SOPA stands for “Stop Online Piracy Act.” It has a related piece of legislation, PIPA, the “Protect Intellectual Property Act,” that does essentially the same thing.

The titles of the bills don’t describe what they would do. They describe the pretext for what the bills will really do:

1. grant sweeping new powers to the U.S. government to censor the Internet
2. grant Big Media the power to automatically shut down Web sites they don’t like, without having to present firm evidence to a court

Simply put, these laws have no place in a society that values freedom of speech.

For more information, I would encourage you to visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They have a one-page summary that is worth your time to read.

Now that the news has sunk in for me, I welcome it. Fourth Edition has its advantages, but it is not without faults, as I have written before. Although I’m annoyed at yet another opportunity to throw out a stack of books and spend a hundred bucks on new ones, I’ve come to regard 4E as the Windows Vista of D&D. Once it’s gone, I think most people will be glad to forget about it.

There is not much information yet about what 5E is going to look like. It was only announced yesterday, for crying out loud. Probably the best source for news related to the new edition is EN World, specifically, their D&D Next page.

Partly out of professional interest as a semi-pro game designer, and partly because I have an active, regular game getting started, I expect I’ll follow the development of this edition more closely than I did for Fourth, and will probably buy and read the books a lot sooner this time around. For now, I’ll just start by reacting to some of the information we do have.

Hope Springs Eternal

I am still at the point where I greet news of a new D&D edition with optimism. I keep thinking, “great, another chance for Wizards of the Coast to finally get it right!” Some may consider that reaction uncharitable, but it’s better than what I bet many of WotC’s other customers are saying.

Some of the words coming out of WotC are encouraging. For example,

“The goal of this project is to develop a universal rules system that takes from the best of every edition and gets at the soul of what D&D is.”

–Mike Mearls, Wizards of the Coast

“Get[ting] at the soul of what D&D is” sounds to me like code for taking a step back from the World of Warcraft influence that’s so apparent in 4E. So that’s good.

I’m a bit more skeptical about the idea of a “universal rules system” — as a designer, I’ve come to believe that the rules of a role-playing game have to be designed to support the concepts and atmosphere the game wants to promote. That’s why Ars Magica has incredibly flexible and robust magic rules, but its combat system is pretty clunky and straightforward; why Call of Cthulhu has pages and pages of rules for how your character can go insane; and so on. A truly generic rules system can’t evoke the unique moods of those games. But that’s not what I think Wizards of the Coast means in this context. While no game system can be all things to everyone, I do think it’s possible for designers to get a grip on the essence of D&D and set down a rule system that captures that essence. It would be “universal” in the sense that, if done right, it should appeal to everyone who likes that essence of D&D.

The Strengths of Each Edition

Mr. Mearls’ stated goal is to “[take] the best from each edition.” I am actually old enough to have read and played each edition of D&D, so here I’ll offer my completely subjective opinion of what was best about each edition.

Fourth Edition: Tactical Options

The real strength of Fourth Edition is that every round, the players always have choices. This is a big deal, and having played Fourth Edition I do not think I would want to go back. Every class has powers it can use at will and every character has more than one of those powers. Having those choices makes the combat portion of the game a lot more fun.

I keep feeling the urge to qualify my praise of Fourth Edition by pointing out its faults, but I’ll resist. Giving players a choice of powers was a revolutionary improvement that drove my choice to adopt it as the edition for my game.

Fourth Edition does a great job of minimizing “down time” and getting the players back into the action. It threw away the concept of Vancian magic (based on the fantasy novels of Jack Vance, which I’ve never read) where wizards “forget” their spells after casting them, with great success. Instead of the spellcasters spending 10 or 20 minutes every couple of hours figuring out what spells to prepare for the day, everyone just heals up and gets going. This means, quite simply, more time for fun at the gaming table.

Another nice thing about Fourth Edition in my opinion is that as characters rise in level, they get better at everything: a character’s level figures into his Armor Class, skill checks, and so on. If D&D is to remain a level-based system, as I think practically everyone expects it should, it’s nice for the character’s level to mean something.

