January 2001. I'd completed my service as a Peace Corps volunteer in the dry
mountains north of Estelí a year previous, and returned to Nicaragua from a
brief shopping trip to the States with a Compaq laptop running Windows 98 SE, a
12 string guitar, and a whole lot of enthusiasm for a modern lifestyle in
Nicaragua's unassuming capital. The Internet had become huge in the quiet
years I'd spent in the mountains. I'd been essentially glad to give technology
- computers, specifically - a miss in all that time, but after such a
prolongued drought of information and intellectual stimulation I was thrilled
to be able to connect to the Internet and feel my horizons expand.
My experiment with Windows lasted exactly one year. I missed out on most
viruses and trojans by religiously paying attention to security warnings and
keeping my anti-virus definitions up to date (to any Peace Corps volunteer
accustomed to taking malaria medicine this is second nature), but Windows gave
me trouble nonetheless - weird crashes, occasional trouble connecting to the
cable modem that only rebooting would fix, and the occasional corrupt file that
ruined documents I'd worked hard on. I began deviating from the Microsoft
classics - Word, Excel, and IE - and experimenting with other software.
Netscape came out with a new browser in late 2000 and I experimented with it,
then a friend turned me on to the Opera browser, which I quickly adopted and
learned to love. But as my growing interest in computing took me across the
internet to learn what Oracle and Sun are, what the difference between a
hardware platform and on operating system is, and my apetite for more began to
propel me in directions I'd previously never even known of, the word Linux
began to figure more prominently in my web searches.
Linux was just a name to me at the time, a rebel and a recluse. It smelled
like power and brute strength to me, and vaguely of freedom. Memories long
archived began to flood back into my consciousness: the roommate named Murray
with whom I shared an apartment in Dorchester who had first exposed me to Linux
on a Pentium II with the hood off and who I caught scribbling incomprehensible
DOS-like commands into an xterm, the tech support guy from IBM who serviced one
of my projects' computers in Managua with a shrug and suggested reinstalling
Windows ("It's not like Linux where we could service the configuration," he
said. "This one is all sealed up and there's nothing I can do."). I wrote to
a friend who used Unix, who referred me to another, mutual friend who ran
RedHat at home. I peppered him with questions - what does Linux 'look like,'
'what's the difference between RedHat and Black Hats?,' 'is it compatible?'
Then a multiple crash and failed system restore left my computer useless and me
fuming. I hadn't lost much information, as I am a relentless backer-upper, but
I'd lost all confidence in my machine and all respect for the software that
could so totally cripple my machine. I faithfully reinstalled, but just for
fun and curiosity I also bought a copy of SuSE Linux 7.1 from Amazon.com.
Fast forward six months, where an intense interest in Linux had converted me
from a dual-booter to a full-time Linux user and I was knee deep in the
manuscript to my new book, which I was writing in StarOffice 5.3 on Linux. I'd
explored KDE and Gnome, figured out how to get around Windowmaker and had even
learned to appreciate Blackbox. I'd figured out RPMs and had installed Opera
on my SUSE box, had played with Abiword and KOffice, experimented with a half a
dozen mail programs including Pine and Mutt, the latter of which would become
my primary mail client for the next 5 years, and still felt like a whole world
of exploration and excitement lay before me. I was amazed how much my little
Pentium III 550 Mhz was capable of doing, how infrequently I experienced
crashes, and furthermore I was thrilled to be free of the dangerous and
time-consuming homework of updating my virus definitions. In short time, I
became an advocate.
I had learned how to do simple web pages, and had offered to help a friend from
back home who was volunteering with a small NGO in Estelí by the name of
Superemos. Maielle came by one weekend so we could work on the site's web page
together, and I did my best to persuade her to switch to Linux. No go - she
was no fan of computers in general but thought I should talk to the Irishman
that ran the NGO, Stephen Sefton, who was like minded and might be interested.
To my surprise, I found Stephen knew quite a bit about Linux, confirming my now
long-formed suspicion that the Americans were way behind the curve where Linux
was concerned. Stephen was running a school that offered classes for poor
Nicaraguans interested in learning how to use computers, sew, and learn other
important skills that would lead to job opportunities. "I've got tons of old
computers and there must be thousands of other old machines around here I could
buy for a song," he mused, "then put Linux on them and use them for the school.
