View from the Mountain

Linux Impressions

While I am waiting for the hoped for SATA Linux solution, I have been using SUSE Linux from a DVD all day. I managed to get e-mail working nicely, access networked Mac files, and print to my networked printer. All of this was done without any attention to a manual.

The Office package included is certainly more than I need. I was unsucessfully in playing a music cd, but I am sure that is just a driver issue.

The feel of the OS is very good. The browsers are both snappy. I prefer FireFox but it is pretty easy to like the one that spawned Safari.

I am much more comfortable in the Linux world than I am in the Windows world.

I am also very impressed that I can actually do work from a DVD based OS. That is really pretty neat. Talk about a safe OS. It is pretty hard to screw up the basic OS if it is running off a DVD.

I highly recommend giving SUSE a shot if you have a Pentium box around without SATA drives.

Customer Service

One of the tenets of my life has been to never sell something I did not believe in myself. I sold Apple computers, Vermeer Balers, along with black and red Angus cattle. Part of the reason you sell a great product is that customer service becomes so much easier.

Customer service when you know a product is also second nature. You know how to make the product work so showing the customer how to get going is no real challenge.

Back in the days when I was training a sales force in Fredericton, NB, I believed it was important that someone representing a product have an idea of the legacy products and how customers use them and potentially how they run into problems. Knowing the old products not only makes supporting the customers easier but it makes selling the new products much more understandable.

Companies are famous for putting out marketing brochures which make every product look like the proverbial swiss army knife of every area. If you have ever used one of those giant swiss army knives, it is not much of a challenge to argue that by trying to be everything to everyone, the knives fail at doing a really good job at anything.

Most products have a comfort zone. Smart companies do not push their products far out of their comfort zone. Sophisticated customers are often more successful than companies at taking products into areas which might be new areas for success.

Companies with sophisticated sales forces make the most of these customer driven moves to take a product into a new area. Listening to the customer through the sales force and applying customer suggestions quickly leads to greater success as long as you can continue to provide a high level of support to your old customers while cultivating your new customers.

I recently met with a Vice President of Information Technology who mentioned that he loved Dell's service. If a customer is having a problem, their motto according to the VP is that the customer is right and they just replace the questionable product. Compare that to the gauntlet of questions some customers face in trying to get their problems solved.

Few companies understand the importance of respecting the feelings and integrity of those customers who have already chosen their product. For every one customer trying to take advantage of your service policies there are fifteen who have legitimate problems. Making it hard to take care of the fifteen because of the one is a huge mistake.

In over thirty years of selling, I can only think of three customers who may have tried to work the system for their own benefit. I am happy to say that I took care of them just like the other customers. If you make a product you believe in, sell it with realistic promises, and support it the same way you would like to get support when you buy something, you are almost guaranteed to have reasonable customers. If we get to the point of building a system to exclude the bad egg customers, you are bound to end up annoying your best customers.

Yesterday I sent an e-mail registering a problem with SUSE Linux. There is still no answer from them, but I hope they understand the importance of key users. When you are a new product on the block, every user is a key user. Building advocacy for a product among key influencers is the only way to sell successfully against a monopoly short of a gigantic sales force and unlimited marketing dollars.

The Season

This is the time of year we often hear about our consumer society and the challenge of "buying for people that have everything."  Our family may not have everything, but we have more than we really need.

Being an only child with much older parents,  I certainly did not suffer from a lack of material goods. My first car was a result of being sent away to military school at the ripe old age of fourteen.  Military school was not a terrible experience if you ignore the first six months of homesickness, but it did mean giving up friends and living with a very rigid schedule.  However, my parents had some guilt over this, and the car was the result.

Part of me wonders if television is one of the drivers for all our wants. There was little television to enjoy if you were in military  boarding school. Even today I find myself  working on my computer or wandering during television shows.  Likely it is a throwback to that thirty minutes of television in the snack shop we got each night after study hall.   People were more interested in talking to friends than in watching a few fleeting minutes of television.

There were no televisions in dorm rooms so that was it for television.  Even in college, no one had televisions.  Imagine that.  I can remember the summers, and enjoying the news and even political conventions on TV. Those days there were no outdoor shows to tempt me with fishing reels and such.  They were also days of youthful hope and enthusiasm.  A fancy home in the suburbs wasn't part of the equations.

There was a burning desire to experience lots of things from skiing, scuba diving, to climbing, flying, and visiting far away places.  That wanderlust led to a trip to Alaska the summer before my junior year in college.  It was done using a Dodge PowerWagon pickup truck so I cannot say that it was done on the cheap except the truck was it for accommodations. A foam mattress under the pickup cover was the concession to comfort.

Eventually the spirit of adventure led me to live in Nova Scotia, but it was a result of wanting to be on my own. I needed to live in a wild, beautiful, place,  and find my own path without pressure from home. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick solved that need.

I cannot say that the journey has been perfect, but there have been some wonderful experiences and unbelievably nice folks along the way.  People have become ever more important than things.

