Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
My first exposure to Linux began with Slackware 97. At the time I was still an ardent BBS user and the amount of bulletin board-related software in Slackware, all for free, piqued my interest. In those days Linux was hard, not because of the difficulty of the OS itself, but in part because loading it on to my IBM Thinkpad 701C (butterfly) required a lot of floppy disks. I would get about 10 disks in only to have to start again because of a bad floppy.
As the years progressed I tried several distributions: Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, even Corel Linux. All of the distributions were good in some respects, but what I found over the years was that some distributions were better than others on certain hardware. In other words, some were easier to get working with a certain set of proprietary hardware than others. So as I shifted to different hardware, I also shifted to trying different distributions to see which one was the simplest to get going with my hardware.
In late 2001 I joined a friend working on his own distribution for a small computer refurbishing project. The distribution, WCLP (Working Centre Linux Project) was Debian-based. At the time I was more of a fan of Red Hat Linux, it looked more polished and I was used to installing all my proprietary hardware under Red Hat. Our distribution was designed to look a bit like Windows 98 desktop and run on a 486 with 16MB of RAM. I think we succeeded quite well, but as the years progressed other projects started up with the same goals in mind. Updating our distribution became difficult. Initially our distribution was released as a client-server model, you set up the server to image the clients. CDs were pretty common, but it took us some time to release a CD image. Then major kernel changes challenged everything, updating the distribution was a lot of work, most of it being done by the project’s founder, Paul Nijjar.
In late 2005 I joined The Working Centre as a paid staff member. My exposure to Debian GNU/Linux as a part of WCLP led me to like apt as a package manager, so when Ubuntu Warty Warthog came along I was itching to try it out. Warty Warthog exceeded my expectations—it worked beautifully and wasn’t too difficult to install.
Warty Warthog worked so well that I started looking at it as a replacement for our WCLP Linux distribution across all the hardware we refurbished. Ten years on we’re still using the Ubuntu-base in the form of Xubuntu on our Linux refurbished computers. Our project is also a Microsoft Registered Refurbisher, and we’ve done a lot to automate installation of both Windows and Linux. We use a PXE boot server to deploy all our tools and software. The PXE server sits on, you guessed it, an Ubuntu server installation.
Our project is a community tools project, we’re smaller than projects like Computers For Schools or RCT, but as the name suggests we try to focus on community. It’s a delight for us to try to help people with Linux/Ubuntu-related problems because those problems tend to be a lot more interesting than removing malware. Paul, the WCLP project leader, also joined the staff of The Working Centre and has been instrumental implementing technologies like our PXE server. Recently Paul set up a system for remote help that lets users click a “Get Remote Help” button on their Xubuntu computers. The button launches a script which connects to a server. Our technicians run another script which generates a password. We give the person needing help the password. Once they connect to the server it prompts them for a password. When they enter it a password is generated on their end which they in turn give to our technicians, thus we have trust on both ends. Then a remote tunnel is established and our technicians can control the desktop on the other end. At any time either party can end the connection. It’s a neat open source alternative to proprietary software like Teamviewer.
It’s being able to solve problems with Linux without having to spend a lot of money on some proprietary solution; that endears me to Ubuntu. We’ve been able to build a large amount of our infrastructure on open source. When we book a repair, and when our technicians work on a repair, they use Xubuntu workstations to connect to a server running Ubuntu Server and PCRT, a paid, but open source (PHP/MySQL) repair tracking database. Regardless of their Linux experience all our volunteers are familiar with Firefox so using the repair tracking database is simply a matter of a little guidance. PCRT has made our repair technicians’ lives a lot simpler…but there was a time when we had to look twice at Ubuntu.
When Canonical made the decision to switch to Unity our project was faced with a big problem—Unity didn’t work on a lot of our hardware. Although I’d used KDE before on other distributions it too was a bit heavy for some of the hardware we were trying to get working at the time. Our own distribution had used IceWM. IceWM is very light, but it lacked the nice drag and drop of GNOME. We considered switching to Linux Mint because Mint was doing some exciting things at the time Unity came out, but ultimately we decided on Xubuntu.
Offering Xubuntu also lets us offer people alternatives when they come in with software that isn’t legitimate. And because we’re willing to offer support it usually works out well, most people are willing to adapt to avoid paying $120 CDN (the approximate cost of Windows 8.1 here). Of course not everything is rosey. We do get support calls when people cannot run software they expect to run. There’s been the rare case where we haven’t been able to get something to run (a very old program WINE wouldn’t run), but we also get the delighted calls from people when things go right (Minecraft on Linux).
I learned to love Ubuntu because it enabled me to enable others, whether it’s volunteers, people coming to us looking for computer help, or even Windows users looking for inexpensive software (FLOSS) they could use as an alternate to expensive commercial solutions. It’s a love that seems to have caught on over the years, many of the volunteers we’ve had who were “strictly Windows” use both Xubuntu and Windows. It’s a love that seems to have caught the eye of some of our newest volunteers who are intrigued by our remote help solution. And it’s a love that’s caught on with many of the people who come to us for help because we no longer have to ask them to install something to help them.