Third Edition: Character Options

Third Edition in my opinion had many strengths, the greatest of which was probably the many possible directions in which to develop a character. At every level, characters get new skill points to spend and usually a new feat or class feature. Multi-classing was available to any character and the rules for it were straightforward and logical. More so than other editions, in Third Edition it was easy to visualize your character’s concept and realize it in mechanical terms. If you wanted an armor-clad dwarf warrior who dabbles in magic and can cast spells in full plate, you could make it. A fighter specialized in the quarterstaff and expert at disarming foes? No problem. More so than other editions, Third Edition was a canvas for the players’ imaginations.

Another of Third Edition’s great strengths was the Open Game License. I think the experiment with open-source roleplaying rules was a roaring success that helped to revitalize the industry. I also think that Wizards’ decision to turn its back on openness is a big factor in the failure of Fourth Edition (that’s right, I said “failure.”) Let’s hope they learn the right lessons from history.

Second Edition: Evolution, not Revolution

Second Edition made a lot of improvements over First Edition. The strength of the edition was that it took a lot of the great ideas from First Edition and made them more systematic and better balanced. A skill system made its first appearance, though it was called by the awkward moniker “nonweapon proficiencies” (a name that rather plainly illustrates the design bias toward combat that is integral to D&D’s legacy). Dragons became tough, instead of being the paper tigers they were in First Edition. In general, Second Edition was better balanced and a good deal easier to play — though it still showed lots of room for improvement.

Second Edition was also when the Forgotten Realms setting really took off. I have never gotten really excited about published game settings — my impulse to create my own is too strong — but a lot of gamers I know, some of whom have excellent taste, love the Realms. If I had to point to a major strength of Second Edition, I think it would be the setting more than the rules.

First Edition: Putting “Advanced” in Dungeons and Dragons!

First Edition AD&D had issues. The rules were complicated and totally arbitrary. At first I was a bit hesitant to name one thing that was really great about First Edition, but then I thought back on the experience of playing that edition. The choice became obvious: the Dungeon Master’s Guide. That book was awesome! Hundreds of pages of dense, small print, with rules and advice on all manner of idiosyncratic topics, it was an opus of amazing breadth. Gary Gygax’s authoritative and unabashedly geeky voice leapt from topic to topic with the energy of a hummingbird, covering subjects as quirky and arcane as the cost to install a new machicolations in your castle to what happens if you mix two magic potions together (the famous Potion Miscibility Table) to what creatures one would encounter in the Pleistocene Epoch to how likely a character is to contract parasites (the Parasitic Infestation Table: I remember it fondly). A lot of the material was, let’s say, “peripheral,” but it suggested so many possibilities. The book was both inspired and inspiring; it was a very far cry from the commercialized, color-illustrated, and basically vacuous content of all later editions of the DM’s Guide. Sure, Gygax’s prose impressed me a lot more when I was ten than it probably would now that I’m past forty (I don’t want to look back at it and spoil the memory). If a new edition of D&D can capture a quarter of the enthusiasm of that seminal work of role-playing, I will gladly embrace it and buy copies for my friends.

Basic, Expert, and All That

I never really played a lot of the non-Advanced version of D&D: I had the blue-book version of Basic D&D but moved on to Advanced long before the Expert boxed set was published. There is something to be said for Basic D&D (and the later Rules Cyclopedia), though: imagine a version of D&D where all the rules fit into one book, and you can get started playing for under $50. I think it would be great if the next version of D&D had a simple, low-cost way to get started with the basics. Given that tabletop gaming today faces fierce competition from video games and MMO’s as well as collectible-card games, it seems like a good idea to lower the amount of money, time, and commitment it takes to play D&D for the first time.

Original D&D: Classic Dungeon Crawling

In comparison to Third and Fourth Editions, the original tan books do not look like much. The mechanics were certainly a diamond in the rough, to put it politely. I think the original version of Dungeons and Dragons had a couple of things going for it, though, that the designers of the next edition would do well to consider. First, it was meant to be a starting point, not a comprehensive set of rules to cover all possible situations. Dungeon Masters were expected to add their own monsters and treasures and to make up rules on the fly. A bit of that spirit would be a refreshing change from 4E in particular, where the publisher tries to spoon-feed every new idea to the players and the game seems engineered to discourage innovation. Related to this is the fact that in the early days, D&D encouraged at least a few third-party publishers. Judges’ Guild produced some high-quality supplements, including the famous City State of the Invincible Overlord.

