Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

When I first started preferring Linux to Mac OS (which was my main OS for about six years before I started using Linux), my main motivation was tweaking the desktop — I started to hate the Dock’s lack of textual information, and I discovered that I could modify the look and feel of the fluxbox window manager to my tastes far more easily than any other desktop environment I’d used. That’s why it’s kind of ironic that I’m now using the less-customizable Gnome on all my installations (though I’m far from wedded to it — anyone with window manager recommendations, or tweaking-Gnome-a-bit-beyond-the-usual tutorials, please weigh in in the comments!).

There’s a lot of ease-of-use to like about Gnome, though. One thing I’m particularly psyched about is the keyboard shortcuts menu. Not only does it make it trivial to set up the function keys (volume control, play/pause, etc.) on my laptop to do what they look like they should do, but it’s customizable for far less obvious purposes. You can essentially assign any key combo or function key to any action. I already have my most commonly-used applications — the terminal and Firefox — as ready and obvious icons on the top panel, but who wants to use the mouse to go all the way up there? I have F2 open a new terminal and F3 open a new instance of Firefox. Every one of the several times a day I hit F2 to get a new terminal window, I smile a little thinking of the several seconds I’m saving.

And then I use those seconds to refresh LiveJournal. Every productive action has an unproductive reaction, I guess?

A few weeks ago I decided to buy myself a new laptop. I did everything wrong, and I was aware of it; I didn’t research my hardware needs, I didn’t research driver compatibility, I didn’t comparison-shop on the internet, and I reneged on my promise to myself to vote with my dollars for manufacturers who offer pre-installed open systems as an option (sorry, Dell!). I just woke up knowing that after months without a functional laptop, essentially tethered to my desktop workstation, I wanted a laptop and I wanted it that day.

So I found myself at Best Buy. I asked an employee whether I could buy a computer that didn’t come with Windows or MacOS pre-installed, and predictably, he said no and seemed confused at the question. This was what I expected. But then, as I asked him to unlock a couple models so I could see how they felt, we had the following exchange:

Me: It looks like the specs on this one are a little better for the price.
Best Buy Dude: Yeah, and you’ll need that three gigs of RAM to run Vista.
Me: Oh, I’m not going to be running Vista.
BBD [startled]: Oh! Uh… you know the success rate for installing a new operating system is basically zero, right? For people trying to put XP on these?
Me: Oh, I’m not going to be running XP either. I’m going to be installing Ubuntu.
BBD: What?
Me: Ubuntu? Linux?
BBD: What’s that?
Me: It’s an operating system. You should look it up, it’s free.
BBD: So what is it, is it like, a word processor?
Me: … It’s an operating system. You should look it up!
BBD: Yeah, OK, maybe.

Yikes! I don’t expect salespeople at big box stores to be free software geeks by a long shot, but you’d think people who help people pick out computers for a living would at least have a vague grasp of what’s going on in the tech world. Or at least, you know, know what an operating system is.

So with the release of Hardy Heron, an Ubuntu-using blogger puts the new system to the “girlfriend test” — he gives his Windows-familiar but Ubuntu-n00b girlfriend a list of tasks to accomplish, and watches her try to accomplish them (she’s able to do most, but not all, of the tasks without any instruction).

This blog post has gotten a lot of attention in just a few days, and with good reason — it touches on a lot of hot-button issues regarding Linux and Ubuntu. The blogger says, “Linux won’t truly be ready for the desktop until someone computer illiterate can sit down at a the computer and with little effort do what they want to do” — and he considers his intelligent, tech-savvy girlfriend’s failure at a few of the tasks to be a sign that this isn’t the case. This is a problematic assessment — many of the tasks he chose are the kinds of things only power users even think to do (Photoshop a picture, download a torrent). A truly computer-illiterate user or even an ordinary non-power-user would be interested in much more basic tasks — e.g. I installed Ubuntu on my mom’s laptop a few months ago (hi, Mom!), and she hasn’t had to ask me for tech support, presumably because she only uses her computer for a handful of things and those things are easy to do.

That said, this type of test is definitely a useful way to see what aspects of the interface are more and less user-friendly; for example, installing Flash, which is one of the first few things I do on any new installation, is completely non-obvious and requires command-line usage — not a good idea for something many non-savvy users will want to do right away.

Of course, there’s always going to be the double-standard folks who will use any non-user-friendly aspect of a Linux distro as an example of how “Linux is too hard”, while ignoring any program that’s buggy, interface that’s confusing, or task that requires the command line on another OS. Their counterparts are the “Linux isn’t Windows!!!” people (”Linux isn’t Windows, so don’t expect someone used to Windows to be able to use it easily”) — I agree, Linux isn’t and shouldn’t be a clone of Windows, but if you want Windows users to switch to Linux, you should care about making Linux easy to use for people used to Windows, just like if you want new computer users to be able to start out on Linux you should care about making it easy to use for people who haven’t used a computer before. Fortunately we’ve seen a lot of progress in these areas in the past few years, and I’m confident that Linux developers will continue to produce distros that are easier and easier for all levels of users.

Oh, and for the “Linux users don’t have girlfriends”(/”girls don’t use Linux”/”there are no girls on the internet”) people? Get over yourselves. It’s not funny, it’s not original, and it’s not true… in fact, I happen to live with a Linux user who not only has a girlfriend but had her install Flash for him :).

Yesterday I installed Gutsy Gibbon on my boyfriend’s Dell laptop (the Inspiron 9200). I continue to be amazed at how smoothly Ubuntu installations run; wireless (!!!) and printing worked out of the box. The one weird glitch is that at bootup, after the phrase “Starting up…” appears, the load hangs with a blank screen — until you press Ctl-Alt-F2. No idea why, but I’ll keep tinkering.

