Freelance Web Design & Development

I posted recently about buying a new laptop — how is it working out, you may wonder?

Pretty well overall. The screen has remarkable clarity, the keyboard is comfortable, and the battery life is okay; on the other hand, the speakers are the quietest and tinniest-sounding speakers of any computer I’ve ever owned/used extensively. At 14.1″ for the screen, it’s just a little bulkier than I’d like (the 12″ iBook was a perfect size; how come computers that small now seem to be a luxury item?), and I’d prefer a slot-loading drive to the tray DVD drive it has. But overall it meets my needs, for now.

Judging by a quick Google search, I’m probably one of the first people to install Linux on this particular machine. It was a little tricky to find an install disk that would boot correctly; it’s a 64-bit machine, but the Hardy 64-bit installer had a problem with xorg and the Gutsy 64-bit disk had a problem with the installer. The Gutsy x86 disk worked fine — though I had to use the partitioner to wipe the entire disk rather than creating a partition alongside the Windows partition, since this computer came with a hidden partition with a “backup” install of Windows Vista. This seems like a particularly egregious invasion of the user’s freedom to use the computer as they wish — fortunately, blanking an entire hard drive still works!

Wireless and sound didn’t work right away; I used Ndiswrapper to install the RTL8187B Realtek driver, which I was able to download from the internet. To get sound to work, I needed to install linux-backports-modules-generic, run alsamixer and turn everything to unmuted/full volume, and reboot.

I did the installation process the day before Hardy’s official release; on release day, I used the updater to install the new release, and everything that had been working before still worked fine. I still haven’t gotten around to fixing suspend/hibernate, which didn’t work out-of-box, but I’m optimistic that I’ll get it going when I have more time to tinker.

After my trusty iBook’s motherboard died for the last, un-practically-fixable time, I thought I might try getting an ultraportable — after all, I reasoned, I pretty much just want to use a laptop for Firefox and ssh so I can work from friends’ houses, coffee shops, heck, even my couch once in a while. I don’t want to store a lot of stuff on my laptop; it’s more important that it be easier to carry around.

So I ordered an XO (you know! for kids!), fascinated by its charitable side effects and hipness factor, and figuring — I’m a small person! I want a small laptop!

It’s too small. It’s just slightly too small to be usable in every dimension — screen, keyboard, RAM, hard drive… I know, it’s for kids with small fingers and small computing needs, and my (relatively) small fingers and (relatively) small computing needs are small relative to those of adult first-world programmers. So I wasn’t too surprised or disappointed to discover that this laptop wouldn’t work out for my purposes (or when it took months longer than initially promised to arrive — they’re a charitable organization, after all, not a business). But I still don’t understand why, especially after they realized that they could profit from first-world demand for a thing like this, the OLPC folks weren’t interested in building a slightly modified version usable by adults. I’d think that the adults in the villages where these are being distributed would be interested in exploring them too, and that the kids’ fingers will get bigger pretty quickly and outgrow the tiny keyboard.

Still, it’s a pretty cool device, with a lot of innovative features — for kids. I hope the kid who got my laptop’s sister through the G1G1 program is enjoying it and learning from it!

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.

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.