In short, the strengths of the original tan booklets of D&D, aside from the fact that they basically pioneered role-playing games and revolutionized popular culture, were that they were simple, open, and extensible. It would be great if the next D&D could say the same.

What is Phishing?

Simply put, phishing is a form of fraud where someone tries trick you into disclosing secret information (such as your credit card number) by posing as someone you trust (such as your credit card company). In fact, phishing is a form of wire fraud, plain and simple. In my opinion it is unfortunate that the word “phishing” even exists. It’s a gratuitous neologism that, because of its cutesy spelling, potentially reads as something more innocuous than it actually is.

In fact, phishing is the most common form of identity “theft.” It’s rampant on the Internet. And you are a target.

How to Protect Yourself

You should also know better than to open a link in an e-mail message.

The whole point of phishing is that it’s trying to trick you. Contrary to what some know-it-alls might say, it is not easy to defend yourself against.

1. Don’t click on a link in an e-mail message, even if the message looks legitimate. Unfortunately this is the hardest rule to follow. Even the best of us forget. It’s easy to laugh off the silly Nigerian money-laundering scam but much harder to remember the rule when the message looks like it comes from your telephone company or a relative. And, like the hapless adventurer who picked up the Duck of Doom, our first mistake may have severe repercussions. Phishing e-mails take you to Web sites that may look legitimate, but actually capture your login and/or financial information for purposes of identity theft.
2. Use software to help you follow rule #1. As I mentioned in my previous post, you really need anti-virus software anyway. You can probably get it free of charge from your Internet service provider so there’s no excuse. Most “anti-virus” software these days is a multi-faceted suite of defenses that also includes some protection against phishing.
3. Do not trust your own judgment to identify fraudulent messages. Sooner or later, you’ll be tired or distracted and you’ll slip up. I used to take pride in my ability to spot a scam, and I almost got burned today. Only my anti-virus software saved me. If you believe you have superhuman powers and will never be fooled, please carefully read the fairly brief academic paper, Why Phishing Works.

My Lesson in Humility

Today is the day when, after years of vigilance, I finally forgot Rule #1 (don’t click on links in an e-mail message). I would have got burned if not for my anti-virus software.

I received a reasonably official-looking message that claimed to be from my Internet service provider, Comcast:

This message looks somewhat credible, but it's a fake. There are some warning signs but I missed them this time.

On a good day, I think I could have spotted this as a scam. There were a few warning signs:

Like many fraudulent messages, this one contained some spelling errors. Today, the crooks got lucky: I looked right past the errors and did what one should never do. God help me, I clicked the link.

Fortunately for me, my judgment was not the only thing standing between me and the outlaw gang that organized this sting. My anti-virus software kicked in and raised a great big red flag, just like it should:

My anti-virus software was more alert than I was, today.

The Take-Away Message

What I take away from this is that the scholars who wrote Why Phishing Works were right:

We also found that some visual deception attacks can fool even the most sophisticated users.

As in all matters of computer security, the odds are stacked in favor of the attacker. They can send a thousand fake e-mails that you easily spot, and then the thousand-and-first comes along and manages to trick you. You need anti-virus software to be there to catch you when your judgment finally does fail.

Since no software is perfect, it would be an epic mistake to rely entirely on your anti-virus program to protect you 100% of the time. Therefore, keep doing what the experts tell you to do: stay alert, and don’t click on e-mail links.

One of the remaining annoyances though is that even though I’ve been pretty careful about what I install on my PC, a certain amount of crapware has crept onto the machine. Crapware is stuff you, the computer user (or “owner” as I like to call myself) never asked for, don’t care about, and don’t want to use, but none the less is installed “for” you when you install something you did want, like a driver for a new piece of hardware. I am not talking about malware here; crapware is harmless but it’s annoying because it slows down the machine. I also have concerns that it’s spying on me a bit, sending “market research” data back to the mother ship. Besides, since I think of myself as the owner of my computer, anything I didn’t explicitly decide I want on my machine has no right to be there.

The particular piece of crapware that is on my nerves today is the help program that came with my Logitech webcam. I am not really opposed to having the webcam help program installed on my machine. What bothers me is that Logitech has decided that the help program needs to start every time I log into my computer. This post documents my quest to make it stop.

