We women make up more than half the population, so by no means are we a minority. Yet we claim a minority status of sorts in the IT world, where depending on who you talk to, women make up somewhere from 20% to 30% of the workforce. This topic is the focus of many heated discussions on Internet mailing lists frequented by women in IT. Many believe the low number of females in computer science occupations is a problem that needs to be fixed. Girls, they say, are being actively discouraged by parents, peers, and teachers from entering fields considered by society to be too “geeky” for women.

If you listen to these pundits, you may begin to believe that girls are champing at the bit to become technologists, but are being forced to instead enter fields like sociology, health care, or services. Some are even being handcuffed to the kitchen sink and forced to become stay-at-home mothers, the worst possible punishment of all, because everyone knows that no one in her right mind would ever want to do anything as subservient and unrewarding as raising a brood of unruly children to be the next generation of leaders. All these poor girls want is to be just like men: aggressive, logical, and task-oriented, and we’re forcing them to go against their nature and be nurturing, emotional, and relationship-oriented. It’s a crime. But I digress.

Assuming that the relative paucity of women in the IT industry is a problem that needs fixing, is creating a new “Girls’ Linux Distribution” going to help? I say no. If we want to become part of the industry, why would we want to separate ourselves and draw attention to our differences? If we’re trying to say that women have all the same aptitudes and tendencies that men in IT have, it makes no sense to then say that we need or want our own flavor of Linux.

What would we include in this distro? Pink butterfly themes? Shopping calculators? Does that sound insulting? It should. So I ask again, what exactly would we include in a female version of Linux? The longer you think about this, the more ridiculous it sounds. In fact, if you believe that there are men out there who really do want to keep women out, it sounds like an idea that misogynists would push just to keep us separate. “Aw, look at those cute little girls playing at technology — they even made their own Starbucks icons!” I can hear it now.

Some say that the reason for a women’s distribution would be to give women the opportunity to work on creating a custom version of Linux. This insinuates, again, that women are being excluded from participating in development of other distributions — that there are hundreds of women out there who would be madly coding away if only they were allowed to, if only someone would hold the gate open for them, if only someone would invite them to participate in the creation of a girly GUI. That otherwise, they’re just too scared and shy, and incapable of jumping in there with the boys.

The fact is that most women I know outside of the IT industry are more tech-savvy than the men in their lives. They are the ones who have embraced the Internet and the gadgets that accompany it. They are the ones who communicate mostly by email, and their husbands and boyfriends and fathers and brothers are still stuck on the phone and can’t boot the computer without someone holding their hand. According to Nielsen, women make up the majority of Internet users, and they spend a lot more money on technology than men do. Just because most of them do not choose to make a living at it doesn’t mean that women are somehow lacking in the ability to understand and absorb the concept of technology.

Creating a special Linux distribution as though it were a delightful surprise that we can use Linux at all is not going to help our image. Special Linuxes are for people with USB keys and religious sensibilities. We women are doing just fine, thanks.

Still, for a rank beginner, Ubuntu might take a little over-the-shoulder help getting plugins and other essential applications installed. Automatix sure sounds like an answer. It installs multimedia codecs that help you play sound and video files properly, all the usual Firefox plugins that you forget you need until you need them (Java, Flash, Adobe reader, MPlayer, etc.), archive support, Skype, an FTP client, several file-sharing programs, multimedia editors, a DVD ripper, RealPlayer, the Opera browser, and a lot more.

To test Automatix, I started with a fresh install of Ubuntu Breezy. Automatix supports all versions of Ubuntu up to Breezy, including Kubuntu and Edubuntu. It doesn’t support Dapper, PPC, or AMD64 yet. Once the installation was complete, I logged in, opened Firefox, Googled for “automatix,” and clicked on the first link, which happened to be to a complete Automatix tutorial on ubuntuforums.org. The tutorial was posted last year and makes reference to Ubuntu Hoary, but it works just fine for Breezy.

At first I was looking around for a place to download Automatix, but as I continued to read the tutorial, I learned that I’d need to open a terminal and type some things on the command line. It’s an easy thing to do, but I wonder if it would be confusing to a new Linux user.

On the command line, I directed Ubuntu to download the Automatix package from a repository at beerorkid.com, and then to unpack and install the script. To start the script, I could click on Applications -> System Tools -> Automatix, or simply type “Automatix” in the terminal. Once running, Automatix got my permission to access Ubuntu repositories and check for some necessary packages in one window. Then, in another window, it showed me a list of all the packages it could install for me and what they contained. I selected the ones I wanted by clicking the check box next to them. I checked everything — what the heck, Automatix was doing all the work for me, and if something gets messed up, it wasn’t my fault!

Once I finally got them all selected and clicked “OK,” Automatix went to work doing whatever it needed to do to get my computer to a state of configuration nirvana. Things slowed down a bit when the script paused to ask for my root password, and it took me a minute to figure that out, because the request came from the first window, which was partially obscured by the second window. After I typed in my password, the script progressed, but stopped two more times to ask again, which I thought was strange since sudo usually remembers my root password for at least a few minutes. After I entered the password the third time, the script and its two windows exited unexpectedly. I didn’t get any kind of error message — everything just disappeared. I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to happen and Automatix had simply finished installing everything. But I read on the tutorial that some user input was required in order to install several of the applications. Not seeing any related troubleshooting information in the discussion thread, I decided to stop looking and just run the script again.

This time things went as they should; I entered my password once and the script went about downloading and installing all the packages I requested. At one point, the script halted because I had elected to install Nvidia drivers despite not having an Nvidia card on my laptop. I was able to circumvent that by canceling the operation. Automatix skipped the package and went on to the next without a hitch. Wine, the Windows compatibility application, was one of the largest packages to install, and it was the slowest, downloading from SourceForge at less than 1Kbps and taking more than half an hour to finish. I think Automatix should point to a repository with more bandwidth, such as ibiblio.org, where I was able to download Wine at 189Kbps.

After Wine was done, Automatix reminded me that I’d need to run a file called winecfg later on in order to setup and use Wine. Automatix still had more packages to install, though. Unfortunately, before it finished, another bug crawled out and threatened to ruin my fun. The script halted because it said I was running another instance of dpkg, the Debian package archive tool. Honestly, I wasn’t!

What’s a girl to do but start the script again? The problem was, I wasn’t sure exactly which applications hadn’t been installed yet — apparently, Automatix hadn’t been setting them up in the order listed on the selection screen. Rather than guess, I selected everything again — except the Nvidia drivers. Luckily, the script zipped through everything it had already done and quickly returned to what it had been working on before.

As Automatix gets closer to its end, it needs more user input. You can’t just walk away from it and come back when it’s done. I was surprised at how long it took to run the script in its entirety. Not even counting the two times I had to restart Automatix, it took about an hour and a half to run. When it finally finished, I put Automatix to the test, and it passed with an “A.”

This is when the payoff comes for having had the patience to make it through a time-consuming installation. Everything I needed worked just as it should with no further research, downloading, or tweaking. All the Firefox plugins worked; when I put a DVD in, Totem opened up and started playing it; I could share files using a Gnutella client or a BitTorrent client; Kino imported my digital video files directly through Firewire; and as a bonus, Automatix even installed OpenOffice.org and Thunderbird.

Automatix lives up to its reputation. It’s worth any time and small frustration it might take to get through the script. And it’s even worth that “over-the-shoulder” time you might spend with a new Linux user to walk them through it. I don’t see any reason why a beginner would not be delighted with Ubuntu after a magic touch from Automatix.