In the last post I listed a series of websites for the different various Linux distros. If you’ve never used Linux before and want to use it then I’d recommend Linux Mint because it’s made for beginners. Unfortunately installing Linux is both easy and hard.

It’s easy if you have some technical skills and it’s almost effortless if you’ve installed Linux before, but it’s not possible to list out what buttons to press, because each computer model has a slightly different way of installing Linux.

There’s simply no way to write a single article detailing how to deal with every possible thing that might come up purely because there are too many different models of computers out there. The steps tend to be nearly identical for each one, but it will take some technical skills to do this.

Also it’s possible to screw things up in such a way that you can’t boot up your computer, but Linux Mint tries to make it harder to do that.

You may want to do this on an old laptop that doesn’t contain any files that you care about.

In order to install Linux you’ll need to download an ISO file from the website for whichever one you choose.

The next step is to download and install this free software program: https://rufus.ie/en_US/

Then plug in a USB stick into your computer. All the files will be wiped from this USB stick, so make sure it doesn’t contain anything important.

If you want to use Linux alongside Windows then you should also defragment your hard drive, and if you’re low on disk space then you may want to back up and/or delete any large unwanted files from your computer.

Next use Rufus to burn the ISO image to the USB stick.

Next reboot your computer with the USB stick still in. If you’re on a laptop then make sure that your computer is fully charged and plugged in. If the power goes out during the installation process then it might break Windows and/or Linux.

Now comes the hardest part. It used to be as simple as simple as rebooting with the USB stick in your computer for every computer, but computer companies changed the default settings to boot to Windows instead.

If your computer doesn’t automatically boot to Linux then reboot again, and press F12 and then select the USB stick to boot from. Some computers may require you to press F2 and go into some settings to tell it to boot from USB, others might have you press some other button.

Most computers will flash the logo of the company that made the computer at boot up and have a message saying which button to press to go into settings or which one to press to bring up a menu of options for things to boot from. You want it to boot from the USB drive, and not the internal hard drive.

Once you’re in these settings you can’t use the mouse. You’ll need to move around with only the keyboard. You might want to disable quick boot, and secure boot, and you might want to change the boot priority so that USB devices are booted to first.

Once you’ve booted up to Linux most distros (including Linux Mint) will have an interactive prompt that will guide you through how to install it.

If you want to keep Windows alongside Linux then that’s called “dual booting”, and you’ll need to tell Linux to do that at some point in the installation process. Many distros will by default erase Windows and install over it, so you’ll need to keep an eye open for when it asks you how to install it.

Once you’ve done that you should check out this free pdf book: http://linuxclass.heinz.cmu.edu/doc/tlcl.pdf which will teach you how to use it better.

In the previous post I talked about vendor lock-in. Computers are taking over more and more of our daily lives, and this trend of computers controlling more of the world is not likely to come to a stop any time soon.

Soon enough cybernetics might start to become a reality. We may someday soon be able to upgrade ourselves as we can upgrade our machines. In such a world vendor lock-in would mean that you don’t own parts of your own body. We can’t allow ourselves to be chained to the likes of Microsoft. We can’t allow our society to remain locked in to the security disaster that Windows so fundamentally is.

At some point you have to ask yourself:
Do you want to be free?

Do you want to take back control? If so then Linux is for you.
Linux is an alternative to Windows and Mac. It’s the official unofficial third option that nobody talks about. Linux is different from Mac and Windows not just because it’s a different product, but because it’s built in a different way.

Linux wasn’t written by a single corporation. Linux was written by many different organizations and individuals from all around the world. Anyone can contribute code to the Linux kernel to add new features or fix bugs in it, and countless people already have.

If you don’t trust corporations then Linux is for you.

Linux is designed to be customizable. While other inferior operating systems let you change the background, Linux lets you decide whether or not there even is a background, or if there’s just a command line. With Linux you can change nearly anything about the system. You can change the desktop to have any kind of theme. You can tell it whether or not to update automatically, whether or not it should have one clipboard or many, whether or not all your files should be encrypted, and even whether or not it can run Windows programs.

If you want customizability then Linux is for you.

Linux respects your privacy. The kernel can’t contain code that spies on you because anyone who would add such code is legally required to make the instructions to it publicly available, and everyone would be able to see the code that spies on you and anyone could make a fork of the project that doesn’t spy on you.

If you want privacy then Linux is for you.

Unlike Windows, Linux is designed with security in mind. Whenever a security hole is discovered it is quickly patched up, and an update is released that makes the system more secure for everyone.

Microsoft Windows has security holes in it that everyone has known about for decades which Microsoft has done nothing to fix. With Linux people from all around the world are able to inspect the code and find any security holes, and then file a bug report which quickly gets handled, or even fix it themselves and send the security patch
to the Linux foundation.

If you want security then Linux is for you.

