Well, my week could be easily summarised as “hardware hell”. After giving my office a complete overhaul and throwing out 50% of my personal belongings in an effort to down-size and declutter, I decided It was about time I put my new machine together. I ended up with a messy office and three computers in pieces on the floor. Anyone who wants to know the gory details can read about it on my personal blog. Finally, I got the hardware working, but the hard drive I pulled from my old machine had decided it wasn’t compatible with my new machine. So I did a fresh install of Mint Linux on a new hard drive and then copied the /home/spode folder from my old machine to the new one. I installed a few packages that I wanted (VirtualBox, Skype, Putty, Amarok, LastFM) and after a reboot everything was as I had it before. It was a remarkably easy transition, marred only by a few issues getting the Nvidia drivers working. Purging the drivers and reinstalling was the cure to this minor woe.

At the same time, I was reinstalling Vista on an HP laptop that needed recovery. I’ve been making a little more effort recently to play with Vista as I don’t want to lose touch with my audiences - and there were some things I liked and some things I thought were crazy. My initial gripe with Vista having put everything in different places is not as much of an issue as I thought originally, as I just pop up to the search box that appears in the control panel and just type in what I’m looking for - it was very reliable about giving me the bits I needed. I also liked the way it gave me links to where I could download patches and drivers to solve reported issues with my hardware.

So I’ve got this blank install of Vista on this laptop and the wired network, wireless network, sound and video are not supported at all without a driver download. This is where I usually pull a trick out of my sleeve - a USB Ethernet device I have that is natively supported in XP without drivers. This has saved me so much time before - but alas, is not supported in Vista, and never will be (as a Vista report told me later when I eventually got on the web). So I was forced to hunt around the HP website for the right drivers I needed - what I would have killed for Synaptic. After some hefty downloads, I had a flash drive filled with the drivers I needed and I was well on my way. In contrast, on this exact notebook, I boot up an Ubuntu CD and everything (including wireless) is supported out of the box - and people worry about compatibility issues…

I’m sure some of you read my rant (and it was a rant) about the BBC technology coverage, and I had some good feedback - but a few key points stuck with me. Firstly, why didn’t he installed EeeBuntu - the Ubuntu derivative designed for the EeePC? But more importantly, I’d have loved to see him try to install Windows on his EeePC, as I imagine he would have had just as much, if not even more trouble getting things working.

Anyways, there are few things I saw this week that I thought I should link to. Firstly, someone has made a rather comprehensive list of modifications you can make to the Acer Aspire One - the rather nifty

With my parents living in Italy, my phone bill is often a little on the scary side when I see it each month. That was until recently, when my parents’ tiny village in the middle of the mountains where they run a bed and breakfast finally got broadband. Using Skype has been great - free phone calls for hours on end and with much higher quality than you get over a phone. A few weeks back I thought I’d give the video aspect of Skype a go, so pulled out a Creative NX Pro webcam and put it in place. I already had Skype open, plugged in this USB camera and didn’t have to do any setup at all - I opened the options panel and it was already selected as the default webcam device. It “just worked”, as Ubuntu would make us believe is the case for everything.

My Dad on the other hand wasn’t so lucky on his Windows XP machine. He had lost the installation CD, so had to hunt around the web to get the right drivers and of course, post-installation was told he should restart his machine. A lot of this contrast is due to one man writing pretty much every webcam driver in the world for Linux. As much as I’d love to leverage on this - installing drivers for something in Linux when it’s not supported out of the box, is a mess that needs working on - usually as it requires compiling stuff yourself, which in todays age, we shouldn’t have to do. But an alarming amount of stuff is supported on Ubuntu without any work from us.

With the high audio quality of Skype and now moving Video to go with it, it completes the illusion well, and I feel closer to my parents than I have in a long time. There’s one thing sending them a picture of my cat, but there’s another thing being able to pick it up and hold it to the camera and watch my face being scratched live, accompanied with my high pitch squeal.

