Re: Of mice and men


In article <3dufb8F8ds9U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> I really need some kind of "Introduction to Linux" because I have no idea
> what the products are that you mentioned. "Suse"?, "White Hat"?.

They're two of the many Linux distributions. Linux itself is properly
just the OS kernel, though that's grown (mostly via dynamically-loaded
modules, so it's not an enormous monolith like some of the Unix kernels
of old) so much that it's practically an entire ear. But when people
say "Linux" they usually mean the OS and all sorts of other tasty bits
it takes to make a usable general-purpose system.

The distributions collect a kernel release and various kernel
modules, the rest of the base OS (mostly taken from GNU, which is the
Free Software Foundation's free implementation of Unix), OS
extensions like support libraries and X Windows, and some of the
many, many free utilities and applications. Then they make that
collection available in some form for people to acquire and install.
Distributions also generally have some form of "package management"
to make installing optional components and upgrading to new releases
more convenient.

Since there's no one central authority for all the software that
comprises what most people think of as a "Linux system", distros do
the work of gathering it up, throwing it in a box, and tying a nice
ribbon around it.

> Here's what I know (if I had a postage stamp, I could write it down... :-)):
>
> 1. Linux is an Operating System that was written by a Scandinavian guy (I
> guess the winter's are cold up there and there isn't much to do...) who
> kindly made it available to the world as an alternative to MicroSoft OSes.

Well, Linus wrote the original kernel, and continues to maintain it,
though there are hundreds of active kernel developers now. And he
made it available mostly because he wrote it and wanted to see people
playing with it. When Linux first appeared, it was just one of
several simple homebrew OSes for x86 machines: Minix and BSD/386 were
also available, for example. And, of course, there were quite a few
commercial OSes out at the time besides Windows - MS-DOS / PC-DOS,
OS/2, SCO ODT, Coherent, and no doubt others that have slipped my
mind.

But as I noted above, most of what people usually call "Linux" is
actually GNU and various third-party efforts. The FSF used to whine
that people didn't call the OS "GNU/Linux", but they clearly weren't
winning that one. (Ideologues often get things done, but they rarely
win popularity contests.)

> 2. It comes as 'distributions' which you tailor to your needs. Degrees of
> difficulty in doing this seem to vary.

Yep. Of course, you can also put it together from scratch, if you're
a masochist.

> 3. It has a penguin for its symbol.

Indeed it does.

> 4. Some people swear by it, others swear at it...

It has ever been thus.

> 6. It can "peacefully co-exist" with Microsoft Windows on the same system
> provided it has its own partition. Such systems are said to be "dual
> bootable"

Actually, there are a few ways to have it co-exist without a
separate boot partition, but that's the easiest approach - unless
you already have VMWare or Virtual PC installed, in which case it's
pretty darn easy to just install it into a virtual machine. I have
an old Red Hat distro running under NT4 that way.

> (I guess each partition must have its own boot track...?)

Not exactly. (This isn't Linux-specific, by the way; multi-booting
x86 systems has been around pretty much since they got hard drives.
Most of my systems have multiple boot options, largely because it's
a hard habit to break once you get into it. I have a Win2K partition
on this machine I've never used...)

x86 systems have a "master boot record" (MBR) which tells the machine
which partition to boot. Some OSes can boot from logical or physical
partitions; others can only boot from physical ones. There are
various add-on boot loaders available, free and commercial (eg System
Commander), which can give you lots of booting flexibility, but these
days OSes come with at least simple boot managers. NT-based Windows
versions, for example, have a built-in boot manager that you can
configure through some control panel or by editing the file boot.ini
in the root directory of your boot drive. (It may be marked as
"system" and/or "hidden" in a default install; I have little patience
for that sort of thing, so I routinely ignore file attributes.)

All the gory details of the x86 boot process are no doubt documented
on the 'net, but for many people it's enough to know that they can
install many OSes in "multiboot" mode and it'll set everything up for
them. (Of course, backing up before installing is always a good
idea.)

--
Michael Wojcik michael.wojcik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

He described a situation where a man is there to feed a dog and the dog is
there to keep the man from touching the equipment. -- Anthony F. Giombetti
.

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