Linux isn’t just one product. There are many variations of Linux that you can choose from. You can go with Linux Mint if you want something that’s simple, Gentoo Linux if you want something that’s really advanced, Debian Linux if you want something that’s stable, Arch Linux if you want something that’s on the cutting edge, Red Hat Linux if you want something for corporate needs, or any number of other options.
Each of them is a variation on the same thing, and each of them is compatible with each other while still offering variety.

If you want choices then Linux is for you.

Linux has been optimized over decades by talented people from all around the world so that it can run on anything and everything in a way that’s fast, and efficient.
Linux is capable of running on everything from the tiny computer chip in your microwave oven all the way up to the super computers that google uses for their search engine.
From digital wrist watches to servers to super computers, from micro chips to self driving cars, from laptops to airplane autopilots, Linux runs them all behind the scenes and keeps the digital world safe and secure.

If you want speed and efficiency then Linux is for you.

And now, with help from Valve Software, Linux is gaining the ability to run an increasingly large number of video games. Someday soon Linux may be the definitive choice for video games.
The truth is that Linux is for everyone.

If you want to be free, then Linux is for you.

 

“If you can’t explain it to a six year old then you don’t really understand it.”

-Albert Einstein

What’s the worst term in your typical end user license agreement? Is it that you can’t sue the company that sold you the program? That they can remotely shut it down at any time for any reason? Is it that you sold your soul to them? No. The worst term in any EULA is the one that seems the most innocent. That you can’t reverse engineer the program.

Hatsune Miku is a scam. Here’s how the scam works.

A computer program is just a series of instructions that a computer follows.
It’s basically just commands that tell the computer what to do.

A file is just a bunch of ones and zeros that is meant to
represent information.

Let’s take a look at some real world examples of this in action:
Imagine that you own a small business. As a business owner you have a lot of documents you need to keep. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you are, you need to keep records of things.

So let’s imagine that you chose to use Microsoft Word to write those documents. Microsoft word is a computer program. It’s just a set of instructions that the machine follows. When you save your document that program follows instructions that tells it how to turn the text you’ve entered into the ones and zeros that go into a file.

When you open that file with word later on there’s another section of the instructions in Word that tells it how to translate the ones and zeros from the file into the document you see on your screen. Those instructions that make up the program are proprietary. You aren’t allowed to know what those instructions are.

That’s just how it’s licensed. As a result nobody knows how to translate word files into documents except Microsoft. So if you’ve got hundreds or thousands of documents in Word then you can’t go through and open each of them up and copy and paste the text into another word editor. That’s just not practical.

You need a word editor from another competitor that can be compatible with Microsoft word documents, but Microsoft tried to make that impossible by keeping the code for processing word documents a secret.

This is the main strategy of Microsoft. It’s called vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in is when the vendor, in this example Microsoft, sells you a product that you become artificially reliant on, which means you’re locked in to them. This is very common in the software world. Nearly every proprietary program you’ve ever used does this. It’s gotten so bad that many people reading this article might be thinking:

“So what if you can’t open word documents in anything but Microsoft Word? It’s a word document. It’s only reasonable that you can’t open it with anything else.” But that’s not how things have to be. The point of vendor lock-in is to make it so that the vendor is not held very accountable to their customers.

That’s what vocaloid does. It’s designed so that you can’t open up vocaloid project files with anything other than vocaloid.

There is another way. There’s free software.

 

When people speak of free software, they’re referring to freedom, not price.

Free software is software that is licensed in such a way that you are legally allowed, and even encouraged to look at the instructions that make up that free computer program. Companies that write and distribute free software are held more accountable to their customers because if their customers find a bug in the product,
or want a new feature added they can send in a bug report and/or feature request, or they can hire a programmer to fix that bug and/or add that feature.

To prevent the customer from switching over to the modified
product the people who wrote the software have to care about their users.

How you make money off of free software when anyone can legally modify it, and give it away for free is really another story for another time, but there are ways for programmers to get payed while still being held more accountable to their users.

They often don’t get payed as much, but that’s partly because it’s hard to compete with vendor lock-in. Free software projects tend to be underfunded, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If there was a demand for vocaloid to be free software then it might become even more popular than it currently is.

It breaks my heart when I see people saying things like “Oh, Vocaloid is so great”
“Oh, it changed my life.”
“Oh, I’m crying every time I watch a vocaloid concert.”
“Oh, I wish Miku were real and Noah wasn’t.”

It’s okay to love an idea but not condone a dishonest business practice, because this is a corporation. They don’t care about anything other than profits. This whole community looks like a bunch of Apple fanboys if Apple fanboys were an actual cult. It’s a product that is created and controlled by a single corporation, but when a thing becomes free software it becomes something more than that. It becomes a thing that is owned and controlled by multiple corporations and a community. It becomes something that can be permanently embedded into the digital world.

The future is free.