| Product: |
Linux in general |
| Date: |
19/06/02 (206 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Good Fun (if you are a geek)
Disadvantages: , Bit of a worry really
Well blow me down with a feather! I'm typing this little missive on a copy of Sun Microsystems' "StarOffice" running on a Linux box that I'm logged on to through a Window on my Windows/ME machine. How cool is that on the geek scale of 10 to freezing? This is seriously clever stuff. Got a spare PC lying around? Wanna have a laugh with something new? You need Linux, that's what you need mate.
Over the past couple of weeks I've been playing around with Linux in order to gauge for myself whether or not it has the mettle to be a serious competitor to Windows. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the answer is "probably" (yes, folks - I've been on the "Assertiveness part I" course, but I just can't decide whether to go on part II or not!). Personally, I think Linux is the bee's knees, however I am also acutely aware that it won't be everyone's cup of tea. Soooo... the sixty-four million dollar question is, "Who's it for?" If we can answer that then we've probably cracked it.
Initially, I thought that Linux would be a place where Geeks and saddo's (like me) could while away their solitary hours without unduly damaging the more tender parts of their anatomy. In one sense, I suppose it is. However, what I was unprepared for is the serious attention being shown at the high-end by companies like IBM and Sun. Linux will now happily run on everything from your laptop all the way up to the big IBM system /390 behemoths. Until very recently, the mighty 390's (if you have to ask the price of a 390 - you can't afford it) only ran IBM's own flagship operating systems, MVS/ESA and TPF. So what's going on? Well, one or two folk are pretty pissed off with old Bill and his crew up in Seattle and Linux is a way in which everyone can signal their collective displeasure. I hope, for his sake, that he's listening.
Let's ge
t one thing straight right from the outset; Linux is a true Multi-User Operating System. Got that? Good. Windows (whatever number it is fitted with) is nothing of the bloody sort, despite what the kiddies in Seattle may want you to think.
Err - right. So... what's the difference?
In order to explain, I feel a short trip down memory lane coming on... ("Oh nooooooooo, the old bastard's gonna start reminiscing again!") OK, hold on tight and off we go....
Firstly, a lot of the stuff that your average computer program does over and over again is pretty much the same stuff that every other program does over and over again. Reading and writing files, acquiring and releasing storage (memory), communicating with some form of operator and so on; same shit, different day. It turns out that only about 20% of the actual code in a computer program is "main mission" (solving the problem it was built for) the other 80% is all about messing with the environment in order to let the program run. Bummer, huh?
They've known about this for a while. Back in the late fifties, a few fairly smart boys and girls and in particular one Gene Amdahl (you don't HAVE to have a funny name to be in the computer business but it sure helps) had the idea of providing a little bit of extra help to the poor old programmer. The best analogy I can come up with for these early attempts is that of a knowledgeable human librarian. When you go into a library you probably don't know how the books are catalogued and organized so it can be quite hard work to find things. The Librarian, on the other hand, knows where everything is and can retrieve any particular item on your behalf without you having to know how the library works. You just have to (politely) ask! Essentially, this is what an Operating System does. It is the program's "guide" inside the computer.
A program might require some additiona
l storage while it is running. Instead of attempting to identify and acquire it by itself, it simply asks the Operating System for it. In fact there are a whole host of things that can be semi-automated in this way and they make programming a whole lot easier. There are a load of other issues to do with something called 'abstraction' that are also made easier by the OS but for now just be aware that the idea of an operating system is a dead good one. In fact it's so good that it probably ranks up alongside things like Swiss Army knives and sliced bread in the league table of 'good ideas'.
The first "true" operating system is generally regarded to have been IBM's OS/360 which was released in 1963 with the launch of the System /360 range of mainframe computers, forerunners of today's System /390 and designed by, you guessed it - Gene Amdahl. OS/360 was a kind of benevolent despot. It would help you do all sorts of things in your program but it would also stop you from doing really dumb things. Another dead clever thing that OS/360 could do was run lots of programs at once. It could look after them all, manage their various requests to acquire and release resources and was able to shut them down when it looked as though they were about to run amok or do some sort of damage (something which happens surprisingly often in a big multi-user computer). However, the /360 was for big corporate organizations with deep pockets. 'What about the little feller?', I hear you cry. Fear not little feller - help was coming from Ma Bell...
In the late sixties, a few of the boys and girls over at Murray Hills (no, not where Sonic the bloody hedgehog lives - the REAL Murray hills in New Jersey, home of AT&T Bell Labs, - Geek Central to you and me mate) were messing about with the new "mini-computers" from GE and DEC. They too wanted an operating system for their little computers. Unfortunately, in 1969 t
he only good software that they could get their paws on was Abbey Road (and that was only available on vinyl or 8-track).
Three pissed off guys, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and Brian Kernighan decided to "put on a show of their own" and promptly set off to write a tight "time sharing" operating system for these new mini technologies. The first computers to run the new infant operating system were the little GE (later Honeywell) 635 and the DEC PDP-7. By modern standards these little machines had about as much CPU power as your watch! Nevertheless, the first versions of the new system supported not one but two users. Within a few years, they would be supporting hundreds and later thousands.
In an ironic pun aimed at an earlier failed operating system called MULTICS, Brian Kernighan coined the name UNIX for the new baby.
In 1973 Dennis Ritchie finished building the "C" programming language and shortly after that the UNIX kernel itself was re-written in C (before this time it had been written in assembly language). Without going into the why's and wherefore's, the C re-write made UNIX potentially very portable between different computers. In 1975 AT&T decided to make UNIX Release 6 freely available to the US Universities. This single act cemented the future of UNIX and its many derivatives. The Universities eagerly set to producing their own variants of the system most of which survive to this day in one form or another.
