gets from some Mac and Linux zealots. Unfortunately, though, it has been shoved down students’ and employees’ throats all over the world to the point where a lot of folks are just crying out for alternatives.

There are various reasons (which I outlined in my last post) you might want to switch to Mac OS X. The biggest one I can think of for considering it as a Windows alternative over Linux is if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple has made it difficult to get those devices working without iTunes. The ways to get those working in Linux are complicated and often end up obsolete in the face of firmware upgrades.

You might be a prime candidate for Linux, though, if you are a dissatisfied Windows user who avoids iPods altogether (or has an older-model iPod), especially if you don’t have enough money for a Mac and if you primarily email, web browse, lightly word process, organize photos, and listen to music. Linux can do a lot more than that, too, but if you are a professional graphic designer or video editor, you’re probably better off with a Mac.

The best thing about switching to Linux from Windows is that it can be done in slow steps and for free. You can run Linux inside a Windows session (using portable Ubuntu), you can run Linux as a virtual operating system inside Windows (using VirtualBox or VMWare), you can run Linux as a dual-boot with Windows (using Wubi or a traditional repartitioned drive), you can run Linux as a “live” session that doesn’t affect your hard drive at all (just using your RAM and a CD or USB drive), and, of course, you can install Linux right over Windows (though I would recommend that only as a last step).

I’d really like people to get rid of these stupid OS (operating system) wars. Mac isn’t better. Windows isn’t better. Linux isn’t better. There is no better. There is only better for you. It’s all about assessing your needs and your means. If you need Windows-only programs, you’re going to need it (Sorry, but Wine does not work 100%). If you like Windows, use it. If you like Mac OS X, use it. If you like Linux, use it. You actually can use all three (you don’t necessarily have to choose).

At the end of the day, an operating system is only a platform to run applications and manage devices. If your operating system runs the applications you need and manages the devices you own, then you’re set. Switching from Windows to something else isn’t a magic bullet that brings you to computing nirvana. My wife is happy she switched to Mac, and she would never go back to Windows, but she still has problems from time to time. Likewise, I’m happy I switched to Linux, and I would never go back to Windows, but I still have problems from time to time. Computers aren’t magic. They’re wonderful machines that sometimes have problems.