November 1, 2003
Leaving Las Microsoft
Warning: Yet Another Geekly Article

Why do I write these computer-centric articles and essays? I don't know. None of you want to read them, that's been made clear to me. Then again, Most of

During my morning hygeine, with the shower running insanely hot as I sit on the toilet nipping at my bottle and contemplating the white and blue tile of the bathroom, I ask my Muse what to write about. Sometimes she tells me to write about strange, horrible science-fictiony things. Sometimes she tells me to write about paunchy alcoholic white guys who make a lot of lame wisecracks while doing boring shit for about two hundred pages. Sometimes she tells me to get on my knees and stick my face into the toilet, and fast, because I'm about to upchuck my liquid breakfast. Today I woke up and the words she whispered in my ear were “Mandrake Linux and VMWare, bubba”.

what I write gets ignored by the great masses of humanity, so if I let apathy bother me I'd just be another one of you cogs in the machine, spinning endlessly without purpose save what's handed you. And I stand up every morning, grizzled and hungover, and shout “Nevah!” defiantly, much to my wife's confusion and my neighbors' annoyance, both of which can be safely ignored once I retrieve the bottle of Bushmills from the toilet tank and toast the morning, calming the shakes and bringing my day into sharp focus. During my morning hygeine, with the shower running insanely hot as I sit on the toilet nipping at my bottle and contemplating the white and blue tile of the bathroom, I ask my Muse what to write about. Sometimes she tells me to write about strange, horrible science-fictiony things. Sometimes she tells me to write about paunchy alcoholic white guys who make a lot of lame wisecracks while doing boring shit for about two hundred pages. Sometimes she tells me to get on my knees and stick my face into the toilet, and fast, because I'm about to upchuck my liquid breakfast. Today I woke up and the words she whispered in my ear were “Mandrake Linux and VMWare, bubba”. So here we are: This will be a very geeky article, and you should turn away now before you get blinded, if this isn't your bag.

First, let me supply the disclaimer: I don't hate Microsoft or Windows. I've used Windows as my operating system (OS) since 1996 (starting with 3.1 and including 95, NT4, 98se, and 2000) and I've lived a happy and productive computing life. Out of sheer curiosity, I started investigating alternate OSs in 1998, starting with FreeBSD 2.2.7, just for fun.

If that last sentence made you go blind with shock and boredom, I beg you to go read something else.

Back in 2001, however, my little hobby of investigating alternate OSs became a little more urgent because of Microsoft's Product Activation (PA) plan in Windows XP. With the arrival of XP, I knew my current OS of Windows 98se was going to be unsupported pretty soon, and XP's Product Activation scheme disturbed me. In a nutshell, PA works like this in Windows XP: You install the OS or turn on your pre-installed computer, and XP takes a didgital snapshot of the hardware in your PC. You can then use the phone or the Internet to give Microsoft a code which XP calculates using that snapshot, and they give you an activation code back which unlocks your OS. If you don't do this, within thirty days the OS locks up and refuses to work until you activate it through Microsoft. If you change your hardware a great deal after you've activated, XP may decide that the reason things look so different is because you've illegally installed it on a new machine, and it'll lock up and demand that you re-activate it. The idea is that you'll have to clear it with Microsoft, and that this will all cut down on the number of pirated copies of Windows out there. It doesn't, of course, but that's the subject of a different article.

What it does mean is that this company, Microsoft, has unprecedented control over you. You no longer have the right to do what you wish with the software you've paid money for. You have to ask permission, even if what you're doing is perfectly legal. Aside from that, there is always the possiblity that Microsoft might go out of business, or—more likely—that it might decide to forcibly retire an old product. I know it bothers Microsoft right now that sales for it's new Office Suite are slow because people can't see much reason to upgrade to it. I can imagine a time in, oh, 2010 when Microsoft announces that it's going to stop issuing activation keys for Windows XP, so people will just have to upgrade to the newer version. And you wonder why I drink. My life is so computer-centric right now, my eyes glow softly in the night with stored-up radiation from my monitor. The idea that this company would be able to tell me to do after I've paid them to go the fuck away makes Akira-like energy beams shoot out of my eyes.

So, I decided, fuck THAT noise, I'm going to switch to Linux. Why not Apple, some of you might be asking, and I know just which ones of you are asking. You're wearing designer glasses with prescriptionless lenses because they are merely a fashion accessory. You collect comic books. You value form over function. You think Apple computers are better simply because they look cool. You haven't performed math since High School and you actually think there's a difference between Apple Computers and IBM-compatible Pcs aside from marketing and design. You are, in short, a moron. Not because you use an Apple; Apples are fine computers and huzzah to anyone who doesn't mind that they cost too much and are a proprietary, closed platform. No, you're a moron because of the aforementioned prescriptionless glasses.

Linux rocks. It does everything Mac OS or Windows XP does, and probably better. I chose Mandrake Linux, and it has worked flawlessly. It's powerful, attractive, and easy to work with. I'm no genius, unless you consider a talent for finding booze in the most unlikely of places a genius, of sorts, or unless you consider these lame little essays a form of genius, and I managed to set up Linux without difficulty. Linux has everything...well, except one thing. It does not have many Desktop Publishing programs, something akin to PageMaker or Quark Xpress. It has, as a matter of fact, one such beast, an application called Scribus. Scribus is a fine version 1.0 application, but when I've used it I've been severely disappointed, and concluded it isn't ready for prime time. I've been using PageMaker for years to lay out my little zine, I needed to keep it. But PageMaker doesn't work on Linux because Adobe is just a bunch of greedy capitalist bastards who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes, so that left me in dual-boot hell, where I had half my hard drive given over to Windows 98se and half to Mandrake Linux 9.1. That meant that every time I wanted to switch between the two environments, I needed to reboot my computer. This caused a lot of trouble, because every time I had to reboot I had a few minutes on my hands, during which time I would inevitably end up passed out in the bathroom again, another weekend lost. And often another job lost.

However, this is not much of an obstacle for the True Geek. I may not be able to code much of anything, and my engineering skills are state-of-the-art circa 1066, but I am, at heart, a True Geek. I just installed a copy of VMWare, which is a program that creates a 'virtual' computer inside my Linux distribution. The virtual PC fools Windows into believing it is a real PC, and Windows happily installs itself and runs as if it were living inside an actual computer. So whenever I need to run PageMaker (or any other Windows-only software) I can boot up VMWare and run it. Windows in VMWis networked as if it actually physically existed, and runs as well as if it were a physical machine. Maybe better.

So that's it: I not only will never install Windows XP or any other future Windows incarnation, I don't even need to have my old version of Windows running unless I need it at that moment. Huzzah for me.

Oh well. If you want to tell me how badly I suck, or possibly send me some money, please do so.

Jeff