The horrors of Linux

[davidn]

In what I can only describe as a moment of temporary insanity, I had a go at running Linux on my desktop yesterday evening. Whitney had been needing some extra space on her computer and wanted to shovel some files onto my external drive, but Mac OS X doesn't provide support for NTFS file systems so it looked like I would have to repartition it and provide some FAT32 space. (Sorry, this is turning out to be duller than most lectures on the same subject I attended. You can stop reading now if you like.)

It turns out that Windows XP doesn't allow you to drag around the sizes of partitions without completely reformatting a drive, although I'm fairly certain - in fact, I know - that Windows 98 could do it. It must be something to do with the change of file systems. I had a look for solutions online - the options seemed to be buying Partition Magic for about $60, downloading a command line one that looked like it would happily erase an entire drive if the wrong character was typed anywhere, and getting a Linux distribution because it has the ability to quite happily mess with partitions. So the preferred choice was obvious. After burning Linux Simply MEPIS Something to CD, I rebooted and watched.

Everything seemed to go well for a few minutes, with a rather nice blue boot screen giving some indication of slow progress. Then it noticed my external hard drive and panicked, vomiting out a rapid series of Received bad response from USB device messages. When Whitney pointed this out to me I tried switching off the device, which caused the messages to scroll down the screen even more rapidly and be interspersed with Dead USB device warnings.

At that point I felt it best to try again with the USB drive off during boot and hope that somehow it would be able to read it after boot, but I wasn't hopeful. With it off, it got right to the end of the boot process, stayed on a blank screen with the wristwatch icon for a moment, then started up with a friendly default background depicting a black and yellow warning sign complete with a skull and crossbones in the middle of it.

I tentatively nudged the mouse around a bit, and it seemed to be working despite the screen looking like it was trying to report that the computer was actually melting. I changed the terrifying desktop background first, then went into the partition manager, which is helpfully in System > Administration Tools > Kernel Rooting Systems > Keep Out, This'll Break Your Computer > Disk Tools > GPart, or something close to that. As expected, it couldn't find the USB drive even after ten minutes of spinning, and not feeling like outrooting my subsigned drivers or whatever it is that Linux people do, I decided to retreat.

It's good enough to eject the CD before it shuts down, making sure that it doesn't immediately boot back up into the scariest operating system in the world again. The gesture was appreciated, but that disk isn't going back in my computer at any point in the near future.

Comments

[lordrosemount.livejournal.com]

Interesting. You know, my old laptop died last year, and quite recently came back to life; since I've replaced it with a newer desktop machine, I thought I might have a go at partitioning the hard drive and installing a dual-bootable Linux on it, just for a jape, really. I hope I don't end up killing the thing off permanently.

[davidn]

I've heard a lot of good things about the Ubuntu family, if you're going to do that - apparently Windows compatibility is getting good as well. So if the time ever comes to upgrade from XP, and I can stomach it again, I might have a go at using that - anything but Vista, really.

[lordrosemount.livejournal.com]

Hm, I'll look into that. Thanks!

[kaedeko.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of anything like this. You must have burned your CD backwards, encoding it with satanic enchantments.

[davidn]

Apart from the USB drive, nothing actually went wrong (although as that was the main point of the experiment it was a pretty disastrous failure, overall). I later found out that the black and yellow skull icon is genuinely the default background for root on MEPIS - it does make sense to warn the user that they're logged in as root, but they could have thought of a less alarming way to do it!

What's most interesting is that I posted the same story on a newspaper blog that I started recently, and people were instantly all over it even though I'd never received a single comment before. Mention Linux anywhere on the Internet and you'll get noticed...

[kaedeko.livejournal.com]

When you have some free time and are feeling quite bored (as in, bored enough to sit through an operating system installation--9.9 on the "I am bored" scale, just below "Bored to tears"), you should install VirtualBox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualbox) and Kubuntu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuntu) Fiesty or higher (at the moment Fiesty is the latest release).

I recommend Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu because classic Ubuntu uses GNOME by default, which while cleaner and simpler, is harder for Windows users to grasp due to it's unique designs. KDE is more like Windows especially when customized.

[kjorteo]

I don't understand Linux users. I really don't.

They use the most horrible programs every and somehow like it. When I was at college, they had what I later learned was Fedora Core 2. We checked our e-mail with PINE, a lovely mostly-text-based e-mail...program of some sort, with an attempt at ASCII graphics that makes ZZT look sophisticated. And woe befall anyone in the CS or IT majors who had to actually program anything, because the editor of choice was EMACS, a horrible imitation of a text editor that actually literally (I am in no way exaggerating) has less features than Notepad.

I assumed my college was just sadistic and secretly hated its students, and real distributions are better to that, but according to a friend of mine, the kind of stuff I messed with is disturbingly common in actual workplaces. I just...I don't understand. I feel like I'm missing something. There are a ton of Linux users out there, so apparently they see something in it. All I see is an operating system that is somewhere around the level of Windows 3.1 only less friendly, and applications that remind me of the days when "Internet" allowed me to indulge my deep and abiding passion for all things Thai. I just...I don't know.

[davidn]

I've had the experience of both PINE and EMACS at university as well! Fortunately, PINE had all been phased out in place of an almost-as-dreadful webmail interface by the time I got to St Andrews, but it was still there when webmail was down (which was always). Even when you typed PINE to start it up it complained that you should have done it via "PINE -h" or something.

And EMACS - I used that for C programming during second year. The GNU version I used actually had far more features than Notepad, but the problem is that you'd never find them because it was written before coherent keyboard shortcuts had been invented. Alt+M Alt+X to save. Ctrl+Alt+Space 2 Backspace to split a window. There are people who say it stands for "Escape Meta Alt Ctrl Shift", and I can quite see why - it has so many obscure keyboard shortcuts that it even defined two further shortcut keys, SUPER and HYPER, that never existed on any remotely human keyboards.

That video on the Internet was just fascinating - I wasn't part of the Internet when most of it was based on Usenet like they're detailing there, but I do find myself liking the idea of it being more involved than it is now, preventing most of the population of Youtube from getting anywhere near a connection. These days, to reword a sentence from the video, "You sit down, you say what you think of the Raiders, and 500 people call you a faggot".

Along the same lines, I think you might appreciate Bad Influence as well (there are a couple of full episodes available for download there). It's got heightened nostalgia for me as I watched it while growing up, but it's interesting to see previews of the latest games (Sonic and Knuckles, Earthworm Jim, etc) and hardware as they were in the early 90s. The best bit is the article on the Philips CD-i as the future of home entertainment...

[quadralien.livejournal.com]

Argh, I remember EMACS - I seem to remember being one of the first in Second Year Computing to discover the "Turn off bloody stupid three-key-combination Copy/Paste shortcuts and replace with nice Windows-styled ones" option in the menus.

Didn't help that I was on a Mac - I used to also take in my laptop's mouse and attach it to the computer in order to have a right mouse button.

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

That's why people with some semblance of sanity use vim over emacs.