Posted on 02/01/2004 5:42:12 PM PST by NCjim
Linux has long been the darling of highly-skilled programmers. But now, the program is going mainstream, reports technology correspondent Clark Boyd.
Major global computer companies are now embracing Linux. IBM, for one, is currently running a series of television and online ads proclaiming that the future is open, as in open source computing.
They have even enlisted author Kurt Vonnegut to help promote the open source ideal of sharing your computer code with others.
It is a far cry from the days when the only people who knew about Linux were a small community of zealous enthusiasts.
The interest from big companies is helping Linux programmers get the recognition they deserve.
"It's helping us get more appreciation from the rest of the world," said open source guru Bruce Perens.
"We are no longer isolated geeks making a system only we know is good. And I think there's a lot of benefit."
Modify and share
The Linux operating system was created more than a decade ago by Linus Torvalds, then just a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
Since then, the program has been further refined by programmers worldwide.
Linux is unique in that its code is open source, meaning anyone can look it and modify it, as long as they agree to share their changes with everyone else.
Large companies have been benefiting from Linux for years now. They use it to run large servers and networks.
The number one issue for many of these companies is money. Linux can be a low-cost alternative to other, proprietary operating systems like Microsoft Windows.
Because Linux is open source, it can be obtained for free, although most companies pay software developers for a package of Linux-based applications, including e-mail and word processing.
They also pay for customer support. But usually not near as much as they would pay to a proprietary vendor.
That is encouraging software developers around the world to make Linux-based products.
"I think the market is looking for an alternative to Microsoft," said Dan Wensley, from Net Integration Technologies in Ontario, Canada.
"Just being an alternative to Microsoft in a lot of markets globally will give you an opportunity.
"Today, business has adopted Linux as an alternative, and as a viable, sometimes better, sometimes as-good-as solution and we've seen it over last five to six years, develop into a real market and real opportunity and real saleable item," he said.
Saving money
Linux is also proving popular in the public sector. Governments like the idea of not paying a proprietary vendor huge licensing fees for years and years.
They also like the fact that open source software allows them to modify the code themselves.
"What we see happening in Europe is that governments are picking it up," said Marcel Hartog of Computer Associates.
"If you talk to governments, they're actually thinking - why don't we write open source software as well.
"So it's not just cost-based, but also the concept of open source software. They just like the idea of saving the people money, but also giving back to the people what they created."
The German city of Munich, for one, recently decided to move from Windows to Linux. Israel and Brazil have also begun initiatives to increase their use of open-source solutions.
Microsoft rival, Sun Microsystems, is currently working with the Chinese Government on open-source software development.
China wants to use Linux to create its own, home-grown software industry.
"If you spend a dollar with a local company working on Linux, that dollar stays in your economy," said Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems.
"When you spend a dollar with a multi-national corporation as a license fee for a piece of software, that dollar leaves your country."
"It's about keeping the money in your local economy, developing skills and developing the local economy to be strong in its own right in a global context."
And that is why some think open-source could be the way of the future, especially for developing countries.
Dimo Calovksi, who works on development issues at the United Nations, believes open source could tap into the developing world's natural strengths.
"In order to be a good information technology professional, to be a developer, programmer, system administrator, one has to have a problem-solving mentality," he said.
"This is something that a lot of people in developing countries have. It is a natural for them to make do with little, and to produce something of value out of nothing."
Commercial waters
The majority of the Linux community is excited about how their creation is being put to use, both in business and in government.
Some worry, though, that large corporations may be reluctant to share their Linux-based software with others. And that, say long-time Linux programmers, would violate the tenets of the open source philosophy.
But open source proponent Eric Raymond says that most Linux programmers are happy to spread the gospel.
"In the last five or six years, we've had a new generation of advocates come out and go public, who are really much more comfortable with collaborating with markets and collaborating with corporations," he said.
"Because hackers are bright people, and they've figured out that if you want to change the world, one of the things you have to do is co-opt the people who write the big cheques."
Those cheques may soon be getting bigger.
At this year's recent LinuxWorld Expo in New Year, it was clear that corporations, governments and programmers are united by one goal - getting Linux onto as many personal computers around the globe as possible.
