pseydtonne | May. 10th, 2007

The following post is very geek but it's also political. You'll just have to decided for yourself whether you can take it.

Fuck you, Ubuntu Developers! Fuck your holier-than-thou attitude that I'm not cleared to get root on the machine I just built. Fuckity fucky-fuckers, I say verily!

What am I on about? I just set up Ubuntu Server 7.04 on what is my good box right now and will eventually be my second-best box once I buy the processor for my new motherboard. I chose the server install because I wanted to try certain configurations it would provide. After what I've gone through, I'm blowing away that installation and putting Xubuntu on instead. In fact, maybe I'll ditch [x|k|ed]ubuntu and try a different distribution.

I was annoyed at first that a server installation would foist DHCP configuration on me. In other words, I have no choice out of the box but to let some other machine (such as my router) hand me an IP address for a box I will want to address consistently. Not only will I have to turn that off but accept that it will never really turn off and I'll have to fake it into accepting the static IP I would hand it. I know what I'm doing so why aren't I allowed to do it?

Then I hit a much larger snag: I can't remember the password I gave my default user. In fact, I don't even know which name I handed my default user. dante? dblando? teebone? lupo? It doesn't matter cuz I can't log in. It's like getting a new car but having no keys.

I figured I'd login as root and fix things from there. Nope. You don't get prompted for root's password when you install. When you research this problem on Senator Stevens's Series of Tubes, I get lectures by Ubuntu fans deep into the Kool-Aid. All they can offer is a smug pointer to a deprecated hyperlink and crap about how wrong I am to want to be root on my own system in case I screw something up.

Son, I've built and administered more Linux boxes than you've had hot dinners. I've made stage one Gentoo boxes, something I never plan to do again. If I screw something up, I fix it. If there's a huge fuckup, I call Todd... or I simply reinstall. It's not Windows: I don't have to reactivate or shell out money.

Linux continues to grow in popularity, too fast to keep up with Unix's oral tradition of mentorship. Does this mean we have to turn into the Hays Office? Why are fellow geeks trying to guilt me out of the birth right of Unix?

Root is the administrator of a computer in Unix. However there is a little more oompf to it: the keeper of the box is root and root means you could poison the tree as easily as you could prune bad buds. You learn not to be wanton because you feel for the tree, you want it to grow strong and be home to lots of critters. You want people to depend on your creation and thereby honor your craft. If you have no desire for this mothering role, you don't get into system administration. If this deeply appeals to you, you buy a baker's rack because you don't have enough floor space to keep all your servers and test boxes. You do at home what you would at work because,,, well, you can't actually shut a child off when it's been bad and children should not offer you pr0n, the two special features of computers.

Ubuntu is Linux for normal people. I guess us multi-degreed Digital Freemasons need to see the scare statements as yet another secret handshake.

I'm only using this distro because I want to focus on using the machine instead of ministering to its whims. Ubuntu is easy to upgrade and XFCE (a lean but well-built graphical desktop) is a default choice from CD (Xubuntu). it to work out of the box. No matter what, I'll have to futz with something.

The problem with a distributed community is that you can't beat any one person with a baseball bat and make enough of a dent in the problem. I envy the heroes at the end of Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back as they use their lawsuit winnings to travel the country and beat up everyone that dissed them on the Internet.

-tip of the hat to the honorable