We operate on a tight budget, you know." We schemed together. Nicaragua is
the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere, behind Haiti, but it had
already been my home for nearly three years and I knew it well. And now I was
in a prime position to help introduce Linux to a country where its attributes -
low cost, easily available, no restrictive licensing arrangements, good
language support, and runs well on older computers - would be highly
appreciated.
Stephen brought down an old computer of his to try out Linux on. It was a PII
and pretty well worn It had 64M of memory - barely enough to run X, and no CD
drive. The first challenge was finding a way to install Linux. I purchased a
shareware utility to transfer files from Windows to Windows over a serial cable
and transferred the contents of the Linux CD onto his computer, repartitioned
the drive, and installed Linux from the Window partition. Before long, Stephen
had a working, dual boot Windows 95/ SuSE 7.1 box. He took it back up to
Estelí and worked with it for awhile.
Stephen and I touched base about a month later. The Linux idea was still alive
and well at Superemos, but the experiment on that box had been a failure. The
print driver hadn't allowed for draft printing, which meant greater use of ink
for this organization with a tight budget, and the lack of memory meant KDE -
the only desktop that made intuitive sense to his students - ran slowly and
poorly. Since that time the KDE desktop and other desktops have improved and
new distros have emerged that run well on low spec hardware like Stephen's, but
for the moment it was a loss for Linux. Stephen and I kept in touch after that
- it was his webpage I had worked on with Maielle - but I didn't press him
about Linux for fear of beating a dead horse.
Imagine my surprise then, when I read Kevin Brandes' article at Linux Journal.
Kevin was in Nicaragua to help set up a Linux-based internet cafe courtesy of
the Linux Gazette, which had sponsored some of his expenses. The publisher at
Linux Gazette wrote,
Here in Estelí the Cooperative Christine King was already using one Linux
system. I came up here in October 2003 to meet with Stephen Sefton, a long-term
Irish volunteer who helped form the cooperative and the Superemos Foundation
which supports it. I was amazed with what was being accomplished with very
little money. I also found the local community to be very reception to "a
solution" rather than "a solution blessed by proprietary software vendors".
After a second visit I decided to move here.
So inadvertently, I'd helped lay the groundwork for something much more
exciting and much more interesting than my own little dual boot experiment in
Estelí. It was time to regroup. Up until a couple of years ago when I moved to
Italy and then Washington DC, if you'd visited the Linux Counter for Nicaragua
you'd have seen that in all of Nicaragua only about 10 people were using Linux.
I was one, and Stephen was another - as part of the deal, I'd install Linux on
his machine but he'd register himself at the counter. Returning to see how
things are doing now, Nicaragua lists 45 users. That's a pretty decent core
group of pioneers, if they are truly willing to advocate on behalf of Linux.
Clearly, the movement has progressed. And advocates in the crowd have already
stood up to be counted. Kudos to the Phil (a.k.a. FYL), who has made Nicaragua
his home much as I have and continues to lobby on behalf of potential
Linux-users across Nicaragua.
The Linux project in Estelí continues to prosper. Kevin helped build a bunch
of handy diskless thin-clients for that project (wish he'd built one for me - I
think thin clients are neat), and lots and lots of Nicaraguans continue to use
the boxes to this day. Maybe they'll notice how well they work and get curious
in Linux themselves. Maybe they'll decide to eschew expensive Microsoft
products and choose freedom? One can help.
Linux is a great fit for countries like Nicaragua, but it's a great fit for a
lot of folks in the "developed" world as well. Hats off to Phil, to Kevin
Brandes, and to all the other folks that continue to identify great uses for
the Linux operating system and free software, and continue to get the word out
on important things like software patents, proprietary document formats, and
individual freedoms. Linux has many strengths, but powerful marketing
solutions is not one of them. Will Linux go on to dominate the world? I hope
so but can't say for sure. What I do know is that if Linux does take over the
world it will be the result of careful, painstaking marketing like the work I
did for Stephen Sefton. Penguins start your engines, the box you build today
might be the web café tomorrow, and millions and millions of people will
someday come to call free software theirs too.
