Fact or Fiction? Top 8 Linux Myths Debunked

Yahoo ^ | Thu Sep 9, 2:18 pm ET | Katherine Noyes Katherine Noyes

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

If the idea of using Linux in your business is one that makes you nervous, chances are you've fallen prey to one or more of the many myths out there that are frequently disseminated by competing vendors such as Microsoft. After all, each Linux user means one less sale for such companies, so they have a powerful motivation to spread such FUD.

In fact, the ranks of businesses and government organizations using Linux grows every day, and for good reason: it's simply a good business choice. Let's take a look, then, at some of the top anxiety-causing myths and dispel them once and for all.

1. "It's Hard to Install"

Today, installing Linux is actually easier than installing Windows. Of course, most people don't install Windows themselves--rather, it comes preinstalled on their hardware, and that's an option with Linux too, if you're in the market for a new machine anyway.

If not, however, the best thing to do is first try out the distribution you're interested in via a Live CD or Live USB. Then, once you decide you like it, you can either install it in dual-boot fashion, so that both Linux and Windows are available to you all the time, or you can install Linux instead of Windows.

Either way, installation has become extremely simple over the years, particularly on distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint and openSUSE. Most include a step-by-step wizard and very easy-to-understand graphical tools; they also typically offer a way to automate the process. A full installation will probably take no more than 30 minutes, including basic apps.

2. "It's Just for Experts"

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Back in my mainfram days I worked on some VM/370 Installations...

it really wasn't ready for prime time though.

I got scars.

[altair]

I installed the newest version of ubuntu on my Dell 1710 XPS.The only problemI had was getting the WiFi system to work

That problem is mainly due to US government regulation which inhibits release of wireless drivers as Open Source. However, the temperature in Hell dropped to 30 degrees and stayed there recently and Broadcom announced that it is going to release Open Source drivers.

What kind of wireless card is in that system?

[altair]

For those, like me, who started their understanding of OS's using DOS commands in Windows 3.1 learning the entire new commands for Linux is daunting. I suppose if I immersed myself in it I would catch on but I just don't have the time.

I understand your concern. I feel just the opposite. I got converted into a zsh user (zsh is one of the common login shells) in the early 1990s and my login scripts have been more or less unchanged since around 1996. I use Solaris and RHEL desktop and servers at work, Mac OS X at home now.

Coming up in a couple of months, I'll be celebrating my first quarter century of running Unix at home.

[altair]

Yeah, that's been a huge problem for Apple. :)

PC gaming is fading out, anyway - most serious players prefer consoles.

The #1 PC game maker is Blizzard (World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft) and they have first class support for Apple Macs.

Gaming is a classic chicken or egg problem. My strategery is to avoid anything Microsoft Windows only. It works out fine. I really only have time for one game and World of Warcraft has first class support for Mac OS X, and unofficial support for Linux under Wine. (The Blizzard developers worked with the Wine developers so that the Warden, their anti-cheat subsystem, recognizes Wine as a valid platform).

[ShadowAce]

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I wonder if that is a record for longest user of Unix around here....sure beats mine.

I think I started playing with it after 2003.

[altair]

I wonder if that is a record for longest user of Unix around here....sure beats mine.

Not quite ... I got my first home Unix machine (it ran a beta Unix System V/R2) around Thanksgiving 1985. I've been a Unix user since September 1981.

Modern Linux is something is something I worked much of my adult life to see happen (I've contributed code to dozens of different Open Source software packages, from glibc and the Linux kernel to sendmail to PostgreSQL), I signed on to the Open Source movement when I got introduced to Emacs in 1987, which of course, was before Open Source got its proper name.

I think I started playing with it after 2003.

That's a pretty good time, actually. Linux distros started picking up polish 2001/2002.

Of course, the burning question is ... Emacs or VI?

[shorty_harris]

2: Microsoft Excel. Simply put, Excel and Word are head and sholders above the competition.

This is the one reason why I keep bringing my Mac Book Pro to work every day. I'm the only person in my organization who uses linux (Ubuntu on a desktop) and Openoffice.

Openoffice usually mangles a word or excel document I try to open, so I have to use my mac version of MS word/excel. But this isn't because MS word/excel is better (at least for a casual user like myself...I find that creating documents with OO and converting them to PDF to send to my colleagues works great), it's because MS probably works at keeping the two incompatible.

[antiRepublicrat]

“It’s not compatible”

This varies by distro. Ubuntu installs perfectly in VMWare Fusion. Mint has a problem with the mouse.

[dayglored]

>> Coming up in a couple of months, I'll be celebrating my first quarter century of running Unix at home.

> I wonder if that is a record for longest user of Unix around here....sure beats mine.

I obtained my first AT&T 3B2/300 32-bit Unix SysV minicomputer in mid-1985 -- that's the same year as altair. I don't recall the month, though, so I'll yield. :)

That box changed my life. I had started programming in C a few years before, but the Unix environment and I immediately got along like old buddies, and it's still my favorite OS.

[dayglored]

> Of course, the burning question is ... Emacs or VI?

I use Emacs, vi, nedit, and sometimes good ol' ed. Whatever is most appropriate, and available under the circumstances.

Today's Helpful Hint: When your company server won't boot because of problems in /etc/fstab, you can't get fsck to act sanely, and you're in a single-user shell with your boss staring at you -- even vi is not available -- use ed. Growing up with a line editor in the 70's has saved my butt more than once.

[dayglored]

> I've been a Unix user since September 1981.

You've got me beat by a couple years as a user.

In 1981 I was working on DEC RSX-11/M on a PDP-11 with a VT-100 and a 9600-baud line. As I recall the hardware was an LSI-11/23 with RL02 10MB disk packs.

