h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Linux is open source and I knew a friend who compiled an open source version of UNIX to run on his Commodore Amiga!

Many people say open source is the future, but it leaves the code open to people who might exploit it to create viruses.

Linux is a good thing as many universities are installing it instead of commercial operating systems, saving them a small (or large) fortune).

Linux usually does save universities a lot of money, plus it's more stable than some commercial operating systems.
My school uses Windows to run it's server. It crashes so much very few people can ever get any work done.

The fear that open source may lead to virus attacks is overblown. The "Security by obscruity", which many closed source companies adhere to, has long been a joke among the computer industry. Hide the code but the virus writers will find the holes.

The advantage the Linux has is that even when a virus is created it is quickly dealt with, by the leagons of code writes that support Linux.

It is interesting to note that there is a Windows competetor on the horizon, Lindows. It is hoped by some, and feared by others, that this product will allow many to migrate away from a Windows based system, taking their Windows software other than the OS, and have a more stable platform to work from.

Jay

And theres me thinking Linux, was something i could only get on percription!

I have a slight cough ATM!

So where can i get to look at this O/S and play with it then as I'm bored and i need of a challange!


Thank you, bored of bristol!

Well, Linux is distributed by different groups as Distributions such as SuSE, Fedora, or Debian. The distribution is only what programs and services the group has put with the operating system.

You can download or buy Linux distributions. Either go to your local computer store and pick up a copy of SuSE of Red Hat, or find a distributions website and download it.

or try to download a copy from:
http://www.suse.com
http://fedora.redhat.com/
http://www.debian.org

They also have something great called 'Live-CDs'. That's basically the operating system on a CD, and instead of having to install it to the hard drive the whole thing runs from the CD and doesnt mess with the hard drive or any of your files. This is good for people that just want to try it out.

A good Live CD can be found at
http://www.knoppix.org/

But if you aren't that great downloading and burning CD images I would suggest just buying the CDs at a store.

You've probably already been told all this but....You can get it from many sources. Download it even if you've got broadband. I'd recommend you get hold of Mandrake 10.0 community as it's probably the most user friendly. It's easy to set up a dual boot Windows/Linux machine. My main problem is that the range of printer drivers available is limited. Otherwise I can do just about everything I can do on Windows on Linux.

Operating System Formely Known As Lindows was sued by Microsoft for trademark infringement and is now known as Linspire. Until later...
BCNU - Crescent

God, Know All, just when i was just getting use to.........

Crescent:

You are quite right, but Microsoft lost that suit! Not only that but Microsoft was in danger of losing any right to use the term "Windows".

What has happened since is that Microsoft has attempted to do an end run around their loss in the US by going to courts in the EU. For wahtever reason Microsoft has been a bit more successful, but not in the way it wants, which is to shut the Lindows concept totally down.

Jay

My friend once showed me a virtual Linux bos that ran as a Java application on any operating systems. It was slow due to the lag time, but you were in control of a real Linux box attached to the server.

Very fun.

"there is a microsoft competitor called lindows"...

technically yes, but lindows is seen as a bit of a joke in the open source community.

lindows is actually a debian based distribution (which can thus be set up to acces the debian archive) which tries to have a more user friendly desktop and charges for access to it's small archive of applications.

The problems with it are many. first there is the attempt by microsoft to sue it out of existance. it is quite possible it will end up[ being bought out.

then you have the yearly fee to access the small archive of software, which is unnecessary because you can just change your download path to the debian archive, and you get more programs for no money.

then there is it's attempt to provide a more microsofty desktop, something which is done a lot better by lycoris, which shares it's debian base, and thus all it's advantages.

And of course lindows tryes to deny it's heritage, hiding as much information as possible about it's code base.

lycoris lx desktop linux:

http://www.lycoris.com/

I thought Lycoris had a Caldera base, not debian. I tried it and liked it, but decided not to use it because it was difficulty to run the upgrade utility remotely.

Which reminds me that all of this "distro" business is hopelessly confusing to a newbie. Too many choices, not enough clear information on what the important differences are, if any, or disagreement on what is important.

Anyone reading this who is confused, it helps to understand the history and structure of *nix.

Unix <-- a commercial product, and the granddaddy of operating systems
|||
LinuxGnuBSD

Linux, Gnu, and BSD are three independent attempts at re-creating Unix as open-source. Gnu is a bit different in that it focused on the "higher end" stuff, and since Linux focused exclusively on the "low end" part, those two are perfect complements - when you get "linux" you are really getting both Gnu and Linux combined. BSD tries to be complete, but also includes a lot of Gnu.

Both Linux and BSD have children, and those are the "distros" or distributions, such as Red Hat, Debian, and Suse, or FreeBSD and OpenBSD. In turn each of the major distributions has children of its own, like Lindows and Knoppix which are based on Debian.

There. I'm just trying to be helpful. Now back to technical stuff.

I think my friend with the Amiga used NetBSD.

The prime website for information about Linux distributions is available at http://www.distrowatch.com, which lists all 252 active Linux distros, but the number is growing all the time!

Everywhere you go you will find a different opinion about which Linux distro is best. Some are commercial - these include Xandros, Lycoris, Linspire, Sun Microsystem's Java Desktop and so on; most, however, are open source and are 'free'.

