Fiendish Operating System: 1 – Sidin Sunny Vadukut: 1

I can now rest in peace. I have got my comeuppance.
Last night I finally managed to wrap up an installation of Ubuntu on my laptop. Minor hiccups aside, things like hardware drivers missing and wireless networking issues, I now actually have two operating system coexisting in peace on this laptop: Windows XP and Ubuntu.

This may seem insignificant to you. But in my little world that is worthy of a Nobel. Now I can use Ubuntu as a light and free operating system to take care of all day to day tasks while Windows can take care of the complicated stuff like downloading Backdoor Trojans and spontaneous hard disk formatting.

This finally puts to rest a long, long war of attrition between Unix and your truly that stretches back almost ten years.

One evening, during my third year of engineering, I suddenly got into a fit of placement pangs. All my usual confidence disappeared. It suddenly occurred to me that I was not exactly what you would call prime recruitment material.

This was the time when software had just reversed the poor trends of 2000-2001 and IT companies were beginning to flock to our campuses again. Everyone with serious job hopes were rushing to their rooms after class and locking themselves away with the usual IT job preparation materials: Shakuntala Devi, Edward De Bono, Yashwant Kanetkar, old Infosys question papers and the like.

(I have been told that things are easier nowadays. Last year someone from NITT told me that some of the top IT names don’t even interview anymore. All you needed to do was just clear the written test. Sigh.)

But back in my time a job with Infy was no forgone conclusion. Of course you could safely assume squeezing in somewhere between Infy, Wipro and TCS. But if you didn’t then the going was pretty tough.

Till then I had assured myself that software was not my cup of tea and I would save myself (one is cocky at that age and with that level of blood alcohol on a daily basis) for one of the tech or core companies. Bajaj, Telco, Volvo – the real engineering types.

And then one weekend morning I lay in bed and decided to quickly overview my career plans for a few minutes. But not for too long as the bread pakoda ran out after 9:30 or so.

Now I knew couldn’t program to save my life. The Meta syllabus included a moderately difficult course on C and C++. I’d passed through with flying colours scoring one mark more than pass point. (The highlight of the course was watching the professor, a high strung nervous sort, struggle with an early morning class on Objected Oriented Programming, break into a sweat and then finally faint into the arms of a vigilant fellow in the front row. I bunked that class unfortunately.)

I’ve often wondered over the years hence why someone would want a C program that printed out a pyramid of prime numbers. What essential human endeavour struggles for want of good pyramid prime programs?

“Houston we have a problem!”
“We know. Perhaps a particular problem pertaining to the pyramid prime processor?”
“We like the alliteration Houston!”
“Merely making the mundane mirthful mister!”
“Ok cut it…”

I sucked at most forms of programming. And particularly the fancy shmancy prime number, sorting, pyramid type programs.

But then what certainty was there that I could make it into one of those engineering firms? They seldom came every year and, even when they did, they picked up one, maybe two people at a go. Was I being foolhardy I wondered, as I lay in bed with an eye on the clock.

Then later that evening I decided that I must hedge my risk. I had to ensure that I knew the bare minimum to make it into a software firm just in case my core engineering dreams fell flat.

So I asked Tuhin Chatterjee what I could do on a war footing. The threat loomed large that I would have to give GRE and then do an MS and PhD because I couldn’t get a job.

“Unix man. Unix is the way to go man. That and Networking. Just focus on those too.”

He shared his thoughts during one of our many walks to the gate for chai and cancer sticks.

For one whole month I sat hunched over a UNIX manual and a huge textbook on Networking.

Who was that networking by? Ah yes. Tennenbaum. Andrew Tennenbaum I think.

After a month I thought I was ready to try out some of my newly learnt computing skills at our computer center, the Octagon. I briskly walked into the Unix lab.

Two hours later I was back in my room pulling out an old Barron’s guide to the GRE from under the bed and already mouthing words like apothecary and apothegm fighting back the tears.

It was the worst thulping by an open source operating system I have ever received in my life.

Why were there backslashes everywhere? Why was vi editor such a cold-hearted bitch? Why do I have to press seven keys simultaneously to scroll down one page? Why? Why? Why weren’t things like the way its said in the manual:

finger – display information about local and remote users

When in reality it was more like this:

finger – put in eye in one smooth motion to get in the mood for vi editor

It was a futile struggle. Around me Unix maestros were clearly enjoying themselves enormously:

“Hey there is a problem with my port. Can someone just finger me right now!” was the sort of thing one Unix maestro would say to the other excitedly.

I went on to pick up a job with an engineering firm where engineers worked as they were meant to: grinding and cutting and welding and sweating it out and coming back home with grease stains. Once there I was asked to design a project costing software.

For close to a decade I never crossed my path with Unix ever again.

Till last night. After much recommendation from a friend I decided to give this Ubuntu thing a shot. I followed the manual by the letter. I slipped in the DVD, booted from the disc, played around with my partitions a little bit, set up a root user and finally waited with bated breath while the installation happened.

As of now everything except the sound card and the PPPOE connection for the internet at home seems to be working fine.

I could try to get them to work too. I checked the user forums and there was a wealth of information such as this response from an Ubuntu expert:

This is bug 2825 (http://https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?i d=2825) . The work around is to ~# ln -f /etc/pppd/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

To which someone with a sense of humour replied:

I can confirm this bug. I am using a tap0 bridge to emulate PPPoE on a Globespan chipset-based USB aDSL bridge and the latests stable eciadsl-usermode drivers (which, btw are not in Universe). It would be nice to have an updated pppd perhaps backported from Dapper.
I know that Debian’s choice of using kernel-mode PPPoE makes rp-pppoe unnecessary, but I wonder if it would be possible to update rp-pppoe to 3.7 for those that still in using it.

I laughed heartily and decided I was ok without the sound.

So for now, between me and Unix, its even.

(p.s. A big hola! to all the regular readers of this blog out at NIT Surat. Especially Raghav and Sanjeev. Much love goes out to you guys! Now send me money.)