Ubuntu my arse

[peterbirks]

I finally got around to trying to install Ubuntu on one of my old machines. I downloaded it without any problem and I used Roxio to burn an iso without difficulty (although the latter would almost certainly cause problems for a complete computer novice).

Then I tried to install it on the other machine.

A couple of hours or so later, all that I know is that I have failed. I get the start-up screen, I try the various options. It seems to start, and then nothing happens, for ages. I just get a screen with a pointer. I actually had an hour's nap wwaiting for something to happen.

I'm sure that I'll get there eventually, because I'm determined. But, what if I wasn't? I'd just say "oh, sod it. I'll stick with Windows".

I found a site with an article on how to install Linux. None of the options that it says I should see has appeared. However, here's a classic piece illustrating how computer people have absolutely no idea how non-computer people think.

From the top of page 1:

I have tailored the material here to beginners. No special sophistication in computers is needed

From about half-way through the piece (btw, none of this article was of any use whatsoever, and yet Google had this listed quite near the top):

From Page 12:

Most Linux distributions do not include your current directory, ‘.’, in the PATH variable. Thus if for example
you compile a program and then type
a.out
the shell may tell you that a.out is not found. You are expected to explicitly specify the current directory:
./a.out

If you consider this a problem, as I do, to remedy it in the case of the BASH shell (the default shell for most
distributions), edit the file /.bash profile In the line which sets PATH, append “:.” (a colon and a dot) at the
end of the line, with no intervening spaces. Then log out and log in again, or do
source ˜/.bash_profile

Huh? That's meant to be stuff "tailored for beginners"? (BTW, I've just reread it and I now understand what he is saying. But why put that paragraph in the article at all? It just doesn't belong there.)

And what does the phrase "or do source" mean? It doesn't even qualify as illiterate or English. It's a dialect.

In the old days, dialects were geographically based. Now they are occupation-based. A broad computer-speaker is less comprehensible than somewone with the broadest of broad Geordie accents.

Woohoo. Live update. I've managed to get some kind of "examples" screen when running it from the disc in safe mode. That only took 15 minutes to load. Life really is too short for all this shit.

The problem with computer installations is that you never know how long you have to wait. What bright spark decided to put one of those bars with the percentage completed of an installation (although the linux one doesn't even have this for much of the time)? Has anyone pointed out that, since you can get very "slow" periods, when the bar crawls from left to right, followed by very speedy periods, when it zooms along, the "percentage completed" is absolutely useless as a guide of how long you will have to wait?

+++++++++++++++++

Lex in the FT this morning had a final sentence that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who thinks that everything will be fine (John Authers was making a similar point in another section). That it merely supports the Birks stance of many years ("inflation will return") and the Butler stance of many years (Buy gold, the system is about to collapse!) is by-the-by. The article refers to high inflation in the Bric countries and the significance of rising prices in wheat, rice and corn.

...dirt-cheap consumer products from abroad have been central to keeping western prices low. There is a credible risk that this is an inflection point. Monetary authorities sohould be firm -- and yet this is precisely the stance that they are unable to adopt because of the banking crisis.

Politicians, meanwhile, are asking "what's the solution?". And you have to tell them that, well, there isn't one. Or that, the one that there is, they aren't going to like.

I'm not a fan of Thatcherite or any other silly economy-lite-ite comparison of the individual to large economies. It isn't just a matter of "scaling up". However, in this case, an example from an individual household isn't that bad.

Think of the US economy and the UK economy as a couple of 25-year olds. For six years they have been spending more than they produce. They have financed this by increasing their credit card debt. This has never been a problem. The lenders have been happy to increase their limits. And there's always another credit card to apply for. Sure, servicing the debt is a bit of a pain, but, hell, their wages are going up. They can cope.

Now, all of a sudden, the lenders will not increase the 25-year-olds' credit limits. And no new cards are available. In addition, the interest on the loans in place is going up. What is the solution?

Well, the solution is to cut down on your expenditure. You pay back the money that for the past few years you have been borrowing from the future.

However, if everyone does that, then consumption drops. And let's suppose one of our our hypothetical 25-year-olds works in, say, the entertainment industry, managing a chain of bingo halls. Suddenly, people stop their discretionary spending. The bingo halls close. He is out of a job. Now he can't even service his debt.

In other words, they may well be no solution apart from the horrific "I wouldn't start from here".

There are chinks of light in this scenario. One is that inflation could come back to wipe out debts. That would be a horrible solution for some sections of the economy (not least our banks, who are, any way I look at it, fucked when it comes to future profits) but would at least get us back to "year zero" in a way that would avoid revolution.

A second possibility is that we persuade the Bric countries to start consuming. The developed world cuts back its own expenditure, the Brics start buying luxury goods. We export ourselves out of trouble while living an austere life. Anny chances of that? Not really.

The likely solution? Politicians will look for annything that appears politically acceptable, without concern about whether it makes any economic sense. And therein, I fear, lies the root of all our problems.

+++++++++++++++++++

Comments

Shiny Bitty People

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Tar us not (or gzip us not, if you prefer) with the label "Computer People." You do have several points, though.

(1) What you pay for is what you get. Linux is free, outside the corporate world. The sort of person who "contributes" "documentation" is therefore, most likely, a weenie. This particular documentation/tutorial, is, I grant you, a monstrosity. "a.out?" I know what this means, and even I don't care. Nor should anybody else.
(2) Weenies hang out with weenies. This skews the priorities on Google. Not for everything, just for weeniedom.
(3) Modern GUIs, especially at installation time, are a badly-thought-out nightmare. This is primarily because weenies are not graphical designers, and have little clue about human-machine interaction.

