Title: WattOS R9 Worth Knowing About

Author: Martin Moene

Date: 07 September 2015 07:08:54 +01:00 or Mon, 07 September 2015 07:08:54 +01:00

Summary: Silas S. Brown recycles some old hardware with a new OS.

Body: 

If your life as a developer is anything like mine, from time to time you’re called on by friends and friends of friends to sort out misbehaving computers, usually Windows systems on which someone has carelessly downloaded a bunch of unwanted software they don’t know how to uninstall. As I speak Chinese, I’m usually asked to sort out laptops that are running the Chinese-localised version of Windows, which, unlike most other multilingual operating systems, has no way of temporarily switching the interface back to English for technical support, and it doesn’t help that my ability to READ Chinese is less good than my ability to speak it: the user is typically unwilling to read the screen to me because it is ‘too technical’, and it’s not usually possible to copy and paste the characters into dictionary software, so I sometimes have to make a few guesses. The strangest case I had recently was a laptop whose user was complaining about the Web browser not working despite her running a few anti-virus programs. “Just install Firefox” I thought, but it turned out most HTTPS certificates would fail to authenticate in any browser, although at least Firefox gave me a more verbose error message that led me to the root cause: the system clock was set to last year. The TLS library was refusing to accept certificates that seemed to be date-stamped to the future, and Windows’ built-in NTP client refuses to automatically synchronize a clock if it’s that far out.

Most of these users are naturally extremely reluctant to have their operating system changed, but there comes a point when you can go no further. Recently I was faced with a Vista laptop that wouldn’t boot, and after trying and failing to recover this I said “either let me put Linux on it or buy a new computer”, adding “preferably a Mac” in selfish hope of having less support to do in future. They opted for Linux, and so for the first time in a long time I was actually asked by a family of computer novices to set up GNU/Linux for them.

When setting up GNU/Linux on an old piece of hardware, the first problem is ‘which distro will install’. Most modern Linux distros require a DVD to install, but not every old laptop will boot from DVD. Some DVD distros can also install from a USB stick, but this is not always the case. For example, Mint 17, which is a version of Ubuntu’s 2014 long-term support release which is supported until 2019 and adds some out-of-the-box features that might appeal to ex-Windows users, has an installer bug that causes it to fail if you install from USB. It is of course possible to patch around this bug, but as there are so many other distributions out there I’d rather just pick one that works cleanly to start with so that I have a simpler recommendation to make when asked (I’d rather be able to say ‘install X’ than ‘install Y and do this bunch of patching’). I could have gone back to the last long-term support release of Mint: Mint 13, based on Ubuntu 2012 and supported until 2017, but I’d really rather give them the 2014 version because they wanted Chinese handwriting input and this has not developed much on the Linux platform until quite recently.

Then I found that the R9 version of WattOS was based on Ubuntu’s 2014 long-term support release and still fits on a CD-ROM (no DVD required). It also installs successfully from USB stick if you don’t have a CD, and the ‘LXDE’ version is quite novice-friendly (the ‘Microwatt’ edition perhaps less so, as it launches you into a window manager that will be most unfamiliar to the average Windows user, so I didn’t give that version to this family). I had to download additional drivers for their Wi-Fi card, which I had to install via USB stick as we couldn’t plug it in to Ethernet, but at least the provided tools told me which packages were required.

I also had to copy over their Windows files, including many unlabelled high-resolution photographs: it was necessary to go into the settings of the PCmanFM file manager and increase the maximum size of files that it will generate a preview for, as they were used to navigating their pictures by preview rather than by filename. Then it needed LibreOffice (for opening various .doc files they had), Chinese fonts (‘apt-get install fonts-wqy-microhei’ did the trick), WINE 1.7 (just in case) and some sort of Chinese handwriting input system. This particular family did not know how to use Pinyin or one of the other standard methods of inputting Chinese from the keyboard, and they had a proprietary trackpad-like device that plugged into the USB port and provided a handwriting input system, but of course there was no way I could find a Linux driver for this device so I just installed the package ‘tegaki-recognize’ (along with its data in ‘tegaki-zinnia-simplified-chinese’ etc) and set it up with an icon on the application launcher: it will let you write one character at a time with the mouse, and paste it into whichever window was foreground before it was launched; I explained this was not quite as usable as their previous tablet, but it’s the best we can do and at least it’s running on a nice fast operating system that works.

The other thing I did was to copy over their browser bookmarks. They had been using Chrome with automatic translation (I think it was me that suggested this circa 2009: automatic translation is not very good, but at least it gives them some vague idea of what they’re looking at, and means they didn’t have to call me every 5 minutes with ‘what does this website say’), and it was no problem to save the Chrome bookmarks file and load it on another operating system, but it was more difficult to set the Linux version of Chrome to automatically translate into Chinese (for some unknown reason it kept on insisting that your first language must be English if you’re on Linux) so I imported the bookmarks into Firefox and found an add-on to do the translation. I hadn’t saved the passwords and cookies from Windows, which turned out to be a mistake because the lady didn’t know her Hotmail password and had been relying on the computer to remember it for her for the last few years. All attempts at password retrieval failed, so she had to get a new email account. (Never ever assume a browser will always remember passwords for you: there are any number of events that could interfere with this. If it matters and you can’t remember it yourself, keep a backup copy in a safe place. I’m glad my email is still provided by the local university: in the unlikely event that there’s a problem with my account, I can walk into Reception with my passport or something and ask for help. You can’t do that with the likes of Hotmail.)

But generally I was pleasantly surprised how smoothly it all went, and how readily they accepted the result. I was expecting to be screamed at because the desktop looked different or the icons were in all the wrong places or their favourite calendar widget was missing or something, but none of this happened: the only ‘hiccup’ was the missing Hotmail password.

Notes: 

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