Linux desktops need more than just a pretty face

Stan Beer
Sunday, 26 March 2006 18:24

Opinion and Analysis

When one launches into a critique about Linux, you really do have to be careful not offend the sensibilities of open source devotees. However, when it comes to certain things that we have come to take for granted in a Windows desktop, well there is no option but to be brutally frank. Linux has a serious problem to overcome before it can it even begin to make even tiny dents in Microsoft's desktop dominance and the problem is usability.

This is not to say that Linux is no good. To the contrary, as a machine level operating system, as far as I can tell, it's fantastic - much better than Windows. I have been playing around with the Breezy Badger Ubuntu Linux distribution for about a month now. I installed a copy on my youngest son's old hand-me-down Pentium II and, after a few tries, succeeded in networking his computer to our wireless LAN. Since all he uses the computer for is playing games and internet browsing, it works like a charm and is incredibly stable. He can leave it on for days on end and it never locks up and requires a reboot like when he was running Windows 2000.

I also installed Ubuntu on a second networked computer in my home. I configured the Evolution email system with identical accounts to those on my Outlook system and all my recent emails suddenly appeared, there were even some that for some reason my Outlook system seems to have missed (which disturbs me somewhat)!

So what am I bitching about then? Well let me give you a small taste. Having installed and configured my Ubuntu Linux systems and hooked them successfully into my home network, I felt it was time to connect them to my printer. I have never been a fan of inkjet printers because, as far as I'm concerned, most if not all are pieces of junk designed to sell ink. Therefore, about three years ago I exchanged my old HP LaserJet 3, which gave me about 14 trouble free years and was still going strong when I sold it, for a nifty little Canon LBP-810 lightweight mono laser printer. The Canon has also proven to be a great workhorse and is going as well as the day I bought it. Imagine my surprise when I found that is not supported by any Linux distribution.

The problem is of course nothing to do with the developers of the various Linux distributions. Canon, for reasons of its own, just doesn't make anything but Windows drivers for this particular printer. Hoping that perhaps someone else did, I did some Google searching and to my joy I discovered on Linuxprinting.org that one enterprising developer by the name of Nicholas Boichat had reverse engineered a driver for the LBP-810. I would have to replace my old printer cable with a new USB connector (luckily my printer has a USB port), install the Boichat driver and it would sort of work but with less functionality than the printer running in a Windows environment. If I happened to have had an LBP-800 or LBP-600, however, they would have been about as useful as paperweights in a Linux environment.

Anyway, I weighed up my options. Should I ditch my perfectly good printer on eBay and upgrade to a Linux compatible machine or should I have a go at installing the Boichat driver? I decided that spending money on new hardware just to get into the Linux game would be contrary to the spirit of the exercise. So here's the rub. The driver download, like many Linux downloads, is supplied in something called a tar.gz archive, which is sort of zipped up and needs to be unpacked. No problem so far. However, once everything is unpacked, the rest is all command line stuff and the instructions are incredibly cryptic and difficult to follow.

No doubt, with a little help, I'll figure my way through the printer installation problem. However, a visit to a number of forums shows that many new Linux users who wish to download and install applications are stumped by tar.gz archives. Most don't want to have to fiddle with cryptic command line codes each time they download an application to install. What they want is an equivalent to an executable Windows setup file. Apparently .rpm and .deb archives provide similar functionality to the Windows setup but all too many Linux downloads are in tar.gz form, which is a huge discouragement to installing new applications and indeed to winning new users over to Linux.

The point of all this is that from the standpoint of a new Linux user, having a snazzy looking interface is all well and good but it means nothing if users have to revert to the command line to perform what should be simple tasks. Installing new downloaded software is one of the most common tasks performed by desktop users at home and in small offices. Until the Linux suppliers can make this task trivial, they will continue to miss out on a whole world of users beyond the command line geeks.