Yesterday I decided to update my Kubuntu to the latest version. I did this whole process from within the operating system itself.

However, I, knowing that Linux will be Linux, was very prepared for this. I burned a copy of the newest version to a CD, fully expecting that everything would be broken and that I’d have to clean install. I backed up my entire /home folder to an external hard drive, a process which took about three hours by the way. I started early so as to give myself the entire day to fix my computer if something went wrong, which I was sure something would. I mean, this is Linux, after all.

Then I hit the Upgrade button.

Two uneventful hours passed while the upgrade did its thing. I tried to stay away from the computer at this point, because I worried I would do something to mess it up, but to be honest the computer was nice and usable the entire time. After the two hours were complete it asked me to restart the computer, so I did.

…

…EVERYTHING WORKED.

I was in shock. I honestly couldn’t believe it. The upgrade had gone flawlessly. It even cleared old kernel versions out of Grub for me. What’s more, it seems to have fixed the sound issues I’ve having since a few months back (where half of my sound/music related programs one day decided to stop working.)

Oh, speaking of which, Amarok is now scrobbling correctly to Last.fm. It hasn’t done that in MONTHS. I would burst into hallelujahs at this point but I’ve already moved on to Clementine which is Amarok without the new over-the-top interface.

The only thing I had to fix was that upon logging in for the first time the bottom panel was missing. I solved this problem by right clicking on the top panel, selecting “Add Panel” and then dragging the various widgets there that I wanted. That was it. Five minutes, tops.

I couldn’t tell whether I wanted to be happy or horrified. Like, I wanted to scream “WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH LINUX” at the screen. Regardless, it’s a big victory for what the Ubuntu folks want, so that’s pretty exciting.

The ultimate test will be when I move in a couple weeks and have to set up *gulp* wireless…

…terrible pun in the title aside, I use a LOT of Free/Open Source software. It comes with the territory when you’re a Linux user.

In no particular order, here are some of my faves:

1. Mozilla Firefox

Possibly THE gateway drug that introduced thousands of us newbies to this newfangled Open Source thing, Firefox is far from perfect (and its memory usage blows up like a balloon if you leave it open for too long), but is still the best we’ve got. Chrome is giving it a run for its money, but while I’ve embraced Chrome as a good secondary browser, it a.) lacks Firefox’s insane addon vault, and b.) still has some weird glitches on Linux.

I loves me some ‘fox.

2. Pidgin

I’ll come right out and say it: when I was still on Windows (back in the day), I was a Trillian user. Trillian does not have a Linux version, though, so I was forced to switch to Pidgin. At first I did so rather begrudgingly but as time has gone on I’ve become more attached to it and now I don’t think I could go back to Trillian. Pidgin is nice, simple, clean, and has some fun plugins.

3. Clementine (aka OldSchool Amarok)

I’m going to tell you a story. Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I used WinAmp. But when I switched to Linux, I fell head-over-heels in love with Amarok. Amarok and I lived together happily for many years, and then something horrible happened: Amarok “upgraded” to 2.0. Problem: Amarok 2.0 came packed with a new GUI I was less than thrilled with, tons of weird sound quality issues, and unstable Last.fm scrobbling. This would not do. So with a heavy heart I bid farewell to Amarok and bounced around music players for a while, trying to find a new home. Exaile and I had a nice little affair, but the void still wasn’t quite filled.

…then I remembered yet another reason why I love Open Source. Because some people had taken the OldSchool Amarok source code and forked it into a new (old?) music player: Clementine. Discovering that this existed was basically the best day of the year for me.

It’s still very much a beta and missing a lot of functionality but if you’re an Amarok refugee like I was I highly recommend this program. <3 4. Open Office

…it’s basically Microsoft Word, but for free. Works like a charm; I’ve never had a problem with it.

5. GIMP

GIMP is one of those programs that you either love or you hate. The two main reasons I hear for hatred are a.) It lacks a bunch of Photoshop’s features, and b.) It is notoriously difficult to learn to use.

My reaction to those two points are: a.) I have never used Photoshop (no, seriously), so if I’m missing out on stuff, I haven’t noticed, and b.) … okay, it is difficult to learn to use. I won’t deny that one.

