And so to 2007.1 . . .

As summer heightens and the need for drawing up the summer-school timetables arrives, I take a moment to consider the latest installations on my two machines here, whilst contemplating a possible third machine - and the reasons for so doing . . .

There was a time when I despaired that I would ever have my own computer again to do my more personalised stuff, to have private files and surf using the browser of my own choice rather than someone else's . . . it's amazing that there are places like Korea where you can work and pay nothing for the place where you live, yet the fundamental usefulness of the employee having his/her own PC and Intenet access seems to be lost on the employer - not just in terms of productivity, but keeping them out of trouble, too. This, of course, is where long-term employment comes in . . .

Then there was the question of installing an OS. On this occasion, I again built my own PC and installed XP Pro. Why? Because here in Changwon, XP was the only OS available for purchase at the shops and even then, I had to wait for three days for it to arrive! There were no choices available. So in essence, I was forced to install XP, after waiting three days for it to arrive (because the store in question didn't keep stock on their shelves, oh what a surprise these days!), and only then could I download alternative OSes along with other bits I didn't really want like firewall/AV software and (cough) file-sharing (cough, cough) programs which I needed to try anything different.

Truth to tell, at the beginning I wasn't thinking much about Linux like I did back in Blighty, mainly because everything in Korea is for Windoze. As I have mentioned before, this has led to South Korea becoming a blackspot for all kinds of viruses and malware, because people buy their shiny new boxes but haven't a clue about them. Same in Japan - so many machines there are also unwittingly infected, sending out spam and who knows what else all the time. So anyone running a Windoze machine here, and trying to do so safely, really has their work cut out; not only is every device a Windoze slave, but the users are clueless and their machines are insecure.

Added to this was the language problem. You can only get Korean Windoze in Korea; you can't buy any other, at least that is what I understood from the guys in the shop. So I was in a quandary; here was the latest version of Windoze and I could not possibly make it 100% secure because all of the menus and dialogue boxes were in Korean. It was when the reality of this sank in that I remembered Mandrake and tinkering around with version 7.0 back in Cardiff, Wales . . . how was Mandrake these days? Must be better than before, surely?

So I got a copy of Shareaza and began downloading Mandrake, first version 10.0 for community, then 10.1 official, joined the Club, migrated to 10.2 Official then 2005LE, and then in 2006.0 it really came together and I knew I was genuinely free of M$ for the first time - there was almost nothing I could do under Windoze that I now couldn't do under Mandriva. And when 2007.1 came along and wifi on my laptop worked out of the box (or at least, right after installation) - I was amazed. Mandriva had well and truly arrived not just as a desktop-enabling OS but now wifi on a laptop too, without any need for tinkering on my part. Wonderful!

What I have found, however, is that things are slightly uneven. For example, I prefer Opera as my default Net browser. When I go to the OANDA online currency trading web site, Opera now cannot function properly with their Java-based trading platform on the desktop, yet for some bizarre reason the installation on the laptop has never had any trouble with this at all! Both machines have had several ftp installs yet the laptop always comes out fine, but the desktop repeatedly has this trouble. I would love to know why this is because it seems to be the only sticking-point on the desktop. Everything else works fine.

This installation also marked a first because, for the first time, I cut the boot.iso to disc, went for an ftp install and now these actually work fine too, and they don't take too long, either. Originally, when files were first installed on the public servers, there were some errors, for example graphic files which had not been installed and which caused the installation process to stop and restart, but the ftp installs were eventually very smooth, what a contrast with having to reinstall Windoze, which nowadays is a nightmare! If Windoze goes down, it's almost impossible to reinstall it even on the hard drive for which it is registered, whereas Mandriva can be back to where it was literally within a few hours as long as you have taken care with backing things up; it just couldn't be simpler.

I am writing this right now because "Patch Tuesday" fell this week and there are updates to be downloaded for the safety and security of the laptop's Windoze Home (ptui!!!) installation. And what did I find when I switched from Mandriva to XP? The bloody RaLink wifi interface was down - yet it had been running fine under Mandriva just a few minutes before! In all seriousness, I am sitting here with the scans going on the laptop having just had to reinstall the RaLink firmware! Unbelievable!

Happenings like these really lead to disillusionment on the part of people like myself. The RaLink kit never fails now when I boot into Mandriva, yet under Windoze, where it is supposed to be a native app . . . words fail me, they really do. We are told that this is supposed to be the world-leading OS yet it seems to fail in one way or another more often than the newer competition and it's less secure to boot . . . it seems to me that the only real fate for desktop Windoze is perhaps to end its days virtualised, safely, under Linux, where it can do no harm. And then, one day, be forgotten as a relic of the software past. A past full of viruses, rootkits and spyware where the vendors were sometimes as guilty as the hackers and script kiddies, where the underlying OS was never originally intended as anything other than a stand-alone system and suffered forever thereafter, and generated a major industry dedicated to relieving users of their hard-earned dosh for the sake of belated protection from malware - but always too late. And only what had been detected already.

People may read a lot of the stuff I write and think that I am some kind of Mandriva fanboi, and perhaps that is true in some senses. But my experiences with M$ and Mandrake/Mandriva have proven to show an interesting contrast between an originally insecure OS paradigm and one which was designed with Internet useability and inbuilt security right from the start. This difference manifests itself at boot time, when it can take up to half an hour just for the hard drive to settle down under XP because of all of the anti-virus and other gubbins which clamour to start, all at the same time instead of in an orderly fashion, something which is neither required nor desirable under Mandriva, where boot time takes about a minute - hardly surprising when the last remaining thing after signing in is just to set up the desktop!

Then we have the awful process of scanning. Last night I took the desktop machine from Mandriva to XP Pro for the first time in about two weeks, it took aaaaggggeeeessss for the HD to stop whizzing around, it took aaaagggggeeeesssss for all of the software upgrades to come down, I actually had to reboot TWICE before I could even start scanning for viruses . . . by about nine o'clock in the evening I was so impatient and exasperated that I gave up and booted back into Mandriva. I have Trend Micro, XoftSpySE, BitDefender Free, SpyBot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware SE Personal, you name it, plus extras like CrapCleaner and WinASO registry defragger, thank God some of these are actually free or it really would be curtains for Windoze on my systems. But scanning slllooooooowwwwwwzzzzzzz everything down and has to be performed repeatedly, it's not just a real drag, the software has to be paid for each year, too. So Windoze brings with it hidden expenses which Mandriva simply doesn't need. Sounds like an advantage to me . . . an advantage worth paying for!

The truth of the matter is that dependence upon just the one OS, which is more the product of slick marketing by the vendor and apathy and ignorance on the part of the clients than anything else, has turned out to be a Very Bad Thing, not just because of the preponderance of that one OS but also because it has inhibited the sense of exploration and discovery on the part of the users which is actually the hallmark of the person who can survive and thrive with computers rather than becoming their slave; who explores the whole system rather than just the GUIfied bits; who actually uses the CLI rather than being frightened of it because there's no GUI there to comfort them.

Let me end with an interesting little report which was linked to the http://www.rense.com/ web site recently about an analysis of the failure of Google's hard drives:

http://209.85.163.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf

One thing which never seems to be mentioned is the contribution repeated HD scanning for viruses and malware makes to the eventual destruction of said hardware. For a desktop, this must surely be significant, especially as they tend to have just the one and a disk failure is necessarily catastrophic. It all rather makes me long for the day when I can have a small tablet-style device with wifi, full keyboard and Linux - and solid-state memory rather than a hard drive.

Andrew (in South Korea) ^_^

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