TKs Musings: Some Things Just Ain't What They Used To Be

When it comes to computers I am not your average user; I've got far too much experience for that. I've fixed too many of the damn things to be able to think of myself as an average user. I know that if it comes down to it I can make a computer do pretty much anything I want it to. Fortunately for me these days my needs are pretty insignificant. What I need more than anything else is a stable writing environment, and I spend my days looking for better ways to give myself that environment.

I tried Linux back when it first started to gain a lot of public attention. The distribution I tried was Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, and the experience wasn't a bad one. However, it wasn't as good as it could have been. The good news was that once I got everything configured properly it just worked and it kept right on working. The bad news, however, was that a lot of work was required to get things working, more work than your average desktop user would be willing to put in. Indeed I remain convinced that the only reason I saw my way through to making everything work when I installed it was sbecause I was a professional technician at the time and I knew that sooner or later someone was going to bring in a Linux system for me to fix. Therefore I needed to be able to get myself into a position where I would either know exactly what I was doing in a given situation or know where I could find the information I needed to be able to fake it.

Since then I've gone back to Linux every now and again and taken a look. With each new generation things get better and better. The hardware detection and installation gets better and better. The user interfaces get more reliable. The operating system itself becomes more secure and stable. It's kind of like watching the development of the Windows operating system all over again, but with one important difference: this time around security was built into the system from the ground up.

It's been about two years since the last time I ran Linux, and that meant it was about time to have another look and see how things have progressed. Besides which I had been hearing good things about a new distribution called Xandros which was supposed to be the next best thing to Windows for ease of use. I downloaded the Open Circulation Edition of Xandros 2.0 and decided to take a look.

I popped in the install CD, restarted my computer, and let the installer do its thing. Less than twenty minutes later the Xandros OS had been installed, had configured itself to work with all of my hardware, and I was left staring at a very beautiful and very functional desktop. I was floored. I had never had a Windows install complete that fast, nor had I seen a previous Linux install finish that fast. For sheer speed and efficiency alone Xandros got a recommendation from me right then and there.

That was about two and a half weeks ago. I've been spending most of my time in Xandros to get a feel for the OS and to make sure that everything works as advertised. For the most part I'm extremely pleased with what I've got, but there are some small issues that I still need to resolve. Printing is one of them. Xandros detected my Lexmark All-In-One without any problems and even identified it correctly. The help files said that the X73 uses the same print driver as the Z42, so that's what I selected to install. Everything looks as though its configured properly. However, when I try to print something the print job seems to disappear into the ether. Nothing actually comes out of the printer. I know its not the printers fault because when I boot into Windows XP and print something everything works the way it should, so that means it's a software problem somewhere within Linux. One of these days I need to sit down and sort that all out. In order for me to be able to work in Linux day after day I need printer access on demand, and right now I don't have it.

Burning CDs is another issue. When I installed Xandros I had a CD burner installed as my second drive. Xandros supports CD burning on demand in much the same way that Windows XP does, but the OCE throttles down your burning speed so I can only make a disk at 4X rather than the 32X the drive is capable of. This is annoying, but it can be worked around by compiling and installing a program called K3B, which is the Linux equivalent to Nero Burning Rom. My problem is that I didn't do this until after I had replaced my CD burner with a Dual Layer DVD burner. Xandros detected the new burner as a CD drive and reads from it just fine, but when I complied and installed K3B Xandros stopped identifying my DVD reader as a DVD drive and started identifying it as a regular CD drive. I no longer have the ability to read from DVD disks in Xandros. I've not tried burning a DVD but I suspect that would be problematic as well. I can probably fix it by reinstalling Xandros from scratch and then installing K3B, and that's probably what I'll end up doing, but it's still a minor pain in the neck.

While I'm at it I also need to figure out how to make use of my scanner in Linux, but that's a chore for another day.

The bottom line is that I'm a lot farther ahead than I thought I would be, and that's a good thing. Besides, I didn't have to do a lot of work to get that far. Just because I have the ability to be a very technical user doesn't necessarily mean that I want to all the time. Sometimes it's good to encounter something that simply works, and that's exactly what Xandros is. It's a Linux distribution that just plain works, and that's a good thing too. As much as I like Windows the simple fact remains that it's becoming more and more dangerous with each passing day to use it. Malicious hackers of every shape and size are targeting Windows users en masse, and they're doing it because Microsoft doesn't have anything in place that can stop them. It's a lot tougher to hack into someone's computer when they're running Linux, and I find it very refreshing to be able to get productive work done without having to spend a lot of time thinking about system security and how to avoid the virus or spyware of the hour.