Being one man’s continuing quest for happiness despite years of unfulfillment

I’ve been using computers a long time (don’t ask) and using microcomputers long before Microsoft even sold an OS. I was a DOS guy before I could afford a Macintosh, though I was using Macs at work starting back in 1985. And I happily benefitted from the Mac’s strength in desktop publishing software for more than a decade.

When I re-oriented my publishing career towards XML and e-books in 1999, I was forced to be a dual-platform guy. There just weren’t any XML tools on the Mac, so I bought a cheapo PC and moved back and forth between my two computers depending on the task.

As I used XML more and my Mac grew ever more gray-bearded, I started buying new programs for the PC instead of for the Mac. This was a huge emotional issue. Where the dollars go, there follows the heart (at least in electronics). Gradually I was transformed from a full-blown Mac enthusiast (and off-hours tech support for various family members long-distance) into a full-time WinXP user. It helped that my job now supplied me with a laptop that I carried from Manhattan office to home office (where I work two days a week) to out-of-state offices every week or three.

When the replacement for XP — then known as Longhorn, now as Vista — first raised its head, I found myself unable to accept the transition. Microsoft wanted me to pay more for the OS than I thought I should pay for the computer itself. And forget Apple. That was a company everyone agreed was the next Polaroid, Xerox and Kodak combined, destined never to regain financial security or market strength.*

I figured then that my next OS would be Linux.

I won’t go into my beliefs regarding open software, copyright and monopolies. Suffice to say that I’m an extremist. Probably many of you here at ITT have followed the same path towards the sanity of open software (maybe not as far as I). But that pushed me towards Linux, too, of course. I went to some Linux shows in New York. I read articles about software I’d never seen or even heard of that I’d use if I/when I made the switch. I finally met a single person in IT who had experimented with Linux. He didn’t know any more than I did.

I didn’t actually use Linux till the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet was announced. June 2005.** As before, here was a circumstance where the software I wanted to use existed only on one platform: you couldn’t run the Scratchbox SDK for the 770 except on Linux. And I was dying to get in there and do something.

For me, at that time, the best approach looked like a Live CD, which would enable me to boot from a CD and transform my work-supplied laptop into a Linux laptop.

More than that, Matthias Schlenker modified a Knoppix (or Kanotix?) Live CD to include “a pre-built Maemo Environment as well as scratchbox for developing applications.”

With Matthias’ Maemo Live CD, I could actually play with the Maemo GUI. (I wasn’t anywhere close to being able to develop an application using it, the rationale for its creation.) And Matthias responded to my requests and included the necessary pieces to build Plucker e-books and read them in the Maemo port made by Nils Faerber and Florian Boor of Kernel Concepts.

I worked out all the steps to go from Windows to Linux to Scratchbox to Plucker Viewer and also from Windows to Linux to Plucker distiller. I wrote a (now-defunct: website disappeared!) tutorial explaining how to make Plucker e-books for the not-yet-released 770. Most of the tutorial dealt with how to make sense of Linux for a non-Linux user like myself.

I used the Maemo Live CD so much I thought I should take the next step and run Linux from the hard drive.

I looked at Knoppix. I looked at SuSE***. I downloaded several LiveCD’s and tried them. And ultimately I settled on Mepis, which seemed to be easier to use and understand than any other distro (a new word in my vocabulary).

I had a Mepis Live CD, and I donated some small amount to the Mepis cause, and I installed Mepis on my original desktop PC. I embarked then on the process of learning Linux, buying a book and trying to set up an environment that would replace my PC life.

I never got scratchbox installed in Mepis, however, and I was really happy with TextPad on the PC and couldn’t bring myself to the task of mastering emacs or vim or any marvelous Linux text editor.

So I dabbled, but I didn’t catch fire. And eventually I ran into a serious problem on Mepis and was never able to get it resolved. None of the posts I put up at the Mepis forum were ever answered. And the aging desktop Mepis was on seemed slower every time I was on it.

Around this time I had to buy another computer for our household (officially it was for the kids to do their homework on, but my wife uses it during the day and in the late-evening).

Aha! I thought. I’ll get a big, big drive and set up a double-boot system.The kids can boot into Windows and I’ll have a proper Linux installation.

And I did. This time I opted for the combination of ease-of-use, ease-of-installation and active community. That meant Ubuntu.

So I dug around in the annals of double-booting and got things installed. I wasn’t very happy, however. Even with my years of command-line computing, the guidance was curt to the point of snippiness and no matter what I tried, I could not set the default to be the Windows boot. So on 90 percent of the mornings**** the computer is started up, it has to be monitored until the OS is chosen or else the non-Linuxians end up with a brown Ubuntu login screen and have to go through the lengthy process of shutting Linux down and booting up Windows. And every re-start in Windows the same.

