Linux Log is now a regular column in Troubleshooting Professional Magazine, authored by Steve Litt. Each month we'll explore a facet of Linux as it relates to that month's theme.
Car enthusiasts demand quality. Their cars are well designed and well maintained. Some enthusiasts drive stripped down muscle machines, others have scores of accessories and amenities, but all are built on top of robust, well functioning vehicles. There's a computer operating system like that. It's called Linux.
All Linux installations have power and reliability. On almost any given CPU/memory/disk space setup, Linux outperforms Windows. Linux is rock solid. It's so solid that you almost never need to reboot it. Even when changing your configuration. That's another Linux advantage over Windows.
Like most young parents, my folks had little money when I was a little kid, so our car was an old beater 48 Ford handed down from my grandparents. I still remember it getting vapor lock and stalling several times a day. Every couple miles, the car would stall and my Dad would run out, pop the hood, and lay wet rags on the intake manifold. My parents carried a bucket of water in the car, because this ritual would repeat itself hourly on hot days. If you are a Windows "power user", I think you know how my parents felt. Yes, rebooting is easier than laying wet rags in traffic, but it's a similar annoyance.
Linux is more like today's Buicks, or, if you prefer, yesteryear's slant 6 and 318 Dodge Darts. It just runs. Always. Every time. Forever.
Linux comes with a wide variety of options. You can install a "stripped down" command-line only Linux. No graphical user interface, no accessories and amenities, just a command line driven OS that can serve web pages, files, and DNS resolution, as well as run some astonishingly heavy processes, on a piece of hardware with surprisingly little in the way of CPU, memory or disk space. Personally, I use Red Hat Linux for such stripped down uses, but any Linux distribution can be used this way.
You can also get the luxury package. A complete graphical interface very much like Windows (but without the hourly vapor lock -- scuse me, blue screens of death). GUI assisted email, web browsing, and internet connection. Netscape Navigator and Netscape Composer (for creating web pages) are standard options of such systems. Windows comes with a rudimentary word processor, Wordpad. Likewise, most Linux distributions come with rudimentary word processors. And of course, for about $70.00, you can get WordPerfect for Linux, which compares very favorably to Microsoft Word.
My favorite luxury Linux is Caldera OpenLinux, which is sort of the "Buick Lasabre" of Linuxes. If you want the "Lincoln Towncar" of Linuxes, get Corel Linux. The look and feel is identical to Windows. The only Windows features missing are the hourly crashes and the blue screen of death. The driver (scuse me, user) has everything at his or her fingertips. If you buy the $89.00 package, you get an official copy of Wordperfect to go with it. And now even Red Hat includes many of these same luxury features. And you get the best of both worlds. Because you can press Ctrl-Alt-Function key and get a stripped down command line interface on your luxury Linux, while at the same time running GUI software on the GUI screen.
Linux distributions vary widely in price, as long as you define "widely" between 0 and $100.00. If you forego the customer support and warrantee, most of these Linuxes can be delivered to your door for $5.00 plus shipping -- often $2.00 plus shipping. A further advantage of the $5.00 CD deals is that they should contain only redistributable software, meaning it should be perfectly legal to install that same CD on your machine and the machines 100 of your closest friends. Or 1000 -- copying redistributable- only CD's is perfectly legal. No software police will show up at your door. I think a good strategy is to make your first Linux full priced (still much less than Windows) so you get some tech support. Once you're familiar with Linux, go with the $5.00 CD's.
Linux isn't as forgiving of oddball hardware as Windows. Here's why. Because Microsoft has had an illegal monopoly for so long (this is Judge Jackson's opinion, the URL of which is in the URL's section of this magazine), hardware vendors were forced to make sure their equipment worked with Windows. Only in the last year have they had any incentive to make their hardware work with Linux. As a result, you need to take a little more care selecting your hardware. You should look at the Linux hardware compatibility at... I have some additional suggestions:
If you want an easy life in Linux audio, choose only a genuine Soundblaster or an Ensoniq, which were made by the same company, Creative Labs. Other sound cards often require some fairly heavy Linux expertise to set up.
Use an external modem. External modems have a very thin interface to the computer (a serial cable). This limits the problems you have with things like interrupts, plug and pray, and the like.
Use a monitor with known horizontal and vertical refresh rates. With monitors not in your Linux installation program's database, you get a much cleaner and more flicker free display if you explicitly specify these parameters.
The Wishing Well
My family bought a house when I was 7. The days of money problems and vapor lock were over. My parents liked the neighborhood, the school system, and the house. I liked the wishing well.
Of course it wasn't a real wishing well. It was just a three foot space between the garage and the fence. Densely overgrown with weeds, it inspired fear and curiosity. I went in, and kept going in. Because every time I went in, I came out holding something cool. A marble, a ball, whatever I wanted. Once I wished for a scooter, and sure enough there it was, 10 feet back in a heretofore unexplored section of the wishing well.
