UbuntuCat

No one has hard numbers, of course, but based on how much it’s talked about on the web, Ubuntu appears to be the most popular Linux distribution for home use (as opposed to for servers). Every tech news article about Linux mentions Ubuntu and will often recommend Ubuntu to new users. Many YouTube videos about how to do something on Linux will feature Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the top distro on DistroWatch (again, just meaning there’s a lot of interest in it—not necessarily that the largest number of Linux users are choosing it over other distros).

How did this come to pass? Seriously. I was there… not from the very start but from very close to the beginning. The very first release was Ubuntu 4.10, nicknamed Warty Warthog. I started with the next release, Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog). My first experience with Ubuntu was not the best. The CD froze up part way through the installation, which led me to use Mepis for a month instead. But I came back to Ubuntu. Why?

On the surface, to a new user, Ubuntu would seem like a bad choice.

• It doesn’t come with popular proprietary software.
• It doesn’t have additional CDs (meaning, for software installation, you probably need a broadband connection).
• Its documentation Wiki (especially at the time I started using it, less so now) is a mess.

I figured in 2005 that distros like Mepis and Linspire would thrive and be at the forefront of bringing Linux to ex-Windows power users, if not “the masses.” After all, in Ubuntu, I couldn’t (in Hoary) edit the applications menu, get numlock to stick, install Nvidia drivers, or add software repositories without resorting to the command-line, which was a very daunting thing for me to use when I first started on Linux. The word terminal was a scary word to see. In retrospect, I don’t know why I was so scared of it, but I was. And, yet, only a month after using Mepis, I moved to Ubuntu and stuck with it for three years. No, it didn’t come with Flash, Java, Nvidia drivers, Skype, Adobe Reader, or MP3 playback. It just had something.

The amazing thing is that even back when Ubuntu was barely functional (no easy-codec-installation or restricted-drivers-manager or Ubiquity installer) it was getting buzz. What got it off the ground? As far as I can tell, these are what Ubuntu had going for it:

• Unlike giants Red Hat and Novell, Canonical was targeting home users first with its catchy (if slightly misleading) “Linux for Human Beings” slogan. Servers were secondary.
• Unlike homebrews Mepis and PCLinuxOS, though, Ubuntu had the backing of some serious money (Mark Shuttleworth’s).
• The free CDs worldwide (including shipping) is a nice gimmick that set Ubuntu apart, even if a lot of those CDs were given away to people who later threw them in the trash.
• The Ubuntu Forums is a good compromise in that it has knowledgeable users but is generally free of the elitism and noob-disdain of other, more difficult distros’ forums. As a matter of fact, this was one of the major deciding factors for me. Much as I liked Mepis and much as their forums were friendly, they just didn’t have enough knowledgeable users to support me in all my questions. The Gentoo forums were far too intimidating for me.
• I think this goes along with the forums being less intimidating, but associating the Ubuntu “Humanity Towards Others” philosophy with the distro seemed to give it a purpose and a flavor beyond mere technology.
• The lack of confusing options really helps new users. You don’t have to know what KDE and Gnome are or choose what applications to install or which of five text editors to use. Ubuntu picks one application per task as default. If you want to switch to different applications later, that’s up to you when you’re more familiar with Linux programs.
• Even though the Wiki isn’t the strongest representative of this, the Ubuntu documentation is pretty easy to follow. When I started with Hoary, the Ubuntu Guide was the best around, and since then a series of screenshot-heavy and video tutorials have sprung up to help new users who feel lost.

I’m a little conflicted on the single CD nature of Ubuntu. Even though I think not having additional CDs hurts the idea of Linux for Human Beings (since it really assumes users have a broadband connection or never want to install new software), I also found the multiple-CD distros confusing when I was a new user. I didn’t think of Mandriva as the first CD for installing the operating system and the second and third for only additional software. I thought I needed all three to install Mandriva. So I steered clear of Debian, definitely, which I think had fourteen CDs at the time.