Gradually the kids’ computer use increased, my wife wanted to spend more time on the web, and it became impossible to get time on this particular computer to learn Linux. So my Ubuntu time shriveled away.

I have an old HP LaserJet 2100M (the model with PostScript) and my wife wanted it downstairs. So I picked up an adaptor that would connect the laser printer to our network. All the Windows machines were able to print to it easily, but finding a driver and understanding what I needed to do to make files printable from the Ubuntu boot took every ounce of my resourcefulness. I got it to work (and published the information for those coming after me), but I was daunted. This was my fourth microcomputer OS, and I didn’t have the same appreciation for acquiring subtle knowledge known only to the masters. I wanted to use Linux, not master it. With no daily Linux users among my friends or work acquaintances, it looked like I couldn’t have one without the other.

The only specific goal I set for myself on this computer was to enable it for Cambodian keyboarding and get the desktop version of FBReader to show Cambodian texts. I didn’t succeed.

Years have passed. After a very lengthy pre-release gestation, Longhorn has emerged as Vista. Still, I am disinclined to migrate to it. My Linux aspirations have fallen considerably. And yet. With OS2008 on the internet tablets, I want to get a development environment set up to see what I can do with building an e-book browser****.

So I thought that maybe I would use VMWare to run Ubuntu under Windows. I have done a fair amount of that with Windows on the Mac, and then Mac on Windows.

I went so far as to download the software and the virtual machine for Ubuntu, but my momentum was so feeble that every possible interruption was sufficient to set aside the install. Never got it going.

Why? I wondered. Well, I think I have an idea now.

You see, after these three and a half passes at Linux use, I have started once again to climb the uphill path. This post by OSEmuTech in response to a thread started by BOFH concerning andLinux was what did it. (That’s a screenshot of Scratchbox 4.0.1 running via andLinux under Windows at the top of this post, as captured by OSEmuTech.)

One thing I didn’t like about the way I had tried things was I had to be in Linux or in Windows. The best I could manage would be to run them at the same time and switch between them if I needed. And, as I had learned with Mac/PC emulations, switching platforms to get to a different app is distinctly unpleasant. (Even if that’s better than having to quit one and boot into the other.)

So I was intrigued to learn that andLinux basically lets you run Linux apps while you’re on Windows. You don’t have two desktops: you just have your Windows desktop. It doesn’t install all the Linux versions of every kind of software you use because you use the Windows version you already have if you like it. And you install Linux versions of software you can’t get on Windows or for which the Linux version is better.

I installed andLinux this morning. Following OSEmuTech’s footsteps, I’ll be setting up a Scratchbox development environment. (And, yes, OSEmuTech, I will depend on you to get me past any this-could-be-a-showstopper obstacle.)

These days, my favorite editor is XML Copy Editor, with both Windows and Linux versions. I use Firefox, ditto. And Filezilla for FTP (ditto). And Inkscape for vector drawing (ditto). And Pootling for translations (ditto). And 7-Zip for compression. And I’m migrating to Scribus (ditto) for page-layout. I’m dying to dive into FontForge with andLinux (Linux only, although Cygwin makes it usable by PC types). I’m still a Photoshopper (going on 14 years now), but I don’t spend so much time in it these days and GIMP may do the trick.

So maybe as WinXP becomes less and less viable, I’ll be in a situation where I commit wholeheartedly to Linux. Not a dual-boot, but Linux alone. With all these Linux-originated apps in my palette, clearly the transition will be easier now than ever before. (And Textpad has failed to keep up with the times, so that I now rely on it scarcely at all. Not that I like any Linux alternative.)

Maybe with andLinux, I’ll finally catch on to the Linux Zeitgeist I never did before. (And, as always, I’ll share what happens next.)

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* Little did we know. The iPod’s success has made Apple so much more stable that its computers are selling better than ever.

** Oddly enough, I have no problem remembering the announcement date of May 25, 2005, though I couldn’t tell you the birthdays of two of my brothers and two of my sisters. Maybe it has more significance for me?

*** One brother’s recommendation; although a Linux user, he has evaded long-distance handholding, support and guidance very successfully.

**** For security reasons, we shut this computer down every night.

***** That is, an extension to the browser that displays paged material, doesn’t require you to scroll up or down or sideways, reflows when you change the font or font-size, has bookmarks and highlighting, works with any XML and provides tag-level formatting to the user. And provides for animation and video.