Man, those were the days.... (cough). :)

[altair]

I obtained my first AT&T 3B2/300 32-bit Unix SysV minicomputer in mid-1985 -- that's the same year as altair. I don't recall the month, though, so I'll yield. :)

Ooooooh. I saw those when they were first announced right around the time of the AT&T breakup. Sweet machines for their time. Size matters and that definitely beats the Stride 440 m68k Micro with 25MB hard disk that I had as does mid year. I concede.

That box changed my life. I had started programming in C a few years before, but the Unix environment and I immediately got along like old buddies, and it's still my favorite OS.

Brother dayglored, that's exactly how I felt my first time on Unix. It was really spooky that it felt so *right*. The magic doesn't go away. I enjoy my Unix based Mac so much that the US government would criminalize it if they could.

It was my second computer that transformed my life. It was an AT&T 3B1 aka PC7300, mc68010 expanded to 2 1/2 MB ram and 50 MB hard disk. Spring 1987 when there was the fire sale at EOL.

All of the interesting software going through comp.unix.sources was generally BSD only. This required porting to SysV tty ioctls much of the time, among other things. An unbelievable learning experience. I had access to Unix source code from my job and I managed to get a working tcsh (without job control and some other features, of course), which I didn't use because I hate csh, but it was fun! I also got a vanilla SysV/R2 port of sendmail working. I could do pretty good software before then, but afterwards, I had confidence I could tackle anything ... and pretty much, I could.

Because it was an end-of-lifed system, there would never be any updates. strip(1) had a horrible bug. If you ran strip(1) on a binary that was already stripped, you got an error message and it deleted the binary. It was at that point that I decided that I never wanted a computer system that I couldn't make fixes to when required and I started contributing software back to what eventually became Linux.

[altair]

Someone has written a M-x butterfly, you know ...

When your company server won't boot because of problems in /etc/fstab, you can't get fsck to act sanely, and you're in a single-user shell with your boss staring at you -- even vi is not available -- use ed.

In upper division college, I was finally off of the System 7 PDP and on the CS VAX which had vi available and ... I couldn't use it most of the time because it was too slow, so I still used ed.

But, question ... how do you edit files using only /bin/sh if for some reason ed isn't available? I figured it out under fire when I was trying to get a Microport install working until I established that it didn't have drivers for the hard disk for the machine.

[altair]

In 1981 I was working on DEC RSX-11/M on a PDP-11 with a VT-100 and a 9600-baud line. As I recall the hardware was an LSI-11/23 with RL02 10MB disk packs.

Man, those were the days.... (cough). :)

:-) We will always have the memories ...

[Calvinist_Dark_Lord]

The author says antivirus software is not needed. Infection does happen so what are linux users doing to rid themselves of viruses/malware?

The virus file just sits there and stays confused. It does not interact with the Linux system. If you find it, you just delete it.

HINT: look for a .exe file which would NOT run on a Linux system. It would most likely reside in either the ~/Download directory, or the /temp directory.

[dayglored]

> But, question ... how do you edit files using only /bin/sh if for some reason ed isn't available?

Well, it's stretching the definition of "edit", but as long as the file is less than about 15 lines (assuming a 24x80 console), and /bin/cat is available:

cat file_to_be_edited
cat > file_to_be_edited

and type carefully, using the first printout as a guide.

If you're really stuck with only /bin/sh and don't even have cat, there's always:

$ echo "line one
> line two
> ... " > file_to_be_edited

assuming echo is a built-in and not /bin/echo.

I use cat > or echo > typically at least once a day, for creating short textfiles of a line or two, such as motd or for testing or flagging purposes. I feel sorta silly cranking up an editor for something I can type in the time it takes for the editor come up and shut down.

Another handy cat hint, if you're using X11 and need to copy/paste some text while removing formatting (say you're copying formatted text from a browser into a plaintext file):

cat >/dev/null
paste the formatted text here
^D

The xterm throws away the formatting, and you can then select-copy from the xterm's echoed display, and paste to the plaintext file. I use that so often I made it an alias "catnul". :)

[dayglored]

I don't think I actually answered your question. :)

> I figured it out under fire...

That implies you could really -edit- a file using only /bin/sh and no other binaries.

All I can think is something like:

exec < file_to_be_edited
while read line; do
  (some shell magic with line)
  echo "$line" >> new_file
done

or maybe instead of a single variable line, use a series of variables for each word parsed from the input on each line.... argggh. And you'd still have to use mv to rename it back, so that can't be right.

I'd love to know how; willin' to share?

[dayglored]

> All of the interesting software going through comp.unix.sources was generally BSD only. This required porting to SysV tty ioctls much of the time, among other things. An unbelievable learning experience.

Yep, funny you mention that -- in 1985 I wrote a computer-to-computer comms program that was a terminal with file I/O and special functions, sort of Kermit-on-steroids, and had to learn all about the SysV I/O for terminal and file control. Loved every minute of it. :)

> I had access to Unix source code...

Alas, although I could have (there was a nearby 3B5 that had full sources), I was not permitted to view them, because the company I was working for was developing a "Unix-like" industrial process control system from scratch and we had to have plausible deniability that we'd ever viewed the actual Unix sources.

[Still Thinking]

Openoffice usually mangles a word or excel document I try to open, so I have to use my mac version of MS word/excel. But this isn't because MS word/excel is better (at least for a casual user like myself...I find that creating documents with OO and converting them to PDF to send to my colleagues works great), it's because MS probably works at keeping the two incompatible.

I tried Open Office v3 and would say that it's at about 90-95% of the functionality and quality of MS Office. Unfortunately, the 5-10% includes a few obscure features on both Word and Excel that I use frequently, but I think for a lot of normal people, they'd be just fine.