>> Sean: We're here again remotely, >> DFB: Yes! >> Sean: ... by the magic of video teleconferencing, and you've had
to do some upgrading I understand? >> DFB: I've been wanting people to ask me about my
upgrading hell!
It's something where I guess all of our audience can find common cause. You may not be running the same mix of kit as I am, but one's
attitude towards upgrading, I think, divides us into two camps. Are you a
serious early adopter of anything that's new? Or are you, like me, a token dinosaur.
"It's only six years old! What do you mean I should be upgrading it?" I have two PCs
that run Windows 10. I have two iPads and the one that is the centre of all my
efforts is the legacy unit - really, in steps, going all the way back to the 1970s.
But at the moment it's a Linux box, right? And the Linux box I have at the
moment - but I'm in the process of changing it: Sean, it's only six years old !
As my Dad used to say (and I'd say - "Dad just get with it") "Son, these things should last a lifetime"
And I always say that to Steve and he looks to heaven whenever I say it.
And I think you do, too, a bit but y' know ... >> Sean: Let's be honest, computers, tablets
whatever are becoming a household appliance >> DFB: Yeah! >> Sean: and it certainly used to
be that you would buy a household appliance and expect it to last 10 years
or maybe, if you bought a Miele, 20 years.
>> DFB: Yes! Quite so! that's exactly right. But as we all know it's just not like that
and you've got to be flexible enough to to know exactly when it's the right
time to upgrade for you. When I'm in, as it were, 'Windows desktop mode' I'm happy
to live with the Windows 10 and that the people at work keep it up to date and all,
for me, and it's not the main focus of
what I use, but they're there when I need them. This time, thinking back, what
was the earliest UNIX box I had? it was in the early 1990s. It was Microport UNIX.
It was, in those days, running on very underpowered PC 386/486 sort of chips.
Something like that. And it was OK. It was a home UNIX system. It was with a
sense of woe and foreboding, really, when I had to move away from UNIX, that
I was so familiar with, for 20 years, to actually having to embrace Linux.
And in those early days and one of my proteges is the legendary John Masters
from Red Hat (who was [previously] at Nottingham) So, yes he was at Red Hat
first of all. But then, as Red Hat became more and more - how should we say :
" ... had to get more commercially focused" then the happy hobbyist air fell away
from it and, you know, you had to use something like Fedora, I think it was?
And I was never very happy with that. So the question is, then, what is my most
recent Linux box? Well it's an Open SuSe system. Now before we start getting
avalanches of mail saying: "Why did you choose that?!" -- I chose that for the
pragmatic reason that the guys at work, whose judgment I trust, had gone for that
flavour of Linux [at the time] for the whole School of Computer Science. And I thought: "Well, you
know, it may not be quite like the Red Hat I'm used to but if they're offering
backup, advice and everything on Open SuSe, I'll do that at home". And it's the
only way to go because it reduces the hassles.
So, yes, the box I'm upgrading away from is Open SuSe Linux 13.2. Go on, Sean,
ask me what forced me to upgrade? Here we are, in a lockdown, can't I just wait a
for a while? Go on Sean - ask me why I'm upgrading ? >> Sean: Well, so, there are two main ways ... there
are loads of reasons to upgrade something. But in my estimation there are two main
reasons and they are the two sides of the one coin of computing: hardware or software?
Where we going? >> DFB: Both! I had problems with both simultaneously! And they kind of
interfered with each other to the extent of giving me inappropriate error indications.
What is the software, not of mine but of other people's, where they
are determined to obsolete you and get you to upgrade? Answer: the Web browser !
Every flaming time! I do not watch movies - if you send me an mp3 or mp4 that
is standalone. That's all right. But I am NOT a mad gamer or I don't watch movies but I
do need to be able to play back my "Computerphile" episodes! So there was I
still happily using Firefox, from 2014, and somebody without my explicit
permission goes and starts imposing HTML5 as a requirement. It started to be
longer and longer and longer before I could see "my" version. And I think you
told me that, because of my ancient set-up, I was waiting for a Flash version?
Was that right? >> Sean: Do know what, Dave, I have no idea! I mean, YouTube makes dozens and
dozens of versions of each. Well, you know, definitely many many multiples of
different versions, from h264 to blah blah blah ... >> DFB: It was making the HTML5
version first, because you were happy. I had to wait for quite some time, often
several hours, before a version came that I could view, but I could live with that.
