Nautonnier Blog

The part of Haslemere nearest to our house is called Wey Hill. It houses a number of odd and vaguely run-down shops although the local council is desperately trying to regenerate it. On one side of the street there is a big Health Food shop, split over two distinct buildings and run by a black-clad bloke with long hair called Dominic. Dominic is your typical docile, colonically correct new-ager (although it has been noted that he doesn’t hold open the door of his shop for mothers struggling with prams). The shop is laid out in such a way that the two main parts of the building are not directly linked (an entrace to a courtyard divides the two ground floors although the upper floor does connect both sides) and if Dominic is the only one on duty he has to shuttle between the two sides, serving customers in both. The shop next door to Dominic is currently vacant but it used to be a new-age/candle shop called Heavenscent. The shop next to this is a computer shop with a hardcore computer shop name (“API Systematics”). This shop is run by a bloke who looks like Dominic’s evil twin. He also believes that black is the new black and sports long hair but unlike Dominic he is heavily accessorised with multiple earrings and pentagram necklaces giving him more of an aura of the sinister mage. Sadly it appears that I am not the first to link computers with the supernatural as a modus operandi. Like Dominic he can appear to materialise out of nowhere; unlike Dominic this cannot be atrributed to the layout of his shop. Despite outward appearances, he seems a very helpful sort and may even hold the door of his shop open for mothers struggling with prams, although I suspect there aren’t too many of these amongst his customer base. The reason I went down there was to see if he had a cheap (of course) network card for my Windows XP computer. (Ironically the linux computer that had been given to me was essentially a swap for the network card which was originally housed in the Windows machine and if you’re wondering who would swap a computer for a network card let me just say that there was a sane reason at the time.) Anyway, my friend the computer mage produced a new PCI network card for £9.99 which seemed magic to me. (Further aside – cost of project to date: 1 x Celeron 355 mHz computer = swapped for network card; 1 x splitter = £17.50; 1 x 30GB HDD = £24; 1 x linux Mandrake CD set = £9).

To help keep our study as tidy as possible (ultimately a doomed ambition), I purchased a little splitter on eBay for £17.50 which connects two PCs to a single Keyboard, Monitor and Mouse. You press a little button and are immediately toggled between the two machines. Linux to Windows to Linux to Windows. Within the next few days I got to press this button so often that even now my left ring finger twitches involuntarily when under stress.

My CDs arrived on cue from fastdiscs and the install was quite easy – you popped the first CD into the drive and booted the PC. Everything else happened automatically. One immediate problem that I encountered was that Linux appeared to only recognise half of my hard disk. There was a 4GB drive in there but only 2GB appeared as usable. This created a problem because all the options that I wanted to load on took up more than 2GB. Sigh. I unticked a load of options and allowed the, now sadly reduced, installation to continue. Some of the questions it asked me were odd and, frankly, scary. I was asked for an Administrator password but not allowed to choose the username (more on this later). I was asked to choose a security level out of: Normal, High, Higher, Ultra-secure. I was asked whether I’d prefer a GNOME or a KDE. There was plenty more in this vein but eventually, still as part of the installation, I was asked to configure the various devices on my compuuter. I took this at face value and did my best to comply. The DSL Modem immediately failed but I wasn’t worried because most of the other stuff did as well. Several reinstalls of the operating system later, I discovered that the worst thing you can do is to try to set up your machine at this point. I shall save the wonders of the Mandrake Linux GUI for another day. Suffice to say that I managed to log into the machine and get most of the devices working. Ultimately though I neeed greater capacity so that I could add the necessary components loaded. Fortuitously I had received an email earlier in the day from a wholesale company selling cheap hard disks. I rang them and persuaded them to sell one to me as an individual rather than a company. I paid £24 for a 30GB disk which I thought was pretty good. As I knew that I would have to reinstall Linux once the new hard disk arrived, I didn’t get to tackle any of the myriad problems confronting me and contented myself looking at the pretty new interface.

It’s been 15 days since my last blog post. Crushing disillusionment and psychosis-inducing levels of sleep deprivation are to blame for the “lost fortnight”. However, I emerge from this dark night of the soul more resilient, wiser and a hell of a lot more clued up on the quirks of Linux. Before I detail some of the obstacles placed in my way, I’d just like to thank Conor Murnane, who, when I was at my lowest ebb, mocked my misery by sending me this article. Thanks, Con.

