ZaReason Strata WebCam problem [SOLVED], Those Silly Mistakes We Make

A while a go, I wrote a post about those days in which we all should avoid computers.  I also posted describing how happy I was with my new ZaReason Strata Laptop.  The only problem I had with it was that the webcam was not working, a weird situation because the laptop would work perfectly with the external Logitech webcam I use in my desktop.

Well, as a follow up of the story of the cam, i have to say that I "solved" the problem like a month ago, but I was so embarrassed that never blogged about it.

Having internalized the emotions, I can now tell the story of how I found the "solution".

When I installed Kamoso, Kamorama, Cheese (and other programs) to work with the webcam and they would say that /dev/video0 did not exist, I suspected that the camera was not connected.  I mean, I tried in Mageia 4, OpenMandriva, and PicarOS without success.  However, the kernel modules seemed to be OK because my machine would detect the external Logitech cam without any hussle at all.

So, after trying for a while, I sent the ZaReason Tech support a message asking for help and waited.  My message only asked for support configuring the cam; I did not want to return the machine.

I waited for a week, but they never got back to me.

After the week had elapsed, I got a bit upset.  From my office, I decided to contact ZaReason again, so I began writing this snarky email when I suddenly noticed a funny function key that I had not seen before in any machine.  It looked like some sort of a satellite dish... or a webcam.

"This can't possibly be it!", I said to myself while pressing both the Function key and the key with the satellite dish.  Sure enough, a blue light next to the cam turned on and my image popped up.  The cam worked, but it had been turned off the whole time!

Luckily, I had not sent the snarky email. I deleted it.

More luckily, I was alone.  Had any other person been there, he or she would have assumed the WebCam was not properly calibrated as my face rapidly  went from my normal color to various shades of red and ended up sort of purplish with embarrassment.

We all have been there: this technological era prompts us to make silly mistakes.  Haven't you ever gotten, for instance, an email from your boss urging you to take a look at "the document attached" only to discover that the attachment is missing?

Has it ever happen to you that end up sending a message to a wrong contact because your email service fills in the address and you assumed it was the right one?

I think most of us have been there.

I guess I am now on the Wall of Fame at ZaReason's tech support... pretty much like the stories here. In fact, I still blush when I remember this mistake.

Oh, well...

There are days in which we should avoid computers

Yes, there are days in which we should avoid computers.

You know, during those days, in an ideal world, we would get an alert message urging us to get a professional diagnosis.  Then, a doctor would run some quick tests on us and would advise us not to touch a computer in two-to-five days or so.  Even the horoscope should say something like: "Taurus:  Because of the influence that Mars exerts on hard drives, keep away from any computer not to ignite trouble".

The user: sometimes the worst danger a computer faces

I am not only talking about older folks that cannot tell a CD and a DVD apart or about technology-blind people who stare at you blankly and go "Huh?" when you ask them "What format did you use to save that document?".   I am talking about each and every individual who uses a computer, be it a Facebook junkie or an IT manager, a Linux guru, or BSD/Haiku developer.  Anyone should keep distant from computers sometimes.

Call it a layer 8 reading fail, the PICNIC result or the well-known ID-ten-T error, the fact is that we sometimes cause havoc on a perfectly sane and healthy OS because of our own interaction with it... even if we cannot explain why. 

Take, for instance, what happened to me last week.  I started browsing the Web with my prefectly functional Mageia 2 Linux box.  Meanwhile, a small voice coming from the back of my head was urging me to shut down the system and go do something safer, like locking myself out of the office not to have easy access to the computer.  Yet, I chose to ignore the call of Wisdom and, after reading about the latest Java manace, I decided to run a test for rootkits on my system.  That was when I lost my grip on reality and went down the rabbit hole.

I must say that I use Firefox and have NoScript, AdBlock Plus, and other add-ons for security.  On top of that, I had disabled iced-tea.  However, I ran the tests with rkhunter and found a worrying message: A rootkit called Gaskit was installed on my system!

Panic invaded my brain and the Windows mentality took over; in a second, I was trasported to a day four years ago, when virus infections were as dreadful as expected, and all my neurons went in zombie mode to format and reinstall the system.

Even so, I visited some forums and read that, after a Mageia update, rkhunter flashed false positives.  I was familiar with false positives since my Windows days, but the zombie neurons had already multiplied and ate up my remaining sane-thinking ability.  I began formatting.

Luckily, the format-reinstall process is accomplished with greater ease and speed in Linux than it takes in Windows: in about an hour and a half, the system was up and running as it was before my sanity collapsed.

Without the fear, I began reading more about how to actually test if Gaskit was installed or not.  I tried the verifications and guess what: it had been a false positive all along!

I could almost sense the resentment coming from the computer.

From that experience, I learned that one should monitor oneself for stupidity before using a computer.  We all know when we are being stupid, don't we?
And then, if the stupidity level is exaggeratedly high, we should simply walk away from the machine until we regain some sense.

The computer will be grateful.

Don't give Linux to your mother

I'd like to give an honest piece of advice to those who are concerned about their parents and their computer skills. Whatever you do, don't give Linux to your parents. Yes, I know that sometimes their constant calls for help regarding security breeches,crashes, and virus infections might make you feel tempted to install one Linux distribution on their computer...but be strong and don't give in!

Of course, many readers might be expecting (if not demanding!) an explanation for my position. Well, let me spare you all the boring reasoning; instead of that, I am going to give you an illustration in the form of an anecdote which I believe will suffice.