Of course any adult knows what happened. The last several owners had children, each of whom left things behind. I was a teenager when we moved out of that house. Surely the child of the new owner found the cool toys I abandoned in that overgrown space. Only a kid could think of it as a wishing well. A magical source of found dreams. It was the magic of childhood, all too brief -- never recaptured. Until I found Linux.
I wished for a web server and found one on my Red Hat Linux CD. Soon I found an email server and DNS server, and complete networking software. I networked my office.
The more I worked with Linux, the uglier Windows seemed. I wished for a Windows replacement. What should I find on the Red Hat, Caldera and Corel distibutions (as well as many others), but something called KDE, a graphical environment that mimics Windows so closely that you can put a Windows user on a KDE equipped Linux box and he'll know what to do. There's another graphical environment called Gnome, with a different set of benefits. If you install both the KDE and Gnome libraries, you can run programs designed for either. I felt like a kid again, crawling through the weeds and pulling out a scooter. But the fun had just begun...
I didn't like the way they had changed a particular feature of the Samba file server software. I wished there was a way to make it behave like the old version. Because Linux and other Opens Source software (including Samba) come with source code, I was able to find the location of the changed feature, and change it back. It was a simple modification of two lines of source code. I recompiled and copied the newly made files, and boom, it worked the old way. I changed the actual software to suit my liking. Your wish has been granted.
Once you install Linux, you'll see the wishing well. It won't look like an overgrown space between the garage and fence. Instead, it will be the Internet. Wish for fax software, and download HylaFax free of charge (yes, legally!). Wish for a word processor? Download free AbiWord, StarOffice, or go to the store and buy Wordperfect for Linux. Free software called word2x converts Word docs to various other formats, which can be helpful. Want a graphics program with the power of Photoshop? It's called Gimp, and comes on most Linux distribution CD's. Want a simple vector graphics program? How about tgif? It has a zero cost license. Or maybe you'd prefer Canvas, a full-featured proprietary ($375 full license) vector graphics program.
Where do you find out about available software available for Linux? The best place is the Freshmeat website at http://www.freshmeat.net. They have a search feature enabling you to pretty much find any Linux compatible software. There's also the Linux section of Tucows, whose URL is in the URL's section of this issue of Troubleshooting Professional Magazine.
How would you like an audio player than manages playlists and plays all different formats? I won't lie to you -- it will take a little research and programming, but you can do it free with Linux. Your windows buddies will ask you why you took all that trouble. You can no more explain it to them than you can explain your weekly maintenance of your 440 68 Charger to your neighbor with a Toyota. Your Charger leaves the Toyota in the dust, and your Linux audio player leaves the Windows music programs in the dust. And if it doesn't, you can soup it up until it does.
Linux isn't for everyone. More than ever before, trade magazines hype the computer as an "appliance". The person wanting an appliance buys a Windows computer. Linux computers aren't appliances. Neither are 68 Chargers.
URLs Mentioned in this Issue
Car URL's
http://www.troubleshooters.com: Steve Litt's primary website.
Linux URL's
http://www.redhat.com: Website of Red Hat, makers of the Red Hat distribution of Linux.
http://www.caldera.com: Website of Caldera, makers of the Caldera distribution of Linux.
http://www.corel.com: Website of Corel, makers of the Corel distribution of Linux, and the WordPerfect word procesing software.
http://www.kde.org/index.html: Home page of the free KDE desktop environment.
http://www.gnome.org: Home page of the free Gnome desktop environment.
http://www.samba.org: Home page of the free Samba file server software.
http://www.hylafax.org: Home page of the free HylaFax faxing software.
http://www.abisource.com: Home page of the free AbiWord word processing software.
http://www.sun.com/staroffice: Home page of StarOffice, word processor free from Sun.
http://word2x.alcom.co.uk: Homepage of free Word2x, the MS .doc conversion tool.
http://www.gimp.org: Home page of Gimp, the free heavy duty graphics program that works under Linux.
http://bourbon.cs.umd.edu:8001/tgif: Home page of tgif, a free vector graphics program that works under Linux.
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO.html: The Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO.
http://www.freshmeat.net: The Freshmeat site, the best starting place for finding Linux software.
http://download.tucows.com/perl/linuxRegion.html: The Linux section of Tucows, which provides links to much software available for Linux.
Other URL's
http://www.troubleshooters.com: Steve Litt's website.
http://usvms.gpo.gov: This page, the US V Microsoft (usvms) page of the US Government Printing Office, has links to Judge Jackson's finding of fact and Judge Jackson's conclusions of law and order.
