There are many ways to get Ubuntu Linux. You can find more details about that here.

If you run into any problems or have any questions, the folks at the Ubuntu Forums are very helpful and friendly.
I will not be answering any support questions posted as comments here.

Step 1: Boot up Ubuntu

With the Ubuntu CD in your optical drive or with the Ubuntu USB plugged into your computer, make sure your BIOS is set to boot from CD or USB before your hard drive. You can usually enter your BIOS settings by pressing F1, F2, F9, F10, F12, Esc, or Del during bootup, depending on the kind of computer you have.

After Ubuntu boots up, you’ll be asked if you want to try Ubuntu or install it. You definitely want to just try it at this point.

Step 2: Install the password reset software

Installing software on Ubuntu is a bit different from installing software on Windows. Instead of going to a website to download setup files, you just tell the software package manager what you want installed, and it fetches it for you off some servers. It’s a lot like the iTunes App Store or Android Market.

This does assume that you have a working internet connection (wired preferred, but wireless can work, too). If, for some reason, your internet connection isn’t working on the computer you want to reset the password for, you can also download the chntpw .deb using another computer, transfer it over via USB, and then double-click it to install it.

First we want to make sure we have the proper software sources enabled to install chntpw.

Go to System > Administration > Software Sources

Make sure both the Universe and Multiverse repositories are checked (or “ticked,” if you’re not American). Click Close and then, when prompted, click Reload.

Wait for the information about available software to reload.

Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager

(Note: to those of you who have installed software in Ubuntu before, you actually do—at least as of Ubuntu 10.04—have to go to Synaptic to install chntpw. You can’t install it through Ubuntu Software Center).

Press Control-F or click on the Search button to get the search dialogue up. Then search for chntpw.

(Note: you may be tempted to type chntpw into the search filter but it won’t show up there, since Synaptic hasn’t had time to rebuild the search index for quick filtering.)

Once chntpw pops up in the search results, right-click it and select Mark for Installation.

Click Apply, and then, when prompted, click Apply again.

Wait for the Synaptic to download and install chntpw.

Step 3: Mount your Windows drive

In order for you to reset your Windows password, you have to make the Ubuntu live session know that your Windows drive is available for use. This process is called “mounting.”

To mount Windows, just click on Places and then select your drive. It will be listed by the size of the drive (in this example, 80 GB).

Step 4: Reset your password

chntpw is a terminal-based (not point-and-click) application, so to use it, we’ll have to open up a command-line terminal. Don’t be intimidated. I’ll walk you through the process.

To open the terminal, go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal

I’m going to be offering a lot of explanation for those who aren’t experienced with the terminal and commands, but if you want to just skip over all that stuff, feel free to just pay attention to the terminal commands and ignore the explanations.

First, you’re going to cd (change directories) to the right Windows directory.

Start typing cd /media/ and then hit the Tab key, and it’ll autocomplete with the address of your mounted Windows drive.
Then type W and hit Tab again to get to either Windows (Windows 7) or WINDOWS (Windows XP). Yes, the terminal is case-sensitive, so upper- and lower-case matters!
Type S or s and hit Tab again to get System32 or system32 (again depending on whether it’s Windows 7 or Windows XP—I forget which it is for Windows Vista).
And do the same for config.

Tab completion makes things a lot simpler, so you don’t have to type every single word out. It also avoids the whole typo issue, in case you aren’t a good typist.

Once you’ve gotten to cd /media/name-of-your-windows-drive/Windows/System32/config or cd /media/name-of-your-windows-drive/WINDOWS/system32/config, hit Enter.

You should then type in sudo chntpw -u username SAM, where username is your actual username. For example, if your username is susan, it should be sudo chntpw -u susan SAM

After you type that in, hit Enter, and you’ll see a whole bunch of terminal output, most of which you can ignore:

This part is important, though:

I would highly recommend typing 1 to blank the password instead of editing the password. After you type that, hit Enter, and you should see

Type y and hit Enter to confirm the change. Once you see

then you’re done.

Now you can reboot, and you can log into your admin account with a blank password. Once you’re logged in, you can go to the Control Panel to change your password to something else—something you can remember.

