Open Source Computing for Artistsby tim at casionova dot com Welcome to the first page of the OSCA website. This is the initial step in creating a site for artists and activists wishing to use open source software. 'scuse the typos! These ideas and the resultant proof of concept computer have come out of my residency at the McCarthyism Contemporary Art Gallery in Sheffield, Tasmania, Australia - thanks to Kate & John for their 'open source' arts administration. This site has been written with no funding or income apart from McCarthyism providing me with a roof, electricity and a telephone line for a few weeks. So please feel free to add ideas and info... the best way to do that at the moment is in a comment on my weblog. At the moment due to a tight deadline it is one long unweildy document. It will be broken up into more manageable chunks in the next few weeks if CentreLink don't bug me too much. (speaking of which read this for a great description of someone elses employment situation which is very similar to my own) What to Expect?A site to find out about and discuss lo-cost, lo-energy, DIY computing methods, covering hardware, software and networks. This site is mostly links and hopefully I will fulfill the role of the artist and help provide the connections between these links. DIY video projectors, GameBoy programming, tiny motherboards, WiFi hacking and free imagery and archiving are just an example of some of the useful artist tools this site will tell you about, or did tell you about ;) . Whats In OSCA?BackgroundWhy This?It looks like our civilisation has reached it's peak and like every other civilisatin, it will crumble. What sets us apart from other collapsing civilisations is that we are also orchestrating the largest extinction event Earth has had. That sucks. What doesn't suck is that the scientific and cultural knowledge our civilisation has ammassed is truly awesome, and unlike any other civilisation prior we have an opportunity to keep this knowledge, because we have de-centralised knowledge storage systems. Essentially that is what this website is about - to keep human thought, ideas, knowledge and culture alive and accessible in a post-carbon fuelled world I am attempting to be a librarian of sorts, (huey bless those real librarians - libraries are THE sacred spaces of the secular soul), in collating information and helping people use this particular library that is the internet. There has been so much work done recently on this library, yet not many have written about the connection between the hackers who can make their Commodore64's access the internet, the scientists discussing how the radio spectrum can be much more efficiently used, the lawyers drafting creative commons copyright, the pornographers and pirates driving programmers to find ways to make networks faster and easier to use, the enormous computer servers in underground bunkers etc etc. This site concerns half of the challenge facing us, the other half is the real stuff: food, housing, transportation and community. Much respect and admiration to those who are forging ideas in these areas, I hope libraries of any sort serve you well in spreading what you know. Thanks for keeping the rest of alive! Why Artists?I have a naive belief that the role of the artist is to critically perceive and articulate nuanced links in the realm around them that normally go unnoticed. The works of an artist can use any tool at their disposal including beauty, humour and intelligence. An artist is constantly experimenting and taking risks with thoughts and materials. This is a role that is essential to any grouping of peoples, like the scientist, the teacher, the fool/clown, the philosopher/priest/shaman. This site is to help artists who wish to use electronic media, and in the process have a practice that isn't directly linked to the next funding round of the Australia Council or what openings they should be at. A practice that acknowledges their own humanity and the society they are participating in. Oh and this site is more likely to get funding support if I say its for 'new media' artists than for humanity as a whole.
Why Me?After attending international symposiums and searching the net endlessly to find a resource like OSCA it seemed like there is nothing out there, so I better do it myself. If anyone comes across someone who has created a similar site PLEASE tell me, so I can go back to my day job of being a rock star. Some DefinitionsComputingThe buggers are everywhere, I even have one for my bicycle. They are strapped to your wrists, inside your washing machines and odds are if you are a well off westerner with a job you spend a great proportion of the day staring at the screen of one, (didn't our mothers tell us not to sit so close to the telly?). So computing means anything one does with these machines, not just twiddling with Photoshop or making stupid Max patches. Open SourceFor the best definition of Open Source, and indeed for the definition of pretty much anything in this document please use Wikipedia. Open it up in another tab of your web browser (I am presuming you are not using Window$Explorer to browse the web, if you are, stop reading and get Firefox or use Konquerer in KDE on Linux) and learn what the potential of Open Source really is. As you can see by Wikipedia it is an encyclopedia written by everyone, and it works extremely well. Hardware (needs work)My Computer: TuxBoxIts built into a makeup box, a pentium3 with cdburner and small lcd screen. Very portable. Laptops suck, they are expensive and one cant pull em to bits and stick bits in em. oh i'm being lazy, when i get to ians where he has one of digital camera doohickeys i'll put photos here. ResourcesPlease go to my alternative computing for artists article on my website, heaps there on how to score cheap gear plus that article is really similar to this one and could possibly be even better (it will be subsumed into these OSCA pages soon). R U Being Served?The internet is now utterly integral to computing, the internet is a bunch of computers called servers. Get your own server. If you work with computers in anyway a server can be even more important than the computer in front of you. I heartily recommend having your own server. This week I bit the bullet and shelled out the princly sum of 10 bux a month for 250MB of high bandwidth with all the whistle and bells server side scripts. I won't link to the company yet, as it is very early days in the relationship at the moment. I always thought heavy duty server space was outta my financial league (a pint at the pub is out of my financial league). My server rent is 70 times cheaper than my bedsit rent (if I could still afford a bedsit). Perhaps team up with someone for a server since even the cheap spaces allow for a couple of domain names and stacks of email addresses How can a server help? Well if it's not in your own country that could of some use, for me that is since pretty much everything I do with computers is illegal under our new agreement with the US (in that I make my stuff on a computer I own using original software written by people who let me use it for free - welcome to the wonderful weird world software patents!). Forsake the evils of