Please don’t come and tell me that your particular OS is the bestest of them all, super stable, easy to manage, easy to learn, no security issues. It isn’t. None of them are. If you think so you have forgotten all the times you scratched your head or tore your hair trying to figure out how to do…

Originally posted on the donation coder forum, but I thought I’d also put it here :D

Note: this is not a rant against linux or open source, not by far! I was using slackware in 1996, that’s how far linux and I go. I am a firm supported of open source, but frankly it is not the universal solution and the best of everything just yet. It might be, but it isnt. There are warts. You make the case for open source with warts, not forgetting about them in near religious zeal. And you certainly don’t claim your OS is perfect, or claim that everything is linux…

It always bothers me when I see people get religious about an OS (or programming language) - this started as an open minded conversation and at some point it starts being an advocacy discussion - with people using the usual myths about each other’s OS (linux is not that user unfriendly and mishmashy, neither is windows that insecure or unstable). The worst is that most of the people get all religious not about the reality of their OS (or language) but the idea of the OS, and the image it projects about them.

Once someone gets religious, then others feel they have to defend their choice (even if they weren’t religious about it, their image has been attacked, implying that they are morons/heretics for using something else. Hard to shut up after that)

I have used: several flavors of DOS, Vax/VMS, SunOS, Solaris, Opensolaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, desktop distributions of BSD, Windows 3.11, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server (NT, 2003, 2008), AIX, OS/2, HPUX, SGI, MacOS, about 20+ flavors of linux over 15 years.

I have administrered/managed, in a commercial setting: DOS, SunOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows (the whole list above except for server 2008 which i only played with), AIX, OS/2, MacOS, Linux: Slackware, Redhat, fedora, debian, DLD, Suse, Centos, and a few specialised one (router/firewall) i can’t remember right now. Some as servers, some as desktops.

So when people talk to me about how wonderful X is, or how innovative, I tend to see red.

First, If you cannot list at least 3 ways in which the other person’s OS is better than yours (things you wish your OS had) then you don’t know enough to debate in the first place. This is called Nebbe’s rule when applied to programming languages, i’ll call it iphi’s rule for OSes.

1. All OSes suck - they fall way short of what an OS should be and might be one day - but most of them don’t suck enough that we cannot get used to them and like them

2. All OSes are unstable - at least any one I have ever used with a GUI has had mysterious crashes, problems, freezes, when pushed a bit.

3. Updates and software install are a problem on all OSes. There will be numerous cases and people who have had things mess up just by trying to install or uninstall on any OS - whether windows, macos, solaris, bsd, aix, linux distributions. If you think you haven’t had any you either have been extremely lucky, or you have forgotten the teething problems in your enjoyment of the idea of your OS.

4. All OSes are insecure especially in the hands of an uninformed user. Granted, some are safer because an uninformed use cannot even begin to use them (this is not a positive feature in my eyes). All of them have vulnerabilities, some of which dont get fixed for a very long time.

5. All OSes are frustrating - With any OS, there’s a time right out of the box where they are fun. Then as you start to really do work with them, especially with deadlines, the cracks will appear and you will tear your hair out. Then if you stick with them you will get to the point where they are stable, work to your satisfaction, and you will be comfortable like and old couple. It can take a month or 18 to get there, depending on luck, the match between the chosen OS and the task you are trying etc.

6. All OSes are fun if you use them to dabble. If you use an OS mostly to have fun and dabble, without pressure, you will like it better. So if you used windows at work but linux at home, linux will feel infinitely more easy, fun, stable - because you can just put up or ignore things that are less than ideal, and what projects you conceive will be projects that fit within the limitations of your chosen platform. If you have linux at work but windows at home (for games and chatting), you might feel otherwise. I have at some point or another absolutely hated every single OS I have had to use, except for the ones I have only ever dabbled with.

Other things OSes don’t do right yet are: navigation and launching, I/O, filesystems, file management, multimedia (try having multiple sound OUT and wanting to send different things, or the same thing, to them!), encryption (all right, opensolaris’ zfs is getting close on this one), and the list goes on.

The mininote can be a pain on many distributions - because it is via based, with the via C7 CPU and a via Chrome graphics card. Also it has a broadcom wifi card which seems to not always be recognised in many distributions, often the distribution’s own b43 drivers did not work on my mininote. SO after lots of trial and error I found a small number which did work. First one, SliTaz

I found out that unless I got certain steps in exactly the right order, things did not work out with the install, or later with the wireless - putting it all up as quicknotes for now, will add screenshots and more explanations later

* Download slitaz ISOs from http://slitaz.org/en/get/

I have used here a recent (April/May/July 2009) version of the “cooking” version, because in early testing the stable version just would not let the wireless work. In the past I have had to manually compile some of the drivers, but it seems the current release has a better package for the broadcom drivers, which means there might be no need for manual compilation as I have had to do in the past. Yay!

IMPORTANT: if you do not have a wired internet connection, download the “packages” version of the cooking (over 1Gb) distribution so you can install the necessary things to make the wireless work

get and run the unetbootin tool

UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions from Windows or Linux, without requiring you to burn a CD. You can either let it download one of the many distributions supported out-of-the-box for you, or do it from your own iso file. I tend to use my own iso files, as some of the files unetbootin dowloads automatically seem out of date versions. But I have found out that about half the distributions iso I downloaded do not boot when you go the naive run unetbootin with iso and standard config route I outline below. I am certain many more would work with the custom settings, but I dont have the time or inclination to try to read up on each distribution’s bootloader modules to make it work. Thankfully slitaz isos have always worked via unetbootin.

* download from http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ (linux or windows). It will run straight from the downloaded file, no install needed.

* put your usb key in the USB drive and clean/format it (fat32 is fine)

* run unetbootin, choose the “iso” option and select the downloaded ISO. Wait till it’s done (can take a while if you have the “packages” iso)

* get to your mininote

Step 2: boot

* put your key in the machine and start the machine

* press F9 (a few times) to trigger the boot menu

* choose USB

* at the boot screen, normally all you need to do is press “enter” to start booting.

If you see the white/blue unetbootin boot list instead of the red/brown slitaz boot screen shown above, choose the “core” option to proceed

* it will take a little time as everything is decompressed and a memory disk is created

* you will need to set 3 choices: the resolution (slitaz does offer the native resolution of the screen, something which so many distributions failed at), the language and keyboard

* once you are on the login screen, just leave the suggested name (tux) as is, and press enter twice (no password)

* IMPORTANT mount the USB key first (else slitaz might mount it to an inconvenient place as you browse around and then you have to reboot and start over)

* at this point it is worth testing if the current packages for wireless work out of the box or if manual work is needed (...)

Step 3: install

The SliTaz install is rather simple - a few caveats though:

* you need to have your partition ready in advance (the install script will format, but it can’t partition)

* you need to have the USB mounted as /media/cdrom to fool the installer

* the grub bootloader instance that SliTaz installs does not include any existing partitions, just the SliTaz instance - if you have others, keep copies of your Grub menu.lst to copy the entries after the install is completed

Step 4: reboot into your new SliTaz

You will have to make the same 3 choices again (resolution, language, keyboard) and you get your newly installed SliTaz

If you have a wired connection, the first thing to do is update packages and get the wifi set of packages installed. This can be done from the command line or from the GUI package manager, I will show both ways in the next article. I will also list a few of the workarounds for some problems I have encountered at one time or another