[amp amp]$ zip Copyright (C) 1990-1999 Info-ZIP Type 'zip "-L"' for software license. Zip 2.3 (November 29th 1999). Usage: zip [-options] [-b path] [-t mmddyyyy] [-n suffixes] [zipfile list] [-xi list] The default action is to add or replace zipfile entries from list, which can include the special name - to compress standard input. If zipfile and list are omitted, zip compresses stdin to stdout. -f freshen: only changed files -u update: only changed or new files -d delete entries in zipfile -m move into zipfile (delete files) -r recurse into directories -j junk (don't record) directory names -0 store only -l convert LF to CR LF (-ll CR LF to LF) -1 compress faster -9 compress better -q quiet operation -v verbose operation/print version info -c add one-line comments -z add zipfile comment -@ read names from stdin -o make zipfile as old as latest entry -x exclude the following names -i include only the following names -F fix zipfile (-FF try harder) -D do not add directory entries -A adjust self-extracting exe -J junk zipfile prefix (unzipsfx) -T test zipfile integrity -X eXclude eXtra file attributes -y store symbolic links as the link instead of the referenced file -R PKZIP recursion (see manual) -e encrypt -n don't compress these suffixes [amp amp]$
Looks like that's been met some time ago.
b) I don't have to recompile the OS to update it
I've recompiled my kernel before. It was over a year ago. Even then it was just to be sure I could if the need arose. It hasn't. Depending on your needs, just about any distribution will work for you out of the box these days. If you like to stay current with the latest kernels, you might check out KRUD. It is a subscription-based distribution. For $65/year, you get a brand new set of full install disks mailed to you every month, that you can use to do either an install or upgrade, depending upon your needs.
c) someone produces a guide explaining just what the hell the installation options are, what they mean, and what they control;
Google is your friend. There is more information about installing various flavors of Linux out there than you can shake a stick at. If you want more information about the different install options of a RedHat based distro, ping me, and I'll give you a rundown.
d) someone explains how to install drivers.
Most drivers will be installed automatically when you perform your initial installation. You don't mention specifically what drivers you are interested in, or I'd give you a more complete answer. To give you an idea, I recently bought my oldest daughter a Wacom USB drawing tablet/mouse combo. The installation process was as follows: 1) I plugged it in. 2) I started using it.
You didn't mention how long ago the problem occurred with your DSL modem. No additional drivers were required by mine. I merely plugged it into my ethernet port, and it worked with DHCP immediately. (I had to tell the system to bounce the ethernet port (eth0)).
One thing you can try to make sure everything works correctly on your system, without the hassel of an install, is to download the Knoppix ISO, cut it to a CD, and boot off of it. Using this, I was able to determine that my mother-in-law's new laptop would have problems with the built-in wireless device, but would work just fine with a PCMCIA wireless card. Knoppix is also a great thing to use if you just want to play with it, and see if Linux will work the way you want it to. It boots completely off the CD, and runs from there (making some program loading slow), but it doesn't mess with your hard disks at all.
Are there any other objections?
pkzip files are typically a single file that contains many files that are compressed into a single archive. You unzip them and get all the files that it contained. gzip only works on single files (though you can tell the program to compress many files at a time). Lets say you have a large file called 'file1.txt'. If you issue the command gzip file1.txt, you will end up with a compressed file called file1.txt.gz. Let's take the case of 2 files, 'file1.txt', and 'file2.txt'. The command gzip file1.txt file2.txt will result again in 2 files, but each will be individually compressed. i.e., file1.txt.gz and file2.txt.gz. Note that the origional file1.txt is deleted during this process and is not typically left behind.
Now, to uncompress file1.txt.gz, you'd use the "-d" switch, i.e., gzip -d file1.txt.gz. This would leave you with an uncompressed file called "file1.txt". So, to compress with gzip, you use
gzip filename
To uncompress, you use
gzip -d filename
Now, most of the time, you're actually presented with a file like myfiles.tar.gz. What this means, is that rather than using a tool like pkzip that creates both an archive of files that are compressed, two separate operations were used. First, the archive was created with tar, (which has no compression applied to it) then the resulting tar file is compressed with gzip.
