The fastest way to send data

Everyone thinks of super-fast optical fibres as being the best way to transfer data from one location to another.  Big organisations generate a lot of data, and in the case of one that I know, 1 terabyte is gathered every day.  It was expensive to gather that data and it is important that it is not lost, so a backup copy is kept on another site 10km away.

How is the data sent? 

By motorbike courier on a backup tape!

Who would have thought that the fastest way to transfer data would be by motorbike?

Small note:  OK, it probably takes a long time to write the data onto the tape, and that should be taken into consideration, but that spoils the story a bit!

Ubuntu 12.04 - the verdict - shall I switch distro?

Having shared a few of my concerns about the way that Ubuntu is changing, and whether I should stick with it or jump ship to another Linux distro (or even to Windows 7), I set into the upgrades on my three machines.  (I won't get into the question of why I have three of them!)

I downloaded the new CD ISO image for the 32 bit version of Ubuntu 12.04 and burned it to disk, then booted from the live disk and created a USB startup 'disk' for the netbook.  I installed a brand new 500GByte hard disk drive on the laptop.  This means that I could roll back to the old (perfectly working) system within minutes or go back to retrieve some critical file that I later need.  You see - I don't trust myself to complete a backup of all my preferences and I didn't want to lose the ability to use the laptop if everything went wrong.  Yes - I have to have a spare HDD 'in stock' but I feel that the cost is worth it!

Here goes!

Installing the system on both the netbook and laptop simultaneously, everything went as well as could be hoped.  Ubuntu installations are a breeze these days - much easier than installing Windows.  Basically everything just works and then there is an hour or so of tedious work to personalise everything to the way I like it, connect to the cloud to synchronise some files, install those favorite packages that are not there by default and get Firefox to synchronise bookmarks and favorites between the machines. 

Now all of that would normally be easy.  I've done it often enough that I have a sort of checklist - one that has gradually got shorter as Ubuntu has improved.  Each time I cross out things that they have fixed.  Even personalising the installation is getting easier if you trust cloud computing to some extent.

But this time I was faced with Ubuntu's new default desktop environment, called Unity.  Some love it, but I and many others absolutely detest it.  I've honestly tried to like it but I just can't.  Not only can I not find things that ought to be there, but I actually believe that those things are not there any longer.  The whole thing seems to me to have been designed for the 'hard of thinking' with horrible big icons (even at their smallest setting) and a strong discouragement to use your desktop as a workspace.  Irritations include:

• It is continuously difficult to find things that you know must be there. e.g. the option to handle Users and Groups - which is actually not there until you install it!
• No top panel or bottom panel, but the (too wide) side panel instead – why can't I choose?
• The side panel is intrusively large, even when setting the buttons to the smallest available (and I find the auto-hide option very irritating).
• Switching workspaces is possible, but not the usual simple alt-ctrl-left and right.  You have to go up and down too because it is in a grid, not just a row and can't seem to change this.  It is not easy to tell which applications are on which space without using the mouse.  This is normally one of the best features of Linux systems, when it works!
• Can't see in the bottom panel (because there isn't one) which applications are open.  You have to blunder round with Alt-tab to try to find what you want, with only tiny clues on the icons on the left panel to tantalise you.
• Power settings have been changed.  Can't set the laptop to suspend when pressing the power button as I would prefer but now have to do it from a menu which takes longer.  Why mess with the basics like this?
• There is now no option for Restart on the shutdown menu, and it doesn't help to say that you don't need one because it is so stable and good - because it isn't quite that good yet and there are times when a restart is the simplest option.  (It makes a restart button after installing updates that it thinks require a restart.  Well, thank you!)

So - after a few days of frustration I decided to ditch Unity on the laptop and go over to the GNOME3 interface.  GNOME 2 was good.  I could find everything and do anything I wanted to.  This new upgrade must be similar mustn't it?

A bit of Googling revealed that the easiest solution is to type in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

Some things really ARE easier in a terminal than they would be using a graphical interface!  After a restart, not using the restart button because there isn't one (did I mention?), the login screen now gives various options as well as two versions of Unity.