It is very confusing for many people new to the world of open source to attempt to choose a distribution. But since there are so many distributions you can be sure to find one that suits you, with your own personal needs. Many distros - including the open source ones - are designed for professional use as servers, for example. Some are designed for academic use, some for testing purposes and some for the home consumer.

Many people have criticised the open source movement because hackers can easily implement security vulnerabilities into the code, but, as it has already been pointed out here, this has not proved to be a problem in the open source world. The fact that so many programmers and open source developers can contribute to a problem means that security holes are quickly spotted and attended to.

Unlike wholesomely proprietary and closed-source operating systems, the user can adapt their computer exactly to their own specification. If they find a bug, they don't need to wait for the next service pack or the next release; they don't even need to send an e-mail to the technical support of any particular company; if they have the know-how, they can quite simply fix the problem themselves and then submit their fix back to the community for everyone else's use. In this way, bugfixing is a far faster process, and new updates and patches can be released extremely rapidly.

I have used NetBSD and for the average home desktop user it is not particularly user-friendly. Many home users will recoil in surprise that NetBSD does not, by default, provide a graphical user interface, including in its installation procedure. But as with all the open source OSs, NetBSD has its advantages (namely, in this case, extreme portability and speed) and its own specific target audience.

you have not quite got it right there d'Elaphant.

unix was developed at at&t, and released to the community freely.

Because it as freely available, those at berkley made a large number of modifications, a lot of which they contributed back to at&t.

It was only when it started being used as the internal at&t system that they though they might be able to sell it, and it became commercial. (as a side point, it still costs about $2000 to go through the testing suite, and be allowed to use the unix name. This you have to do with every modification, and thus isn't done with open source, although one distribution did pass the tests and got approval).

eventually, this mix resulted in a court case, which resulted in bsd having to rewrite six files, leaving them with a distribution which was entirely freely distributable under the bsd license.

At the same time, some of the people behind the free software foundation were finding the multiple incompatable versions of common tools to be akward, and thus decided to produce a complete unix solution which was freely available.

later on, the 386 based pc became prevelent, and some people tried to port bsd onto it. because of various problems, this split into openbsd, freebsd, and netbsd, all of which are good, for specific purposed.

because there was not a bsd available at the time, and the gnu "hurd" kernel was not progressing, a norwegian student called linus torvalts created his own kernel based around the gnu tools.

While this was an improvement, you still had to download and compile the individual components yourself, so the distribution was born.

It started off with this guy producing the slackware distribution, which is undoubtedly for experts and is still going strong, but stuck with the TGZ file format used to distribute the individual programs.

Debian and red hat were spawned from that, developing their own package management systems, .deb for debian, and rpm for red hat.

Debian went for stability, redhat went for relative ease of installation.

Later on, suse and mandrake both spun off regionalised versions of the red hat system, german for suse and french for mandrake. Again there was a jump in ease of installation.

Even later than this, others branched off, including calderra which spawned lycoris and lindows, both with the target market of microsoft users, and both based around somewhat restricted debian systems.

All through this time, linux has been extending the number of architectures it supports, as have the others.

debian can now be compiled to run on 12 different processor families, running various different kernels including linux, hurd-386, netbsd-386 and freebsd-386, all from the same code tree.

At the same time, linux can run on everything from pda's right through to mainframes and supercomputers, so it can hardly be said to "focused exclusively on the low end".

A lot of the software will run unchanged across many of the varients of open source unix, and a lot of the proprietary ones as well. All it requires is recompilation for that system.

This is partly through the good work of those people at debian.

The gnu compiler suite supports even more architectures, so we can see a future where it is just a recompilation away to support whichever new chip happens to be made next. in fact, it is partly here already.

intel already develops and tests new chip designs using mostly open source software on linux.

You describe it much more detail than I could.

I should point out that I was being terribly vague in my use of "low end" and "high end", mostly from a desire to avoid getting too technical. I in no way meant to indicate low-end or high-end machines, but rather different parts of the system itself - the kernel versus the application layer. Command line tools, applications and shells are "high end" because they rest on top of the kernel which by comparison becomes the "low end". If I was discussing a car, the seats would be high end and the engine low end.

And I guess I should have continued the explanation to include KDE vs Gnome, which for some distributions ends up as yet another decision someone choosing linux needs to make. These (in terribly vague terms again) are the two main choices of "graphical user interfaces" - the part that is missing from the default install of NetBSD.

that is the nature of posting here, you have to decide to stop somewhere.

Another thing that hasn't been covered is that once part of the system gets good enough, people start to build stuff on top of it (because that's the way we do things in unix ).

so what happens then is tha the new stuff starts growing, bringing in a whole new audience for the software, and the older stuff keeps maturing underneath.

for example, one of my machines still uses one of the old 1.?? kernels, but my programs work the same on that as the latest 2.6.3? kernel, with only the advanced features looking different (until they stabilise).

and in the meantime, my programs have improved as well, occasionally forming the basis for higher level programs.

it all works out eventually.

I read an article recently that said Linux was fast taking over in the PDA and smartphone martket due to its open source and flexibility.