I am quite proud of the Ubuntu developers’ work. Even though I have minor complaints, I like what I’m seeing: more point-and-click options, less need for the terminal, prettier artwork, easy codec installation. Yes, there are bugs. There will always be bugs. But Ubuntu is a solid distro with a large userbase to support and welcome you if you want to come. It was a dark horse rising up and now appears to be the de facto distro for new users.

If you’re too lazy to install the proprietary codecs yourself, though, you can use a Ubuntu variant like Linux Mint, which includes them by default.

I used to be an English teacher. Back in those days, I would get nervous for the first day of classes; but on a day-to-day basis, I didn’t think too much about speaking in front of a group of people. If you have to do it that often, you don’t have time or emotional energy to spare on getting nervous—you just do it.

I’m out of practice, though. The past four years, I haven’t been teaching. I’ve been working in administrative support in schools. So, yesterday, when I had to speak in front of the whole school during morning meeting, I had jitters, serious jitters. I could feel my heart pumping. I could feel my throat getting dry. I got a headache the night before. Theoretically, I knew I could do it, but I also knew I was four years out of practice, so I was worried I’d choke.

Of course, I didn’t do my nervous self any favors. First of all, I am not one of those people who can memorize a speech or just read off a piece of paper. I don’t like creating PowerPoint presentations in which the text is there on the screen and all I do is read it verbatim to the audience. Frankly, I don’t even like notecards. I did do a mock write-up, but I strayed from that significantly during my talk. That was a brainstorm more than anything. I like being extemporaneous… I guess that’s the problem I’ve created for myself.

In the end, though, I managed to pull it off. I’m no Obama, but I didn’t freeze up or lose words. I somehow got through all my points and said Um maybe only five or six times (instead of fifty times). I’m glad I got a chance to speak to the school. Thank God that’s over with, though!

Every now and then—in everyday life or on blogs—someone will decry any perceived blurring of gender lines and declare something along the lines of Men and women are different. Their minds are just hard-wired differently.

I have to say if that’s the case, you really shouldn’t have to declare or decry anything. If nature has limited us in terms of how we can stretch the boundaries of gender, let nature do its own work. If men and women are truly different and meant to be different, why do you have to keep telling us and reminding us that we’re different? Shouldn’t we just automatically be different?

Do I concede that in various aspects of life, men and women each have their own bell curves and the curves do not overlap precisely? Yes. Is all of that difference (between the center of one bell curve and the center of the next) due to a difference in “wiring”? No. Do I think that that means we should encourage the gender whose bell curve is to the right to exaggerate whatever’s being measured, and we should encourage the gender whose bell curve is slightly to the left to downplay whatever’s being measured? Definitely not.

Let’s take upper-body strength, for example. I think most people believe that men, on average, have stronger upper bodies than women. But does that mean all men have stronger upper bodies than all women? No. And yet people will say things like, “Women shouldn’t be firefighters because men have better upper body strength.” That’s absolutely ridiculous. Why don’t you just have an upper body strength prerequisite, then? If you do, it’s possible that most firefighters will be men, but why deny a bulked-up female the possibility of being a firefighter? This is about as silly as saying that women on the whole are better at working with children, so men should not be elementary school teachers. There are plenty of women who aren’t good at working with children, and then there are men who are great at working with children. And how much of this has to do with upbringing versus “hard-wiring” or “nature” is still debatable.

But even if we were to assume there were natural limitations on what people could do, why keep harping on those limitations? Let nature decide what the limit is. I’m naturally more inclined than your average person to eventually be diagnosed with diabetes. Does that mean I should just throw in the towel and become obese in the hopes of speeding up the process? Asians, on the whole, are generally shorter than Whites and Blacks. Does that mean Asians should withhold protein and other nutrients needed to grow in the hopes that they might exaggerate the shortness of Asians? Just because you have a natural tendency toward something doesn’t mean you should reinforce that tendency. In fact, in many cases, you should fight against it—your pride in achievement and sometimes even your morality depend on that fight.