But if you’re willing to climb the steep learning curve, I think you’ll find that this is quite a splendid program with lots of functionality. I mean, I’m not a professional artist or anything, but I’d like to think I do more art-stuff than the Average Joe and I’ve done it all in GIMP.

As a side note, when I first started using GIMP, I HATED the way it would open up a bunch of different windows for each part of the program: one for your picture, one for the toolbox, one for layers, etc. … but as time has gone on I’ve become so spoiled by it that anything else would make me feel terribly claustrophobic.

So yeah. GIMP. I <3 it dearly. 6. Celtx

I actually prefer “Sophocles” as a screenwriting app. But Sophocles has a ton of drawbacks. Drawback #1: Trialware (a good half the features are locked unless you’re willing to shell out tons of money.) Drawback #2: …not in development anymore, from what I can tell. Drawback #3: Proprietary formats that can’t be exported to anything else unless you pay money.

Enter Celtx, which is still a bit buggy, but is ASTOUNDINGLY promising. This goes beyond a mere screenwriting program and allows you to do storyboards, script breakdowns, et al. I really can’t wait to see where this program is in a couple years.

7. Choqok

As everyone and their dog knows by now, I love Twitter. It fills a chatty void that my inner IRC Junkie has been missing for years. I spent a good long time searching for a Twitter client that fulfilled criteria like not requiring Adobe AIR (I have my reasons for not liking Adobe AIR) … which, trust me, is easier said than done.

So after lots of searching I decided a while back to give Choqok a shot. And folks, I am in LOVE. This is a fully featured Twitter client that supports everything from re-tweets to favorites to following convos to searching to… yeah, you name it, Choqok does it. You can even customize your color scheme.

The only reason I don’t wax poetic about this program’s virtues more is because it is– as far as I can tell, anyway– a ‘nix only program, and I figure most of my readers/followers aren’t ‘nix users.

…man. I mean, I haven’t had any intention of “going back to Windows” for years, but this program seriously puts the nail in the coffin, it’s that good. <3 8. VLC Media Player

It plays everything. ’nuff said.

9. Konsole

I made mine green text on black so I can pretend I’m Trinity from the Matrix.

As an aside, when I went to xkcd on April Fool’s Day, this is what I did:

…and…

10. Linux!

Cause regardless of how close/not-close it is to being “Ready for the Desktop”, I <3 my tinker toy! Wow, it was hard to narrow the options down to ten. I may have to make a Part Two later...

This is part three of my “Discovering Linux” series. Here’s Part One and Part Two.

2007 was a busy year. I was graduating from university and as such, that February I was smack in the middle of senior projects, all of which seemed to be happening right at the same time. Still, I was coming up with excuses to sneak away and use my Linux-ified Laptop. I lurked around on Ubuntu Forums and idled on Linux-related IRC channels. And more and more, having Windows XP on my desktop was starting to bother me. It was compounded by discovering that downloading an mp3 from Apple would play on my iPod but not Winamp, and downloading an mp3 from Microsoft would play on Winamp but not my iPod. This irritated me beyond belief. How could these companies expect to justify not-pirating-stuff if they made it so difficult to listen to music? I didn’t think I could do much about it, though. I needed Windows for games, right? And all those other programs that Linux couldn’t use, right?

I can’t recall what I was doing with my computer, exactly, that fateful day in February. It was the week that all of my senior projects were happening. Film shoots, theatrical plays. I wasn’t working at the time, having saved up a lot of money to take the year off, and yet there were days that I was gone from 9am until well after midnight.

And somehow, amidst all of this, I managed to royally screw up my computer. I think I must have known that what I was doing would screw it all up, because I conveniently happened to back up all of my important files the day before. Maybe I was trying to set up a dual-boot… who knows, really. I can’t remember. Regardless of what I was doing, though, I destroyed my Windows XP. Here’s how I wrote it on my Livejournal at the time:

I was just going around minding my own business (okay, maybe I was sorta messing with things… >.> shh!) and I had to restart my computer and when it came back up I was greeted with all sorts of fun “OMG CAN’T BOOT, OMG NO DISK, OMG RESTART, OMG STUCK” errors. Going into the BIOS didn’t help me at all, and a Google search on my trusty laptop informed me that the solution for this particular error was essentially this: “Nobody knows exactly what causes this error. Here is a list of 5,389,126,734 things you can try that may or may not randomly fix your computer. If none of those work, you’re screwed.”

