Ah, distro! (Linux in general)

Name: davidbuttery

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Product:	Linux in general
Date:	27.06.02 (304 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free!, Extremely flexible, Ever-growing community

Disadvantages: Still needs some nerve to set up, Small games selection, Some users are too fanatically anti-Windows

The first problem when it comes to Linux is the name. Should it be pronounced "lie-nux" or "lee-nux"? (A: Officially, it's whatever you prefer.) Should it really be referred to by its "full" name of "GNU/Linux"? (A: Yes, but practically no-one bothers, so I'll follow suit.) And should a system running, say, the Mandrake distribution of Linux, be referred to as being a "Mandrake Linux" system or a "Linux Mandrake" one? (A: Oh, for heaven's sake man, who cares? Get on with the damn op, will you?)

Now, the first thing to say about Linux is that, whatever its diehard supporters (and there are plenty) may say, it's not a viable replacement to Windows (or Macs, etc, but I only really know about PCs) for most of us. There are two major reasons for this.

The first is that, because of Microsoft's behemoth-like status in the PC world, the really large makers of add-on hardware tend to develop first and foremost for the Billy Gates Band. Although Linux does support an impressive range of graphics cards, soundcards, printers, modems and so on, there tends to be a bit of a lag between the card being launched and a Linux driver being available. USB peripherals are a good example - they've been around for quite some while now, but it's only in the latest distributions that Linux has really supported them.

Oh, yes. Modems. Better get this one out of the way first - fireproof overalls on, everyone. If you're a Windows user with an ordinary dialup connection, then you're going to connect to the internet by means of a modem... or so you think. In fact, there's a very good chance that what you're using is a thing calling itself a "winmodem". This is a cunning piece of deception by the manufacturers - "aha," you think, "a modem designed for Windows - just right". In fact, though, these things are no more than a few basic circuit
s - the real work is done in software by the operating system itself, which is to say Windows. And only Windows - with a very few exceptions, they won't work in Linux. At all. And woe betide anyone who asks on the Linux newsgroups about winmodem support - if you're answered by "THEY. ARE. *NOT*. MODEMS!!!!!", you're getting off pretty lightly.

Anyhow, on to the second reason for not using Linux exclusively. Five letters - games. Go to your local branch of GAME and see how many boxes mention Linux support - you'll be looking for a while. There *are* good games available for Linux - Quake and Railroad Tycoon II for example - but the range is tiny, because the mass consumer market the big publishers require these days (a bad thing in itself, IMO) just doesn't exist. Actually, some games will run by using a Windows simulator by the name of WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator - see my retro-computing op for the difference between emulators and simulators), but it needs some quite advanced fiddling about.

Of course, the purists will be horrified that you want to keep a hold of Windows, for fear of something worse, and they'll say so. In fact, one of the least attractive things about the otherwise generally very supportive Linux community is the rabid intolerance a significant minority show towards the idea that Windows can do *anything* well. Lots of people, for example, use the tremendously childish nickname "Windoze", which even Linux's official "Advocacy HOWTO" document discourages as achieving nothing. But stick to your guns - dual-OS systems are a good thing, all right?

And here we come to the factor that - understandably - makes a lot of people nervous about installing Linux, especially if they don't have a spare PC for testing purposes. To install Linux on a machine that already has Windows on it, you're almost certainly going to have to get down and dirty with the hard disk - an
d if you get it wrong, you can indeed wipe out your entire Windows partition. Make a backup of everything important - don't just think "that would be a good idea"; actually *do* it, in case you have to reinstall Windows (which is actually very easy in most cases - if you can handle installing Linux, it's a cinch).

Fortunately, the makers of the main distros (short for distributions - Linux-speak for customised Linuxes) have realised this, and all the main players now provide a graphical installation process, which tells you as you go exactly what you're doing, and - hopefully - gives you a chance to back off if something looks like it's going horribly pear-shaped. Caution is still needed, though, as when all is said and done Linux users are assumed to be at least vaguely competent at setting things up themselves.

So, what sort of system do you need to run Linux? Well, it must be said that the old days of "isn't Linux great? It can run on a 386!" are pretty much over if you want to move at above slothlike pace. To run a modern distro (RedHat 7, Mandrake 8 etc), you'll feel very cramped in anything less than 64MB RAM and a 1 gig hard disk, and for comfort you should double those figures. Linux allows you a great deal of say in how you set up its filesystem, though, so it is possible to install only those bits you need for a slimmer system (now this would be useful for Windows!).

Installation itself is, as I intimated earlier, far easier these days than it used to be - largely a case of multiple-choice boxes and messages which effectively say "you do have a GeForce graphics card, don't you?". If you do have to choose which packages to install, it's a good idea to leave all the automatically-chosen ones in unless you're very short on disk spaces, as otherwise you may find that a program you want to use is missing vital support files (this is called "dependency"), and y
ou'll have to install the missing bits manually, which is a chore. Other than this, you might well be offered a choice between the "big two" window managers (GUIs) - Gnome and KDE. I recommend KDE as I find it easier to use and there'd more info around about it, but it is a bit of a resource hog - don't even think about it on a PC with under 64MB of RAM.

