My basement looked like a computer graveyard this past week while on vacation.  My primary PC, as I had mentioned, is strewn all over the desk in a tangle of cables, drives and panels.  I’ve pulled my drive cages and have three loose drives sitting on the table, wired into the system.  My bios cooling fan popped off and now dangles from the motherboard (no idea what happened there).  And I’ve scavenged a couple of case fans temporarily to jury rig a cooling modification to my TV cabinet (we have to keep the doors sealed to keep the kids out of the DVD/TIVO compartment, and the TIVO has started to throw warning messages about overheating.  So a couple of fans, and old CPU power supply, and a Dremel left me with an intake and exhaust fan back there).

Next to the primary, the secondary has been dismantled and shelved in pieces for the time being.  I left the file system on the drives intact for reassembly if needed.  That freed up a monitor for my primary, so now I have the coveted dual screen setup working in Linux.

Off to the left (appropriately), I have an older iMac loaned to me by Chris Garrett.  The slot-loading drive on the iMac no longer works, so I took the Mac apart and extracted the drive to see what I could do with it.  As a PC man, I have to say I was impressed with the construction of the Mac.  It is impressive, if you are happy with never having to crack the case and install a component.  As I like to tinker, the Mac wouldn’t make me happy.

I searched for a replacement drive on-line, but couldn’t find anything less than $90, and that was for a ROM drive!  And, of course, Apple has their own specially sized drive to fit this little, tiny space.  I did manage to reinstall the OS by booting through a standard CD drive plugged into the ribbon cable, but the system can’t be reassembled like this.

I was in geek heaven.  At one time, I had two PCs, a Mac and a laptop running as I updated software, shuffled files, and configured the core of my home network (going to build a server).

Before the week ended, I installed Ubuntu on my laptop and now have a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP.  I can’t give up XP completely, not when I use the laptop for so many things out in the world.  After spending a good hour trying to figure out how to get my WiFi chip to hook to my router under Linux, I’m certainly convinced I need the XP option in case I have the same problem with a strange wireless node.

The Linux experience is fascinating.  It’s like learning about PCs all over again.  Bash, VI, apt-get, KDE and Gnome: it’s a new world.  Sure, it is taking me longer to do things, but I’m having a blast doing it.

Am I wasting time better spent on the writing passion?  Probably.  I really appreciated the fine comments recently about my potential and my use of time.  It was flattering, particularly when I view myself as some pathetic slackard who can’t seem to get anything done.

But I’m having a lot of fun with this, and I’ll be keeping at it for a little while longer.  That doesn’t mean I’m giving up writing, but there is another project that intices me right now (and a few of you know what I’m talking about).  So this isn’t exactly wasted time.  Not yet.

But it could easily get there.

Time went by, and last month I migrated over to Living Dot as a host. While poking through my site files, I discovered this little orphan HTML file that contained every single post going back to the start of time. It was like a gift from on high! Here were all of those posts, even if the comments were lost forever.

Unfortunately, WordPress can’t import raw HTML files, and I was looking at over a thousand posts that could require hand editing to get them in an acceptable XML format for import. The task looked impossible.

Until my friend Chris Gidman turned me on to Vi, or more accurately, Vi-improved, or Vim.

He ran me through a quick demo of the capabilities of this ancient Unix-based editor, and I was stunned. Text editing, for me, has always been about surfing through MS Word and making a bunch of tedious changes. Why would anyone need an editor this complex?

My HTML conversion was precisely the reason I needed this. So I picked up a book and waded in. In about twenty hours total of reading and experimenting, my HTML file is now in acceptable XML, and over half of it has already been uploaded into the Blog. You’ll see a bunch of new posts in the ALL category (at least until I get them sorted properly here in the coming days).

You may still wonder why this is a big deal. Let me give you an example.

The HTML file listed the posting date as a text string – Posted on September 11, 2004. I needed that to become 11-SEP-2004. And I needed to do that over a thousand times in a nineteen thousand line HTML file.

Then I had to perform text conversions, strip and add tags, re-order lines and so forth. How many man-hours would that be? I wouldn’t even want to guess.

It took me a few hours and a hint from Chris to arrive at this command:

:%s/Posted on \(…\).\+ \(.\+), \(.\+)/post_date>\2-\U\1\e-\3< \/post_date>

With that, every single date in the file was fixed when I hit enter.

How cool is that? Sure, it isn’t intuitive in the slightest, but I still saved a bunch of time and learned a new skill.

I’m so thrilled with VIM I’m actually looking for excuses to use it. My horizon of knowledge has grown a bit, and I feel more powerful.

Unfortunately, that decision led to about four hours of multiple installations of XP and Ubuntu, trying to get them to play nice together. It didn’t take long for me to get really annoyed, and that lead to muddled thinking. After the fourth hour, it finally dawned on me that my RAID controller wasn’t configured properly for the boot sequence I wanted on the two OS drives. By that time I had reverted to a pure Ubuntu build and left it at that. I’ll worry about XP later, or just keep XP work confined to the laptop.

After that, I soaked up the particular quirks of Linux. My brother had a good question – why do I need Linux? After going through an hour of installing ATI video drivers, I question that myself. Do I really need this? Isn’t XP enough? While I’m sure many members of the Linux community are scoffing into their green screen text-based browsers, it is a fair question.