Obviously you would choose Gnome wouldn't you?  Wrong - as you can see on this rather thorough and fair assassination of GNOME3 from Tom's Hardware.    He covers all the things that I find so irritating, and a couple more that I hadn't yet noticed.  He starts with:

No desktop, no taskbar, no Ubuntu, no Mint. Panned by critics, shunned by users, Linus calls it an “unholy mess.” Saying there are a number of things wrong with GNOME 3 is an understatement. But how the hell did it go so sideways?

So, GNOME3 is not popular.  However, the other option at the login screen, 'Gnome Classic (no effects)', brings things almost back to normal.  A few things have moved and it takes a little while to find them, but it is nothing that is beyond the wit of man. 

After 4 weeks I reached a decision.  I can't cope with Unity.  I had continued to run it on the netbook and found myself wanting to throw it at things on a regular basis, so it is now also running Gnome Classic (no effects).  Everything is working on the laptop, and now I have 'upgraded' the desktop machine too.  I have three machines working to my satisfaction, mutually compatible, synchronising nicely through 'the cloud' and Ubuntu has survived for a little longer.

12.04 seems quite fast.  It starts up and shuts down quickly, and the option to suspend the system makes this even better - even on the desktop machine.  The Ubuntu One cloud computing service works pretty well too.  Almost the only thing I would want from it is stability.

However, I should say that Ubuntu is very much 'on notice'.  My acceptance of 12.04 is very much in spite of the direction that Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) seems to want to take the product and I fear that the future is bleak.  The net result is that I took a little time to install a copy of Fedora 16 in parallel to Ubuntu as a dual boot system.  At present it is only on the desktop machine not on the portables.  On the advice of a friend who was visiting from New Zealand last week, I also plan to try out a distro called Mint.  (Mint comes in several flavours, it seems!  The recommended version is a direct fork from Debian, making it a sibling of Ubuntu, but there is another that is based on Ubuntu, making it a daughter.  When I tried that before it was good, but it defeats the object of moving away from Ubuntu doesn't it.)

I know for sure that the Ubuntu community is being fragmented by the changes that have been introduced.  Canonical might claim not to care, but by writing this you can see that at least one long term Ubuntu 'fan' doesn't need much more of a push before he jumps to another ship.

**Sadly Fedora 16 also ships with Gnome3.  I don't want to learn KDE, and xfce is pretty basic.

Ubuntu 12.04 - the questions that divide a community

I have been running several computers on the Ubuntu Linux operating system for 5 years, and although not expert I would at least claim some sort of familiarity with the capabilities of the system, its strengths and weaknesses.  I have written previously in Windoze or Ubuntu (Linux)? that I can do virtually everything on Ubuntu that I could do with Windows, enjoy some features that Windows does not offer, and that the one thing that I would really miss if I had to abandon Windows completely is Microsoft Excel.  (Word is pretty good too, although gradually less so!)

Ubuntu has for a long time had a policy of bringing out a new version every 6 months (which is perhaps a bit too often), but having a Long Term Support (LTS) version once every 2 years.  The LTS version is guaranteed to be supported for an extended period, thus making it a more attractive option for people running large networks where they can achieve a level of stability for their users.  I personally like that stability as an individual user too.  Almost everything continues to work fine, although individual packages might get left behind in the rush for 'progress'. 

This means that my desktop machine has been running 10.04 for over 2 years.  I had a netbook running 10.10 and a laptop on 11.04. (My mother and two of my children also run 11.04.)  I have a policy of never installing the version before an LTS release as they tend to be experimental to the point of frustration.  (No I can't support that claim with evidence!  But I do believe it.  9.10 was a disaster from my point of view!)

Over that 5 years, my familiarity with Linux has improved.  The general compatibility and usability of Ubuntu has also also been transformed.  During that time I have found that some of the features that used to be problematic now 'just work'.  Sound was one of those things that sometimes had to be coaxed into operation - now it works fine.  Laptop wireless networking was another weakness that has been improved beyond measure.