Auto-Run Programs

In Windows 7, programs can be configured to start automatically when the computer starts or when a user logs in. Loosely speaking, programs that start automatically when the computer boots are called services and those that starts when a user logs in are called, in the degraded patois that passes for technical English these days, autoruns. “Autorun” is, apparently, considered a noun. I hate that. How do we get from the verb “run” and the adverb “auto(matically)” to a noun? By means of a failing public education system, that’s how! The end result sounds like a particularly virulent form of gastro-intestinal distress: “I’ve got the autoruns.”

I will use the word “auto-run” as an adjective because I just can’t stomach using it as a noun.

Vendors have a penchant for installing their crapware as auto-run programs, either because they fervently believe that their crapware is central to the user’s computing experience and life without it would hardly be worth living, or, more likely, they want their brand name in the user’s face as often as possible for as long as possible. It’s a bit like the “free” advertising-supported PC of the late 1990′s, only without the free equipment.

Auto-run programs used to be called “startup programs” (in days when gramatical standards were a bit higher) and they were controlled via the Start Menu. This seems no longer to be the case.

Good and Bad Auto-run Program

I would first point out that there are some programs that I definitely want to run every time I log in. Norton Internet Security falls into that category. I can see people might want to always start an e-mail program or even Skype or a chat program.

However, every program that starts automatically takes some time to start. If you have too many of them it makes the log-in process slow. If you have way too many, it hogs memory and CPU power, slowing down your ability to run other programs. What I find disturbing is that increasingly, software vendors foist their crapware on us as auto-run programs for whatever reasons — and I doubt that out benefit figures prominently among those reasons.

My point is that you, the owner, should solely make the decision of what programs do and do not run automatically.

Getting Started on Controlling Auto-Run Programs

To start my quest, I typed “disable startup program” into Windows Help. Did I mention that Windows 7 Help is pretty cool? It allows you to type strings and then returns results whose relevance ranges from approximate to comically off-target. It’s like a search engine, but for help. The reason I used “startup program” as a search term is that is what auto-run programs used to be called in past version of windows.

Interestingly, Windows 7′s reply to my query was:

You can improve your computer’s performance by preventing unnecessary programs from running automatically when Windows starts. For information about tools that you can use to do this, go to the Microsoft website.

That page is actually pretty interesting: it wants me to download and install a special program that promises to help me get rid of unwanted autoruns. This sounds a lot like fighting crapware with crapware. I was skeptical, but decided play along. And it turns out the name of this “good” crapware is Autoruns. That’s right: I am going to be giving myself the autoruns!

What Autoruns Reveals

So I downloaded and unzipped the autoruns program. Just to make things confusing, “autoruns” is itself not and auto-run program: it’s a regular program you run in the usual way (by clicking), that tells you about auto-run programs.

If you are following along, you can unzip that file to any destination you want; I just stuck it in my Downloads folder for the time being. Then open the destination folder, right-click on autoruns.exe, and choose “Run as administrator.” You can run it as a regular user, but to actually remove auto-run programs (I still can’t bring myself to say it like they want me to) you’ll need administrator privileges so you might as well start out that way.

This is the list of auto-run programs that Autoruns revealed. I feel dirty.

Here’s a screenshot of what autoruns showed running on my machine. There are a lot of auto-run programs! If you try this on your machine and you see a lot of stuff you can’t identify, don’t worry: I don’t understand it either. Windows, in any version, is a big, complicated beast, and even professional Windows technicians don’t understand all of it.

Safely Removing Auto-Run Programs

Autoruns makes is pretty easy to remove auto-run programs in a way that you’ll be able to undo later. There is a check box next to each entry. Just uncheck that, without removing the entry. Danger: it does not look like autoruns has the ability to add auto-run programs, only remove them, so if you actually delete an item from the list you will not be easily able to get it back! You’d have to guess whatever software package included the deleted program(s) and re-install that.

Chances are, if you are going through this exercise you already you have in mind one or two auto-run programs of which you’d like to rid yourself. Another good cue is to look at the “Publisher” column in the autoruns display: generally things published by hardware vendors (such as the maker of your sound card or webcam) are good candidates for disablement. It is unlikely you will accidentally disable the driver because drivers aren’t auto-run programs: they need to start when the computer boots, not when a user logs in. The worst that could happen is you might accidentally turn off some automatic feature that you really do want, like the ability to play a music CD automatically when it is inserted. I am inclined to believe that most of that type of functionality is handled by Windows itself, and most auto-run programs provided by the vendor are superfluous and perhaps redundant.