Let us assume you have a directory with a bunch of TXT files in it that you want to put into a 'tar.gz' format. Tar is an incredibly powerful program that was originally developed to create archives on a tape backup device (hence Tape ARchive). I shant discuss the full capabilities of tar because, like I said, it is extremely powerful and flexable, but you can get by with just using a very few of the options to make it do 95% of what you want to do unless you want to get really fancy. Tar, for the purposes of this discussion has two modes, the "-cvf" switches to create an archive, and "-xvf" to extract the files from the archive. Again, recall you want to create a single archive of a bunch of txt files. The syntax to do this is simple: tar -cvf filename.tar files_to_tar.
Briefly,
tar -cvf myfiles.tar *.txt
To eXtract the files from a given archive, use the -xvf switches mentioned above:
tar -xvf myfiles.tar
Now, at this point, you have a tar that contains a bunch of TXT files, and you want to compress it:
gzip myfiles.tar
You will now have a file in the directory called "myfiles.tar.gz" that is compressed.
I've used a lot of verbiage here to describe a process that is really fairly simple. Once you use it a few times, it will work for you pretty easily. I'd like to point out one thing though. Many modern versions of 'tar' know how to handle compression all my themselves. You just add a "z" to the switch mentioned below. So, to create a single compressed archive of a bunch of TXT files in the current directory, you'd simply use one command:
tar -czvf myfiles.tar.gz *txt
To extract them:
tar -xzvf myfiles.tar.gz
I really hope this is as clear as I intended it to be. Personally, I would prefer it if people just used zip rather than the tar/gzip combination, but I tthink it's largely institutional inertia that keeps tar/gzip alive in the unix world. Also, just about any unix system is pretty much guaranteed to have both the gzip and tar commands available, while there is considerably less likelihood that the zip, and unzip commands will be available. This is getting to be the case less and less though, so hopefully it will eventually cease to be an issue.
It might also be worth noting that there are many front-ends written for dealing with zip, tar, and gzip on most Linux distributions. These will hide most of the messiness from you.
One final note: in many cases, it is traditional to create tar files of subdirectories. When a tar created in this manner, the subdirectory containing the files is created upon extraction. This is largely a safety measure which guards agains accidently overwriting files that exist in the current directory but have the same name as something in the archive. So, in the above example where you had a bunch of txt files in a directory called "MYTEXTS", you'd 'cd' to the directory above, and create the compressed archive like this:
tar -czvf myfiles.tar.gz MYTEXTS
This will, of course put everything that is in the "MYTEXTS" directory in the archive. Extraction works exactly as you'd think given the above:
tar -xzvf myfiles.tar.gz
This will create a subdirectory called MYTEXT that contains all the files.
I really hope this is helpful both to you and anyone else who reads this thread. If anything needs to be clarified, please feel free to ask.
Here's the scoop.
Knoppix is easier than any Windows because you don't have to install it, and it does not disturb the current configuration of your computer in any way. It runs straight from the CD. It comes complete with Open Office and Mozilla web browser, plus a thousand other things.
It is also a great rescue disk. Just last week I had a Windows NT machine that quit booting. The Windows NT installation disk could not even mount the primary NTFS partition because the file table was corrupted so badly. Knoppix booted and mounted the NTFS partition without difficulty. I was able to copy all the user's data files to a network share.
If you want to run games, stick with your Windows machine for now. I have run Quake III Arena on my Linux box, but the OpenGL drivers are a bit of a pain to install, and you would have to do that with a standard hard-disk Linux install.
But a very important Linux milestone has been reached with Knoppix. Windows will never be as easy as Knoppix to run, because if you could just stick a Windows CD in a computer and be on your way the Windows license would be impossible to enforce.
"Volunteering" doesn't get them a pass when it comes to judging the end product, especially not if the quality of the end product is one of the touted benefits of the work. Either it works for me, or it doesn't, but the fact that they're not writing to please me doesn't foreclose me - or anyone else - from pointing out that doesn't work for me if that's the case. My four year old daughter "volunteers" all sort of time coloring in her coloring books, and while God knows I love every one of them, that doesn't mean that they belong in the Louvre just because it would be somehow wrong to judge someone's voluntary work produced for their own pleasure....
After some research, I believe that a Linux version will be out at the same time, if not before, the Windows version.
I have owned and installed Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Caldera and Turbo Linux systems. As the years went on, the installations became more reliable. I like Mandrake's installation.