On the whole, Ubuntu installs easily, finds the settings for all your hardware and implements everything without human intervention.

Nevertheless, in the background, Ubuntu has been gradually trying to lose the word 'Linux', and appears to be trying to go away from the accepted conventions of all desktop environments in an attempt to stamp out a look and feel of their own.  In some senses, Ubuntu seems to be gradually changing its appearance to be more like the desktop environment of the Apple Macs, and not all of us regard that as being progress.  But for example, why on earth would they move the icons from the top right of a window to the top left?  Yes you can get a script that moves them back, but they fact that Ubuntu imposes this irritation on us shows that they don't give a sh*t for our opinion! 

Introduction of the utterly horrible new 'Unity' interface was another example of that, and the fact that Ubuntu is one of very few distributions to have packaged the 'GNOME3' 'shell' is takes it a step further.  For many Ubuntu users one of these was an incumberance, but putting both together was an imposition that is certain to drive loyal users away.

It is with these points niggling at my mind that I undertook the process of converting all three machines over to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, released 26th April, while half-wondering whether the time had come to abandon Ubuntu in favour of one of the other well-known Linux distros.  Fedora and Debian both have a good following, and Fedora in particular has excellent community support.  Open Suse was another option that I have considered exploring.

One month and a week into the experiment I have completed the transition.  First I transferred the laptop and netbook over, and only after establishing that all my usual activities (see below**) worked properly on the laptop did I convert the desktop machine.

I will say a bit more about my conclusions in a few days.  (I will add a link here when I publish it.)  Will I stay with Ubuntu or not?  The jury is out.

** Normal activities include web browsing, e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, online messaging, Facebook and Twitter (including bulk uploads of tweets), web site maintenance (including FTP), photography and image manipulation, blogging, downloading podcasts and synchronising them to an MP3 player, Skype, listening to music and watching DVDs and probably more.

Haiku errors

One from the archives today!

The Japanese have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft error messages with their own Japanese haiku poetry, each only 17 syllables, 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second, five in the third...

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

The Web site you seek
Can not be located but
Countless more exist.

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

First snow, then silence.
This thousand dollar screen dies
So beautifully.

Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Having been erased,
The document you're seeking
Must now be retyped.

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

Small note: Hmmm!

Browser wars - and Microsoft is losing!

Recently one of my most loyal readers told me that she had swapped from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome due to some sort of problem with Facebook.  She told me that people were leaving IE in droves, and as one who left it a few years ago I wondered whether I could see the evidence for this.

So I decided to trawl through the Google Analytics record (for another site that I administer) as Something Surprising has only been running for 10 months.  This graph is on the basis of 20,000 visits from around the world.

As she had said, Internet Explorer is losing the battle (blue line in the graph).  On balance, Chrome (red) is winning, and Firefox (yellow) is pretty much holding its own after a bit of a fight with Chrome a few months ago.

Is this a result of global legislation about competitiveness or is it due to the power of Google?  I would suggest that it might be a bit of both.  Many people would formerly have had no notion that there were other browsers.  Nowadays in Europe at least they have been forced to consider other options - and the bigger they are, the harder they fall.  Chrome has attractive features and I can understand people liking it. 

For me, the cross-platform nature of Firefox means that I can use the same browser at home as I do at work, and share bookmarks between desktop and laptop with very little effort.


Small note:  This is a small study and might not be representative of the whole of the internet.  My statistics are poor but the consistent trends suggest that they are not inaccurate.

Smaller note:  Other browsers are available for Macs and other unusual operating systems (like Ubuntu which I use).  That is why the percentages do not add up to 100%.

