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...or how to spend January in Latvia

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Here I sit at about midnight, WBGO Newark playing in my ears, typing in Open Office, a free version of the dread Microsoft Office group of programs, and on a lovely, Bill Gates free operating system. That's right, therieb is migrating to Ubuntu, the current popular version of Linux. Let me tell you, it's not a pain-free process. I was hoping that I could tell my old man he could switch over to Linux and give Gates the finger too. No such luck! Ubuntu 8.10 isn't for the faint of heart. It took forever to get the wireless network going, and a month of intense screwing with the system to get the microphone working in Skype. Definately not for someone who still finds the Windows desktop a place of surprise and mystery.

But perhaps I'm not being fair. After all, it was the old fart that introduced me to tinkering with electric trains, Radio Shack experiment kits, car repair, and Heathkits, those do-it-yourself electronics projects that were available long before do-it-yourself was abbreviated as DYI. Heathkit started as a hobbyist's alternative to buying a radio or oscilloscope off the shelf at the store. The kits offered good components and a much lower price, as long as you were willing to learn how to read a schematic and hold a soldering iron. My Pop has a Heathkit ham radio in his office, but he has expressed absolutely no curiosity about how his computer works. Ubuntu is the Heathkit of operating systems; if you are looking for out of the box convenience, look elsewhere! If however, you are interested in learning the rudiments of file systems, disk usage, and the like, Ubuntu might be worth a try.

My first few minutes with Ubuntu gave me an unwelcome surprise. I had been drawn to the Ubuntu website by their slick marketing which features hip, young, geeky looking people frolicking in a Window's free environment. How difficult, I reasoned, could this be? The site offered a program called „WUBI“ for Windows, which would allow Windows users to simulate the Ubuntu operating system without making the commitment to change anything on their computers. I decided that would be a great place for me to start. I don't know what „wubi“ means, but I'm guessing „gotcha!“ is a pretty good translation. No sooner had I clicked on the „wubi“ .exe on my Windows desktop than the program partitioned my hard drive and installed a full, working version of Ubuntu on my machine. Not, I must say, what the doctor ordered, but I was willing to be flexible. From that moment on, when I booted my machine, an extra screen appeared that asked me if I would prefer to work with Ubuntu or with the Windows XP operating system that came installed on my laptop. I chose Ubuntu, and off I went.

Some differences between the two operating systems were immediately obvious. The time it takes from starting the machine to being fully functional on the desktop is cut in half in Ubuntu. Ubuntu also makes changing the language of the operating system easy from the login screen, whereas I have yet to find where it is in Windows. This feature may seem like a trifle to many users, but one laptop, two language families like mine find easy language and keyboard support a godsend. Ubuntu has chosen to emulate the Macintosh OS X family of operating systems. Icons on the desktop are frowned upon. Items on the launch bar come flying at you when you start a program. Most importantly, there is the terminal window with a command line, the single feature that really separates a Linux operating system from Windows. At the command line you can fix, alter, add things to, remove things from, and yes, screw up your computer. The command line lets you change your computer's characteristics, including the characteristics of the operating system itself. It is the soldering iron of Linux, and like the real thing, you can burn yourself and destroy your equipment if you don't know what you're doing.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu has also chosen to emulate some of the most obnoxious features in Windows. Chief among these, from my perspective, is the music that plays when the desktop starts up. Windows always opts for some self-aggrandizing jingle that lets everyone within a three mile radius know that you just booted up a laptop they can steal. Ubuntu has some ghastly chord blasting to multicultural wagga wagga African drums. I was able to silence this horrid tune in the sound preferences, but the initial drum beat warning me to log in to the system may be with me until the day I die. If you think I'm being too picky, you haven't woken up a Latvian Princess with your laptop's login sound lately. It's not a pleasant experience. Ubuntu also comes preloaded with a bunch of programs that emulate Windows favorites. Open Office heads up the so called „productivity tools.“ I'd been using the Open Office programs in Windows (because I refuse to pay Gates for Microsoft Office) and I find them equally effective in Ubuntu, although they are just as weighed down with features I never use. The tool bar of Open Office Writer (oh for the days when it was called a ruler!) has so many choices I feel hopelessly inadequate just looking at it. All I want is a footnote, dammit!

