Penguin Pete had a thoughtful post recently about struggling with technology, and it reminded me of things I know but often forget.

One of my problems in moving to free software has been a stubborn resistance to letting go of my old Windows ways and jumping in to the deeper end of the freedom pool. I’ve often indulged in despair when I’ve struggled with getting something working. It’s normal to feel some frustration when confronted with road blocks and wrong turns, but you have to just keep at it. Pete wrote, “It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop.”

I’ve been getting over my self-directed FUD campaign and am enjoying the learning process these days. I really like the Unix way of doing things as opposed to Windows. (Although I’m probably going to miss some of my Windows creature comforts for a while.) I’m slowly gaining experience and confidence as I manage to figure out a few things. I can picture myself gradually learning GNU/Linux the way that I’ve learned Windows over the past twelve years.

And I still get lost and run in to dead ends that make me doubt my ability to do this “moving to freedom” thing.

!@#$%^&* Firewire!

A recent example of frustration that threatened to turn into despair has been my experience getting video capture to work in Ubuntu. Why video capture now, before the many other basic things I need to get working in GNU/Linux? Because I have a 16-month-old daughter and about 10 mini-DV tapes I want to transcribe to DVD and get a backup copy to my safe deposit box.

I had quite a time of it, and spent a lot of time searching and experimenting. I couldn’t get video capture to work in Kino with my firewire/ieee1394 card on the system76 system I’ve been setting up (Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft). The card and cable had previously worked in Windows on my main workstation.

I try to hold off on asking questions on forums until I’m really stuck, and by that time I think I’ve exhausted many of the easy answers I might have received. After finally posting my questions and not receiving an answer right away, I impatiently decided to try a different tack. I took the card out of “Prometheus” and put it back in “Zodiac,” which is my Windows XP machine. Worst case I figured would be to make my DVDs in Windows (although I hadn’t previously had great luck there, either), but first I tried booting with the 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Live CD.

And…

Joy! Now, the card was recognized and the drivers automatically installed. Installing Kino through Synaptic in Feisty gave me 0.9.2 (versus 0.9.0 in Edgy), and it worked like a dream. It looks like it will work much better than some of the free video software I’ve tried in Windows.

Lesson learned — at least for my situation and peace of mind — is to have at least two machines so that the chance of things working on one of them is much better. And that Live CDs are great for experiments. (But I already kind of knew that.)

Ruminations

What a relief! But now what? I didn’t think I’d have the disk space to capture the video and then burn it to DVD. I didn’t really want to work off the Live CD. Nor was I ready to install Ubuntu and start dual-booting Zodiac. I had thought I’d keep a dual boot for a while there even after moving off, just in case. I had been imagining a lot more work before I started bringing the revolution to my old workhorse.

But now I had some motivation to start liberating Zodiac. And another factor came in to play that led to further motivation. I’ve been mulling over what to do about my graphics situation. Zodiac has a video card with two outs to run my two 19″ flat panel monitors. I’ve become dependent on dual monitors, and was thinking I’d have to buy another card for Prometheus (the system76 machine) before I could seriously start working in Ubuntu. Which meant research and a purchase decision and money spent, which I wasn’t looking forward to right now. But if I installed Feisty on Zodiac, I could probably make do with what I already have. (Although I anticipate some struggles with the dual-monitor setup.)

Feeling Impetuous

I was getting the fever. I think my expectation of a long, slow, uphill climb has been holding me back from just jumping in. It always seems like there is so much to do before I can really do my day-to-day work in GNU/Linux. It occurred to me that it’s mainly MS Money and a couple of Excel spreadsheets loaded with macros for which I’ll need Windows for awhile yet, and that I could run these on my laptop that currently dual boots W2K and Ubuntu.

Take the plunge? Sink or swim?

So, the last couple of days I’ve been moving all my files down to the slug and thinking about what I’m going to do. Maybe I’m being hasty and impulsive and will regret this, but I’m going for it. I’m putting GNU/Linux on Zodiac. I’m going to try letting go of Windows as my primary working environment.

I didn’t even want to take the time to write this post, but I thought it would be fun to say, “I’m going in!”

Afterthoughts…

(The question is, will I rely on a dual-boot crutch? Or just start clean with 7.04/Feisty? While writing this, I feel inspired to let Windows XP go, but we’ll see if uncertainty and doubt keep the proprietary beast animated a while longer…)

(And of course now it’s getting late, so we’ll also see if my resolve holds up another day or so…)

For the curious, you can see my post at Ubuntu forums, and then essentially the same post in the Kino forum. I don’t know why you’d be curious. Maybe you’re a glutton for technical details.

I can accept the possibility that my problem/question wasn’t worded very well, and maybe I just needed to give it time, but check out this other thread where someone got some feedback in the Ubuntu forums on a similar problem at around the same time. Oh, well. It’s nice that people are so patient, I guess.