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June 26, 2004
You can count on Debian
Back in the late 90s, I bought a Gateway laptop. That was before we had cables at work to lock laptops to our desks. The laptop was stolen. We never found out by whom, though you had to badge to get into the building.
Anyway, since this happened at work, Sun was able to have it replaced, so on recommendation I got a Sony Vaio. The Sony laptop of course makes a good first impression, what you'd expect from Sony. It also has some flaws: the keyboard's too small; the battery only lasted about 3 months; the sound card only lasted about 4 months; you sometimes get electric shocks when you touch it in the wrong place; the surface above the processor heats up such that you can no longer rest your palms while typing after the laptop's been running for half an hour; much of the hardware remains unsupported on Linux because Sony refuses to release the specs; etc. But it sure looks hip. Almost as hip as an Apple portable.
I'd installed Java Desktop System on the Sony laptop. That went fine. Fastest Linux install around. But I couldn't figure out how to read from a little memory stick we got to take pictures with a Sony digital camcorder. So I decided to put the factory version of Windows 98 back on and try that.
I followed Sony's instructions, using the recovery CD. This of course didn't work, since nobody expected you to recover (sic) to Windows after being smart enough to partition the whole drive for Linux. ("Cannot find C:... call tech support.")
I then tried Java Desktop System. Version 1 did not target laptops. (I know this because I spoke with the guys at Sun who built it on top of SuSE enterprise edition. They were aiming first at workstations.) Java Desktop System wouldn't let me repartition, or at least I couldn't see how to do it, and when it loaded modules, Java Desktop System made itself incapable of reading from the CD it had just loaded the kernel and install program from, which is attached by PCMCIA and the BIOS knows how to read at boot time.
So I rooted around, and there were the CDs I had burned to install Debian Woody. It's true, I'm just not enough of a geek to appreciate Debian entirely. Right at the install, the Debian folk put you in charge. (For those of you who like analogies, Debian is a distro from the future where we've made the transition to participatory economics and people expect to take charge, so the Debian installer and all the rest of it seems very natural.) I had faith that when all else failed, free (as in libre) software would save me from bad engineering. I plopped the first Woody CD in the drive and rebooted.
No problem. In 30 seconds I was in cfdisk. In 2 minutes I'd partitioned the drive for Windows 95 Fat 32. Debian not only saved me, it didn't even complain that it had let me recover the capability to install a proprietary OS with a bunch of proprietary drivers whose engineers needed assistance from a bunch of free software dudes just to get their own software to function.
Can we attribute all this to GPL? Well, only after a fashion. It seems to have more to do with why the folks making Debian keep going. They love what they're doing. The engineers at Sony probably like what they're doing, but they're getting paid to do it, and many of them probably would not do it the same way if they weren't getting paid. I'd pick labors of love over labors for money every time I have a choice. Imagine a world where people work hard on things that they want to do, share the chores, and don't mind taking charge. I'm pretty sure the Debian folk already live there.
Posted by Mark at June 26, 2004 06:51 AM