I'm a great candidate to use Ubuntu because I am not a power user. I don't work with any powerful Windows-only programs in my daily life. My needs run to typing, listening to music, occasionally watching video, talking on Skype, updating my web page, and viewing online pornography. These simple tasks can be accomplished by any contemporary operating system. Furthermore, we have moved beyond the days of file incompatibility. I can read any spreadsheet, document, or presentation made in Microsoft Office in Open Office, and vice versa. All that said, there were a few programs on the Windows side of my computer that I sorely missed. One of them was my Langenscheidt Deutsch als Fremdsprache dictionary, which only runs on Windows. For such occasions, the Linux community has concocted something called WINE, a program that allows Windows software to run in Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems with varying degrees of success. The makers of WINE primarily seem concerned with getting their Windows computer games to run successfully (World of Warcraft: Platinum Status!!), but such simple programs as a dictionary work great as well. The only feature that doesn't work is the „Pop-Up Suche,“ which gives definitions for words within web pages and documents with a mouse click. I'm pretty sure I could get it to work if I installed a web browser in WINE, but I'd rather not have two web browsers on the system, so for the moment I can do without.

Itunes, however, I cannot do without. At first, I thought this would be an insurmountable obstacle. Steve Jobs does not write a Linux version of his music program, and he records music in the proprietary AAC codec rather than Mp3. I drank the Ipod Kool-Aid long ago, and my music library is at least 90% AAC files. What to do? Would I have to reboot the machine and use Windows every time I wanted to listen to music? Luckily, the situation is not nearly that dire. Ubuntu comes with its own music player, Rhythmbox, which can sync an Ipod and read and write in AAC. The setup for me was quite simple. Since my music files exist on an external hard drive, all I had to do is plug the hard drive in and tell Rhythmbox where to go to find its library. Rhythmbox is buggy and tends to spit out error messages when there really isn't a problem. It also seems to recheck to see if all of files are actually in the library at random intervals, which can take up to five minutes. On the other hand, Rhythmbox offers some distinct advantages over Itunes. I have no idea where Rhythmbox is pulling track and cover art information, but it seems to be much more accurate than the accursed „Gracenote“ database that Apple relies on. Furthermore, Rhythmbox moves us much closer to real relational database functionality. I can choose to browse by genre and then by album, rather than by artist, which fragments classical music albums in Itunes. Also, the player is free of advertising, which makes me feel much better about using it. All in all, Rythhmbox is an improvement.

So far, so good. I had a working Linux operating system with 90% of my programs functioning acceptably. Time to call some people on Skype and congratulate myself! And there my troubles began. The laptop's microphone didn't work. Or it sometimes worked. Or it worked, but the sound was too quiet. Or there was static. Everything worked fine in Windows, so it couldn't be a hardware problem. What to do?

When you have software problem in the Windows world, you either call or chat online with a well-meaning support person from a third-world country with a tenuous grasp on the English language. Sophisticated companies also offer the chance for you to surrender control of your computer to these „technicians“ over the internet, so they can attempt to fix what's wrong without exhausting the 300 or so words in their vocabulary. It was just such a situation that ignited my interest in Ubuntu in the first place, after having paid the requisite $50 to the Synaptec Corporation to keep my Windows computer free of viruses for another year. The new version of Norton Internet Security continually greeted me with alarming errors in red across my screen. I dutifully called a tech support specialist, who managed to babble his advice to ignore the warnings. The software was new and a fix would automatically download in a matter of weeks. Now call me old fashioned, but when I pay $50 for something, I expect that it will work, and I certainly expect that it doesn't make matters worse. My demands for help mystified my new Indian friend, who referred the matter to a supervisor with a better Hindi-English dictionary. After several days, and countless hours on the phone and chatting, the problem remained, and it remains to this day when I boot up Windows. „Live update invites you to fix error 3909,1.“ Yes, friend, I've been down that road. It takes 45 minutes to go through the procedure, and you end up right back where you started.

No such „help“ exists in Ubuntuland. Instead, you enter the fascinating world of the Ubuntu forums. The forums are giant lists of real problems and possible solutions on the internet, asked and answered by fellow users. Using search terms just like you would in Google, you type in your computer's malady and find a conversation or „thread“ where people like you are banging their heads against the same problem. The people who write in the forums refer to Ubuntu users as community members, and indeed, there appears to be a fair amount of helpfulness and community spirit there. Contributors are polite for the most part, and seem genuinely interested in helping each other. I remember the earlier days of Linux from my time at Amazon, and help was not always so easy to come by. Requests over the internet or to co-workers were often greeted by a „if you're not smart enough to figure that out, you're not smart enough to use this software, go back to Windows“ attitude. Very little of that remains in the Ubuntu forums. Also absent are the so-called flame wars, which are endless and insulting conversations between two or more self-appointed Linux experts over trifling matters, doubtless conducted from their respective parents' basements. The minds behind Ubuntu have discovered that such elitism is counterproductive. Like other minority groups, Ubuntuians have learned that a certain amount of assimilation and acceptance of outsiders is imperative to achieving their goals.