So what did a very exasperated and rather un-amused Pike do?

Stuck the Kubuntu 6.06 CD in the drive and reformatted, of course.

Granted, it wasn’t all fun and games and smooth sailing. I had tons of display and graphical issues and I became very well-acquainted with the dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg command. And, if I recall correctly, I actually had to go out and buy a new wireless card. All of this in the middle of my senior projects that determined whether or not I’d graduate.

And yet, it was worth it. For the first time in years I felt like I was doing something really and truly productive and, dare I say, fun involving my computer. It was challenging and frustrating and it was a blast, and within two days I was all set up and ready to go.

…and that’s how it happened. Since then I’ve been a Linux user. Three years as of last month.

A lot of things have happened since then. I began playing World of Warcraft in May of 2007. I am forever grateful that I was a full-time Linux user before I started playing because I can guarantee you now that I would never have considered a full-switch to Linux if I was on Windows when I started playing and I thought that maybe Linux might do something to my precious WoW. (Um yeah, I was a serious addict for a while. *cough*)

WoW on Linux/Wine was relatively easy to set up– although I had no sound the first day or two that I played– but this was quickly fixed and I leveled to 70 (the then-level cap) without ever logging onto a Windows box. Things got tricky when I started raiding and suddenly Ventrilo was a must; Ventrilo, try as I might, never ever worked for me on Linux.* So it was that February of 2008– after one year of being an exclusive Linux user– I caved and turned my computer into a dual-boot machine. I’ve dual-booted since then, although I don’t particularly like it. I give Linux the lion’s share of my hard drive and only ever use Windows for Ventrilo or FRAPS, and since those are very situational uses I still do consider myself to be a “Linux exclusive” user in the end.

(In fact, right now my Windows partition is quite gimped– no sound, broken graphics, and it won’t connect to the internet. Linux did it all out of the box, so I’ve no desire to go mess with my Windows partition, especially now that I no longer play WoW.)

And so it is that we reach this point. I’m not a computer wizard. I’m not “elite”. I’m not a programmer (though I yearn to be one so I dink around with Python.) I’m just a girl who fell in love with open source one day and decided to see how deep the rabbit hole went.

And so begin my stories…

—

* Ironically I finally started to get it to work about two weeks before I quit WoW. My last ever raids were done, perhaps fittingly, on Linux, so I’d come full circle.

This is part two of my three-part “Discovering Linux” story. Like the last post, this was written up at some point last year.

Who-buntu?

I don’t recall exactly where I first found out about Ubuntu, the rising new star in Linux distros at the time, or what it was that inspired me to download the LiveCD. Actually, now that I think about it, I think it may have been the unknowing “fault” of a poster at a forum I frequented at the time. She would post up her Ubuntu in those “Post Your Desktop” threads, and I was… jealous, to say the least. That should be me, I thought. I was the one who did the research on Open Source and oldschool hackers… why couldn’t I have Linux too?

I do remember downloading the Ubuntu LiveCD, putting it in my computer, and being extremely disappointed to find out that try as I might, I couldn’t get it to play nice with my wireless internet.

Why I also had the Kubuntu LiveCD (Kubuntu being, well, Ubuntu with a different desktop environment), I honestly can’t remember, and why I tried it out after Ubuntu I can’t remember either. I do know, though, that wireless internet worked flawlessly and out of the box on Kubuntu, and that I fell deeply in love with this beautiful operating system that was pleasing to the eyes and that was so very deliciously “open source”… all the ideals I’d found myself falling in love with.

But then I went back to Windows. Because the Linux LiveCD was just a LiveCD in my eyes; I’d never get to actually install it. I didn’t think I was that talented. Besideswhich, I figured I’d need to use Windows for video games. (Never mind the fact that I only very rarely played PC games at that point).

