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Let's be serious for a moment, shall we? I know I enjoy writing about losing my pants and drinking myself into sweet oblivion, and I know you enjoy reading about it, and those activities certainly do fall under the general category of More Shit I Gotta Do, don't they? But it can't be all fun and games. Every now and then I actually have a serious thought which demands expression, and this is the only forum I actually have. The only one I can't be run off from, at least. Of course, luckily for you there aren't a lot of subjects I have any sort of authority in. Boozing, maybe, and baseball, but aside from that there's really only one subject I'd have the balls to speak semi-authoritatively on: Computers. I realize I just lost half my audience, leaving me with two people, only one of whom, chances are, reads English. But a lack of audience has never bothered me—I'm a zine publisher, dammit. Zine publishers don't care about readers or distribution. If we did, we'd be slaving our way up the chain at Conde Naste or something similar. Instead, we're pouring our hearts, souls, and wallets into publications that few, if anyone, aside from our immediate friends and family pay any attention to. So gather 'round, you hearty souls who are left, and let me ramble on for a few minutes about Open Source Software. I'll skip the laborious and boring history and background, and get right to the point: If you're into the DIY spirit, if you're anti-corporate and all for freedom of expression and all that great shit, stop using Microsoft or Apple products immediately. Also, if you're cheap, which is my main point. Whether you do it because corporations never have your best interests at heart or because you put all your money into your zine and eat dog food, do it, bubba. This isn't going to be an anti-corporate tirade; while I'll cheerfully admit that corporations are generally considered harmful and suck the Big Suck, I'm also in many ways a typical corporate stooge. So if you need a better reason than vaguely paranoid corporate-hate to switch from Windows or Mac OS to something free, it's easy enough: Money. I know zine publishers and DIY people: We will all, as a group, walk over burning coals to save a dime. We're constantly scheming to steal photocopies, postage, and supplies. We treasure the zine trade because we've got stacks and stacks of unwanted back issues in our garages and love the idea of sending out our unwanted issues instead of cash for someone else's unwanted issues. We'd kill our siblings and some complete strangers caught up in the Akira-like maelstrom of our rage if we thought they'd been hiding some postage from us in their wallets. I'm not saying that DIY publishers are cheap. . .all right, I am saying it: DIY Publishers are cheap. If we weren't cheap, we'd be paying someone else to publish our stuff, and would cease to be DIY. Q.E.D. So here's the simple fact: The cheapest computer you can buy new someplace is going to run you about $400 with monitor included, and some of that money is paying for the software on it. If you could strip off Windows and all the software on a new PC, you'd save yourself $100-150, easy. But of course that's never an option, is it? People often think of Windows as free because the price of the Operating System is embedded in the overall cost of the system—but you're paying for it. So what's you're other option? Well, WalMart, evil corporate empire that they are, will sell you a computer without an operating system, and you can find tons of used systems complete with monitor for truly insane prices (www.affordablecomputers.com is a good place to find cheap PCs and monitors). These days, for desktop publishing and mild mannered Internet usage, a 5-year old computer will serve you just as well as that brand new screamer, so don't waste money on a new PC. Buy a cheap PC—or get one donated from a friend or relative—and then you can stock it with software for free. For absolutely free, forever. If you were to, say, install a Linux operating system on this PC, and use the huge list of free applications that work with Linux (many included on the installation CD, the rest ready for download) you get the PC at cost of hardware, and you can do everything you ever wanted with the PC. Future updates to the software? Free. Where Microsoft will eventually come out with Windows XP 2006 or something and want you to pay $200 for the privilege, future versions of Linux will be just as free as the one you install today. The same goes for the applications—will Microsoft let you download Office 2006 for free? probably not. But I'll download my next office upgrade at no cost. How could this not appeal to the pennywise DIYer? The choices are endless, so i won't go into specific solutions. Here's what I'm using currently to produce The Inner Swine. Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary. Operating System: Mandrake Linux 9.1. I experimented with a few free Operating Systems over the years: FreeBSD, Red Hat Linux, and Lycoris Linux being a few. Mandrake, for me, is the perfect combination of ease-of-use and complexity—it allows me to tweak away and control the system, but it's also easy to set up and maintain. There are easier distributions (here's a good overview: http://users.netwit.net.au/~pursang/distro.html) but Mandrake is stable, well-supported, and hasn't caused me any grief yet. Word Processor: Open Office 1.0. Office suites are just not so special that MS Office has any lock on the features or concepts. Open Office open MS Office documents and kicks ass, in general. Image Editing The GIMP. Funny name, I know, and while The GIMP ain't Photoshop (yet) it is a really powerful image editing program that can do much of what Photoshop does. If you're an image professional, maybe The GIMP ain't ready for you yet, but for DIY publishing needs it's more than enough. Desktop Publishing: Okay, here I cheat a little. Since 1995 I've been using Pagemaker to layout the zine, so I have files going back ten years in that format. Since I shifted to Linux I've been using a non-free program called VMWare to emulated Windows 98 so I can keep using PageMaker as my desktop publishing software. However, this is purely for the backwards compatibility issues. Scribus is a great desktop publishing package available free for Linux. The newest version of Scribus will allow me to convert postscript files into Scribus, so in the near future I'll be doing a massive conversion project and will switch to Scribus as my DTP program. There are, of course, plenty of other applications. I don't miss Windows, before, everything I did on Windows I can do on my Linux box these days: Internet applications (Web browser: Opera, Email: Evolution, Newsgroups: Thunderbird), Multimedia (MP3 player: XMMS, Movies player: MPlayer), Games (I've been playing a lot of Doom 3 and Medal of Honor) and a million others. Many of them have versions which will run on Windows or Mac OS, so you can check 'em out and gauge their quality before taking the deep plunge. There are also Linux distributions designed to run from a bootable CD Rom you can download, burn to a CDR, and then boot from, allowing you to try out a Linux OS without making any actual changes to your computer. Of course, chances are you're buying the computer hardware from a corporation, too, but at least that's a single point of interaction—you buy the PC, take it home, and you can do whatever you like with it, it's yours, so I tolerate it better. Software is just licensed to you, you know, and the company that developed/published the software retains the ability to affect how you use it forever. Microsoft can stop supporting Windows XP tomorrow if they choose, or issue a security update that will alter how you use your computer—the rising invasion of Digital Rights Management, for example. With an open source solution, you retain much more control over your computer. Just a thought. I will now return to pantslessness and tales of delerium tremens—all composed on corporation-free software, of course. Of course my pants, my beer, and just about everything else I use are produced, distributed, and profited from by corporations, so what do I accomplish by using Open Source products? Very little. Very little indeed. But we're all, I'm sure, used to that. Shut up! Bastards. If you didn't stop reading at paragraph two, email me here. Jeff |
December 17, 2004