One of the great challenges for open-source is to break out of preaching to the converted and into the wider world. One great way to do this is for every member of the community to ‘adopt’ friends, neighbours, relatives and convert them to open-source. Watching how they fare can provide valuable feedback on gaps still to be filled on the road to desktop domination.

I started doing this several years ago when an elderly relative was looking for a new PC. I bought her a PC, dumped MS-Windows, and loaded Ubuntu onto it using my home broadband connection. I jumped through some hoops to get the Winmodem working, and then put the PC in the back of the car, drove down, and handed it over. She had been on a few MS-Windows based ‘computing for the terrified’ courses, which had left her with very basic skills – enough to access the web, send emails, and do simple office tasks.

With a few simple ‘crib sheets’, and remote support over the phone, the Ubuntu system has proved adequate for the task. Most of the subsequent problems have arisen when well-meaning friends have tried to install MS-Windows software or use MS-Windows only peripherals on the PC However, time has gone by, and she wanted a new printer, so I decided it was time to upgrade the software. I put my own Ubuntu laptop and a 6.06-1 CD in my suitcase and went on the four hour train journey on Friday night.

Bright and early on Saturday morning I put in the CD and away I went. Only 5Gb of the 40Gb disk was in use; there was no obvious way to back this up, so I decided to shrink the existing partition and install into a new 35Mb partition. The Ubuntu CD should let you do this – however, it simply didn’t work, hanging at different parts of the process during repeated attempts. I eventually dialled up from my laptop (no broadband), hunted around on the Ubuntu forums and found I had to repartition manually using GParted. I followed this tip and I got a basic Ubuntu installation completed around lunchtime.

We had planned at this stage on taking the PC to a next door neighbour to use their broadband connection. Unfortunately they had gone away for the day, so there was nothing for it but to try and get dial-up networking installed (telephone access is cheap at the weekend). I had done this recently on my laptop – all I had to do there was apt-get install sl-modem-daemon and it had worked.

Unfortunately, this failed to work with the Winmodem in this PC. Back to the Linmodems site using the laptop to download scanmodem. It was obvious this was going to turn into an epic, so off to the local PC superstore to buy a USB memory stick to transfer files from the laptop to the PC, a new printer, and an external modem (just in case).

Back to the house again, and into the soul destroying exercise of getting the Intel536-based Winmodem working. This involved installing a complete development platform on the PC, filling up the hard disk with rubbish like make, gcc, kernel headers, etc. In the end, the modem worked, sort of, but only by going through Network Monitor -> Properties -> Configure -> Network Settings -> Activate – not ideal for an ageing relative. By this time it was time for bed, so I set an apt-get update running with an estimated download time of 6 hours and went to bed.

On Sunday I set off full of enthusiasm to hook into next door’s broadband. Alas, they were using a flaky Alcatel SpeedTouch USB modem – another Winmodem with dubious Linux support. A quick look through support forums convinced me I didn’t want to go there. Back to painfully slow dial-up.

I though I needed a quick win – let’s get the HP Deskjet F300 printer to work. The hplip package in 6.06-1 didn’t know anything about this particular printer, so I tried downloading the latest version from HP’s SF site and entered into another wonderful dependency hell. Every new dependency meant a painful download of anything up to an hour. In the end, I abandoned the attempt and simply downloaded the new PPD file from LinuxPrinting. That got the printer working, but not talking to the HP utilities.

Now I needed to make the networking user-friendly. Previously I’d installed the wonderful modem lights applet for my relative, which connected and disconnected with a single click and showed the modem was working with simulated modem lights.

For some inexplicable reason, this has been dropped from 6.06. The wiki recommended gnome-ppp. It didn’t work. Reduced to using the command line – wvdial – didn’t work either. pon/poff – didn’t work. The wiki also recommends kppp and in desperation I decided to apt-get it and download the megabytes of prequisite KDE crud. Hours later, it was installed. It didn’t work either.

Rapidly running out of time, I wrote some documentation for the Network Monitor -> Properties -> Configure -> Network Settings -> Activate which at least worked reliably and hoped my ageing relative would cope. It’s not a solution I would wish on a technically proficient user, never mind an ageing relative.

Conclusions: Winmodems are completely evil. Ubuntu is great – if you have broadband. What happened to the distros that came on three or four ISOs which contained every piece of software you might need? Why on earth has modem-lights disappeared from view? Why does a distro which has origins in the southern hemisphere have such lousy support for dial-up?

Ho hum. Wouldn’t it be nice to be Microsoft and be able to make hardware vendors solve all these problems for you?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.