Don't Count on Using AT&T DSL With Linux

You sign up via phone, give them your credit card number, high-tail down to th store and buy yourself a DSL modem, hook it up, use the temporary user name and password to get online, and then go to set up your permanent user name and password. ActiveX, insert a CD, what? That's right, you can't register for a service you are already paying for unless you are running Windows. "What if I get on my Mac (I didn't tell her this Mac was purely hypothetical, I don't got one)." "I think there is a separate devision in our fee-for-service support that does that. "Is there anyone else I can talk to?" After another 15 minutes on hold I get a new tier -2 support tech, but at least this one has some common sense. She calls billing to verify I am who I claim to be. Fifteen minute wait. In the end her and Billing decide the only information they have that they can verify me by is my street address. After that I can hear her mutter to herself and can tell she is running through the ActiveX applet on my end. I tell her a username and a throw-away password, the last 4 of my SSN, set some awesomely secure security questions "favorite pet? That's going to be KlekZ3~x04!?," and then finally I have the DSL username and password.

So the moral of the story is if you are persistent, don't believe anything the AT&T folks say, are highly technical, and are OK with someone else agreeing to the TOS on your behalf, hey it's easy, it just takes 53 minutes.

And what should AT&T do? Either fix their system so that you can sign up without ActiveX and without browser sniffing and without a special CD that I highly doubt contains a Linux setup guide, or provide a free on-site tech to come out and set up the account since they want to ensure it is done on hardware and software that meet their specifications, which is not enumerated by the person you call to sign up, and which should play no roll in the business agreement between me and my ISP.

Anyone Billionaires at Canonical want to take up these kinds of things for the cause? Wanna talk about reasons why this year isn't the year of Linux on the Desktop? Here is one, there are thousands like it. Four or five people full-time (because this kind of work is boring as dirt, trust me, I just spent 53 minutes doing it) helping sympathetic individuals file appropriate help-desk tickets within their organizations and passing out kudos and warnings to deserving individuals might go a long way.

Last 10%

VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro FX 570 (rev a1)
UniData
Inter-Tel Session Manager

What's your last 10%?

With Enemies Like This

Dilbert:XKCD :: Andy Rooney : linuxhaters.blogspot.com

The Duality of Patches

Looking back on it, I have to express some disappointment with Hardy. Right now it feels great, the world is all sunshine and roses. But that's not enough for an LTS release, and so we must ask ourselves: how did we do out of the gate, did we start strong, was there a reason for ISVs to have their act together to support the LTS on day-one?

So how did things look day one for me on Hardy? Not so good. Accessing Samba shares was unreliable, credentials kept getting forgotten. During the boot sequence, my screen was black until the login screen, I feel very bad for new users who thought their computer would not boot because they had a black screen while a scheduled file-system-check (which is automatically scheduled and they likely don't even know exists) runs in the background for twenty minutes with the progress indicator completely hid behind a veil of blackness. Working with windows network shares was very, very difficult. Nautilus frequently locked up, often forgot the username and password I had explicitly told it to remember, and could no longer open the locations I had add to my side-bar. Virt-manager couldn't run my existing qemu virtual machines, Compiz still resulted in daily hard-locks and routine visual corruption, and had to be disabled. It was the worst of times.

But now here we are at the best of times, things work by the magic of updates. Lots of updates. And I'm glad, because my life is much better with things working than not. Windows shares work better than they ever have on any Linux distro, and now are on track to be as-good-as or better than MacOS by the next LTS. The screen is no longer black while booting or checking the disk. Virt-manager now launches my virtual machines and they run as they are supposed to. And Compiz? It's enabled, I'll let you know next week how it goes.

So hurray for updates, I've got a working system, if I gave it to my mother she could do what she needed to do. But, alas, it took a while. And good things take time, lots of time, also good things come to those who wait, and other numerous cliches, but perhaps we shouldn't slap the LTS sticker on until we have let it chill out there for a while.

But Rob, it was used by tens-of-thousands (hundreds-of-thousands? anyone got figures), we worked on it during the allotted time, what more can we do? Should we give up our time-based release schedules? Hire an army of engineers with funds from sugar-daddy Mark?

No. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no, no! But, let's have a thought experiment: Imagine if a release was not an LTS release until after the first service-pack. What would life be like? Would overall user-experience for corporate users, grandmothers, and other non-geek audiences users be improved? Would we just end up with a more buggy LTS release to start with and end up with the same quality at a later date, with everyone differing their bugs until the patch? I hope not. "Surprise, this patch is an LTS!" is about the worst release methodology I could think of. What might be better would be to plan for the next LTS to be an LTS release as soon as the first service-pack is out. The aim would be issue a release that had an equal amount of bug-fixing effort put into it as a non-LTS release. This should result in a release that is pre-LTS but still significantly less buggy than a standard release simply because the blueprints for the release would be more conservative, with about the same level of entropy as those introduced for Hardy. This slightly more stable build would then be honed and polished as Hardy was, and as of the first patch Ubuntu X.YZ would be Ubuntu X.YZ.1 LTS.

Google has taught us two things and funded the down-payment on our house by two simple principles : 1. there is still a lot of money to be made with a good algorithm and 2. Stick BETA on everything for the first five-years it is out. I think they have taken it a bit far with the BETA thing, actually ludicrously too far, but there is something to the principle. There is no substitute for a few million users doing important work with your software. I'm not convinced our LTS release are any less likely to "eat someone's data" than any other release, but I am convinced that LTS would be more meaningful if it meant that modem-users could farely reasonably keep up with the updates, OEMs and ISVs could be confident that they could get in on the PR bandwagon for the LTS release without having major headaches coming their way, and that mere-mortal developers would feel better about developing against a release that was to a great extent concretized.

Gnome 2.22 should be a brown-bagger

Welp, it looks like Gnome 2.22 is going to be missing an ftp:// handler and probably some other semi-major features as well. Even worse, hobbled and almost unusably buggy, it's probably better than what we have now.

I can't say that I've ever once managed to use the old ftp:// without running into some trouble. Be it usernames containing @ or %, refusing to start anywhere other than the ftp root (which can be a show-stopper if you don't have permission to view /home or / but only /home/youruser, etc. Likewise, smb:// can only improve, but I just don't see us getting any kind of real stability in the .22 time-frame.

I'm betting to see this in Hardy anyway, and expecting to see roughly weekly gio-related packages coming through update manager for the first month or so, and hopefully a few more over the course of the LTS so that those desktop users aren't stuck without ftp:// until 2010ish.

/me-casting

How long till /me goes to the store on IRC will automatically update my Google Talk status, send it out to twitterfacespace, etc? I'd expect the primary interface for setting presence info would be a pretty empathy widget of some sort, but would expect it won't be too long until something of the sort presents itself from somebody somewhere.

Four Things I Hoped to See in 2007, But Didn't

1. Ubuntu Server supported on Dell's server line-up. I'd take HP as a consolation prize.
2. A move away from the walled garden to and more decentralized software distribution. A GUI to help users break their system by use of a repository://? If thats what it takes, hopefully there can be something a bit prettier. We having growing pains a coming, lets get em over with sooner than later.
3. An Ubuntu-specific landing page on the "I see your running Linux and don't have Flash/Java" pages. Brownie points for a .deb to fix the problem.
4. VMware Server releases during the Beta period so they are in the archive and working when final is tagged.