GeekLinux

My daughter is on a 10 day tour of Italy with her high school.  The first picture she sent home was this photo and adding “Look what they have in Italia :-p”.  She really knows her ole’ man.  Looking closely at the photo I get the distinct impression that Linux is much more prevalent in Italy than here in the US.  Anyway, I was just tickled that she thought to take the picture.  Did I get a picture of the Colosseum?  The Vatican?  The Leaning Tower of Pisa? Nope, just a magazine rack full of Linux mags.  Does she really know me or what?!?!

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For the first time since 1993 I have purchased a new computer that is just for me.  It’s not for work, it isn’t for the kids, it’s not to share with my lovely wife; its just for me.  I have to say I enjoyed the shopping experience and it was enthralling too. After considerable searching and questioning folks whose computing prowess I admire I decided on a Laptop from System76.  The Pangolin.

My wife and I agreed that I could get a new laptop for Christmas but that I should wait until after the holiday and all the Christmas bills were paid. My time had come but in anticipation I began shopping.

I knew I wanted the machine to have Linux natively installed. I have installed Linux dozens of times but this time was going to need to be different. For one I wanted every piece of hardware to “just work”. The SD Card reader, the finger print reader, the web cam, EVERYTHING!. Also I wanted the whole “new computer” experience, like the “new car smell”, the computer I purchased would have to meet this requirement. I also knew I wanted the new computer to be a laptop. Over the past several years I have found myself working almost exclusively on laptops. The issues I had early on like not liking the keyboards as well etc. had all passed away, and I have become totally comfortable with using a laptop and the laptop keyboard.

My first impressions of System76 start with a phone call I made several weeks ago which started with questions about the 13.3 inch “Gazelle” model and ended with me believing that the 15 inch Pangolin was the best fit for me. What attracted me initially to the Gazelle was its size and weight but after speaking with the Sales representative “Tom” and covering the items I wanted to do with the laptop he suggested that my 45 year old eyes would be happy longer with the 15 inch model. I was really impressed with System76′s pre-sales support. I spent also 45 unhurried minutes on the phone asking questions about 64 bit Ubuntu and then went over every detail of the hardware and their after-the-sale-support. Every question was answered in a polite and knowledgeable manner, I never felt like they were trying to get me off the phone or make decide right then and there to make the purchase. They knew at that point I was just-shopping and they were fine with that.

On the topic of after-the-sale support they said that the support process normally starts with an email describing the issue. If emails can’t resolve the issue they will call you or you can call them…and yes you get a person very quickly on the phone, not holding forever waiting for someone. If a hardware part needs replacing they will attempt to assess your proficiency with changing out the hardware part in question. If you both come to the conclusion that you can probably handle the part swapping then they will ship you the part with a pre-paid return package for the defective part. Assuming that fixes the problem you simply package up the defected part and send it back. If however you both come to the conclusion that the repair is out of your comfort zone they will ship you a prepaid box to ship your machine into them. This of course adds time to the process, but the key is customer satisfaction. If you have ever gone through the nightmare of phone support with the big chains then you know the frustration that awaits and the pain of being without the machine you rely on.

So far everything is working great and I have been really pleased with the Pangolin. If you are interested in a System76 machine I can definitely recommend them. Feel free to email me any questions you may have. Check out my podcast episodes 31 and 32. In episode 31 I talk about shopping for a Linux laptop and in episode 32 I give a review of the my new laptop.

I hope to come back and post additional updates going forward, I still have yet to test the modem, HDMI port, SATA port, burn a CD or DVD, heck I haven’t even popped the battery out yet!  I just got my new laptop and I’m lovin’ it!

Pictures of my System76 Pangolin

System76.com

Episode 31 and Episode 32 of “The Techie Geek” Podcast

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Well if you landed here because you heard me mention this blog on my podcast then I am very glad you’re here. I have wanted to update this blog for awhile, but until today (Father’s Day) I just really haven’t had the time to. Going forward I want to use this blog as a place where I will write down the issues, struggles, triumphs, and joys I encounter while working with Linux. By doing so I hope others who end up here may be able to benefit from my writing.

Also, I mentioned in the podcast that I have an old version of this blog here. I had said that I was having problems migrating the old posts from my free GoDaddy blog to my new WordPress blog. Well after some fooling around and some manual copy and pasting I think I have everything migrated over. In the process however I managed to delete the comment that Dan Borislow, the Inventor of the MagicJack had left on my old blog. Thankfully Google cached the comment, so the cached comment can be found here. Hopefully Dan will leave a new comment informing me that MagicJack is coming to Linux soon!