If you’re curious, you can see an older version of this page.

Here’s one, for example:
Issue 1664: Gmail should allow choosing the From: address on an account that has multiple addresses
Send As Feature in Gmail

For years, I’ve been using Thunderbird as my email client. I used it on Windows. Then I used it on Ubuntu. Then I used it on Mac OS X. Recently, inspired by my move to an Android phone, I decided to go as Google as possible. Google Voice. Google Docs. Google Maps. Google Reader. Gmail. There were some things that took adjusting to in Gmail (conversations instead of messages, anyone?), but I didn’t miss Thunderbird as much as I thought I would. Google gives you nigh-unlimited email storage (I don’t see meeting the 7 GB limit any time soon the way my emails are going), and the interface is simple and quick, and easy to use. More importantly, I can aggregate with Gmail a bunch of email accounts into one, just as I would with a traditional desktop email client (like Thunderbird, Mail, Eudora, or Outlook).

In the regular Gmail web interface, you can choose which of these accounts is the default email address (meaning if you compose a new message, that message will have the from: address be that email address unless you choose otherwise), and you can also choose to have all replies sent from the email the original message was sent to. That means if someone sends an email to my church account and I hit Reply, the reply will appear to come from my church account; and if someone sends an email to my home account and I hit Reply, the reply will appear to come from my home account.

Pretty nifty feature to have. Too bad it’s missing from Android’s Gmail app. In the Android Gmail app, if you compose a new message, it will always come from your Gmail email address, regardless of what your setting is on the web client. And if you reply to a message, it will also come from your Gmail address. That makes it pretty much useless to me in terms of writing emails, seeing as how I use my Gmail account to aggregrate other email accounts, and I basically never want emails to appear to come from my Gmail account.

Fortunately, there’s a workaround, but it’s not pretty. The workaround is not to use the Gmail app. Just use the Gmail web interface in your favorite Android browser (Browser, Opera, xScope, Dolphin, etc.). If you use the mobile version (which is the default) of the web client, you won’t actually get to see your from: address, but it’ll still operate the way it’s supposed to (I tested it on both a reply and a new email). You can switch to the desktop (or “classic”) mode of the web client if you actually want to see the from: address.

Now, Google, how difficult would it really be to fix this problem?

Yet two years ago when Asus was just starting to be successful with the Eee PC netbook (which came preinstalled with a version of Linux, which Microsoft had to stop right away by resurrecting XP for the first of many times to come), that’s what a lot of the press coverage assumed. Geez. I mean, a lack of advertising campaign or in-person models to try out in the store couldn’t have anything to do with Linux netbooks not selling. It must be that Linux is too hard to use. It must be that Linux isn’t ready for consumers. It must really be that consumers just prefer Windows when given the choice.

Well, there is some truth to that in that the Linux distro Asus chose to put on the Eee PC was essentially crippled (not at all like Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Debian, OpenSuSE, or any of the other popular distros of the time). It wasn’t even vanilla Xandros. It was a custom Xandros that could be customized only through pasting cryptic commands in the terminal.

Nevertheless, if they’d marketed it correctly, Linux could have been a success. The problem with Linux on “the desktop” (or the laptop or netbook) is the myth of meritocracy. You don’t win by being the best. You win by marketing.

Think about it.

When the iPad was announced, critics focused on the features it didn’t have (no webcam, no Flash, no USB ports), but Apple with its clever marketing department convinced the hoards that the device was magic, so the hoards bought it. If a Linux tablet had been released without Flash, people would have just laughed and said “This is the reason Linux will never succeed—they need to realize the masses use Flash.” But Apple releases a tablet and all of a sudden people are actually saying Flash isn’t necessary. HTML5 is suddenly the wave of the future. Apps for websites are suddenly better than just going to the websites themselves.

