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LINUX birthday @ DISTORT webzine © 1999 Per Johansson
All rights reserved

Editors comment: Below is some(in the PC world) real old writing about LINUX, my fav OS. What has happened since ? Today(2000-08-06) I still haven´t converted totally to Linux, many of my best programs are still Windows-only. But with apps like StarOffice 5.2 and the Gnome 1.2 desktop, Linux have crept clooser. Of course one could run Windows-apps under Linux through WINE(Wine is not an emulator) or some virtual machine, but with a performance loss noticeable if one can´t afford 1Gig processors. No, today I run my machine as triple boot; my default OS is Windows ME(quite good actually, I´ve got it stable with 5 gigabytes of programs installed! -Buy it when it comes out, if you wan´t your programs up and running, but don´t forget to use only the latest drivers for your hardware as it´s more touchy on that than Windows 98 was). My second boot option is, of course, Windows 2000 Professional SP-1 with IE-5.5 final(not beta). WIN2K works really great, and now there is many updated drivers out so you can start to use some older hardware with it, as well as new versions of essential software which is also out . But Win Me have been stable enough now, contrary to 98, so I tend to not use Win2k so much as I expected. My third boot option is Linux Mandrake 7.1(Helium) with kernel 2.2.16 mdk9 and the latest updates as of today. I use the Gnome 1.2.1 desktop compiled by Helixcode for Mandrake and i686 optimized with all the latest updates as of today...In fact, Gnome looks estetically much more beautful than KDE and have some extras which will not be found on KDE until 2.0 arrives(i.e. transparence). My Mandrake installation is really complete with over 4 Gigs of software installed, and it really isn´t much I can do with Windows that I can´t do with Linux nowadays. Even the look, feel and "snappiness" is getting very similar in standard. Also, I have full file interchangeability between all 3 OS:s so as to productivity it doesn´t matter much which one I boot with. Linux can read all Windows partitions, and the ability for Windows to read the Linux partitions is accomplished by a small, but terrific, program named "ext2fs" which I use extensively. Anyway, Windows Me is still default so the Linux-community have some more to do. My writing below is about a year old and the Mandrake I use today is very much better than I dreamt of at the time, I wrote "in mabe two years" so one year to go and it´s getting hot for Bill....To the old text:

Linux is 8 years old, Happy Birthday ! Yes, that´s how long the worlds only totally free operating system for x86 processor based computers have existed.
It features a story which happily could do as a hollywood movie, with Linus Torvalds starring as The Hero, aided by all the worlds good hackers. No big guess who the bad guy would be ? Jokes aside, I don´t think Linus have had any big adventures worth doing movies about, good stuff for story writers though.

Nevertheless has he made a really great impact on the computing world as we know it. Without him there would have been nothing but commercial alternatives to power the worlds PC:s, that would have slowed things down. Now, instead, theres a perfectly free possibility for an aspiring hacker to learn in depth what a computer is able to do. No expensive, manufacturer controlled, software training courses. Not only makes it the way to an interesting job opportunity easier, but also speeds up the overall technical progress in society. Worldwide. But what was it Linus did ? Two things mainly. One, he came up with the idea to develop a new UNIX (mainly POSIX 1) compatible OS, and got the work going through various newsgroups on the internet. Two, he decided in an early stage that the ready OS should be distributed under the free GNU license. So that anybody could participate and improve the OS, but still would have to recognize the source. There is a third thing. He choose to make it UNIX compatible. Not a completely new architecture (even if the code is completely rewritten, to avoid license issues). So that there would be a broad software and programmers base to pick from. Backwards compability has always been an issue, which have made others fail. For example, I´m not deeming it dead, but who would buy BeOS ? It´s really great, in a technical way, but where are all the software tools to do actual work with ?( who knows, mabe thei´ll come ). This is a problem even for Microsoft, who would have loved to kill off Windows 9x years ago. They can´t because of backwards compability issues.

Now, Linux comes with the possibilities to use ALL UNIX software, which have been developed through a couple of decades. Makes things easier, doesn´t it. And as the internet is mainly UNIX based, it makes it really commercial in a way. The only major shortcoming today is that, since Microsoft have had a monopoly on office/home computing for almost two decades, there isn´t very much software available under Linux for home entertainment and/or office/small business productivity. That is rapidly changing today, as Linux have actually made such an impact ! I believe that, mabe in two years, Linux WILL be a serious threat to Microsoft in home computing. It alredy is on the internet and the server arena. Not bad thinking from a young student, who just wouldn´t take what was thrown at him in the form of OS:s.

For myself, I´m looking forward to explore what multimedia capabilities can be crushed out from the OS. Not much for now, I´m afraid, but I do have a softsynth for Linux and the Jazz++ midi sequencer with audio recording. It´s just, as I am not a hacker, it takes weeks of struggling with the file handling systems before I will be able to really put out a song made under Linux ( Microsoft had to hide away DOS before home PC:s really exploded, so does Linux have to hide away it´s command line, seriously: you don´t want to learn hundreds of obscure commands before being able to paste a photograph from your digicam ). So let´s hope that Linux will fulfill the promise of ease of use within two years, or it will remain a hackers system. I strongly believe, that computing for computings sake is totally meaningless, there must be a goal to achieve which can be made easier with the computer assisting you in getting there...

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