It’s official: I don’t do Windows

I know, it sounds a little lame, but I realize now that, over time, my practical and useful experience with Windows — in any flavor — is now either many years out of date, or so thin as to be transparent.

The issue came to light a day or two ago with a question about how to change a desktop setting in Vista, and I was looking in completely the wrong place for the answer. I got the “I thought you were a geek” look from a co-worker, who went on later to get the correct information from one of the in-house gamers. I was a tiny bit embarrassed, for having tried to be of help at all.

So I am building the habit of referring Windows questions to actual Windows users, rather than trying to be of some help myself.

I take the approach to any variation of Mac operating systems, so it’s not a new idea. I haven’t used a Mac machine on a regular basis in decades, and I certainly wouldn’t offer advice to anyone having problems with that OS.

And the same goes for Ubuntu, although it is a little “closer” in my mind than the others. After all, I can install a vanilla Gnome Ubuntu desktop on my Inspiron and suffer through the weak performance, if someone needs an answer. But really, it’s one of the reasons I stepped down as a moderator for the Ubuntu Forums, about a year ago. I just lack the immediate experience to be of help.

And the last time I used Windows to any degree beyond setting my router software or setting up a sparse dual-boot system was … almost four years ago, and the playing field has changed considerably since then.

For a while I still felt relatively comfortable answering questions about Windows machines, but no longer. I tell Windows users to ask Windows users how to solve problems. I really don’t think I can be of much help.

Unless they want to get away from it altogether.

A sheep in wolf’s clothing

I had an interesting conversation with my company’s owner yesterday. By “interesting” I mean several things.

I should say up front that as bosses go, mine is fair-to-middling. I’ve had worse, but I’ve had better too. I don’t always agree with his management style, but in general he doesn’t interfere with my duties, which can be a huge obstacle in some Japanese businesses.

But something I have always suspected about him became alarmingly clear yesterday — that his technophiliac posture is just that: posturing.

I’ll explain. In the past few months, another of the office laptops has been relegated to the shelf where the crude little Sotec has sat since I put it there, many months ago. This one is a Toshiba something-or-other, probably a Pentium III and no doubt also infested with any number of spyware scanners, malware filters, Norton utility suites and so forth. It could probably handle Arch, if not Ubuntu.

We are a small company, and so as I’ve mentioned in the past, he generally does all the technical services himself, or asks one of his friends to come to the office and solve problems. The only time I have ever seen a professional technician in our office was when the new desktop machine arrived, and Vista was preinstalled. The reason a pro was needed should be obvious just by saying that.

Yesterday I mentioned that there were quite a few leftover laptops (in other words, two) sitting unused on the shelf, and I offered to buy them for cheap, with the intention of donating them to charity. It is, after all, what I do.

At first, the idea of getting money from them seemed attractive to him — after all, he is a Japanese businessman — but it came crashing down again when he realized the computers would be given away to someone completely unknown. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be an issue (we do a lot of charity fundraising at times), but because there was the possibility that customer information might be on the drive, he wasn’t interested.

Of course, I tried to explain through my muddled Japanese and his thin technical understanding, that it was possible to completely eradicate everything on the drive, but I realized my error too late. Because he hadn’t ever heard of these things, he thought the files would be deleted manually. In his mind, the new owner would be receiving the machines with the standing software installation in place, hopefully sans any client information that had accrued over the decade they had been in our office.

Of course, that couldn’t be further from the truth. But when we crossed into an area that he wasn’t clear on, or what had become new territory, his tone changed. He went from amiable to authoritarian, I took the hint and closed the discussion.

I have met other people like that in my time, who occasionally profess or even boast of a measure of technical proficiency (or are “gamers”), but once their comfort zone is expended, their supposed technophilia turns to technophobia. I don’t resent it; I only find it irritating when, as is the case for my boss, one person’s technical inability infringes on the ability of other people to do their job.

And ultimately, ignorance is expensive. This is the same boss who dumped an easy US$1000 into a brand-new (albeit low-end) desktop machine because the old one was running slower and slower. Instead of taking the time to learn how to fix the old one, the solution was to get a new one.

