I'm Trying To Quit... Commercial Software Pt. 2

In this experiment, FOSS is effectively graded on whether or not it can substitute all or most of my proprietary software needs, without me having to substantially change the way I use software. It's highly subjective, and human nature, like laziness and apathy, is very much a part of it, as you will see.

This is the second installment of my personal Free Open Source Software experiment. Read the first installment here.

Within a year of getting my new notebook, my wife's laptop gave up the ghost. It was a Dell Inspiron 8100, and frankly, we'd gotten our money's worth. I purchased a new laptop, a Gateway M6882, and we did the laptop shuffle again.

The Gateway came with Vista, but I wanted to run XP. I immediately discovered that XP was going to be difficult to manage. There was no floppy drive, XP didn't have the needed SATA controller, and there were only three hardware drivers available for XP on the Gateway site.

After thinking about it, I realized that regardless of my feelings for Vista, it's going to be inevitable, and I might as well get used to it. However, I'm resentful about my conclusion, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. As far as portents go, this is a bad one for Microsoft.

Ultimately, this ended up being a good thing. I'd been wanting an excuse to run Linux, and here it was. I decided to keep Vista, since I might need it, but repartition and dual-boot Linux.

Thus began the second phase of my "experiment". I would see just how little I'd have to use Vista, if Linux were available instead.

Linux

I started with Ubuntu 7.10 LTS, since it seemed like the distro with the most momentum. Installation was a breeze. I particularly like booting from the CD and getting to play around with the desktop before doing the install.

After installation, however, I began to bump into oddities and frustrations.

First, the M6882 is a widescreen with an optimal resolution of 1280x800. The Gnome desktop used the entire screen, but the top and bottom system bars only went to a width of 1024 pixels. I tried to change the resolution using the system config tools, but nothing worked. I had to hit the forums, and after some time (longer than I would have preferred), finally found a solution that involved editing the xorg.conf file. I still don't understand exactly what I changed, but it had something to do with TV out settings.

This gave a bad impression. The facts of life are that in the many many installs I've done of Windows, I've never had to do this much work to get the system to the correct screen resolution.

I still had one other hardware problem that was bothering me. The sound card didn't work. This took even longer to fix than the screen resolution, and was twice as painful.

I hit the forums again. I tried several suggestions with rather involved steps, with no success. I had a glimmer of hope when I found and downloaded the Linux drivers from the manufacturer's website. It was a source package, with some simple instructions for compiling and installing. But the install script first removed the existing sound libraries that the X server had been compiled against, using the fatal rm command. Then, the build failed. Unaware of what had happened, I gave up and at some point rebooted. The desktop failed to load the next time I tried to boot.

The manufacturer's Linux driver package had clobbered my non-working, but non-failing sound libraries without backing them up, or even checking that the build succeeded first. At this point I was pretty much hosed, and the easiest thing to do was to reinstall.

I reinstalled, fixed the screen resolution problem again, and still didn't have sound. I finally found a solution, on some guy's blog. There was no compiling required, just a bunch of funky steps to get a "backports" package installed, after which I had to re-run some updates I'd already done. After that, my sound worked fine. But, like the screen, this was far too much work to have to do for something I consider basic and essential to an OS.

The next hassle I had was that I changed my password, and suddenly was being prompted by the keyring manager every time I logged in. Again, my only resource was the forums. I'll spare all the details of resolving this problem, but I'll say this: the problem with forums as the help is that you don't know who you can believe. I'm not saying anyone would attempt to purposely mislead you (although they might), but they can and often do get things wrong, communicate the solution poorly, or miss a detail that is essential to your particular system.

In the keyring case, I followed one person's advice, which involved compiling from source, and began the descent down the dependency Inferno, only to find out that all I really needed was to run the following simple command:

rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/login.keyring

Using the community forums as the help system is a problematic solution at best. With no monetary incentive, you get only the best someone is willing to offer at the time, you have no verification of the expertise of your source, and no one is responsible. You may get an excellent answer, a partial answer, the wrong answer, or no answer.

Never booting into Vista

After getting past the problems above, I began using Linux in earnest. As far as the basic things I need to do on a computer, e.g. programming, web surfing, email, FTP, document editing, spreadsheets, playing music, etc, Ubuntu was able to deliver.

But here's what I still need Vista for:

DVD playback. I couldn't play a DVD of 24 with Totem. I had installed GStreamer the ugly and also Mplayer. No dice. Mplayer looked like:



I also tried VLC. It got some images to the screen, errored out, and froze.

I didn't give up that easily. Next I installed Totem with the xine backend. When I played the DVD this time, I got the FBI warnings, but it complained about encryption when it came to the video, and also failed.

In Vista all I have is the Windows Media Center, which sucked in XP. It's been improved, and other than the audio being slightly lower than I would have liked (perhaps a hardware issue), I can play DVDs without a headache.

Photoshop. I know I could learn Gimp, but I already know Photoshop, and know it well. It had a steep learning curve, and has all the capabilities I need and then some, so switching doesn't appeal to me. I'd much rather just boot into the system where this app runs and use it there.

Doom9.net. I use a lot of the multimedia tools (e.g. BeSplit, MeGUI) available from this site. Most of these interfaces, while freeware, run on Windows.

Netflix. Sorry, but they have that Watch Instantly feature, which will not only just run on Windows, but also will only run on X number of installs of Windows. I don't like it, but like Vista, it's just the way things are.

Rooting for Linux

While I'm growing increasingly fond of Linux, and certainly rooting for it, it's got a ways to go. Hardware will be a weak point for some time to come. This isn't the fault of Linux, but instead the fault of economics. Money is the big incentivizer, and the OS that can bring in the most money will always get priority. My experience with the manufacturer's sound driver installation is a clear example of this.

Microsoft may not win any medals for its ideals, but sound drivers usually install without the user having to jump through hoops or inadvertently clobbering their system, and I can play most DVDs by just slapping it in the drive.

Linux also suffers in the support department. Again, this is because the model of Linux is essentially based on altruism. Really, it's an amazing feat that Linux works as well as it does, has the support it has, and is as advanced as it has become. I'm rapidly turning into a fan, and have optimism for the future.

Watch for my next installment, in which I begin to play around with Gimp, surprisingly, because of laziness, switch to openSUSE and am pretty happy with it, and have some trouble connecting to WIFI where Vista does not.