What hasn’t “just worked” is the sound with Skype. I’ve had terrible trouble with Skype either stealing the sound all together (meaning I get no sound when watching flash videos in FireFox), or the other way around. I’m unsure if this is Skype’s fault (I know ALSA support is fairly recent), or the use of Pulse Audio in Hardy Heron (8.04). It’s certainly frustrating! There also seems to be a bug with the sound mixer that it doesn’t properly select my microphone as the current line in. I have to load the console based “alsamixer”, deselect my microphone as the capture and then reselect it. Quite odd.

An interesting read on works with u about another man’s struggle with getting his wife to use Ubuntu. Worth a glance if you’re on your lunch break

What a great way to start my week, but with a rant about a BBC article on Linux. I will be the first to admit that Linux isn’t quite ready for consumer consumption - but it’s certainly very close. If Mr Parkinson wanted to actually give Linux a go, he should have researched a little more - like I don’t know, asking any of the thousands of Linux users out there who would have given him some wonderful advice and probably filled the holes in his article. The first thing they wouldn’t have recommended is to try replacing the stock distribution on an EeePC.

Trying GNU/Linux is made very hard because it is such an organic product - not only are there thousands of distributions, but there are new releases of each every 6 months or so. Trying Windows is easy, you can move from machine to machine and find everything exactly the same, and there are only a finite number of versions available. So when people keep harping on about the EeePC running Linux, they assume that just like Windows, everyone that uses Linux uses what the EeePC uses. “What? So our server admin uses THIS? Hmm - I thought Mac’s were simple.”

As far as I’m concerned - the EeePC doesn’t run Linux. It certainly doesn’t run Xandros as the article suggest. It may have been based on Xandros, but it is not a complete operating system - it is stripped down and designed specifically for the EeePC with its own interface, just like the operating system on your phone is designed for your phone. It is not designed to be expanded, except by the Asus specific update tool. Complaining that you had to open a terminal to do something the device is not designed for is misleading to the public. For the majority of situations now, you do not need to open a terminal in a complete Linux OS.

The article continues, with his biggest complaint that he can’t synchronise with his iPod. Ok - so that much is true, it doesn’t. But this is the fault of Apple, who feel they have to control everything with their DRM and force people to use their music software. Why do you think very few Linux users have an iPod? There is no freedom with your music if you own an Apple music device. That’s why I still buy CDs and rip them myself, so I’m in control. The writer then suggests that we never see iTunes on Linux because Apple don’t follow the same “hippy mentality” of open source. Software does not have to be open source to be available on Linux - it can be a closed binary, just like the nVidia graphics card drivers. Apple just don’t want to. Of all people to understand what it is like to have a small control of the OS market - it’s Apple. And considering the Unix origins of Mac OS, would it really be that hard to port it?

His piece reads like he’s giving Linux a thorough test. If this was his intention, then using the EeePC was a big mistake. However, the fact the WiFi didn’t work in Ubuntu? Very valid and annoying, which is why I still recommend looking up Linux compatibility before making the jump. I guess if this chap had written this anywhere else, I could forgive elements of it. But having pride of place on the BBC website, it is very damaging to Linux’s reputation and misleading to the public. It’s not a review, or look at Linux - it’s a blog of one man’s struggle to make a device (yes, the EeePC is a device) do something it shouldn’t. I’m sure if they had enabled comments on the piece - there would be some angry comments there at the moment. Sigh.

No, it’s really not. GNU stands for “GNU’s not Unix” - a common theme in open source naming systems. On my trip around the web today, I came across Stephen Fry talking about GNU/Linux. You can watch this video on the GNU website, marking the 25th anniversary of GNU/Linux. There is also an article worth reading on the GNU website, which explains what GNU is and its relationship to Linux. As an avid Linux user, even I haven’t paid that much attention to the history of Linux - putting it all down to Mr Torvalds himself. To quote the site:

Whether you use GNU/Linux or not, please don’t confuse the public by using the name