It Just Works

Ubuntu Karmic Koala and Happiness

As I described in my previous post, I have kludged together a rag-tag collection of spare and cannibalized parts to create a "computer" system I refer to as the Jalopy.

It is based on a Dell Dimension 8200 I inherited from a relative who had no use for the dusty beast after an upgrade to a newer system. In its day, the 8200 was top of the line and sports a 2.4 GHz P4 with Hyperthreading (HT) technology and 512 MB of system RAM. I received it without a hard drive but had an even older Dell system that I use for spare parts and grabbed it's massive 12 GB Maxtor Fireball.

The Jalopy had no problem booting from the Karmic CD and the system partitioned and formatted the Fireball in ext4 format and installed the OS in around 20 minutes. Working with the the late Beta of Ubuntu 9.10, I went all out and also grabbed the latest development release of Google Chrome for Linux and it runs nicely.

On day two of enjoying blazing speed, nifty graphic effects and 100% free software the integrated network interface circuit on the 8200 motherboard stopped working. At first I thought perhaps our network was down, but after some port swapping and verification with the other systems in my office, the network looked fine. The interface displayed a solid red LED rather than the standard amber so I figured the old network interface had breathed its last breath.

Not be dissuaded from all of the Karmic goodness I ran down to my "junk pile" and grabbed a rusty (no exaggeration) 3COM PCI 10/100 network card, shut down the system and inserted it into an available PCI slot in the 8200. Given my experience with older, less developed operating systems, I fully expected the scenerio to go something like:

• Install the new PCI network interface card
• Reboot and have the OS inform me it cannot find drivers for the new device
• Reopen the case and try to find a model number on the NIC
• Use a different computer to surf the web for the NIC drivers
• Download the zip file onto a USB
• Move the USB over to the Ubuntu system, copy and unzip
• Install the new drivers and reboot
• Realize there is only about a 50% chance it will work on the first try

So I put on my best frown, slid the case back under my desk, hooked up all of the connections and pressed the power button. Instead of the above senerio it turned out like this:

• "New PCI Detected"
• "PCI resourse conflict - resolving..."
• "Username:"

I'm sorry, what? After logging in my connection to the Internet was restored and all systems back to normal.

What a concept... The machine discovered a problem, resolved a resource conflict, installed the proper drivers and connect to the Internet... automatically.

Good Karma indeed.

Happy Happy, Joy Joy

Flitting Among the Clouds

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had a slew of reasons to leave my MS Windows-controlled hard disk drive behind and cross-over into the Ubuntu Linux cloud.

Things are, well... Awesome. I actually enjoy sitting in front of the laptop again now that I don't have to stare at the system tray wondering how many files are being fragged, how soon before I will need more virtual memory, when the next virus or Trojan attack will happen or why the heck the MS File Indexing tool is taking up so much system memory while I'm not running any foreground applications or changing any files.

Crossing over wasn't easy. Not that it was the fault of Ubuntu. Microsoft knew I was sprinting off on my Logan's Run and did its best to prevent it. The largest problem was getting an iso copy of the Ubuntu OS. I knew that Ubuntu had recently released the beta of 9.10 Karmic Koala so I figured I would give it a spin.

I used one of the Lenovo ThinkCentre systems at work sporting an Intel Core 2 VPro chip running MS Vista and an RW-DVD drive to create the bootable Karmic CD. I located the iso image file at Argonne National Laboratory Public Software Mirror and downloaded the 700 MB file in under a minute. Things were going well. I planned to simultaneously install Ubuntu on a Toshiba Tecra laptop running a 1.66 GHz T1300 Centrino chip with 1 GB of RAM and a jalopy desktop I kludged together at work that is based on an old 2.4-GHz Pentium 4HT with 512M of RAM.

The jalopy doesn't support booting from the USB so I needed to burn a bootable CD containing the iso image. After my elation of the quick iso download, I was brought down to earth quickly. The Vista system presented options for creating an audio CD or a File Manager formatted data disk, but no iso burner. So I downloaded a copy of Alex Fienman's ISO v2 burner and installed. I send my continual thanks to our IT department for promoting my network account to Admin or I would have been dead in the water.

