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Linux limbers up
ON THE last day of 1998 I was hard at work at the interface, doing the usual
things . . . deleting spam, yawning at flame wars between students who cannot spell,
finding yet another new portal site acting as a shopfront . . . and so on.
Then, as Banjo Paterson would say, an answer (to my tedium) came directed in a writing
unexpected. Not quite, but a package containing a CD with the Red Hat Linux operating system and the Pocketbook manual, ordered online three weeks earlier,
was certainly a tonic.
As I have been technology-free on Rottnest for the past week, I have not installed Linux
to sit side-by-side with Windows yet. But I have had time to RTFM, as they say on the Net
(that is Read the Flippin' Manual, or something similar, for the uninitiated).
I am both fascinated and a little scared. Linux's exacting commands are a challenge. It is
said the OS is user-friendly, but it is very choosy about its friends. However, it appears
to promise a return to the days when users were put in control of their computers rather
than vice-versa.
It also appears to promise fewer crashes -- one user is on record as reporting more than
320 trouble-free days of non-stop operation -- and a bit more speed with optimum use of
the hardware.
The biggest plus is that it is considerably cheaper than the $159 that a Windows upgrade
will cost. In fact it is free. Users pay for documentation and shipping, not for the
operating system.
Linux is free because it was developed collectively across the Net by skilled programmers
working in the open source tradition which holds that software should be freely accessible
to the community.
Experienced computer users know all this already. Linux has been developed co-operatively
since its invention in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. A lot of newer users may not be aware of
it, however. And companies like Microsoft, which control so much of what a typical new
user does, would not mind if it stayed that way.
Linux -- enjoying a surge in popularity because of its endorsement by Netscape last
January -- rose to even more prominence in November when a memo by a Microsoft engineer
was leaked on the Net.
The so-called Halloween Documents
explain to Microsoft bosses the threat posed by a free Linux and the open source software
development community that built it. Linux threatens Microsoft's ambitions for the
much-postponed new NT system, now renamed Windows 2000.
Interest in Linux is increasing steadily. Salon magazine claims more than five million
people have it installed. An International Data Corporation analyst also told Salon that
between 2 million and 6 million copies of Linux were installed in 1997 alone (compared
with 3.8 million new installations of the Macintosh OS in 1997).
Microsoft is probably not quaking in its boots . . . yet. And at the moment, Linux is not
for the faint-hearted. You need to know DOS and understand directory structures at least.
Its strength still is in running network servers under the guidance of computer-savvy
staff.
But at the rate the co-operative nature of the Net works, an attractive, reliable -- and
very cheap -- operating system with an easy-to-use shell is sure to emerge soon for home
users.
Help Desk:
Perth Linux Users' Group: plug.linux.org.au
Linux Australia: www.linux.org.au
Linux Home Page: www.linux.org
All articles Copyright: © West Australian Newspapers |
