Walk Alone

Pacenet is clearly one of the more technologically stupid ISPs around in this city. It uses RASPPPOE - it gives you a dial-up experience on a LAN. When it works, its real good. But when it breaks down, there’s no knowing the reason. They don’t provide any software to use their system from a Linux machine. But that’s OK, because there’s rp-pppoe available to use the connection. Supposedly. I called up their customer service today to ask them to enable “Linux support”. Why should that have been necessary, in the first place? And with Linux doing all the adjustments and adapting, what were they supporting? But well, sorry - but NO. No “Linux support” for packages with speed below 64 kbps - mine is 40 kbps. What the …?

Time to change ISPs. Hopefully, I should be able to persuade my sponsors, I mean my parents. Besides, the supposed advantage of Pacenet, its LAN sucks too. With a DHCP not worth its name, even the local IPs keep getting into conflicts. And are there any people out there on the LAN to play those Counter-Strike maps with? Nope. Any file sharing? Nope. And the breakdowns are now irritatingly regular. These are in addition to those caused by “maintenance/upgrade” at their “control room”. Got to switch. Urgently.

Got this delightful article from Freedom Computing - a group started by a guy from Delhi, Ankit Malik and like minded friends - about Linux, ofcourse. Ankit contributes to LFY regularly. You can read his blog too.

Here’s the link. Quite good, I think.

A friend of mine believes that the different licenses used by M$, RH and other companies are just a play of words. That when you distribute OSs, its piracy regardless of their licenses, because you (or rather, the person who is taking it from you) are not buying it from the original vendors. He moves around with RHEL 3 - which he uses at home - and I believe thats piracy. RH allows non-commercial redistribution of RHEL, but with its logos removed. There are conflicts on whether RHEL is open source. Besides, I believe RH may allow its enterprise linux OSs to be spread once they are stripped of its trademarks and logos; but the installation of RHEL on multiple machines the way my friend is doing, by spreading his copy of RHEL may be construed as a violation of its license. As far as I know, the only way I can get a RHEL branded CD is by buying it from RH.

As for his opinion that GPL is crap - that the way I or other linux users spread linux is actually, truly a form of piracy no different from M$ piracy, I refer the nay-sayers to GPL, BSD license and MPL. Also the OSI site has a repository of different licenses which say the same basic thing - you are free to see the source and spread the software. So maybe you people will be informed on why copying linux is not piracy. And I don’t mean RHEL.

Finally! Installed FC 3 on my machine. With support for Indian English (Hinglish?), Marathi and Hindi. Saw Tamil, Gujurati also. Selected “install everything” and got 6756 MB worth of software. Was sweating for two hours while Anaconda was doing its stuff. After all, my CD-drive is eccentric and atleast two of the four install CDs were not at 100%, on visible inspection ie. - their surfaces were slightly cloudy/scratched.

Anaconda starts real fast. X comes up quickly too. It hanged for some time at “preparing to install, this may take a few minutes…”. By hang, I mean it took 10 minutes. Once the actual copying of packages started, it was all downhill. BTW, the ‘remaining time’ indicator never went below 50 minutes till near the end of the 3rd CD. It peaked at 70 minutes near the end of the 1st CD. During the 4th Cd, the time started dropping.

Time to explore a new OS. It sure looks sharper and neater than FC 1. And the applications have increased. Will be exploring them all.

There is no other way to describe the spread of Linux. Look at the magazine stalls. Nearly all computer magzines are carrying a distro - from a single CD Knoppix to Debian and Fedora Core DVDs. Even my friend who swears by w32 is saying, “I still believe that Linux is crap compared to w32, but I want to try it.” Now I don’t know whether he wants to try it to bash it up later or to migrate to it eventually, but I guess there’s no harm in letting him get his hands on a distro, eh?