| wIndependence Day Essay: And a Child Shall Lead Them |
by Charles Howell (July 18, 2002)
I own a small English school in Nagasaki, Japan. My wife and I started it about two years ago. At that time, I was the only teacher, and I did all of my business work on my computer running Windows ME.
The first problem that made me consider leaving Windows wasn’t caused by Windows so much as enabled by Windows. I opened an E-mail attachment from a friend one day, and… WHAM! The resounding boom of the crashing of my system and taking with it 4 years of files echoed for months as I had to scramble to recreate virtually all of my original materials (some, like a phonics workbook I had nearly finished, I have never had the heart to begin again). At the same time, a friend of mine got an e-mail from my PC with a similar attachment. He called me to gloat: 'bet that virus you tried to send me trashed your system, dude. Hope you’ve got backups. It didn’t even phase my Linux box'. I had looked into Linux before. I actually tried to install Vine Linux on my PC, with disastrous results. My printer, and modem were non-functional, and when I booted into Windows to log-on to the internet and get help, the responses I got were people telling me to type something that looked like gibberish at the command prompt. I was not ready to make the jump to Linux quite yet.
Over the past few years, my school has grown in size quite a bit. I have 2 locations and 2 teachers to assist me. It was in hiring new teachers that a new problem surfaced. I need real Japanese support to run my business. Putting aside the fact that English Windows gives really strange results with a Japanese keyboard, it also lacks a good Japanese input and viewing system. I had always just used Japanese Windows. Now I had two teachers who couldn’t navigate simple pull down menus. I started debating the idea of having a dual boot system with English windows on one partition and Japanese Windows on the other. It was while I was debating this somewhat expensive option that a five-year old child convinced me that Windows was not going to be the best option for the future of my school.
I keep a PC at the desk in the lobby of my school. The teachers use it during their breaks, and sometimes siblings of my students play games on it while their older brother or sister is in class. One day, the younger sister of one of my students got tired of the Blues Clues game she was playing. After closing the game she opened the my documents folder. She apparently had a good time selecting a number of the subfolders with the mouse and pressing delete (or moving them to the trash can, I didn’t watch as she did it). Luckily she didn’t know enough to empty the trash (only a click away), and my files did not die a horrible (second) death.
A day later I was talking to my friend who uses Linux. He told me a bit about distributions, desktops, etc. He, being Japanese was a big supporter of TurboLinux, but I went with Mandrake. I downloaded the ISOs burned them and rebooted. All I could say during the install process was ‘WOW’.
In less than 2 hours I had my office PC set up with 4 accounts plus root. 2 accounts had their menus in English, but all had good Japanese support. I found a plethora of educational software, and was able to use wine, and winex (and actually basilisk II in one case) to play some of my older educational titles. At first I tried to install Word with wine (not recommended for a beginner), but I now have open office running as the main office suite.
I was a bit afraid of switching, having tried it once a few years before, and my two teachers were computer novices. Would they be able to use Linux? My two teachers and I are very happy with the switch. We all now have separate e-mail accounts, our own private home directories, and our desktops don’t look anything alike. I think the thing we all seem to like about Linux is the ability to customize your own personal settings. Initially we had a dual boot system with Windows, but we got rid of it about a month ago.
I guess the thing that surprised me most when switching to Linux was how easy it really was. The installation was actually easier and quicker than my Windows XP installation on my gaming machine at home. The desktop is at least as easy as Windows, and infinitely more flexible. The availability of software ‘out of the box’ was so incredible. I actually went back in December and bought the Mandrake Linux Gaming edition. For the first time in a long time I felt like I was getting more than my money’s worth in software.
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Please note: The opinions expressed in this essay are those of the writer, not of the management or staff of DesktopLinux.com.
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