Disabling a program in autoruns doesn’t stop it from running, it only stops it from starting the next time you log in. To actually stop an auto-run program that is currently running, you have two options:

1. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and remove the program from the Task Manager. This may seem a bit daunting at first but you can’t mess anything up permanently; the worst that will happen is that your computer will be out of whack until you restart it.
2. Wait till you’re done editing in autoruns, log out, and log back in (or just restart your computer)

Check that everything is working normally and if it’s not, re-run autoruns and re-enable some of those programs you unchecked.

Lately I’ve been playing two tabletop RPGs, which partially accounts for the lack of blog posts in about three months. One of my games is, of course, Ars Magica, and the other is the (relatively) new Space 1889: Rad Sands setting for Savage Worlds.

I find that over the past three or four years my tastes in gaming have changed quite a bit. I still love Ars Magica of course, but (as I’ve written previously) increasingly I am interested in games where the rules stay out of the way and the players can focus on the story and on role-playing. So Savage Worlds, with its lightweight core rule book (paperback, 160 pages, $9.95 retail), was just the thing to try.

Overall I am very satisfied with the Savage Worlds system. It’s lean, straightforward, and includes features, such as Edges and Hindrances for characters, that encourage role-playing. Character creation was pretty quick and I was able to get my new group of five players to create characters and learn the basics within a couple of hours.

So why is it that, now four sessions into this game, we are still tripping over the combat system?

Simple Does Not Mean Easy

The Savage Worlds rules take a pretty minimalistic approach to resolving most tasks: your character sheet tells you what kind of die you get to roll, you roll it, and if you get a 4 or better, you succeed. If you get an 8 or better, you succeed extra well, and so on. I think the rule book only spends about twice as many words as that to describe the basic mechanics.

As with most games, combat gets its own chapter. Players expect this. Frankly if you are going to use combat rules at all then I expect those rules to cover the many common contingencies one might run into, such as using improvised weapons or trying to fight in the dark. Satisfying that expectation pretty much means that the combat rules are a beefy chapter in that skinny rule book. This is all well and good. The funny thing is, we weren’t using the various esoteric options, hanging upside down from a cliff edge while firing full auto at a moving target and such. We were pretty much running vanilla melees and firefights.

I decided to create a flow chart to help myself and my players learn the decisions involved when playing a battle. It turns out, there are a lot of them! This chart basically covers a single attack, which every player makes every turn, and it’s simplified — most of the optional rules like called shots and so forth are left off. They wouldn’t fit.

Now that I have the chart in front of me, I see why we were having trouble. More so than other games, there are a lot of decisions that get made every round. Now from a playability point of view, decisions are fun. Individually those decisions are all pretty simple. They’re straightforward and quick to make. What takes a bit longer is getting a handle on how those decisions feed into one another and what happens next after the outcome of an earlier die roll. I think this flowchart is really going to help us.

It would be an interesting exercise to make a similar chart for another game, like D&D. But for D&D (Fourth Edition at least) the chart would have to be very abstract, something like “decide what power to use, find your DC, make your attack, modify your roll up the wazoo, and then if it worked read the effects of your power to see what happens.” And when you boil it down to those terms, D&D combat sounds pretty boring: endless variations on the same theme. That is of course less than half the story, because deciding what power to use at a given moment (based on the details of how it works) is where the fun of D&D lies.

So both Savage Worlds and D&D have fun combat systems but they approach it in totally different ways. D&D has a simple pattern that players can re-use in endless variations of different powers; Savage Worlds has a more complex system with lots of little decisions here and there that add up to a deceptively large amount of player control. But I do have to say, D&D combat is easier to learn.

SavageWorldsCombatFlowChart.pdf

SavageWorldsCombatFlowChart.odg

The trouble with Windows Search is that it can only search certain kinds of documents. Not too long ago I spent more money than I care to admit on a bunch of PDFs for Ars Magica; I already owned most of those books in hard copy but the corpus of material for that game has grown so large, and is scattered across so many books, that I don’t have the time or the patience to flip through all the possible books that might contain an obscure rule. (This is compounded by the publisher’s choice not to include an index in most of the recent books, but that’s another rant.) I thought that with the electronic rule books, that problem would be solved. Imagine my disappointment when I typed “magus” (the word for wizards in Ars Magica) and got no results!