Experience helps you to correct some of the mistakes in your own life along the way.  Helping your own  own kids grow up allows you to help them miss a few mistakes you made along the way, but mostly they have to learn on their own.

Economics often plays a key role in either creating an addiction for material things or in allowing you to be happy with what you have.  With three kids and our first ten years on the farm, financially new cars for the kids were out of the question. 

They all started driving in the same old Subaru wagon that I had used as a company car.  By the time they  were done with it, there were 110,000 miles on it, and the transmission had been rebuilt.  Our oldest, Erin, actually went off to college with the Subaru.  Michael, our middle child, had the benefit of inheriting his grandfather's ten year old Ford Ranger.  Unfortunately, he got nailed in an accident (not his fault), and the Ranger was totaled.  I think he had a most exciting year driving our old Previa van his second year in college.  The Previa still survives with 185,000 miles on it.

Most folks are not lucky enough to live their whole life in the lap of luxury. Our family has been no exception.  We went through some pretty tough times on the farm.  I can remember one Christmas when we were not certain that we would be able to afford a turkey.  There was no shortage of food but buying from the grocery store required cash, and we had a couple of tough winters where cash was anything but plentiful.

Being short on cash never made us unhappy.  It created pressures, but it also made us appreciate money when we were fortunate enough to have it.

All of our kids have lived on their own for a time now, and I am proud that they have survived some tough times on their own.  Tough times make you stronger.  Often those lessons make you question the need for that next consumer goody.

At this point in our lives we are more interested in getting rid of things instead of accumulating them.

As I walked through one of the big box stores, it is hard not to notice all the gadgets and things which likely we can all do without.

There are always a lot of expensive televisions going out the door.  Yet I have seen little to justify a new television

The last few years have clearly shown me that people are far more important than things.

One big challenge for our society which has moved from making things to managing information and services is to realize that owning something is not an adequate substitute for creating something. 

As we shovel more and more information around, finding a way to unleash your creativity while making the world a little nicer for the next person is going to be more and more important to our happiness.

It's certainly better for the soul than heading off to the mall.

Skip ahead to the future and read about The Last Mowing or visit my homepage which will change over time.

 

 

The Adventures Continue

In my last post, the Dell was up and basically running. Silly me, I thought things would get easier. Well Windows networking is definitely not easier. Now I know why there are so many MCSEs. Talk about pain. In setting up a Windows network, my network printer just disappeared. On the plus side the Mac was immediately able to see any Windows file sharing. It took a lot of work to finally get the Dell to handle sharing initiated from the Mac world.

I did, however, get it to work, and finally got printing re-established. This was after I managed to set up printer sharing via CUPS which was acutally pretty neat. Try typing http://127.0.0.1:631/printers after you have turned on printer sharing on your Mac. You can find an article on www.macosxhints/com detailing this. I ended up not using the Mac printer sharing since I stumbled back across adding a printer through defining a TCIP port on the Dell. All in all another reason why Macs are much less stress.

Of course one of the real reasons for buying the Dell was to get Linux running. Since getting a Windows box set up is such a pain, I decided that I did not want to chance resizing the Windows partition and thought it would be educational to add another drive to the Dell. I have to give Dell credit, their manual certainly provided clear instructions. Also the two page invoice list of what was in my computer left no doubt as to what my machine contained.

I did open the machine up to make certain that I did not need power cables. Opening the machine is relatively easy, assuming you completely read the instructions which as a Mac user I have to admit I am a little lax on doing. Of course any of the desktop Macs made recently open up easier, but few people ever open their machines so it is probably a feature few would appreciate. I made a couple trips to Best Buy and Wednesday ended up with a Maxtor 120 GB 7200 RPM SATA drive. I should have been immediately suspicious when there was only one SATA choice among dozens of drives, but it has been a long time since I worried about what type of drive is in my computer so no red flags came up.

Michael, my son, made it home from Reston on Thanksgiving day. The Friday after Thanksgiving we decided to install the drive. Michael, being much better than me at doing hardware upgrades, managed to get the new drive in with little trouble. Of course the computer could not see it. Michael correctly suspected that some settings needed to be changed in the BIOS. Unfortunately the machine quickly told us that my nice new Dell flat panel with a digital connection could not display the BIOS information. Thank goodness for strong young sons. Michael hauled my nineteen inch Sony monitor over and hooked it to the Dell and made the correct changes in the BIOS so the machine could see the second SATA drive.

In getting all this done, he also managed to correct some errors that I had made in setting up the Dell box. He took down the extra firewall that apparently was turned on. I was well protected, McAfee firewall, Windows firewall, and our hardware firewall. In fact earlier we were unable to get our Linux downloads going from the Dell because it was so well protected. Michael fixed that and turned on a login screen which would require passwords. I had been unable to figure that out.

We then decided to try a Linux installation. Using my Mac I had been downloading Fedora 3 from Red Hat while Michael was installing the drive. We tried to boot up from the first optical drive and found that was a non starter so it looked like we were going to have to haul the Sony monitor back over but I remembered an analog cable that came with the Dell so this time we hooked up the flat panel using the analog video ports and made the appropriate changes in the BIOS so the Dell would boot from the first optical drive. Now I know why they sent along the analog cable.