Identity crisis on Google+

Who am I - really?  That is a question that must be in the mind of a lot of people who have been considering using the new 'Google+' but are being put off by stories of account suspensions.  If you haven't heard the stories, try this link, Google+ and pseudonymity: An open letter to Google, for one of the more prominent stories of the week.  It details how a (quite well-known) online personality has had her account suspended by Google because GrrlScientist is apparently not her real name.  Even though it is a pseudonym that she has used for many years, it is deemed unacceptable by Google.

Google+ is clearly aiming to be a direct competitor to Facebook, and let's face it, Facebook needs one!  How often does FB 'helpfully' change features that we have started to think we understand.  FB doesn't have a great reputation when it comes to privacy either.  The default option seems to be to tell everyone everything.  Well I exaggerate a little, but I was amazed when I started using FB (just this year) that I had to spend so much time locking down information that I didn't want to be known to everyone in the world.  (And I was already cautious about what information I had added to it!)

There is a raft of reasons why people use pseudonyms on-line.  I can only give my own reasons here.  I masquerade here on Blogspot as Plasma Engineer, use the same name on RD.net, plasma.engineer on gmail, and use @plasma_engineer on twitter.  I use another name for a work-related technical web site that I have been running for some years.  I even have a completely anonymous-looking hotmail account to use on sites that I suspect will send me a load of spam.  However I still use the name that my parents have given me on Facebook.  A few of you know all of these names, but I trust that other readers are not offended that I keep these identities separate.  I am not upset if I don't know your personal details, but I always feel honoured if you reveal them to me.  It is not just a matter of trust, it is just that we all have degrees of friendship in our real lives, and the same happens in the online communities that we frequent.

As a professional person, I believe that it is important that my personal opinions are separated from my professional opinions.  I don't kid myself that I am so important that it really matters on the grand scheme of things, but I have a role which requires me to act with authority sometimes.  I don't want my personal views on other topics to affect that role.

Having a pseudonym online means that I can exercise my right to free speech with a little more freedom than I would under my own name.  It is not that I feel concerned from a legal perspective.  After all, Google knows perfectly well who Plasma Engineer really is and the authorities could track me down in an instant, although I do not have an I-phone!  Even if I hadn't associated Plasma's e-mail account with my personal account they could easily enough spot that I typically log in from the same few IP addresses and MAC addresses and associate them.  Before you complain that Google would not do such a thing, remember the saga of the 'accidental' logging of wireless network SSIDs, IP addresses and other information while they were conducting the photographic survey of UK for Google maps.

Let's face it.  Google knows everything about us, like it or not.  It is part of the cost of an online presence.  I like to think of it as a responsibility check in some ways.  I'm not completely comfortable that Google knows so much but it does and its too late to change that.

Identity fraud is another area of concern for all of us.  We are constantly warned about it and still we hear stories about how identities and cash are stolen from the wary and the unwary alike.

On top of that, to be perfectly honest I'm literally scared of some factions.  I tend to speak out about things that concern me and some of those things are a matter of life and death to their proponents.  Indeed the life and death matters are the ones that I feel we should all know more about - if we have no warning we can't take any action to prevent things happening.  As an recovering christian, I tend to attack Christianity's inconsistencies sometimes.  There are probably fundamentalist christians who would wish me harm.  I also point out the dangers of creeping Islam, and I am certain that there are fundamentalist muslims who would actually wish me dead, and I have had thinly-veiled threats via Twitter - generally from ignorant idiots who seem to have no notion of rationality, truth or human rights.

So, is Google right to implement a rule about the use of real names on Google+.  I really don't know.  I can see why they want to avoid online fraud from accounts based on their servers. My G+ account actually is in my real name.  So is my Facebook account, and the Something Surprising Facebook

One thing I would have liked from Google was a warning when I set up my G+ account.  If they had made it perfectly clear that our accounts had to be in our real legal names rather than with a pseudonym then I would have felt that they had good reason to close some that were not - whether we like it or not.  Just saying to those who have lost their entire Google 'lives' (however temporarily) that it is against the terms of service (TOS) of the Google account is rather lame.  I have re-read the TOS again and find it hard to work out which clause they are invoking anyway.

