Canllaith.org

Yet another ‘wow, I can’t believe how awesome Linux is getting’ post.

I went over to a friend’s place tonight to give her a hand configuring her Kubuntu laptop. In the time we’ve known each other she’s reinstalled Kubuntu a few times now, mostly to upgrade to new versions cleanly as she uses a lot of manual configuration that doesn’t survive a dist-upgrade well.

We’ve noticed it getting just a little bit easier with every new version, but tonight on installing ndiswrapper something she said reminded me that a long time ago, I’d written an article about ndiswrapper in the Bad Old Days of doing just about everything by hand. I poked around on the webserver I used to host my things on and it seems it’s still there.

We had a bit of fun browsing through my baby steps in Linux - I’m embarrassed to admit I used to think those little w3m ‘Compliant HTML!’ buttons were cool, and that I used to write HTML tables by hand because at that stage I couldn’t figure out CSS. Moving right along now.

The thing that really struck us going through all these old how to’s though is how markedly they show the improvement in ease of use over the last few years. All of the tutorials describe editing configuration files by hand, compiling kernels and other software by source and even writing custom init scripts for hardware.

Now, installing Kubuntu on my friend’s laptop is the work of a pleasant hour while sitting on the couch chatting. The only thing that isn’t picked up automatically is the Synaptics touchpad and the BCM4318 wireless card. One quick edit to the Xorg.conf and a little bit of fiddling with ndiswrapper (which goes much quicker when I don’t accidentally set the wireless switch to off! Go Jes!) and away we go - and this is on problematic SIS chipsets, about the least Linux compatible laptop I’ve ever seen. On Intel hardware, it pretty much JustWorks.

The attitudes have changed a lot too lately. Now it’s just terrible if I can’t get beryl’s 3d effects working right or my plug-and-play dual head configuration occasionally has a glitch. I almost feel guilty complaining about it when I look back on having to spend 3 days compiling just to get online.

I think I’m getting a bit spoilt :)