| wIndependence Day Essay: How a freak Powerbook accident made me into a Linux/Laptop Geek |
by Steven Cohen Louden (July 25, 2002)
For most of my adult life, I have been a loyal Mac User. My first Mac was an SE. My first laptop was a Powerbook 145. But, this is not a story about my first Macintoshes. It is about my last one and what I use for a computer now.
My last Macintosh (named Ariadne) was a Powerbook G3/333 (Lombard). At the time, OS X was still in Beta Testing, and I was a tester. So, I spent my time booting OS X Beta and running OS 9.1 in Classic mode.
I just loved it!
You see, in my college days, I had the unique opportunity to run early versions of Stone Design's Create under OpenStep on a NeXT box. It was the most amazing thing that I had ever used (also, the most expensive).
And, I really appreciated the CLI as an addition to the intuitive GUI. So, OS X was exactly what I had been waiting for.
Well, one day I had taken Ariadne with me down to a local Net Café figuring that I could download some updates at more than 3.0k/sec. I got my cup of dark roast, exactly how I like it ('off-black' with 2 sugars). I plugged into the network, booted into OS X, started downloading some cool stuff off my iDisk, and started to poke around the web with OmniWeb.
Then, it happened . . . it just froze . . . and it would not reboot.
The final diagnosis was that SOMEHOW a power surge had fried the motherboard. But, of course there was no way to prove that it had happened at the Net Cafe, so here I was with a dead Powerbook.
Now, a dead Powerbook is not worth much on eBay. And, I am not drowning in disposable income. So, my next (and current computer) was an HP Omnibook XE2 (AMD K6-2 475 mhz) that I bought for $460 on uBid. It came with Windows 98 SE. And, the IT guy at work installed all of the software that I needed.
It worked for a while . . . kinda . . .
okay, I had to tweak it almost daily. No matter what I did, I was not as productive as I was on my Mac.
Then, a friend of mine at a Linux start-up turned me onto SuSE Linux. At the time, the current version was 7.2. And, after about 30 minutes of tweaking, I had a working GUI (sax2 -m 0=fbdev (3 cheers for RTFM!)). A day later it got set to thousands of colors (thanks to linuxnewbie.org). And, later that week my Netgear FA411 network card was up and running (added info to /etc/pcmcia/config (thanks #linux!)).
So, there I was a little portable linux island in a sea of windoze . . .
Could I print? Nope.
Could I save stuff to my NT network folder? Nope.
But, I did have a work around . . .
I printed documents to .pdf files, started up the FTP server on my laptop, went to a Windoze machine, open the documents remotely and printed. Simple.
And, I was happy . . . kinda . . .
You see, StarOffice handled every M$ file I threw at it just fine. BUT, being a former Mac user, I really preferred the KOffice paradigm. KOffice feels a lot more like AppleWorks. It is a tightly integrated suite of apps that conform to the GUI and conventions that I had learned for KDE.
StarOffice is nice for a former M$ user. But, I didn't even have Office on my Mac. It just wasn't how I chose to work. But, at the time KOffice was just not mature enough (the beta on the SuSE 7.2 CD was buggy), so I reluctantly used StarOffice.
Not having the bandwidth at home, and with a newly instilled fear of Net Cafes, I did not bother downloading SuSE 7.3. I used YaST2 to keep my system current, and I used YaST1 to update KDE to 2.2.2 (ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/...). I heard that 7.3 was better, but not enough so for me to bother updating (kinda like the differences between MacOS 7.5.5 and 7.6.1 for any Mac-Centric readers).
All of this changed last week when I happened to walk into my local computer super-store. I saw SuSE 8.0 Personal Edition. A small voice deep inside me said, "No! Don't by version .0 of anything! No!" (Okay, it wasn't that small of a voice. Mac-centric readers may note the stable versions of their beloved OS: 6.0.8, 7.1.1, 7.5.5, 7.6.1, 8.1, 8.6, 9.2 Need I say more?)
But, I like SuSE. And, my $40 once a year in a computer store is my small way of saying, "Thank you for a wonderful product." I mean have you SEEN what comes on those CDs?
When I was a Mac user, these were my Must-Be-Current apps:
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Golive
Adobe Acrobat (Full Version)
As a Linux user, these are my Must-Be-Current apps:
Quanta
Kontour
Gimp
Mozilla (mozilla -edit)
So, let's take the cost of the Mac apps and compare it to the cost--
Wait a minute? Cost of the linux apps? (Can you see where I am going with this?)
Have I spent a lot of time re-tooling myself? Yes.
Has it been fun? Yes (I like puzzles.)
Have I emailed interesting people that write cool programs? Yes.
Have I learned a lot about how things really work? Hell yes!
So, SuSE 8.0 installed without a glitch. KOffice 1.1.1 is so good that I didn't even bother to install StarOffice. I am one happy end-user.
But, that's just it. I am an end-user. How am I contributing to the open source movement? Well, up until now, I haven't really.
So, these are my resolutions:
I will send in DETAILED bug reports for any glitch I can reproduce.
I will send thank you notes to helpful netizens from Usenet and IRC.
I will evangelize (Heck, Mosfet's Liquid with Crystal Icons makes a lot of people peek over my shoulder and ask questions already. So, I might as well sing the praises of my OS).
And, (here is the biggie) I will find some job that I can do for KDE. Maybe I could volunteer to write some documentation? Sounds like fun to me!
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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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