In running, men have historically been faster than women. Some of the fastest high school boys milers run at the pace of some of the fastest Olympic athlete women milers. Does that mean women should give up running the mile? Would you conclude from that fact that women are meant to be slower than men and that women should just give up trying to be fast? Let’s put it another way. Let’s say you had a young daughter who had a strong interest in running and told you, “One day I’m going to run the mile in 3:43 seconds.” Would you tell her “That’s great, honey, but women just can’t run that fast”? Or would you tell her “It won’t be easy. No woman has ever done it, but if you train as hard as you can, I think you’ll be the one to do it”? Which response do you think will make her a better athlete in the end? I’m betting on the second response. If she’s not meant to run the mile in 3:43, that’s up to her body to decide, not you. And if you encourage rather than discourage her, even if she doesn’t end up running 3:43, she’s far more likely to run at least 4:12. The gender gap in running records has been steadily closing over the past few decades, and it’s probably being closed by women who are encouraged to run, not women constantly being reminded that men are faster than women.

So if you have a room full of 100 men and 100 women, and three of those men seem less-than-manly to you, and three of those women seem less-than-womanly to you; instead of telling those six people they need to be like the other 194 people, just let them be. If they face limitations in life from nature, it’s not your place to remind them of nature; nature itself will decide.

Or perhaps the fact that you feel the need to keep chanting “nature” and “hard-wired” shows a secret fear that nature isn’t really on your side. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The biological determinists doth protest too much, methinks.

There’s a Sara Bareilles song called “Love on the Rocks” that begins

We met on a rainy evening in the summertime
Don’t think I need to tell you more

While some people get annoyed with such say-nothing phrases (another example is, “This person needs no introduction” before a usually lengthy introduction), I delight in them, particularly this one.

If she had said only We met on a rainy evening in the summertime, I would have mentally ingested the phrase as a statement of fact and not think any more on it. Since she goes on to say Don’t think I need to tell you more, I begin thinking about why she doesn’t need to tell me more. Then my imagination starts kicking into gear and I start examining the implications of meeting on a rainy evening in the summertime. I start wondering what kind of steamy meeting it might have been. Is it like those movies where the stars rush to each other in the pouring rain and kiss, pneumonia and hypothermia be damned?

Same deal with “This person needs no introduction.” Sure, you’re going to give her an introduction anyway, but that’s just bonus—she doesn’t really need an introduction. More importantly, the message (not needing an introduction) isn’t the point of the phrase so much as the metamessage (this person is important, and if you don’t know why, shame on you, but I’ll tell you anyway just in case you don’t know).

If you get irked by say-nothing phrases, I urge you to use your imagination. Imagine a world in which people don’t always say phrases and sentences to convey only the literal meaning of the words they’re saying. Say-nothings can be fun!

The most annoying kind of blog post I’ve ever seen is the link without commentary. I know you’ve seen them before. It’s just a link to something interesting and nothing else. The worst is the link to just another blog post from someone else.

I understand you’re excited. I understand you want to share your excitement, but could you at least say something? Why is it interesting to you? What’s your take on the post or story?

Please. Offer. Something.

Introduction
When I announced to the other Ubuntu Forums staff members I was getting an Eee PC and planning to stick with Xandros (as opposed to installing Ubuntu on it), one of the first pieces of advice I got was to remove unionfs from the Eee to free up space.

What’s the deal with unionfs anyway?
Just a quick primer on unionfs (as well as I can understand it): one of the great features the Eee has is the ability to restore factory settings with the press of a couple of buttons at bootup (tap F9 quickly and then select the restore option from the menu). One person made a YouTube video of the process and clocked the restore at two minutes. I did the restore myself and it took about ten seconds (not kidding).

This works because the Eee has two major hard drive partitions (and two random smaller partitions at the end—I don’t know what those are for). The first is mounted at boot as read-only and contains the factory settings. The second is mounted as read-write and is the user partition you modify after you start using the Eee. While having those two partitions makes restoring (in case you mess up something) easy and quick, it also sucks up a lot of hard drive space on a drive that is already pretty small (4 GB on the 701 version).

