Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Friday 2/06/2006

Ubuntu's new shininess comes at a good time. Like most of you, I act as an unpaid support service to a collection of friends and family, and that usually means battling with various broadband and Windows problems over the phone or — if I'm lucky — a glass of wine during a site visit. A lot of this is Windows 9x running on elderly machines, usually encrusted with enough cruft to hold a dog show. This combination has become unsupportable, something that came home to me on my recent travels: I overheard at least three conversations in shops and airports between people moaning that they were really going to have to move on from exactly that setup.

Next week, I am meeting with one of my more recently acquired clients, who has a 2001-vintage laptop with Windows ME. It no longer works. And sometime this month, I'll be in a similar position with a parental computer — more recent hardware, but Win 98 SP 1. I have a choice in what to recommend. Do I say "new hardware and XP", which even though you can get a decent box for £400 these days seems a lot for just webbery, emails and letter writing? Do I make heroic efforts to return the installations to some sort of working form as-is? Or do I turn up with a live Linux CD and say "There we go?"

For lots of reasons, I'd like to do that. Clearly, once its set up and running it will do what they need and carry on doing it — and I will be more than happy to be relieved of the worries of AV software, registry hacking and trying to undo some of the messes that botched or inappropriate software downloads can do. And while I don't mind donating time and effort to supporting software for free — these are skills that have served me well and it's good to do what you can for people you care about — I'd much rather it was free software. I know Windows backwards, which should make it easier to support, but in practice it has so many arcane and baroque ways to go fut that even solid experience doesn't always help. And XP is pretty time-expired itself these days.

Yet — printing. Network configuration. New peripherals. USB drives. "Rupert, I've got this Access database I need to read". "Your mother needs to share these files with me". "This CD writer isn't working." How will it feel to take those phone calls?

I have a cunning plan. It involves making a selection of live CDs — Puppy Linux is impressive in its simplicity and flexibility, while Ubuntu seems to "just work" — and giving them to my punters. Go and play, I'll say. See what you think. You decide. Of course, I'd love to give Windows XP (and, one presumes, Vista) a fair crack of the whip, but that's illegal. Then I'll set everything up, most certainly including proper remote management via SSH on secret ports, and leap.

The other cunning plan involves settling on one standard Linux distro, buying ex-corporate Dell Latitudes from eBay at £150 a pop, setting them up and refusing to touch anything else.

And the other other cunning plan involves moving back to the chicken shed in Sweden and refusing to come out. Ever.

Mmm.