I also see a lot of Linux poo-pooers claim Linux doesn’t have any apps, and that Windows users have certain killer apps they need, and that’s why Linux won’t succeed. Well, when Android first started, it had very few apps. In fact, for the end of 2008 and all through 2009, iPhone fanatics kept pointing out how many hundreds of thousands of apps the iTunes App Store had compared to the few thousand Android had. Well, Android now has almost 100,000 apps. If this pace continues, the iTunes App Store and Android Market will probably have the same number of apps by this time next year. The Linux desktop (as opposed to server or embedded) has been around since… the late 90s? Android has been around since 2008. The Linux desktop isn’t mainstream but Android is.

What should we learn from all this? Marketing matters. Being able to test a physical product out yourself matters. Dell selling badly marketed (or even anti-marketed) Ubuntu models on its website isn’t going to sell Ubuntu preinstalled in great numbers, nor are relatively obscure vendors like System76 or ZaReason without a proper store front or brand name recognition.

I would love it if all the bugs in Ubuntu (or some other popular Linux distro) could be fixed. I would love it if some more attention would be paid to ease of use or to making more applications available in the software repositories. I would love that. But that won’t fix Bug #1. If Linux wants to make a dent in the desktop/laptop/netbook world, it needs to give up the idea of being good enough and start embracing the idea of crafting, shipping, and marketing a product—yes, one people can try out in a brick-and-mortar store. In other words, what I said two years ago is still true.

So first I went to the Ubuntu wiki to find out if it was worth my time. According to the Macbook Pro 3,1 page, everything works pretty much out of the box with Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). That was encouraging. Then I read up the generic Apple Intel installation instructions. They didn’t sound too complicated. Install rEFIt, repartition the hard drive, install Ubuntu in the new partitioned space. Easy, right? Well, not so easy. Here are a few bumps I encountered along the way:

• rEFIt didn’t install correctly. After you install it, you should reboot and see the rEFIt menu. No menu. So I had to do some digging and found out there is a script you can run in the terminal to sort of reinstall rEFIt.
• I couldn’t resize my hard drive through Disk Utility or BootCamp. Both failed, claiming there wasn’t enough free space, even though there was plenty (at least 70 GB after I backed up my files to an external hard drive and deleted them, planning to copy them back later). So, believe it or not, I took the hours to completely reinstall Mac OS X from scratch and then repartition the drive.
• Since Ubuntu can’t reliably write to HFS+, I put my music, pictures, etc. on a shared FAT32 partition. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t really dig that. If I try to skip to the next song, I get about five seconds of the rainbow circle of death before the next song will actually play. The symlinks from the FAT32 partition also broke at first, too, because initially it was mounted as /Volumes/Storage but then it suddenly became /Volumes/STORAGE. After fixing everything to point to the upper-case mount point, the links appear to be working again.
• Ubuntu would not install the first five times I tried. That’s right. I tried five times. It kept failing in the middle of the installation, claiming the CD was bad or the CD drive was bad or the laptop was too hot. All of those things could have been true to some degree. The CD had a little bit of dirt on it, which I tried to clean off but couldn’t get completely clean. The CD drive was definitely bad. In OS X it was pretty good at reading commercially produced CDs and DVDs but would sometimes reject homebrews (it would spin and try to read for a minute or two and then just spit the disc out). Also, unlike my wife’s new Macbook Pro, this old MBP overheats like nobody’s business. You could probably fry an egg on it. Eventually, I did something that worked, and I’m not sure which part of it did it. I turned the computer off for the night (let it cool down completely). Then I immediately booted it up and while Ubuntu was installing, I never left it alone. I played gBrainy. I looked in the file browser. I changed various settings. I didn’t let the CD rest and give up. So I don’t know if it was having it cool or constantly engaging the live CD session, but eventually Ubuntu did get installed.
• I installed the Nvidia driver, but then Hardware Drivers instructed me to use a more recent driver. After that, suspend didn’t resume. But then I removed the old driver and rebooted, and resume from suspend worked fine, as did Compiz.
• The touchpad works extremely well for two-finger scrolling, but the touch sensitivity is a bit much (and can’t be adjusted, as far as I can tell), so I have to be careful not to tap the touchpad accidentally when trying to scroll; otherwise, I end up clicking. If I turn off tapping to click, then I can’t right-click by tapping down two fingers. A bit annoying.
• Control is a rather small key on the Mac keyboard, but for most navigation it’s used more often than the Cmd key (the Super key, for all intents and purposes). The key placement is a bit odd when you’re used to coming from Mac OS X or even from a regular Windows keyboard. Takes a bit of getting used to.
• I thought Skype was broken, but it wasn’t. I set my account to offline instead of invisible, and apparently if you’re offline you can’t do the Skype test call (it just fails immediately). I didn’t know that, so I was trying all these crazy fixes like uninstalling PulseAudio or whatever. Turns out it just works fine if you’re invisible or online.
• The Picasa from the Google repositories is broken with the latest Lucid kernel. If you download the .deb straight from Google, though, it works just fine.
• I had a 32-bit Ubuntu CD already, so I didn’t really want to bother downloading 64-bit Ubuntu to take advantage of all 4 GB of RAM (and waste another blank CD, since Macs can’t boot from USB). I guess that would have been interesting to try, but 32-bit works quite snappily with only a bit more than 3 GB of RAM being recognized.

