10. You have Dropbox, Ubuntu One, or some other free file hosting service and no longer need to ferry files by sneakernet.

9. You have a laptop, smart phone, or other portable computer. Some geeks take pride in running full operating systems off of thumb sticks. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.

8. You have a portable music player. While you could install CoolPlayer+ and other portable apps onto your USB drive, your iPod already functions as one, with a built-in player.

7. You have an ereader device or app. PDFs can go on USB drives, but what better way to enjoy them than on a Kindle or iPad?

6. You can’t remember what a gigabyte is. Some people deal in terabytes now. Anything less is pitiful; how else would you store your digital movie collection?

5. USB transfer is too slow for your needs. Another endorsement for Dropbox: It uploads and downloads unusually quickly for a free service.

4. WiFi + Shared folders / DropCopy / netcat.

3. BD-RE.

2. Viruses, privacy, it’s so easy to lose that tiny thing, where oh where did I put it last?

1. The Internet, or as hipsters say, “the cloud”.

The USB protocol is here to stay, in some form or other. It’s tremendously convenient to be able to connect various and sundry devices through the same port. But USB flash drives can only lose as cloud storage space becomes cheap as free and the Internet becomes ubiquitous.

The problem isn’t solved there. Plastic knives probably make it through X-rays undetected. Furthermore, TSA dramatically features, as only security theater can, the X-ray screens that TSA officials use to scan passengers. Patience and a few cheap flights could help a misanthrope test whether his weapons of choice are visible on screen. A better setup would hide the screens behind curtains, like old photographers, or to fork out the cash for the laptop privacy filters advertised inside in-flight magazines.

I use Boot Camp and rEFIt to dual boot between Mac OS X and Windows 7. I recently added Ubuntu to the mix. But rEFIt has trouble synchronizing the GPT and MBR records, and as result, Mac OS X and Ubuntu boot fine, but Windows boot fails with the message:

Windows failed to start.

ENTER=Continue ESC=Exit

Ubuntu’s GRUB overwrote the Windows boot loader, corrupted the GPT-MBR tables, and crashed the GUI every ten minutes. Now I remember why I used to install Ubuntu in a VMware virtual machine. It’s less hassle. I decided to uninstall Ubuntu, fix GPT-MBR for rEFIt, and fix the Windows MBR.

It’s worth trying to sync GPT one last time. Install gptsync, either with Synaptic/apt-get, or if you’re like me and Ubuntu fails to recognized either of your network interfaces, by manual download. Assuming you have only one hard drive, you will target /dev/sda.

$ sudo gptsync /dev/sda
Status: Analysis inconclusive, will not touch this disk.
Error: Not Found returned from gptsync.efi

Rats, that’s the same error rEFIt displays. We might as well use GParted to remove Ubuntu.

You’ll find GParted under System -> Administration -> GParted. After a few minutes, GParted will identify the partitions. If you decide to remove Ubuntu but keep Mac OS X and Windows, you’ll want to delete the ext4 partition then grow Windows to the remaining free space. Don’t forget to apply the changes.

The MBR still needs to be fixed. If you have a Windows or FreeDOS CD handy, you can reboot, use Repair mode, and run fixmbr. I don’t know whether FreeDOS comes with fixmbr, the website’s downright confusing. If you don’t have some sort of livecd with fixmbr, I recommend the ms-sys Ubuntu package. I’ve used it to remove Ubuntu and restore the Windows bootloader on two computers in the last week.

$ sudo ms-sys -m /dev/sda

Then reboot, use rEFIt to sync the GPT-MBR tables, and enjoy Mac OS X and Windows again. In the future, I’ll stick to virtual machines for Linux. Partitioning is not worth the trouble.

And yet, in late December 2011, Ubuntu, Linux’s premier desktop environment, still has fatal flaws.

• The latest version, 11.10, exhibits glaring bugs such as random system freezes.
• 10.04 lacks crucial drivers, including WiFi and Ethernet drivers for ASUS computers, and WiFi drivers for MacBooks.
• Many Ubuntu packages (e.g. clisp) are out of date.
• By default, vi can’t handle arrow keys.
• Audio is often quiet/muted.
• One of the first things a user sees in a fresh installation is an annoyingly long list of system updates.
• It’s unclear whether users should install software with Synaptic, apt-get, aptitude, ppa, or build from source. This is worsened with aptitude competing with specialized package managers such as RubyGems.
• Grub has way too many menu items. We haven’t needed RAM tests since… ever.
• GParted lists partitions in terms of MB instead of GB.
• Ubuntu found zero proprietary drivers for an ASUS A35E. ??

Individually, these problems are fairly Googlable/solvable. However, the aggregate effort required to configure a decent Ubuntu installation is a daunting task. It’s hard to convince nontechnical friends, or even yourself, of the usefulness of Linux. Windows is suboptimal and Mac OS X isn’t all that it could be (try managing packages between Fink, MacPorts, and Homebrew), but for many people, the dollars paid are worth the endless hours saved: Windows and Mac OS X provide basic, reliable functionality. NICs work, speakers work, finding and installing apps is a cinch.

Ubuntu will get there, and we can all save a buck once it happens, but for now I treat Ubuntu the same way I treat Haiku. They’re experiments, worth checking in on every six months, but not worth adopting for everyone.

If you’re lucky enough for Ubuntu to perfectly suit your needs (it really does have a lot of built-in drivers), then enjoy it. If not, maybe hook up an Ethernet cable and check for proprietary hardware drivers. If that doesn’t work, you might as well switch to Gentoo for all the configuring you’ll be doing. Otherwise, I recommend Mac OS X. It’s an expensive FreeBSD clone that seems to always have the right drivers for the hardware. It’s something about how Apple makes the software for its own hardware. Hmm…

Here’s a thought: Bollocks everything but a terminal, a web browser, a media player, a pack of every free/libre media codec known to man, and a pack of every free/libre Linux ethernet and WiFi driver known to man. That way, users can watch a movie while Linux silently installs relevant drivers and system updates.