Whilst waiting for the Mandrake CDs to be shipped, I realised that Wal-Mart is the hidden master behind the whole Linux community. Let me explain. The single most troubling aspect of Linux is that it is free. To the commercially savvy mind this prompts the question: How does the company afford to keep going? And if it can’t keep going, am I going to be left high and dry with unsupported and unsupportable software? Admittedly, for the lazy geek these Linux distribution companies package up their wares and sell them for a few dollars (a few hundred if you’re a company) but I can’t believe they sell many. The reason I turned to Linux in the first place is that it’s cheap and I’m cheap so I’m not going to spend any more than I have to. And if I’m a corporate customer I’m probably worried about where the company revenue is coming from and it’s medium term survival prospects – hence a Catch-22 situtaion. The other tack they take is to try and get you to either donate or to join a Linux club – again for a few dollars a year. All of this comes across like a less persistent version of Mrs Doyle from Fr Ted. Go on, you will join, go on, go on, go on. Ok click here not to join and download the software for free anyway. I’m serious. Check out Mandrake version of this little psychodrama here. Clearly all of this fails to make a big impact on greedy Linux-hunters like myself. Check out the fastdiscs.com web page referred to yesterday. On the main page you will see a little counter that records how much money from the sales of Linux CDs has been passed back to the Linux community. Let me quote in its entirety: “Since 15/11/2003, fastdiscs.com customers have donated a total of £56.00 to free software projects.” That’s fifty-six pounds, people!! Hardly enough to pay for the electricity to run a single computer over this period. So how do they keep going? Where is their money coming from? Cruising around the Linux sites the realisation suddenly hit me: they all sell branded mugs and T-shirts.s the principle of back-end sales (“the public, overt face of any business will rarely reveal where the real money comes from”) illustrated in text book fashion. The geeks come to the site for the software which is essentially free (the hook) and come away with their branded goods. As there are so many different versions of Linux, the geeks can now identify with a single brand, their brand, they have their Linux colours and their special Linux affiliation. Now they can start my-linux-is-better-than-your-linux arguments while proudly displaying their version of the Linux penguin crest. No different, in fact, to the behaviour of football fans in their team colours, really. And, though I can’t prove it yet, I fancy Wal-Mart is sitting behind the whole enterprise, the secret owner of all the different Linuxes, happily counting the money pouring in from T-Shirt and mug sales.

As soon as I saw one of them, however, I knew this had to be the one – Mandrake Linux. By eerie coincidence I had just finished reading Toyne Newton’s pre-cursor to The Black Alchemist wherein he devotes an entire section to the Mandrake plant and its occult connections. If you haven’t time to sample the delights of this pre-Collins thriller, have a look at the Wikipedia entry for mandrake which nicely summarises all the salient facts. Quite obviously, for the PsychicQuesting website, Mandrake Linux was the perfect choice. When I looked at the description of this distribution I instantly realised that it was popular, had good hardware support out of the box and was compiled for i586 and above machines. After a moment of panic, when I realised that I didn’t know what chip family the Celeron belonged to, I went looking for ISO files for their latest version (Version 10.0) on the various download sites listed. Here I spent an incredibly frustrating time reading readme files, install.txts and every other note I could lay my hands on. On the Mandrake Linux website it helpfully stated that in every download site there would be a directory called ISO which would contain the images. Wrong. It was on none of them. Nor did the ISO files appear to be in any of the other directories. Still nothing. It seemed as though I could download the source code and get into the whole recompile mess but the easy installation of pre-compiled code was missing. Eventually I saw a note which said that 10.0 had been removed until the Mandrake club members had had a chance to download it. Fine I thought, I’ll get the previous version (9.2). Sadly that appeared to have been removed completely as well. In a flash of inspiration, I tried the Greek mirror site for Version 9.2 and they still had it available. I guess they probably had their minds on other, more pressing, matters. I started downloading the first of three CD images. Based on my rough calculations the whole thing was going to take nine hours to download. Lengthy though my lunch breaks are, this was still way longer than I could wait and I doubt my colleagues would have appreciated the drain on the bandwidth. Getting vastly frustrated I searched the Mandrake Linux website where they have an online store and although they have add-on packs galore, I couldn’t actually see that they were selling the core Operating System (did I mention that Mandrake is a French company). Back on the Linux ISO site, banner ads were proclaiming 10 Linux systems (on 26 CDs) for $29.95. If I ever get to the stage where I am experimenting with 10 separate versions of Linux I give you all leave to bundle me off to the nearest padded room. In desperation I went back to Google and searched on “mandrake linux” in UK sites. None of the results looked promising but one of the sponsored ads on the right seemed just what I was after. www.fastdiscs.com were offering a 4 CD “official” 10.0 release for just £9 including postage which seemed like a bargain considering the pain I had just been through. I happily signed up for a copy and put all thoughts of Linux out of my head for another day.

