Shantytown computing

I went round to see my copy editor today. I had to deliver a copy of the worm book, and she had asked if I could give her a lesson in *nix.

Of course, I gave her, free. the most important command anyone could ever learn for Linux :
No [aArRgGhH]
as soon as she raised the possibility. But she assured me that she had already got two installations running, she had learnt that it was a disaster, and she still dreamt of freedom from Microsoft.


This is a woman without much money to spend. It does make sense for her to use Linux when she is otherwise dependent on semi-pirated hand me downs and prefers to do her editing in Word Perfect 6 for DOS.

She lives on the fourth floor of a rather unpleasant tower block of council flats just off the Old Kent Road. Ten or twelve years ago, she had an hour’s training on an Atex system, when she was a sub on the Sunday Correspondent. Everything else she has just absorbed by playing.

The toy before LInux had been a copy of Partition Magic. So when I came to look at her desktop, I found that it wasn’t dual-booting. It was triple booting, into Dos, Windows 98 (on separate partitions), and Linux. There was also a third partition dedicated to Windows 3.1, while the Linux bits were split into, I think, five paritions, none larger than 2GB. In all, the 20 GB disk had 11 partitions on it, and the last 8GB left completely unformatted or partitioned. “That’s just space I don’t need”, she said.

Next to the machine were two HP inkjets stacked on top of each other; one at least ten years old, the other at a guess six months old. They were running through one of those parallel port switchers that you now find only in junkshops but new cost nearly as much as an HP inkjet cartridge now does.

It was a completely William Gibson setup, except that his idiot savant hackers have some savvy. I spent a couple of hours being astonished, then patient, then argumentatitive, and finally cutting the number of partitions back by two; adding another 5Gb to the Linux setup so she could actually install some software; installing bloody OpenOffice there so we could play revision markings. Finally, exhausted, I left. As she walked me to the bus stop, she was profuse in thanks and praise. But, she added, she’s going to edit the book in WP6 for dos, because she knows it. And then she’ll probably end up faxing the fucking corrections, just like the last book we did.

She’s a damn good copy editor, though. Amongst other things, she did the Andrew Morton Diana book.

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