Ubuntu was first released in 2004, largely compiled from another version of Linux called Debian. A South African venture capitalist named Mark Shuttlesworth and a British corporation called Canonical currently oversee the new versions of the operating system, which appear twice a year. It appears that Cannoical is in charge of the releasing and distributing the software, as well as for deciding exactly what goes into the operating system and for quality control. The software is written by programmers who have been accepted into the Ubuntu development community through their previous programing work, contributions to the public forums, and bug reports. The acceptance process is set up to look like a cross between a difficult job interview and a rite of passage into an elite sect, where a Council of Elders debates the worthiness of each candidate. It is unclear which of these acolytes receives a salary, or who decides which sections of the operating system they will work on. This strategy allows Canonical to take advantage of the efforts of a small army of software volunteers. Unfortunately, the efficiencies of using volunteer software engineers introduce some difficulties in keeping everything together and compatible, as my experience with my laptop's microphone demonstrated.

I have always suspected that I have a mild case of Attention Deficit Disorder, and the Ubuntu forums pose a real challenge for people like me. I ran a search on „microphone, intrepid,“ Intrepid being the release of the operating system I was using, and I came up with several useful discussions from people who were having the same problem as me. Whoopee! I'm not alone! I'm not just being an idiot! The problem was that the different threads led off in different directions toward different proposed solutions. I started following one and got distracted by another when it looked more promising. I made changes to my system and forgot to keep track of what I did. Pretty soon I lost all confidence that my microphone ever worked, so I booted up Windows and checked. Yup, still worked, back to the drawing board.

There are several types of personalities on the forums. Some people write in just to complain. These executive types „I installed Ubuntu and it wasted three hours of my precious time, blah blah, why isn't it a real operating system?, blah,“ don't last very long. I suspect many of them are complaining from Windows that they had their IT guy reinstall on their computer. More common are people like me who admit to not knowing anything about Linux but are willing to learn and need some help. Often we are helped by other „newbies“ or „nubes“ who have been down the same road, and sometimes by people who actually know what they are doing, including some developers who listen in to troubleshoot larger software problems that people are having. Everyone is polite and helpful, but the quality of the information you're uncovering is not always clear. One proposed solution for the microphone problem apparently broke the entire operating system, preventing it from starting up when you booted up the computer, or I read as much from an irate user who followed that advice. At least the original poster wrote back and told the poor guy how to get his system working again.

I will not bore the reader with the minutiae of the Ubuntu microphone problem and its solution. Suffice it to say that the developers behind Ubuntu have made some changes to the sound architecture in Ubuntu without fully appreciating or perhaps understanding all of the ramifications. Many of the people on the forums started their posts the same way: my mic and speakers were working fine, I upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu, and now everything's broken. Hobbyists like me were disappointed. People who bought laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled had a legitimate grievance. It appears some attention has been paid to the problem in the development community in the past week. Many of the update packages the computer downloads automatically have to do with sound. After about a month of messing around (and hearing Baiba refer to my laptop as my new girlfriend) I solved the problem. It was a quiet victory. I was alone at home, and could clearly hear my voice coming over the speaker after having recorded myself in Sound Recorder. Skype worked too. I closed my eyes and was reminded of how my Pop talked about working on horrible technical problems: You close your eyes and you can still see it, the Heathkit, the MG Midget carburetor(s), and now Ubuntu linux.

And then a funny thing happened. I felt ridiculously proud of myself. I had done it (with the help of a very good post from someone named Fluxx in Bavaria, Vielen Dank!). I had solved my problem and I wanted to share my new expertise with everyone, or certainly with others who were having the same troubles on the Ubuntu forums. Certainly part of the attraction was that I wanted to show off, but I also found I have a genuine interest in helping people solve their problem, just as other posters helped me. I suppose I discovered the secret of the Ubuntu community. My struggle with the microphone made me feel a part of something. Cynics will call this creating community through bad software, but how different was my struggle with Ubuntu than my trials with Windows and Synaptec's virus software? Both consumed my time, but the Ubuntu problem taught me something, and unlike the Windows problem it did actually get fixed. It more than got fixed, I triumphed over it. Truth be told, I'm still celebrating. There are other mountains to climb: the video camera doesn't work, the sound card stops when the computer comes out of hibernation, DVD playback is poor. That said, I have a well-functioning laptop freed from Bill Gates and the Indian tech support hoards. Henceforth, dear reader, these dispatches will be coming to you from Ubuntuland!