A round of GNU/Linux, heading in to the back nine. (Part 2)

Continued from Part 1: How was your round of GNU/Linux?

Irksome Screen Resolution Problems

Everything was pretty well set: I had network connectivity and could get to a network server for sharing spreadsheets and use Firefox for browsing. But the display resolution was too “big.” I found where you can set it, but there were only two options: 800×600 and 640×480. And getting it to go higher was a bother.

It felt a bit like going back in time. Suddenly I had to try remembering things about the hardware, and it reminded me of when I had to hop through a lot of hoops to make things work in Windows. For quite a while now in Windows, things have gotten so well supported with drivers and “plug and play” installation–which works very well these days–that I’d gotten out of the habit of thinking about the hardware.

I wasn’t looking at this as a knock against free software. For one thing, hardware manufacturers spend the most amount of time making things work for Windows.

What goes on in computers?

It made me think about computer literacy. It’s good to know what makes computers go and it’s fun to play with them, but should it be necessary? If we go with the old car analogy, people used to tinker with the hardware in their cars a lot more. For myself, I know very little about the mechanical workings of mine, and I don’t really want to. It gets me from here to there. That’s all I care about.

But a computer isn’t exactly like a car, so the analogy only goes so far. The computer is a very flexible device that can do a lot more than move us from point A to point B. I’d argue that it’s much more important to be knowledgeable about using the software on the computer. The hardware can be interesting and fun, but it’s the software that I really care about. So is it possible or desirable to be hardware ignorant and software educated? The two are often so tightly coupled, but surely over time this won’t be true, will it?

For the handling of hardware, should we expect GNU/Linux systems to be as idiot-enabling as Windows?

So much varies depending on perspective. I know Windows, so it feels easy to me. I can avoid a lot of problems, and the problems I run in to, I can usually fix without too much effort. And then I read GNU/Linux experts who look at it the opposite way.

Even though the installers have gotten very good, and there is support for a lot of hardware, I got the feeling from this brief foray that GNU/Linux distributions still have a ways to go to be as easy to use as Windows. Or maybe it’s just as much that hardware manufacturers need to put as much effort in to making their hardware work with free software. What will it take to make that happen? People have to ask for it. Will the population of free software users grow large enough to have a loud enough voice to demand this support?

The Resolution Hassle

So there I was, wanting at least 1024×768, if not 1152×864. Some searching on Google led me to check the video driver. It looked like the correct driver was configured. I tried adding “1152×864” to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, but that didn’t seem to do the trick. I was avoiding the other advice I kept seeing, which is for people to download drivers from the manufacturer web site. But I eventually went to nVidia’s site and got an install package. And then another. I was getting a little anxious about where this could lead, since all I wanted was a simple resolution change and not to be plumbing the depths of the system just then. Knowing at the same time that this is how you learn it, by solving problems like this.

The installer didn’t want me to be in X. Took me a while to figure out how to use /etc/inittab to get the run level changed and longer yet to realize whatever I had done to set up VNC was causing some X thing to run that the installer kept complaining about. So I got that out of the way.

Finally, the installer goes to work, and now it complains about not having the right kernel something-or-other. And it couldn’t create the proper kernel something-or-other, and it couldn’t find it on the web. There was something about getting and pointing to the kernel source code to create the something-or-other. And now I’m feeling despondent.

It’s Still a Geek System

In my past Linux experiments, I had gotten hung up on trying to compile my own kernel, because that seemed like something you should be able to do. But I never accomplished it and abandoned the effort. And again, this kind of stuff I’ll need and want to know about, but I didn’t really want to do it that day. This is fine for a hobbyist system, and I know it’s an attractive feature to people who would rather not have the unwashed masses joining the club, but it’s not going to be great for people who are technically competent enough to run Windows but don’t have the time or interest in learning how to compile their own operating system software.

I expect there to be challenges, and I know things may not work as quickly or easily as I’d like, but it was still frustrating. It just seemed like so much work when the video card was using the right driver and everything seemed to be fine. Too much work for a simple thing. And anxiety producing when there are so many instructions and you’re not sure all what applies to you. There’s so much assumed knowledge. “If you have version N then run modprobe -q agpgart,” I read in the nVidia instructions. But it seemed like an offhand suggestion, the way it was presented, and I didn’t see it in other instructions. So is it important or not? What the hell is that supposed to do? There’s just this sense of a million things that you should know but don’t. I’m aware that this is how it probably seems to new Windows users, also, but we have a lot of experienced Windows users and we’d like to convince them to switch teams.

Don’t get me wrong. Competently running a Windows machine is also a job for geeks. It’s just a little bit easier for people to muddle along when the OS comes preinstalled on their machines. I’m thinking a lot about how we get to the state of affairs where people start with GNU/Linux, and then the geeks in their lives have an easier time keeping them running than they do today with Windows. (You know those people, the ones where you don’t hear from for a while, but you know they’re busy allowing their machine to fill up with viruses and spyware and incompatible gewgaws, until one day they call and ask you why their Internet is so slow, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg and an introduction to a tedious afternoon of untangling a knotted mess.)

I might be an idiot–there is plenty of evidence in favor of it–but I keep thinking that if I struggle to make the switch, it’s going to be difficult to get a critical mass of people on board. Although people who use their machines for light duty jobs should be easy to move over, if they mostly use email and the web.

Ignorance and Luck Saves the Day

I ended up doing something dumb that caused a problem and then took care of the issue. Looking at the install instructions for the driver I had downloaded, I made some changes to xorg.conf. Knowing that it was kind of a lot dumb, but making note of them so I could change them back.

When I restarted, I got some errors and unhappiness from the system about the conf file, but then I was presented with a big list of resolutions to choose from, and I stabbed at 1152×864 with desperate hope. And then it seemed to clean up the xorg.conf file and everything was just peachy. So it must not have been a driver problem. More just a problem of me not finding the right page to tell me how to configure my resolutions.

I felt like I had gotten lucky. I didn’t feel I deserved to have the resolution problem solved the way I went about it. But I also felt pretty good about poking around and doing things in there. This is the sort of encounter that in the past has caused me to retreat and then abandon the effort to start using GNU/Linux. I felt that familiar old feeling of not wanting to deal with it, but this time I’m much more invested by having this blog. Partly because I’d feel very foolish to say “Uncle” after so short a time, but more because I really believe in this and want to make it happen.

So all was well, except for one problem. Fedora runs dog slow on a P2 400. Windows 2000 hadn’t performed so hot on it either, but I had been hoping I could get away with just running Firefox and OO.o Calc and that it would be more responsive.

It’s going to be a process. I have to just plug along and not worry about those alpha-geeks out there who write breezy blog entries about how they switched from Windows to GNU/Linux over a week or two and how it was such an easy transition. I’m going to just keep packing boxes, preparing for, and making the move to freedom.

Coming Soon…

The slow machine caused me to try running Xubuntu from a CD and that worked really slick. I was impressed. And that suggests another entry and some thoughts on what I might turn to for a better GNU/Linux experience.

Related: Part 1: How was your round of GNU/Linux?