I also recently switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu on my main desktop workstation, after using Gentoo as my primary operating system for about a year. I picked Gentoo (with fluxbox!) initially because I wanted to start from scratch, know everything on my system, and gain the knowledge and experience that would come from compiling and installing everything myself. And I did — but now I’m ready for a setup where, when I plug in my digital camera, I’m prompted to download pictures instead of digging around in /dev/ looking for the device. I know that if I want to install/uninstall/tweak/configure anything, I have the freedom to do so — the freedom of the GPL!
When I initially put the Ubuntu live disk into my desktop, I was booted into busybox (initramfs) rather than the Ubuntu desktop; the fix was to press F6 at the boot menu and edit the boot parameters (if I recall correctly, add ‘all_generic_ide’ before the ‘–’). After that, everything installed smoothly — I was able to put the existing contents of my hard drive in a new partition, which is now my dedicated /home partition.

This is my third recent Ubuntu installation — at Christmas I installed it on my mom’s Dell Vostro (dual-booting with XP — I love that the installation disk makes it easy to keep your Windows installation as-is). That needed some configuration for the wireless card, but other than that everything was simple to get set up.

Since last year’s Feisty (which I installed on my (now-defunct) iBook, after dual-booting Edgy and OSX) I’ve been totally psyched about Ubuntu; its out-of-the-box settings and programs, for ease of use, sane defaults, configurability, etc top any proprietary system I’ve used. Hardware support isn’t consistent enough for the non-technical user to be able to install it on their own; but non-technical users rarely install their own systems, proprietary or free. Once it’s set up, the modern Ubuntu distribution strikes the perfect balance of ease-of-use and workability (as good as or better than Windows or OSX) and configurability (potentially infinite, as with any GPL’d product!), perfect for any level of user.

“Free software”, as in “free as in speech”, means the freedom to run the program for any purpose. This means using my music software to play music in the format of my choice; it means owning my media in a format that doesn’t lock me in to using one company’s devices; it means knowing the program will still be useful if the original creator stops supporting it or changes it in harmful ways.

Avoiding the “Sorry, dad” scenario described in this article that describes, albeit from a different perspective, many of the reasons I’ve transitioned from a Mac geek to fairly anti-Apple (similar reasoning articulated very well by Mark Pilgrim) is a big reason savvy consumers of the future will (should!) consider open licensing an important criterion for purchase of any product.
Elgan says:

At least with Windows, you could reformat your PC and install Linux or any number of other PC-compatible operating systems. Can I reformat my iPod and install something else? Can I uninstall iTunes but keep using the iTunes store and my iPods? Apple strongly discourages all that, claiming that the iPod, the iPod software and iTunes are three components of the same product. But that’s what Microsoft said about Windows and IE.

Well, fortunately it’s not that bad; my Apple-manufactured iBook and iPod didn’t become useless to me when Apple’s software stopped being worthwhile, because although Apple discourages the practice, they hadn’t started actively trying to prevent users from installing the (free) software that would do what they wanted. Judging by the encrypted firmware that’s preventing Rockbox from being available for the second-generation nano, they’re starting now.

So yeah, the iPhone is sexy and tempting, but when I have the cash in hand for something like that I’m buying an OpenMoko phone instead. The iPhone would work great for a while, but just as I wanted my music player to play .ogg files and I wanted my operating system to give me greater control over the interface, I’d soon enough want my phone to do something it didn’t already do; and at this point I’m not interested in supporting manufacturers who restrict my freedom to do what I want with the devices I’ve purchased.

In my never-ending quest to free myself from the fetters of non-free software and to amuse myself by putting new operating systems on things I find in my house, I installed Rockbox on my iPod nano recently.

It was essentially pretty easy. The hardest part was actually figuring out the difference between Rockbox and iPod Linux. It turns out that Rockbox is a music player, like the original Apple firmware, and iPod Linux is a Linux that runs Linux programs. I toyed around with iPod Linux (played some Tetris!), but since my goal was to have a music player, I moved on.

First step: converting my MacPod (HFS+, which Linux hates) to a WinPod (FAT32, a more widely supported filesystem). Interestingly, Mac OS, Windows, and Linux all recognize the WinPod, while only Mac OS and some subset of Linuxes recognize the MacPod. To convert a MacPod to a WinPod, just plug it into a computer that’s running Windows (if you can find such a thing!); you’ll automatically be prompted to reformat. You lose all the data on the iPod when you do this, so back up first if it’s anything important. After that, it’s just a matter of following the instructions here.

So now my iPod dual-boots, just like my laptop — and just like my laptop, it will rarely if ever see the Apple OS boot up again. There’s nothing that Apple’s iPod software did that I preferred to Rockbox, and plenty of things Rockbox does that I like better. To name a few: it’s free as in speech; it plays .ogg files (the .ogg standard is also free as in speech!); it lets me choose to keep my existing filetree organization, or use its ID3-based database, or both; it lets me put (any kind of!) files on it and then retrieve them on any computer under the same name and format; it’s highly skinnable, so I can get it to look more attractive than the original Apple look; and it allows finer tuning of settings (for example, I can choose whether or not it stops playing when headphones are unplugged, set how long it waits before going to sleep, &c). Using it under Linux (or any OS) is simply a matter of mounting it as a drive and then copying files directly to its filetree, rather than using a specific piece of software. Without a doubt, Rockbox has increased my ability to use this piece of hardware the way I want to.