Sean's blog

Internet on Canvey Island. How hard can it be?

Canvey Island postcard from www.canveyisland.org.uk

I’m an eternal optimist. I went to the UK a few weeks ago for a party with some old friends in Lancaster, but stayed first with my parents on Canvey Island. Canvey Island has its detractors, but I grew up there and have very fond memories of it. I always make sure I get a couple of long walks in around the sea wall when I go back there. It’s not picturesque, but it is interesting to see the remains of the ancient sea wall poking out from beneath the modern one, and I never tire of seeing the sea so high on one side and the houses so low on the other!

I like to travel light – I would never carry a laptop with me (article on Dell Mini 9 coming soon!) unless I was actually en route to do a job with it. There’s a ten year old Compaq Deskpro 6300 in my parents’ attic from when I did my PhD. I thought I’d arrive there, buy any missing parts I needed (I knew there was no screen, for instance), install a copy of Ubuntu, and connect via dialup with my old US Robotics modem, or try out a USB 3G adapter.

I bought a cheap wide-screen (and later regretted not having a scroll button on my old mouse!) LCD monitor from the Tesco in Pitsea, and went to the local library for a copy of an up-to-date linux. There was an old Slackware install already on the hard disk, but I couldn’t get a PPP session established with any of the dial-up numbers a friend gave me. The old Slackware install didn’t seem to be complete, so I set off for a walk around the Island to find an Ubuntu install CD. Was I being naive? I didn’t think so at the time!

My first stop was the Library. I have very fond memories of Canvey Island library. As a teenager I spend very many evenings and weekends there. It had an enormous SciFi section back then, and had the best opening hours of any library of any town or city I have lived in in the last 20 years. It was open late into the evening 6 days a week and open on Sundays too. Now it seems to have a lot more space inside, but I was pleased to see a wall filled with PCs. When I asked the very nice librarian if they had any boks about Linux that included a CD, it seemed like I was speaking a foreign language. I remember first finding Linux in a book with a CD inside in a library. I’m sure I first installed MkLinux on a PowerMac from a library book.

I searched the IT shelves (not very many!) at the library and found nothing about Linux at all. I asked the librarian if I could download a copy of Linux and burn a CD, but they replied that they did not provide the means to burn CDs. I asked for computer shops on the Island, and they told me I could try Selectronic or Canvey PC. The Island is not a big place, and my dad never stopped waxing lyrical about the benefits of Shanks’ Pony (academic, we were always too skint to afford a car), so I set off on foot to find Linux.

There’s a Sainsbury’s in the Knightswick Centre just across the road from the Library. It was one or two other supermarkets before that, and when I was at St Joseph’s over 30 years ago (I’m so effin old!), the area was just a huge waste ground. I think I remember some sort of covered market there from when I was very young, but by the time I was at school, it was just a great place to climb Elder trees, make dens in the Ivy that hung between them, and throw stones at the remnants of old windows in the ruined buildings there. Happy days!

I had a look through the computer mags in Sainsbury’s for a Linux CD, but no such luck. There was a big Martin’s newsagent in the shopping centre, but that seems long-gone. Selectronic is not much further up the road, but it seems to be a photo-printing shop with a few extra bits and bobs (including a Nokia 6500 Classic for ten quid cheaper than I paid in Tesco at Pitsea a few days earlier, I noticed). They said “no, nothing like that” and directed me to Canvey PC.

Canvey PC

I couldn’t find Canvey PC at first. I must have walked past it 4 or 5 times before I noticed the sign by a door by the side of another business. Upstairs is a modern-looking shop and workshop, and the man working there reached into a cupboard and gave me an Ubuntu install CD. It was a real ‘Hallelujah moment’ until I got home and realised how old a version it was! Still, I was impressed just to find someone who knew what I was asking for, much less had a copy available! Well done, CPC.

The old PC at my parents’ house seemed to work great with that Ubuntu installed, though it was 6.06 (Dapper Drake), so the Vodafone USB TopUp And Go USB 3G adapter that I bought at the Vodafone shop  in Basildon wasn’t recognised by it (Ubuntu 6.06 was released in 2006), and I still couldn’t get online with the dialup numbers my friend gave me. I was glad to find that you can use the ‘screen’ utility to get a terminal session on the modem, just in case those dialup numbers offered BBS-style help menus, but no such luck. Does that kind of thing even exist any more?

By this point, I was kicking myself for not bringing an Ubuntu install CD with me. A friend of mine who lives some distance away from the Island dropped off an up-to-date Xubuntu install CD at my parents’ house which failed to read in my old 4X (so slow!) CD drive. I asked the same friend to pop round again with the CD image on a USB flash drive, and took it to Selectronic, who burned it onto another CD for me (the old Compaq wouldn’t boot from a USB drive) and charged me a reasonable price for something they presumably don’t do every day.

Xubuntu

Finally, I had Xubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) on my old PC, and it recognised the Vodafone USB 3G stick straight away and connected to the Internet. The old PC is a 300MHz Pentiuim with 192MB RAM, so the user experience isn’t lightning fast – but it works! Running more than 1 or 2 applications at once causes the machine to thrash the hard disk too, but I edited some images from my phone using the GIMP and everything in Firefox seemed to work just fine. Flash videos were too slow to watch – only 1 frame every few seconds on some videos. I didn’t try watching any proper videos, but when Jess and I were first married, we used to watch DVDs rented from the local late shop on that machine. Mplayer did drop some frames, but not annoyingly so.

I guess the moral of this story is that if you’re going somewhere expecting free open source software to be growing on the trees, you’re as big a twit as I am! Next time, I’m going to carry the CD with me. A bootable USB stick might be a good compromise between use and reliability, but if you’re presented with an old nail of a PC, you’ll be needing someone to burn that image on your USB onto a CD for you. A photo printing shop seems like the place to ask. The bootable USB I made later requires that Ubuntu’s files are stored on a FAT partition, so if you want the option to burn a CD-ROM too, you’ll need a USB flash drive that’s big enough for both uses: something over 1.5GB (or two USB flash drives!).