Dr. Dobb's Journal October, 2004
Now that's not entirely fair. My friend Joel Rosenberg is no UNIX wizard, but he has converted most of his household to Linux. He does all his writing, and his wife does her research, on Linux boxes and, for the most part, his daughters have been content, although they do insist on having Windows for some communications and games and such. Joel installed the Mandrake distribution of Linux a couple of years ago and is long past the initial use pains. When he sends me mail or text files, I don't notice anything different from files sent by Windows users.
For a number of reasons, despite Joel's recommendation I never really got around to Mandrake. What experience I did have with it showed it wasn't quite to the point where Aunt Minnie could use it. Then came Xandros (http://www.xandros.com/).
"Try it," Bob Thompson said. "Just put the disk into the machine and use the defaults. Anyone can install it."
I couldn't resist that challenge.
The first thing was to go to the Xandros web site (http://www.xandros.com/products/ home/desktopoc/dsk_oc_intro.html) and download the "Business" distribution. Actually, that's what you have to do. In my case, the Xandros press relations people sent me a link, so all I had to do was click on it to bring in a copy. Next, I expanded that, fired up Nero Burning ROM to make an ISO (bootable) CD-ROM with the Xandros files on it, and I was set.
My first installation attempt was on the Intel D850 3-GHz system formerly known as "Principessa," which used to be my main communications system. The system had a brand new Maxtor 120-GB drive and a full GB of Rambus memory. That, I thought, should make a screaming Linux box. Alas, when I set it to boot from the CD-ROM, I got the Xandros splash screen, then the number "4040" written all over that screen, then nothing. Principessa had an nVidia GeForce 4 video board that was supposed to be compatible with Xandros, but I tried an ATI video board just in case. Same result. Finally, I put in an old Matrox video board, but all I got was the splash screen and a lot of 4040s. It was pretty clear that Xandros wasn't going to install, probably because the motherboard used a chipset supporting Rambus.
Okay, I have "Shaman," a 2.53-GHz Pentium 4 on an Intel D845PEBT2 motherboard, 1 GB of Kingston DDR-SDRAM, and an nVidia GeForce 4 video board. This system has Windows XP installed on the primary disk, and has a second hard drive—the one that used to be Principessa's boot drive. I've already copied off the really critical information from that drive but I'll still need access to it once in a while, so that will be a test.
I put the boot disk into the machine formerly known as "Shaman" and turned it on. Up came the Xandros splash screen. Then another screen. Then another. All was well.
I didn't need to log installation decisions because all I did was accept the defaults offered to me. This took a while. Eventually, I was offered a final choice: Did I want to repartition the drive, leaving it bootable into Windows XP as well as Linux, or reformat and start over? I chose repartition. There was a warning that this would take a while, and it did—about an hour. The machine then rebooted, trundled a bit, and up came the Xandros desktop. Remove the boot CD, and all is well. I have a machine that will boot in Linux or in Windows, and all I had to do to get there was to accept a series of offered defaults. Nothing here that Aunt Minnie couldn't do.
It also advised me to make two accounts—an Administrator account with its own password and a second user account, also with its own password. Those I wrote down. Then I logged in as myself (rather than as Administrator). I also gave the machine a name, "Xander." Now it was time to let the system go look for updates. It found its way out through the router without any problems and found a bunch of updates. Before those would install, I had to give it the Administrator password. I'd already forgotten it, so it was well that I wrote it into the log book.
And that's it. The updates installed automatically, and I now have a fully functional Linux box.
Xander is part of a work group, not the Chaosmanor domain. There should be a way to change that, but I haven't looked into it yet because it works. The Linux interface is different from Windows, but quite intuitive, and I had no trouble accessing the local network—where I found that Xander sees every machine in the network without problems. Moreover, from Xander I can, given a valid user name and password, access files on other Windows machines in the Chaosmanor network in about the same way that I access them from any other machine here. Permissions and sharing are enforced properly.
Xander can also see "Ariadne," the 15-inch Mac PowerBook, but so far, I have been unable to access anything there. I didn't spend a lot of time trying. Given that it takes literally five minutes to try a combination of user name, password, and "domain name," there's not a lot of incentive to do it. Understand, though, I have read no documents or even help files. I just moused around seeing what was easy to do.
It's the same with file sharing from Xander. It works just the way it does in Windows, complete with setting permissions and requiring a password. Setting up the D: drive to be shared as XANDER-D took less than a minute and the drive was visible all over the network the instant I was done with it.
I'll keep playing about trying to set up some kind of share between Xander and the Mac. It can't be much harder than it was to set up sharing between the Mac and Windows Active Directory. I'm pretty sure that once I cotton onto the trick, it will Just Work.