Day 3 started well when some nice man who must remain nameless kindly offered me an old Celeron desktop (oooh – who could that be?) which would be ideal as my new Linux web server. Buoyed by this early stroke of good fortune I spent my lunch break (of course!) looking for a copy of Linux that I could get my hands on. Not having a clue where to start, I simply typed “Linux” into Google. The first result was www.linux.org which provided a baffling wealth of information about Linux in general but little in the way of specifics. For example, the main page has a big button on it called “Download” but when I hopped to that page I couldn’t find anything to actually download. When I slowed down to understand it all a bit better I realised that the key thing you had to find was an ISO image, a file which can be burned to a CD resulting in a proper install set. Back to Google and I typed “Linux ISO” which brought back a first result of www.linuxiso.org. Two hits out of two and, despite some unnecessary messing around looking for phantom downloads on the wrong site, I felt I was making good progress. Now the linux ISO site is a marvel to the Linux newbie for many reasons but it was at this point (yes I realise that I’m slow) that I had an epiphany about what was meant by Linux “distributions” and the whole OpenSource phenomenon. For the realisation that finally broke through my Microsoft-conditioned skull was that Linux exists purely as source code which is freely available to anyone. The resulting dynamic is that different companies take this code and mould it, tweak it, specialise it, add different support for different applications and generally hack it and cut it around to suit specific uses. So there is not one Linux; there are hundreds. Each version or flavour is called a “distribution”. The problem now facing me was in deciding which distribution I should choose. The Linux ISO site lists no fewer than 15 “most popular” distributions and although one or two of the names were vaguely familiar, the one which rang the most bells was Red Hat. I looked at the description of Red Hat which affirmed that it was the best known distribution but worryingly also added that support was being withdrawn soon, turning Red Hat into a commercial product (is that allowed in the OpenSource world) and spinning off a freebie version called, rather inelegantly, “The Fedora Project”. That didn’t sound too clever and it also mentioned something about being designed for an i386 chip. It turns out that most of the hardcore Linuxes are done this way to provide the greatest level of support. However, if you have the source code you can recompile it for your specific machine. Clearly for a newbie like myself this was utterly terrifying and totally out of the question. Luckily Linux ISO also provide a filter so you can see which versions work on an i586 platform. I applied this and was left with nine contenders.

As part of my ongoing obsession, I am in the process of developing a PsychicQuesting website which I hope will help raise the profile of this glorious exercise amongst the masses. As I get further and further into this, I’m encountering all sorts of technical hurdles. Partly to maintain a decent record of what I’ve done, partly because it may amuse the more geeky amongst us, I’ve decided to keep a blog of my onging progress. This blog – TechnoBlog – can now be accessed off my main web page or directly from this link: http://www.simonjnugent.com/TechnoBlog/infraactive.dll?Form=CallsOut&Database=TechnoBlog. I will be the only one who can post to this blog but if any of you have suggestions/comments/wise cracks as I fumble my way along, please email them to me and I will include where appropriate.

I’m rather fond of my personal website and don’t want to sacrifice it in the creation of PsychicQuesting.com. If I am to hold both websites on my home computer I need to be able to identify which site people are looking for (as both websites will resolve to the same IP address – i.e. my home computer). Last night I started the process to get a test page up on the internet so that I could configure IIS to make this distinction and to test that it was actually doing it correctly. It was with great horror, therefore, that I suddenly discovered (after much struggling with the IIS admin console) that Windows XP doesn’t support multiple websites. This was something of a savage blow. The only alternative seemed to be to install Windows Server 2003 but this (1) is very expensive and (2) doesn’t allow an upgrade from XP! I guess I could have bitten the bullet and forked out the cash and reformatted my home PC but this seemed rash particularly when my home machine is set up so nicely with multiple profiles that Lisa and I (and visiting guests) can, and do, use. I searched around and some hard core hackers have created ISAPI filters to allow multiple websites to be hosted on a single XP machine (for example see http://h4ck3r.net/ – IIS multiplex section) but even their domain names terrified me and I read on another thread somewhere that there are still limitations with this approach. If I couldn’t use my existing machine or sensibly upgrade it, there seemed no alternative to setting up a new web server which could handle multiple websites. Again, given cash constraints, this pushed me firmly in the direction of cheap hardware and, if possible, free software. Although every fibre of my being cried out against it, I was moving inexorably towards Linux usage.