Overall, I have to say Ubuntu works quite well on a Mac. I think it even runs a bit cooler, too (still very hot but maybe not hot enough to fry an egg on). My plan is to keep playing around with both (sometimes boot into OS X, sometimes boot into Ubuntu). With a FAT32 partition for files, I have that luxury, except that I will have to be in OS X to import into iTunes and iPhoto—Rhythmbox and Picasa on Ubuntu will automatically watch folders for new files.

Here are a few examples:

• Me: As some of my Ubuntu-using readers are dismayed about, I recently switched my primary operating system to Mac OS X on a Macbook Pro (still using Ubuntu on the netbook, still will keep updating Ubuntu tutorials). At the same time, I have an Android phone, and I will not be giving it up for an iPhone until Steve Jobs says (in all sincerity, not as a joke) “I love Google Voice and I think it’s the app everyone should install on the iPhone!” To make the most of my Android experience, I use GMail also, even to check my non-GMail accounts (via POP3). And, of course, I use Google as my main search engine.
• My wife: She’s an Apple user through and through. She uses a Mac at work, and she uses a Mac at home. She has an iPhone. She uses Mail, not Thunderbird or GMail. Safari (not Chrome) is her main web browser. At the same time, she has a Nook (Android-based) e-reader, and Google is still her main search engine.
• My pastor: Even this Apple hipster recently traded up his iPhone for an Android phone (albeit an iPhone clone), but he plans to get an iPad to keep up his “street cred.”
• My sister-in-law: She uses a Mac Mini with iTunes and has an iPod, but she also has an Android phone and a GMail and Google Voice account.
• My boss: She uses Google for just about everything. It’s her search engine. GMail is her email. She just got started with Google Voice the other day. She uses Picasa to organize her photos. But she’s an iPhone user.

In fact, I would say, at least among my social circle, the last example is the most typical. Yes, I know a lot of iPhone users. Before they had iPhones, they had iPods. Some of them still use iPods separately from their iPhones. But Google is the main search engine. GMail is the email. Google Voice is starting to catch on. Even if you don’t have an Android phone, there may be other Android devices (like a Nook) that you pick up. Even if you love Google, you may still have an iPhone.

Who’s going to win? Apple or Google? I say both will win. In some ways, both have already won.

P.S. I do know a couple of iPhone users interested in Google Voice. Anyone with a non-jailbroken iPhone who’s been using the two together for a while willing to share the experience of using the Google Voice mobile page in Safari? Pros and cons?

The other day, I had the opportunity to read a book on her Nook, and it was quite a pleasurable experience. It was a lot better than I thought it would be. I know she prefers clicking the hard button on the side to turn pages. I found I liked turning pages by lightly flicking to the right or left on the touchscreen (after it has dimmed—before it dims, a touch will select a menu item). Even though the Kindle gets a lot more press, the Nook looks a lot better (my wife had some random person on the bus ask her if the Nook was an Apple product) and it supports the ePub format.