Workstation or Server? Server for sure (right now). You can take a lower end PC, install Linux on it, and have your web and email server running in minutes.
I tend to do a custom install, and load up what I need, or think I will soon need. I generally find that if I go with default installs, it never really contains what I want.
Yes, we've seen that.
That depends on whether the solution to my particular problem relies on having the knobs arranged a particular way, doesn't it? Not to mention that having the knobs arranged a different way from what one is used to may very well impose a cost to switching all by itself - if nothing else, in time spent adjusting to the new arrangement. In either case, knowing that they're arranged differently may very well be useful information to others, the fact that you don't find it useful notwithstanding.
Perhaps the Mahler volunteers are brilliant, in both interpretation and performance. Or perhaps they blow chunks. Either way, anyone interested in Mahler is certainly entitled to judge their performance on its own merits, and to share that judgement with others. And if it turns out that their performance is substandard, then it is a disservice to those others to pretend otherwise, or to pretend to withhold judgement simply because they're goofing around on their own time - in such a case, Mahler enthusiasts are better served by going to the record store and picking up a Bruno Walter or Otto Klemperer recording, even though that means paying for the performance rather than receiving it for free. After all, "free" is not enough, in and of itself - it has to be free and solve some problem for me, or else it's free but useless. But, of course, if the only way to know such a thing is to judge the product on its own merits, how can anyone do that if critical examination of the product is ruled out-of-bounds by virtue of the fact that it's a volunteer-driven effort?
I don't believe it does. Remember, you framed the issue as one of "quality." That is a different issue than "maps well onto my personal preferences." To tell other people that a car that goes 300,000 miles without a tune-up or a breakdown is of low quality because the knobs on the radio are not arranged the way you prefer them, is to project your own preferences onto others without regard for their needs. Most people would consider a car that was that reliable to be worth looking into, and to gain its advantages they might be willing to read the manual to see how to work the radio. That you personally do not like new-fangled radios so much that you would trade reliability for radio-familiarity does not make the car a low-quality one. It makes it one that you personally would not buy, but that's all it does.
I don't believe it does.
Err, well, not to put too fine of a point on it, but I really don't think you're in a position to judge that for anyone but yourself, are you? The whole idea is that people ought to be free to judge some effort on its own merits, whatever their particular idea of "merit" happens to be. You may not care that the ultra-reliable free car doesn't come in blue, but if one of my absolute requirements is a blue car, then "free" and "worthless" are roughly synonymous in my case, and it's really irrelevant to me what your preferences are. I appreciate knowing that I can't have one of the things I want, and perhaps there are others in the same position. Maybe not getting it in blue isn't that important to me either, in which case, it's still useful information to have in order to judge the suitability of the solution proffered - that way, I can make as full and fair a judgement as possible, given as much information as possible.
You've got a loser here, IMO, and I'm surprised you're sticking with it as doggedly as you are - the net effect of what you're arguing here is to suggest that less information is better than more information, and I think you're going to have a hard row to hoe with that one. I certainly respect your right to announce that not being able to play Galactic HyperMegaBlaster 3000 is not an important issue to you, but for you to begin spinning that into it not being an important issue for anyone is really a bit much.
Remember, you framed the issue as one of "quality." That is a different issue than "maps well onto my personal preferences."
(shrugs) - quality in terms of suitability to task, then. It makes little difference in any case - the major point I'm addressing is this notion that the Mahler volunteers and the Linux kernel hackers are (or should be) beyond critical examination because they're volunteering their efforts. You can put them beyond criticism by pointing out that "they're not doing it for you", but why should anyone take advocacy seriously in that case? Especially when that makes a perfect catch-all response to any suggestion of any shortcomings at all? "I installed Red Hat yesterday, and now my box glows a funny green color and all my hair is falling out." "Well, they're not doing it for you, and besides, it's a volunteer thing..."
Being a computer illiterate with no Apple service center or store near you can be a reason not to go Mac if you just have to have something local. About the best reason I've seen is the one you mention -- the need for very specific software that is not available yet on the Mac (as opposed to the false general "there's no software" claim). Your reason is even better since I wouldn't want to do Doom3 through VirtualPC like you can for most of the other missing Mac apps.
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