Weblog entry #8 for mcortese
See all weblog entries made by mcortese.
Gary Parkinson, editor of BBC's "Wake Up to Money", explains why he had hard time when he tried out a laptop equipped with Linux.
Me too, I experienced similar problems. Not with a laptop, though, but with a car.
Much like Mr. Parkinson, I had modest requirements: I just needed a means of transportation from home to my work place, while allowing me to place hand-free phone calls while in the city traffic.
Mainly moved by patriotic motivations, I went for a Fiat model.
I was quite happy with it, except for a couple things which I found particularly annoying.
To begin with, although the car is equipped with a standard USB port in the dashboard area, I couldn't connect it to my mobile phone, which features a proprietary connector.
Then, the instrument panel is really awful, showing the designer's distaste in every detail, from the shape of the dials to the colour of the backlighting. Therefore, I logically decided to replace the car's whole interiors, from dashboard to seats.
After buying a ton of new hardware from my local spare parts seller, I started the replacement, only to find out that the task was harder than I had imagined. As it turned up, Fiat cars are full of bolts, studs, and screws, the sort of things you see in movies when the hero character, hands covered with oil, is desperately tuning the engine of his Formula Indy dragster to get those few extra horse-power that'll make him win the final race.
That was too much for me, whose driving skills are limited to turning the key on and fiddling with some knobs.
I couldn't get any help from the forums I turned to, either, because their language is oriented at the DIY-type, which — as you might have guessed — I'm not.
I finally managed to have the dirty work done by a tuning garage, and everything went in shape (except the mobile phone, but apparently it is the phone that's not compliant with the set standard).
The bottom line is: Fiat cars are great, but be warned that there are things you may want to do with them that require you take a screwdriver and get your hands dirty.
Comments on this Entry
Hehe&hellip
I really like his
It's probably worth mentioning one other important point about Linux here. It's a text-based operating system, which means that a fair few of the things you may want to tell your computer to do - installing certain new software, for example - requires you to open up a "terminal window" and actually type text into the little window.
It's a bit like the way all hackers in Hollywood movies furiously crash out lines of incomprehensible text on their laptops when they're trying to bust into the Pentagon's defence network.
That scares me. He's a journalist, right? … Typing text in a window shouldn't be that foreign to him (heck, I'm typing text right now — people might think I'm hacking Pentagon — I better stop and get rid of the keyboard … I hope there's a fully point&click wordprocessor out there!).
-tweek
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
This one is pretty good too:
Because Linux is open source, different programmers have taken its kernel, or core, and written variations on the theme. They may use the same base code, but the desktops look and feel very different.
Darned, idealistic, "Hippy" programmers.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
KDE manages to look and feel different depending how you configure it, damn communist free software developers giving us choice, let us all drive Trabants like Bill Gates intended.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
Actually I'd say installing pretty much any random OS on random hardware is going to be hard. People forget that most Windows installs are done for them and even when they reinstall it's from a preconfigured OEM Windows disk with the only the correct drivers provided.
I would say that in fact Linux installs may be hard but they are potentially easier than installing Windows...
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]