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I decided that I like having more control over my journal.

Space Odyssey: 2001

This is where a spoiler warning might go, but I honestly don’t know that there’s anything to spoil. I was about 25 minutes from the end and there really wasn’t any plot progression.

I gave Space Odyssey: 2001 an honest shot – I watched most of it before I got sick of the drug-out scenes. This movie had great potential, and was completely ruined by what appeared to me as some weak attempt at giving it artistic value. It had artistic value, no question about that. For the time, and even now, the art direction was great. It was very realistic, from the way stars weren’t visible when the ship was in focus, to the motion of the characters in space.

It should not have taken the monkey people 30 minutes to find the obelisk, and another 15 to be changed by it. It should not take 5 minutes for HAL to kill the crew. It should not take 30 minutes to go from “Hey look, Jupiter!” to “Whoa, mindtrip!”.

That was the last I saw – I had to switch to something else before I passed out. The only time where the stretching-out was appropriate was the scene where the guy was disconnecting HAL. That’s an appropriate use of suspense.

It could be condensed in to a 90 minute movie by cutting some of the scenes to about 25% of their length (which wouldn’t lose any suspense or content), and it would be an enjoyable movie.

Windows tax-free Desktops from Dell

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/e510_nseries?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

Edit: Let’s Digg it

Advocating Linux

Something that has historically held Linux back is that up until a few years ago finding any sort of beginner friendly help was impossible. You could piece together the answer to your problem from manpages and clunky mailing lists, but only a minority of computer users have the time for that. Now it’s 2007 - Linux is fairly easy to install and run, and information on resolving issues is available in the form of user maintained wikis, websites, and forums. With all this, Linux still hasn’t hit mainstream. Why is that?

Marketting

Marketting is why Apple is able to dominate with a $300 music player with a music rental service that tries to keep you from using the music on any other device. Marketting is why Sony was able to dominate the console market with its technically inferior Playstation 2.

IBM ran a very awkward ad some years ago with a small boy in white clothes in a white room by the name of Linux, and it was so horribly vague that if you didn’t already know what Linux was, you would think IBM had lost their collective minds. Beyond that I haven’t actually seen any TV ads for any distribution. Linux needs marketting.

Network Effect

“Network Effect” is a phrase that’s often thrown around by marketers, but it’s a real thing, and it’s very important for something to achieve mass adoption. Windows started off as a business desktop environment running on top of DOS - it later moved on to 9x, which was still built on DOS, but didn’t require that you own a copy of it. That was around the time Windows started to gain mass adoption. Now we have XP, which runs over 90% of the world’s desktops. Ubuntu is a great start - they provide free CDs, and there’s an enormous community built up around it. Even with how far the Linux desktop has come, it still lacks something very important…

Hardware Support

What does the avid gamer say when they hear that their new video card will work, but they have to go through extra steps to enable 3D acceleration, and that it might be buggier than on windows?

“Why should I switch then? Windows handles it just fine.”

Linux has come a long way in terms of hardware support, but to achieve mass market adoption, you have to bring in the people that typically drive adoption of technologies. If the latest and greatest video card or the wireless card in their shiny new laptop won’t work without changing configurations, or not at all, you’ll have a hard time convincing them that switching is a good idea, and it’s unlikely that they will reccomend Linux to their friends.

Marketting is easy enough, but hardware support is a sticking point. It’s trivial to get someone to look at something - people are naturally curious. When they get there and find out that some of their hardware might not work without tweaking, they go elsewhere. Some people stay and work through it, but most people are happy with Windows and won’t be compelled to switch. With the budgets behind some of the larger distributions, it’s surprising that none of them have used it to cut deals with hardware manufacturers to at least provide stable, redistributable binary drivers for Linux when they ship their hardware.

Getting In To Linux

If you’re here, it’s probably because you have heard about this Linux thing, perhaps in reference to Open Source.

You probably like the idea of a free, open way of using your computer, developed by thousands of talented people all over the world, and used by millions of people that get to do what they want with their computer.

You want in on this, but you have seen all the confusing choices and aren’t sure where to go or what to do. I’ve been there and know how it feels. What I’m going to do is tell you what you should start with, let you see Linux in a way that lets you play around with it that doesn’t mess with your current operating system (probably Microsoft Windows, maybe OS X). From there, you’ll gain the knowledge to make your own choices.

I can already tell you that you can handle Linux. You’ve read this far, which means you’re willing to learn. A will to learn and a computer that is less than a half decade (5 years) old are all you need. That’s a bit of a half truth - you can run it on old computers, but for now we’ll stick to the user friendly Linuxes that require more power.

You should read all this before doing anything - might want to print it out in case you want to read it away from the computer.

One thing I need to emphasize is that Linux is a minority. The companies that make the bits and pieces that run your computer develop with Microsoft Windows in mind. Linux has a huge community around it, so when hardware producers neglect Linux, we step up and make an honest effort at making it work, and usually do so at least as well as the manufacturer.

More than likely, you will follow the instruction in step 1 and have a fully functional Linux system at your fingertips to do with as you please. You may not, in which case you will need more help. This is addressed through links on relevant words in this article.

Step 1: Grab Ubuntu. Not Kubuntu or xubuntu - these are made out of Ubuntu, but provide different ways to use your computer. Ubuntu’s specific way has the most support. You’ll want the Live CD - the others are for different things that we don’t address here. If you’re confused by the notion of mirrors, just pick one. If it’s slow, pick another. They’re all the same, just hosted in different parts of the world.

The next step is why I said you need to read everything. If you have a wireless card, you may need to take other steps to get it to work. Ubuntu has an excellent documentation system which covers getting your wireless card up and running. If you have wireless, you should read it, because your card probably won’t be detected automatically.

Step 2: Burning can be a bit confusing if you’re not familiar with ISO images. The .iso file is like a ZIP archive - it holds other things. You’re burning the files in the image to disc, not the image itself. The burning software you use should cover the process for doing this. Burn the files in the image, place the disc in your CD-ROM drive, and reboot.

Step 3: If everything went well, you should see something that reminds you of the desktop you’re familiar with. This interface is called GNOME. GNOME is one of many desktops (usually called Desktop Environments) that provides a simple way of using your computer. When you booted up, you probably received a nice welcome message from Ubuntu’s maintainers with some useful links.

And that’s the introduction - you have a fully functional Linux installation to learn in. From here, you can launch Firefox (the little blue icon on the bar at the bottom or by pressing alt+F2 and typing in firefox, then pressing enter), and explore the wiki at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/. Wikis are collaborative documentation pages, similar to Wikipedia, where anyone involved can write and edit the documentation. This is the best source of information if you use Ubuntu. I chose Ubuntu due specifically to this - it’s full of helpful, well written articles that will make your experience with Linux reasonably painless.