Linux is easier than Windows, hands down

It all started a few weeks back when my wife and I decided to get her a new laptop. It was also conveniently close to her July 14th birthday and Dell had a huge campaign going in the newspapers. Dell had just started selling laptops with various Linuxes preinstalled, and Ubuntu was the environment of choice, so I felt reasonably sure that the machine would be usable even if the Linux preinstalled option is not available in Norway yet. After all, our daughter had essentially no trouble at all getting her laptop (a sleek little LG number) going with Ubuntu earlier this year.

So I ended up clicking my way on to the Dell web site and ordering an Inspiron 1520 with 1440x900 resolution and the Ruby Red option (actually it's just the lid, but it does look distinctive).

As luck and Dell's suppliers would have it, the color added some time to the delivery. The machine apparently shipped earlier than expected, and arrived here last Monday afternoon, most likely very close to when the plane with my wife and daughter touched down at Madeira.

I had already burned a 7.04 desktop iso to CD and booted from that. As with anything that comes with Microsoft preinstalled, you need to be really careful to hit the right key at the right moment unless you want to do battle with the Microsoft installer.

Eventually I succeeded, though, the thing booted, went into the traditional graphic Ubuntu startup and dropped me to a shell. Odd. Fortunately from my OpenBSD laptop I was able to find this ubuntuforums.org post which explains in some detail what needs to be done. In particular, the piece about how to fix the graphics driver is quite instructive.

Getting things done right when the graphics card and the wireless network card both need proprietary drivers loaded is a little puzzling when the system is supposed to be all graphic and your default network is wireless, but by following the instructions from the forum I made it eventually.

The short version is, in addition to the oddities involved in getting proprietary drivers the machine requires, the Feisty installer kernel for some reason does not have the proper support for the SATA controller in this Dell model.

Going back to the earlier version lets you do a clean upgrade, and to get all the bits working you need to have both the universe and the multiverse repositories in your package manager's configuration. Not hard for somebody who has not yet recycled all the grey cells with Debian etched into them, just a bit tedious, and even though all steps of the process was accompanied by sensible messages from the system, our only live Ethernet is in the attic where the servers live.

Anyway by elevenish in the evening I had the system all installed with native resolution and 32 bit color depth, on the wireless network and Just Working. The process took significantly less time than putting Windows from restore CDs back on the system it came with.

Yet another evening spent on other things than I had intended (such as writing those crucial bits of the book), but seriously folks, you must never miss an opportunity to make your wife happy.

With that out of the way, I can state with even more confidence:

Linux is easier and more user friendly than Windows.

By now I consider that to be documented beyond question.

But for the things I care about, I really prefer OpenBSD or FreeBSD.

Updates: The spamtrap is growing by a few new addresses a day. I sometimes spot them flying by in the xterm where my spamd log is tail -f'd, sometimes I grep them out of the mail server's logs. Some patterns are emerging, but more later when I have more data.

Go west, young man! (BSDCan, that is)

BSDCan is on in a few short days, and for the second year in a row, I'm heading there to present.

Last year, I did the PF tutorial and then hung around for the rest of the conference, taking in a number of excellent talks and hung around with the best and the brightest (or at least a significant subset) of the BSD world. (Then off to SANE the week after, spending I think about 12 hours at home before heading out to Delft. Good conference, but you might want to consider the jetlag with 6 hours' time dofference).

This time around I'm doing a revised PF tutorial (on May 17th, not bringing flags though) and presenting at the conference proper, with the malware paper on May 18th. I suppose that means I'm now officially a two trick pony.

There were some downsides to last year's BSDCan though: several of us greying BSD guys travelling with laptops spent up to several hours getting a rather too thorough examination of everything including laptops when going through Canadian customs. Greg's diary entry about his arrival in Ottawa describes rougly what I went through too, only they kind of gave up looking for kiddie porn, and for some reason they did not staple any weird documents into my passport. That episode is as far as I can determine one strong reason why Greg is not attending BSDCan this year. I'll be travelling with a camera this time, I wonder if that will set off any alarms in the bureaucracies. If it does, I do hope the invitation letter Dan Langille sent me will have some effect.

Anyway, it's now less than twelve hours until I leave for the airport. Still some work to be done on the slides, so this could turn out to be interesting in several ways.

Traffic to the PF tutorial is still a bit higher than what we'd been used to. It looks like undeadly has brought in some 1917 new friends (uniqe IP addresses or host names logged as visiting some part of the tutorial directory tree), while 467 have come over here via rootprompt.

The total number of visitors (again uniqe IP addresses or host names) to the tutorial now stands at almost nine and a half thousand since I moved the files over to the present site.

How many of those actually ended up using OpenBSD or some other PF equipped BSD is of course not so easy to tell, but it certainly is encouraging to know that people are reading the stuff.

May 1st: OpenBSD 4.1 is out, rootprompters pouring in

The big story today is, of course that OpenBSD 4.1 is out.

Well done, Theo and team!

I pre-order early and got my disk set a couple of weeks ago (and in fact I think this time I managed to grab the right snapshot), so for my sake it was only easier access to updated packages that happened today. Plus of course a reminder that I still need to edit the good new bits into my PF tutorial.

Lots of nice stuff in there, so if you haven't already, NOW is the time to go get yourself a copy; whip out the credit card. Or download and donate, of course.

On the other hand, rootprompt.org decided today was a nice day to publish the story I submitted to them a few weeks back, with a link to the PF tutorial - calling it "A well rounded PF tutorial (with spamd)". Thanks for that, Noel! And people referred from rootprompt.org have been pouring in, at least 120 by last count, bound to increase now that the leftpondians have woken up.

Since I submitted the story to rootprompt, Linuxtag changed their collective mind and decided they were interested in offering my PF tutorial after all. Combined with the "silent network" malware paper it might turn out that I go to Berlin after all, budgets allowing.

So the rough schedule for now looks like it's Ottawa, Berlin, then home to write, make the manuscript deadline before going to Copenhagen, back home to watch what happens, then when OpenBSD 4.2 and the book is out, Venice.

That, and a bit of writing work.

update: undeadly (aka OpenBSD Journal) noticed the rootprompt post too :)