A really important thing to remember about Linux is its multi-user setup. This matters even if you're the only person who ever uses it - you should still create an account over and above the built-in "root" account. Yes, I know everyone skims over the instructions, thinking "oh, it's just an extra bit of work", but this really does matter. And for why? Simple - if you are logged in as "root", you can do more or less anything... and, depending on how your system is set up, this can even include deleting your *Windows* files (yes, all of them). If you're logged in as a normal user, then Linux's security features stop you from doing anything quite so apocalyptic. Of course, some functions (compiling software from source code, for example) do require you to be root, but it's a good idea to go in, do what you have to do, and get out as fast as you can.

What? Compiling from source code? Yes indeed. This is far more common in Linux than it is in Windows, and for a very good reason. Linux will run on just about any halfway modern PC, Apple Macs, Ataris, Acorns, Suns... the list goes on. That means that the assumptions Windows software programmers can make about the form of hardware the program will be run on are not necessarily valid. So the best way is to provide source code in a language such as C, and allow utilities on the end user's computer to interpret these in a suitable way for the machine in question. It's all a little bit fiddly at first, but before too long you should find it all coming together.

Anyway, th
ere you are looking at (let's assume) the KDE desktop, which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Windows, and thinking "huh?" - what do you do now? Well, somewhere in the various menus (under "Terminals", perhaps), there should be an option called "Xterm". Open this up, and you'll see something that looks quite similar to a DOS prompt. Type

ls

(and RETURN, obviously) - there you'll see a directory listing. If you type

ls -l

you'll get a long (ie detailed) listing. A lot of it will be gibberish, but never mind, as we can easily get help by using

ls --help

(note the *two* hyphens). The "--help" flag is similar to DOS's "/?" one, in that it gives a brief summary of the options available with that command. For more detail we need to type

man ls

(man is short for manual), which gives a very long (hundreds of lines) and - for most of us - overly detailed rundown of what ls is, what it does, why it does it, how to stop it doing it, who made it do it, and how to report to someone that it doesn't do it anyway.

Now, let's say you've read some of this, and decided that you use "ls --l" far more than just plain old "ls". Wouldn't it be helpful if there was an "lsl" command that could save you a bit of typing? Ta-da! There is! Or rather, there can be, thanks to the wonderful world of aliases. Type

alias lsl='ls --l'

Now, type

lsl

and you'll see that your prayers have been answered. (Incidentally, if you type alias on its own, you'll get a list of the current aliases, which is very handy - some distros have a few built in.)

A few other handy commands are "cd" (similar, but not identical to, the DOS command", "df" (shows disk usage), "free" (ditto for memory), "exit" (shuts d
own the terminal window) and "mount" (to make various devices - disks etc - available to Linux or otherwise). There are far more than this, and a good guide is a must.

One last point - there's plenty of software available. The excellent office suite OpenOffice.org (son of StarOffice) is available free, as is Corel's Wordperfect 8. There's the excellent GIMP image processor (think Paint Shop Pro). And there's the Mozilla browser - no Internet Explorer, of course! So then, let's say you've decided to take the plunge and have a go at Linux. Where are you going to get it from? There are three easy ways:

1) Download it. Yes, Linux is free, thanks to the wonders of the GNU General Public License[sic], which says in effect that you can do anything you like with a program released under it... except make it or its derivatives proprietory. The obvious problem, though, is that the thing is absolutely enormous these days - most distros are over a gigabyte - so unless you have broadband it's not really worth the bother.

2) Buy it. I know I said it was free, but that is, to use the accepted definition, as in "free speech" rather than "free beer". That GNU licence even allows you to sell the damn thing - but why should anyone want to buy it? Simple. Firstly, there's the protection of a "big name" like Red Hat - the *trademark* as opposed to the programs themselves can't be copied (actually, "Linux" is trademarked by its Norwegian inventor, Linux Torvalds), so you know it's the real thing. And second, the boxed versions will include proper manuals and perhaps a dedicated support phoneline. Doing things this way will cost you around £50 - still far cheaper than a full version of Windows.

3) Get it off a magazine coverdisc. This is by far the best way if you're not obsessed by having a bleeding-edge version. There are two mainstream Linux magazines - Linu
x Format and Linux Magazine - and they often carry cut-down versions (in terms of toys, not functionality) on their CDs, and full ones on their DVDs. You'll need a CD burner and appropriate software (eg Nero) though, as in general the distros are supplied in the form of about three ISO images, the first of which forms the bootable CD for installation purposes.

So, after 2000 words of this, how shall we sum things up? I think like this: Linux is not (yet?) a replacement for Windows for most people, but as one half of a dual-boot PC it's a very powerful and flexible alternative which can give you a lot of options. Certainly, my PC is now set up to run Linux primarily, and Windows occupies perhaps a quarter of my computing time, most of that for games. It's big, it's clever, it's fun and it's free. Go to it.

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