The reason I think this is lame is a matter of consistency.   Google's fantastic and free blogging service does not seem to apply the same rules - not yet at least!

Of all the blogs that I follow - not many, but surely a representative number - I think only 10% are published under legally recognisable names.  My main concern about Google is that this identity crisis might get extended to Blogspot.  I have put a lot of effort into this blog this year, and loved doing it.  I now have a reasonable following of intelligent readers too.  Will Something Surprising get closed summarily because I would not answer to the name Plasma Engineer in the street, even though I really am an engineer (of sorts) who works with plasma?  If so, Google will save a LOT of server space as most of our blogs will vanish overnight without warning.

I would find that sad.

(Time for a backup I think!)

Later edition:
Reading further, I think the aim of Google's campaign against pseudonyms is to avoid the launch of a lot of 'corporate accounts' for every company, band and blog.  This link is to an article that Google+ Witnesses Traffic Growth Decline.  Funnily enough it neglects to emphasise that subscription is still by invitation only.

Atheist 404 error?

How often have you typed in a web address and made a mistake, resulting in

Error 404:  The page you are looking for can not be found.  You may have mistyped the address or it may have moved.

If this happened on an atheist web site there might be an opportunity for a little fun.  What might we like the error message to say?

Error 666: The deity you are seeking can not be found.  You may have prayed to the wrong entity or failed to find the true way.

Perhaps you have a better suggestion and might be tempted to leave it in the comments.

Tweet on time - with klout

Have you discovered the power of Twitter?  You might notice that I tweet about all my blog posts and sometimes retweet other people's ideas.  You might have found this post or indeed this blog via Twitter.

Since the aim of my posts is always to bring you something surprising (and hopefully I sometimes succeed) it is not enough for me to mention something that you could hardly have failed to notice. So I will mention some other things about Twitter that might not have encountered.

At my place of work - a place that I sometimes feel quite proud of - Twitter is banned.  That seems quite reasonable.  We wouldn't want everyone tweeting all the time.  They have work to do.  However, a few of my colleagues working in public relations do use Twitter officially, and since they follow many of the people who follow them, they have expressed surprise that I sometimes tweet during the day.  My esteemed friend and loyal follower, Derby Skeptic, asked almost the opposite question.  "Are you on the web all the time?"  Neither had reckoned with a nice little web tool that I have been using, as recommended by The Honest Blogger.  I ignore her implication that the rest of us might be less honest and appreciate her advice. :)

Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) is a nice free package that allows you to schedule your tweets.  I have been using it for a few weeks and noticed that it brings in readers from all over the world.  But it is more than just a scheduler.  It allows you to run more than one Twitter account at a time (which I don't, but I might).  It also allows you to see (on one screen) tweets coming in from people you follow, your @mentions, your sent tweets and your direct messages or whatever you like.  You see each of them in a column which updates as often as you tell it to update.

You might not realise that you have something called 'Klout'.  With www.klout.com you can get an indication of your ability to influence social networks.  Hootsuite shows the klout of your contacts and can tell you your own score too.  I hear that only one person has a klout of 100 (but I am not young enough to remember his name).  There are others in the 90s, including Lady Gaga.

OK - my klout has only reached 43 but seems to be rising slowly.  I think a good target would be to keep my klout higher than my age.

Small note: I can also schedule these posts to go out while I am at work.  I make a point not to blog from work.  Then I can be as controversial as I wish without embarrassing anyone else.

Podcasts for everyone

Have you ever listened to a podcast?  Most people seem still to be shying away from learning to enjoy the range of listening or viewing opportunities available to them.  I'm hoping to convince you that it is easy and that you might be missing out on a world of entertaining and informative programming.

Perhaps you have tried your favorite TV station's web based player to watch a TV programme that you have missed?  It is as simple as that to listen to a podcast.  If you don't mind sitting at your computer or using your mobile phone's web app you can often just go to the website of a podcast and listen or watch it there.  There is actually no need to wrestle with new software or learn how to transfer it to your MP3 player (or i-pod if that is your preference - although it definitely isn't mine).  I'll come back to that later.