What will happen with dedicated eReaders, though? My guess is, unfortunately, they will remain a relatively niche product. I don’t think there is a huge percentage of the populace who reads a novel a day. I think most people read only a little bit at a time. So the eye strain issue of a backlit screen is moot. I don’t agree with people who say “Lots of people stare at backlit screens at work all the time and don’t have eye strain.” I actually know quite a lot of people who do have eye strain from staring at laptop screens. In any case, a lot of laptop users at work are using their laptops to do various small tasks instead of just staring at it reading one long manuscript. And, really, that is how most people will be reading eBooks—a few pages at a time on an iPhone, an Android phone, or an iPad or other touchscreen tablet.

The bright colors and touchscreen appeal will definitely beat out the pragmatic eInk technology on dedicated eReaders… at least for most people. I think my wife can read sometimes two or three novels a day. For her, eInk makes a lot of sense. I don’t read nearly as much as she does, but I think eInk may make sense for me, too.

Tell you what, though—if they can make an eInk screen that is in full color and touchscreen enabled, that would kick some serious electronic book butt.

What makes Pixar movies compelling is that they have good stories, good characters, good animation, and good jokes. It all comes together. Lately, though, I’ve noticed their internal conflicts have been a bit dull.

For those of you unfamiliar with fiction terminology, there are two major kinds of conflict in a story—external conflict and internal conflict. An external conflict involves two external forces (usually separate characters or groups of characters) fighting against one another.

If your character is trying to escape from a psychotic killer, trying to get out of debt, or trying to find the perfect mate, your character is involved in an external conflict. While these external conflicts can be mildly entertaining or visually stimulating to watch, they are not very intellectually stimulating.

If your character isn’t sure whether someone is a psychotic killer or not or whether she wants to escape or not, if your character is thinking about whether she might embrace debt or try to get out of it, if your character is starting to doubt how satisfied she’ll be with the perfect mate, then your character is involved in an internal conflict. Should I stay or should I go? Who am I? Do I really love this person? What’s wrong with my life? These struggles are struggles we can relate to and involve a lot of introspection and tough choices, a lot of times with no easy right answer.

Without giving away the plots of any movies, I’ll just say the last two Pixar movies I saw had both internal and external conflicts, but the internal ones were dealt with quite quickly, and they actually weren’t even dealt with at all. Let’s just say if you’re wondering “Should I stay at this job or not?” and then you get fired, you didn’t really have to make a choice, did you? If your girlfriend may be a normal person or a serial killer, and that thought haunts you, her coming at you with a butcher knife pretty much puts the doubt out of your mind.

Pixar, your jokes are still funny. Your animation is always improving. And your characters are still interesting. Please keep them interesting by fully exploring those internal conflicts. Don’t just make the internal conflicts moot because the external conflicts involve chase scenes and characters who seemed nice at first but turned out to be totally evil.

About Apple Hardware
We bought this computer back in January 2008, less than 2.5 years ago. At the time, it was US$2000, quite a significant purchase price for a computer. Given some people’s much-vaunted claims about Apple computers’ “superior hardware,” the real truth is that Apple uses generic components. Nvidia graphics card. Fujitsu SATA hard drive. We’ve upgraded the RAM on two Apple laptops using generic RAM from NewEgg (much cheaper than the Apple Store RAM), and it works just as well as the Apple RAM. There is nothing special about the Apple internal hardware. The external hardware is a work of art—well-constructed and pleasant to look at. But an Nvidia card in an Apple laptop is about the same as an Nvidia card in a Windows or Linux laptop.

Graphics Card Failure
So last week, I was in the middle of using this laptop when the screen started rapidly flickering white like a strobe light while the mouse turned into the rainbow circle of death (also known as the beachball). I could move the mouse, but I couldn’t click on anything. Eventually, the only way I could get it to stop was a forced shutdown. After I rebooted, everything seemed fine for an hour or so. Then I got the crazy flickering again. I did a forced shutdown. This time, though, when I rebooted, I got a failure message saying that I had to reboot. I wasn’t happy about this. In between various successful reboots, failures, and flickerings, I did Google searches and tried every suggestion I could find. I reset the PRAM. I took out the RAM and put it back in. I tried using the laptop without the battery. I tried using a lower screen resolution. Nothing worked. After a certain point, the display just totally died. No flickering. Nothing. Dead.