In my opinion, fear drives technophobes to pretend to be technophiles, and I don’t say that to suggest I am someone with superior ability or know-how. You can see this in almost any technical field, from medicine to car repair to wine-tasting. When a self-styled network administrator — or outdoorsman, or teacher of classical Greek drama, or what have you — encounters something that suddenly tests their expertise, that fear suddenly becomes a barrier.

In this case, my boss’s fear manifested itself in that sudden change to an authoritarian tone, and his signal that the issue was closed. In other people it can be hedging, stipulations in the conversation or even outright prevarication. I have heard some interesting solutions to medical problems coming from people who had reputations as health care professionals, who didn’t know that I have medical qualifications of my own.

The unfortunate consequence is, of course, that two otherwise servicable laptops won’t find their way to new homes. No matter to me; there are a lot of other junk computers out there. But ultimately fear and pretension (and I daresay a small degree of pride) will keep those two stacked on a dusty shelf in an office for the next decade or so, whenever the business comes to a close.

And whither then? I cannot say.

DSL revisited

I caught myself endorsing Slitaz over Damn Small Linux the other day, not realizing exactly how long it has been since I used DSL, and whether or not it has improved in the past year or so. Slitaz scooped me up quite easily after relying on DSL for many years — so easily in fact, that I never looked back.

But when I suggested it over DSL again, I figured I ought to take another look, to be fair. After all, I think the last time I used it was when it had just crossed to 4.0, and as we all know, point-oh releases are never quite right.

To be honest, I don’t see much on the surface of version 4.4.10 that appears to have changed.

Or I guess I should say, the changes that I first notice are mostly aesthetic. JWM is still the window manager with Fluxbox as an option, but with a different “look” here and there — new wallpaper, different desktop font, and so forth.

The application array seems similar to what I remember from a year ago. Probably one of the strong points for DSL is the choice of office software that comes in so small a bundle — things like the Siag suite; Word, PDF and postscript viewers; dictionaries and so forth.

And a round assortment of games and Internet appliances are there too, including chat programs and FTP clients. Sylpheed is on board, along with a short list of browser options — the old Dillo, Firefox 2.0, and some others.

And it’s nice to see some fundamental improvements in the way DSL manages itself. I don’t remember a MyDSL Browser before — something that makes picking out software a lot easier. I could swear I had seen something very similar running the show with Tiny Core though — perhaps it was borrowed from that project.

And once DSL is up and running, you have the option to install a lot more fun stuff. Most of the commonplace applications you would expect in something like Arch or even Ubuntu are ready to download and run.

So I certainly can’t fault DSL for being established, well-rounded and extensible. And it manages to find the hardware on my Inspiron without a fight. So why do I still, even after this second look, prefer Slitaz?

It’s hard to put my finger on it. DSL does a great job, but Slitaz feels cleaner, slimmer and faster. DSL still seems absorbed by unusual assortments of GTK1.2 software, mixed in with a few extra programs which don’t seem to mesh well, appearancewise.

I don’t hold any grudge against outdated software — after all, I regularly rely on text-based applications I dug out of the corners of the Internet — but I wonder why the 2.4 kernel is still preferred (answer here). I wonder why a newer version of Firefox isn’t in there by default … if Firefox is going to be in there at all. And I wonder why, after all these years, someone hasn’t managed to come up with a slick, cohesive look for DSL — rather than two or three vaguely connected themes (particularly in the GTK1.2 category) and a somewhat-matching wallpaper or two.

Okay, okay. I apologize. I know full well that those are superficial points. I should be more enthusiastic that DSL starts up and runs fine. I have met distributions that couldn’t accomplish that.

But I can’t help noticing all these little points and wondering what’s holding DSL back … particularly when I start up Slitaz again.

So that’s my impression. I will always like DSL, and I admire it for its loyalty to outdated machines. But so long as Slitaz can do much the same thing, in less space, with fresher software and a cleaner, faster look, I will continue to choose it over DSL.

And that’s what it’s all about: choice.

Happy third anniversary

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure if it’s an anniversary or a birthday. Whatever you call it, August 2009 marks the end of a third year for this blog, and another month closer to a fourth anniversary for me with Linux.

