The second and final part of Chris' personal history with Linux

[liam_on_linux]

This is the second, and I very much fear the last, part of my friend Chris "da Kiwi" Thomas' recollections about PCs, Linux, and more. I shared the first part a few days ago.

Having found that I could not purchase a suitable machine for my needs, I discovered the Asus ROG Windows 7 model, in about 2004. It was able to have a RAM upgrade, which I duly carried out, with 2 × 8GB SO-DIMMs, plus 4GB of SDDR2 video RAM, and 2×500GB WD 7200RPM hard drives. This was beginning to look more like a computer. Over the time I used it, I was able to replace the spinning-rust drives with 500GB Samsung SSDs, and as larger sticks of RAM became available, increased that to the limit as well. I ran that machine, which was Tux-compatible [“Tux” being Chris’s nickname for Linux. – Ed.], throwing away the BSOD [Blue Screen Of Death – that is, Microsoft Windows. – Ed.] and putting one of the earliest versions of Ubuntu with GNOME on it. It was computing heaven: everything just worked, and I dragged that poor beast around the world with me.

While in San Diego, I attended Scripps and lectured on cot death for three months as a guest. Scripps at the time was involved with IBM in developing a line-of-sight optical network, which worked brilliantly on campus. It was confined to a couple of experimental computer labs, but you had to keep your fingers off the mouse or keyboard, or your machine would overload with web pages if browsing. I believe it never made it into the world of computers for ordinary users, as the machines of the day could not keep up.

There was also talk around the labs of so-called quantum computing, which had been talked about since the 1960s on and off, but some developments appeared in 1968.

The whole idea sounds great – if it could be made to work at a practicable user level.  But in the back of my mind, I had a suspicion that these ideas would just hinder investment and development of what was now a standard of motherboards and BIOS-based systems. Meanwhile, my Tux machine just did what was asked of it.

Thank you, Ian and Debra Murdoch, who developed the Debian version of Tux – on which Ubuntu was based.

I dragged that poor Asus around the Americas, both North and South, refurbishing it as I went. I found Fry's, the major technology shop in San Diego, where I could purchase portable hard drives and so on at a fraction of the cost of elsewhere in the world.

Eventually, I arrived in Canada, where I had a speaking engagement at Calgary University – which also had a strong Tux club – and I spent some time happily looking at a few other distros. Distrowatch had been founded about 2001, which made it easy to keep up with Linux news, new versions of Tux, and what system they were based on. Gentoo seemed to be the distro for those with the knowledge to compile and tweak every little aspect of their software.

Arch attracted me at times. But eventually, I always went back to Ubuntu –  until I learned of Ubuntu MATE. The University had a pre-release copy of Ubuntu MATE 14.10, along with a podcast from Alan Pope and Martin Wimpress, and before I could turn around I had it on my Asus. It was simple, everything worked, and it removed the horrors of GNOME 3.

I flew happily back to New Zealand and my little country cottage.

Late in 2015, my wife became very unwell after a shopping trip. Getting in touch with some medical friends, they were concerned she’d had a heart attack. This was near the mark: she had contracted a virus which had destroyed a third of her heart muscle. It took her a few years to die, and a miserable time it was for her and for us both. After the funeral, I had rented out my house and bought a Toyota motorhome, and I began traveling around the country. I ran my Asus through a solar panel hooked up to an inverter, a system which worked well and kept the beast going.

After a couple of years, I decided to have a look around Australia. My grandfather on my father's side was Australian, and had fascinated us with tales of the outback, where he worked as a drover in the 1930s and ’40s.

And so, I moved to Perth, where my brother had been living since the 1950s. 

There, I discovered an amazing thing: a configurable laptop based on a Clevo motherboard – and not only that, their factory was just up the road in Fremantle.

Hastily, I logged on to their website, and in a state of disbelief, browsed happily for hours at all the combinations I could put together. These were all variations on a theme by Windows 7, and there were no listing of ACPI records or other BIOS information.

I looked at my battered old faithful, my many-times-rebuilt Asus, and decided the time had come. I started building. Maximum RAM and video RAM, latest nVidia card, two SSDs, their top-of-the-line WiFi and Bluetooth chipsets, sound cards, etc. Then, I got it sent to New Zealand, as I was due back the next day.

That was the first of four Metabox machines I have built, and is still running flawlessly using Ubuntu MATE. 

My next Metabox was described as a Windows 10 machine, but I knew that it would run Tux beautifully – and so it did. A few tweaks around the ACPI subsystem and it computed away merrily, with not a BSOD in sight. A friend of mine who had popped in for a visit was so impressed with it that he ordered one too, and that arrived about three months later. A quick wipe of the hard drive (thank you, Gparted!), both these machines are still running happily, with not a cloud on the horizon.

One, I gave to my stepson about three months back, and he has taken it back with him to the Philippines, where he reports it is running fine in the tropical heat.

My new Metabox arrived about six weeks ago, and I decided – just out of curiosity – to leave Windows 11 on it. A most stupid decision, but as my wife was running Windows 11 and had already blown it up once, needing a full reset (which, to my surprise, worked), I proceeded to charge it for the recommended 24 hours, and next day, switched it on. “Hello” it said, in big white letters, and then the nonsense began… a torrent of unwanted software proceeded to fill up one of my 8TB NVMe drives, culminating after many reboots with a Chatbot, an AI “assistant”, and something called “Co-pilot”. 

“No!” I cried, “not in a million years!” – and hastily plugging in my Ventoy stick, I rebooted it into Gparted, and partitioned my hard drive for Ubuntu MATE.

So far, the beast seems most appreciative, and it hums along with just a gentle puff of warm air out of the ports. I needed to do a little tweaking, as the latest nVidia cards don’t seem to like Wayland as a graphics server, and the addition to GRUB of  acpi=off, and another flawless computer is on the road.

Now, if only I could persuade Metabox to move to a 128-bit system, and can get delivery of that on the other side of the great divide, my future will be in computer heaven.

Oh, if you’re wondering what happened to the Asus? It is still on the kitchen table in our house in the Philippines, in pieces, where I have no doubt it is waiting for another rebuild! 

Chris Thomas

In Requiem 

03/05/1942 — 02/10/2024