I soon got to a point where I was using the Kubuntu LiveCD anytime I had the excuse, though. Mostly on my laptop; I would cozy down on my bed with the lights dim except for maybe a candle, and do my stuff on Linux. It felt so… right. Does that make me a giant dork? Probably. But hey.

I moved on to the next step in my little obsession, which was the determination to get Linux installed on something. I chose my old computer which I no longer used. One day I pulled it out, popped the LiveCD in, and… failed to get it to boot the LiveCD. Doublechecking the BIOS and trying out Smart Boot Manager literally got me nowhere. So, after several hours… I gave up.

Temporarily.

Happy New Year

I gave it another shot a few months later. Why I thought I could succeed that time when I hadn’t before, I don’t know, but I spent hours trying to get it working. It was something I wanted so badly, I could taste it.

And so it was that about a week later I pulled out my laptop, surrounded myself with penguin plushies for luck (dork, remember?) put in the Kubuntu LiveCD… and clicked “install”.

I partitioned the drive so I would be able to dual-boot Windows and Linux. Afterward I leaned back and took a look at the finished job: Linux, running much more quickly and smootly than it had with the LiveCD. And Windows still booting fine as well. Success?

Perhaps not.

Somehow I had messed up my install, and given myself a gigantic Linux partition and a teeny tiny Windows one. This was the opposite of what I initially wanted. Now at this point, I was still a giant nub and had no idea about partition editors like GParted so I assumed that my only option would be to wipe everything, reinstall Windows, and start from scratch.

I had a copy of Windows XP laying around, so in the disc went into my laptop and after a bit I was good to go. Or so I thought. I had no internet and no sound. See, these were drivers that came pre-installed with the laptop’s Windows XP and they didn’t give them to you separately. I went on a massive search for said drivers, with no luck. Before long, night had arrived, and I went to bed with tears in my eyes, convinced I had ruined my laptop and rendered it completely unusable. I knew I shouldn’t have tried to mess with Linux. I knew I would mess something up. I knew it was out of my league.

I woke up the next morning hoping that it had all been a bad dream. But no, I still had a laptop running a gimped version of Windows XP. I glanced over at the Kubuntu CD. I glanced back at my laptop. I thought for a while.

And then Kubuntu went into my laptop and I wiped XP and installed Linux onto 100% of my hard drive. No more of this dual-booting crap with an OS that I couldn’t get working if it didn’t happen to be installed by default.

And then it was done; I booted up my computer and up came Linux.

The sound worked by default.

The internet worked by default.

It was January of 2007, and that year, I was free.

This, of course, was only the beginning– my desktop computer, which was the one that I used most, still ran Windows XP. That would soon change.

To Be Concluded!

This is something I initially wrote back June of last year. It’s part one of a three part story describing how I “found” Linux and turned into a FOSS nerd. I figured it would be worth documenting partially so I wouldn’t forget, and partially because while I am a geek, I am by no means a programmer, and I figure this makes me somewhat unique among typical FOSS nerds so maybe it would be a story worth sharing.

—

Computers

Computers have always been a part of my life. When I was very young, it was the Commdore 64, and then when I hit Kindergarten and throughout much of elementary school career, it was green-screen IBMs. By fifth or sixth grade the school had graduated to Mac, which I preferred over the IBMs for two reasons: Kid Pix, and fireworks screensavers. Why can’t you find any good old’fashioned Pyro! fireworks screensavers anymore? But I digress.

The internet also exploded onto the scene at about this time; I’ll never forget that random commercial in the middle of kids’ shows saying you could now enter some contest or other by “e-mail”. What a strange new word.

Our beloved Commdore 64 at home finally gave up the ghost when I was in seventh grade and we bought a shiny new computer with Windows 95 installed. For the first time I tried out this “internet thing” myself, though I don’t really remember what I did. I do have a vague memory of talking to my cousin on ICQ, though.

The default web browser was Internet Explorer, which disappointed me because I much preferred the browser with the shiny “N” logo that made sparkles when pages were loading, and had an overall more fun GUI, which, back then, is basically how I judged most programs. But Internet Explorer was what came with the computer, and so it was that the Big Blue “E” would become synonymous with the internet.

