dacs.doc electric

THE LINUX operating system has been getting a lot of press this past year as an up and coming possible competitor to Windows. I thought it might make an interesting addition to my computer's existing stable of operating systems: Windows 95, 98, NT, and OS/2.

I started reading about the different "distributions" of Linux. In theory Linux, a clone of UNIX that runs on PCs or Macs, can be downloaded for free from various sites on the Internet. This would not be recommended for a first-time user of Linux, or someone with an ordinary modem connection to the Internet. There are several companies that conveniently package Linux on CD-ROM. I decided to try Red Hat Linux, which is supposed to be one of the easier distributions to install. The latest version is 5.2, released in November 1998.

My first point of confusion after deciding on Red Hat was finding that there is more than one Red Hat distribution available. I first ran across a "Red Hat 5.2 Deluxe" in a light gray box that is actually put out by MacMillan Publishing. It is supposed to contain the text of four Linux books on the CD-ROM and comes with 30 days of support. Later at a bookstore I found and bought the official Red Hat in a blue box, which includes 90 days of e-mail support and has an extra CD-ROM of demo Linux applications. A typical price would be $39.95. For less money you can also get a copy of the Red Hat distribution on CD-ROM from various mail order companies such as CheapBytes that includes no hard-copy manual.

A couple of other distributions worth mentioning are Caldera OpenLinux, which seems to cater more to the business market, and S.u.S.E. Linux which is most popular in Europe. You may also run across the Slackware distribution in the back of a Linux book, which is known for being difficult to install but which is noteworthy for being one of the first Linux distributions available. MkLinux and LinuxPPC are versions that run on the Power Macintosh.

I had planned to install Linux on my third hard drive but found out that the boot or root partition needs to go on the first or second hard drive. I still had room to add a partition on my second drive, so I chose to put the root partition there, with a swap partition and a /usr partition on the third drive.

Well, already I have to start explaining some things because Linux is very different from the DOS, Windows, or Mac world. Linux has its own file system, which is different from the common FAT file system used on PCs by DOS and Windows. Instead of drive letters like C:, D:, and so on, it has a hierarchical system of directories and files with a common root designated by "/", no matter how many physical partitions Linux may span. Under the root directory you will see top-level directory names such as /root, /home, /usr, and /var. Notice that Linux uses a forward slash instead of the backward slash to delimit the directories and subdirectories, for example, /usr/local. If you don't have much experience with partitions, you may want to use a second hard drive separate from your Windows stuff, or if you have an older computer still around, that might also make a safe laboratory to do your Linux experimentation in. A 486 should work, or maybe even a 386 for just text mode, but you'll need a minimum of 16 MB of memory (more would definitely be better). I'd recommend at least 500 MB of disk space to give Linux a real try.

Installation

Suffice it to say that if you are a Linux novice you'll need to do a little research before jumping into an installation. In many cases you need to know exactly what sort of hardware you've got-videocard, soundcard, etc.-and for ISA cards what IRQs and I/O addresses they require. If you have Windows 95 on your machine the Device Manager is a great place to gather this information and print it out. It's also good if you have some documentation on your monitor, because you'll need to know exactly what range of horizontal and vertical refresh rates it supports. Once you reach the point of actually starting the installation, it goes pretty quickly--faster than any other 32-bit OS I've installed.

In my case I knew my Matrox videocard wasn't supported out of the box with Red Hat 5.2, but I could go ahead and install it and boot to a command prompt, and then download and install an updated version of the X Window System later to provide a GUI environment. When I first went looking for an update to the XFree86 X Window System at http://www.xfree86.org, I found the required installation files in .tar.gz compressed format. Aside from the basic files you'll need the VGA16 driver for the setup utilties, and one other driver specific to your videocard. To configure your mouse, keyboard, and monitor I recommend XF86Setup instead of the Xconfigurator or xf86config utilities mentioned in the RedHat Installation Guide. The first page of setup is for your mouse. Be careful to use only the keyboard and not the mouse until you've chosen the correct protocol for your mouse. After completing the installation I started the GUI environment using the command startx.

When I first saw the GUI come up there wasn't much there-just two or three command windows floating on a solid color background. There was no Program Manager, File Manager, or any icons. The windows didn't even have a frame around them, just a title bar. I couldn't even figure out how to resize a window. Later I came to learn that I was using a "window manager" called twm, or Tab Window Manager, which is a minimal default window manager that comes as part of the XFree86 package. If your videocard is supported out of the box in your chosen Linux distribution, you won't run into this unfriendly welcome. You'll likely be greeted by something like fvwm95 that looks a little similar to Windows 95, or AfterStep, or the new full-blown desktop environment called KDE, which will be an easier adjustment for someone used to Windows. Red Hat is promoting another new desktop environment called Gnome. The nice thing is that you have a choice of a GUI shell that sits on top of the Linux operating system. I'm currently using Window Maker, which emulates the look and feel of the NextStep OS.