The only trouble is . . . how to find out what is available out there, and where. 

A year ago I had not taken the plunge into the ocean of podcasts, but now I am surfing the waves and hardly ever listen to the radio.  This is not just my annoyance with the BBC showing through again.  Radio 4 actually does host some interesting, intelligent and informative programmes.  But there are not enough of them, and the overpowering political correctness sometimes forces them to 'teach the controversy' even if there really isn't one to teach.  Most independent podcasts do not feel compelled to follow the same restrictive guidelines and they can take the risk of causing offence without upsetting their directors (or the government).They do not have to present a fully balanced argument, although most of them do.

To be perfectly honest, I can't remember what made me look for the first podcast, let alone which one of my current twenty I found first.  But these days I look forward to day of publication of several independently produced programmes.  Some others are there as gap fillers, and I even listen to one  religious offering about 'Intelligent Design' - and hate it!  My own preference, as you will have noticed from the topics of this blog, is currently for scientific and skeptical subjects, and I am not averse to a regular dose of atheism.  If you are one of my regular readers - yes there are a few of you and I appreciate you all very much - you could enjoy the same.  I think over the next few weeks I might venture to review some of the good (and the bad).  I am just trying to decide how to categorise my comments.

I have deliberately avoided getting into the question of how to download podcasts onto your mobile device.  If you find yourself drawn to this type of media I am sure that you will find a way.  It is of little use to explain that I personally use a programme called 'gpodder' to manage my podcasts and transfer them to my Sony Walkman 16GB MP3 player.  Those of you with Macs will find that it is all intuitive (or at least you will tell us that until your dying day) and those on Windows can probably use media player or something similar.   (I might have mentioned before that I don't use Windows or a Mac at home, but run Ubuntu linux instead.) 

As a taster - try these, in no particular order but all excellent!

Skeptoid 
by Brian Dunning. 
Short accurately researched weekly episodes about the mysteries of the world.  Click the picture for a link to the home page containing recent episodes (or transcripts if you prefer to read instead of listening).

Skeptics Guide to the Universe 
from the New England Skeptical Society. 
Intelligently and entertainingly looking at subjects of interest to skeptics.  I think this embedded code for the following picture will play the latest episode for you, but failing that you will at least find their web site here.  There are two options: the regular weekly hour long programme or the '5 x 5' podcasts which are more like those from Skeptoid.

The Pod Delusion
UK based, (clever name too), taking 'sceptical angles on topical politics and pseudo-science'.  Many interesting reports from interesting reporters and now apparently very high on the list of favorites on i-tunes (not that I know anything about i-tunes).  They also publish special recordings of specific UK events from time to time.  All being well you can listen to the embedded object here or you can visit their web site.

Windoze or Ubuntu (Linux)?

I more or less promised last week to talk about why I tend to use Ubuntu Linux these days instead of Windows.

What would I miss about Windows?

1/  Excel
2/  . . . hardly anything else!


However, there is always the option of using it by running a copy of Windows in Oracle's excellent (and still free) VirtualBox environment on Ubuntu.  Windows in a window is a compromise.

What would I miss about Ubuntu?

0/  Security (I think)
1/  General speed and responsiveness
2/  The online community's help with (almost) whatever problem I meet whereas for Windoze it seems more difficult.
3/  LaserJet 1000 printer driver (none available on 64 bit Win7 but no problem in Ubuntu)
4/  Multiple desktops - how you get used to having this facility! 
5/  Easy way to save Youtube videos as they download - grab them from the cache folder.
6/  Ubuntu One synch so easy - if you trust cloud computing.  (And OK - there are other ways to do this on Windows.)
7/  Tomboy notes just work and synch.  I keep little notes to myself and can open them on each of the three machines that I use regularly.  (Cloud computing again though.)
8/  It's free
9/  Its so easy to reinstall in event of a major problem - and did I mention . . . free!
10/  Freedom from Win7's unexplained one minute freeze ups experienced on my laptop
11/  Login window without a visible choice of user names.  (This used to be available in Win XP but seems to have vanished in Win 7 and I regard it to be a security feature, albeit 'soft security')
12/  And finally - OK I admit it - It is not Windows.  My slightly anarchical world view is showing through.)


