Descent Into Linux (Part Two)

Part Two of Two. (Interested in Part One?) Lots of people told me the truth about what Linux was like. But I still didn't get it. Linux has nothing to with software or technology. It's a test of the human spirit. I have a better feel for all those macho geeks who've been flaming me. If I survive this, I just might singe a few newbies myself. In part two, the road to Linux brings us a mangled computer, a slobbering dog, and takes us to CompUSA, the literal embodiment of Computer Hell.

I should have known it wouldn't be so easy, because one of the laws of technology is that it never is. There's rarely such a thing as getting a computer, turning it on, and having everything work right out of the box. It's never happened to me, not with any of my dozen-or-so computers, not even with my beloved Macs.

Still, I was excited. I cleared the dining room table and carefully opened the smaller box. My wife had warned that the delivery service had dropped the box on the porch. "Ooops," the driver had said, laughing, as the box tumbled off the dolly.

When I pulled the computer tower out of the box, its case came off right in my hands. The guts of the computer, rattling around inside, spilled out all over the floor - the modem, the motherboard, six or seven screws, and the ribbons I later learned should be attached to the hard drive. The metal shelf on which the hard drive was resting was bent by at least two inches. The outer case was so damaged it didn't fit over the computer. It looked like the drop on the porch wasn't the only one. Maybe the term Open Source was to be taken literally.

I'd rarely seen the insides of a computer before, and was mesmerized even as I watched the parts of my box scatter across the floor. My yellow lab Stanley scarfed up the motherboard and paraded around with it proudly for a minute or two, as if it were a downed duck or quail, until I pried it out of his slobbery mouth.

I could have just sent the whole thing back to IIS, I suppose, but it wasn't their fault, and I had come too far to wait another few weeks. I was edging towards obsession. I stuffed everything back into the box and drove to the nearest CompUSA. Only extreme desperation drove me there.

To me, CompUSA is computer Hell in its literal incarnation. Everything about the place is designed to insult, alienate or abandon customers. There are few salespeople, and they rarely know a thing about computers. Most try to duck the hapless, overwhelmed, increasingly frustrated customers who get shunted from pointless line to pointless line, and wind up begging total strangers for help. The chain isn't satisfied to make buying computers and equipment a brutal experience; playing for what you buy is just as hard. CompUSA works to ensure that there are always too few cashiers, and they're apparently required to be hostile and mono-syllabic. I'm happier buying a used car from the sleaziest dealer than buying a toner cartridge at CompUSA.

Until I went to one of the Fry's electronics stores during a trip to California, I didn't know that computer salespeople even could be helpful.

The service manager of the Tech Support department at this particular CompUSA store had always been happy to take tons of my money for my various Mac crises and repairs, but he took one look at the carnage I pulled out of the box and practically tossed me out of the store. "No way I'm touching that," he said.

"How come?" I thought PC's were supposed to be easier to repair than Macs. "It's got Linux on it," I offered hopefully.

He shrugged. "I don't know Linux. I don't want to work on it." I hadn't even told him about the dog slobber.

By now, the plastic front had come off as well, and the motherboard and modem were rattling at the bottom of the machine. People in the long line behind me were picking up screws as they bounced off the floor and handing them to me.

"Do you know any other place I could take it?" I asked.

"Nope," he said.

Discouraged, I thought I'd have to send my Linux box back even before I turned it on, but before I retreated, I remembered that I was out of computer paper. I stuffed the mess into a shopping cart and rolled it towards the paper aisle.

At which point, I spotted a CompUSA employee in a red shirt moving rapidly down one of the aisles, a middle-aged geek with a beard and glasses. (I don't know how, but I have some metaphysical chemistry with geeks. They know me; I know them.) Without even being asked, he came over to see what strange object I had in my cart. No one at CompUSA has ever been helpful when I asked, let alone when I didn't. I was amazed.

"What you got there?" he asked, fascinated, in the way any true geek would be at the sight of an exposed computer. I told him what had happened, and he shook his head. "They could fix this. I've seen this before. Shipping problems."

Looking around, he motioned me over to the farthest aisle where his boss couldn't see. In a minute, we were both down on the floor, where he had pulled the Pentium from its cardboard box and spread it and all its parts on the floor. He did know Linux. Soon, two or three geeks had gathered around, watching, kibbitzing, offering advice.

"Let's see," he said, "let me slip the board in'the modem goes here?" He picked up the screws and attached the monitor connection, then bent the casing with his hands, all the while looking around warily for his boss. It was a good board, he said, and good modem too. "He'd kill me if he was me doing this," he said. I said I understood; from what I'd seen at CompUSA, helping customers was probably a firing offense.

"You better have this looked at it," he said. "This is really a mess, but nothing much appears to be broken. And it's good stuff." The plastic on -off switch snapped off in my hands - "maybe a touch of Crazy Glue," he said. The housing for the hard drive needed to be straightened, he said.

I was stunned at the guy's helpfulness, and grateful. He slapped me on the back, and we shook hands. I nearly hugged him.

I put the more-or-less reassembled machine back into the box, and drove it to a small PC repair place. The tech there, a geek poster boy in Airwalks with the skin color of a fish, seemed happy to take it in; he'd clearly seen worse. He told he'd once gotten a motherboard a dog had actually chewed.

Oddly, none of this has discouraged me. I've been spending the last few months traveling around the country for a book, interviewing geeks. They live for crises like this, and I can hear their voices in my head: all problems are solvable, be confident and patient, figure it out, stick with it.

I e-mailed one of the most resourceful, Jesse Dailey, in Chicago and told him what happened. A young man of carefully chosen words who rarely expresses emotion, he was moved, deeply sympathetic. "It's a bit like having a sick pet in a way," he counseled. "Gotta keep your hopes up and keep praying for it."

So, I'm still descending the road to Linux, stalled a bit, humbled, bloody but unbowed. Still using Microsoft Word and my Mac. Waiting for my machine to get fixed, I've started on "Running Linux." I like it. It's clear from the preface that this is a book - and project - for me.

"We invite you to dive in, enjoy yourself, be the first on your block to know what it means to tweak your dot clocks and rdev your kernel image," write the authors.

Linux, they say, is something of a rebellion against the world of commercial software, although an unplanned and disorganized kind of insurrection.

"You must expect the unexpected," write Welsh and Kaufman. "You must always yield to the driving force behind free software: that being the desire - no, need - to develop and maintain the most succinct and powerful system anywhere. To put it in a nutshell: you must hack."

Linux, they say, is something of a rebellion against the world of commercial software, although an unplanned and disorganized kind of insurrection.

"You must expect the unexpected," write Welsh and Kaufman. "You must always yield to the driving force behind free software: that being the desire - no, need - to develop and maintain the most succinct and powerful system anywhere. To put it in a nutshell: you must hack."

So okay, I'm ready for the unexpected and ready -- past ready -- to hack.

Alex, the PC tech fixing the box, just called to say putting the Linux box back together again was possible. A tech from IIS had called him to help him run through the system. He said I needed a new case, a new on/off switch and some new screws. It would cost $173. But he thought the modem and board were fine. He thought it would work. I didn't ask about the dog slobber.

And oh, he asked, what was Linux like? He'd heard a lot about it.

I don't know, I said. I've never seen it.

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