Lots of today's animators use Linux. My older brother was in television
and used it extensively in outside broadcast work.

I doubt if very many TiVo users realize they've been using Linux for
years!

The rest of us found out when hacking our TiVos to fit larger hard
drives which shipped with 10-30 GB hard drives.

We haven't met, Ian, but I confess to being a reformed unixophobe. I'd
been keen to learn unix in the 80s, but eventually I developed a severe
dislike of it back in 1991, because:

1) there were 400 different versions, and not all of them compatible

2) the command line was cryptic (as was CP/M's), whereas MSDOS was in
English: for instance, "pip b a" versus "copy a [to] b" (Can't remember
the unix command, but I know you could "copy" to the printer or the screen
as well as file to file)

3) I was into personal computing, and unix added too many compexities
simply by its (to me unnecessary) power.

When Linux appeared I was scornful: what, yet another flavour? - and only
when I discovered Ubuntu a year or so ago did I finally see the light. Now
I'm definitely vistaphobic.

Mind you I'm still not ready to re-learn the unix command line
heiroglyphs; but happily what you can't do by GUI these days you can do by
cut and paste.

As I said before I tried several distro's
and different versions of distro's since about '95. It was always noe
or two of three things that wouldn't work or wouldn't work right;
video, sound, or internet. Finally about two years ago I came across
Ubuntu and everything worked. When I need to do command line, I copy
from some document telling which command to use and paste into
terminal. Works great. Also it's a slow, but helpful way to learn
commands.

Until a few weeks ago, that would have been me.

I tried Linux about four or five years ago, and that was enough for
me. In the 80's, I fooled around with just about whatever there was.
TI, Apple, Commodore, Amiga, CP/M, MS-Dos, Mac, and even a Novix
computer that ran a native Forth system. At one point I wanted one of
everything, and spent many an hour getting data from one system and
format to another.

However, in the mid 90's the computer groups died, the computer had
become an appliance and the point for my interest was no longer the
computer but what you could do with it. So I quit focusing on the OS
and the innards, and was busy playing with graphics, video, and
getting peripherals to work well.

When I tried Linux, and I did try a couple of flavors, the graphical
interface appeared amaturish compared to Mac and MS. My sound card
didn't work. My video card didn't work at full resolution. My
scanner didn't work. And there were other dissapointments. To be
fair, I only played with it for a few days, and probably could have
gotten most everything working if I would have spent the time to find
out what I needed for drivers, and edited configuration files
appropriately. I felt then, and I still do strongly feel now, that to
be a viable operating system the OS should install, find everything
that is hooked-up, install the drivers, and away you go. Now that
being said, I also appreciate it if I can take manual control to tweak
things and get better performance. But just like my other hobby
(photography), I want manual override, but sometimes I just want to
take a snapshot and be done with it. I don't want to have to fiddle
when there isn't time to, in order to catch a fleeting moment for a
good picture.

Sooooo, about a month ago..... We had a project here at work, where
we needed to back-up images of SCO Unix and HP Unix hard drives. We
had tape back-ups, but our customer requested copies of the drive
images for safe keeping. Our resident Unix/Linux guru suggested
trasferring the images to DVDs. Well the Unix machines are about 8
years old. None of them have a DVD burner. So, our resident guru
says we can do it with Linux and Windows. Linux to make images and
get them on a USB hard drive, and Windows to burn the images to DVD.
When he told me that we didn't even need to build a Linux box, I was
very interested and a bit skeptical.

In he walks with a Knoppix live CD, and boots the machine off of the
CD. Impressive! The computer did have an Adaptec SCSI controller
installed, so we hooked the drives out of the Unix computers to the
SCSI controller, one by one, and used the amazingly powerful DD
command to transfer images of the drives to a NTFS formatted USB hard
drive. Then hooked the USB drive to a computer with a DVD burner and
burned our DVDs.

Add to that, that the graphical interface was beautiful and that
everything worked! Graphics were at full acceleration, sound was
working, all from a CD.

My Franken-puter has hard drive racks that are removeable. (I make
DVDs of some of the stuff off my satellite dish from time to time, and
it saves wear and tear on my cables.)