It's a classic case of an over-hyped product, I'm afraid, and in the weenies' defence, most of the hype comes from the media and not from the producers. Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu is, of course, a bit of both.

However:
(4) Ever tried to re-install Windows from scratch? The experience is eerily similar, especially with hardware from two or three years ago (which I assume your second computer has). The documentation and help system is equally futile.
(5) Do you really, in your heart of hearts, believe that Google is the new Oracle of Delphi, only without the ambiguity? Google suffers from the same problems as Ubuntu, indeed Windows. People are led to believe that it performs miracles behind the scenes, when it's merely a tool (as you know). Moreover, it's an advertising tool. The motives of Google do not coincide with the motives of the consumer.

Perhaps it is like the Oracle at Delphi, after all.

(6) Computers are inherently complicated things. They're not complicated enough to justify drivel such as mentioning BASH (ne bash, or /usr/bin/bash, so even that stupid piece of documentation wasn't much help) or the intricacies of the PATH variable, but they are complicated, and computer users should keep this in mind. Don't get me started on environment variables (a concept shared with Windows which should have gone out with the '70s). And don't get me started on why the current directory is not, by default, part of the path. There is no excuse to do this to power users, and IMHO there is no excuse even when you're a SysAdmin. Unix weenies will tell you that this is for "security." I suspect that it is more to do with the ridiculous duplication of command synonyms across a badly-defined wilderness of directories.

The underpinnings of both Windows and Unix (and, by extension, Linux and Mac/OSX) clunk to the max. We're all going to have to live with this.

In the mean time, I find that the best approach is to pretend that you're buying a car from the junk-yard. Drive it around for an hour or two, and, when it falls apart or makes irritating squealing noises, go back to the junk-yard for another one.

Ubuntu, I feel, is not for you. (It's not for me, either, for similar reasons.) Try CentOS, which is a fairly straight-forward cut from old Red Hat releases. It's reliable, but it's not bleeding-edge. But then, do you really want your edge to bleed?

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Politicians will look for annything that appears politically acceptable, without concern about whether it makes any economic sense.

Well, quite.

Re: Shiny Bitty People

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Yes, the "You get what you pay for" argument is valid. I was unaware that it was the media that was hyping up linux/ubuntu rather than the producers.

I was unaware that Ubuntu would require 384mb of RAM. Although I think that the machine has 512mb (I haven't checked), this could be a cause of the problem.

However, I'm not sure that I want an OS that requires that much RAM to install. Xububntu or Damn-Small Ubuntu would probably be a better answer here.

It was only a bit of fun to try to get back to basics. It looks to me, in retrospect, that what these guys are trying to do is produce a free Windows clone.

I agree that computers are complicated things (I've been reading about the Vista situation and the ATI/Nvidia/Microsoft/Intel disputes) and that much of the problem is one of historicity. We made a mistake in 1972, and we have to live with it, because it's way too late to tear everything down and to start again. Oh, and we made a mistake in 19973, and we have to live with that one, too. And in 1974, and in 1975....


My reference to Google was indeed that its ranking system is fairly good. As you know, the algorithm works on a comlex interaction of link-throughs, click-throughs, link-backs, and so on. If something appears high up on the "ordinary" list on Google, it proves, at least to some extent, that it is being used and recommended. I hadn't thought that it would be geek-biased, because I deliberately looked for a non-geek piece of documentation. (I found one, eventually (one specific to Ubuntu), and this made it clear that my machine was actually hanging, rather than 'taking a long time').

PJ

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Bankers, on the other hand, appear not to care about either. What does that make you, as an employee of said bankers?

I like this game, Eccles. Does it have sossinges at the end?

"What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

I wonder which "necessary" evils are actually necessary?

I don't think banking is necessarily evil - as is starting to be shown, the liquidity provided by the sector makes borrowing cheaper (or at least, the current supply problem is starting to make borrowing more expensive). Might that be considered a social "good"?

Technically, I'm in asset management at the moment, which carries some fiduciary responsibility, but it's a nit-pick: I work there partly because I find the business interesting and mostly because I think it's going to pay me the most between now and when the kids are older and the inheritance tax is paid off.

necessitas est mater inventium

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

I've searched high and low in every single religious and philosophical text I can find, and there's not such thing as a "Necessary Evil," I'm afraid. From there we go to "the ends justify the means... Oh yeah.

Did I say that banking is evil? No, I did not. Did you imply that politicians are worthless pond scum? Yes, you did.

One can do useful work in either sector. All I'm saying is that there's a moral equivalence, and it's worth bearing in mind when you have to implement the distasteful and, occasionally, irrational directives of either.

I would submit that blanket cynicism on one side or the other would tend to obscure this otherwise fairly obvious assertion.

Can I have my liquidity now, please? I've got two houses and a bridge over the East River to sell.

Re: necessitas est mater inventium

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

"Did I say..."
"Did you imply..."

A good straw man is not hard to find. Which is good news for me.

Re: necessitas est mater inventium

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

"Did I say" is, very possibly, a straw man.

"Did you imply" is more an assertion; and I think you did so imply.

My apologies to drones everywhere in the Financial Services industry for my solecism on the first point.

Did I mention that I was simply commenting on your apparent one-sided cynicism? Perhaps not. And you're probably right. Bankers, politicians, all individuals under-endowed with intelligence and/or honesty and over-endowed with temporary power over things they can't control: you just gotta love them both. Or hate them both. Or start burning that straw man...