My fifty-something mother, who had never used a computer until three years ago, took a course on Windows and MS Office and, as she grew confident with her new skills, she bought herself a nice computer. However, despite all the time and money invested on her courses, she could not advance in her computer usage because she would constantly get the familiar error screens that Windows gives to those who trust Microsoft, not to mention the common virus infections that made the machine act funny. It goes without saying that the episodes would normally end with her justified frustration ("I did not cover any of this in the course!") and our visit to her house to fix the problem...time and again.

Then my brother got truly fed up and installed Pardus Linux (Anthropoides Virgo, I think) onto her hard disk in 2010. The reaction was instantaneous: after a minor resistance on her part, the calls concerning computer problems dropped to almost zero. One of her last calls was to tell me that she was proud because she had been able to burn an MP3 CD using K3b. I felt really happy for her because she had terrible problems trying to do the same in Nero.

But here comes the most remarkable thing: since viruses were no longer a problem, she got an ASDL connection to the Internet last January 10. Everything went off quite nicely until two weeks ago. We got a phone call: something had happened to the modem and she could not log in. It turned out that it was an ISP problem, so they sent a technician to solve the situation and...the guy had never seen Pardus Linux! He was extremely surprised because a woman her age was using Linux, an OS that is supposed to be horribly hard to use.

My mother told me that the technician spent some extra time trying to configure the modem, but he succeeded and went away proud because he could...(wasn't Linux impossible to use?)

When I saw the computer, the guy had messed up with Plasma and deleted some applications from the lower panel, too; he also threw the desktop icons to the garbage bin and resized the screen size. To sum up, "no puppet kept its head", as written in the Quixote.

Returning the computer to its normal state was a matter of 15 minutes and my mother said "It's because Linux is easy". Well, she is right. In fact, Pardus 2011 is even more user-friendly. So is SimplyMepis. And Mandriva 2010.2 is easy too, according to this article.

Therefore, do not give Linux to your mother or father. They might end up loving it, learning what they never could and, worst of all, putting an unsuspecting technician accustomed to Windows to shame.

Confessions from a Relatively New Linux User

I was a Windows user once. Well, I still am to a certain degree: in my work, I sometimes have to use the XP platform that, with iron claws, resists the burial services that Microsoft has sung in its memory more than twice.

I began my Windows experience with Windows 3.11, jumped to 95 (I still keep the upgrade CD that rendered my computer useless), bought my copy of 98, and even learned to coexist with the rather recurrent BSODs of Windows ME. During those days, my brother received a bonus CD that included promotional software. I remember seeing the word "Linux" there for the first time but, although I felt tempted to try it, I never did. This way, Linux became a distant toll of an unknown bell in my head. To be honest, Windows "Mistake Edition" had grown so dear to me that I stubbornly refused to abandon it to try XP. Yet, my determination failed with the purchase of a new computer and XP became my system of choice. Back then, Microsoft would still let me "choose" my OS...or so I thought.

As a plain user, I spent more than eleven years of my life mastering life-saving secrets to protect my Windows system. The peak of my learning took place during the XP dynasty; my brother, who has always been two steps ahead of me, gave me fine weaponry that included a zombie monitor, an antivirus solution, a firewall, a malware monitor, multiple vaccines for USB drives, programs for regaining browser control and many other third-party software solutions that supposedly transformed my Windows system into the desktop equivalent of an M1 Abrams. Yet, regardless of all protection, my computer was still vulnerable. Mysterious viruses would easily filter through cracks invisible to the untrained eye and nest in the untouchable brain tissue of the OS. Therefore, shamanic rituals were required to keep my desktop usable...some more aggressive forms of therapy, like formatting, had to be repeated once every three months to keep malware from growing and spreading.

Then, Vista came along with its bothersome "Are you sure you want to to this?" and virtually the same problems XP had. I began suspecting that there should be more to life than that never-ending sense of vulnerability.

Thanks to a netbook, I had contact with the Penguin again. This netbook was powered by Linux Xandros, an OS that I decided I loathed despite being invulnerable to well-known threats, so I replaced it with the familiar XP. It was a deadly mistake: because of the modest metrics of the netbook, XP would take five minutes to boot, menus would freeze, and XP ate disk space avidly...not to mention that I had not even installed the office suite! With Xandros, the computer was fast as a bullet (30 sec to boot), had enough disk space to work, and even received voice command! Thus, I decided that, if I was to use Linux, I had to find a Linux that I liked.

I knew nothing about Linux then, so my impractical (yet fun) plan was to download distributions at random and to test them one by one. Thus, I got Kubuntu first. I liked the way it looked, but there was a terrible flaw: it did not activate the wi-fi.

Hence, I downloaded Mandriva 2009. If it failed, my next choice was Linux Mint Gloria...but Mandriva picked up the wi-fi without my intervention. For me, that settled the matter and I installed Mandriva to the netbook. With it, the machine worked almost perfectly, except for a nuisance: one had to turn off the computer manually. "If I could live with viruses all this time, I can certainly overlook that problem", I said to myself. Nevertheless, I did not have to deal with that issue for long. In November 2009, Mandriva 2010 ("Adelie") was released and this new version took care of the shut down problem.

I cannot say that my journey with Linux was a rosy road. I have discovered that Mandriva has several flaws (the way of handling uninstallation of dependencies is, by far, its Achilles' heel). However, my determination not to go back to the world of viruses has pushed me into learning about Linux. Today, I'm using Mandriva 2010.1 ("Farman") and I'm the happiest camper.

Although my brother was reluctant to try Linux at first, he discovered SimplyMepis and fell for it. And, despite his somewhat tardy start, he is still two steps ahead of me.

Some weeks ago, he asked me if I remembered that almost-forgotten bonus CD with Linux. He said that he ran it to see which Linux distribution it contained.

"So, which distro was it?", I asked.
"Mandrake", he replied.

When the disciple is ready, the master will come.