Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I’ve been a part of the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative for a long time, and I’ve been advocating for the use of open source software in the nonprofit sector for years. More lately, I’ve been working to focusing my advising practice on helping people implement open source software (mostly server-side) in their organizations, providing advice and training. I’ve installed more versions of varied Linux flavors than I could even think about remembering (going all the way back to the first or second versions of Slackware in the mid-90s). I’ve been responsible for administering many Linux servers over the years, some Red Hat, some Debian.

And, for all of that time, the Macintosh has been my primary desktop. I had a (very) brief flirtation with Windows (2000) as my primary desktop, but ever since 1987, when I bought my first computer (a Mac SE) I’ve owned at least one Macintosh. I’m not about to change that.

I’ve tried making Linux my primary desktop many times (5 at last count.) It was always something that got in my way of migration. In the beginning, it was lack of software (I first tried this back in 1999), or printer drivers. More recently (last time I tried this was back in 2004) it was not being able to sync with the palm treo I had at the time.

But, Linux has changed, and I have changed. And, in some ways, NOSI has changed - we’re thinking more and more about talking about Linux on the desktop, which we thought was not ready for nonprofit primetime for a long time. I think it’s ready now. I certainly will see. This is the 6th, and last time I will do this. Why last? Because I’ve decided that no matter what, I’m not going back. Because I want to understand, in the most personal possible way, what the pains (if any) of migration to an all free and open source platform will be.

So, I did some research, and realized that the best choice for me was to get a Thinkpad - most everything works right out of the box. I have been, unfortunately, a bit hampered by the fact that my satellite modem died last week - so we’ve been on dial up at home (and broadband at the “local” cafe). But here’s Ubuntu week 1, not edited or smoothed out. I’ll understand points of pain, for sure.

Week 1

I should have taken pictures - unboxing a new laptop is a lot of fun. I got a Lenovo Thinkpad Z61m. Good specs, cheap price. My first step was to make sure the laptop booted. It booted fine. I stopped at the license agreement. I popped in my Fiesty Fawn (Kubuntu 7.04) CD that I’d burned from a downloaded ISO, and rebooted. Once Ubuntu finished booting, I clicked the wonderful “install” icon at the top. Because the recovery media for this laptop was on the hard drive, and I also wanted to create a separate /home partition, I did a manual partition, deleting both partitions on the hard drive, and creating three partitions: /, /home, and swap. (I might regret hosing the recovery media w/o getting them on CD later, but I hope not - I was in a purist mood - I would have had to have agreed to the license agreement for Vista and activated the product in order to burn the media, and I wasn’t about to do that.)

A few minutes later, I had a Ubuntu install with KDE - but it was bare bones. The next step was to get online. That’s the first snag. Ubuntu doesn’t come default with an easy GUI way to connect to a wireless access point. I had to go command line in order to get online. I imagine if I was wired, it would automagically work (that’s been my experience in the past.) So I had to dig out of my memory (and do some online looking) about iwconfig. I also ran into a weird problem with a daemon called “avahi-daemon” which is basically the Linux implementation of “Bonjour”. I’m glad it’s there, but it mucked with my network, and it seemed strange that it was on by default.

So, I got on my wireless network, finally, and got online (I had to use a CLI tool called dhclient to get an IP address. That was annoying.)

So, so far, the major pain has been the wireless stuff. We’ll see how that works once I am able to download some of the good wireless GUI tools out there (like NetworkManager, which I hear is good.)

Next up, let’s see how the details of migration (web, mail, address book, etc. work.)

Technorati Tags: linux, nptech, opensource, windows, ubuntu

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 7:01 am and is filed under Linux, Open Source, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.