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Phil's Blogservations
Friday, March 30, 2007
Posted by philgomes 12:40 PM
"Why Do You Use Linux, Phil?""Why Do You Use Linux, Phil?"
A lot of people ask me why I use Linux (specifically, the Kubuntu distro) at home. This question usually comes after I tell some tale of a botched upgrade, munged package dependencies, or a vexing incompatibility, ultimately resulting in a desperate nocturnal call or IM session with my buddy and Linux guru Tim Tuck.
The answer doesn't get more basic than this: Just as some people dig Windows PCs and others the Mac platform, I prefer to tinker with Linux.
Here's why, in two stories...
First... When I was about six years old, my Dad brought home our first computer. It was a Tandy TRS-80. A cassette drive and, later, dual 5.25" floppies whirred and clicked to load the operating system into its teeny RAM. For that effort, you were presented with a blinking cursor.
The computer stared at you, almost challenging you.
"Yeah? What you got, beeyotch?"
You quickly flashed your gang sign with a command that was either caveman-like in syntax or completely cryptic. And you had better get it just right, too. After all, as they would later tell us in the Chabot Community College computer summer class for pre-teen nerds, satellites have de-orbited and even burned up due to missing #'s, @'s, and .'s in their instructions.
It wasn't long before Dad brought home the hard drive. It was beige, the size of a breadbox, with two lights: one for "power on" (in case you couldn't tell by the noise) and the other indicating disk activity. It held 10MB and cost my Dad something like $5,000.
*gasp* Would we ever fill it up?
Naaaah... Never! And, in any case, 640k was enough RAM for everybody back then...
(It was a few weeks before I figured out that the point of a hard drive was that you didn't take out the disk inside and, unbelievably, that was supposed to be a good thing. At the time, though, I thought that was useless — more of an annoyance than a feature. After all, I could take a floppy to a DOS/BASIC-running friend and play my games over there. Even swap and copy games.)
Second tale... Many years later, I was an associate sysadmin in my college library. We had about 50 PCs running everything from DOS 3 to Windows 3.11. I joked that we were the east bay branch of the Computer History Museum. Patrons would sometimes complain about the grinding fans of the older 286s. Certain that they'd complain more if there were a paucity of computer stations, we kept them in service.
In order to provide our patrons with a certain periodical search resource, we had to buy an IBM PC server and a license for pre-SCO Novell UnixWare. (The software wouldn't run on anything else, we were told.)
That sucked up a lot of budget. So, for a departmental email server, my boss (Martin) directed my colleague (Andy) to go download Linux.
Martin had been using Linux as his main computer for some time. I remember his fondness for the X window system, an open-source GUI that, among other features, offered multiple virtual computer desktops. "I'm never going back to just one desktop at a time," he said in a faux mad-scientist stage whisper. "NEVER!"
An FTP site had Linux (Slackware, I think) on a series of floppy images. I showed up to work to find Andy laboriously downloading those images and using the rawrite program to copy the images onto those floppies — plain old copying the bits just wouldn't do and rawrite put the bits in exactly the spots on the disk they were supposed to be. (Sadly, CD-writers were not yet commodities.)
After cobbling together what was to become our most powerful PC to that point (a Pentium-75MHz with 16MB of RAM and a just-sub-gigabyte hard drive), we set to work installing the system. The boss named the system "Simon", after a friend of his. (Had I stayed longer, I would've insisted on "Alvin" and "Theodore.")
Simon didn't have a GUI. It only operated via shell commands. Primarily, we used it for email. Some of us experimented with web publishing. I wrote a script that helped me track the maintenance rotation on every PC, monitor, and peripheral in the library.
We took a particular pride in that machine, I believe, because we felt we had a bigger role in its creation. In some ways, it kind of felt like packing dirt into the shape of a human and breathing life into it.
Why am I bringing all of this up?
Because, back then computers held a sense of wonder — magical boxes that had marvelous capabilities... if, that is, you knew their magic incantations.
("Eenie meenie chili beanie, the spirits are about to speak...")
As the efforts of Microsoft, IBM, and Apple not only made PCs essential business tools, but — thanks to clone-enabling BIOS companies like Phoenix and Award — even made them mainstream, some of the magic was lost. (Neal Stephenson explains it better than I ever could.)
My current home PC, a Tim-supplied Shuttle PC nicknamed "Daria", has had its Linux partition re-installed about four times during the course of my trial-and-error exercises. ("Daria" does have a Windows partition, which I put on there to satisfy the odd game craving.) Last weekend, I upgraded to the latest, stable version of Kubuntu Linux and, after experiencing some truly psychedelic output on my monitor, eventually got it to speak to my new nVidia card. I considered it a small victory.
About a fifth to a quarter of my scarce time with "Daria" has gone towards making the machine productive, as opposed to actual productivity. That said, there's a ton I've learned during this process.
And I wouldn't change a thing.
I realize that my experience described above is not for everyone, or even a handful or people. Most computer users want it to just work — especially after an entire workday in front of a computer — and don't care much for tinkering under the hood.
I can tell you that it can be a helluva lotta fun, though, with all of the related frustrations and victories all along the way.
(Disclosures: Not that it really has much bearing on this post, but my employer works with Microsoft on various lines of business, including the Xbox and the recent consumer launch of Windows Vista. I think that, in the dim and distant past, Edelman did some work for Apple as well.)
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This is the blog of Phil Gomes, SVP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL.
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