There were, for many years, three main UNIX derivatives known as; BSD (Berkeley Systems Division) - IBM's AIX is a BSD derivative, SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) - optimized for very small systems including the early Intel 8086 and 286 CPU's and SVR4 (System 5, Release 4) - derivatives include Sun's 'Solaris', HP's 'UX', and NCR's 'MP/RAS').
From its humble beginnings, UNIX has risen to challenge even the big flagship
IBM operating systems for the high-end computing platform business. Companies like SUN, HP and NCR market UNIX based computers which are every bit as powerful as the big IBM mainframes with which they compete.
The Windows system from Microsoft, whatever its merits, was never designed to be multi-user. The idea was that it would have one keyboard, one mouse, one screen one disk and one user at any one time. It was, after all, for PERSONAL computers. The thing is, that today's personal computers are way more powerful than any machines Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie ever got their hands on. Maybe we could use that power better if we adopted something like UNIX instead of Windows.....
In 1991 a young fellow at the University of Helsinki decided to try to port a version of MINIX (a mini UNIX filesystem) onto his 386 PC. His name was Linus Torvalds and he must have been either very bored or very stupid to want to do such a thing. Rather surprisingly the damned thing worked and he christened it LINUX. Linus then set about, more or less, re-writing a new version of UNIX. For this reason Linux is often referred to as a UNIX "Clone" rather than a derivative since it is not based on any other UNIX but instead, is a complete re-write. In many ways, this makes it better and faster than its forebears.
One decision that Linus made from the outset was that Linux would be "open source" software. In other words it was to be distributed free of charge to anyone who wanted it. This is still the case today. This to my mind, more than anything else, is the thing that will damage Microsoft. I notice that to upgrade to the latest version of windows (at time of writing) costs over 100 GBP. That's a lot of money for something which doesn't appear to do very much on its own. I bought the latest version of Redhat (7.2) for twenty-nine quid!
All in all, the current version of Redhat installs better and
easier than Windows to my mind and once it's up and going it just seems to run. Up to press I have not been able to make it fall over once. As to the assertion that you have to have a deep understanding of UNIX command line syntax in order to use it, I can only say that I have attempted to avoid using the command line at all. I haven't quite gotten away with it, but only because I needed to use it to stop and start SAMBA, the Linux/Windows file sharing component. In order to get file-sharing working properly I had to read up on SAMBA. However, aside from one jittery bit (to do with windows passwords), I had it up and working in a few hours. As to the rest of the system, everything can be accomplished in X-Windows, the GUI front-end for Linux. I actually prefer StarOffice (also called OpenOffice, depending upon who you buy it from) to Microsoft Office. It seems to execute more quickly in the Linux Environment.
Linux itself is just the 'kernel' or operating system. The product is the kernel plus all sorts of other stuff which all together make up a 'release'. You can buy Linux releases from many different companies however, by far and away the most popular, is the one from 'RedHat'. The Windows equivalent of RedHat Linux would be Windows plus a shed load of utilities and smart stuff together with the Office Suite of products. All in all, you get a lot of software for your money. Moreover, because Linux is a true multi-user OS you can have lots of users on your Linux system at any one time. So what? I hear you cry. Well it's all to do with future shock and the upgrade cycle my boy... Now, sit up and pay attention because there's a dead good bit coming any minute now.. Ready?... Here goes...
I am willing to bet that you are reading this little missive of mine on the latest hot-poop-scoop of a PC. It probably has a 1Ghz+ CPU and a graphics card that can flip triangles fast enough to worry some
body who is really really good at flipping triangles. Fact of the matter is that 99% of the time, it's doing bugger all. It's just sat there running some sort of smartarse graphic 'nobody's here' type screensaver. What a waste. What's worse is that you just upgraded to it last year and traded in a Pentium II to get it. Except you didn't trade the Pentium II in did you? Because it was worth precisely three eighths of bugger all, so you chucked it in the cupboard and forgot about it. Am I right? The truth is that your Windows PC is single user and always will be. One user at a time.
However, if you were to run a Linux image on your old Pentium, you could use it as a file server, or a firewall or a print server or a dedicated Word Processor, all accessible directly from your spiffy new Windows-go-faster-stripe-version-with-furry-dice PC, and continue to get your money's worth out of the old kit! How cool is that? Even better - if you have several PC's in your household, they can all be logged on to and using the Linux Box simultaneously! Linux is much more efficient than Windows so it can serve several users at once even from a relatively titchy PC.
That's why a multi-user OS is important and that's why Bill Gates is shitting himself. Because if you continue to get value out of what you've got then you won't buy as much new stuff and before you know it Bill's overall worth will have dropped to less than three times the GNP of The People's Republic of China! What will he do then, the poor bastard?
Dr Michael Tracey, a leading light at The Harvard Business School and all round 'good egg', contends that new breakthrough technologies go through three phases; they start out as a joke, then they become a threat, then they become obvious. If Linux is already obvious to me then how many other people is it obvious to? What is really sweet to the IT fraternity is that B
ill was always an interloper. He never made a dime from any original thought, either from himself or from his organisation. One day I'll do a big reminisce on the whole Microsoft thing, but not today. Today, I'll just have fun playing with my little Redhat........ He he he!
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NCG1 - 07/07/02 Really, really good. If I owned a computer, you would have persuaded me. ;-) |
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