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I’ve been having fun with the live CDs from STD and Helix.  There are tons of really cool security and forensic tools.  Give them a try, you won’t be sorry.

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Over the past few months I have tried several different optical mice with my 1GHz  Fedora Core 5 system and a Belkin 2 port KVM with no success.  I found that I could only use a standard ball type mouse.  Today on a whim I tried another mouse, a Logitech MX518.  To my surprise it works perfectly.

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One of the topics that gets batted around when ever Linux Geeks get together is “What’s you favorite Distro”?  Right now mine is Fedora Core v5 (FC5).  I like almost everything about it except the speed of updates using yum.  My favorite thing about Fedora Core is that it works with all my hardware.  I am running FC5 on two different machines.  The first is a P4 1.5 GHz with 384 MB RAM and a Celeron 1.0 GHz with 256 MB RAM.  The other distros I have tried are. Slackware v8.1, Debian Sarge, Ubuntu v5.10, and, PCLinuxOS.  Except for Debian Sarge all these distros had trouble detecting all my hardware.  I used Debian Sarge for several months but I got frustrated with it not having the latest apps available.

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Over the last few weeks I have heard many good things about the file manager emelFM2.  After hearing Dave Yates and Chess Griffin mention emelFM2 in their podcasts I finally did install it and I must admit, it seems very fast, clean, and simple to use.  Up to now I have most often used Midnight Commander, Nautilus, and Konqueror.

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So why another Linux blog? Well….that’s a little hard to explain, but I’ll try. I have been a Geek most of my life, I have enjoyed hacking things since I was old enough to crawl, my parents enjoy telling stories about how I use to get into things, in fact some of my earliest memories are of taking things apart just to find out how they worked. Like so many others Geeks I did not fully blossom as a Geek until I got my first computer in 1983, an Apple IIe. I had exposure to other Apple computers too, my neighbor had an Apple II he use to let me use and my Dad purchased one of the first MacIntosh computers as soon as they came out; I also had exposure to IBM PCs in college and at work. I couldn’t wait until I could finally afford to buy my first PC. That day arrived on 12/3/93 I purchased a blazingly fast 486DX33 IBM Clone with 4 MB of RAM and a 200 MB hard drive running MS-DOS 5.0 which I later upgraded to MS-DOS 6.22 and then finally to Windows 3.1; life was good. But then came Windows 95! Oh the hours, days, weeks, and months to get that OS patched and tweaked. Around this time I distinctly remember having the feeling that “there must be a better way”! I was big into the BBS scene, one of the BBS’s I was on was becoming a real ISP. I quickly became a member of this ISP and was given access to something I had never seen before, a Shell account, that Shell account ran on Sun Solaris . At that time I was working as a CAD Designer for a company running EDS Unigraphics which was running on top of HP-UX. During this time I learned basic Unix commands, how to install software updates, and how to do backups. After leaving that company I went to work for a company that was still using dial up. I was lucky enough to have a chance to help shop for an ISP and get the Ethernet setup. The ISP we selected supplied us with a Cisco router and a firewall running OpenBSD. During this time I learned basic router commands and I learned even more Unix type commands in OpenBSD, and I was doing most of the Windows Systems Adminstration for this company. I was getting more and more frustrated with the constant support issues with Windows. In 1997 I started to hear that Linux was ready for the desktop so I dicided to check it out. After several attempts I was unable to get all my hardware running so I gave up Linux for awhile. In 2000 I took a training class on UNIX Administration. Even though the class was on UNIX the school used Slackware v8.0 for the class. The instuctor handed out CD-R’s of Slackware v8.0 and the hook was set. I installed Slackware v8.0 on an old PC and kept practicing command line excerises on that Slackware box and later setup a Debian Woody box. Meanwhile my ISP upgrade my Shell account to OpenBSD. I followed the advancements in Linux fairly closely over the next few years and I am finally ready to begin the final switch leaving Windows behind on my personal workstation. This blog will be a journal of my struggles in making that move. I am currently running Fedora Core v5 on a P4 1.5GHz with 384 MB RAM and a Celeron 1.0 Ghz with 256 MB RAM.

So why did I write all this? Well, I think that it is usful to blog the struggles of someone migrating away from Windows toward Linux. Even though I work in a Windows world I am attempting to go Linux every place I can. At home I now use Linux for all my Internet and email. I also use it as much as possible for music, word processing, html editing, etc.

I hope you will check in here from time to time and watch my progress in becoming full time Linux, first at home, someday I hope, at work.

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