The next step was to install Microsoft Office 2000 on Xander. My usual method of installing Office 2000 is to make a disk image of all four installation disks in Folders called Office/Install/Disk1, Disk2, and so on, and do the installation from there. That way, I never have to find the original CDs when I want to upgrade or change the office installation. Since I wasn't quite sure of what I was doing here, and I have the original installation CDs anyway, I didn't bother doing that—I just put Disk 1 into the CD Drive.
Up popped several screens telling me I was about to experience a program called "Crossover," then a window saying that when the program was finished installing, I should "click here to inform Crossover" I was done, and finally the Windows installation dialog. This all went normally: User name, Initials, Organization, the long installation key, followed by the usual Windows fuel gauges and such. Indeed, except that it was all taking place with that "Click here to inform Crossover when the installation is done" window as background, it was impossible to tell that this wasn't being done on a Windows system (albeit one with odd wallpaper).
And, presently, it was finished. Now up popped the oddest screen of the lot: A message telling me that we were simulating a Windows system reboot. The screen blinked, the Windows "Finishing Installation" dialogue box popped up, and that was that. The "Click here to tell Crossover you're done" window went away when Office informed me that installation was finished.
And there on the desktop, on a Linux box, was the Microsoft Internet Explorer "e." I couldn't wait to try that: and lo!, it opened Internet Explorer, and I could browse the Web. Naturally, I went to http://www.jerrypournelle.com/ and told Explorer to add that to its favorites. My site looks just fine viewed by Internet Explorer 5 running under Xandros Linux.
Office 2000 Professional comes on four disks, of which three are installation disks. When it came time to install the second disk, it all started exactly as before, including the window with the "click here to tell Crossover when installation is finished" button.
While the installation was going on, I was curious as to whether Xander had 500 MB or a full GB of memory, so I opened a couple of windows looking for system information. I found a "performance" meter that showed memory and CPU use, and told me there was a GB of memory. However, when I went back to the installation screen, the Windows dialog boxes had vanished, and I had no idea whether the program had installed properly or not. I waited a while, but there was no disk activity, and the CPU use meter was near zero, so I figured it had to be done and clicked that button to tell Crossover.
It warned me that it would be A Really Bad Thing to interrupt an installation, and was I sure it was done. I was, but I waited another couple of minutes just to be sure anyway, then clicked it again and said "Yeah, I'm sure," at which point things trundled, the "Reboot simulation" window popped up, the Windows "finished installation" message appeared, and all was well. Since then I've been fairly careful not to do anything else while a Windows program is installing.
Most of it works. So far as I can tell, all of Word does. All the templates and styles and various other formatting tricks—autocorrection, spelling and grammar checking, all work in Microsoft Word 2000. Double click on a document and Word opens as expected and the document appears. Copying back and forth between the local disk and drives out on the network works as expected. Excel spreadsheets open properly, even across the network. PowerPoint works.
Documents edited on Xandros and shipped across to a Windows machine open just fine. One of them was a draft of this column, with comments. No problems. In brief, when it comes to Word, if you can use it on Windows you can use it on Xandros Desktop OS.
FrontPage 2000 doesn't work. It opened, twice, but when I tried to read in a web page, it just went away as if it had never opened, and later attempts to open it failed entirely: The system trundles, then stops trying, and that's it. I'll have to look into that because it's a disappointment, but as of now, FrontPage 2000 isn't available.
That appears to be the only part of Office 2000 that doesn't work, though.
They've made it—a Linux for Aunt Minnie. I have only worked with the Business Edition of Xandros, which contains the Windows Crossover software, but I can certainly recommend that one. At some point I will try to make time to experiment with the free edition but that may not happen soon: If any of you want to play with the free edition of Xandros, feel free to let me know how that works out.
And, of course, Xandros may be the solution to the Internet Explorer security dilemma: Install Xandros and use Explorer to your heart's content. Any adware, spyware, or worms, oh my! that creep in should starve to death in the Linux environment.
The book of the month is Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, by Steve Coll (Penguin Press). This is both fascinating reading and good information, and his characterization of the various amateurs and professionals who have been influential in the U.S. intelligence organizations is spot on.
If that's too heavy for you, get out your old copy of Heinlein's Starman Jones, a juvenile work written in 1953 and still able to keep you turning pages. I dug it out because my new novel begins with a teen-age character, and it's always well to refresh your recollection of how the master handled such things.
The computer book of the month is Sarah Millstein and Rael Dornfest's Google, The Missing Manual (Pogue Press, 2004). Like all the "missing manual" books, this one has the subtitle "The book that should have been in the box," but, of course, Google doesn't come in a box, so that's a bit silly. The book is useful, though, giving some insights into how Google works, and strategies for both finding things and being found.
DDJ