It was getting more and more annoying. I thought: "This has got to change"
But then what tended to happen was that even on my ancient browser and
even when I wasn't trying to view HTML5 files - of course you got nowhere with that! -
It was still "falling over" as we say. a lot, that browser, and I started
thinking that every time it fell over it was leaving a crash dump somewhere,
because my root disk-file system got full up like crazy. And then, on top of that,
I began to suspect and it took me back to the mid- to late-70s when
this was commonplace. That 2014 system is running off proper conventional discs
right? Rotating things you know with brown iron oxide on them inside which
our colleague Dr. Steve I've never heard this before calls ... ? >> Sean: spinning rust?
>> DFB; spinning rust! "Dave, you're on spinning rust. I bet you've got bad blocks?"
I said: "you're right!". We used to get those in the 1970s off our big disk packs we put in.
You used to have to do an 'fsck' before you started it up, find your bad blocks, map
them out and all that. I started to have the odd file - fortunately not important
ones at all - where I couldn't delete it. It just wouldn't let me because there
were bad blocks. So, I thought, OK, for hardware and software reasons I must now upgrade.
So, I went to see Dr. Steve. Without whose help I couldn't even begin
to stay in the Linux firmament. He said: "Dave, Open SuSe is so "yesterday" and so
"deprecated", if you want me to support you - and of course this is where we're going
to get into Linux Flavours Wars ... He said: "The flavour of Linux I find just
about tolerable is Debian" And I said: "Steve, whatever you use is fine by me
so long as you can keep me going on that new version" And the first thing he gave
me was a mostly configured [Debian] Linux system with no "spinning rust". I think I've got
16GB of main memory and something like 200 and something GB of what I still
regard as "disk" except that it's really solid state memory now. And boy! is it a
lot faster than when you're having to wait for the next block to come round on
spinning rust !?" Then, of course, you've got to ensure that your
new Linux system has got all the utilities on it that the old one had.
One of the most wonderful things about Linux is that you get
- I'm sure there's exceptions - pretty well, binary compatibility [for a given architexture]. You don't have to
keep on recompiling your stuff. Are you listening up there Steve Jobs?!
One of my problems in doing this upgrade - and why I have to have Steve [Bagley] around as a
consultant - is that if you start only doing it every few years you forget
really, really, crucial things! And, I mean, one goof that just about finished me was
that in the good old days, because disks were so small [in capacity] you had your root
filesystem on this disk and you could, optionally,
have your /usr file system on a physically separate disk, right? So all [of]
/usr and its descendants could be on a separate disk - physical disk. They're now
all on one walloping great big disk with lots of partitions. But when I was running
out of space on the root filesystem - immediately below that is /usr. I thought: "Back in
the Berkley [UNIX} days, if you had two smaller disks you could put /usr on a
separate disk" So, right, go to super user mode. A little knowledge is a
dangerous thing! And I tried moving /usr to elsewhere to free off more space.
And you know what happens next? It won't recognize any - or will only
recognize a tiny proportion - of your UNIX commands when you type them in from a
command line. All right something like 'who' to see who's logged on
doesn't work. Why? Because you have made /usr/bin where it was
finding the binary to do that ['who' command] You've made it invisible. And I'd forgotten all
about this! Pick up the phone [plaintive voice]: "Steve ...I've got a problem" Actually, bless him, he was really better:
"Dave, listen carefully, stop gibbering,
we'll get it back! We've all done it! We have all done this but because I do it more often
than you, I now do it less frequently. And if I do, accidentally, do it I know how to
rescue myself!" So, it's things like that. It's a system that back in the 70s
required a lot of expertise ... Oh! and that's another thing: 'look and feel'- Oh! Lord!
Probably [we need] a separate EXTRA BITS video on this. That's the one last thing I want to talk about.
Honestly, yeah, again you go with Steve Jobs you take the pill you
drink the Kool-Aid, or you follow Bill Gates and his successors and you get
Windows 10. But basically what you see on your screen is what they think is good
for you. You do not get, like you do in Linux, Oh what sort of windowing system would
you like on top of all this, Sir? Are you a Gnome customer or are you a KDE customer?
Well I've flirted with both in my time and I think I've relapsed .... they can now
cohabit, I find, in this latest edition. They seem to cohabit a lot better.
But this is the problem of having such an amorphous market as Linux is.
I mean it's covering everything from high-end Web servers that have all sorts of things.
So, you can buy in exactly what you want but-but-but-but it means that if
everything is an add-on then nothing is standard. you know? So yeah, I'm basically
back on a machine that will tolerate either Gnome or KDE but it's choosable
and that suits me fine. And, yeah, even in the great Wild West that is Linux
systems there are signs of common sense breaking out. I think they are more
upgradable, in general perhaps better maintained, than they used to be five or
six years ago.