Michael guided me through the Fedora installation and we started formatting the second hard drive for Linux. It quickly got 11% through the task and hung to the point we had to pull the plug on the computer to restart. We tried another few things including formatting the second drive as a Window volume just to make certain it was a good hard drive. We got similar results with each attempt at installing Linux and gave up for the night with the knowledge that bleeding edge is never too far away in the technology world. Other than the much more reasonable cable than the traditional ribbon cable, I cannot say that SATA drive technology has made my life easier.

On Saturday as Michael made his way home up Interstate 81, I tried two more Linux distributions of Fedora and basically got stuck in the same place. This was a little more time consuming than it might appear on the surface since each distribution involved downloading four or five images of up to 650 mg each. I did manage to download and burn those on the Dell. Burning a CD isn't quiet as intuitive as it is on a Mac, but it is certainly no real challenge.

Saturday night on a whim, I decided to look at SUSE Linux. Novell/SUSE has what they call a Live Evaluation DVD. http://www.suse.com/en/private/download/suse_linux/index.html I got it downloaded with little trouble and within short order was up and running SUSE Linux Professional 9.2 all off of a DVD.

I was very impressed with the KDE user interface, the easy networking, printers, and especially the mail package, KMail. Sunday, I headed back to Best Buy and bought a boxed copy of SUSE Linux Professional 9.2 for $89.95.

After a few minutes confirming that the Redskins would lose once again, I started the SUSE installation. Much to my disappointment it doesn't seem to understand SATA drives any better than Fedora. The installation dies quickly after starting to access the SATA drive. My Dell Dimension 4700 is not a top end machine and according to Michael has a standard Intel 915G motherboard but I guess it is too new for easy Linux support. I tried going to the BIOS myself and changing the SATA operation from native to combination which apparently is a bridge to some older OSs that do not understand SATA drives, but it still produced the same frustrating result of dying just after starting to format the drive.

The good news is that Novell/SUSE promises installation support so I have registered my product and hope that they respond to the trouble ticket that I have logged. I know the SATA problem will be solved, but it would be nice to have the problem solved quickly without having to buy a different type drive.

When I get the Linux running, I suspect my use of the Dell will be limited to the GPS map loading that was one of my original reasons for buying. The Linux just looks too good compared to Windows. The imaging model is much superior so my old eyes can read the text much more easily. Also all the rebooting you have to do in Windows after changes gets very old.

I will look forward to making some performance comparisons once I get Linux running off of a hard drive instead of a DVD.

The perfect home setup could be a Macintosh Powerbox running OS X, along with a Dell desktop running Linux and Windows. That would cover all the options. Perhaps that will be a realistic option as some of the manufacturers start delivering Linux systems. I know I would have ordered the Dell with Linux and Windows if that had been an option.

My Welcome to Windows

Early last week, my new Dell Computer arrived. Luckily I was at home and it did not have to sit on my door step very long. My nearly twenty years at Apple might have caused some good natured teasing from my neighbors.

Setting up the Dell was an interesting experience. I really did not run into any trouble, but it did take a lot longer than the Macs that I have used. There are a lot more cables. I was absolutely amazed at all the security precautions that for the first day or so seemed to take up most of my time on the computer. I did get Firefox, iTunes for Windows, and the Microsoft Office updates all installed.

My surprise of the day was when I went to shut down the system and was told that I could not shut down since someone was logged into my computer. It did not take long to figure out it was MS once I was told that they would shut down the system after they were done with it.

Somehow the next morning, updating my virus definitions caused my virus program to reinstall but I have managed to get back to normal.

The key reason I actually bought the system was so I could upload GPS maps under Windows. Now I can buy my GPS and we will have a Pentium based Linux box as a bonus. Of course there are a few other reasons that made the purchase worthwhile.

We expect to get the Linux going by installing a second drive this week when my son, Michael, visits for Thanksgiving. I think the plan is to install Fedora. I was told Linux on the Mac has enough additional driver and software challenges that a Linux beginner like myself would have better luck on a Pentium based system.

The Dell also has the added benefit of providing Windows Office experience for anyone in the family who wants to venture into the Windows-centric business world.

One of the other reasons for the Windows box was to test web pages and web enabled databases that I am building over the winter.

It has been rewarding to see how the other 98% lives. I now can understand why most people find MS Windows an acceptable substitute. The prices in the Windows world are exceptional and there is plenty of choice out there. My whole Dell 3 ghz system with flat panel display, MS Office, four years of warranty and accident policy was only about $300 more than Apple's cheapest flat panel display.

Of course I still feel much more secure on OS X but perhaps that will change over time. It should come as no surprise that I am doing this writing on my trusty Mac. It just seems more natural. I believe most people would be very surprised at how easy computing is on a Mac, but perhaps they would run into a similar software challenge like I did on GPS and end up with a Windows box anyway.

It will be interesting to see how easy the Linux installation is and how well the Dell software handles some of my many digital pictures.