My experience with unionfs and reasons for removing it
Even though the advice I got turned out to be good advice, at first I was hesitant to remove unionfs for two reasons:

1. I knew I’d be tweaking Xandros a lot and wanted an easy way to restore the default installation in case I messed things up.
2. I didn’t have an external DVD-ROM drive to use for the restore DVD that came with the Eee, and I was intimidated by the tutorials about making USBs into bootable live “CDs.”

Well, after a lot of tweaks, I did manage to mess up the Eee badly enough that I could fix it by undoing all the tweaks, but I was glad to have the option to quickly restore it. And, more importantly—too cheap to buy an external DVD-ROM drive—I rolled up my sleeves and actually followed a tutorial on making a USB device into a live “CD.” It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be.

So, with the ability to back up my installation (I used the dd command to back up the entire Eee PC hard drive to a .img file on an external hard drive), I had fewer qualms about removing unionfs. I also realized through regular use with unionfs that a little less than 2 GB is not a lot to work with after you have applications installed. I don’t want to store my entire music and photo collections on the Eee, but I’d like to have some selection available there.

The removal process
Emboldened by how much easier the make-a-USB-live-”CD” process was, I went ahead and tried the Removing UnionFS/aufs tutorial on the EeeUser Wiki, and the process could have been a lot smoother. I basically ended up following the instructions, messing everything up, and then having to restore my Xandros .img with dd and then redo the instructions again.

If you’re planning to follow the instructions, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• You do not need to enable (i.e., add as a permanent boot option) single-user mode or recovery mode on the Eee, but it’s probably a good idea to know how to make it available for one-time use.
• If you have an easy way to back up the Eee (the dd command, for example, or an external DVD-ROM drive with the Eee PC DVD), you can simplify the process by using a live CD (or live “CD” USB stick) to make all the changes to /dev/sda1. You should be familiar with mounting partitions, but it’ll save you the trouble of going into recovery mode and using vi and all that. You also won’t have to constantly reboot and test things (again, you should have backed everything up first; otherwise, testing is a good thing).
• There are instructions in the middle of the page about growing the /dev/sda1 partition using GParted, but then there is a warning at the bottom of the page about how using GParted won’t work and how you should use fdisk and some other command-line options instead to merge partitions. Please heed this bottom-of-the-page warning. I tried to grow the /dev/sda1 partition in GParted to fill the space and got an error message and the /dev/sda1 partition then appeared to fill all 3.7 GB but was also almost completely full. When I rebooted into Xandros, the drive was reported as being only 2 GB large and almost full. If you want the non-unionfs-ed partition to fill the whole drive, follow the instructions about using the command-line to do it.
• The other thing I learned is that the commands given seem counterintuitive to the uninitiated. To expand the first partition to fill the space, they actually have you delete all the partitions and then create a new partition. My intuition was telling me, “Hey, this is wrong! I don’t want to delete the partition. I just want to expand it.” But if you follow the instructions and delete all the partitions and recreate a new one, it actually has the same effect as expanding the first partition. Don’t ask me how that works, but it does. You backed everything up anyway, right? There should be nothing to lose.

Conclusion
My advice to owners of any Eee PC that has a 4 GB hard drive or smaller is to find a way to back up and/or restore your Xandros installation and then get rid of unionfs as quickly as possible in order to reclaim hard drive space. The quick restore tool is fun and amazing, but it takes up too much space. I’m so glad I now have 1.8 GB of free space on my Eee instead of 400 MB.

As a longtime feminist, I’ve read quite a bit of both layperson and professional writing on the objectification of women, particularly the sexual objectification of women. I understand it’s wrong. I understand it’s damaging to society and is one of many ways the patriarchy tries to keep women down.

My question, though, is whether the wrongness of it is in the implementation of that objectification or the mere existence of it? In other words, in a perfectly egalitarian society (let’s imagine it’s possible), would objectification ever be okay in certain contexts? Or if it wasn’t the context that mattered, would it be okay if it weren’t prevalent (in other words, is it a quantity problem, as opposed to a quality problem)?