The next portion of the saga is something I could have avoided with 20/20 hindsight, but suffice it to say my cardiologist will have some more damage to repair on my next visit. Long story, short, the Vista system only created an error-free iso burn on the fourth try. I didn't expect this shinny new Core 2 VPro Vista system to have any problems burning a CD-R. It looks like the classic "This system is about to create files on the writable CD. Please do not run any programs during this operation. Even mouse interrupts can cause errors in your copy." disclaimer of the early-1990's is still in effect in 2009. Ugh.

After I obtained an error free disk, the sun started to shine and the heavens began to sing. Inserting the CD into both systems, answering five configuration questions, including boot sector options, and they were on their way. Both systems took around 20 min to be reborn as a 9.10 Karmic Koala Ubuntu system running from a freshly formated ext4 hard disk drive.

Karmic includes Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3 for Ubuntu and on the laptop it takes 30 seconds from cold boot to login screen and 20 seconds to launched browser after password. Wow... I'm impressed. Neither system required me to troll virus-laden device driver websites to get everything working. It just "works".

Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be in official release at the end of October. If this late-stage beta is any measurement, it will be awesome.

Going Rogue

Off the Reservation

This past summer I did two things that have profoundly changed my world view. I successfully passed a 29-hour examination to earn my 1st Dan and I picked up the 50th Anniversary Edition of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Since the exam my training in the martial arts has begun in earnest and opened a new world of study and possibilities. So far I have only made it through one-third of the 1000+ pages of Rand's magnum opus, but each page contains such exquisitely-worded theses that I need a few days to unravel and digest individual passages. Both events have emphasized the tyranny of the status quo.

Like other early 40-somethings, my love affair with computing started in high school with courses like "computer math" and data processing in accounting. Learning to program in FORTRAN, BASIC and COBOL on the TRS-80, IBM PC, WANG, and IBM VMS was more than a subtle hint that computing was important and something to be looked into. In college, the IBM PS/2 lab was the sparkling wonderland over which all of us geeks volleyed for time. DOS was something that everyone spoke fluently along with PEEKs and POKEs on the Commodore-64. Every new advance in hardware and software brought blazing increases in execution speed.

That was until graduate school. I was busy writing instrument drivers and data analysis software in FORTH under DOS while we all awaited the day when our research group could afford to upgrade to Windows 3.0. This new "WIMPy" operating system using windows, icons, menus and pull downs looked like "the future" and just had to be awesome. I remember huddling around the Gateway2000 PC as we fed it the 5.25" floppies containing WordPerfect for Windows. And then... SLOOOOOOW. This couldn't be possible. Windows HAD to be awesome. DOS had to suck. MS wouldn't intentionally release a product that took us backward in productivity. Ahh... the loss of innocence.

So here I am working on a centrino-powered laptop sporting a "Designed for Windows XP/Microsoft Vista Compatible" sticker. The only thing worse than the performance of this system is my abject fear of actually trying to install Vista on it. Running Windows XP SP3 and its system tray menagerie of anti-virus software, memory manager, disk defrager and malware security sentry results in having to wait 3 - 4 minutes for it to come out of suspended mode, being constantly harassed to remove unused icons from my desktop and installing yet another update to the Windows Genuine Advantage software. YES! I'm running a purchased and licensed copy of Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003 - the same Office package that takes 60 seconds to import a .docx file.

I've played around with Ubuntu and even had a dual boot instance of it a while back. But not having a few of my important Windows-only applications at the ready prevented me from taking the plunge. Well, no more. I am so far into the cloud that I only use my hard drive to store photos and music. And most of that is co-located on dropbox anyway. My OS is now the Browser. Anything that stands between me and my Internet interface is the enemy. I don't want to defrag. I don't want to virus scan. I don't want to dynamically modify the size of my virtual memory. I want to open the top of my laptop and check my email, glance at my iGoogle page, see what's trending on twitter, upload some photos to facebook, rant on my blog, add the next paragraph to Myebook, review comments on my knols, watch my Youtube subscriptions, check my Adsense account, work with my Google Docs, and add content to my Google Sites.

I'm out. Color me gone. I've taken a train on the John Galt line. I'm grabbing my Ubuntu install CD and reformatting my hard drive. I'll be sure to write from the cloud...