Ubuntu

Steps leading to Ubuntu:

When I was a small schoolchild back in the 1950s, I think we had a school excursion, maybe to Philadelphia (or am I fantasizing about those long-lost memories?). We were shown up to the glass-enclosed gallery overlooking a large room, containing men in shirtsleeves and ties. The room contained various metal boxes with blinking lights. This was the UNIVAC. Some of the school children breathlessly asked if it could think - whether it had a soul. The earnest man explaining things to the visitors gallery told us that you could not, as yet, say that that was actually the case.

I was invited to the "National Youth Conference on the Atom" in Chicago as a guest of the New Jersey electricity companies in 1964 (or was it 1963?). Despite, or perhaps because of this, I am opposed to the generation of electricity using atomic power. When touring through the Argonne National Laboratories, I noticed a large room filled with wires and vacuum tubes. Maybe it even had transistors. This was also a computer. I particularly remember admiring a beautifully woven framework of crossed wires, and I was told that that was the main memory. It must have been at least 256 bytes. Or perhaps even a whole kilobyte! A beautiful piece of intricate handwork.

During my undergraduate, and also graduate studies at Canberra, I had nothing to do with computers. What a waste of time it would have been to try to write a FORTRAN program, submit it to the computer center, have it typed into punch cards by the young women who worked part-time there, have it put through the card-reader some days later, then a week or so afterwards go back to the computer center and ask for the print-out of the result, showing that I had not quite understood the syntax properly! Nevertheless, towards the end of my time there, in about 1975, I was shown a "small" computer which only took up a single wall of a room and had a keyboard which was directly connected with the computer. Thus a single person could actually fiddle with the computer alone, without a hundred other people having to be involved, as was previously the case.

In 1980 or so, some people became fascinated with the "programmable" pocket calculators of Hewlett-Packard. They cost about $1000, or say $2000 in todays money. You could type in a sequence of key strokes and then pull a magnetic strip through a slit at the top. Later, passing the strip through the slit again reproduced the same key strokes. I decided it wasn't worth it for me. A year or two later, I did get the first Hewlett-Packard micro-computer. That cost (in todays money) more than $2000. It had a BASIC interpreter. You could actually write your programs onto a magnetic tape using a cassette recorder. If you were prepared to fork out a further $2000, you could buy a large metal box which, if you spent another $1000 or so, you could buy a floppy disc recorder and put it into the box which connected it to the BASIC computer. I decided that I didn't really need the box.

Then I got an Apple II in 1983. The beauty of the Apple was that the entire operating system, plus BASIC interpreter, consisted of only about a thousand machine instructions which could be looked at and easily understood. It was possible to buy a copy of UCSD Pascal, which was a great improvement on BASIC. The down side of the Apple II was that it cost something like $5000 or more. (I'm thinking in terms of todays money all the time here.) I restrained myself from buying a second floppy drive - at 140 kilobytes, and $1000. But I did buy a Microsoft CPM card for the Apple, again costing at least $1000. In those days, CPM on the Z-80 was the big thing for the future!

In 1985 I got a "fat" Mac, with 500KB. I was able to trade in the Apple II, but still, I had to pay a further couple of thousand $$ on top of it! Unfortunately, there were no programming languages available. Apple was unhappy about the fact that so many other companies were selling copies of the Apple II. Thus they decided to make the Macintosh "closed". Attempts to look at the contents of the ROM were blocked by the technique of using the exception handling code in the 68000 processor. They did allow MacForth to be sold to such "end users" as me. It cost about $500. I also spent many $$ on a Pascal compiler, and I even bought Microsoft Word for the Mac, which cost at least another $500! (or more, when I consider the painful exercise of converting this into todays money.) Some of the big-spenders in the computer club I was in actually bought the hard disc which fitted elegantly underneath the Mac. They proudly exclaimed that it had a "footprint" on the desktop no bigger than a piece of A4 paper. It had a huge 10MB capacity, but it cost upwards of $10,000! I decided that I could do without it. However, later, perhaps in 1990, I did buy a 20MB external hard disc, since the price had dropped drastically to only $2000, or so.

During this time, our Faculty started to buy some micro-computers, thus establishing a degree of independence from the computer center (as far as anybody on the faculty actually did use computers). For example we got one PC which made a noise about as loud as a jet taxiing across the runway before takeoff. Then we got a DEC Microvax, which we found to be impressive. After taking it out of the box, I was the first person to type in a little BASIC program, just to see if it worked.

Unfortunately, in 1992 or so, the picture tube on my Macintosh blew out. So I replaced it with a Macintosh LC II. This had the advantage of having a detachable picture tube, so that if it blew out, you didn't have to replace the whole computer. It also had a really fast 20 MHz 68020 processor. I don't want to think about how many $$ it cost! (But at least it was considerably less than the original Macintosh.) It was even capable of compiling TeX! Unfortunately, MacTex also cost lots of $$. Don't think about upgrading this software, since any such step would cost hundreds of dollars! It was also slow. I suppose a 30 or 40 page TeX file took a couple of minutes to compile on that computer.