After all, isn’t there plenty of objectification that is “okay” in our current society? We objectify movie stars and rock stars (and not just sexually). It’s not as if we all appreciate them fully as human beings. A lot of times we just isolate one part of them (acting ability, good looks, confidence, stage presence, whatever) and idolize it. How many times have you heard a fan of a star say something like, “Yeah, I know she’s an asshole in real life, but I love her movies”? It happens all the time.

I’ll admit it. I objectify people all the time. You’re the annoying loud teenage kids on the bus. You’re the smelly homeless person asking me for change. You’re the guy in drag walking down the street. Do I get to know these people? Do I appreciate them for who they are as whole human beings and not just one aspect I choose to isolate and judge them by? No. I objectify them. I definitely objectify them. I’m sure people objectify me too.

We don’t have the time to get to know everyone and appreciate them all as whole human beings. It’s just not possible, and it’s not really part of human nature. That doesn’t mean that women should always be perceived as sex objects—whether they’re walking down the street, playing sports, giving a corporate presentation, or acting in a film. And I think (not 100% sure here) that that may be the problem, the sheer ubiquity of the sexual objectification of women. It’s not that women should never be objectified but that they shouldn’t always be objectified; and, in contemporary American culture (and other countries’ cultures as well), they are almost always objectified sexually.

I’m try to imagine, for example, if I were a porn actress, would I mind that people viewing my movies were objectifying me and thinking of me only sexually? Probably not. That’s kind of the whole point of the porn movie. On the other hand, if I were meeting with my accountant to discuss filing taxes or just meeting someone at a fundraiser, I probably would want them to talk to me and not my breasts. Maybe my imaginary life as a porn actress is way off, but that’s just what I’m thinking. I know some would argue that porn (as opposed to erotica) serves to make sexual objectification in everyday circumstances more prevalent. That may be true, too. Probably depends on the type of porn and who’s watching it.

Any input into this, women and men, feminists and non-feminists? Is objectification in any context or society always wrong, or is it a matter of degrees or manifestation?

Well, my enthusiasm for Ubuntu was a bit hasty, I guess. Everything was good for a while, but then I saw the extent to which things weren’t working. I though the microphone and video in Skype were working, but they weren’t, and the boot time was just too long (and suspend didn’t work). Worse yet, the sound controls are not integrated. The volume applet and the volume controlled by the keys defined in System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts didn’t control the actual master volume. The whole experience of getting things to work was too frustrating, so I’m very happy I had imaged Xandros and put Xandros back on for now.

Eventually, if I get restless again, I’ll probably try out eeeXubuntu 7.10, or I may wait until Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) to see if the Ubuntu developers have worked to make an Eee-friendlier release; I realize it’s tough for them since Asus uses some proprietary components.

Well, it was worth a shot, and I may shoot again, too.

Moving from Windows to Linux can be a harrowing experience. One who does this may experience culture shock and then frustration at not being able to do things the way she was used to doing them. Every now and then (through Ubuntu Brainstorm, a blog post, or a Ubuntu Forums thread) I’ll read a Ubuntu user propose that we have a little balloon or pop-up tutorial on first boot to educate new users about how to use Ubuntu.

I have to say I don’t see what this would accomplish. In my experience, both advanced and average users tend to view pop-ups of any kind as an annoyance to be quickly closed. The only difference I’ve seen is that advanced users tend to read the pop-up message before closing it, and average users tend to not read the message at all.

Some definitions first. The kind of advanced user I’m talking about is the person who is not necessarily a programmer or technology professional but is definitely the person friends and family go to for help with computer problems. The kind of average user I’m talking about can’t find how to start a program if you remove or move its launcher icon.

Let me give you some examples of the behaviors of average users I’ve seen (usually at work, in various jobs).