At that point, both my wife and I had considered the laptop gone. $2000 down the drain, and after only two years and a bit. It was past the manufacturer’s warranty, and we didn’t have Apple Care (as a matter of policy, we do not buy service plans, because they are generally a waste of money, and if we added up all the money we would have wasted on all those service plans, we could easily just purchase a new whatever-electronics-device-is-broken). I decided, since we gave up on it anyway to do just a little bit more Google searching, and I came across this Apple support article: MacBook Pro: Distorted video or no video issues, which says:

In July 2008, NVIDIA publicly acknowledged a higher than normal failure rate for some of their graphics processors due to a packaging defect. At that same time, NVIDIA assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected. However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected. If the NVIDIA graphics processor in your MacBook Pro has failed, or fails within three years of the original date of purchase, a repair will be done free of charge, even if your MacBook Pro is out of warranty.

I wasn’t too hopeful Apple would honor this, but I figured I had nothing to lose. It was a dead laptop. If Apple wouldn’t honor this article, I would still have a dead laptop. If they would honor it, though, I would have a resurrected laptop.

The Genius Bar
I went to the Apple website, created an Apple ID account, made an appointment at the Genius Bar for a couple of days later. Then my wife and I went to the Apple Store at the appointed time. I was perfectly ready to be condescended to. I was perfectly ready for them to treat me like an idiot. Fortunately, no such thing happened. The “genius” (I forget her name) was friendly and simply asked me what was wrong. I explained that the graphics card was dead because of this problem (I handed her a printout of that support article) and that I had already tried resetting the PRAM and was pretty confident it was the graphics card, since the laptop still made the bootup noise and the Caps Lock light could turn on and off. She seemed to believe me but just wanted to run one quick test. She plugged in a firewire external hard drive into the computer and booted up the laptop while holding down the S key, explaining to me that she was just running a graphics card test on it. She then plugged the external hard drive into another computer, opened up a log file, and confirmed that the graphics card was indeed dead. She asked if I had Apple Care. I explained nervously that I didn’t need it (according to the article, I shouldn’t). She said she knew I didn’t but just wanted to know if I had it. Odd.

So she printed up a work order for $0.00, and I signed it. She said the part wasn’t in but would be in a few business days, and that the store would call me when the repair was done. That was Saturday.

Today, the store called and said the laptop was fixed. I picked it up. Painless process. It’s working fine now. That’s how customer service should be. I had a very pleasant experience with the Apple Store Genius Bar. I don’t know if they’re actually geniuses, but they sure are friendly. That said, I am disappointed that Apple appears to blame Nvidia for providing a bad video card, and then when Apple replaces the dead video card, guess what they replace it with—exactly the same video card. So the offending graphics card is the Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT. And after the Macbook Pro was fixed, the new graphics card is also the Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out if you replace a faulty model with the same model, it’s likely to be faulty again. Hopefully, we can get at least another two years out of this thing…

Here are some of the events you can watch, courtesy of the Google search engine:
Which Is Worse? Racism, or Sexism, or Asking Which Is Worse?
Sexism Is Worse Than Racism
Do victims of racism or sexism suffer more?

I don’t get why people get in stupid debates about whether racism or sexism is “worse” and whether black men face more obstacles than white women face. It’s silly. I’ve created a very simple illustration to show why it’s silly to entertain such a line of inquiry.

Take a look at this square. Let’s say that being closer to the top of the square means… better, whatever that is (more opportunities, less hate, more money—however you define “better”). Let’s also say that being closer to the bottom of the square means… worse, however you define “worse.”

So how would you then describe the situation of the dark-green stars in relation to the light-green circles? Is one simply in a better situation than the other? I don’t think so, since even such a relatively simplistic illustration shows more complexity than the “sexism is worse” or the “racism is worse” crowd would have you believe. I don’t get why people who have presumably taken geometry in secondary and/or primary school can get into such linear ways of thinking (“I’m ahead, you’re behind” or “You’re ahead, I’m behind”).