Hotmail! Get rid of Yahooligan advertising! Don't be bound by yer @bigcon.com.au ISP email address. Having your own server means you have complete control your email addresses and can download your mail into your machine wherever it is plugged into the net. You can have mailing lists, websites, blogs whatever, all tailored to your needs. This probably sounds really damn tricky but the (open source) web based front ends to servers are getting very sophisticated so setting all this up can be a point and click affair. SoftwareLinuxWhats Linux?It is essential to understand what Linux actually is. Window$XP is one operating system, Mac OSX is another operating system and if you remember back to the good ol days the AmigaOS was/is an operating system. Linux is not an operating system, it is a set of tools that hundreds of different operating systems are constructed from, ('Linux' is the name of the kernal, the lowest level part of the opeating sytem, how everything communicates to each other) These operating systems are called distributions, each distribution is an installer, a set of programs and various other bits and pieces assembled to serve the needs of what the distribution maintainers view what the users of that distribution would. Distro watch is a good starting point to learn what distros are out there. One linux distribution would run, say, a matchbox sized robot, another could operate a clustered supercomputer (hi Fluff Daddy!), another could let you use your Xbox to play classic arcade games, another could be extremely similar to WindowsXP in a business. Perhaps the most common distribution is RedHat, now called Fedora. You may have heard of Mandrake, SUSE, or of Debian, these are a few of the more common distros. The key to understanding Linux is that it is completely modular - it can be whatever you want it to be, in fact the next distribution I am going to try and which I will discuss further, Gentoo, could best be described as a distribution that creates your own distribution. I was briefly tempted to move over to the Mac when the Mac Mini was released - the mac operating system now available for bargain basement price, then I realised, despite the weirdo Linux-like core of OSX, I would never be able to run the vast number programs I need to run that I take for granted when using Linux. So to dispel the myth that one needs to hang on to proprietory operating systems I will outline my current and in the near future computing needs. (eventually each of these will have its own section on this site)
that is just my own uses. Can I do all that on a single window$ or mac machine AND without buying or pirating software AND with a computer that is over five years old that I put together from a heap of junk? There are two different types of Linux installation, the first is sticking it onto your computer to replace or as an adjunct to your current operating system. The other is what is known as 'Live' distro. These ROCK! Essentially you put the CD into your computer and reboot and VOILA there's a Linux operating system. Remove the CD and reboot and VOILA there's is your normal operating system as if nothing had happened Live CD's are useful for a number of purposes, for those who are new to Linux to try out various distros, for those who do not own their own computer and want to have their own operating system and as I am discovering to make your Linux system do whatever you want it to do without needing to be a command line guru. Say if you have one computer but you want it to edit your feature film on it during the day and on weekends you want to leave it in a corner of club so that passersby can play Galaga on it. It takes one CD to achieve that, just boot up with a copy of KnoppixMAME or AdvanceCD distros in your cd drive and then you instantly have a public computer that emulates old arcade games. Want to watch a DVD but can't be arsed going through your whole bootup routine, or perhaps you have a sluggish CPU, use the Geexbox distro to make your computer be a media player. Which Distro?For artists starting out on their Linux adventure I recommend the Dyne:Bolic live distro, full of video and audio tools. For peeps who just need to office and internet it and dont want big learning curve Mandrake is pretty sweet. I reckon for the best most flexible option it as to be Gentoo. If you want to do interesting things with your computer be reconciled to the fact that you have to learn things like editing your fstab (ouch). The thing with Linux, unlike other operating systems, if something goes wrong there is a way to fix it and you can find out how, but the learning curve can be quite steep. The strength of Gentoo is that it is an utterly customisable distro, your computer will do everything you want it to do and you can have the programs you need loaded on. It is a tricky install but that's the point - the handbook, erm, handholds you through the installation and in the process you learn exactly how your system works. Sure one can tweak and install what you want after you have setup any other Linux distro, but believe me I would rather learn that stuff at the beginning than gnash my teeth down the track. Where to get a distro?If you have internet access the best way to get a distro is to download an .iso of the distribution you want. An .iso is an image of a cdrom, so these files can be huge. The best way to download anything large is with Bit Torrent, (do check out the DUDE behind it!) You probably have heard of Napster, Kazaa or the phrase 'peer to peer'. Bit Torrent is peer to peer but uses a much better system. To find out more go the site of Bit Torrents programmer. It is quick and easy to install Bit Torrent onto your system. I can't remember exactly how I did it, it was that painless. Now all I do is click on a Bit Torrent file link on a website, a little torrent file gets downloaded onto my computer. I then click on that little file that is now on my machine and BitTorrent gets to work. If you use windoze then you probably have a CD burning program called NERO, or some such, make sure you burn the .iso file as an is or disk image. If you are running WindowsXP, (I envy your speedy computer but not your operating system.. hey if you DO have speedy computer use it for good and help model the climate or fold some proteins for medical research) one could also download this tiny program that will burn your .iso with just a click or two. Oh and when burning turn the speed DOWN on your CD burner, critical for audio and very recommended for .iso's and probably a good idea all round to make sure your data lasts longer. Now you are ready to try Linux, reboot with that CD and Shirley's your aunt. Going PostalIf your internet access is limited try emailing a Linux user group and someone might be able to sort you out, or try a business that posts Linux CD's. Since I am in Australia the cheapest mob here are {oops not in my bookmarks} Go to the Libraryor the newsagent. Computer magazines often have coverdisks of full Linux distros. In Australia APC magazine is good for this and most libraries have them. Due to very intermittent internet connection this is how I have always gotten Linux onto my computer.
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