Our computer was always having issues so we wound up replacing it and reformatting it several times for the next few years and we cycled through virtually every new Windows operating system up until XP, which is when I graduated high school and got my own computer as a present. It came with Windows XP Home pre-installed and I. Was. Excited. Finally a computer of my own to play my own games on and set my own wallpaper on!

I played a lot of Starcraft. Mostly just games against the AI because my internet access at the time was dialup and very spotty at best. I could get internet access at school, and I found myself joining a few forums, but but I never stayed very long because I couldn’t access said forums from home. Things really started to change in early 2004, though, when I finally obtained home access to high-speed internet…

Enter the Fox

The Big Blue E. That’s what I clicked on to use the internet, and use it I did to explore this big new world that had opened up in front of me. At some point earlier, my brother (who got a computer of his own a few years before I did), showed me this new thing called “Mozilla” which he called “The Browser of Champions,” but I didn’t really get the appeal and went back to my Big Blue E.

Until it decided to start being stupid.

Every so often it would suddenly and out of nowhere decide to open up multitudes of copies of itself. I had no way to stop it until it decided to stop, at which point my taskbar was cluttered with dozens or even hundreds of instances of Internet Explorer, and I had to go through and individually close each of them. I was quite vexed by this and went to the aforementioned brother for help, who gave me a solution that I wasn’t expecting, but which turned out to be even better than I expected:

A new web browser. It was apparently still in Beta; version 0.8, I believe, is where I jumped in.

It was called Firefox.

I was immediately hooked. The kinks were all still being worked out, the browser was still somewhat glitchy in several respects, but I was hooked nonetheless. The Big Blue E was ditched and from that day on, it was the still mint-new logo of a fox circling the globe that would then define the Internet.

Perhaps most importantly though, Firefox showed me something that I hadn’t even known existed. See, I like to research things, just to learn more about them, and so naturally at some point I stumbled across something or other about Firefox and I was reading it and discovered a new term: Open Source.

Hackers

My very earliest introduction to Linux was this thing that my brother showed me called Knoppix. From what I understood at the time, it was a CD that you put into your computer that turned you into a hacker.

Let’s stop and talk about this for a bit. Although my personal definition of the word “hacker” has changed throughout my life, I can never remember it being a negative word. At the time that I was shown Knoppix, a “hacker”, in my understanding, was a cross between Neo from the Matrix, and Robin Hood. An outlaw with a heart who stole code from the rich to give to the poor. Someone who was probably scary but was still, at heart, a Good Guy. I have no idea how this picture got painted in my mind. It was possibly inspired by the “I Know Unix” girl in Jurassic Park, a movie that I watched about a million times when I was ten years old. But regardless of where I got this image in my head, it was there, and Knoppix was seen as this shiny, offlimits toy that I should never use because I knew I wasn’t Neo or Robin Hood, I was just an ordinary girl, and to use something like Linux would be like stumbling out of my domain and profaning something that was beyond my reach.

And so other than ogling at it one time I went on with the rest of my life, not thinking about it again until going on one of those wonderful zen moments on the computer of just clicking and clicking and learning and learning about new things, and this time it was Open Source I was learning about and somehow I stumbled across Eric S. Raymond‘s website.

It was then that I devoured the Jargon File and became fascinated with this idea of the true, original, dorky MIT hacker. A geek like me, who was also trickster like Br’er Rabbit who made fun things with computers.

Could I do that?

On that site was a tutorial called “How to Become a Hacker“. I gulped it all down and then got to one of the steps:

“Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.”

I thought back to Knoppix and how alien it had seemed compared to Windows, with its big terminal and an unfamiliar GUI. Yeah, it was out of my league.

So I decided I couldn’t become a hacker, I wasn’t awesome enough. Fair. I was still fascinated with the idea of Open Source, and became relatively involved in the Spread Firefox community for a short time as a way to prove it. I felt like I’d sort of reached a dead-end, though, and because I was still relatively content with Windows my initial love affair with Open Source sort of faded away.

For the time being…

To Be Continued!