I don’t have any wisdom to impart or advice to offer — or at least, none that you probably aren’t already aware of, if you’re reading this page at all. If you’re not currently using Linux or some variation thereof, I strongly recommend it. Switching is a life-altering experience. No joke.

And that goes for starting a blog too — the part about not having any wisdom to impart, that is. I only did this because I wanted someplace to take notes for future reference, and it became something gnarled and monstrous. Like a B-grade science fiction movie.

Anyway, this has all been mentioned before, and suffixed with the same thing I say every year. If you visit, I thank you, and if you find something useful, I am pleased. Starting this blog for my own benefit was the obvious thing to do at the time; if that same action has been of benefit to someone else as well … that’s a great bonus.

Cheers!
K.Mandla

Putting the Pentium back to work

It’s been a few months since I worked with my old Pentium laptop. The ambient humidity has fallen a little bit since the local rainy season ended, and as a result the hardware eccentricities on a 13-year-old laptop have evened out a little. In other words, I’m not afraid I’ll send spontaneous pulses of electricity through the thing, just by turning it on.

Initially I wanted to rebuild the graphical desktop I created about six months ago, for no other reason than morbid curiosity. I found the Musca window manager on the Arch Forums the other day, and I was thinking that might be even more appealing than Awesome … since Musca apparently weighs in at an emaciated 600Kb+, while running. It sounded perfect for a machine that has only 16Mb of memory to start with.

But it was not to be. I’ve tried two different installations, building each one by scratch on a surrogate machine, and neither one would reach the graphical desktop. X complains every time that there is inadequate memory to start anything graphical, which is odd, since I have proof of the opposite.

But hey, I had wondered the same thing, often for weeks at a time, way back in February. How in the world did I get it working so many times in the winter? Beats me. Maybe it’s the humidity again.

But anyway, I took the hint and decided what I could really use is a dedicated machine for passing files back and forth between the other two. And a host for the only two torrents I actually feel “responsible” for — the old Lowarch ISO and the short-lived Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix. And a Crux ports server. And … and … and …

So I rebuilt the thing, this time using the freshest software cut-to-fit a Pentium Classic, and set it up with ssh, nfs, rtorrent, screen-vs, cron and so forth. I’m keeping it on a wired connection this time, mostly because I don’t see any real improvement between the quirky ASIX-based Corega card I found, or the ancient Linksys WPC11 card I sometimes use. The internal hardware freaks out when it sees transfers above 256Kbps or so anyway. That’s so low that nothing is lost or gained by using one card or the other.

And I like it in this role. It’s silent, it’s low-power, it doesn’t need a raft of side packages to do the job, and it makes me feel like an old, old machine is finally getting back to work, instead of sitting in the closet.

That’s my goal.

So many projects, so little time

I wandered face-first into the Framebuffer UI pages the other day. It’s probably obvious, but I find the idea of running a framebuffer environment from within the kernel itself quite appealing.

Of course, it would mean dropping back to the 2.6.9 kernel, which is a big step back in terms of time. I doubt configuration would be an issue since much of the hardware I would use would be still older than that, but the first kernel I ever worked with was 2.6.15, I think. A six-version difference would be interesting, in a way.

No, what holds me back is really just the time I have available. Last month was an exception in that it was even more busy than normal, but given the few hours here and there in a week that I have available for experimentation, “normal” is a slim term anyway.

The time it would take to install, troubleshoot, reinstall, retroubleshoot, etc., would take weeks to make any progress.

There are lots of other things I would like to examine and try out. I found the outdated but still useful ISO for PublicIP the other day, and thought it might be fun to try running my house network with that. (I have more than enough network cards to make it work. )

And I would love to come across a low-end laptop or low-power desktop and run FreeNAS on that, for the long term. As it is now I generally rely on the modular drive in my Inspiron to hold backup files, and run one or another machine as an NFS server to transfer stuff between computers. FreeNAS makes more sense.

And in that vein, I would love to have time to work more with the BSDs, if for no other reason than what little I’ve seen is very appealing. Light, fast and customizable, and plenty of new things to investigate.

I could list a half-dozen other things that would be fun to tinker with, if I could corral about a week or two with no outside obligations. I suppose that’s the way it always is though: So many projects, so little time.