Someone I know wanted to do some image editing, so I had her install GIMP. Now, whenever she starts GIMP, though, there’s a tip of the day that pops up, and she just gets an annoyed look on her face and closes the tip of the day. This happens every time. She doesn’t ask how to make the tip of the day not appear or read the pop-up, which tells you you can uncheck the box to make the tip not appear when you launch GIMP. She just gets annoyed and closes the tip of the day pop-up.

I, on the other hand, also get annoyed when the tip of the day appears, but I uncheck the box and make sure it never appears again.

Then, of course, there’s the Firefox We blocked a pop-up for you pop-up (or drop-down, or whatever you want to call it). I haven’t met a Firefox user yet who enjoys seeing this appear on her screen.

Just as with the GIMP tip of the day, most Firefox users I know look immediately for the red X to click and then click it to make it go away. Unfortunately, they don’t bother to click on Options to see if there’s an option to make the drop-down not appear again the next time a pop-up is blocked.

If they had, they would have seen that there’s the option Don’t show this message when pop-ups are blocked. And just as with the tip of the day, I, being a relatively advanced user do look for the option to disable the pop-up, but I, too, am annoyed that the pop-up appeared in the first place.

Lastly, all the annoying little messages that appear in the system tray or notification area. You have unused icons. Updates are available to install. Do you know how many Windows users I’ve seen just ignore the notification about updates being available for installation? Do you know how many people do not take the Welcome to Windows Tour of XP?

Pop-up balloons and messages just get in the way of people. Although there may be rare exceptions, generally users fall into one of two categories when it comes to pop-up messages: people who don’t care to read what you have to say, and people who care about the message but would rather get it another way (on their own, without it being shoved in their faces).

So my guess is that if we had this pop-up tutorial or balloon for a tutorial in Ubuntu, then veteran Ubuntu users would be annoyed by something popping up and then not read it because they know it all ready, and new Ubuntu users would be annoyed by something popping up and then not read it because they’re annoyed.

Generally speaking, I’d say if people want to learn something new, they’ll find information about it on their own. If we do want to insert a beginner tutorial into the Ubuntu process, though, what better place to put it than in the installation process? That’s why I’ve proposed this on Ubuntu Brainstorm: Add a tutorial slideshow to the installation process.

Veteran users can click Install, answer a few questions, and walk away. New users can click Install, answer a few questions, and then stay and learn something, because they have to wait for Ubuntu to install anyway.

There are two instances in which I have had this jumbled-word paragraph brought to my attention:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

(The original source is here, but the server appears to be down right now.)

The first time was when I was still an English teacher. One of my students, after having gone through a rather rigorous unit on grammar thought it was amusing. When I shared it with my co-planning teacher, he said he’d rather have shards of glass stuck in his eyes than read papers written that way.

The second time was on the Ubuntu Forums, and a forum member thought a few of us (who occasionally correct others’ grammar or spelling when we just can’t take it any more) were being pedantic, so she or he saw fit to show us that spelling doesn’t really matter.

Here’s the thing, though: as my former colleague pointed out with his exaggeration about shards of glass, just because you can read something doesn’t mean you want to read it the way it’s presented.

After all, I can watch fuzzy black-and-white television on a four-inch screen while I constantly push the antennae around in futile attempts to get better reception, and still hear all the dialogue and understand what’s going on in the movie or television show I’m viewing. I can also listen to third-generation mix tapes that have had two decades of deterioration and still “hear” the music I’m listening to.

Nevertheless, I somehow still like clear pictures in HD on large screens that have digital surround sound and also still prefer to listen to CD-quality recordings of music. The same goes for language and communication. Grammar and spelling conventions and rules don’t exist just to make your life miserable—they actually are around because consensus gives meaning to words, phrases, syntax, and punctuation. If you follow the established guidelines, you don’t leave it up to your reader to make meaning of what you’ve said; you convey the meaning to your reader. Good writing is like an HD-quality movie or a CD-quality song.

That doesn’t mean we have to fly off the deep end and nitpick grammar points that don’t matter (split infinitives or misuse of the terms compose and comprise, for example), but it does mean we should strive to be understood most efficiently, with the fewest words, and with the least amount of work on the part of the reader.