I installed 8.04 on one of my drives, and again just about everything
works. I will have to play with drivers and configurations to get my
Epson R280 working properly. (I like the way it prints to printable
CDs.) And I will have to get my Canon scanner set up.

But still, this appears to be an operating system that is ready for
prime time and one that I can live with.

And to tell you the truth.... Though long ago I declared that, "I just
want to be able to use my computer to do things, and not be fooling
with the OS anymore.", I have to admit I am having more fun with my
computer than I have in over 10 years. I used to miss the early days
of personal computers and all the flavors and choices. Looks to me
like the choices and the fun are back!

It is nice to see that the fun can be put back into computers. I
got my start on the Apple II and experienced the same joy then that I do with
Linux now. In between were my wilderness years.

I recently read a blog where a man said that he spent a couple of days
re-building his wife's computer which runs Win 2K. He had to do this every few
months and found it to be drudgery. He did not describe what he did, but I have
had to do the same thing on my wife's laptop recently, so I know the feeling.

Everything needed to be backed up and then the drive needed to be re-formatted.
My reluctance to doing this is that my wife can only use her computer if it is
the way she expects it to be. Not an icon out of place, not a file lost, not a
setting changed or she does not know what to do. Computer training is out of the
question. She simply does not care about the inner workings and only about doing
what she needs to do, in the way she is used to doing it. She was in agreement
that it needed to be done, but I knew that I had to do it just right or she
would be lost.

I had to re-install Windows XP and then search through my disks for drivers and
programs, installing each one separately and doing online up-dates for some. I
had to get the firewall, anti-virus and Winpatrol going and up-dated and then
Windows updates took quite a while, with re-boots in between some of them. I
could walk away while some things happened, but it was time consuming and it is
not something that I look forward to. She was happy that her laptop ran almost
like new and was none the wiser for all of the work it took.

When the new Mandriva came out the blogger spent less than an hour installing it
on his own computer and it was pure pleasure for him. For him they were two
totally different experiences. One was work because he had to do it and the
other was a joy because he wanted to do it.

When I install Linux, I get the same experience. Everything is on one CD and I
never have to fumble through a wallet of CDs for drivers or programs. I am not
ever asked to re-boot and if the kernel is updated and a re-boot is in order, I
can wait for days, weeks or months if I want to and not re-boot. Since my
equipment is very standard, I have no driver issues and things seem to work out
of the box no matter what distro I install. I even get to keep my settings and
bookmarks because I re-use my home folder. Unfortunately, our second Windows
machine is slow and it needs some attention. I have been trying to avoid it, but
it looks like I will have to steel myself and do it soon.

I can install any distro in an hour or so and I do it willingly because I know
beforehand that it will be fun! When I get it working perfectly, I want to start
all over again. The reason may be that I am a bit bent in this respect, but it
is also because Linux can be fun!

My first computer was a Commodore 64. Back in those days it seemed
everybody believed in open source and free software, because many
programs, games etc, were in basic and easy to customize. Also we
rarely went to someone's house without taking our latest programs and
blank disks. When we got there we'd copy each other's newest
programs. Yes I know it's now considered piracy but we were kid's and
hadn't even heard of licensing or piracy. And of course I don't
defend that type of behavior now. The best thing about that time
though was how people shared knowledge. If you heard a someone was
having trouble with their computer you'd hurry to help. If you
learned how to do something on your computer you shared your new found
knowledge with everyone you knew and they did the same. By the
eighties it seemed everyone started having a different attitude.
You'd see someone had done something cool on their machine, "Hey how
did you do that?". You'd usually get a response like, "I figured it
out on my own, you figure it out". One of the things I like about
Ubuntu/Linux is that it reminds me of the old day. Software is open
source and usually free (without piracy) and people are willing to
help and to share their knowledge.

One last note: I don't miss putting my favorite game in the dataset
of my C 64 and waiting for a half hour while the game was loaded. I
found that game recently and now it takes seconds to load on my P III.

I still use my old C-64 to play BoulderDash.
Using the add-on Final Cartridge, it boots & loads faster than Ubuntu or XP
on my quad_core Pentium.