It turns out, Windows Search doesn’t work on PDF documents, only MS Office documents and plain-text files. At least, not out of the box. But it is easy to add that capability.

The Technical FAQ for Windows Search contains the answer, and it is easy enough to find on Google — once the possibility comes to mind.

Windows Search can handle the file formats Microsoft controls, plus ASCII text. PDF is a proprietary file format, although there are free programs that can read and produce it. Ergo, there are licensing restrictions on who can include what PDF-related functionality in their software. (As an aside, this is why proprietary standards are annoying and harmful; they stop people from doing things that would obviously be useful.) If I had to guess, it may have been licensing reasons that stopped Microsoft from including PDF functionality in Windows’ search feature.

Windows Search is designed to be extensible, though. Software vendors can write a drop-in component called an “IFilter” that users can install, and then Windows Search will be able to process a new file format. This is pretty similar to the idea of a browser plug-in like we use to play Flash video or view PDFs in a Web browser, though instead of plugging into the browser it plugs into the Windows Search software. (Why Microsoft didn’t just call it a Search plug-in is beyond me.)

An IFilter for PDF documents is available from either Adobe or Foxit. You only need one of the two, so take your pick. I downloaded the Adobe version and voilà! I can find the word “magus” in that big folder full of e-books I just bought.

Windows Search can find text inside PDF documents like these e-books, if you download and install the right IFilter.

Merlin decided to stand in as Dungeon Master for our last D&D game.

At our last D&D game, Merlin decided he had been a spectator long enough and got directly involved in the game. He is quite the copycat. It’s a pity I couldn’t have snapped this picture a half-second earlier, when he was sitting down behind the screen and looking directly at the camera.

Two orcs are getting blasted by Todd's wizard using a 3x3 area effect: probably Thunderwave

Playing D&D 4E pretty much requires the use of tabletop miniatures (or some equivalent, like cardstock counters). During one of the early sessions of our current campaign, I realized that the wizards in particular were using a lot of area effects. Probably that’s because wizards have access to first-level powers that can be used at will.

I found that fussing over where exactly to place these area effects was slowing down the flow of play. So I went to a craft store and bought some pipe cleaners and made a few simple outlines of 3″x3″ and 5″x5″ areas. In Fourth Edition, all area effects are square, so you really need only a couple of different sizes.

These work amazingly well. Now every time one of the wizards casts a spell, his player plunks down the pipe-cleaner outline and we can all tell at a glance which monsters are going to have a bad day.

Warning: Apparently these carefully shaped pipe cleaners are the best cat toys ever according to my cat Merlin. So if you leave your pipe-cleaner templates unattended on the table, and you have a cat, you can expect to find them the next day, under the couch, crusted in dried cat spit and mangled into postmodern art. The one in this photo is all kinked because it has been resurrected from just such a fate.

A couple of years ago I bought an Inspiron 1210 laptop (also known as “Inspiron mini 12″) from Dell. It’s a nice, lightweight laptop with a 12-inch screen. Interestingly, it has an Intel Atom processor, which is a 32-bit dual-core chip. It’s probably the last 32-bit general-purpose computer I will ever buy; all processors are 64-bit these days except for embedded processors on phones, toasters, set-top boxes, and the like.

At the time I bought it, Dell was shipping that model with Ubuntu Linux installed. I was looking for an inexpensive laptop for use at the gaming table, mostly to keep my notes and to run RPTools. My little Dell seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Initially, I was very happy with it.

Fast forward to late 2010, when I was assigned to give a presentation to my cloud computing class (I was a student, not the instructor). Like any good free software enthusiast, I made my presentation using OpenOffice (now LibreOffice) on my desktop PC at home. When I loaded the presentation onto my Dell mini, it wouldn’t open because it was created with a newer version of OpenOffice than I had used to create the presentation. “No problem!” I thought. “I’ll just update my version of OpenOffice.” That’s where the trouble began.

