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.

Which Windows XP version is it on that laptop?

Q: Which Windows XP version is it on that laptop?

A: None. I run OpenBSD.

That exchange happened in my office a few days back. The reason? At my day job, we do a number of different things, and at times we do tests on new hardware for customers who require that. So a customer asked us to do an assigment which involved going to an airport in a different city and test some equipment there. And they asked if we would have a laptop with English-language Windows XP on it to bring along. That's when I answered that actually my laptop does not run Microsoft Windows at all. I added that if I could dig out the restore disks for my old one, it would probably be Norwegian.

Frankly I'm not sure what my response my colleague sent back to the customer, but it probably said something along the lines that we may be able to dig out one with Norwegian XP on it. It took me only a few minutes to dig out the restore CDs (for some reason my old Fujitsu-Siemens laptop (an Amilo 1840W if it matters) came with two apparently identical restore disks), and put them on my desk. Then of course I forgot to bring them with me (that machine was in my attic at home), but finally I brought the machine into the office this morning.

Why bring out a 2004-vintage machine in the first place? Well, the ThinkPad R60 I'm typing this on did come with some sort of Microsoft system on it, halfway installed with no backup media, and since this is the machine I rely on for stuff I need to do every day, it has been running recent OpenBSD-current snapshots since I got it last October.

So for a detour into the world of mobile Microsoft computing, I needed to get the older unit up and running again. It had worked reasonably well up until I bought the newer machine - with a 3.2GHz Pentium IV and three fans in it it sounded like a hangarful of F16s and it never did have more than about 72 minutes of battery life (since reduced to zero), and in the end small bits of plastic started coming off it here and there, but it still worked and it did come with restore media.

So arriving in the office this morning with a sligtly heavier backpack than usual, I plugged the machine in along with the others, turned it on and after a bit of fiddling with firmware menus got it to boot from the restore CD. (That is, to actually get the thing to boot the CD, you need to watch for the right moment to press Enter, I almost forgot.) The installer takes a while to load, and if we forget about the 'you have to agree to this EULA' screen it's on par with FreeBSD's sysinstall for intuitiveness or lack of it.

The first thing that really amazed me was how long it took to create a file system on the disk. The last system on the machine pre-windows restore was OpenBSD, so of course creating a new partition and file system was necessary. Past lunch the thing was still only in the early stages of copying system files.

Then for a while it just stood there with a dark screen making CD crunching noises, so I power cycled the machine. It came up again with a the traditional teletubby background and a dialog which demanded to see the restore disk for a while more. I gave it that, and it went on for a while, finally rebooting. Over the next few reboots the system consistently tried (but failed) to find the correct resolution for the internal display (1200x800), trying 800x600 alternately and 1024x768, never finding the physical resolution at all.

Any X I've encountered just magically found the optimal configuration for this kit; for the first few months I had the machine it ran fine without an xorg.conf. After I started taking it to lecture halls to speak to projectors it turned out I needed one to fiddle with, but finding something that worked on the interal screen was never ever a problem with any freenix and X. But then of course I guess Windows had to be different. By the time I had XP's Service Pack 2 installed, it was 3.30 pm.

What would you do - go on mucking about with the Windows machine and try to make it behave, or tell the customer "if you need me to go there with something that speaks wifi and I can use to take notes, I can bring my OpenBSD Thinkpad"? It runs X with KDE, so I won't look too scary I guess.

Bah. It's late in the day, SWMBO just called in for supplies, and I have other writing to do. In the meantime, I could see how far installing that FreeBSD-current snapshot on it gets.

The book, it's still progressing.