The children got a PC with Windows on it in in order to play computer games in about 1995. I was trying to ignore my expensive Macintosh LC II, with its nail-printer which had also cost me two or three thousand dollars as well.

But then in about 1998, I read an article in the Guardian Weekly, describing a free version of UNIX which actually worked on those PCs which people were using to play computer games! It was called Linux. So I looked around and found that I could buy SuSE Linux in a box with a CD for only $70, or so, and it had all the standard computer languages - C, Pascal, Lisp, etc., etc.! So the children upgraded to a new PC, capable of handling Windows 98 and the newest computer games, and I inherited the old PC which now had Linux. TeX worked like a charm!

A new PC for myself in 2000 only cost about $1000. What a change from the bad old expen$$ive days with those old Apples! To keep up with the newest trends, I upgraded SuSE every year or so. After all, it only cost $80 or $100 or so to get the latest version. And I could write it off on the taxes too. Unfortunately though, each upgrade involved erasing the hard-disc, which involved saving all the old junk somewhere externally. I got into a cycle of calling the German Telecom and asking when they would be able to supply ADSL to our house. They said, in a couple of months. This went on for about two years, at which point I gave up and changed to Arcor, which could do it immediately.

I experimented with a spare hard-disc, trying to install Debian. It worked, more or less. But no sound. The Debian enthusiasts in the Faculty indicated that my lack of sound merely reflected my lack of intelligence with regard to computers. Other things didn't work either. I decided to give up on Debian.

In 2005 I got an Acer Aspire laptop. I didn't erase the Windows XP on the hard-disc, but rather partitioned it with half MS, and the other half SuSE. The standard things worked with SuSE - printing, TeX, browser, mail, and so forth. But the wireless receiver didn't work. At least I couldn't get it to work, despite hours of trying. In the pre-installed Windows, the wireless worked for brief periods before closing down. My computer-savvy son realized that Acer had installed the wrong driver, and he downloaded the newer version. It worked somewhat better, but the pickup was still rather weak. The 3D processor didn't work in SuSE. I learned that SuSE in the version 10.0 was freely down loadable! So I did. Still no 3D. But not bad. The wireless now worked in SuSE, and the reception was better than that with XP.

Finally Ubuntu! I decided to get a new 100GB laptop hard-disc to allow myself to experiment freely. It cost almost nothing! $100, or so. The wireless reception was much stronger than before. 3D worked beautifully. A tiny DVB-T antenna, plugged into the USB port, also worked beautifully. (In XP, using the software supplied, it only worked badly, often losing the signal on my laptop). Some things still didn't work. For some reason, the Google people had not written their Google-Earth program so that it worked with the 3D processor in Linux. But that's OK. I had thought that I had lost the XP business on my old hard-disc, but it was still there. It's better to have these "closed source" programs on some more disposable medium. After all, who knows what malicious things Google, or some Google hacker, might have slipped into such a program. Also our GPS car navigator only worked with XP, as far as loading new maps into it was concerned.

And finally, I salute Mark Shuttelworth for all that he has done for us!

An update: It is now the year 2012, and so we have the version 11.10. Ubuntu 12.04 will be released this coming April (the 4th month of the 12th year of this millennium). A month or two ago my old computer gave up the ghost after seven years of intense use. Funny patterns appeared all over the screen, making it almost impossible to see what was going on. But I was able to save the few things on the hard disc which had changed since the last backup. So now I've gotten a new laptop, a Lenovo. The old one was an expensive 1600 euros back then, and for that price it was able to do almost everything which newer models can do. The Lenovo cost less than half of that, but still, it gives a solid impression. Before turning the thing on, I removed the installed drive - together with its bloatware infested Windows operating system - and substituted a solid state drive which I used to install Ubuntu 11.10. Of course now almost everything designed for Windows runs perfectly in the wine emulation software of Linux. In particular David Fotland's Many Faces of Go program, which I only very seldom can beat when it plays in its 1 dan mode (such frustration!), and the NoteWorthy Composer music program. I had thought that when using a solid state drive, everything would be so cool that the ventilator would never need to run (except when the computer is calculating its next move in Go). But no. Even when idling, with the help of the "powertop" program I see that it uses almost 25 watts. At that power consumption the ventilation needed is so small that the fan is almost silent. Nevertheless, the Windows system which comes with the computer is sufficiently optimized to bring the power down to well below 10 watts. I suppose the problem is, as ever, the fact that for some reason the manufacturers of the various components refuse to openly release their driver software. During the installation I tried installing the proprietary ATI driver, but that failed. The open-source driver does work, but it must be responsible for most of this extra heat.