Linux Version on the Dell Mini

The Dell Inspiron mini shipped with a Linux variant called the “Dell remix” based on Ubuntu 8.04. (This is not to be confused with the current Linux remix Dell is using for netbooks and handhelds, called Moblin.) The main problem with the Dell remix is that it had a specially-modified version of the normal Update Manager that could only talk to Dell’s servers. That is excusable in a way, since the Inspiron needs an oodle of proprietary device drivers and the users needed some way to get those. What’s inexcusable is that Dell quietly withdrew support for the Dell (Ubuntu) remix some time in 2010; I can’t be sure because they never announced they were dropping support, and most of the documentation seems to have gone down the memory hole.

What this means is that I had a Linux computer that could only get updates from Dell’s servers, and Dell’s servers were permanently offline. So, no new versions of applications like OpenOffice for me. No security updates, either. Thanks a lot, Dell.

Needless to say, this treatment from Dell has irrevocably altered my perception of the company and its service. “Don’t buy from Dell” is my new mantra. And I didn’t; the new desktop I bought last year was from PCs for Everyone. It works great, and best of all, PCs for Everyone has never screwed me over. Thanks again, Dell.

Installing Linux 10.10

Since Dell left me with no upgrade path, the only thing for it was to wipe the hard drive and install a real version of Linux. This is not as easy as it sounds because the Inspiron mini 12 doesn’t have a built-in DVD or CD drive.

There are a couple of ways to get past this. For me it was easy; I had bought an external DVD drive that connects via a USB cable. When connected, that drive is bootable, so I could just pop in a DVD and boot and install from that. If you don’t have a DVD drive, you might want to look into trying to boot from a USB thumb drive. Since I haven’t tried that myself, I won’t try to explain how to do that.

Be sure the Linux version you install is for 32-bit machines. All the Inspiron minis were 32-bit when I bought mine, though this may have changed by now. Dell is still making machines with the “mini” label.

Drivers

Installation went smoothly enough but right away I noticed the machine was locking up within a few minutes of starting. This is due to the fact that Dell builds their laptops using a lot of proprietary hardware, for which free (as in freedom) drivers are not available, at least not from the main Ubuntu download site.

Graphics Driver

The problem was the GPU, which is an Intel GMA 500. It took quite a bit of digging to find a solution to this: finally I tracked down this excellent forum post that explains everything. Essentially you need to install some firmware packages and manually edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. See the post for details; I don’t want to reiterate it here for fear of losing some important detail in the transcription.

Once I followed those instructions, my lock-up problem went away.

Wireless Driver

Which brings me to the wireless driver. I’ve heard it said that Dell is quite inconsistent with what wireless hardware it ships with each computer, and even two computers with the same model number might have very different wireless chip sets. I can kind of understand that; Dell’s supply chain is large and complex and the component vendors’ upgrade cycle is not necessarily synchronized to theirs. I understand it; I don’t have to like it.

What this means is the fix for me may not necessarily work for you.

The model number of the wireless card is listed on a label on the underside of the laptop, like this:

The wireless networking card's specifications are on the lower-left label on the underside of the Dell mini laptop.

The model number should be at the very top of this label. For me, it’s “Broadcom BCM94312MCG”. Wire that down, because you’re going to need it.

Next, see whether Ubuntu has a proprietary driver for your wireless card. This is a bit of a catch-22 because you need an Internet connection to download the driver, and you need the driver to connect to a wireless access point. So, you’ll have to connect to the Internet the old-fashioned way, with a Ethernet cable (more properly known as a Category 5 or CAT-5 cable, though technically CAT-6 should work too).

Once you’re online, go the main menu on the desktop and select System -> Administration -> Additional Drivers. This will take a moment to scan your hardware and search online for a driver that fits. You should see one or two drivers available. Choose the one that best fits your driver’s model number, select it, and click “Activate.”

If you don’t see an exact match, you can perhaps make an educated guess based on the model number. For me, there was no exact match for my model number, but the description of the “Broadcom STA wireless driver” listed a bunch of model numbers so I figured it might be close enough. Seems to work fine.

Danger! Look before you download!

CAUTION: if you just Google for keywords like “Linux driver {your model number}” you are very likely to come upon a malware site! There are shady characters who set up fake “freeware” sites to trick people into installing Bad Things on their computers. I found a bunch of ‘em, the first time I ran a quick search looking for an exact driver. I recommend you first use trial and error to see if a driver from the Ubuntu “Additional Drivers” installer will work, and if that fails, try asking in a reputable discussion forum such as Ubuntu Forums.