Since yesterday (Monday) was the first full day of program tester Angela Smedley’s foray into Linux, we felt that it was only fair to dedicate today’s Free Line to it. Rest assured, everything will be back to normal tomorrow.

The Great Linux Experiment continues in earnest. The first major problem that Angela encountered was with the video card drivers. Unlike most people, she employs/relies on a dual-head (two monitor) setup. Monitor number one had nothing in it, while the second, decidedly smaller, monitor featured the desktop. After a few minutes and an Nvidia-sponsored update later, everything was working fine. This does, however, lead us to an interesting question: is it alright to run drivers that are not completely open source?

To many, this question is an easy one. You paid for the video card. Why can’t you run the drivers associated with that card? There are those, however, who don’t necessarily see things in that way. See, the drivers, while official, are closed source. Closed source, for those unaware, simply means that the code used to formulate the drivers are not available to the general public. Some believe that withholding code like this is a downright unconscionable, immoral act. After all, one of the main pillars of the open source community (primarily Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation) is the ability to keep the playing field level for all. By keeping the code all to themselves, the video card companies are essentially putting themselves “above” the user. In order to avoid a life of “indentured servitude,” many choose to run open source, third-party drivers.

Now honestly, we are not here to argue the morality of code. We are simply telling you what others feel and what we did. We loaded the official drivers because frankly, it doesn’t bother us. But if the idea of loading drivers and programs full of walled off code keeps you awake at night, by all means load the third-party files. There really isn’t that big of a difference between the drivers anyway. It all comes down to what you believe is the right thing to do.

The next major obstacle Angela encountered was with Flash. Try as we might, we just could not get Flash working in KDE’s native browser, Konqueror. Thankfully, it all worked in Firefox … or so we thought. While Flash-based videos and websites were all running at full vigor, Flash programs like Pixlr and SumoPaint were just not coming up. After a bit of research and a few conversations with various message board denziens, she found that the problem was with SELinux. SELinux is a line of security patches designed by the NSA to ward of evildoers of all shapes and sizes. It works for the most part, but has the tendancy to be a bit overzealous at times. The fix was simple — disable SELinux. After a quick reboot, her Flash apps were working perfectly.

Still, not everything is working properly. For most of the day, she has been trying to get her computer to recognize her handmade data server. As we mentioned before, said server runs on Windows Home Server, a specialized version of Microsoft Server 2003 with various “consumer friendly” add-ons attached. Try as she might, she is unable to get Samba to properly connect to it. Despite the setback, she is far from “losing hope.” One format, one work-in-progress, and several major successes is nothing to sneeze at.

…And there you have it. Until tomorrow, we bid you all a fond adieu from the land of penguins and GNUs.