Welcome to the first installment of MCMagOnline's newest column, "The Linux Letter"!
As you can tell from the title, the main topic of each month's column will be Linux, the Swiss army knife of the operating system world.
Most MCMagOnline readers no doubt are aware of Linux by now. It's hard not to be, with IBM and other industry heavyweights supporting the OS. But according to conversations I've had with my peers, it seems that many of you have yet to experiment with Linux, and that's a shame. The cost of entry is extremely low--Linux is available free from the Internet or at a nominal charge from any number of vendors. The hardware requirements are easily met by the PCs that your company casts off because they can't handle the latest OS onslaught from Redmond. And the Linux information/documentation drought (used as an excuse by many midrange professionals) is now over. You just can't escape Linux in the trade publications, technical journals, technical libraries, and techie Web sites any longer. What I want to do with this column is to convince those of you who haven't tried Linux to do so. And for those of you who already are hooked, I want to make you a partner. I'd like to know what topics you would find interesting. In short, I'd like to make this a Web-based users group for iSeries and Linux users. Obviously, I'm stretching the "users group" analogy somewhat, since a users group traditionally meets face-to-face. But I do hope that you'll provide me with fodder for upcoming columns.
In this first column, I'd like to introduce myself and tell you why I find Linux, and, by association, the open-source movement, so attractive.
I cut my computing teeth on a Digital Equipment Corporation (now owned by Compaq) PDP-11/34 minicomputer running the RSTS/E operating system. My introduction to the IBM midrange market came when I took a job with a company that ran its business on an IBM System/34. The difference in reliability between those two machines was apparent to me almost immediately. Neither machine was on a UPS, but whereas the DEC machine dropped at the slightest hint of a power failure, the IBM machine could easily outlast short drop-outs, due in no small part to the huge power-supply capacitors the IBM hardware gurus had over-engineered into it. Since the System/34, I've been through the IBM-encouraged upgrade path. The System/34 was replaced by a System/38, which was replaced with a CISC AS/400, which has since been replaced twice with increasingly larger RISC AS/400s. Over the years, I've become a self-proclaimed AS/400 bigot (as have many of you readers), and I'm proud of it! This machine really is a workhorse and is extremely stable.
I also am old enough to remember the launch of the IBM 8088-based PC. The first one purchased for our office had a generous 256K of RAM and dual 360K floppies. The PC upgrades came at a much faster pace than those of the midrange machines. The 8088 became an 80286, then various '386s with ever-increasing clock speeds, then '486s, and finally Pentium-class machines. Accustomed to the multitasking capabilities of the midrange computers I used, I naturally wanted to take advantage of the ever-increasing capacity of my PC with a multitasking operating system. So I went through the various DOS hacks, in which category I include Windows 3.1 and Windows 9x, and found the stability lacking. What I finally did end up with was IBM's OS/2--which I contend still has the finest user interface of any PC operating system. With OS/2, I experienced the stability of my midrange computers on the desktop, and life was good--until IBM decided to drop support for my beloved OS. IBM made this perfectly clear when it announced the end of development for the OS/2-based Client Access software. So, once again, I was on a quest to find a stable PC operating system. During the early 1990s, I attended the Dayton Hamvention (the world's largest amateur radio flea market) and found a booth offering subscriptions to what at that time was little more than a newsletter titled Linux Journal. I'd read a bit about Linux in the UseNet groups, so I subscribed to the magazine. Soon thereafter, I downloaded all of the diskette images for an early Slackware Linux distribution. Once I got everything installed and running (no small feat at that time), I got hooked by the UNIX-like operating system. The rest, as they say, is history.
Although I miss OS/2's Workplace Shell GUI, I've never looked back. Not only is Linux every bit as stable as OS/2 was, it is fully multiuser. No extra software is required. And unlike OS/2, which is a commercial product suffering from a dearth of applications, Linux is open-source with a wide selection of applications. Besides the laptop on which I'm currently writing this column (a Pentium 200 with 256Mb of RAM), I have Linux on my desktop computer and on numerous servers at various client locations. I have one Linux machine acting as a Windows-network primary domain controller for 30 Windows NT clients. Another is running our fax server for incoming and outgoing faxes. I have several other servers in locations that perform file and print serving tasks for Windows networks. At the time of this writing, the oldest of these has been up for 616 days without a reboot or failure. Not only does it do file and print serving, it also acts as a DNS server, an email server, a server for a paging terminal, and a SETI work unit cruncher (all this on a Pentium 300Mhz computer with 128Mb of RAM). I have a couple of co-located servers on the Internet, running the Apache Webserver, the Jakarta Tomcat servlet container (for server-side Java applications), and the PostgreSQL DBMS. I even use an old 486 for the company's firewall! The total combined cost for software licenses for all of these machines: $0.00.
Over the years in which I've used Linux, I've heard a lot of arguments against using the OS. Let's review and debunk some of the more common ones now:
- Linux is hard to install. That used to be true, but now modern distributions fix that problem. The latest from Mandrake (http://www.linux-mandrake.com), Red Hat (http://www.redhat.com), SuSE (http://www.suse.com), and the rest seem to detect most modern hardware quite well. In fact, many argue that it's easier to install Linux than that other operating system. I concur.
- Linux doesn't support modern hardware. It may not support bleeding-edge hardware, but if a given piece of hardware is interesting enough for a Linux hacker to purchase, then it's likely to become supported in short order.
- Linux is not secure because everyone has the source and crackers can find the weaknesses. This is the latest from the FUDmeisters in Redmond. Okay, perhaps some cracker can find and exploit one of these holes. How long do you think it will take for the Linux hackers to fix these defects? How long does it take for the commercial companies to fix (or even acknowledge) vulnerabilities found in their software? While you contemplate this question, consider how secure your closed-source, proprietary Redmond product is. Read any good Microsoft email viruses lately?
- Linux won't run Microsoft Office products. Okay, at the moment that is true, if you are talking about a native port. I can, and do, run Windows 9x on my laptop under Linux using a product called Win4Lin (http://www.netraverse.com). And on my desktop machine, I run an instance of Windows NT using a product called VMware (http://www.vmware.com). So if I get really desperate, I can run a Windows-based product. The only reason I even loaded VMware was so that I could configure my iSeries using the only tool IBM provides for some facets of the system: Operations Navigator. If they ever port that to Linux or make it a complete Java product, then I'll be recovering disk space when I uninstall VMWare and WinNT. But I digress.... The topic is Microsoft Office and how to communicate with others who insist on sending and receiving Word documents. The solution I use is a productivity suite called Star Office. I've written numerous articles and a book using this product, reading and writing Word documents that the editors insist on exchanging. They've never figured it out. In fact, I'm writing this article using it. The version of Star Office I use, 5.2, is free and a darned nice piece of software. (So that no one cries "foul," I will mention that both Win4Lin and VMware are commercial products and not free).
- Linux is fine for the server but not good for the desktop. I assume this is because of some perceived lack of desktop software. If you want to see what's available, point your browser to http://www.freshmeat.net, the clearing house for open-source projects, and decide for yourself.
- Linux has no support available. Don't tell that to Red Hat or SuSE! They are but two of the many companies now offering support contracts similar to IBM's Support Line. If you aren't comfortable using the Internet for Linux support (which, I can tell you from personal experience, is actually not unreasonable), you can elect to use a commercial offering.
That's all the space I have for this month. I hope that I've stimulated your creative juices and that you're thinking about some projects that might be interesting to do in Linux. For me, Linux has returned the fun to computing.
Have a great month. Send your questions or suggestions to me at
--Barry L. Kline
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