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Birth of an Era - Linux comes to Nicaragua

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) ((picture here), 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.

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