October 2014. I'm still using the Lenovo with Ubuntu 12.04. After an update a few months ago I was pleasantly surprised to find that the laptop is using only about 12 watts of power, and so the fan remains turned off. And it stays off even when the computer is considering its next move in the game of go. How wonderfully peaceful life has become! Somehow they seem to have obtained sensible drivers for the components of this computer. It is as good as the old Apple II of 30 years ago, which had no fan at all. My only complaint now is that we are still bound to Vodafone, which took over the old Arcor (which originally was Mannesmann), as an internet provider. We are so far from the next relay point which Vodofone has bothered to establish that we only receive about 1MB per second. Vodafone says that if you don't terminate the telephone contract within 3 months of the end of the yearly contract period, then it is extended for another year. Well, our contract runs till October the 30th. On about the 5th of August a pleasant notice appeared in our mailbox. The local utility, which also runs a local Internet provider service, has put a high-speed telephone box into our neighborhood, and we are certainly less than a mile from it. While we may not achieve the 50MB which is available within a few hundred yards of the box, still, I was told that we should have at least 10 or 15MB here. And the service would be much cheaper than our present Vodafone service! Oh... If only they had told us this a week or two earlier!!! Ah well. At the beginning of November 2015 we will be able to have a - more or less - high speed connection. But I suppose we can live with this tedious Vodafone business till then. After all, I mainly just read the news, and other texts, on the Internet.

May 2018. The Lenovo is still going strong, but the operating system 14.04 is nearing the end of its lifetime and will no longer be supported. So I went to the electronics store and got a new SSD with 500 gigabytes which cost less than 100 euros, and I have now installed the version 18.04 of Ubuntu. This time using Ubuntu Mate, which seems less fussy than the standard installation.
But I wonder if it makes sense to continue adding things here, since all of this personal computer software seems to have reached a stable phase of its evolution. It is rather like the history of bicycles which, after 20 or 30 years of early development, settled on the modern design which has only changed in small details over the last 100 years.

Four years ago, we were looking forward to a higher speed internet, and it soon came. So we now have a steady 11 megabits/second That is not considered particularly fast these days, but it is certainly sufficient for us. It's enough for two simultaneous Netflix streams. (I understand that 25 megabits/second is necessary for "ultra-HD", or whatever it is, but we don't have such a television.) So now I've seen all the episodes of Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Downton Abby, and so forth. And it has gradually become boring. We haven't seen anything in Netflix for months now.

Politicians are saying that every house should have at least 50 megabits/second. But why? The main thing is that our service is reliable. A friend has an optical cable running near to his house, and he subscribes to the Telekom. But he says that on Friday or Saturday nights it often becomes painfully slow. Their servers are too slow for the traffic. We have a constant 11 megabits/second almost always. And when there is a problem we can ring up the local people, and somebody at the other end immediately picks up the telephone. Not an answering service. This is a tremendous advantage.

But returning to the comparison of Linux with Microsoft Windows, I did have an interesting experience. I wanted to get away from those TomTom GPS navigators since (although they run internally using Linux) they only allow downloads of new maps via Windows. I wanted something with world maps - we took a trip to Australia and were driving about for some weeks - and also lifetime map updates. But I only found a TomTom device which fit the bill. So, looking behind the dust in a cupboard here I found the original hard disk which came with the computer all those years ago. Taking out the SSD disk which I had been using and putting in that old hard disk, it seemed to start nicely. It requested my name, so I typed in a funny false name. And a password. Then it started downloading endless things. Who knows what? In Ubuntu, you are asked in a civilized way if you would like to perform an update, and you can do it at a time that suits you. But apparently Windows spontaneously updates without asking. After a very long time the computer seemed to settle down. Then I tried turning it off. But it said: Do Not Turn Off This Computer until it says so. This message appeared and remained fixed on the screen for at least a half an hour. It seemed that the system had died without shutting itself off. So I stopped it by holding down the start button for 10 seconds, or something.
Trying to start things again, the computer again seemed to take forever to get going, but eventually it did start, and it even did something sensible such as starting a browser. Again I tried shutting it down with the same result as before. One or more attempts to start things were again almost successful, but each time, the operating system seemed to accumulate more and more errors. In the end I left it for almost 24 hours in the state of saying that it was shutting down and don't turn things off, and at the end of that time it actually did something! But this was not success. A further attempt led to the announcement that it would refuse to do anything more and I must insert the "rescue CD" which I was told I should have burned when originally buying this laptop. But I hadn't. Therefore I threw all the Microsoft junk which came with this computer in the garbage. Good riddance!
Luckily we have another computer with an intact Windows system where we actually did burn a rescue CD. Normally it has an Ubuntu SSD, but the original hard disk can be exchanged for such updating once every 6 months or so. When turning off that computer when it has the hard disk in it, I am careful to let it take all the time it wants to communicate whatever it likes with the Microsoft center, telling Bill Gates and all his people everything it knows about us. That is very little, since otherwise it is not connected to the computer, gathering information about us. Then after it has shut down, I start it again, letting it take its time to start downloading whatever it downloads. Then let it shut down, again downloading something or other for a further few minutes. I do this for 3 or 4 such cycles until it seems to start and stop with little fuss. And then I thankfully take the disk out of the computer and put it away somewhere.