Learning Curve

Linux will be tough slogging at first. I felt like I was playing one of those adventure games where you're not quite sure what the object of the game is, but you go foraging around for clues until some pieces start to come together. The commands are mostly different from DOS/Windows (e.g. ls instead of dir to list the contents of a directory). The configuration files are scattered all over rather than being centralized like the Windows registry. It seems like almost everything I have working in Linux now took some effort. Here are some simple things you might take for granted that I had to expend some effort to get to work or figure out:

• I can boot Linux from my root partition on the hard drive instead of from a boot floppy disk.
• I can print to my laser printer that supports PostScript.
• I can dial my Internet provider and connect to the Internet.
• I can listen to a music CD.
• I can read files from a CD-ROM or floppy disk.
• I can read and write files from a FAT partition used by Windows (also read from an OS/2 HPFS partition).
• I can use helper applications and plug-ins to play sounds and video in Netscape (multimedia is not built in).
• I can use the wheel on my IntelliMouse to scroll.

An excellent book that a fellow customer in a computer store recommended is A Practical Guide to Linux by Mark Sobell. It's a thorough tutorial and general reference book on Linux from a Unix expert. However, the one thing it's not good for is information on installing or configuring a particular distribution of Linux. For instance, it was of no help when I was trying to set up my Internet connection in Linux. You may want to look for a second book that's specific to your distribution, if you didn't already buy one with a CD-ROM distribution inside the back cover.

Almost any problem you'll run into in setting up Linux has been encountered by someone before you. Since there are likely fewer people around you that know Linux versus Windows or the Mac OS, you'll need to learn to use the Usenet newsgroups on the Internet. You can browse through the many Linux newsgroups using a newsreader, or point your browser to a newsgroup search site such as Deja News and type in a few key words to find newsgroups postings on your very problem.

On your CD-ROM there will be a whole series of Linux HOWTO documents and there's also a Web site index of HOWTOs at http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/. There are various other sites dedicated to Linux, but one I particularly like is http://linux.miningco.com. I especially recommend the article series entitled Introducing Linux.

Locally DACS has its own Advanced Operating System SIG, but if you're willing to travel to Cheshire, CT, there are also some very knowledgeable Linux folks in the Connecticut Free Unix Group.

Things I Like About Linux

The operating system seems to very stable. It doesn't force you to reboot to resolve application crashes. I've occasionally had Netscape for Linux hang, but all I had to do was kill it from an xterm command line window and I was back in business. The application problem didn't destabilize the rest of the system in any way. Installing an application doesn't require a reboot, either. The only time I was ever forced to reboot was when I upgraded the kernel, or made a change to the partitions on the hard drive.

Linux doesn't force you to do everything in the GUI environment. The command line environment can be very efficient and is capable of accomplishing things without the GUI, with full network access. For instance, when I was in the process of upgrading my X Window System, which provides the GUI videodriver services, I was able to dial my Internet provider and use ftp to download a missing file, all without the GUI up and running.

The security model is much more sensible than Windows NT. You can temporarily log in as the superuser from a command line to install a program or perform some other administrative task. All without logging off your current user ID. With Windows NT you would have to completely log off and exit the desktop environment to log on as an Administrator. I've generally found this so inconvenient that I've given up on trying to run Windows NT as an ordinary user, and just given myself Administrator authority. With Linux I can make use of the security features without it getting too much in the way. Some permissions do need to be set up properly at the start, but thereafter the security doesn't get in the way of getting things done. For example, at the outset you may find that you can't listen to a music CD or access a CD-ROM drive as an ordinary user, but if as the superuser you choose to give read permission on the CD device for other users, they (or you as an ordinary user) can make use of the device without a problem.

Linux is so educational. You will learn things about your computer and networking that you never knew before. It will be very frustrating at first, like learning a foreign language, but ultimately you'll find it very rewarding.

The file system is much more flexible when you need to reconfigure as your system grows. If you decide to move your /home or /usr directory to a separate or new partition, you don't have to worry about the nonsense of drive letters changing that might break your applications. You just copy the directory to the new location with a temporary directory name, rename or unmount the original, mount the new partition under the permanent name, and your back in business with nary an application broken by the move.

Many applications are free. If you can handle a 70MB download you can get a complete office suite with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentations program, database, personal information manager, drawing and graphics program, and Internet browser that is free for personal use. It's called Star Office 5.0 from Star Division and can open and save in Microsoft Office formats as well as HTML and its own native file formats. If you don't want to try the download, you can order the CD-ROM with a manual for $39.95. You can also get WordPerfect for Linux from Corel.

So is Linux ready for the masses? It's certainly proven itself as a server OS. Many Websites run Linux with the free Apache Web server and FTP server programs that come with it. Some of the top computer companies are now offering Linux preinstalled on their server machines. The next market to conquer is the desktop OS. As of this writing it's not quite ready for mass deployment, but for you early adopters willing to invest the time in learning a new OS, you'll get a stable OS that's a refreshing alternative to Windows. Soon when Linux becomes available preinstalled on a computer that the average user can buy, then I think we'll have some real competition in the desktop OS market for a change.