I would admit that there are still some slightly negative points about using Linux but I can live with these:

1/  Shorter battery life on my laptop - this is the only really annoying factor.
2/  A few niggles about wireless network cards and in some versions the reluctance of the PC to suspend to RAM (sleep) and resume (wake).
3/  Intel/nvidia's Optimus technology - there are no linux drivers if you are unlucky to have that hardware.  You lose the speed and 3D acceleration but just have basic graphics.  I'm quite happy without it as my graphics card is not nvidia and the processor is not Intel.  Nvidia always used to be the Linux users graphic card supplier of choice, for good compatibility.  Clearly their policy has changed.  What a pity.
4/  I suppose if you are a big game player there might be other items too.  

So have I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 yet?  Well - yes on my laptop.  The experience is generally rather positive too.  More on that topic soon.

Ubuntu 11.04 out today

Why is this surprising?  Well of course the date of release of the new version of Ubuntu has been known for some time and indeed these releases come around every 6 months.  The fact that 11.04 (so named because it is in the fourth month of year 11) has been launched today is not a surprise at all.

Ubuntu is of course a computer operating system - an alternative to Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac's latest expensive offering may be.  I started playing with Ubuntu about 4 years ago as a result of 'force majeur'.  I had been thinking of trying it out for quite a while, but when my new desktop PC's hard disk failed under warranty and the supplier had gone bankrupt I was not prepared to pay anyone for a new copy of Windows.  So the adventure started!  Ubuntu is totally free but totally worth as much as Windows!

As you might know, Ubuntu is a version of Linux, and Linux is a version of Unix.  Unix users have always maintained (from their 'ivory tower') that 'their' operating system was secure and powerful and free from viruses.  Everyone else has been 'taught' that it is simply non-intuitive and impossible to use.  So is this true?

After a few years I suppose you might expect that any semi-intelligent person could persuade themselves of anything, so my own experience is merely anecdotal.  However, I have one desktop, one laptop and one netbook running Ubuntu.  When I last had to buy a new laptop and considered returning to Windows (or Windoze as Linux users like to say) I made myself a list of things that I would miss about the two operating systems.  Result:

Windows 7 - 1 thing (namely Microsoft Excel).
Ubuntu - 11 things (subject of another blog post perhaps)

As a reasonably knowledgeable PC user and fixer, I suppose that is not surprising either.  However, the interesting thing is that people around me have been easily convinced.  These are people who want to use their PC, not to spend time learning about it and trying out new things.

My mother - well into her 70s - has had a PC for nearly 15 years.  She started off with Windows 3.1 (on a cast-off PC), and had graduated to XP.  She complained about a year ago that her PC was getting terribly slow (4 minutes from switching it on to getting to Google).  I suggested trying Ubuntu instead of Windows, and much to my surprise (even shock) she agreed.  (Result: 1 minute from switching on to reaching Google.)  She hardly ever looks back and has even installed a newer version herself!

But what about the younger generation?

My 16 year old daughter decided to buy a netbook and after only 2 weeks managed to get something nasty via Facebook (I think).  Windows 7 was not easily recoverable.  (I tried!)  Surprisingly she agreed to try Ubuntu.  She hasn't looked back either - and believe me, its not because Dad can do no wrong.

Finally (for the time being) my 13 year old son had a similar problem and I decided to try to convert him too.  We are one week into the experiment, but so far so good!

Windows - watch out!  Linux really is coming!

The question is - how long can I resist downloading the new version of Ubuntu?  I feel strangely reluctant but somewhat tempted.  What I have got is working and I don't like to rock the boat.  But maybe the new version is even better.  We'll see!