I want to learn Linux because I’m curious about computers, and I have a thing for learning OSes. Am I going to be more productive or more profecient? Probably not, at least for a very long time. But I’ll have fun in the journey, and I think that is all that matters.

The ATI driver install did give me some significant problems. I dismantled what used to be my TIVO box, freeing up an extra 17″ monitor. I’ve always wanted a dual monitor configuration on my primary desktop, so this seemed to be a good time. Here’s what happened next.

I downloaded the ATI Linux drivers and extracted them. I then had to find them in a filesystem still a bit unfamiliar to me. They turned up in /usr/X11R6/bin, so I had to BASH over there and execute the install script $sudo ati-driver-installer-8.25.16-x86.run, let that unpack, then run /usr/X11/bin/aticonfig -install or something like that.

Of course, that didn’t work right as the aticonfig failed to load some alphabet jumble of library packages. So it was off to the support forums. I’ve figured out that Linux could not exist as a viable OS without the support forums. But without Linux, there would be no forums. I’ll leave the metaphysical chicken and egg thing to you.

After a bit, I managed to get the script to run and the drivers came up. Unfortunately, the dual monitor would only display in clone mode, giving me two identical desktops. Not really useful.

So then I had to learn about editing my xorg.conf file (of course!! ). I managed to figure out the modification for that, but then ran into the superior Unix based security feature that forbade me from overwriting a configuration file. I remembered this from an earlier Linux battle, so I ran chmod, changed the permissions to 777, overwrote the file, then chmod’ed it back.

A quick reboot brought me back to one huge desktop spread over two monitors. Oh yeah!

Unfortunately, it was too late for me to do any actual work…but I have the large desktop for whenever I do!

Can anyone suggest a replacement for iTunes? I’ve purchased a number of songs and I understand iTunes doesn’t work under Linux. That doesn’t seem right. My concern here is the protected .aac files purchased through the store. MP3 players should be easy to find (and I think Ubuntu installed with a couple).

I haven’t been able to get my recently ‘unMBR’-ed Windows data disks mounted, but it is more from lack of trying than any failure with the OS. Maybe this weekend.

I’d appreciate if anyone wants to offer a list of your favorite applications and what you do with them. This is a whole new world to me, and I’d like to dig right in.

The last encounter was Fedora. When I spent a long evening trying to get images off of my digital camera, I was done. This was after investing $50 in a brick-thick Wrox tome and wading in. I would have got there, but with two new daughters…forget it.

A couple of weeks ago, my primary desktop beast threw a bad Raptor in my RAID array. My two 250 GB IDEs are fine and that data is secure, but I’m going to have to rebuild the system drive.

So, you can see where this is going, right?

This time, I’m giving the shot to Ubuntu. Why? It is a bit arbitrary. I’m seeing a lot about it online, and it seems to be drawing respect. I’m not into the whole ‘Nelson Mandela’ vibe, since I’m more concerned with system performance than social consequence. The world will save itself, I just want to run my network.

Even as I type this down in the basement-of-solitude, Ubuntu is spinning up on my primary. My secondary desktop is eyeing me warily as I scan through the hard drives to see what use I can put it to. On the shelf, a Frankenstein stack of salvaged parts is nearing assembly into a third PC, for which I have no useful purpose to apply it towards.

The laptop will stay Windows for the time being. It is far too critical to my daily routine to introduce a learning curve. But who knows, maybe in a few weeks I’ll consider the dual boot option.

Or I’ll retreat from Linux for the fourth time…

Well, last night I took the plunge and reformatted my computer. I had intended to set up a dual boot with Windows, so I had a back up in case the Linux install didn’t go well. Also, if I needed to access the internet for drivers and such, I had that ability through Windows.

But I decided to install Linux by itself, just to see what would happen. I figured if it was a disaster I can wipe and start over with the dual boot idea.

The install was super simple. The system came right up and knew how to get to the internet. It automatically updated the software through the Red Hat site, asking me for my root password to make sure I had the authority to change system software. The graphical interface is very similar to Windows with some improvements.

It’s going to take a long time for me to figure out the details. Since it is Unix based, the command line is nothing like Dos. All the commands are completely different. An example was my attempt to get Flash working on my browser. It requires a download, but it does not autoinstall like it does with Windows. I have to expand the compressed file, then use a loader program in the command line to execute it. As it is, I don’t even know how to navigate to the file, let alone the actual location of the downloaded file!

But I understand the curve here. The first time I ran a DOS/Windows PC, I had the same problem, so I’m just starting over with a new OS. Actually, it is kind of exciting! I did some reading last night and learned the proper commands, so tonight I should have it figured out.

Linux is peculiar if all you know is Windows, but I see why they have taken this path. The fact that many programs have to be installed outside of the GUI is a trade for stability and security. Also, the core of Linux is compiled for your specific hardware configuration. If you install new hardware, you have to compile and install a new Kernel for your new configuration. Where Windows stores thousands of drivers in the OS for every possible piece of hardware, your version of LInux only carries what you need. It reduces bloat and increases stability, but again, you have to be prepared to recompile when you add hardware. A trade.

So essentially, I have access to my email, internet and chat, but that’s it for the moment. I think I’ll be learning something new everyday, which is actually kind of exciting when the computer was becomming more like an appliance as of late.

I’ll keep you posted.